Here LISDIS co-organiser Jess looks back on her Chartership experience, and how LISDIS 2015 played a part in that. Look out for exciting news from LISDIS soon…
I was registered as a Chartered Member of CILIP in April this year, after a year and a bit of putting my portfolio and my evaluative statement together. LISDIS was, for me, a major part of my Chartership. I was proud to include it in my Evaluative Statement, under Criteria Three: “Enhanced their knowledge of the wider professional context and reflected on areas of current interest”. I wrote
“After the NLPN event, myself and three other librarians reflected on how useful an opportunity to present our own dissertations would have been. We formed an organisational committee, and LISDIS took place in November. The experience of planning and facilitating a national conference hosted in my institution made me learn how to communicate effectively with stakeholders, how to plan large projects in diverse and distant teams, and how to publicise events effectively. LISDIS was extremely successful, with a vibrant discussion online as well as excellent speakers, which made me consider various aspects of my professional practice including how I catalogue items and the digital divide in my community. This will now become a yearly conference, and has contributed to the range of activities for New Professionals within the wider LIS sector, of which I am very proud.”
I also included within my portfolio (that you hyperlink to within the evaluated statement at appropriate junctures) PDFs of the blog post that I wrote for CILIP http://www.cilip.org.uk/blog/share-celebrate-use-your-lis-dissertation-research and my later article reporting on LISDIS in CILIP Update. Writing for CILIP in any capacity is great professional practice-as they are very good at publicising it to the wider world. Although Update is not totally OA, you can add anything to write for them to your institutional repository after a month. LISDIS offer many opportunities for conference reports from our sponsors, or you could approach your local CILIP groups to see if they would accept a conference report for their newsletter or blog. You could even blog for LISDIS, on any aspect of completing your dissertation, or research in practice tips-just email us with suggestions.
LSIDIS covers a multitude of PKSB areas. The ones I applied it to directly as an organiser were
10.9 Project Management
12.4 Social Media and Collaborative Tools
12.5 Communication Skills
16.6 Networking Skills
But we’d also suggest that it covers
2.7 Knowledge Sharing and Collaboration
3.8 Abstracting and Summarizing (for presenters/applicants)
4 Research Skills
BUT-remember that the PKSB is personal to YOU-it is YOUR development, and if you think something applied to your desired skillset and you can reflect on that then you should! Attending or presenting at LISDIS may lead to you being able to apply so many different areas as you learn from the research of others. In 2015 we had talks and posters on everything from cataloguing issues to libraries in times of conflict. We have no idea WHAT amazing a brilliant dissertations will be presented in 2016-the sheer variety of research with LIS means that literally any part of the PKSB could be covered.
Going to conferences or networking events is important if you want to be active in the LIS community, share good practice, and learn about the wider world we work and study in.. Chartership is the process of ratifying that practice into a portfolio of evidence that shows you to be a professional, and I would heartily recommend attending a conference such as LISDIS as part of it.
Jess Haigh
LISDIS 