CILIP Cymru Wales Open Day & AGM

Jason Evans, Libraries and Wikipedia - An unlikely partnership

Libraries and Wikipedia might not seem the most natural of allies, however, with Wikipedia well established as the largest and most visited source of knowledge in the world, libraries have a crucial role to play in ensuring content on Wikipedia is accurate, well sourced, well-illustrated and well balanced. The National Wikimedian at the National Library of Wales will guide you through some of the activities they have undertaken with Wikipedia and its sister projects with a look at some of the benefits seen by Wikipedia, the library and CILIP.

Juanita Foster-Jones, Professional registration – what’s changed

Professional registration has re-opened with some changes on how you submit. Juanita will give you a whistlestop tour of what’s changed, and why professional registration is the next step on your career journey.

Rheinallt Jones, Digitisation & Libraries at People's Collection Wales

The People’s Collection Wales is currently working in collaboration with Newtown Library to use a new universal crowdsourcing platform to develop a project allowing online volunteers to produce useful metadata for a collection of c.5000 images of Newtown, Powys.

This will allow for the capture of useful metadata to allow the publication of an important collection of images related to Newtown.

Hywel Lloyd, Materiality in special collections: a day at CILIP’s Rare Books Study Conference

I was delighted to win a bursary from CILIP Cymru to attend a day of CILIP’s Rare Books and Special Collections Conference in September. It was a valuable experience to learn and interact with other people who do similar work to me at other institutions. Several of the sessions gave me insights on how we could better interact with our users at the Library and create partnerships to co-operate both locally and remotely. The unique features of books and letters was a regular theme and how libraries should endeavour to record them to ensure that the information is available to users.

Gwyneth Davies, The Living Memory scheme

The aim of the Living Memory scheme is to utilise the potential of The National Library of Wales graphic and audiovisual collections to unlock memories and to facilitate reminiscence therapy with older people and those living with dementia.

Packs of archival photographs and films have been compiled. These resources are available free of charge to public libraries throughout Wales and to those working in the field of elderly care and mental health care.

Gwyneth joined the National Library of Wales in 2012 to establish and run the volunteering scheme. The Library welcomes around 50 volunteers of all ages, backgrounds and abilities to the building every week, while more than 600 remote volunteers are currently registered on its crowdsourcing website.

Leo Appleton, Say it loud and say it proud ‘I'm a librarian’: the superhero approach to engaging with your profession!

The superhero roadshow is a library staff training and development workshop which aims to get library professionals, from all sectors, thinking about how they engage with the library and information profession.

Participants are invited to think about their own personal impact and value at work and how they celebrate their professional achievements. A major focus of the workshop is about how library professionals can engage with scholarship and scholarly activity through participating in professional activities and presenting their work and achievements through conferences or through publications. The workshop uses the concept of librarians as ‘superheroes’ as a light-hearted metaphor through which to convey the significance and importance of library work and professional engagement.