Hi there, thought I would write a little bit about a couple of days that I have had out of the office recently, which were both very enjoyable. The first was a couple of weeks ago now, a practical project management course, which was presented by JISC Infonet on behalf of CILIPS.

I found the course to be a very good introduction to the main principles of project management, and whilst I don’t feel as if I learned everything there is to know (a pretty impossible task in one day at any rate!), I do feel slightly more confident in my ability to plan ahead for projects, if I were ever asked to undertake one. I feel as if i could even use some of those principles learned on a smaller scale within my everyday work. A couple of other people from my work were also there at the training course, however, they both have quite a lot more experience than me in managing projects. I think that they both found it to be of use to them too.

The course itself had quite an educational focus, but was transferable to other areas, although some of the principles might be different, e.g. when we undertake projects it is often on behalf of others (paying customers) and so we don’t generally need to justify the project to management in the same way that someone in an academic or public library might need to.

They also provided quite a lot of material for us to take home, and directed us to a range of materials which are available for free on their website, all of which would be of great use to anyone undertaking a project of pretty much any size. There are also other infokits (as they call them) related to other aspects of management, such as change management, which I might also have a look at, as management is one area of my chartership where I feel that I might perhaps be lacking in experience slightly, due to the nature and organisational structure of my current employment.

The second day out that I have recently had is to the CILIPS Branch Group Day, which is normally held in Peebles, but was this year held in Dundee. I think this was to make access for people who live in the north of Scotland easier access to the event. I met in with a few people that I already know there, and also was introduced to other people. Funnily enough, I bumped into my previous dissertation supervisor and co-author of my recent article (mentioned below) on the train on the way there. It was nice to get out of the office and to network with other people who have sometimes vastly different roles to my own. I was chatting for a while to a woman who works in a health library, and it seems to be completely different to my own experience, and is something that I would be quite interested in experiencing, perhaps only as a work shadowing day though, rather than as a future career path!

I sat through a number of interesting talks provided by the different branches of CILIP. I was quite conscious to pick talks which were quite different from one another, so as to get an insight of library related issues in areas that I am not so familiar with. The first talk was on digitisation of local and national heritage materials, and the main issues surrounding this. I felt that much of what was said had already been covered in my ILS degree, as we did a digital libraries course, but it was still interesting to hear about it from a different perspective. A number of interesting sites with digitised materials were also discussed, such as the NLS, and examples of good practice shown.

The second talk that I attended was on Google and whether libraries and librarians will be able to evolve in order to keep up with technology and changing user demands as a result of this. There was a lot of emphasis on the library becoming less important as a place, and less visable in the provision of resources and services. How libraries and librarians could improve their libraries so as to stay relevant to people, particularly young people in higher education was a main focus of this talk.

The third talk was about the establishment of student centred learning at Napier University, such as the use of blended learning through a VLE and the importance of providing support for the users of such services.