Thing 5: Reflective Practice

For Thing 5 I thought I would use the opportunity to reflect on a recent cpd25 event that I attended.  The event was held at Kings College London and was entitled: 'Supporting our users: current trends in academic liaison and outreach'.  The two presenters Michelle Blake and Nicola Wright, both from LSE, were clearly passionate about this topic. 

The session started with how the role of the subject librarian has developed over the years.  It was explained that a subject librarian was traditionally defined as someone who was a subject expert or specialist (and more often than not held a degree/post-graduate degree in that subject) who was primarily concerned with creating and building a physical collection to reflect the research/teaching being carried out in their institution.  In contrast the subject librarian of today has a much bigger communication role, including: being the point of contact for academics on all library/department issues, taking an active role in teaching and managing various 'relationships' both within the institution they work for and with outside stakeholders such as publishers and book suppliers.  This means if you are an aspiring subject librarian you must have excellent oral communication and presentation skills - something which I know I must work on!

Next we discussed what we call our subject librarians; it highlighted the vast range of job titles people have even though their roles are essentially the same.  This in turn emphasized the importance of being careful about what job titles we use.  For example, if you told a lay person that you were a Information Advisor, as we do in my institution, would they know you worked in a library?  Probably not.  So why do we insist on using it?  I feel that sometimes we seem too pre-occupied with our image; we need to be bold enough to state exactly what and who we are!  

In discussing the role of the subject librarian the presenters touched upon something I had come across before: the Future Libraries project.  It is a scenario-based strategic planning project with the aim of imaging how our academic libraries and the wider society might look in the year 2050.  The three scenarios discussed in the report were: Beehive, Walled Garden and Wild West.  You can find out more about the project here: http://www.futurelibraries.info/content  

Reflecting on the event as a whole has left me with some questions and things to think about:

• What value do subject librarians add to their organisation?  I am particularly interested to find out how other universities structure their subject staff; where I work we have a separate subject team dedicated to each faculty allowing specialist knowledge about the subject to be built up.  However another attendee at the event explained they have one liaison team who do this work.  It would be interesting to compare the services offered between these two types of structures.
• How will the role of subject librarian evolve in the future?  What will be the impact of new technology?
• The two presenters stressed the importance of telling people what you are doing and making them aware of what you can do for them, in other words, use every opportunity to market the service you offer and the skills you have.

This was the first cpd25 event that I have attended and I would recommend them to anyone wishing to share ideas and gain knowledge on a particular library practice/theme.  More about cpd25 can be found here: http://www.cpd25.ac.uk/About-Us/index.php