Monday 3 July 2017

A personal approach to mentoring

Looking for me?
Independence can be an obstacle to effective mentoring. From a personal point of view I'm happy to go away and look up an answer myself if I'm struggling. That's perfect if it is a fact based problem but what if it is more empathic or personal? Allowing yourself to develop your soft skills through discussion is actually a skill in and of itself. Asking for mentoring assistance can be tricky and requires an exchange of trust. 

Tuesday 20 June 2017

Virtual teams and collaborative working #BIALL2017

I've now completed my first full week of truly remote working so am reasonably well equipped to comment on and consolidate the notes taken from the various relevant sessions. As usual BIALL had ensured that although there were topic overlaps, a different perspective was given by each expert. Eleanor Windsor from LibSource presented on 'Managing a successful virtual team', whilst the entire Vinge law firm library team came in to offer insight on working together in different offices. And finally a duo from the University of Law talked about collaborative working to reduce pressure on library services.

Wednesday 14 June 2017

Being Informed about Brexit #BIALL2017

The notes that follow arise out of the BIALL Conference 2017 and given the theme of the conference was 'Together or Apart? Effective ways of working'  I'm happy to share my notes! This has recently been updated to reflect the #BIALL2019 conference on Vable.

Being Informed about Brexit


The first plenary session - and Willi Steiner Memorial Lecture was entitled 'Informing the debate about Brexit', presented by David Allen Green. This is obviously a contentious topic as a whole but at least law librarians can claim to be well informed as to the arguments. After all, it is the legal chaos in which we are interested. As I have noted in the past information specialists are experts in spotting fake news. We have all the skills and expertise required to assist the general public and others who rely on us to get things right.

Thursday 2 March 2017

Content is dead! Long live content!

This article was originally published on Iris Briefings but I feel strongly about the message it sends. When we create content, who are we trying to reach? Search engines or people?

A recent article on content marketing got me thinking. As a qualified information professional it has always been my responsibility to get the right information to the right person and at the right price. My colleagues knew that if I sent them an article or document, they could rely on the quality of the content. Increasingly though, people researching online are being deluged with rehashed, badly written ‘junk articles’. I’m unsure whether this is the fault of a decreasing amount of discerning readership, or a rise of a new king: the search engine.