Twittering #CILIP2

That incomprehensible title refers to a rather unique professional event I “attended” 2 weeks ago.

CILIP held a council session on the merits of using Web 2.0 techniques (such as this blog) to reach out to its membership and to librarians who are not currently members. In fact it was partly due to Web2.0-loving non-members’ enthusiasm that this session was held (at Katherine Widdows’ blog is a summary and links to the pertinent “historical” documents!).

The session was rather dificult to follow – watching a succession of hundreds tweets and blog posts appear over a couple of hours was pretty confusing and tiring (perhaps because I tried to combine it with enquiry desk duty!!!).

From my perspective, a few interesting points did come out though:

• Twitter is a format, or protocol, more than an application – it was futile trying to use the bare Twitter interface to follow the free-for-all; many, if not all participants used Tweetdeck or Twitterfall to collate and respond to the comments and links as they appeared. This made it clear to me that although we are dealing with a new piece of web-delivered software here, it is very much a question of information literacy competence that makes it effective in practice.
• CILIP is, as I have long thought, and commented during the session, already a good user of Web 2.0 technologies. The CILIP Communities forums and blog landscape are an under-used and under-valued resource for the library and information community. They are rightly somewhat protected, in my opinion. Going beyond the mistakes and misunderstandings that sparked the conversation on #CILIP2, the real problem here is a simple need to have that conversation and more of the same. There needs to be a much broader, ongoing engagement of professionals both in and outside of CILIP on these issues (which is why I set up the unofficial #CILIP2 wiki to capture some of the ideas and conversations that began there).
• The job of a professional institute is to provide continuity and coherence across a varied and changing sea of people and ideas. There’s nothing wrong with being a little cautious about change; since change has begun to happen clearly and explicitly, we can begin to move forward to a new position. I, for one, am pretty positive about the whole affair, since it reinforces the stance I took in my MSc dissertation; we need to be intelligent users and educators in the technologies available, while making the content our professional focus.

By the way, in another nice piece of news, I was awarded the Harry Galloway award for said Masters – it recognises that I achieved the highest grades in the South West for a library and information Masters!