CILIPS Conference 2019

Three Italians with Glasses, and also Information Professionals, at the CILIPS Conference

In this post, we are going to share our experiences from the CILIPS Annual Conference in Dundee. And wasn’t that fun! We genuinely enjoyed ourselves and not only because we were all there together. It was an uplifting, inspirational, informative, entertaining and well-organised event. I hope some of you, lovely readers, had the opportunity to bump into us: we were those three smiley people wearing those nice, colourful badges with hypnotising circles!
For those of you who weren’t able to attend, the presentations’ slides are now available on Slideshare.

All of us have applied and won a bursary to attend the Conference (one through SLIC, one through the CILIPS Professional Development Fund and the other one through the CILIPS Tayside branch). This is a message for all of you out there: if you want to go to conferences, apply for the sponsored places and bursaries offered by various institutions since there is a chance that you’ll get it ;)

The keynotes and breakout sessions on both days covered topics related to our own sectors as well as different ones. We did not stick together the whole time (after all, we are separate entities!) and we went to different sessions across the two days, so we have decided to pick those ones we liked the most and focus on them in this post.

Elena

One of the sessions I have enjoyed the most is probably “Leveraging libraries: community, open access and Wikimedia” presented by Sarah Thomas, Wikimedia UK and Jason Evans, National Library of Wales (I’ll refer to this as NLW).
Personally, I wasn’t fully aware of the “behind the scenes” of Wikipedia. And little I knew about Wikimedia. It has been eye-opening listening to Sarah Thomas and Jason Evans.

Sarah Thomas has talked about training projects and events (edit-a-thon), physically involving libraries, in order to get people educated to edit Wikipedia. One of the events had been held in the Inverclyde area.

Jason Evans has illustrated what NLW and he have accomplished. He has focused more on the WikiData project of Wikimedia. He showed what can be achieved and made me think: what could happen if all the libraries were able to invest a small part of their resources in a Wikimedia project? Because the concept behind Wikimedia is to make knowledge accessible: and what are libraries (especially public libraries) if not places where knowledge is being made freely attainable? Training people in every library would make the accessibility of knowledge so much easier and faster.
An example of this is the project of digitisation of the material held at the NLW: this material is physically held at the NLW, thus if they weren’t on Wikipedia, they wouldn’t be seen unless going to the NLW. These images would be hardly discovered.
I found that the ideas presented at this talk could be actualised in libraries which could benefit from projects in partnership with Wikimedia. Something to think about!

Laura

There are two sessions I have chosen to focus on, for different reasons: the talk delivered by Dominic Tate, Head of Library Research Support at the University of Edinburgh, on Open Access and Plan S, which is particularly relevant to my job and the entertaining and brilliant session with Daryl McKinley from Tree of Knowledge.

Open Access (OA), as Dominic illustrated, is part of a larger phenomenon called Open Science, along with many other components, such as Open peer reviews, Open research data and more. The talk highlighted the benefits of OA (see this image), which include larger exposure of researchers’ work, value for money for taxpayers (for publicly-funded research) and a way to help researchers in developing countries. More and more funders are now requiring that researchers share their work as openly as possible and sanctions are being applied for non-compliance. A mention of the REF (Research Excellence Framework) was unavoidable, considering that it is what keeps up at night all those staff working across the research environment!

Dominic also touched on PlanS, an initiative supported by cOAlition S, an international consortium of research funders, that is strongly pushing towards making scientific publications resulting from the investment of public grants, OA by January 2021. Although REF2021 does not include an OA Monograph policy, this will be part of the next REF exercise and Dominic concluded his talk with the good news that Scottish institutions are investigating together the creation of a Scottish Universities Press, which would give researchers the chance of publishing their books OA at affordable prices.

I want to write a few words about the brilliant talk by Daryl McKinley, which closed the Conference on a high, refreshing and uplifting note. If you wonder what an experiment with polo mints, thread and coasters has to do with a conference on librarianship, well I am sorry to say that you should have been there to understand! Or you need to get in touch with the guys at Tree of Knowledge to find out more! What I can say is that Daryl made us all laugh heartily, giving us, at the same time, an opportunity to reflect on how we are facing everyday life - message: stop being grumpy and put a nice, big smile on your face! - and how helping others is the true way to happiness. I felt so full of positivity leaving the room after his presentation!

Luca

What I loved about this conference is the underlying focus on the importance of sharing stories to build resilience in our patrons, as well as in ourselves, librarians. From the Bibliotherapy expressions in two different school libraries, Elgin Academy and St Ninian’s High School, from the stories of resilience by the people who made Glasgow Women Library to the libraries of Yarra subversive adventures, almost everything inspired me with new ideas and give solutions to challenges to use in my everyday practice.
Probably the most imaginative talk has been the one by Jane Cowell, CEO of Yarra Plenty Regional Library service, Australia. Innovation: it’s a state of mind. After a very flashy video presenting one of Yarra’s libraries, the iE library, she focused on explaining how to be innovative in the library. While you can see the slide show here, I will focus on three main points that resonated in me and I think I can apply in my practice the most!

Innovation needs Space: the library needs to be more local, needs to build a sense of community and has to build the ‘human needs in any library programme. This is its core.’ I am trying every day to involve the community, and not only the school one, but also parents, external stakeholders and other members that are local to my school. With this note, I felt more empowered and even more motivated in doing what I am doing, if not even dedicating more time in community involvement.
Innovation is Environmentally Friendly (and Question every library norm): Jane Cowell made me think when she asked ‘Why are we still using plastic library cards? And plastic book jackets are really necessary?’ I looked at my collection, which is in a school library, and thought that even if most of the paperbacks lifespan is better preserved when we use the plastic jackets, water damage and tear and wear are the most common damages these book encounter, and therefore plastic is unnecessary, since it does not prevent these kinds of damage. Can we be more environmental-friendly? I am bringing this up to the next meeting with my manager, but I think that as librarians, we need to be more aware of what we are leaving behind and of our footprint.
Innovation needs Courage: while this is pretty explanatory, I think that librarians need to be brave and stand up for their rights and for the rights of their communities. And start to accept that we can make mistakes: failing is part of innovation because we learn from the errors we make and we can come up with better ideas and plans for ‘the next time’. Now, I am sure that the speaker is not advocating for trying just for the sake of trying, but she is making a clear point that we should not feel blocked by uncertainties or fear of failures: what is important, after a proper risk-benefit assessment, is being able to learn from the experience and go on with the best service we provide. Non-perfect librarians, unite and rise!

On another note, the CILIPS conference has not only been about keynotes, speakers & panels: I have to admit, this year’s theme ‘Courage, Laughter and Innovation’ shone through all the breaks, lunches, and also the time from one room to the other: every attendee was there with a smile, sharing not only a good experience and a word of advice with some young professionals as ourselves, but laughter and courage were definitely there, strong and powerful. Yvonne Manning (CILIPS President) could probably not be replaced by any other person present at the conference. We have been lucky to share some time with her, having a ‘jolly good chat’ and talking to her about the library of the future, and the library of the present. She has been the undisputed Queen of the conference. I also enjoyed the way she concluded all her interventions reading a quote from a book, that always felt a perfect fit for the occasion: she could not remind us in a better way that reading is a pleasure for everyone and an important part of our profession!

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The conference has been a great opportunity for the three of us not only because we are working towards the Chartership so we had a lot of “food for thought” seeing what’s going on in the other LIS sectors, but also because it has been possible to do some good networking.
It has been an amazing experience, for many different reasons. It has been inspirational listening to how the LIS professionals are doing, the impact they are making in the world through their jobs, through their passion and it reflects on the brilliant ideas that they have presented, the projects that they have completed.

We hope you enjoyed reading this honest account of our experience at the CILIPS Conference 2019. We also hope to attend again next year, as we had a great time!