LILAC 2015
This year, I was very fortunate to have the opportunity for the first time to attend the LILAC 15 Conference at University of Newcastle http://www.lilacconference.com/WP/ For the uninitiated, LILAC is the Librarians’ Information Literacy Annual Conference.
It was also great for me to able to do a presentation with Alex about the Employability work that we have been doing. It is something that I am really interested in and it’s nice to be able to share and discuss this with other colleagues. Our presentation is here.
Some top conference survival tips:
Prepare and rehearse your presentation (especially if co-presenting) and think about any possible questions that may be asked.
Plan your itinery, read the abstracts and try at a large conference to choose the parallel workshops that sound generally innovative, useful or relevant to your role.
Look at the delegate list and see if there are any people that you know already and then try and find them. They might introduce you to other colleagues. Make an effort to introduce yourself to new people for example after a presentation and take an interest in their work.
Use an iPad or tablet and an app such as Evernote to take notes and photographs (of slides for example) from the workshops. When you return, read and reflect on your notes and try and develop some new ideas.
Allow yourself some time and space for reflection. We were fortunate that the weather was really warm so we could spend some of our free time outside walking, shopping or taking photographs of bridges and flowers.
Best advice I received from a workshop: view your colleagues as hobbits, orcs, ents and elves. (This is not at all problematic for me to do).
Enjoy the social events, networking and feasting.
A couple of the sessions included:
Hull University (IL delivery for the masses)
The team decided on new generic, bookable sessions run by all of the library team rather than subject specialists. Hull had also just had a refurbishment and wanted to exploit the new space by doing training in the Library.
The sessions fall into these main groups:
- Induction,
- Spotlight session,
- Workshop,
- Masterclass
The training is backed up by informal peer support, online resources, formal peer support, and one to one appointments. If subject specific sessions are requested the library train academics to do their own sessions.
York St John University (RefWorks support )
Ran a 10 days of Refworks promotion using a blog Ten days of RefWorks blog 10 days of RefWorks blog.
Each day had a RefWorks task to complete.
http://blog.yorksj.ac.uk/10daysrefworks/
They have a 1 minute video on creating a RefWorks account at https://hml.yorksj.ac.uk/Play/5198
Other 1 minute videos are also on the blog such as http://blog.yorksj.ac.uk/10daysrefworks/2014/07/02/day-3-entering-a-reference-manually/
I’m really grateful for the opportunity to attend the conference and have new insights and ideas. I learned about having liminal, breakthrough moments when learning and keep having these now when writing my Academic Practice coursework.
The LILAC presentation archive can be found at: http://www.lilacconference.com/WP/past-conferences/lilac-2015
