Wednesday 2 June 2010

Brown-bag on Phil Bradley's CILIP 2020 post

Today's brown-bag lunch for Cambridge librarians will be at 13:00 in the Archaeology Department's South Lecture Room. Note that that's not where librarians' brown-bags have been held before. Enter building by Museum door in NW corner of courtyard, & get up to first floor, & you'll see South Lecture Room by the top of the stairs. See map.

Grist will be a blog post from internet guru Phil Bradley.

Phil Bradley is a regular in Update, and this particular post is on what the librarians' professional body CILIP might be like in the year 2020. He is daring CILIP to be something very different from what it is today. Here's a typical paragraph:

"I want to see CILIP get it wrong. I want them to make mistakes, and try things that fail. I want this for several reasons -- if they fail, and I can see how they have failed, it means that the rest of us can learn from them, and hopefully won't fail ourselves. If they fail, it means that CILIP is exploring and experimenting. Failure comes out of attempting something, and without failure you don't get success. I want CILIP to throw caution to the wind and to realise that getting it wrong isn't a bad thing, and that 'getting it right' isn't always the best result."

So -- whether you're in CILIP, or not in CILIP, or even if you haven't heard of CILIP -- come at 13:00 with your thoughts about that way of doing things, and that way of being a professional body, and what you would look for, or what you shun, in a professional body.

And the bonus of Betty's Tiffin from the CLG recipe book, recipe by Patricia Ward, cooking by Clare Baker.

4 comments:

  1. Where are these brown bag lunches advertised? I remember having emails about some of them in the past, but I can't remember from which list(s). This is the first I've heard about the lunch this week, and sadly I'm already busy this lunchtime - how can I prevent disappointment in future? Is there any chance of a someone there writing a blog post about the discussion?

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  2. Aagh. Sorry I didn't advertise the event more findably. I emailed it via the ucam-libs-discuss list, and put several announcements on Twitter. This morning, I put the announcement on my blog, which didn't exist before Monday evening, and on the Cambridge_Librarians space on CamTools. I tried announcing it via the 'Cambridge Liibrarians' group on Facebook, but got snarled in procedures (I don't use FB much). However, if this morning's blog announcement was too late, then announcing the thing on Facebook a few minutes later still wd have made no difference.

    I will see if I can find time to blog about the discussion. It was very lively, I can say that, and entirely on-topic.

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  3. I wouldn't want to poke my nose too far into (semi)private conversations, but I'm pleased that my piece was a useful focus for discussion. I'd certainly be interested in your summary Aidan, and of course if anyone wants to talk to me directly about anything I said, I'm more than happy for them to do so!

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  4. That's OK, Aidan. I'm not on ucam-libs-discuss, and I don't Twitter (yet, I suppose...). I imagine that I heard about previous brown bags on the cclf list.

    I think is a perfect example of the patchy communication discussed on Thing Blogging - hopefully we'll come up with some solutions during 23 Things!

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