Welcome to the Spring 2011 issue of Central Issues, my first as newsletter editor for CDG WM. First of all, thanks must go to Jess Humphreys for all her hard work on Central Issues over the last few years, and in particular for facilitating a straight-forward handover! My move from Chair to Newsletter Editor wasn’t the only change on the CDG WM committee in January. Anna Brown has taken over the role of Chair and Sabelo Mapasure is now our Candidate Support Of-ficer. You can find out more about Anna and Sabelo and the route that brought them to CDG WM later in this issue. But first we have an article about following events that you are unable to attend in person. With staff development budgets being slashed in these challenging times, this is a timely reminder that there are plenty of creative ways of continuing your CPD on a tight budget! As usual, you will find a ―cut out and keep‖ guide to upcoming CDG events—please let us know if you don’t see the events you want!

Georgina Hardy Newsletter Editor, CDG WM

Editorial

See your name in print!

There are plenty of opportunities to contribute to future issues of this newsletter. If you have participated in an event or development activity recently, or maybe you’ve read an article that inspired you, please share your experiences with your colleagues across the West Mid-lands. It’s a great way to keep in touch with your reflective writing skills! For more information, contact me on g.c.hardy@aston.ac.uk.

Spring 2011 Issue 21

Central Issues The Newsletter of the Career Development Group West Midlands Division

The Career Development

Group is a special interest group of

CILIP, The Chartered

Institute of Library & Information Professionals.

Registered Charity Number 313014.

Inside this issue:

Editorial 1

Following events from afar

2

Librarians with Lives

3

Committee Profile: Anna Brown

4

―Christmas‖ Meal

5

Committee Profile: Sabelo Mapasure

6

From your CSO 7

Keeping in touch

7

Dates for your diary

8

Jo Alcock introduces the concept of “Event

Amplification” and demonstrates that even librarians with the most active of lives can

still find ways to participate in CPD:

I’m not at the stage of my life yet where I have delightful children who take up all my spare time (though our two cats can be demanding little fusspots at times!), but I do like to think that I have a life outside of work, so I consider myself a li-brarian with a life. I also have a few professional plates to juggle; I’m still com-pleting my MSc dissertation, I’m a member of two different CILIP committees, and I write a blog.

CPD is important to me. I love to attend events, but it’s not always possible to attend the ones you’d like to – sometimes for finan-cial reasons, or lack of time, or maybe it’s dur-ing the day and you have work commitments. But nowadays you can often still follow the event without physically being there.

Event amplification is a term which is being used more commonly now – it refers to the event be-ing amplified beyond its physical barriers, often by utilising technology such as Twitter, live blog-ging or live streaming. Many event organisers are starting to utilise these technologies to en-able people to follow the event from afar. It helps the event get more publicity and could mean more people attending their next event – I’ve certainly earmarked a few events I’d like to at-tend based on the information I have followed.

Through my Twitter connections, I’ve been able to follow events from all over the world. Sometimes it might not even be an event you’re aware of, but if you spot a tweet from someone and it has an event hashtag, you can then set up a saved search to see all the tweets with the hashtag.

More and more, event amplification information is publicised on the event fliers and emails, so you can even set it in your calendar and try to set aside some time during the day to catch up on the tweets from the event, or watch a particular section of the event when it is live streamed if it’s something you are interested in.

Following events from afar

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Librarians with Lives

So, if you want to follow events from afar and help others do the same, here are some quick tips:

join Twitter and follow people within the community with similar interests to your own – they will be most likely to tweet from events that you will also be inter-ested in following

keep an eye out for details of a Twitter hashtag for events or details of any live streaming or live blogging for events you are interested in – add them to your calendar with appropriate URLs where applicable if you attend an event and are able to tweet, explain to your followers what event you are at and include a hashtag if there is one (if there isn’t, consider creating your own to keep all tweets together and make it easier for people to follow)

Here’s to more event amplification enabling us to follow events whilst sat at home in our jim jams or drinking wine – cheers!

Jo Alcock is an Evidence Based Researcher at Evidence Base in Birmingham City Uni-versity. This basically means she’s a librarian without a library who spends her time on research, evaluation and consultancy for the library and information community. You can find Jo on Twitter @joeyanne and blogging at http://www.joeyanne.co.uk/. This ar-ticle was first published in the Librarians with Lives blog and is reproduced here with permission.

CPD for the timestretched. Frances Machell invites you

to find out more about the Librarians with Lives blog. Are you a librarian with too many commitments? Do you have a dog (or two), a toddler (or two), a garden, a band, a time-consuming addiction to reality TV? Do you feel you can’t attend conferences or join professional committees because on most days it’s a struggle just to find time to load the dishwasher? Are you, in short, a Librarian with a Life? If so, Librarians with Lives (http://librarianswithlives.wordpress.com/) is looking for guest bloggers and would love to hear from you. It’s a blog dedicated to CPD and professional issues, for the many people out there who are juggling jobs along with other commit-ments, but who haven’t given up on professional development yet. We’ve had guest posts on the subject of networking, Twitter and social media, advocacy and current awareness, and would love to hear your thoughts too. Come along, read, comment and if you’d like to contribute a post, tweet us @libswithlives or email frances@realms.co.uk.

Anna Brown Chair

I completed my MA in Information and Library Studies at Loughborough University in 2001. Since then, my professional career has been rather varied, including roles at a university and a law firm (both in Bristol), a government de-partment in Wellington, New Zealand and a business school in Dublin, Ireland. Throughout all this moving between sectors and countries, the Career Development Group has remained one of my CILIP special interest group sub-scriptions. CDG is relevant to anyone who sees library/information work as more than ―just a job‖, and for me that is what membership of a professional organisation is all about. So, when I arrived in the West Midlands in January 2010, it was only natural that I should get involved with the local CDG Division. Luckily, soon after I moved to the area, the CDG West Midlands Division held its annual belated ―Christmas‖ dinner in Birming-ham, so I had an early opportunity to meet some of the people involved. The group was very friendly and welcoming, so I started attending Committee meetings and help-ing out or contributing ideas where possible. As 2010 came to an end, it was time for me to take on more responsibility with an official role on the Committee, the post of Chair became vacant, so here I am! Although I’m still a little surprised that I allowed myself to be persuaded to take on what sounded like an important and challenging po-sition, the year is going well so far; with enthusiastic and capable colleagues on the Committee, the role of Chair is mainly one of co-ordinating and communicating across the Committee and Division. I now live and work in Coventry. After a few months working on the NHS Evidence

specialist collections at Warwick Medical School, in October 2010 I took up a perma-

nent post as CEBIS Specialist at University Hospitals Coventry and Warwickshire

(UHCW) NHS Trust. CEBIS stands for ―Clinical Evidence Based Information Service‖

– a new development at UHCW, where information professionals are integrated into

the clinical teams, providing and evaluating the evidence to support decision-making,

and thereby promoting evidence-based practice.

Committee Profile

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Curious to know more about the “Christmas” dinner that Anna mentions in her

article? Peter Kargbo tells us more about this year’s celebration... Most workplace Christmas get-togethers in the UK tend to happen some time between December 10-22 which sounds perfectly sensible given that friends and colleagues like to make the most of the Christmas spirit with all it’s promise, expectations and excite-ment .

So January 27th might sound like a rather odd date to have your annual Christmas

meal, several weeks after the Christmas lights have been switched off, the frantic shopping has calmed down a bit, the Christmas holidays are over and we all look for-ward to going back to work.

Not so for a group of savvy librarians living or working in the West Midlands region. CDG West Midlands held their annual Christmas meal social on January 27

th, weeks

after the Christmas hype had calmed down, the restaurants were relatively quiet and the ridiculously inflated restaurant prices had returned to normal.

The venue was Chez Jules, a down-to-earth French bistro just off New Street in Bir-mingham city centre. The ―guests‖ were librarians working in public, school, medical and academic libraries. The food and drink was well within our budget and a lot less than you’d expect to pay during peak Christmas season at the same venue. Having the meal on a relatively quiet, post Christmas Thursday eve-ning was yet more evidence of smart thinking as we practically had the place to ourselves. There was no pressure to eat up and make way for waiting cus-tomers which meant we had plenty of time to enjoy the food and drink while discussing professional issues in a pleasant, relaxing and mutually suppor-tive environment.

Peter is a Law Librarian at Manchester Metropolitan University, living in the West Midlands region.

Photo credit: Kevin R Boyd http://www.flickr.com/photos/kevin_r_boyd/5314264074/

“Christmas” Meal

Sabelo Mapasure Candidate Support Officer (CSO)

My career in Librarianship spans over 20 years, and I seem to be happy with it. While living in Luton, I worked as a Principal Librarian at Imperial College London responsible for information skills training and day-to-day management of the St. Mary’s Library in Paddington. At the end of the contract, I took a few steps backwards (salary-wise) in my career ladder by joining the National Institute for Medical Research (NIMR). However the motivation was that NIMR of-fered to support my chartership. I have taken a risk in my profession and moved to Shropshire in August 2010 to work on a fixed term con-tract as Library and Knowledge Services Manager for NHS Telford and Wrekin. I had worked as Assistant Librarian at NIMR since January 2008.

I first attended a Chartership seminar in 2006, but I only began to make meaningful progress and registered for Chartership in 2007. My first encounter with CDG was through signing up for Chartership seminars and the AGM in 2007. I volunteered to write a report on one of the seminars and got published in Directions, the Newsletter of the London and South East Divisions. I recall visiting the University College London Library’s Cataloguing Department where I met Maria Cotera who invited me to their CDG meeting. On the first meeting I attended, there was a call for committee positions and immediately I was drawn into the Events Team and subsequently became CSO Support in 2009. On completion of my chartership in July 2009, I volunteered to become one of the CSOs for London and South East Divisions. My first facilitation as CSO was in May 2010 in Flitwick (East of England) boundary, where over 48 candidates attended with the majority for certifica-tion. I also facilitated a portfolio building surgery and a chartership seminar in London’s Ridg-mount Street. All the sessions in London and Flitwick were over-subscribed; however I have been alerted that West Midlands has less numbers. I really enjoy supporting candidates with their chartership or certification. As you will imagine, changing jobs in the middle of the year was a challenge as I had to count the loss of my CSO role in London. Attending an NHS Librarians meeting in Birmingham in October 2010 helped me to network with some of the CDG West Midlands Division committee members. To my surprise I was in-formed the current CSO was standing down and there was a vacancy. Later on I was con-tacted by the CSO (Preeti Puligari) and then followed the nomination procedure to continue the role of CSO in West Midlands.

Committee Profile

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The plan for this year is to run a Chartership and Certification workshop in May as a morning session, followed by an afternoon session on Portfolio Building. Other Char-tership events for the year will be held July and November. If you would like your name added to the waiting list, use contact details below. I am keen to recruit a CSO Support. The Support role fits someone currently working towards Chartership with a desire to motivate their progression or with a desire to be-come a future CSO. To volunteer as CSO Support; or if you need any advice on your draft portfolio; or if you need to borrow example portfolios; or to find out about the training dates; or any general enquiries: please feel free to contact me on sabelo.mapasure@telfordpct.nhs.uk

Sabelo Mapasure Candidate Support Officer (CSO)

From your CSO...

Find us on Facebook to discover more about CDG WM events and activities. By becoming a fan of the group you will find out about the latest CDG WM events as soon as they are promoted and see who is in the CDG WM committee. For more information visit: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=77209952331

Sign up to the CDGBULLETIN JISCmail list to receive monthly events listings: http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/lists/cdgbulletin.html

Find us in your web browser: http://www.cilip.org.uk/get-involved/special-interest-groups/careerdevelopment/divisions/west-midlands/pages/default.aspx

Keeping in touch with CDG

Your ―cut out and keep‖ guide to what’s happening with the Career Development Group over the next few months.

CDG New Professionals Conference 2011 "Professionalism and Activism in a Time of Downturn" Date: Monday 20th June 2011 Venue: University of Manchester The call for proposals for this conference is now out (closes 5pm on Friday 15th April). For further information on how to register for this conference, see the CDG website: http://www.cilip.org.uk/get-involved/special-interest-groups/careerdevelopment/cdg-benefits/events/pages/new-professionals-conference-2011-call-for-papers.aspx ………………………………………………………………………………………………….

Chartership/Certification seminar Date: Thursday 26th May, 9:30 to 4:30 Venue: Birmingham Central Library To be confirmed—please contact sabelo.mapasure@telfordpct.nhs.uk for further informa-tion or to book your place.

Librarians as Teachers Following the success of Librarians as Teachers 2010 (#LAT10), CDG WM and UC&R WM will be teaming up again for another Librarians as Teachers event. Look out for fur-ther details soon via Facebook, JISCmail or our website (see previous page for details).

Love your Chartership These regular, informal events are an opportunity to chat to other candidates about the Chartership process and have been running successfully in both Birmingham and Coven-try. If you’d like to come along, look out for details on LIS-CILIP-REG.

Look out for future events including...

Dates for your Diary

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