Last week was the third national Library Camp. This time we were in the new and distinctive Library of Birmingham: a place full of books, escalators and ideas. I thought it would be interesting, after this summer's fun and games, to pitch a session dedicated to coming up with good ideas and inspiration for the future direction of
CILIP. The aim would not be to rehash the old moans, which are now pretty well rehearsed, but to come up with some positive ideas about the way CILIP should be heading, and how it might better prosecute its cause. The results are presented below.
In the main body text we have an account of my scrawled notes, wrangled into some sort of sense, and not nearly as glossed as my Library Camp write-ups usually are: this is, I think, a fair summary of what was said, made slightly more comprehensible to an outside observer, and in some places re-ordered in the interests of a less tangled narrative.
On the right, a little way below the side-bar stuff, is a Storify summary of relevant tweets gathered using a search for cilip AND #libcampuk13 . If you have a tweet in there and you'd rather it wasn't, let me know and I'll gladly get out the scissors.
Let's start, then, with the first idea that was pitched, and work our way through from there...
We should take the example of free student membership and extend it to, for example, one year's free membership for para-professionals; one year's free membership for all first time members.
Get them in, get them hooked. Admittedly, CILIP is hardly crack. But hopefully some value can be demonstrated in those 12 months of freedom. There's still probably a need to make the first step into paid membership a little less sheer (those pay bandings are still bizarre), but we're here to make new suggestions and not get bogged down in the old standards.
Ok, so what wonders can we offer in this gratis year? What can we give that will be worth the fees once the novelty's worn off?
Most of the people attending this session were CILIP members, but we were here giving up our Saturdays for a library conference thingummy so maybe we're naturally that way inclined. The reality beyond the golden lattice of Brum is a little less rosy, with membership at an all-time low. Why do so many of us feel it's just not worth joining? Is it simply a recognition that accreditation lacks the degree of importance it has in certain other professions? We don't
need the accreditation and hence we don't
need the professional body? And while we may be put off applying for a job that doesn't ask for a library qualification, in the current climate perhaps we lack the luxury of being so choosy. To this end...
CILIP needs to be an advocate for the profession to ensure a) an appropriate professional standard and b) its own relevance.
One avenue that might be exploited is LIS Job Net: the main route through which our profession advertises its vacancies. It currently charges its advertisers, which doubtless has certain financial benefits for CILIP, but how about if we...
Make it free to place an ad on LIS Job Net, thereby increasing interest, creating an industry standard platform, and allowing proper monitoring of pay and standards within the profession.
One of CILIP's difficulties (though also a potential advantage in other respects) is the diversity within the profession(s) it exists to support. CILIP needs to be able to operate across this segmentation while catering for each slice accordingly. Perhaps the one unifying demand from across the sectors is this appeal for greater advocacy, but joining everything up seems to be a struggle. Maybe we need...
Some sort of coordinated Advocacy Toolkit to promote knowledge and develop our skills base.
There are plans and hopes for online training and MOOCs, and a space to pool stories of good practice and impact. This sounds like a good platform from which to build.
CILIP also needs to bang some heads together in local authorities, of course. Maybe our services are such a pervasive, ubiquitous thing that they blend in and become part of the furniture. We therefore need the occasional bit of waving and shouting. To enjoy the living room, you need a really good settee, and it's easy to forget that detail until the springs go and the stuffing falls out, or the thing gets repossessed. CILIP needs to be pointing this out, albeit on a metaphorical level (we've dabbled enough in home furnishings for one year).
We want CILIP to be louder!
Some of us would even quite like a Library Workers' Union of sorts, though given current membership of both CILIP and the unions it would take a lot to set such a thing going. Maybe a spot of gentle, coercive rattening would bump the numbers up for CILIP??
CILIP is felt to have moved away from a unionish role (for "unionish", I suspect we are to read "militant", "protectionist" etc.) in its efforts towards advocacy, and that it now stands at something of a crossroads: is the "soft" advocacy working, or do we need to get angry?
CILIP should be more controversial!
The no-confidence vote in Ed Vaizey is seen by some as a much-needed exclamation of serious disquiet, and by others as a retrograde step that complicates essential diplomacy. The truth is that we want CILIP to be promoting our interests in all directions: leading a good librarian / bad librarian assault. Good advocacy takes time: softly softly catch a politician and all that. CILIP is proud of its deep advocacy and the results it produces (an example was given of a school libraries promotion) but it can only do a couple of such projects at any one time, and the process is far from dramatic. It can all too easily look like we're doing nothing very much at all while Alexandria burns.
CILIP is not a union, it's a charity. And it has always worked tirelessly behind the scenes on advocacy projects, in the interest of the public good, or education and of libraries. But we expect it to do more. We see wholesale dismantling of our public libraries and we say "surely CILIP could be doing more to stop this?!"
CILIP is not Ridgmount Street. We are CILIP. And if we don't like it we need to change it.
In a way, maybe the membership question (the lack of membership question) is a white elephant. Certainly, more members will produce more money with which to fund more projects, but the reverse is also true. Part of the membership problem is the cost, but the other part is the benefit. Maybe we're not showing our worth at the moment...
We, the members of CILIP (and recall that the vast majority of the people in this session were current members),
are CILIP. If CILIP isn't offering us anything, part of that is down to us, because ultimately we do the offerings. We need to be coordinating local meetings, putting on development events, getting out there and
doing. We have to put things in to get things back. And if we build it, others will come...
So why aren't we? It's not purely indolence (we've all given up our Saturday, remember; we've all come here of our own accord, spent money on transport and accommodation; dug into our pockets to help fund Library Camp; maybe even helped with the organization on some level). There's a blockage in the pipes, somewhere. To put it crudely, why are we at Library Camp and not at CILIP Library Camp? There is something wrong with the internal structure of CILIP (which current plans will hopefully soothe).
CILIP is not Ridgmount Street 2: London is a long way away for many members. We need to decentralise, and we need to have more going on in other parts of the country.
Yes, the AGM was in Birmingham this year, and yes there have been other major events in Manchester and other reaches. These are Good Things. But there is a definite imbalance. It's inevitable that CILIP uses its HQ for things, and so it should, but sometimes it does so without adequate notice (cheap train tickets need prior planning). There is a perceived dearth of activities in the North, and even in the Midlands. More problematic is that while some local groups are lively hubs of excellence, others are mere zombies. There's a real lottery according to where you live.
There needs to be more interaction between branches, and more equity.
Does that lead to duplication of effort? Is that a problem? The money / bums on seats equation is certainly a problem. And it is a self-perpetuating one. A person may want to get involved, but if there's nothing to get involved in then they don't. It's ok to say "if you want something, do it yourself", but most of us need some sort of structure to support that ambition. An active group can offer that support, creating a healthy turnover of participants; a dead group cannot. How do we shake this up?
Increased canvassing in Library Schools.
So we've got the students interested with the free membership, now let's get them involved. Go into the universities and say hi. Promote the possibilities. Some of our biggest Library Schools are in some of the least active CILIP regions. That's partly a problem, but maybe it contains the germ of a solution too? There's much-needed experience to be gained, and students are (necessarily) into the experience-gaining game.
Try asking your local network for some pennies.
Fancy organizing a Library Camp? Maybe CILIP can help. It's worth a go, at least. But how do you get involved in your local CILIP group even if you want to? We're Librarians so we should be able to find it out, but it's the weekend and the last thing we want to do is struggle with the CILIP website. Therefore:
Create a simple route to involvement: an idiot's guide.
And once you
are involved, it pays to keep others informed. Again, some of this comes down to just being bothered enough to read the right things at the right time (something I'm particularly guilty of not doing). But there are a lot of special interest groups out there, and most of us will only be a member of two (such is the way it works). Maybe, in the interests of unity (and promotion) we could be promoting the activities of all the groups to all the members a little more effectively than we do right now:
Produce a digest of special interest group news and activities.
...just a case of creaming off the best of what each group's been up to and sharing it (say in
Update) to advertise and to inspire.
Speaking of inspiration, my favourite suggestion of the session:
CILIP should propose a name change every year.
Let's face it, I doubt this session would've happened without that particular debacle.
So there we have it: a handful of ideas to hopefully offer
some inspiration for the future. We did fall into the odd spot of moaning now and again, which is probably inevitable, and while the presence of
@johnrdolan permitted some discussion of practicality, context, and current practice, it might have limited opportunities for a more fanciful unleashing of our imaginations. Maybe that's something to try in a future session!
Thanks to all who took part, and if you feel I've missed anything, do add any suggestions or clarifications below. x
