The Business Librarians Association (BLA) conference is one of the highlights of my year at work. I’ve been to three so far and they get better year after year. This year’s conference was held in Sheffield from the 13-15 July. The theme was “Making an impact: demonstrating value”. As a member of the BLA committee my conference starts a day earlier than most delegates with a final committee meeting at the venue. At this meeting we run through the programme for the next few days and divide up the remaining jobs. The final task is to make up the delegates [...]
advocacy
What do I do?
Over the past few weeks I have been mulling over the question of how librarians are viewed from outside the profession. A topic which has been much discussed on blogs and Twitter but always within the echo chamber. I am prepared to admit that I am absolutely useless at promoting the profession; I don’t know why but I just can’t talk about what I do. I am aware however that if we’re ever going to break down the stereotypes then people like me need to get bolder about talking about what we do and why it’s important. This seems more [...]
The Librarian as Consultant
Today I attended a Librarian as Consultant course. The overall message of the day was that as consultants librarians should be working to change the perception of our role from information provider to information adviser. I think one of the key challenges of this is getting our users to understand what skills we have and how we can use these to help them not only access information but evaluate and manage it as well. Throughout the day the thought that kept coming in to my mind was how this links to the echolib debate that is developing on Twitter. If [...]
