Don't stand by on the sidelines whilst decisions are made without you...
Choose to become an active voter and take this opportunity to learn more about the 6 candidates who are standing for the 4 available CILIP Council places.
You can read the candidates' manifestos (and nominating statements) on the CILIP website and learn more about their vision for CILIP by asking questions and engaging them in conversation here in Communities. Important dates to remember:
• 16 October - ballot papers despatched• 5pm GMT, 23 November - deadline for return of ballot papers • 24 November - count • 24 November - election results announcedNB: If you have any queries about voting, please contact Daniel Sabel, CILIP's Governance Manager at daniel.sabel@cilip.org.uk or 020 7255 0656.
This is the third year we have created an opportunity for e-hustings in Communities and we hope that members will use the opportunity to get involved and to find out more about the people who will be making key decisions about the direction and the future of the Institute.
Remember that the people that you elect as CILIP Trustees will have three years to serve ie. Jan 2010 to end 2012.
Lyndsay
Senior Adviser - MSU - CILIP
Dear Lynday,
Many thank for setting up these e-hustings. I am really looking forward to having an opportunity to discuss the elections with fellow CILIP members, and to answering any questions they might have.
In the meantime members can also follow my election campaign on Twitter at @votenickpoole and on Facebook at: http://bit.ly/AgVGA.
Looking forward to receiving those votes! Do get in touch if you'd like to know anything about the campaign or my reasons for standing.
Many thanks!
Nick
Well done, Nick, for getting a Twitter and Facebook presence, as well as being quick off the mark in posting to these Hustings.
The last couple of years they were quite useful in getting some issues discussed: let's see what the response is this time
Bruce
I’m disappointed to see that none of you have anything to say in your manifestos about the defence of library and information services, or the Institutes’ highly successful intervention in the Wirral.
Given that the choice at the next election will be between three parties who only disagree on detail when it come to public expenditure cuts, should CILIP campaign against cuts and closures? And how?
Tom Roper tom.roper@gmail.com http://tomroper.typepad.com
Housekeeping notice
Oops - apologies folks. When I set this thread up yesterday I should have made it open to everyone, but I defaulted to CILIP members only.
We want to widen the debate and encourage more conversation so I have corrected my mistake and opened the discussion up into a new Forum called CILIP eHustings. Apologies to those who have already posted - I hope you are comfortable with this?
Fine, much better. Will you migrate posts made hitherto to the new forum, or do we have to post again?
Hi Tom
I've tranferred the original thread (that I began yesterday) to this new forum - so that I can be open and totally accessible. If you spot any problems please let me know. Your initial post is part of this thread (scroll down (or up depending on how you have set your preferences).
The advantage of having a whole forum to play with is that people can initiate new threads and be more topic (question?) specific.
Tom,
I thought that I made it clear that I did. I have taken it as a given that there will be very hard times ahead, and that CILIP must and should be fighting sensibly all the way against them. I have said before, and I will say so again, unless we can "prove" to decision makers our value to the communities that we serve, we have no defence against such cuts. Decisions are usually taken first and consultations made later. We need to be armed with materials for our defence beforehand, and - IMOH - we damned well should have had them in our armoury long before now.
I dread that it might be too late already. The "statistical" measures that the MLA have are potentially useless, and leave every authority to fend for itself. National research programme should have been but in place ten years ago - Maggie Haines and I recommended as such in the KPAG report - so that a corpus of justifiable data and examples could have been created. If our libraries do NOT have these resources available, and I would advocate a relatively simple resource pack to provide some back-up, and sit back shyly in the hope that they will be overlooked and survive, Their life is going to be short.
When you compare research in the US, Denmark and Japan on the value of libraries to a wide variety of communities, and how they effectively pay the authority and community back, you wonder where we have gone wrong. Yes, there has been some useful work - Colin Bray's work in Devon was a splendid example - but not enough, and we have not built up a good case to prevent cuts.
Should be campaign against cuts? Yes, but we have to have solid cases to support us. Waving a nbanner sating "Libraries is good" wont help.
Bruce, thanks very much for this. I am really keen to use platforms like this, Facebook and Twitter to ensure that as many people as possible have a say in these elections.
I think that CILIP is entering a critical period both in its own development, and in terms of the challenges facing libraries, so I think these elections are extremely important. I'm looking forward to a lively discussion on the e-hustings too!
Dear Tom,
Many thanks for this. I think, above all, we have to be pragmatic about this. Cuts in overall public expenditure are absolutely inevitable as the Treasury seeks to balance the books on an unprecedented injection of new money to stimulate future economic growth.
The real aim, then, is not so much to prevent cuts and closures as to try and limit their impact. In doing this, I'd argue that we need action at every level of the profession.
Certainly, there is a national case to be made for the value of public and other library services - personally, at this stage, I'd be making this case in terms of the vital role we play in stimulating skills which contribute to the Digital Economy. At the same time, there is a need for coordinated and effective lobbying at a local and regional level to protect the interests of individual services and their users.
If elected to CILIP, I'd campaign for a joined-up National Contingency Plan, to address the following:
Although some might see it as accepting defeat to be planning for further cuts and closures, and I very much hope that such a Contingency Plan would never be used in anger, I think it is time to create a new narrative for library services in society and to seek to drive it, rather than letting others drive it for us.
How many Candidates will be present at tomorrow's AGM I wonder
I was pleased to see the range of candidates.
I think there was some acknowledgement amongst them of the challenging times that lie ahead. It will be important that CILIP responds to this beyond the public library world.
I only noticed one candidate deal with the question of the need for new members. For CILIP to be viable it needs to recruit and retain new professionals.
How do the candidates propose CILIP ensures it is seen as a valid and valuable network for professionals? Given the debate online around membership fee levels there needs to be a strong case made to attract new membership.
Something must have gone wrong, as my reply has disappeared.
Sorry Bruce, couldn't make this year's AGM as I was teaching a course for Carers in Northampton. This had been been on my schedule for a long time, and there was no way I wanted to get out of it. Last year's was fun, though. Did I meet you there?
Stop Press: the vote on the proposed membership fees was 115 for, 66 against, with 3 abstentions. Nobody present spoke against the increase (which one member pointed out was the equivalent of a couple of modest bottles of supermarket wine per annum), but Norman Briggs pointed out the need for a MASSIVE increase in new member recruitment.
Liz Maclachlan set the scene for a Big Conversation over the next few months, engaging both members and interested non-members, about the future role of a professional body for information workers. It would be interesting to hear the thoughts of our Candidates on this.
Norman Briggs and I discussed some of the issues about membership at the last AGM, although I don’t know whether I came to any definite conclusions.
I believe that among the major issues we face is that we do not have a clear picture of the potential size of our membership pool and how to contact them. We have a fairly coarse idea of what CILIP members want – and I say that advisedly - rather than need. We have a reasonably well defined vision of what CILIP needs to be doing in the national arena. What I feel we lack is any real idea about who our non-members are, why they are not members, and what we need to do to get them to become members. What are their wants, needs and aspirations? What does CILIP need to initiate, change or merely publicise/advertise to convert the potential member into the member?
There are several ways that we could go about this, but the simplest would be a questionnaire. With many of our members in senior positions within their organisations we could ask them to administer a questionnaire designed to illicit the answers we need across the applicable components of their workforce. It would only be a snapshot, but a large enough snapshot would provide us with what we need to know.
An issue that would need to be resolved would be whether it would be ethical to get our members to ask non-member colleagues to complete such a questionnaire. I don’t perceive it as one, but there may be others for whom it is.
Probably the biggest problem would be how to get the results analysed. It is unlikely that CILIP would have the resources to do so, and commercial analysis would be prohibitive. Alternatives such as analysis by retired volunteers or by students as part of course project work may be an alternative.
I’m just putting this up as an Aunt Sally, and I am sure some of the other candidates will have other ideas.
Yes, agree with Alan's question - getting, and keeping, new members is the key.
Asking non-members is one way, as one of the candidates suggests, and another is a recruitment drive.
Beyond this, I think the point is to identify the ways in which information professionals can genuinely offer more to employers and to the community, building on the work that has already done within CILIP to promote the Institute to employers. The aim has to be to encourage employers to seek out CILIP members when recruiting to information posts. This in turn will make membership more attractive to potential members.
Have we considered advertising?
Stephen and Nick, thanks for your replies...any other candidates got anything to say on the matter?
Stephen I did see the section in your statement on cuts, but I wanted to stress the Institute's campaigning role and see what you thought of this. You were the only one to mention cuts at all.
Alarming that only two of six have found their way here, but early days, I suppose
I received the Booklet yesterday.
As a new member truly (and personally) committed to embedding / reinventing the value proposition of librarians in several contexts, I appreciated the Manifestos of the candidates particularly where they pinpoint the need of new alliances, partnerships, cross sectoral work and openess to creativity.
Brunella
M. Brunella Longo
Dear Bruce,
Many thanks for your update on the Membership vote. I have been really struck, since launching this campaign, but how many current CILIP member have told me that they are considering not renewing their membership next year.
I absolutely agree with the need to extend CILIP's catchment and to attract new members. I am, however, also minded of the old retail adage about the relative value of keeping existing customers against the much higher cost of attracting new ones.
That some parts of the current membership feel disenfranchised and disillusioned should, in my view, be our first priority. People speak of feeling alienated from the organisation, of a sense of fatigue and a lack of momentum. When I look across the current activity of CILIP, these views do not reflect the organisation I encounter. There is tremendous value and a genuine sense of purpose here - but this seems not to be translating to some areas of the broader membership.
My priority, then, would be to re-connect the current membership, refresh their sense of purpose and belonging and then to ask them to help the CILIP Executive and Council to shape an offer that is sufficiently compelling to attract new people.
The other key thing about current members is that they are the best champions CILIP could wish for. If every current member, armed by CILIP with a clear sense of purpose and conviction, is able to attract just one colleague to take up membership, it'd transform the reach and impact of the organisation.
My final point would be that librarianship does not only happen in libraries. It happens in museums, archives, local history centres, people's homes and countless other non-traditional library places. Information management is fast becoming the concern of almost any type of service provider. If CILIP is able to develop a powerful and compelling offer, based on creating real value for the many professionals working in these areas, there are significant opportunities not only to increase membership numbers, but also to enhance the depth and diversity of membership.
It's a challenge I certainly hope I have the opportunity of taking up!
Apologies for the typos in the last post. My keyboard is broken!
Hello all!
Bit of a consolidated reply so it's going to go on a bit!
Tom - no need to be alarmed, just been a very very fraught busy last week or so, so been casting fleeting glances at this rather than posting thus far. Would imagine a few others could well be the same.
Topics arisen thus far -
Defence of LIS services and need for campaigns re cuts and closures.
Pragmatic fact is if we just do all-out defence then we'll be utterly ignored on the 'well you would say that woudln't you and you're not actually helping us with our real world problems here' line. Therefore it needs to be a balanced approach based on how to engineer information services and provision so that they meet the needs of their user communities in receiving a quality service while acknowledging the pressures upon the decision-makers within the overall organisations. and also advocating the value that the service brings to the organisation and to it's priorities and goals and how it can help to achieve those. We have to appeal to organisations own self-interests and key concerns. Where organisations are considering actions which we firmly believes puts service delivery and quality at risk then yes we need to say so and fight it (Wirral being an example), but we have to be able to evidence the basis on which we're making that decision and that we're not just doing knee-jerk head-in-the-sand. So we have to develop a range of diagnostic tools against which we can measure potential changes to services and service delivery to see what is genuine attempts to find new ways to do and deliver things in the current harsh environment and what is arbitrary or un-thought-through cuts.
So we have to do a range of things
1) Continue to develop sectoral tools to measure proposed changes against (cilip has just issued one to help re assessing english public library provision; Council has started discussing one on change in academic libraries provision)
2) Shore up sectors where we can make a public good argument (so it's not just us seen as being arguing for our members in a blinkered way) such as supporting the campaign to make school libraries in england statutory.
3) Develop more of an evidence base (things like supporting the Research Coalition help in this).
4) A lot more outward-looking better resourced cross-sector focused employer engagement actually getting out and about and talking to employers (so there's a Council Task + Finish Group on this just now that I'm Chair'ing).
5) Continue to flag up ways in which CILIP membership supports individual members in a time of a lot of on-going uncertainty about jobs and stability of jobs across all sectors. Every sector and organisation is hit by the current downturn. Very few members of the profession are immune from the effects.
Need for new members and to retain existing ones.
Well yes, that is urgent.
Membership falls at a slightly faster rate than we attract new members year on year. So we lose faster than we replace. This has a gradual effect which soon mounts up. Add to that there's an awful lot of the current CILIP membership due to retire in the next 10/15yrs.
With numbers comes - bluntly - authority and clout as well as the future of the organisation. If you want people with power to listen to you and what you say as an advocate and voice for the profession it helps to be as large as possible, as cross-sector as possible, as cross-geography as possible, and to have a big range of levels of members, and a broad range of expertise which also incorporates many specialists. It also helps if very senior folk are in membership because they have the ability to really promote and make a difference, whether to their own staff or outwards through their connections into other parts of the profession and other allied disciplines or cognate bodies. So the smaller we get, to be blunt, the less clout we're able to utilise, the less resources (in terms of people and expertise) are available to further objectives.
So we need a wider or a more varied membership offer, a different model to the one we're on now. THere's lots of different potential models out there other than the one we're on now, so one of the things that the Membership Task + Finish Group is looking at is about other potential models that may be more attractive to members.
There are huge amounts of people who operate within information roles who may or may not consider that they do so but don't currently see CILIP as the place for them, maybe because they do 'non-traditional' roles or converged roles or they do something in which information is a part but they also do other things. So the idea of the information profession needs opened out and made more attractive.
Within CILIP itself - sometimes folk just hear very negative messages about things that are currently irritating folk (perfectly natural, we all vent at times or want to communicate in a broad manner to ensure we're heard) but don't hear all the good things to balance it (we're not good enough at communicating, especially the good stuff).
All the employer engagement stuff also comes in here - if your organisation or your line manager values and understands something it's more likely that you'll be encouraged to do the same.
Sometimes there's old messages still cluttered up in people's minds and things have maybe moved on, but because they moved on too they haven't realised it, or they just haven't been made aware of the changes.
So - as usual - a range of things (nothing under the sun is uncomplicated she says ruefully!).
Employer Engagement
Covered in bits in responses above. There are basic problems in terms of possible coverage and resource if you're a vastly varied profession which tends to work in support of other disciplines. Which is why initiatives to date have tended to be very targeted and quite limited ones. It needs a far wider approach which is above all sustainable, cross-sector, cross-geog, and as far as possible is out-going and outward-reaching and person-to-person. It needs to get across both values / advocacy (what the profession is about and why important) and practical benefits (i.e. what a trained LIS professional can do for the organisation, the value added bit). All of which means swinging resources within CILIP around in support so there's a Paper (shrieks / winces to self noting it'll need written and out within a week of the meeting) etc due to Nov Council in a few weeks on this after next meeting of the Task + Finish Group on re potential workplan and swinging resources round under to support and what that would mean in terms of next year's budget (the normal, opportunity cost, detimental impact on other area's, risks, timescales etc.).
And yep, sorry for being virtually absent from this specific arena for a bit - as I say - somewhat frenetic last week or so on many fronts (gah), back now... (with fervent wishes for this week to behave in a more peaceable fashion so I can get caught up!)
Isabel
Isabel Hood Legal Librarian Semple Fraser LLP 130 St. Vincent Street Glasgow SCOTLAND G2 H5F
tomroper: Stephen and Nick, thanks for your replies...any other candidates got anything to say on the matter? Stephen I did see the section in your statement on cuts, but I wanted to stress the Institute's campaigning role and see what you thought of this. You were the only one to mention cuts at all. Alarming that only two of six have found their way here, but early days, I suppose
A straight answer to Tom Roper. Yes we should campaign. As has been mentioned previously alliances are necessary as well.
I would add that involvement by local members is essential as well as support centrally from CILIP. This could be through branches, and/or hopefully by active local members. It may sound a bit old-fashioned, but the more you put in the more you get out.
We should also apply our intelligence to problems. Emotionally I hate to see libraries close, but just occasionally a public library may have to be resited or close. Poplulations do move and can leave libraries stranded on the wrong side of a motorway for example. I would like to see local authorities make more use of rented shop premises for smaller services. These can be fitted out quite quickly.
However, I do not agree with the point made elsewhere that we shouldn't defend our interests (where decided) wholeheartedly. Yes, our appeal may have to be on the basis of what other people are looking for, but sadly governments rarely respect those that don't strongly stand up for themselves.
I'm not sure that campaigning against every cut and closure is necessarily the answer. Public spending cuts are inevitable and it seems unreasonable to expect the public library service to escape this.
I think we need to look at the reasons behind cuts and closures and what the results will be. There will be cases like the Wirral where the proposed closures would result in a council possibly failing in its statutory obligations and these should be campaigned against, There are, however, likely to be cases where a councils proposed cuts will be justified.
In truth, the best way of campaiging against closures is to avoid the need to do so. If public libraries help to fulfil their county councils objectives, if they can produce proof that they are of value in economic terms as well as social ones then this is the strongest argument that can be put to councils in their defence.
This is not to say we shouldn't support campaigns against cuts and closures - CILIP should support its members in such situations - but that we should recognise that some fights will be more important than others and that we cannot hope to win them all.
Thanks Lyndsay for the opportunity to contribute and apologies for not getting on the case sooner but I have been at meetings etc. I am pleased to say I know two of the other candidates personally and am happy to report that one once bought me a pint and so must be worth voting for.
I have been following the debate and Wirral cuts etc. It is perhaps a little ungenerous to say that this was not mentioned. The Wirral was very much on my mind when I wrote the first paragraph of my manifesto and indeed it actually appeared in the first draft but there is only so much you can say in 300 words. Different people will take different messages from the Wirral but in service defence of all kinds, partnerships of those concerned are essential. It is not just about librarians and while I think all proposed cuts should be challenged it should be on the basis of evidence of positive benefits rather than just the ‘it shouldn’t be allowed’ type of argument. People always react most positively to positive arguments. I have some sympathy with Steve’s arguments as we both have a performance measurement background but I have had a go at the Value and Impact lark myself and proving direct evidence impact is not as easy as it might look.
I do think we need to talk up our game in terms of advocacy. I am sure we are all impressed by President Obama’s proclamation (URL http://www.whitehouse.gov/the_press_office/presidential-proclamation-national-information-literacy-awareness-month/ ) but behind it lies a great deal of patient work by a wonderful man called Woody Horton. We have a lot to learn from American colleagues.
I am not quite sure who Alan Fricker was referring to when he said that only one candidate had mentioned recruiting new members but my manifesto certainly focuses strongly on members. There is going to be no magic answer during a time of cuts but in general terms I think that CILIP is a more membership focused organisation that it used to be. I was a member of the old LA for many years and it did seems to me at times that it saw members, to some extent at least, as subscription fodder. It also used to be the case, that, to get a lot out of LA/CILIP, you had to put a lot in. CILIP now benchmarks with comparable organisations and there is much to be learned from their experience. It would also help to beef up membership benefits – discounts at Sainsbury’s perhaps. However I do think we have to start with where we are and do our best to support our existing membership, especially our activists. I attended an English Branches Forum meeting in September and attendees said that support was what they need. In many ways members are the best people to make the case to lapsed and non members by focusing on how CILIP and its services have supported their own career development. I even persuaded a friend to return to the fold after only twenty years of trying!
John Crawford - and I will include a photo once I have found out how to do it!
I agree with just about everything John has said. However, although we both agree that identification of value is very difficult - I did twenty minutes of work, which wouldn't have happened if I hadn't been there, which led to a saving in today's terms of about £20,000,000 - it is not impossible. Unfortunately instancessuch as my own example are difficult to identify, justify, and/or claim a share of. Streatfield and Markless have been doing some very interesting and exciting work on impact analysis which may well provide us with useful tools for our armoury, but it is probably significant that much of work that they have been doing was funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation on studies in eastern Europe.
Similarly, there has been superb work done on identifying user and non-user populations use of city, commuter and rural public libraries without which it is no doubt very difficult to create coherent plans , but it all seems to have been done in Japan and Denmark. Check out Haruki Nagata's work. But where is the equivalent stuff for the UK when we need it? There may be stuff out there that I do not know - pretty certain that there is - but if there is it needs to gathered and used in central pool, which I feel CILIP needs to lead. We need to get on with that sort of thing now.
On the membership question, I still believe what we really lack are the answers to some very basic questions. Who are our potential members across the whole information management community - not just librarians. Having identified those who are not, we need to know the reasons why they are not. We also need to know what would be the triggers that would encourage them to join, or the key factors that currently prevent them. Only when we know this sort of detail can we aim at making significant changes to our membership situation.
I resigned from the LA in about 1980 for the reasons that John mentioned - they wanted my money and gave me nothing in return, and were damned rude about it too. It was only when the IIS and LA merged that I came back into the fold, having sensed thestart of massive sea change we have seen over the last decade. Being bullied by three ex-presidents and Norman Briggs also helped.
There has been some criticism of the candidates for not mentioning certain things in their manifestos, but like John says, you've only got 300 words, and that was very strictly applied. And while not knocking the Wirral success through not mentioning it, let us also include those other, less prominent, successes (and failures) that are happening all the time because passionate believers in service are fighting for what they believe in. They often don't get the publicity they deserve.
Oh yes, it is nice to know that John remembered me buying the pint - pub across the road from Newcastle Station on Friday 21st August 1999. I remember it well!