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.

This was my first CILIP conference as a member of the LIRG committee and I was very excited to be on our stand and meeting delegates. It was also the first time I’d met some of my fellow committee members in person as we’ve been meeting on Zoom since I joined. We had post-its and pens to give away as well as a competition to win a place at one of our future events and were very pleased with the engagement from delegates. We did have chocolates too but I’m sure that’s not the only reason people came to talk to us.

From fab keynotes and networking opportunities to interesting sessions it was two days well spent. I also tweeted on behalf of LIRG at the conference so if you want to know more follow us on Twitter @cilipLIRG and look for tweets with #CILIPConf22

Key take aways from the Conference:

• When you lose access to knowledge you lose the ability to think for yourself (Sayf Al Ashqar Secretary General of Libraries, University of Mosul, Iraq – opening keynote day 1). This was an inspirational keynote telling the story of the rebuilding of the library after the destruction by ISIS.
• University presses have an important role to play in open access publishing and the global impact is the most compelling reason for Deans to back such a venture (Dr Paul Ayris, UCL, breakout session on Open Knowledge, Open Science)
• Intellectual freedom and censorship is a thorny issue but CILIPs new policy is aiming to provide help to information professionals on this issue. If you want to get involved in the consultation more information here: https://www.cilip.org.uk/general/custom.asp?page=intellectualfreedom (Intellectual Freedom and Libraries, a policy consultation – breakout session)
• We are all continuing to learn, if you think you’ve learnt it all as a librarian it could be time to move on or out (Krystal Vittles, Deputy CEO of Suffolk Libraries – closing keynote, day 1), full of energy and a great speaker, couldn’t have had anyone better for an end of the day keynote when we were all starting to flag.
• COVID affected our emotional responses, heightening them and making rational policy decision-making about big issues more difficult (Professor Jacqueline McGlade, Professor of Natural Prosperity, Sustainable Development and Knowledge Systems at UCL – opening keynote day 2)
• Information Literacy teaching and resources need to adapt to include new/different concepts and skills in order to be sustainable into the future, including open research topics (Karen Veitch, University of Strathclyde – part of the New Voice, Big Ideas breakout session)
• The IFLA storytelling manual helps you to present your value and impact to stakeholders. More information here: https://librarymap.ifla.org/storytelling-manual (Evidence Impact with IFLA’s Storytelling Manual, breakout session)
• Anyone can make data driven decisions, they just need training - Amy’s book “Data Driven Decisions” aims to address this by providing a toolkit for people new to data, but also for managers (or data lovers) to work with others to develop them (Amy Stubbing, University of Westminster)

The final session of the conference gave a number of speakers the opportunity to talk about what CILIP means to them and how being a part of CILIP has supported them in their careers, whatever stage they are at. This was a really positive end to two days of interesting conversations around all aspects of the information profession. If you’ve not attended a CILIP conference before maybe check it out next year and look out for bursary opportunities to help with attendance. As a special interest group we were able to offer a bursary place to the conference this year and you’ll be hearing about our winner’s conference experience in a future blog post.

Are you interested in hosting EBLIP11 in 2021?

The EBLIP Conference is a biennial conference designed to promote the use of best available evidence to improve library and information practice in all types of libraries. It aims to bring together practitioners, researchers, and students involved in critical and reflective information practice to think through new ways to address contemporary issues of evidence based practice in less isolated, more collaborative, ways.

The first EBL(IP) Conference took place in Sheffield, UK in 2001. The success of this conference led to further conferences in Edmonton (Canada, 2003), Brisbane (Australia, 2005), Chapel Hill (USA, 2007), Stockholm (Sweden, 2009), Salford (UK, 2011), Saskatoon (Canada, 2013) Brisbane (Australia, 2015), Philadelphia (USA, 2017) and Glasgow (UK, 2019).

The International Advisory Committee is inviting expressions of interest to host the next EBLIP conference in 2021.  Deadline for expressions of interest are 31 March 2020.  Please note this is a revised deadline.

Expressions of interest should be sent using the template and guidance from https://www.eblip10.org/ to Alison Brettle – A.Brettle@salford.ac.uk