Learning, in Salford

I'm learning a lot about higher education at the moment - the Cofhe/UC&R Conference in Liverpool a couple of weeks ago, a staff conference for Information and Learning Services at the University of Worcester on Monday this week - and then, on Tuesday, the high-level Strategic leadership in HE through integrated IT and library services conference, hosted by the University of Salford to mark twenty years of converged services at that institution.

Tony Lewis (Executive Director of Information and Learning Services and Chief Information Officer - another splendid job title to join the collection I seem to be gathering recently) is a Chartered Engineer by background and he understands perfectly the need for an appropriate professional infrastructure to support the sort of integrated provision for which he's responsible. Indeed, "professionalism" is stated explicitly one of the four key values which underpin the work of Tony's ILS team. I first met Tony a few years ago when I helped to launch the Access Salford initiative, and he's been very supportive of CILIP - encouraging relevant members of his staff to become Members of CILIP and to progress to Registered Practitioners at the various levels of CILIP's Framework of Qualification and Accreditation.

So I was delighted to be invited to say a few words in the opening plenary session of Tuesday's conference. My full slideshow and script is now available. In essence, I said (1) that there's a common rationale for integrated provision across an institution and unification across a professional domain, (2) that professional cultures sometimes lag behind institutional strucutres, and (3) that we need to move towards a new paradigm of modern information professionalism which parallels the evolution experienced in modern information technology - from proprietary systems and silos to an arrangement of professional interoperability which recognises different specialisms but works on common platforms and across open networks.

The components of that modern interoperable professionalism are beginning to emerge and getting this into some sort of shape - and discussing it with practitioners and employers across the library/information/knowledge spectrum - is going to be one of our key tasks for the second half of 2008. I look forward to that discussion.

Oh, and a quick word about the catering at the Salford event - in a word, excellent! We all know (from all those evaluation forms) that a conference marches on its stomach, and Salford did us proud. The pre-conference dinner in the fine surroundings of the Imperial War Museum North (I've never eaten dinner before with a warplane overhead) and the conference lunch were both first-class. The dessert concoction of spendidly sloppy fruit and cream deserves a name of its own - Salford Mess? - and the shots of smoothie in the coffee break were a masterstroke!

So then; good speakers, good networking, good facilities, great grub, and some useful stuff to think about on the train home - an excellent learning day was had by all, in Salford.