Thank you and au revoir Sheila

Reflecting on LILAC last week, it was so nice to catch up with Sheila Corrall at the conference. Many of you will know Sheila from her career as a university librarian or, more recently, as Professor of Librarianship at Sheffield University's iSchool. Sheila is about to leave Sheffield to take up a post in Pittsburgh and I think it is right to pay tribute to her before she goes off to the US.


We were very fortunate to have Sheila as our External Examiner for MSc Information and Library Studies for a number of years. We always have two externals, one practitioner and one academic so that both bases - professional relevance and academic rigour - are covered. Sheila was initially appointed as our practitioner academic when she was University Librarian at Southampton. However, shortly afterwards, she was appointed professor at Sheffield and so became our academic one. I think this is almost unique and what it does emphasise is something that I've always held to be really important in librarianship education, namely that the academic and the professional can and should go hand-in-hand and that the "library schools" are not located in remote ivory towers.

Sheila has been a terrific ambassador for the profession and for professional education and she has been an excellent advocate for the work of library schools over recent years, particularly when she was Head of Department at Sheffield and during her time convening BAILER (the British Association for Information and Library Education and Research) the group which brings together all of the departments in the UK and Ireland which teaching information science. Sheila has a real understanding of our profession and has done so much good work, in so many areas, to move our sector forward. She has also been a very good friend of RGU and our Information Management department. As external examiner, she was rigorous, clear-sighted and always incredibly fair.

So, it was a great pleasure to catch up with Sheila ahead of her move across the Atlantic. I really wish her all the best for the move to Pittsburgh. Good luck Sheila and au revoir for now.

Right, better get my act together.....off to Belfast for the LAI/CILIP Ireland Conference :o)