Wednesday, 2 June 2010

Brown-bag 2 June 2010

The brown-bag discussion was lively. It's not in the nature of brown-bags to produce structured minutes, with resolutions and actions, and this one didn't. But the discussion never flagged, and I didn't have to throw in any of the prepared questions -- either to restart things or to get them back on track.

Highlights:
  • an amazing cadenza from a school librarian, frustrated at the poverty of provision in school libraries and the effect she saw this having on youngsters' literacy
  • speculations about what provision for online voting might do to re-invigorate CILIP's democracy
  • disclosures about the number of backchannels of communication, within CILIP and within the Cambridge library world
  • frankness about the need for librarians to learn new skills, especially programming skills
  • pleasure in the progress of Cam23, one organiser and several participants being of the party
Ten people were present. I had perhaps placed too much faith in Twitter -- indeed, I can be said to have fantasised about the likely effect that announcing the event there might have on attendance. I had not ignored other channels, but I suppose what I had put out through them was either too early or too late. A fruit of Cam23 is a burgeoning of individual blogs by Cambridge librarians, including this one; it'll be interesting to see how far we come to communicate as a result.

Next brown-bag will be at 13:00 on Wednesday 7 July, hosted by Libby Tilley in the English Faculty Library. See you there!

3 comments:

  1. Twitter worked for me as publicitysince I had sent you an acknowledgement and it was displayed when I logged on as a reminder. Wed after a bank holiday in exam term might have made attendance difficult for some.

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  2. I might try to get to the next one - I didn't know these existed before 23 Things.

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  3. Thanks for this summary - I read it a couple of days ago and forgot to comment until now.

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