You may have seen Gillian Siddall's post from HLG conference last week, well she also went to CILIP conference 2024, 10th-11th July in Birmingham, to present on the LIRG research project and share her reflections with us. 

Gillian is an Academic Librarian at University of Northampton

Presenting at a conference and getting a speaker’s place for a day is a great way to attend a conference you wouldn’t ordinarily be able to. I’m grateful that by presenting on the LIRG research project I was able to attend the CILIP’s conference: uniting the sector’s leaders. I attended the second day of the conference and listened to inspiring speakers. Starting with the CILIP’s new CEO Louis Coiffait-Gunn, who encouraged us to fight for intellectual freedom and use evidence and civil discourse to lean into tricky debates. The conference was filled with interesting presentations that shared ideas to help promote and build our profession and role.

Janet Peden from Ulster University presented her experience as University Librarian, building and developing the staff and library sites. Her fundamental message was that in the current climate of significant digital acceleration and fluid change you must:

Turn the library inside out and become highly visible – you have to be seen, to be valued!

A lesson for us all: we can’t assume everyone understands the purpose or value of a library, we need to make sure it’s clear for all. Janet explained how the library service had moved from collecting resources to connecting the university community. A key change for her department was the move from service and support to partnership and expertise.

Speaking about becoming ‘match-fit for a senior leadership role’ Regina Everitt, from the University of East London, highlighted the importance of building trust in and with your team. As a leader, you set the culture for the department, so you have to be authentic and specifically engage with the digital landscape. Working with IT, rather than against or in isolation from it. Partnerships move everyone forward. From NHS England, Louise Goswami highlighted the importance of skills development to improve your knowledge and experience. In the current tempestuous times, it’s reassuring to hear from someone with experience that redundancy can be a positive step to help you buy time to think about what you want to do next. The knowledge and skills you develop come with you and those transferable skills are highly valuable: influencing, negotiating, and communicating skills. Louise encouraged us to remember that everyone’s a little bit frightened and you are not alone, work with your network, and your team.

Leading and managing a team is helped by understanding the ‘why’ – if you understand why something happens and you understand the language that resonates with the people you’re trying to influence, you can find your advocates. A key tip from both Regina and Louise was to always over-prepare your information and do your homework so you understand your audience and use the language and evidence that is most appropriate. Don’t blind them with library speak! In response to questions in the room, self-care came up as a key part of leadership. Leading by example (allowing people to say no, to have down-time and be honest) helps your team. If you look after yourself, your team will see it’s ok for them to look after themselves too and know that you’ll do your best to look after them as well.

Considering the entrepreneurial leader Tom Penford and Zak Mensah presented different ways of understanding and building your core ‘business’. From his role in Birmingham Museum’s Trust Zak encouraged the audience to look at the lifetime value of our customers, what can we do to support those true fans who will support us in return. Suggesting we consider how far we can push things without getting fired! Framing changes and developments in terms of the needs of your true fans (or community):

As a …

I need …

So that …

To understand and then justify the changes that need to be made.

Tom Penford explored the Lego story to help us understand why we need to think ‘around’ the box. To look at what our core values are and build on those (rather than trying to create something completely different or simply maintain the status quo). Linking back to Janet’s presentation – we need to be part of the conversation, visible to our community to help them understand the value we bring. Discover and demonstrate why you are key to the community you are in.

The inspirational talks continued after lunch when I went to a talk discussing inclusive collections. A really interesting point was the fact that the majority of libraries are outsourcing key library skills, such as acquisitions and we’re also not training people in them. If we’re to make a difference and make a coherent and relevant collection for our communities, we need to be clear about how and why we are purchasing (or subscribing) to resources. We should avoid being passive consumers and re-invigorate our skills with acquisitions and cataloguing – understanding the data (and the power it holds).

Presenting at a conference can be a nerve-wracking experience. However, Louise and Regina’s point about over-preparing really helps. The more confident you are in what you’re saying, the easier it will be to stand up and feel confident in what you have to share. Most library conferences I have been to have been incredibly friendly and supportive, attendees want to learn, and they want you to succeed. Hopefully if you keep that in mind, it will help you conquer your nerves. In my case, the value I took from the conference presentation was the breadth of ideas and expertise of the audience we were presenting to. It’s reassuring that even though we work in different sectors, we are all keen to see the profession grow and succeed. Sometimes we may only be making incremental steps, but we are moving forward and that is something to celebrate.

UKSG 2024 took place in Glasgow again this year and we discovered that three of us (Ebony, Cath and Jess) would be attending so took the opportunity to meet in person as we’ve only ever met before online. We thought it would be a good idea to write a little piece for the blog to share our reflections on the conference to maybe help others decide whether it’s something they might want to attend in future. The call for papers has actually just gone out for next year’s conference which will be in Brighton. Just a note to say if you present a breakout session you get your attendance, accommodation and reasonable travel for free. You do have to present your breakout twice over the three days. There are other options, like lightning talks but I think you just get your conference place paid for if you are delivering one of those. More details on the Conference website.

UKSG Conference is the conference for the organisation UKSG which started life as the United Kingdom Serials Group conference and was very much focused on purchasing and E-Resources. Now more than a third of the membership is based outside the UK and the conference covers a much wider range of topics including scholarly communications and research support. So the organisation is known as UKSG. The conference is attended by delegates from across the global knowledge community, including librarians, publishers, intermediaries, technology vendors, consultants and more. As well as presentations and workshops there is an exhibition area with various vendors having stalls you can visit, with an array of freebies and information on offer.

Cath

I had the great pleasure of being a breakout speaker for two different presentations. When I put the papers in I didn’t expect both to be accepted but they were which meant I was doing 4 sessions over the 3 days. I had a co-speaker for my session on Open Journals, Rebecca Wojturska from Edinburgh Diamond and were talking about our two services (mine being LJMU Open Journals Service). Unfortunately Rebecca was unable to make it at the last minute but as I had her notes I decided to go ahead anyway with the presentation. Coupled with that, she was supposed to be on a plenary that my colleague had organised on predatory publishing and I volunteered to step in to take her place. I was also presenting on our LIRG research project which meant I ended up presenting 5 times over the 3 days. So I think for me UKSG was tiring! However it was very rewarding too. I enjoyed being able to talk about our research project as well as listening to others, when I wasn’t speaking myself. The conference also offers to opportunity to meet up with colleagues and make new connections. Following on from the conference I’ve had 3 meetings with people I met there.

In terms of the sessions I found useful, there was the session from Simon Herrick and Toby Green on the 5% manifesto for REF which I thought was very interesting. This has led to a follow up conversation with Simon as he also attended my session on the research project and is coming to talk to the LIRG committee about what they are hoping to achieve. I also enjoyed the session from Elaine Sykes and Tom Grady on how to achieve sustainable funding for open access books. All in all, UKSG is an excellent conference for learning from others, meeting colleagues from other institutions and making new connections.

Jess

One of the big themes of the UKSG Annual Conference was the UK’s transition to open access via transitional agreements, also known as transformative agreements or Read and Publish deals. Key findings from JISC’s recent review of these agreements were presented during a plenary session (the full report can be accessed here) and in one of the breakout sessions, librarians from King’s College London shared their approach to managing Read and Publish deals, including a checklist they employ to evaluate these deals.

As I work for the NHS Wales e-Library service, which does not currently have these agreements set up, I found these sessions particularly insightful. It was valuable to listen to and learn from the reflections of higher education institutions who have had these agreements in place for several years. I am eager to keep updated on the progress of transitional agreements, and any alternative initiatives that may be introduced in the future.

Overall, UKSG Annual Conference was an enriching experience and, with the participation of publishers and content providers at the conference, I am optimistic that the event has provided an excellent opportunity for collaboration between publishers and the LIS community to continue to effectively shape the future of open access scholarly communications.

We are pleased to announce the upcoming session in our Lunchtime research methods series. 

Statistical Analysis with Elaine Sykes

When: Thursday 25th April 2024 - 12-1pm

Where: online but please register to get the link

Cost: Free (and the event will be recorded and circulated to those who have registered for the event)

Register here: https://www.cilip.org.uk/event/statistical-analysis 

Elaine is the Head of Open Research at Lancaster University. She holds a Maths degree from Durham University, an MBA, and has over 10 years' experience in academic libraries.

Upcoming webinar dates and titles - “LIRG's Research Methods: Lunchtime events series" : 

Friday 21st June, 2024 - Narrative Inquiry

There is still time to book for the first session of 2024 Online Interviews with Sheila Webber - more information on our previous post

More sessions will be added to the webinar series in the autumn. Each session will run virtually on Zoom and start at 12pm.

If you require more information please contact Marlene Rak

Attribution: Image by PublicDomainPictures from Pixabay

I am working on a project for LIRG who have identified the need to develop a rationale for how and where to focus limited research funding supporting library practitioners across the UK.

The project will ask:

• What future developments will libraries in the UK need to significantly engage with, in the next ten years?
• Which of these areas are most critical for us to understand and require in-depth focused research to support this (and thus benefit from funding)?  

The key purpose of the research is to provide a clear indication of the research focus for libraries for the future. It is anticipated that this would support coalescence of activity in critical areas for the LIS community.

Over the last two months I have been working on several aspects of the project simultaneously:

Firstly, ensuring that the nuts and bolts of the research process such as ethics approval and relevant documentation is finalized for participants.

Secondly I have been searching for, and collating the themes, for as many conference programmes and 2024 ‘calls for papers’ across the profession as possible.

The following groups conference information have been included to date in the analysis:

1. CILIPS
2. CILIP : conference and Libraries Rewired
3. WHELF
4. RLUK
5. CONUL
6. SLA
7. LILAC
8. The EDGE Conference
9. LibPMC
10. University of Northampton Researcher Conference
11. CILIP’s HLG conference
12. BIALL
13. CALC
14. Academic Libraries North
15. Libraries Connected

I have amalgamated and then themed the outputs of all the conference listings, with some indication of the types of conference papers that have led to the creation of a specific theme. The current list is large; librarians certainly have a wide range of interests, some specifically niche to their area, and some that are likely to be relevant to all. The next step to this part of the process is to test the list with library staff from all areas of the profession to ensure that the list is robust and relevant for all.

In order to undertake the second part of the research process, in advance of the final Delphi workshop I have also been making contact with as many colleagues/organizations across the profession as possible, initially following my original research plan and then diversifying in other directions as other leads made themselves apparent. The aim is to find as many staff from all areas of the profession to check the themed list created through the conference activity.

IF YOU ARE WILLING AND INTERESTED IN HELPING WITH THIS STAGE OF THE RESEARCH PLEASE GET IN TOUCH! Responses to this element of the project need to be completed and returned to me by 7th February: elizabeth.tilley@cantab.net

I am already aware of the many issues that arise when undertaking a research project and what might have seemed so simple on paper, doesn’t always translate into reality. I genuinely consider myself to be a problem-solver, so I have made at least one significant change in the second part of the research process. I had planned to hold semi-structured interviews with library staff rather than ask for an email response, however both time constraints AND a realization that actually I want to ask everyone the same three questions, has led to a change in the process; this should not be to the detriment in the results at this stage of the process, rather it should allow me to access more varied staff across the profession in the long run. 

I’m looking forward to hearing from lots of you this month…………

Libby Tilley elizabeth.tilley@cantab.net

LIRG Research Award 2023 - Congratulations Libby Tilley!

We are delighted to announce that Elizabeth (Libby) Tilley (formerly University of Cambridge Library) has won the LIRG Research Award 2023. Libby is receiving the LIRG research award fund and support to conduct research which aims to identify the most important and answerable research questions for UK library practice. Over the coming months Libby will update her progress on the LIRG blog. We look forward to supporting this exciting project and discovering research priorities for library, information and knowledge workers in the UK. Well done Libby!

Judy Wright, CILIP LIRG Research Awards Officer