Touring libraries, controlling documents, anticipating the Borders and having birthdays

Yesterday, we took this year's MSc Information and Library Studies students on two library tours. In the morning we visited the new Sir Duncan Rice Library at University of Aberdeen. We were divided into three groups and taken round by Susan McCourt, Elaine Shallcross and Janet MacKay, all of whom did their librarianship course at Robert Gordon and, indeed, I taught both Elaine (in our first cohort of distance learning students) and Janet (who did the full-time course). The students were very impressed by the new building and the presentation given Susan was very interesting and showed both the philosophy behind the building and the university's aspirations for it. I seem to have spent a considerable amount of my time up there over the last week.

Then, in the afternoon, we had our annual visit to the Central Library where we roam all over that equally fabulous building. We began with a presentation from Susan Bell charting the development of the library and how it has changed over its 120 years (and yes, before you ask, Marcus Milne was mentioned). We were then in four groups for this visit and the students especially appreciate seeing all the behind-the-scenes areas and hearing from staff what their role entails. We ended with a presentation from John Grant about the current priorities for the service before a question and answer session led by Fiona Clark. Altogether it was an excellent day and one which was very beneficial to the students.

Today I have been involved in discussions about various short-course developments. We have recently launched one of these (five credits worth at undergraduate third year level) called Document Control Foundation. This is basically introductory training for those working in document control in the energy sector (primarily in the oil and gas industries). It struck me this morning as the meeting to discuss this was finishing that this aspect of information work is one that I haven't touched upon at all on the blog and yet Information Management work in the oil and gas sector is a crucial component of our professional life here in the North East.

The Document Control Foundation course was born out of a Knowledge Transfer Partnership (KTP) which our department had with a local company called the Amor Group. Amor provide technology and information solutions to a wide range of firms including many in the energy sector up here. They also were behind technologies used for online check-in by some well-known airlines and for many of the systems used at Scottish airports so I suspect you may well have used their products without ever knowing it. Amor does a lot of work in supplying document controllers for the energy sector and the central plank of the KTP was the formation of the Information Management Energy Forum which brings together practitioners in this field and also seeks to share good practice and develop suitable training.

This was lead by my colleague, Dr Laura Muir, together with the KTP Associate appointed for the project, Fionnuala Cousins. We struck gold in the appointment of Fionnuala who has been the driving force behind the forum and its activities. The KTP formally ended in February but the partnership is still very strong and I appointed Fionnuala an Associate Lecturer within the Department as soon as the project finished. The Document Control module was (along with an annual Benchmarking exercise) one of the most tangible outcomes of this KTP and, although only launched in May, we will have had nearly one hundred students complete it by the end of the year. We are very proud of the success of the KTP project and are working hard on building on this.

The oil and gas sector in Aberdeen has a bewildering array of information professionals working within it and many of them are our graduates. One of the key things about developing this kind of short-course training is actually listening very carefully to the sector and to what the businesses in question require. This has been central to the approach that Laura and Fionnuala have adopted and it has paid dividends and we fully expect to carve out a very distinctive (and, indeed, unique) niche for IM educational provision with this. We will be developing short courses in other areas too but the energy related ones are a particular achievement.

Next week, I am delighted that CILIPS Policy and Resources Committee is coming to Aberdeen for its November meeting and I am looking forward to welcoming everyone to RGU for that. Our campus is something of a building site at the moment with our huge new teaching building (and new library) going up and it is now about six months from completion.

At the end of next week, I am off down to do a presidential visit to the Borders and this is something I have been looking forward to enormously. I am very grateful to Margaret Menzies for organising a super programme for me. I have a great love of the Borders as I spent many wonderful family holidays in Kelso as a child and my love of that part of the country has never diminished. I may even break into the Lay of the Last Minstrel when I report back on my trip on the blog later. I am delighted that I can also manage to find time on Friday next week to visit the new Johnston's Visitor Centre at the mill in Hawick. This was very much the creation of my very good friend James Sugden who was, until recently, their Managing Director (he also holds an Honorary Doctorate from RGU). We are having lunch there on Friday so next week promises to be a real treat on a number of levels.

Now dear readers, I am having a day off tomorrow (an almost unheard of thing for me during term time) as Mrs Reid has a special birthday tomorrow. I do, of course, mean my mother and not the other Mrs Reid, of Penicuik, a lady much renowned on this blog last year for keeping the Immediate Past President on the straight and narrow. I am very grateful to the Penicuik Reids for their good wishes for the impending birthday :o)

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)