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)

The colour LILAC

Yesterday evening I had the great pleasure of attending the LILAC dinner at the Old Fruitmarket in the Merchant City in Glasgow. It was a fantastic evening and was a chance to catch up with a number of old friends such as Anne Kail from Credo Reference, Sheila Corrall from the iSchool at Sheffield University as well as a number of our former students. The dinner, like the conference itself, had a really positive, up-beat buzz and, having been following the Twitter feeds ahead of the dinner, it was clear that lots of creative and innovative idea-sharing was going on. Well done to Debbi and all the organizing committee and thank you for the invitation to represent CILIP.


My part in proceedings was to say a few words of welcome, ahead of the dinner, wearing the Presidential chain which provoked much comment, most of it more flattering than the comment of a friend earlier this week who, having seen a photograph of me wearing it, remarked that I looked like the Provost of a now-defunct county and added, rather pointedly, "like Banffshire". Alan Reid Esquire would have been as mortified as I was ;o)

Information Literacy is, of course, one of the areas where libraries and librarians make an enormous contribution to wider society and I could not agree more strongly with LILAC’s own definition of information literacy which highlights it as the cornerstone to learning and an essential skill in the digital age and in the era of lifelong learning. As we all know information literacy is not, just about “finding stuff”; it is increasingly being seen as a key skill for the modern workforce and a skill which consequently has economic, social, cultural and political impact. LILAC's themes emphasise this wider impact of information literacy on society, particularly those looking at IL and the digital future and, of course, IL and employability and both of these topics close to my heart as an academic.

I opened my little speech with anecdote that I've alway rather liked and not being a person overly worried about repeating myself, I'll end with it again now. As I was driving down for the dinner, I was reflecting that is seemed odd to be leaving Aberdeen at lunch-time for a dinner engagement and I was reminded of the story about the late Norman St John Stevas, the flamboyant minister in Mrs Thatcher’s first government. He got up to leave a cabinet meeting early and Mrs Thatcher turned on him, enquiring “Norman, where do you think you are going?” He replied that he had to leave early as he was going to a particular dinner that evening. The Iron Lady said “Yes, I’m going to that dinner too but I have two further meetings after this”. St John Stevas replied “yes Margaret dear but I take much longer to dress than you do”.

I must say, though, everyone had spent a long time dressing for last night's dinner. Thank you LILAC. It was great.

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.