Tom Roper's Weblog

CILIP Member's day part II

There was no wireless at SOAS so my wish for live Members Day blogging did not come true.
The high point was Debby Shorley's Presidential address; some important ideas delivered with wit and a light touch. She looked at the organisation from the point of view of a tourist browsing the Rough Guide to Cilipia.  Her slides are in the Presidential area of the CILIP website.
Fellowships and Honorary Fellowships were awarded, and it was good to see health librarians well represented, at least in the former category.
The AGM, apart from some gripes about subscriptions, was mostly uneventful. But CILIP now has legal advice on how members should handle approaches from the police and intelligence services for access to library users records; and on a similar theme we and others have written to Charles Clarke, Home Secretary, expressing concern about the implications of the Terrorism Bill for libraries. The text won't be made public until Charles Clarke has replied, but there's a press release on the CILIP web site.
Pat Beech gave an outline of progress in the review of CILIP Special Interests Group.
I missed Chris Smith: he was delayed so didn't speak till 7

CILIP Members' Day

I'm at CILIP Members' Day. I'm not sure whether the technical infrastructure at SOAS will support live blogging. We shall see.

Let's dance the incapable morris

On Wednesday night I went to the Cricketers in Berwick to see Morris dancing: the Chanctonbury Ring and Hunter's Moon, the expedition being organised by the Sussex group of CILIP's South East Branch.
There are rather poor photos in Flickr.

Effective libraries vital to make poverty history

The text of the resolution is out, with a press release on the CILIP site

'Whereas library and information services underpin information, literacy and the learning process; and whereas literacy and learning underpin all our aspirations, locally and globally, for ourselves, our communities and our economies including equality, social justice and the eradication of poverty; therefore be it resolved that this conference declares its support for the Make Poverty History campaign and calls on the UK government to recognise and promote the role of libraries in sustainable economic development.'

Friday morning: making poverty history

I chose the evidence-based practice stream for my first session this morning,and was rewarded with two excellent presentations, one by Josephine Kavanagh of the wittily-named EPPI-Centre on systematic reviews in education and related social policy areas, and Maggie Haines, who gave an extraordinarily wide-ranging paper on applying evidence-based practice in higher education. It was billed as a case-study, but was actually far more.
After coffee things became even more exciting, with Ross Shimmon, former General Secretary of IFLA reporting on the Byzantine politicking of the preparations for the World Summit on the Information Society, and IFLA's role in lobbying. In the discussion someone suggested that a motion should be put to the plenary this afternoon to make the link between information and the eradication of poverty, and Bob McKee and I both started scribbling at the same time. It was just like being in a compositing meeting at an NUS conference c 1974.
I'll give the text of the motion once the final version appears, but it will say something like "noting popular support for Make Poverty History and the contribution of library and information services can make to eradicating poverty, we call on the British government to use its influence in international fora to ensure that the role of libraries is acknowledged".

CILIP Council's Open Forum: l'audace, l'audace, toujours l'audace

Yesterday morning was CILIP Council's Open Forum. The presentation and debate are going up on the web, so I shan't attempt a full account but will make a few points.
Maggie Haines presented the Health Executive Advisory Report Implementation Group's report which went to Council the day before.
HLG's will be a model of a new type of Special Interest Group in CILIP, with more of a policy role. I'll report back to HLG Committee on this in detail.
There was some discussion about  the level of change management skills among librarians. I think we're too negative about things like this; it reminds me of the assertion,  made without supporting evidence, that health librarians lack numeracy and research skills; yet its these very people who are training their clients in research skills, in critical appraisal and so on. It may have once been the case, but I don't think it is now.
Framework of qualifications: Margaret Watson reported on this, and the first new ACLIPs are to receive their awards.
Also Freedom of Information, led by Eric Davies, and the review of Special Interest Groups, introduced by Pat Beech. An intriguing idea came up in the latter discussion, that SIGs and their membership charges might be left to the mercy of market forces. I'm not sure about this; I think HLG would probably do quite well out of such an arrangement, but others might not.
Sandra Ward, who had chaired the morning, concluded by calling on us to remember three words: relevance, risk and audacity.

Umbrella: the first post

I'm in Manchester for the 2005 CILIP Umbrella conference. I've set up a Technorati watch list to see if anyone else is blogging from the conference. So far, no one else, though I see the bog standard blog will attending
There's also some photos in Flickr.
Last night Debby Shorley, the President and the Lord Mayor welcomed us at a reception in the gorgeous Manchester Art Gallery, the Lord Mayor reminded us of Manchester's place at the forefront of the public library movement in the nineteenth century, and Debby replied as gracefully and wittily as ever.
This morning, CILIP Council hold an open forum, with Maggie Haines leading a discussion on health.
The CILIP web site says over 700 registrations, but I'm not sure when that was posted. I hope we'll break the 1000 barrier.
I had my first conference run this morning.

WiFi at Umbrella

Hooray, for CILIP tell me there'll be a wifi network at Umbrella. Let conference blogging be unconfined.

Blog people in Manchester

It seems de rigeur for Deans of North American library schools who came from the right side of the Atlantic to denounce blogs and bloggers. First Michael Gorman, then Blaise Cronin. Is it simply a public relations ploy to generate publicity for their schools?
It's unfortunate that some bloggers have responded in kind and Professor Cronin provides a catalogue of insults sent his way.
Professor Gorman will be one of the speakers at our Umbrella conference at the end of the month and there's a profile in the latest CILIP Update, which refers in passing to to the Blog People controversy, quoting his statement that he "doubts if any of the blog people are in the habit of sustained reading of complex texts". I look forward to his speech and, tempting as it is to sit prominently in the front row wearing a Revenge of the Blog People t-shirt, blogging on my Powerbook on one side, with a print copy of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus on the other, it would be discourteous to a guest. I do hope there's a chance to debate the proper place of blogging in librarianship and in culture generally.
I wonder how many other delegates will use blogs to record their conference experiences and contribute to Umbrella? What use will CILIP, having discovered RSS feeds, make of them at Umbrella?

CILIP's RSS once more

CILIP's RSS feed now works. It looks as if there was a problem with the whole CILIP site this morning. And it validates nicely at Feed Validator, whereas mine gets the message "this feed is valid, but may cause problems for some users"
The explanation of RSS is a little superficial.