Profession in crisis? Thing 15: Attending, presenting at and organising seminars, conferences and other events.

CILIP Career Development Group / North Wales Library Partnership joint event – January 2012, Llandudno Junction. Image © Stephen Gregory / CILIP CDG Wales, 2012.

The picture above, for me, recalls an excellent joint event hosted in North Wales in January 2012. I attended and spoke at this event, and it reminds me of the pleasures and perils of doing both. I found myself agreeing with so much provided within the brief for Thing 15 and its related links. Participating in professional development events, as delegate, speaker, chair or organiser really is so fulfilling, beneficial and invigorating. Consequently, my first attempt at this blog did little more than replicate the suggestions and experiences encapsulated in the brief. Little point in re-inventing the wheel!

However, I would agree with Katie Birkwood's comments that attendance at events is being increasingly jeopardised by the current economic situation. In my experience this really is becoming a significant factor to the viability of our professional events. Furthermore, in the absence of other activities, this affects the viability, vibrancy and raison d'etre of our formal professional groups. It seems to me that the impacts of the economic downturn on professional development are numerous, including:

• from the employer / employee perspective:
  • depleted or non-existent training and development budgets
  • reduced staffing levels, meaning that: retained staff work to increased workloads; capacity for planned absence is reduced; ability to catch-up after absence, or to clear the decks prior to absence, are diminished.
  • Stagnation on the career ladder. There are fewer opportunities for promotion and advancement, meaning that staff loose motivation and enthusiasm for cpd. Staff new to a role will have greater need to attend formal CPD activities in order to aid their development for fitness to undertake the role effectively and fully.
  • Organisations are less likely to support professional development in its broadest contexts, favouring job-specific training only. This is in part because of training budget limitations, but also because of workload pressures and reduced capacity to sanction cpd absence.
    
    
• From event providers' perspective:
  • Economic viability of events is being squeezed, leading to increasing likelihood of event cancellation.
  • Events become undertakings where the risks of financial and reputational disaster are too great. Can an organisation afford to loose money, or in effect subsidise events? Can organisations weather the potential for loss of credibility with poor attendance rates and perceived declining impact or professional value?
  • Events are not able to get off of the ground because the burdens of event organisation are too great for volunteer group committee members, especially given that support by their employees may be severely decreased.

There may be additional factors in some areas too. For instance, being based in Wales, where travel times from Bangor to Cardiff are at best half a day, we have significant problems of geography and costs associated with this (hotel fees, journey practicalities and time). However, in Wales geography can also be an issue for much more local destinations. Public transport routes between a location in one valley and a nearby location in another valley may be tortuous or non-existent. Video conferencing may be a solution, but as professional and social networking is such a valued feature of many meetings, can this be effectively replicated via a video-link?

How can some these barriers be overcome?

• Collaborate or use partnerships for events! Use vibrant local groups to jointly host successful, well attended events. The North Wales Library Partnership was a superb group to collaborate with. In South Wales groups such as Cardiff Libraries in Co-operation are incredibly active, now run with very little financial assistance. Other local divisions or circles of CILIP's Special Interest Groups or your CILIP Branch may also be able to assist. In the case of Wales it may be more appropriate for us to collaborate with our neighbours in West Midlands, North West, or South West, because transport links make it as easy, or easier, to attend events in Birmingham, Hereford, Chester or Bristol. (It could work the other way around though couldn't it! Marketing events in Wales more actively to colleagues just across Offa's Dyke.)
• Make events free / very low cost, and seek funding to cover costs via other routes. Grant funding, sponsorship, bursaries, awards, and dare I say, creative financing.
• Where possible use central locations, with excellent public transport links, and if possible with addition attractions or benefits.
• Plan well ahead and market your event extensively. Know your intended audience(s) and plan timing to maximise attendance. I consider timing to mean in this context two factors. Recognition of delegate availability (e.g. probably best not to run an event for academic library staff in late September or October). And also training budget cycles. When are training budgets set (April / August / January)?, and so when might chances for successful bids for expenditure from this budget be most successful? Remember that with some organisations expenditure for events that coincide with the end of a financial year, or which can be billed for in advance, using up residual funding in one year, to support CPD in the following, will be successful. Of course, if you are funding an event through means other than delegate charges, then this becomes less relevant, except where creative financing options may be considered.

Case Study

Walled Garden at the National Botanic Gardens of Wales

© Copyright Andrew Hill and licensed for reuse under this Creative Commons Licence

In the Spring 2012 I organised for CILIP Career Development Group in Wales, a one day event at the National Botanic Gardens of Wales with the Gardens' voluntary library manager. The day was planned to enable delegates to find out about:

• botanical and horticultural information and library collections for these subject areas, including the delights of herbaria and seed banks;
• implementation of Koha shareware library management system, and how to do this very successfully on a very small budget;
• the use of volunteers within a library service; and
• the Library's plans for the future.

I naively thought with that spread of fascinating and pertinent topics there would be significant interest from delegates. Unfortunately we had far too few bookings to make the event viable and so cancelled the event at one week's notice.

So what did I learn from this?

• Sell-ability. Potential delegates may have found it difficult to convince their line manager that attending this event was good use of their time and would provide excellent returns for expenditure from the training budget
• Affordability. If your employer wouldn't pay for your attendance, then the pricing was too high for self-funders (£40). If this is an option then delegates may also be burdened with using a day's leave and funding transport costs.
• Geography. The Gardens are difficult to get to unless travelling by car. Public transport would have been viable, but the journey is time consuming and a further expense. (I'm not quite so convinced by this one. No one contacted me to see if lift-sharing was possible, or if a quicker connection from the local train station could be collectively organised.)
• Increasing professional malaise or apathy? I hope not, but sometimes I can't help but suspect that this is the case.

What might be the way forward?

• Technology - video conferencing / virtual meetings are proving to be a vibrant and low-cost means for providing cpd. But technology has it's limitations: uneven user demographic; barriers caused by the technology; the lack of “by chance”, face to face networking opportunities.
• More local “live” networking events: pub meets, New Professionals meet ups; charity fund-raising initiatives.
• Mentoring – mentees and mentors both gaining through formal planning, discussion and evaluation of professional development, job roles, professional issues etc.
• CILIP Branch and Group Review. Changes to enable Groups and Branches to be more sustainable, but also more vibrant, creative, effective and supported.
• Where geography allows, the formation of cross-sectoral local groups providing cpd events, forums for discussion and debate, library visits etc. Partnership working between groups of all different types, sharing the burdens and risks of running events, but also gaining through their collaborative muscle and reputation. For CDG Wales linking more directly with the Annual CILIP Wales Conference might be a good way of promoting the Group, increasing our membership and our activity levels.
• Further exploration of alternative funding mechanisms and sources.

Regrettably, I don't have a prescription guaranteed to provide success. I do have ideas, enthusiasm and energy to support events, where and however I can. But what do you think?

CPD Thing 14 Reference management software

Reference Management Software - helping to bring order in an otherwise disordered world?
Order or disorder? Prairie planting of spring bulbs at Ascot House (National Trust), Buckinghamshire.
Image (c) Stephen Gregory

Thing 14 encourages participants to investigate reference management software, or to reflect on experiences on using referencing software in the past. To my shame, I had no previous experience of using RMS, although I recall that such packages have been available, commercially at least, for many years now.

I haven't been an extensive writer of assignments, professional papers or reports, and therefore my need for RMS has always been somewhat insignificant. On reflection, I guess that the thought of getting to grips with a new piece of software, successfully integrating this within my word processing package, and making effective use of it, would have been far more time consuming than rewarding. This Thing has demonstrated just how wrong that misconception was! 

It's some time since I worked in higher education librarianship, where I suppose greatest knowledge and usage of RMS occurs. Awareness and demand for RMS in my current organisation has been very low. To be fair, how many of us can truly  say that we successfully and confidently use indexing, referencing and content page features within our standard word processing packages? These relatively simple tools can help make life easier when creating reports or longer documents, but how many of us have taken the trouble to find out about them and use them? There are strong parallels aren't there! If you are like me, then you'll probably have done all of your referencing manually, and this will have been reasonably straightforward when using Harvard, and with a small set of cited documents. On the rare occasions when creating a longer reference list, or indeed when required to use numeric or Vancouver referencing, then this can become more problematic, especially when citing the same reference at several different points in your document and trying to retain numbering consistency. Isla mentioned her similar experiences in the Thing 14 brief.

So is there scope within my routine work to use RMS? In providing literature search results and current awareness bulletins, probably “yes”. But these aren't straightforward bibliographies are they? And so I guess that some manipulation and experimentation with output formats will be required. [Anyone have any experience of using RMS in these contexts?] My colleagues are experimenting with Reference Manager at present and I await their findings with keenness. Were our service to develop into providing more narrative and evaluative research (see my Blog on information synthesis / value adding) then the argument and benefits for using RMS are clear. In this context RMS could make our work more efficient, alongside the possibility of creating a database of frequently used references easily sourced within our RMS repository.

As part of Thing 14 I explored Mendeley, a freely available internet client and desktop download, with add-ons for reference import and citation management within word processing packages. The registration, download of the desktop client and installation of the add-ons was all straightforward. Within an hour, I had viewed the helpful training presentations, installed the package, explored the desktop and internet clients, imported references from documents already held on my laptop, imported additional references from a variety of internet sites and databases. In this time I had also drafted some sample text, inserted references and created the bibliography all using Mendeley's intuitive features. The integration with Open Office, my word processing software, with Google Chrome for reference harvesting, and the synchronisation between desktop and internet clients all worked perfectly. So my experiences were all very positive, and I had wondered why I hadn't used such systems previously! Very definitely time well spent.

Mendeley offers a range of collaborative tools too and I plan to explore some of these in a little more detail. The Mendeley profile will be of interest; I'll complete my details more fully and see if other Mendeley users share similar interests. PDF annotation will also be helpful. I like the idea of being able to create my own notes and comments on PDF documents. I doubt whether the PDF sharing function will be of relevance to me, but can see the value of this function for a team of colleagues working collaboratively on something, or within a research grouping. However, I'm struck once again by the need to caution our users about copyright and database licensing terms and conditions, with this type of activity.

So Thing 14 leaves me with some follow-up actions:

1. Investigate and implement Mendeley more fully, including profile and seeing if other users match my interests. Equally importantly try to incorporate using Mendeley as a matter of routine.
2. Find out about my colleagues feedback on Reference Manager, and see if this can be used within our context of literature search results and current awareness bulletin creation. If yes, how is this achieved and could similar be achieved in Mendeley?
3. Check out CiteULike. This would be useful to have some basic knowledge on this.

Cloudscapes ... Thing 13... collaborating and sharing

© Copyright s g b roberts and licensed for reuse under this Creative Commons Licence

Source - http://www.geograph.org.uk/reuse.php?id=2910113 

I'm old enough to remember early online searching where connection was enabled through dialling and then placing the telephone handset into a modem carriage. You paid for the phone line and so searched after 1pm when line charges were cheaper. You also paid for your time spent online with the database provider, and for the number of references retrieved. So your searching was very well prepared, very focussed, and undertaken with trepidation.

In 25 years how we have moved on! Online connections are now ubiquitious, fast and cheap; online storage is similarly plentiful and cheap. Thus, cloud computing comes to the fore - hence my title for this blog. Through the cloud Google Drive, Dropbox and wikis can function.

Thing 13 invites participants to explore and consider Google Drive, Dropbox and wikis. Regrettably I haven't used Google Drive in the past, but I have used the Microsoft Hotmail equivalent - Skydrive. Similar to Google Drive this allows online document creation, storage, sharing and group editing, as well as enabling remote access and working across platforms (Mac or PC). I have used Skydrive to access files from multiple locations and devices, but I haven't used these tools for collaborative working. I appreciate the secure storage and backup that cloud based storage provides, and the fact that if I loose or break my laptop then I can still access many of my vital files. (I do have alternative local backup solutions in place too, but Cloud-based solutions give me extra reassurance and ease of remote access). Skydrive came into it's own in pulling together my CILIP revalidation portfolio, but perhaps, on reflection, Dropbox or a wiki may have been even better?

As Secretary of the CILIP Career Development Group Wales Division the Committee has talked about using Google Drive for collaborative drafting of our divisional plan. Having watched the Wikis in Plain English video I now wonder if this process may be more easily achieved through a wiki.Worth trying this for 2013! The group currently archive and share files through JISCMAIL File Store features, which forms a handy central repository, but it is now cumbersome and dated in its operation. A wiki or cloud-based solution for Divisional files would, it seems to me, to be easier for us all to use.

Some departments in work are dabbling with internal wikis, providing desk notes, a knowledge base and an interactive environment in which to work collaboratively. For self- or team- generated content I can see that wikis would form an excellent platform. However, as information professionals we need to be exceptionally careful in guiding our users in appropriate use of external content within their wikis. In such situations we need to effectively raise awareness of copyright  and database licensing terms and conditions. I speak from experience on this one!

I haven't tried Dropbox, but it is very useful to know about this facility. The security restrictions of my work-based computer may not enable me to download the local software for Dropbox. This is disappointing because the automated storage and synchronisation of files seems to be such an advantage. That said, in work we access files from shared drives and within an electronic records document management system. Consequently, we should all be working from the same files and not generating multiple copies of a document. The need for Dropbox within work is therefore not quite so clear. But when collaborating with external partners Dropbox could be very helpful , and far less trouble than  remembering to manually synchronise files between different machines, network drives and cloud based storage services! There may be times when Dropbox could prove invaluable and I am glad for this opportunity to find out about it.

Definitely food for thought, and inspiration for future action here.

1. Try out a wiki page for use with CDG Wales.
2. Maintain my awareness of Dropbox.