As many of you will already be aware, the CILIP Branches and CDG Divisions across the country will be merging to form new Regional Member Networks, and so the West Midlands Division of CILIP’s Ca-reer Development Group will be winding up over the next few weeks as we see the new CILIP West Midlands Member Network launched. That means that this will be the last ever Central Issues. In this special issue, we’re taking a little look at CDG WM history, through some of our past and present committee members. You can read about how CDG WM has contributed to the careers of Carol Bark-er (p. 2) and Katrina Clifford (p. 4). The current committee contribute their comments on p. 6. I have thoroughly enjoyed being Central Issues editor 2011-2014. In that time, I have edited nine issues of the newsletter (including this one), each of which has been jam-packed with interesting articles from all the authors who have been kind enough to write them. It isn’t al-ways easy plucking up the courage to put your experiences down in print, so I am hugely grateful to everyone who made my life easier by sending their contributions (before the copy dates—mostly!). We will be leaving the Central Issues archive up on issuu for as long as they are prepared to host it - please do have a browse through at http://issuu.com/cdgwm. So as the sun sets on the West Midlands Division of CILIP’s Career Development Group, we can look forward to the bright new dawn of the West Midlands Member Net-work—see p. 8 for how to get involved. Georgina Hardy (Former) Newsletter Editor

Saying goodbye to Central Issues

Winter 2014 Issue 29

Central Issues

The Newsletter of the West Midlands Division of CILIP’s Career Development Group

The Career Development

Group is a special interest group of

CILIP, The Chartered

Institute of Library & Information Professionals.

Registered Charity Number 313014.

Inside this issue:

Saying goodbye

to Central Issues

1

A decade with

CDG West Mid-

lands

2

Congratulations

to Ayub Khan

3

Quizzes, visits

and lots of enve-

lopes – my time

with CDG WM

4

CDG WM – The

End of an Era

6

Vacancy Bulletin 8

Long-standing CDG WM member and committee member at both divisional and na-

tional levels, Carol Barker was awarded an Honorary Fellowship by CDG in 2010.

Here she reminisces about her involvement with CDG. My first encounter with CDG was whilst as a student at Loughborough University. My friend Emma asked me to go along with her to the East Midlands committee meeting in the Pilkington Library, with a view to us being joint student reps. I don’t remember much about the committee, however we were lucky enough to be given a place each at the CDG conference in Aberystwyth in March 1997, which was great fun.

It wasn’t until the following year, and I was by now a qualified librarian working in Leek in Staffordshire, that I decided to attend the AGM/Members’ day of West Midlands CDG in the old Birmingham library. I got chatting to Ayub Khan, who I think was then Chair, and he encouraged me to come along and ob-serve the committee, as part of my CPD. Within a short space of time I was invited to be Secretary, and I settled into my new role on the committee, meeting every couple of months in Birmingham Central Library.

At first there were a lot of acronyms to learn and concepts to understand, but everyone was so friendly and I soon got into the swing of it all. Before too long though, the Treasur-er left the committee so I took on her role. And then the Chair (Amanda Balaam) left to go to a new job at the end of 1999, and by now our committee had dwindled significant-ly, with just myself and Nikki Phillips to run the Division and cover the various roles. We used to meet up and think of ways to encour-age more people to join, wondering how long we could carry on with just the two of us...

Luckily for us, we ran a Chartership course sometime in 2000, and we suddenly had a wave of new enthusiastic committee members, notably Amanda Quick (who went on to become President of National Council) and Judith Smith (who went on to become Nation-al Treasurer). From then on, there was no looking back for West Midlands. We continued to have support from CILIP and National Committee to run courses (Susie Kay - then lat-er Michael Martin - and Tom Relph respectively) until in 2001 I was successful in becom-ing Chartered, and then was delighted to take on the role of Candidate Support Officer and relinquish my other roles.

I thoroughly enjoyed the role of CSO (2001-2005), though it was difficult when on one oc-casion a candidate rang me in tears to say her submission had been rejected by CILIP for not being evaluative enough, in accordance with the regulations (sadly this has often been an issue with Chartership submissions). Unfortunately she hadn’t asked for my sup-

A decade with CDG West Midlands

Central Issues Page 2

(L-R) Carol Barker with Georgina Hardy (CDG

WM Chair) and Maria Cotera (CDG President)

at the event to celebrate Carol’s CDG Honorary

Fellowship on 10th May 2010.

Issue 29 Page 3

port before sending in her submission, which might have prevented this outcome... However, I was delighted to get a phone call some months later to say that after our meeting, she had re-written and re-submitted, and had finally succeeded, and this was a fantastic part of the role.

During my time as CSO, with support from the committee, I developed a Portfolio workshop. This was in response to candidates whom I was supporting, who were clearly struggling to understand how to evaluate rather than describe their experience and development, or who just didn’t know how to get started with pulling it all togeth-er. The practical course was a great success and I shared it with the other CSOs across the UK, and I was delighted when it was adopted by other Divisions (and I be-lieve that it is still being run, although no doubt it has been modified).

By this time, a number of others had joined the committee, including Frances Machell [née Hall] and Georgina Hardy, who were committed and enthusiastic and continued the momentum of the Division when in 2005 I was invited to join National Committee as Honorary Learning Officer (2006-2008).

My time spent with the West Midlands Division committee was a fantastic experience for me as a new professional, and gave me some skills and confidence that I would not have gained in my day job, and which certainly helped me in my job applications in subsequent years. It wasn’t all work though, and I gained some good friends locally and nationally, and we attended some great social events (not forgetting the legend-ary National Council evenings which usually went on until 4 am, with heated debates in the bar of the Tavistock Hotel!).

For all this, I am so grateful to Ayub for the initial invitation, and to everyone else with whom I worked on the committee, at National Council, and at CILIP (apologies to those whose names I cannot recall right now), as well as to all those candidates whom I had the pleasure of supporting at that important stage in their career.

Carol Barker is Senior Assistant Librarian: Bibliographic Services, De Montfort Uni-versity.

Congratulations to Ayub Khan A former CDG WM Committee Member was made a Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) in

the 2013 Queen’s Birthday Honours List. Ayub Khan, Head of Library and Information Services for

Warwickshire County Council received the Honour for

services to libraries in Warwickshire. And, of course, he was instrumental in persuading

Carol Barker to join the committee (see above)!

From 2004—2007 (?), Katrina Clifford (née Sked), then a Science Information

Assistant/Cataloguer at the University of Warwick, was a committee member of

CDG WM, including serving as Press & Publicity Officer.

It’s funny how in life, things coincide sometimes. A day or so before I was asked to write this piece, I’d had cause to reflect on my time with CDG WM for 2 reasons. Firstly, I was coming to the end of my time on the Cataloguing and Indexing Group committee and re-alised that with deliberately not starting anything new, it’s pretty much the first time in my professional life that I’ve not been on a CILIP committee! The second thing was going to Library Camp at the new Library of Birmingham and walking past the old library where CDG WM held their committee meetings.

I’ll be honest and say that my memory, usually so good on dates, has let me down and I’ve guessed the dates I was on the committee, though I’m fairly sure that that’s right. I know I started fairly soon after starting at the University of Warwick, my first professional post. One of my colleagues was already on the committee and myself and Helen Baylis, another young professional, were really keen to get involved in the way that fresh-faced Chartering people often do.

As a result of my habitual over-eagerness to volunteer for things, myself (and Helen) soon became Press and Publicity Officers, which in a pre-Twitter, pre-blog era meant putting together the printed newsletter. Rather than let CILIP send it out with the Gazette/Update magazines (after a couple of times where newsletters got mixed up and went to different regions), we rashly decided that sending them out ourselves was the best idea. To say that my some of my most vivid memories of CDG WM centred around stuffing, stickering and stamping endless envelopes may only be a slight exaggeration!

There were, of course, other aspects to my involvement: we ran a quiz a couple of times which although small in terms of attendance was no less competitive! There were visits too – WM was actually a huge area, stretching as far as Hereford, where we visited the cathedral there. We also took part in the walk for one of the major CDG anniversaries which was great fun.

Quizzes, visits and lots of envelopes – my time with CDG WM

Central Issues Page 4

The Summer 2007 issue of Central Is-sues, edited by Katrina.

Issue 29 Page 5

Being a new professional in my first ‘proper’ job, having just moved to the other end of the country and only seeing my then boyfriend (now husband) every 5-7 weeks, having a ‘life’ outside work was so crucial to me and CDG was a big part of that. It was a really lovely committee to be part of, and not for the first time, I realised that I really was so at home being a librarian. Not having had a graduate trainee year and having done my MSc placement in an academic library, it was the first time I’d met librarians from outside academia and it was really refreshing to have a mixture of people on the committee.

I wish I had some ‘amusing’ or ‘interesting’ anecdotes to relate rather than simply

some unstructured ramblings but I’m afraid I don’t – I can say however that it was a

joy to have been part of CDG WM, I learnt a lot and had fun while doing it. I wish all

CDG members, past and present and all current and future members of the new Net-

work all the very best and hope that the new venture goes from strength to strength.

Katrina Clifford is Senior Information Advisor (Bibliographic & Metadata), Kingston

University.

The CDG WM committee in 2007 Back Row (L-R): Helen Bayliss, Vanessa Bell, Frances Hall (now Machell), Georgina Hardy

Front Row (L-R): Gail Owen, Katrina Sked (now Clifford), Abigail Williams

Current committee members Anna Brown (Committee member 2010, Chair 2011-

2014), Lisa Basini (Vice-Chair 2012-2014) and Angel Egbuji (Secretary) reflect

on their experiences of CDG WM.

Anna: My first encounter with CDG West Midlands was the belated “Christmas” meal / annual dinner in January 2010. I was new to the area and without employment, having moved to Solihull because of my partner’s job, and I thought going along to the meal might be a good way to meet some local people, find out about the area and local em-ployers. The group was friendly and welcoming, and George (then Chair) invited me along to committee meetings. By the end of 2010, I’d been to a few meetings and it was time to commit to a full officer role. I went along to the final meeting of the year, thinking about positions I’d be interested in, maybe Website or Events Officer... but as it hap-pened, there was only one vacancy on the committee that really needed filling, so I ended up as Chair! I’m proud of the Division’s achievements over the past few years, the committee has continued to be active and provide opportu-nities for local CDG members by organising CPD and net-working events, sponsoring members to attend confer-ences, and supporting CILIP candidates. Being involved has benefited me in many ways including meeting new peo-ple locally and nationally, developing skills and attending conferences. I have learnt a lot, both about my own strengths and weaknesses and about the library/information world beyond the walls of my own workplace.

Angel: My first contact with the CDG was in 2008 when I was considering Chartership. I was invited to an informal Chartership event and I enjoyed the experience so much that I did not need much persuasion to become a member and subsequently joined the com-mittee.

Through the CDG West Midlands, I was exposed to a lot of experiences and activities that enabled me to complete my Chartership programme and continue to enrich my ca-reer. I have represented the committee at the National Council, was sponsored to one of

the National Conferences, and participated in the planning and organisation of activities, branch meetings and conferences. Most activities we had, though educational always had a fun element; the visits to other libraries, tour of Birmingham, the an-nual meals out, etc.

A bonus of being a WM CDG member was the abil-ity to interact with professionals across the wider information sector enabling exchange of good pro-fessional practices. I have met a lot of fantastic people over the years who have impacted on my

CDG WM – The End of an Era

Central Issues Page 6

Issue 29 Page 7

career and whom I hope have gained something from me.

I do not know about the other Divisions but I can certainly say that the CDG West Midlands Division is great and it has been a privilege to work with the team as their secretary. This may be the end of the Career Development Group as we know it but I am confident that, in the West Midlands, the new Member Network will continue with the achievements gained and much more. It is exciting to say the least.

Lisa: I joined the CDG WM committee in May 2012 after meeting some of the com-mittee members at the Members’ Day a few months previous. I was in the middle of my CILIP Certification and having recently attended one of their Certification and Chartership Portfolio Building events I wanted to be able to get involved with the group that had helped me. It was also great to be able to add it to my Portfolio – I used it on my PDP as evidence of getting involved with my Special Interest Groups.

While I wasn’t on the committee for a long time I did help or-ganise the joint Librarians as Teachers conference with the ARLG Committee. It was something that I wouldn’t have gained experience of in my job and I’m really glad I did it. I also gained experience of promoting such an event online through email mailing lists and social media and while I learned a few lessons the hard way (such as telling the speakers in advance what the correct Twitter hash tag is!). They are lessons I can take forward, and I certainly plan to get involved in event planning again in the future – although I scared my sister a little when I said that one day I want to help organise a National Conference!

The Librarians as Teachers conference was also my first real experience of using Twitter – while I did Tweet a little from the Health Libraries Conference the year be-fore I mostly took my notes on paper. At the Librarians as Teachers event I felt that as an organiser/promoter my time was better spent on Twitter and it was invaluable – my ‘notes’ are online so I haven’t lost that aspect completely, but I was able to inter-act with the other attendees at the same time which helped start conversations with them in person during the breaks!

I’ve also had the chance to write for the CDG WM newsletter a few times which is something I hadn’t anticipated and this led to me having the confidence to volunteer to write a book review for the Health Libraries Group newsletter, not once, but twice! Again, this is something I plan to build on – it’s given me the confidence to say that one day I’d like to get published in a Journal, or maybe if I can think of a suitably ex-citing topic have my own book reviewed in the Health Libraries Newsletter (or even the Regional Network’s one!)

I’ve met some lovely people in my time on the committee, both committee members and others such as event attendees and the ARLG committee who we worked closely with on the Librarians as Teachers event in June ’13. I’m planning to continue work-ing with the new Regional Networks, and this is one aspect I’m looking forward to – I love meeting new people!

As you have seen on the preceding pages, getting involved in your pro-fessional organisation is a very rewarding way to contribute to your profession and can provide you with plenty of opportunities to address skills gaps in your CV. The brand new CILIP West Midlands Member Network is actively re-cruiting committee members. This is your chance to get involved in shaping the new network and ensuring that West Midlands CILIP mem-bers are supported throughout their careers. If you’re interested in finding out more, e-mail cilipWMMN@gmail.com or tweet @CILIPWM.

Vacancy Bulletin: Your new West Midlands Member Network wants you!

Central Issues Page 8