Dents in the damage » Library Day in the Life – The Professional Body

Library Day in the Life – The Professional Body

Continuing with my Library Day in the Life updates today I wanted to tell you a bit about my first trip to CILIP HQ (The Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals).

I was up at 4:30am and on the train to London by 05:55am! Hitting London rush hour is a nightmare and if I’m honest completely stresses me out so I wanted to get there nice and early to allow a little time to relax before the start of business. As with all training events there’s usually a welcome coffee upon arrival and an opportunity to network with other attendees – today was no different.

I plonked myself down next to a couple of really lovely school librarians and one of CILIP’s own administrators and started to find out more about who they are, where they’re from and what kind of work they do. One of the ladies at my table had come all the way from a Sunderland academy school. I was so impressed with all the new technologies being used within the library that I assumed the academy was pretty exclusive and relied on tuition fees for funding. Well, turns out it doesn’t. In fact the academy is in one of the most deprived areas in the country where education is not particularly highly valued. It has higher than the national average of students on free school meals, unemployment is rift and the likelihood of children continuing into higher education is low. Introducing the school as a Mac only environment and investing in all the latest gadgets – iPhones/iPads – is just one of the ways the chief exec is encouraging students to be inspired by learning.

Anyway moving on…

One of CILIP’s aims is to ‘enable its members to achieve and maintain the highest professional standards in all aspects of delivering an information service, both for the professional and the public good’ through a wide ranging catalogue of training and development. Today’s event – entitled E-Learning to M-Learning: Supporting learning and information literacy – was an opportunity for us to look at how new technologies can be used to support learning. These included:

mobile technologies – ClassMate Readers, Nintendo DS’ (Pictochat), Sony PSPs, talking photo albums, RNIB Penfriends;
mobile webpages – CampusM, Summon, IEEE Xplore (mobile view);
photo sharing – Flickr, Picasa;
video sharing – YouTube, MoLeTV;
text messaging – Text a Librarian;
podcasts – AudioBoo, iPadio;
augmented realities – Layar, Foursquare;
QR codes;
personal response systems – Interwrite;
and handheld strategies – mobile Netvibes.

It was great fun playing about with devices and listening to how these are being used in other instutitions. Events like these always give you a lot to think about in terms of how your own organisation interacts with users and what kind of support you offer. Many of the ideas I picked up today I hope will feed nicely into the Emerging Technologies project I wrote about yesterday.

Tomorrow I’m back in the office and so I’ll be back to talking about my day-to-day activities. In the meantime take a look at some of the photos I’ve been taking over the week.

[flickr album=72157624483111277 num=10 size=Square]

EDIT: I forgot to say… The Twitter archive for #mlearn10 is on TwapperKeeper if you’re interested (there weren’t many Tweets so shouldn’t take you long to have a quick scan through)!

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