Photo of Debbie Hicks, Creative Director, The Reading Agency

CILIP Conference 2024’s headline theme of intellectual freedom sparked thought and conservation from the opening address by PEN’s Daniel Gorman, who spoke how libraries, with their principles of open access, are a centrepiece of society and culture.

In the following panel discussion ‘Intellectual freedom in the age of post-neutrality’, discussion flowed freely about how libraries can continue to uphold principles of freedom of expression and represent the diverse communities they serve.

The conference’s K&IM streams did not only draw in delegates from the sector, but created cross-pollination with attendees from the libraries profession, who also took part in the stream’s collaborative workshops that covered leadership skills training and upselling your own work in your organisation.

In Libraries, Health and Digital Literacy, a cross-sector panel, including YouTube’s Dr Vishaal Virani, looked at the challenges and solutions that health literacy education offers when 43 per cent of patients struggle with words in health information (which increases to 61 per cent when it includes numbers).

In the afternoon, Shared Intelligence’s Ben Lee ran a two-part practical introduction to Future Literacy and CILIP’s ‘Come Rain or Shine’ report, a toolkit and methodology for building resilience and agile thinking to make libraries sustainable in the long term.

Janet Peden of Ulster University took the stage to start off day two’s events, and shared a personal case study of the challenges and successes from her experiences in library-wide transformation and change management, and how she ‘turned things inside out’ to make the university library services an active partner in student learning.

The lunchtime keynote featured a conversation with Tammye Huf, Author of A More Perfect Union, and winner of the 2021 Diverse Book Award, who talked about her writing process and how she tried to do justice to enslaved people through fiction.

Evidence-based practice is one of CILIP’s core values and ‘Evidence-informed practice: moving the agenda forward’ provided insights into how CILIP’s Library & Information Research Group transformed itself into a research working group to understand how librarians are supported and equipped to undertake their own research in their workplace. (full report coming soon)

Amy Staniforth, Consultant and Metadata Librarian and Sarah Ewing, Lecturer in Academic Literacies, Centre for Academic Language and Literacies (CALL) Goldsmiths, the conference with a fascinating discussion on making collections and libraries more inclusive, with insights on the CILIP Wales Anti-racist Collections programme, and Sarah Ewing’s work on hierarchies of knowledge and legitimacy in research and pedagogy.

CILIP CEO Louis Coiffait-Gunn left the delegates with a simple message in his closing remarks to sum up the two days of talks, workshops, discussions and ideas: "We are stronger together as a community."