Brilliant Belfast

I spent three days last week over in Belfast at the joint conference of the Library Association of Ireland and CILIP Ireland. I have uploaded some pictures here. Rhona was there with me and I think it is fair to say that we had a brilliant time. We flew over on Wednesday afternoon to the City Airport which is ten minutes from the city centre and allowed for a hassle-free journey. The conference was being held at the Merchant Hotel which is located in the Cathedral Quarter. This five-star hotel is sumptuous. It used to be the Ulster Bank and the front part is opulent Victorian with a new extension to the rear which is themed art deco. From my room (enormous and with the most extravagant bathroom you've ever seen) I had an lovely view over to St Anne's Cathedral with its modern stainless steel spire, added recently to mark the success of the peace process and which Rhona and I visited quickly first thing on Friday morning.


We had time that first evening to go for a walk around the centre of Belfast. We visited the new Titanic Memorial Garden at the side of City Hall. It is beautifully done, subtle, understated and very poignant with the names of all the victims. We then walked down to the Waterfront Hall, a beautiful round building (something I love). The modern architectural additions to Belfast are, I must say, fantastic and give the city a really modern feel; they do, however, sit very comfortably with some of the equally stunning Victorian and Georgian buildings. Rhona and I were both struck by the use of glass in many of these buildings. It is almost as if architects, designers and those commissioning buildings are saying "we'll use glass now because we can" without any fear of windows being blown out. We then had dinner at a lovely restaurant called Nick's Warehouse and very delicious it was too.

The conference began on Thursday morning with CILIP President, Phil Bradley, talking about social media and how we must embrace it or become irrelevant. Phil made some really interesting observations, not least about where Google goes from here given that the success of Google (as a search engine) means that people leave it as a site as soon as they've got what they were looking for. My presentation wa in the afternoon and it was about professional education. I'd a packed house and a really engaged audience and I thoroughly enjoyed it.

In the evening, we went out to Stormont for a ministerial reception hosted by Carál Ní Chuilín, MLA, the Minister of Culture, Arts and Leisure. Also present was Fergus O'Dowd, TD, the Minister of State for the New Era, from the Republic. Stormont is absolutely stunning; the setting, the landscaped grounds and the sheer impressiveness of the building itself. Afterwards it was back to the hotel for a wonderful conference dinner.

The following day there were some fascinating presentations including ones from Margaret Hayes, City Librarian in Dublin on that city's status as an UNESCO city of literature and Nicky Parker, Head of Transformation at Manchester City Council on their recent library developments.

Rhona and I managed to fit in a whistle-stop tour round the new Titanic Centre which is, again, a fantastic piece of architecture and a really, really impressive heritage centre with splendid use of technology throughout. If you get the chance folks, go!

LAI/CILIP Ireland's conference was super and we were made to feel very welcome. Thank you to Fionnuala Hanrahan, Adrienne Adair and Anne Peoples for everything. Loved the conference, loved Belfast, loved the hotel!

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)

What I did on my Easter holidays.....

I was on holiday last week and very enjoyable it was too, apart from the snow on Tuesday. The weather being so foul at the beginning of the week meant that I could stay in, guilt-free, and do some family history. The results of my digging around ended up posing more questions than were answered, but doesn't it always? It's really interesting how so much of this kind of research can now be done from the comfort of home using online tools like Scotland's People or Family Search. I did, however, have to make a trip to the local studies collection in Elgin to photocopy Arradoul Episcopal Church's parish registers for the 1760s and 1770s (there will be a prize at conference for anyone who can pinpoint Arradoul).



In the course of my research last week, I made quite a lot of use of Ancestry which can be good but it can also be dangerous. Many people who post their family trees on Ancestry fail to do the necessary corroboration of facts, rely too heavily on information online, make speculative guesses and then post them as fact which in turn leads lots of others to copy the same mistake into their pedigrees and errors end up as being presented as truths. I encountered a lot of this last week and it often builds the frustration nicely. The internet has revolutionized the way in which genealogists ply their trade now but it is foolish to assume that it can all be done online. I wonder, however, how well our local studies collections are responding to the new generation of online family historians? Local studies is, as many of you know, something I'm very interested in and these unique collections provide us with a really distinctive picture of Scotland. There is a real challenge here for librarians looking after local collections; how do we get the meat of the collections more widely available (and not just for the family tree brigade important though that is). One of my PhD students, Kate Friday, has recently completed her doctoral research looking at "e-genealogy" and how family historians use the sources and also what lessons are to be learned for local studies collection in this virtual family history world. There are some very interesting results from her study about the visibility of our local collections online and the type of content that is available.

I am going to be tackling some of these issues when I speak at Locscot's Spring Seminar on Wednesday, 25th April at AK Bell in Perth. The day is about the future of local studies and, I think, a big part of that is going to be about local studies in an online world. Ironically enough, my own home area of Moray has a very good online tool LIBINDX which indexes a vast array of local sources, including newspapers and gravestones. But, there is plenty more to be done.


So what else did I do during my week off? Well, I had a couple of days in Edinburgh to see the new exhibition at the Queen's Gallery at Holyroodhouse and pretty spectacular it is too, with one corner of the room having drawings by Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael and Michelangelo. And, then, the highlight of my sojourn in the capital was a trip to the zoo to see the pandas. I'd been concerned that we might not see them because of their mating rituals but by Thursday they were back on show. They were adorable and I want one but fear supplies of bamboo in Port Gordon are limited.


This week I'm delighted to be going to the LILAC Conference dinner in Glasgow. It is so good to have such a big, well-know library conference happening here in Scotland. Then next week it is off to Belfast for the CILIP Ireland / LAI Joint Conference at which I'm speaking about professional education now and in the future.