Category: BIALL

Thing numero seveno – professional networky stuff

So, for this Thing, I’m looking at my professional networks and organisations.

CILIP / CILIPS
I was never a student member, and only joined in the first place because 1) my employer paid the fees, and 2) my line manager at that time was heavily involved in the Scottish branch. The same pretty much applies now as the reasons for me maintaining my membership! Oh, and also because I’m Chartered now, and if you leave CILIP, you lose the Charter (which is fair enough – there’s no point having a qualification that shows your commitment to your own and others professional development if there’s no-one checking you’re doing what you say you’re doing) .

What do I get from CILIP/CILIPS? Well, currently, not much. As a Chartership candidate, I attended a session on the process, and I’ve attended occasional events organised by CILIP, where I could squidge them to kind-of fit with my internal Appraisal goals. I get the CILIP info email on library related news, but as my job involves keeping up to date on most news, I’ve usually already read the articles that are linked to by the time it comes in, and the journal is almost always of no interest to me, as it’s seems to be just about public and academic libraries. I know they do lots of good things, but none of them are currently of any real use to me. I think the lack of relevance of CILIP for me at the moment is because I work in a specialised sector, and other groups already fill the role for me that CILIP seem to do for public and academic librarians.

However, I’m planning to register as a Mentor for Chartership candidates soon, so by being involved in that process I may feel that I’m both more useful to CILIP, and that they are to me. As Loopy says, CILIP’s one of those things that you get back what you put in. For me, I’ve mainly not been putting anything in with CILIP.

BIALL
BIALL (British and Irish Association of Law Librarians) is an excellent and very active group.  I’m a member because my workplace pays for my professional fees, which is great, as it allows me access to the Journal of Legal Information Management (lots of articles relevant to legal information professionals), the newsletter (updates on BIALL and supplier activities), salary surveys (great to pass to Higher Ups, to show where your salary sits when compared to other professionals with similar responsibilities and experience), and there’s also an email list. The email list does often seem to be the backup plan for people posting initially on lis-law, in order to try and get as many responses as possible to queries, rather than the first port of call, but this is probably because not all legal information professionals are BIALL members. Finance issues mean I’ve not been able to attend a conference since 2008, but when I have been able to attend, the conferences have been informative, fun, and given me a great chance to make contacts outside the Scots law field, and to put names to the faces of the people whose names I’ve seen around the internet.

Hopefully, I might be able to attend the next conference…or is it my boss’ turn? I may have to suggest a game of Stone, Paper, Scissors to settle matters…

SLLG
The SLLG (Scottish Law Librarians Group) group is, for me, the most useful of the professional groups that I’m a member of. Plus, I’m on the Committee, so I have no choice but to be heavily involved*! Again, my employer pays my memberships fees for this group, but seeing as it’s only £15, I would be a member of this group regardless of who paid the fees.
It’s aimed at trying to fill the need for legal-sector specific training for information professionals in Scotland, has a quarterly newsletter, a members email list, and additional regular social events to encourage face-to-face meetings. Which is lovely – letting you put a face to a name….as long as you’re better than me, and can remember which face goes with which name. This is not my strong point! Name badges are often my salvation.
Since it’s a small group, it feels quite friendly and approachable, and the email list allows members to ask each other for help on topics which may be specific only to Scots law.

Side Points
According to a Twitter post from CILIP Info earlier this week, my CILIP membership also means I’m a member of IFLA. I had no idea! I think I’m also a member of some CILIP Special Interest groups, but they can’t have made a big impact on me, as I can’t remember which ones they are!

What Do I Get From It?
So, those are my “formal” professional groups, and I definitely get different things from the membership of each one. I suppose it just shows that no professional group can ever be able to do “everything”.

I’m quite happy to be a member of all of these, although my involvement level varies significantly between none with BIALL, some (and soon to be increasing) with CILIP, and total with SLLG. I also see that, as I have progressed in my career, I’ve become more involved in the organisations I feel I can be useful in: first, with the SLLG, and now also with CILIP as a Mentor.

It’s also meant that my CV, which might otherwise just have shown very little other than the work I do in my firm, could now show me with extra professional qualifications (yay for gaining extra bits of the alphabet after my name!), the skills to organise training events, lots of great contacts throughout the legal and general information profession, and a commitment to helping others develop the skills they need to progress in their careers. Quite a change from “I do this at my desk all day” I think.

*Also, I’m therefore contractually obliged to report that it is The Best Thing Since Sliced Bread. And actually, I do pretty much think that. Apart from the fact that we don’t usually have any home baking activities in the SLLG. Yet.

Belated BIALL thoughts

So, after a busy few weeks, I’m finally ready to sit down and pull together my thoughts on this years BIALL conference, in Dublin.

Bear in mind, this is all my persoanl impressions, and my opinions will be coloured by how much relevance I can see various sessions / talks having to my professional life. If I didn’t like them, that didn’t mean that they were actually rubbish!

I hadn’t been to a BIALL conference since Harrogate in 2005, (shortly before I changed jobs and moved into a commercial firm from an institutional body), and I was hoping for more talks of relevance to me this time around. Working in a nice old legal body’s lovely, but as you’re neither academic, or corporate, finding the useful stuff from the conference can be hard.

To be honest, I hadn’t thought the provisional programme had looked too interesting, but I had some hopes that the blank spaces would be filled in closer to the time, and as these talks were obviously still in discussion, I thought maybe they’d be more topical. So I booked in the hope of some Web 2.0 stuff, perhaps something on digital copyright (the new CLA electronic licences)…but mainly, it was going to be a chance to meet people in the flesh that I’d only met online, and hopefully attend some interesting seminars.

Well, the meeting people bit happened, and that was great, I had a lot of fun and made some good contacts and friends. But the useful information bit was sometimes a little bit harder to find…

I was a good girl, and attended all (well, almost all) the conference sessions and parallel sessions.

So, how did they go?

The Plenary Sessions on the Friday morning were fine, although Richard Susskind seemed to be presenting a standard paper, which he tweaks slightly depending on the audience he’s presenting to. The bulk of it was presented the next week at the Law Society of Scotland conference. And although Lesley Robinsons talk on “Information to Knowledge – the Process” was interesting, and it would be lovely to be involved in all the process she was talking about, it’s just not something I’ll ever be doing in my current role.

Lunch was an interesting affair…they may not have been quite prepared for 400 or so delegates descending on the 2 food stations!

The afternoon Plenary Session was one I’d really been looking forward to, appealing to my inner geek as it did by being an interactive panel discussion on Web 2.0. I thought it would be a discussion on the ways we can use Web 2.0 to make our jobs easier, and what the pitfalls were…instead, it began with a 20 min musical chairs and Chinese whispers session. I understand that the point was to illustrate that people in widely separated areas can find it difficult to communicate, that misreading of their messages can happen, and that sometimes, the people originating the messages or passing them on may be corrupting them. And that’s a good point to make, but could have been done in 5 minutes. Then it was time for each of the speakers to give their presentations. Janice Edwards ran through some of the basics of Web 2.0, and what it may evolve into. Next up was Martin de Saulles, with an interesting presentation (download available here) about Web 2.0 tools and the hype surrounding them. Then Sue Hill was up, discussing how, as someone unfamiliar with Web 2.0 until a few weeks before, she was enjoying exploring the potential uses for her company. Keep an eye on her site for developments!

Overall, an interesting session, although I have to confess, I thought there was a better understanding in the general librarian population of Web 2.0 than became apparent from some of the discussions both in this session, and in chats following it. I’m in shock – that must mean I’m ahead of the game!

I was a bad girl after that, and scampered away into town instead of going to the Members Forum /Have Your Say, mainly because I didn’t have anything I wanted to say! Oh, and of course I needed to buy a dress for the Presidents Dinner…

Next morning, I decided sleep was more needed than my first Parallel Session, so I can’t tell you what Margaret Flood of Trinity College, Dublin was like, talking about “Legal Deposit – Preserving the Published Record or More? Facing the Challenges of a Digital World”. But I can say that Heather Semple of the Law Society of Northern Ireland’s talk on “Researching the Law in Northern Ireland” was very interesting – lots of useful information about where to find NI law, where it comes from, what it’s called when…sure to come in useful next time we get one of those “I need an amended version of this NI Act now!!” questions. Although being able to say “Actually, they don’t have consolidated legislation for NI” probably won’t make me any friends!

Another interesting picnic style lunch followed (aka balancing a plate on my knees while sitting on the concrete floor of the conference venue), then back into Parallel Sessions C: “Who’s Really Computer Savvy? Web 2.0 Technologies and Your Library”. I have to admit to tuning out during this one, as it was sorta preaching to the converted…see, never happy me! But, as far as I could see, it was very well received, and Stephen Weiter was a very good speaker.

And then it was “Federated Search – the Process and the Problems” from Melanie Farquharson. Again, another one I tuned out in slightly, as it’s something completely out of my hands, and in my current position, not going to be an area I’m ever likely to be involved in dealing with. Shortsighted? Maybe, but if it turns out that I need to know more in 5 years, I’m pretty sure the technology will have moved on so far that anything I learned now would be outdated. I’m working on the ‘information overload minimising’ approach at the moment!

And…the final talks on Saturday sort of blur into one! The talk by Lucy Dillon on “The Impact of the Legal Services Act” had only minimal relevance for me, as it only effects English law practitioners, but I kept one ear open. With my employer covering both Scottish and English matters, I need to be aware of the possible impact of this on Scottish law firms. As far as I’m aware without checking, Scotland’s a few years behind, but planning on implementing similar legislation within 5 years or so.
“Law, Crime and Punishment in Bloomsday Dublin” was an entertaining explanation of the real-life legal cases referred to in James Joyce’s Ulysses…and also included a 4 page synopsis handout of the book itself, which is probably as close as I’ll ever get to actually reading it myself!
Victoria Janetta’s presentation on “Implementing an Enterprise-Wide Search Tool” was another one I zoned out in – for various reasons relating to our IT, it had no relevance for me.
And finally, Samantha Steer spoke about “Information Managers in the 21st Century”. This was basically a talk around the research done earlier this year for Sweet & Maxwell, and released with much fanfare to The Gazette and CILIP. As I’d already requested the slides from them when they were released in February, I zoned out again here…

I’m sure there’s probably links to many peoples presentations available, but I can’t find them on the BIALL website…hmmm, maybe I should have gone to the Members Forum after all….

And all that’s left now is…to wonder when the CD of everything that we ordered will turn up?

And contemplate next years conference…which does actually look a lot more like my sorta thang! In another year, there’ll have been more chances to see what Web 2.0 is and isn’t doing for us.