Goodbye CDG NE, hello North East Member Network

The facts: the CILIP Career Development Group is no more (well, almost) since the end of March 2014. In the English regions, its divisions have merged with the local branches to form the new Regional Member Networks.


Why do I bother writing about it? Because for the last two years I was a member of the Career Development Group North-Eastern division (CDG NE) committee - I was even the secretary for the last year and a half. I'm not qualified to tell you about the history of the group; I just want to say something as I feel it brought me a lot.

Two years ago, I chose to join a group committee because I wanted to gain some new skills to have a better chance of evolving in my career. I chose CDG NE because it seemed so active and so welcoming. I wasn't disappointed! I met a really nice bunch of people: some new like me, some with a lot of experience on the committee but all enthusiastic about libraries and helping people in the profession. On the committee I got to do things I did not have the opportunity to do in my post at the time. The highlight for me was helping out with the Marketing Libraries training: I assisted the organiser on the day and got to attend a great event!
I don't think I'd be lying if I said my involvement with CDG NE helped me get the job I'm in today. It showed my commitment to the profession, but also proved that I had the experience and skills needed to make the jump from a library assistant to a professional librarian post.

Picture: https://www.facebook.com/CilipNorthEast
Yes I'm shamelessly plugging our Facebook page!

And now I'm chair of the new CILIP North East Member Network. Argh! What do I do now?!
Well I'd like us - the new merged committee - to keep things that, in my opinion, worked in CDG NE, for example:

• motivated and enthusiastic committee members;
• friendly and welcoming ways of working within the committee, opportunities to gain new skills;
• a wide range of events: training days, library visits and CILIP qualifications support, but also socials.

And I'd like us to improve things such as:

• better communication: using a monthly news mailing, social media;
• transparency: giving more insight to members into the activities of the committee, making meeting minutes public;
• more collaboration with the CILIP Special Interests Groups locally and the neighbouring Regional Member Networks;
• more interaction with members who are not on the committee - we want everyone to feel involved within CILIP North East!

Following our very first committee meeting on Wednesday, I can already say that we do have enthusiastic and friendly committee members coming up with lots of wonderful ideas!
I hope we will be able to create/re-create/maintain a great library and information community in the region and encourage members to get involved.
Shall we talk about all this again in a year's time?!

Marketing Libraries event

The CILIP Career Development Group North Eastern Division - whose committee I am member of - organised a training event on 5th September 2012 at Durham University Library entitled: 

Marketing Libraries

strategic and creative communications for information professionals

The event was coordinated by Rachel Smith from Durham University, who had asked me to come and help on the day. I was delighted as that meant I would get to hear all the presentations!

Rachel did a very nice Storify of the day, but here is a more detailed recollection to complement it.

For practical reasons, I chose a seat at the table by the door - so I could greet delegates as they came in and tick them off my list. Also at this table were Kerry, librarian at the Scottish National Gallery, Jackie from Northumbria University, Karina from Newcastle University Library and Becky from Newcastle Libraries. (Note the number of people working in Newcastle upon Tyne; this is important for later)

The morning session, "How do you like your eggs in the morning?", was delivered by Kay Grieves, Michelle Halpin and Heather Campbell from the University of Sunderland Library. It was based on Kay's 7 step toolkit for creating strategic marketing plans. Here are the 7 steps:

• Step 1: Establish where you want to go - your strategic direction and priorities
• Step 2: Identify your overall service offers
• Step 3: Identify, segment and describe your customers
• Step 4: Define a targeted service offer for each customer segment (to meet their identified needs)
• Step 5: Transform your service offer into benefits for each customer segment
• Step 6: Translate these benefits into targeted messages or conversations for each segment
• Step 7: Communicate your key messages through customer conversations

It was a very practical session, interspersed with hands-on activities. First, we were asked to segment our customers - my table segmented customers of a public library. It was complicated as these can be divided into so many categories, that intersect themselves! Age is an obvious one, but also employment/education status or personal life (whether they have a family, live on their own, etc.) For the second activity we looked more closely at one of these segments - we chose students, as they can also be found in museum and university libraries, focusing on non-UK students and why they come to a public library, what they need from it and what challenges they may face. This is when Becky and I realised Karina and her colleagues were sending us customers! Apparently, foreign students often ask for audiobooks to help them improve their English language skills, which the university library doesn't stock - but the public library does. From this came the idea of offering to these students, and to any person arriving to the city from outside of the North-East of England, a "learn Geordie" audiobook to help them adapt to the local dialect! We got very excited by this idea and used it in the next activity when defining a range of service offers for our segment and articulating the benefits of each service to our recently-adopted Newcastle residents. Lastly, we started thinking about a campaign to promote our "borrow an audiobook to learn Geordie" service to our customer segment.

Unfortunately, neither the universities nor Newcastle Libraries would have the resources to actually create this audiobook, but contacts were made to maybe set up a joint university/public libraries social media campaign which would contribute to enhance international students' experience in Newcastle and could involve a "Geordie Word of the Week" on Twitter. I can't wait to see this happen!

During the lunch break we had a quick tour of Durham University's main library and its new East Wing. (picture below)

In the first session of the afternoon, Luke Burton talked to us about social media marketing for libraries. No offence to Luke, but that's the topic I was already most comfortable with, so I am not going to write about it here.

Next was Helen Thornber, who used to work at Durham University Library but is now part of the private company Mariposa Development. Helen made us focus on branding: what does it entail? It is linked to an organisation's image, its shared values - we had to think, with the help of a list of examples, about which brand values are used by our organisations. These values, which represent the organisation, are translated into its visual identity: logo, strapline, but also colours, visual style...

Helen gave us some tips on creativity but also warned us to be aware of what our organisations' branding guidelines are!

Antonio Jimenez-Milian closed the day with his session on marketing for small and specialist libraries, where he used his experience from his days at York Minster Library - and a lot of humour when comparing the library to famous big brands.

Historic libraries are important because they represent knowledge, going from one generation to the other. But how do they communicate this? How do they get the visitor to become a member, to become involved in their preservation and development? Antonio guided us through the journey from the physical visit to the library ("Don't let your visitors leave without any written information! Otherwise they'll easily forget about you"), to the visit to the website, then the library's Facebook page ("Out of four posts, three should be not about your library but about things you want to be associated with. Talk about local things, things your visitors might be interested in"), the subscription to the newsletter and finally (the nirvana): Membership! You have to make being a member attractive to your visitors; you need to give them more than the right to borrow. For big commercial brands' customers that means gifts, exclusivities and discounts; for the library members it can be an invitation to exclusive behind-the-scenes tours or to see a new exhibition before it opens to the general public, and include incentives such as: "renew your membership and get a dedicated bookplate in one of the Library's books"!

Bookplate from CDG NE's Summer visit to York Minster Library - we do feel special!!!

It was a very enjoyable day, and I feel a lot more confident about marketing plans - it is something I had learned about at university but the refresher felt welcome, and the workshop activities made me realise I could actually do it, if needed. I also feel I understand branding better and gained some good tips on using social media on behalf of a library. Finally, being able to hear and see what others in the profession were doing (the stunning marketing campaigns of the University of Sunderland Library or Antonio's tips on making members feel special), talking with people working in different sectors such as academic or museum libraries, generally stealing each other's ideas sharing best practice, making plans to collaborate - all this was fantastic!

Social media talk at NE CILIP AGM

Tuesday 13th March 2012 was a busy day for British libraries. In London, the libraries lobby was taking place, with a rally at Westminster and a call for constituents to come and talk to their MPs.

Up in Newcastle, we had the North-East Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals (CILIP) AGM and a committee meeting of the CILIP Career Development Group (CDG) North-Eastern division.

The NE CILIP AGM took place in the beautiful old lecture theatre of the Mining Institute. To the best of my recollection, Colin Raistrick, chair of NE CILIP, put it this way: "I know you didn't come to hear me addressing the group, but to hear Phil Bradley tell you about social media afterwards"! So I have to be honest: I didn't take any notes during the AGM... but I did fill a few pages during Phil Bradley's talk!

For those of you who have never heard of him, Phil Bradley works as an Internet consultant and is the current president of CILIP. And I have no idea how many ties he owns, but from where I was sitting, the one he was wearing that Tuesday looked a lot like it had both PCs AND books drawn on it... Hehe.

Phil Bradley started by explaining his role as CILIP president. Running for the presidency of CILIP is a 3-years commitment: the first year you are vice-president, the second year president and the last immediate past president. The president is a non-voting member of the CILIP Council. He chairs different committees, works with the CILIP team, represents CILIP at some conferences, talks to the media, etc. Phil Bradley stressed that he was keen to talk to and listen to members. The move of this year's national AGM to the North-East is also part of an effort to be more in contact with members and to have a less London-centered CILIP.

Phil Bradley is focusing his presidency on the following themes:

• Ensure that CILIP as an organisation and individual staff use social media resources to enhance and leverage its position;
• Articulate the importance of social media to individual members and groups;
• Discover and broadcast good library practice and innovation to the membership as a whole.

His goal for the end of the year is to come up with a set of CILIP social media guidelines which would help members use social media and gain access to it as part of their professional lives.

The third theme would also help him give arguments in favour of libraries and librarians in the media and in political debates.

But back to social media. What is it then? Phil Bradley admitted not being keen on definitions but still explained that social media was linked to the notion of user-generated content, which was the focus of what we had come to call "Web 2.0" - or more simply, the way the internet is developing. Nowadays, you do not need an in-depth knowledge of HTML or FTP to make something available on the internet: everything is more simple to create than pre-social media, which also results in easier access to information as more and more things are "cloud-based". As an aside, it is actually something governments are trying to regulate: for example, the American SOPA was designed to control what users can do.

Phil Bradley said that the tool (the PC) is not important anymore: it is the activity that matters. Our society is moving away from the artefact to a frictionless environment, where things are browser-based and the user is not tied to one particular device anymore.

Before social media, everything was on websites. Now, everything is crowd-based and easy to share (via Twitter, blogs, etc.) with many ways available to communicate.

Go to www.theconversationprism.com to view the full image

Institutions restrict access to social media because they are concerned that staff are going to be consumers rather than creators, and also because they are afraid of what their own staff might say about them online! It is important to have access to social media in the workplace because there is now information on it that is not available anywhere else. As an example, news tend to appear on Twitter first: it is almost instantaneous, whereas it would take time for news websites to create articles and then for search engines to index them.

Press departments no longer have control over the message, as people can easily blog, tweet, comment, etc. Where Web 1.0 was about control over the information, social media is about free access to it.

In practice, what does it mean? For a start, there are changes relating to internet search. A lot of search engines are now incorporating Web 2.0 in their results (blogs, wikis, tweets, presentations on websites such as slideshare, etc.) - hence the need to have access to it. The ranking of results on Google is also moving from "the most linked to website at the top" to "the most recommended [via social media] or talked about".

Social media is indeed about people recommending things to other people. Instead of searching for the information on our own, we like to ask people we know or see what they recommend, and we are now used to participation. Having a social media presence is therefore a way of getting involved into people's conversations.

There are several websites or apps helping us pull data back for our use, based on topics pre-set by the user and on recommendations. For example, Zite or Flipboard create your own personalised magazine downloaded straight onto your iPad. Similar things are also possible with websites such as XYDO, Scoop.it or even Netvibes. These tools, as well as other RSS aggregators, wikis, etc., demonstrate an evolution of the Internet away from websites that are too still, too fixed.

At this point, Phil Bradley also recommended Quora, where you can ask questions of people who are experts in their field, and social bookmarking websites Trailfire and Pearltree.

To conclude, social media results are becoming more and more important. Librarians need to go where the conversations are to find the information. Therefore, we need access to social media to allow us to do our job more quickly, cheaply and effectively.

"It's all just information!"

And just to put a bit of drama into this post: thus the presentation ended. Well, not quite; there were a few questions and comments!

Later on that same day, I attended the committee meeting of CDG North-East at Newcastle University Library. And I am proud to announce I am now an ordinary member of this committee!