Welsh librarian of the year winners!

Last night at the CILIP Cymru Wales conference in Cardiff, the winners of the inaugural Welsh librarian of the year award were announced. The judging panel must have had a really hard time choosing the winners from the short listed candidates because as Stephen Gregory (maternity cover policy officer for CILIP Wales) described the wonderful achievements of the candidates it was obvious they are all fantastic examples of librarians doing wonderful stuff to serve their respective communities.

Anyway, to the winners! The public librarian winner was Bethan Hughes from Denbighshire, and the academic sector librarian winner was Lori Havard of Swansea University. Lori was also awarded overall Welsh Librarian of the Year award. Llongyfarchiadau (congratulations) to Lori and Bethan, and to the other candidates (Preeti Pathak from Cardiff public libraries, Carole Morgans from Cardiff public libraries, and Rebecca Mogg from Cardiff University.) There was also a long list, which you can see here.

The award was kindly sponsored by SirsiDynix. I overheard people saying it was a great way to end the first day of the conference and several said they had a ‘warm and fuzzy feeling’ after hearing about the nominees and what they achieve, and hearing from Lori about her passion for libraries.

I shall ask the winners if they’d like to do a guest blog post on here, so hopefully you’ll hear from Lori and Bethan in the future. (Pics were taken by CILIP Wales – I shall seek to borrow one or link to it when they’re available.)

So what does a library development adviser actually do?

Me!

My job title is Libraries Development Adviser, but what does that actually mean? Hopefully by the end of this post you’ll have a clearer idea of what I do and how I can maybe help you, especially (particularly) if you work in a library in Wales.

So, my job role is pretty varied, and that’s probably one of the reasons I’ve been in post for 7.5 years (and counting). It has four main elements:

• Advice and support
• Ministerial work
• Policy work 
• Networking, current awareness, research, presentations etc

Plus, for reasons not relevant to this post, I am also the editor of the CyMAL magazine, of which two issues are published a year.

For library staff in Wales, the advice and support role may be the most relevant of my tasks. Any member of library staff can contact me about any library issue and I will do my best to provide the advice and support needed to answer the query. The most common queries relate to bursaries, qualifications or cataloguing and library management systems for small specialist libraries. The inner reference librarian in me loves answering a good query and finding out the answer. 

I’m also really enjoying blogging, which I see as part of my advice and support role – blogging about things I find out or which I think might be useful to library staff in Wales.

In order to be able to answer any questions I need to keep on top of library matters, so that’s where current awareness comes in. I find my RSS feeds on my Netvibes (public) dashboard really helpful for keeping up to date, along with Twitter, library email mailing lists and catching up with colleagues at events. 

Ministerial work plays an important part in my job and can involve work on ministerial correspondence, briefings, diary cases (for events), and briefing for questions in the Senedd. It’s vital the minister has the most up to date information on a range of topics and can make informed decisions. The nature of this work means that there’s often short turnaround times, which keeps us on our toes!

Alongside the ministerial work is the longer term policy work, developing and delivering the Welsh Government’s strategy for libraries. We are now into year two of Libraries Inspire, which is the third library strategy for Wales. We worked closely with the library sector to produce the library strategy and I act as the nominal programme manager for the strategy (chairing meetings, overseeing the budget, keeping the delivery plan up to date, making sure we’re on track to achieve things etc).

There are also a lot of grants associated with the library strategy and each grant has a key contact in CyMAL who keeps track of the project, ensures they’re working to budget and to proposed milestones etc and ensures the claims are completed successfully in Feb-March. I have quite a few grants that I am the lead for, so that keeps me in touch with library staff in Wales. And I’m the strand leader for a couple of the work strands of Libraries Inspire, working with a small team in the National Library of Wales, and also the Libraries Inspire marketing team based at Wrexham.

I’m also the lead for the evaluation of Libraries Inspire. The evaluation is being carried out by Scotinform – you can read the evaluation of Libraries for Life on the CyMAL website.

New for this year I’m also going to be shadowing a colleague on the Welsh Public Library Standards, and from 2014 will be leading on this piece of work.

My job also entails networking, giving presentations/lectures, attending events etc. I also try to get some articles published each year about successful Welsh library projects because I know that we’re doing lots but that it isn’t well-known outside of Wales. However, when there’s a squeeze on time that’s often the thing that falls off the list. A piece of research work I’m involved with is working with colleagues in Scotland and Northern Ireland on a return on investment toolkit for public libraries. Public libraries in Wales will hear more about that soon!

My job is therefore both front-facing (as a lot of us in CyMAL are, which is unusual for civil servants but we’re a ‘new’ division set up in 2004) in that I work directly with the sector, and also internal within the Welsh Government.

I’ll see some of you at the CILIP Wales conference in a few days where various parts of my job come together (keeping up to date, attending events and networking) – maybe see some of you there?

‘Parents, children, libraries and reading’ research report

The Pew Internet (part of the Pew Research Centre in America) have released another useful report (Parents, Children, Libraries, and Reading) which investigates the views of parents on these topics.

One of the brief summaries about the research said “Parents of minor children have a special relationship with libraries. Most believe libraries are very important for their children and provide extra resources that are not available at home.”

The report is available in full, or by chapter. Some of the summary findings are:

• Half of parents of children under age 12 (50%) read to their child every day and an additional 26% do so a few times a week.
• 94% of parents say libraries are important for their children and 79% describe libraries as “very important.” That is especially true of parents of young children (those under 6), some 84% of whom describe libraries as very important.
• 81% say a major reason libraries are important is that libraries provide their children with information and resources not available at home.
• 71% also say a major reason libraries are important is that libraries are a safe place for children.

There are also lots of useful graphs on library usage, library activities etc. It’s worth a quick skim at the least, although it is based on telephone interviews with only 2,252 adults.

Libraries of the future infographic

Another snazzy infographic depicting the possible future of libraries. It was adapted from PewInternet for a key address at the State University of New York Librarians Association Annual Conference in 2012. The Pew Internet produce a lot of research into library use in America and are worth checking out – they have a whole library section. and in finding the links for this post I came across another interesting infographic on how likely Americans would be to use various (mainly techie) resources offered by the library.

++ Click to Enlarge Image ++

Source:LibraryScienceList.com

Rewarding marketing of Welsh libraries – the results

For the fourth year running libraries in Wales have been able to compete in a national (all-Wales) competition for marketing awards. These are run as part of the marketing strand of the library strategy (Libraries Inspire), and are organised by the lovely team at Wrexham who manage the marketing strand.

The awards celebrate the valuable work that library staff do to bring their services to new audiences and to develop new activities for existing users. The awards give library staff at all levels the chance to win national recognition for their work in promoting their service. The entries were judged independently by Dr Jonathan Deacon from Newport Business School. Jonathan commented that all entries achieved marks of over 70% and the standard was extremely high, with very little to choose between the top few.

The results were announced a few weeeks ago so some of you may have picked this up already. Apologies for my tardiness. And the winners are:

Public Libraries

1. Breakfast Club – Cardiff Central Library
2. Big Scary Stories – Bridgend CBC
3. Work Club Abertillery – Blaenau Gwent
4. Highly Commended ‘The Kids Take Over the Library’ - Flintshire 

FE Libraries

1. Treasure Hunt Challenge - Coleg Sir Gar

HE Libraries

1. ‘Parrots plagiarise…do you?’ - Swansea University 

Highly Commended – ‘Step in, Step up to Success… and Stress less!’ - Aberystwyth University

To read more about each of the campaigns, read their evaluations and the judge’s comments, log into the staff tooklit in the librarywales.org portal and click on the Marketing Awards section. (If you’ve forgotten how to log into the toolkit, let me know or ask Jane & Bethan in Wrexham.) All the entries are on there, not just the winners, and it’s great to read of all the interesting and sometimes unusual marketing going on in Welsh libraries. Entries from previous years are in the toolkit too – why not have a look through them and pick up some ideas!

Well done everyone!

 

Bursaries for library staff in Wales available

CC from Open Clip Art, by Nicubunu

As in previous years, library staff in Wales are able to apply for funding to undertake a range of qualifications and training/career development needs. The bursaries are available for qualifications from Level 2 upwards (i.e. from the Certificate in LAIS) to Level 7 (Masters) and include the Foundation Degree and its conversion to a BSc and the PDA in ICTL (Professional Development Award in ICT in Libraries).

There are also bursaries for people wishing to undertake the Assessor and Verifier award training, and leadership development. These bursaries are one element of the workforce strand of the Libraries Inspire strategy, the Welsh Government’s strategy for libraries 2012-16. The funding allocated to this each year is finite, so once it’s gone it’s gone  (i.e. don’t dilly-dally around, speak to your employer and the course provider and get an application in!)

If you currently work in a Welsh library you are eligible. How you apply depends on what qualification you are interested in. Read the Library Workforce Development Grants 2013-14 document on the CyMAL website for more information.

If you have any queries get in touch with myself or my colleague Velma Hather – contact details are in the document.

CyMAL also runs a cross-sector (i.e. museums, archives and libraries) free training programme. Upcoming courses and dates are listed on the training pages of the CyMAL website. Some of these may be of interest to library staff in Wales.

The librarian of the year long list is announced!

CILIP in Wales have just announced the long list for the Welsh librarian of the year award for 2013 (its first year).

To find out who the 12 wonderful librarians are, read the CILIP in Wales blog post. The winner will be announced in the CILIP Wales conference on Thur 16th May. Good luck everyone!