CILIP conference

(By Camila Garces-Bovett).

This July, I was fortunate enough to attend the CILIP 2016 Conference in Brighton, thanks to CILIP’s Community, Diversity and Equality Group, who awarded me a bursary. It was my first ever conference and I wasn’t really sure what to expect, but I was well and truly blown away.

Tuesday morning’s keynote speaker was Scott Bonner, who became director of Ferguson Library in Missouri five weeks before the killing of Mike Brown. Scott took us through the timeline of events, the accompanying crisis and how the library and community dealt with what happened. He gave us plenty of food for thought concerning the role of libraries and how to ensure the ethics of librarianship underpins all our decisions. It was a very moving and inspirational opening.

Over the rest of the day, I heard a further eight speakers in the Everyday Innovation and Using Technology strands. My particular highlights included:

• Amy Hearn and Tiffany Haigh (Kirklees Library Authority) explaining how to combine stories and walks to engage with children who are struggling with reading
• John Vincent rallying the audience with his talk, ‘Libraries really do change lives!’
• Feeling horrified at the myriad ways that patrons’ data can be used and abused without their (or our) knowledge at Alison Macrina’s talk about her work as director of the Library Freedom Project
• Learning about the power of GIFs and using social media to bring the world to your library with Adam Koszary
• The day ended with fish and chips, dodgem rides and dancing to Beyoncé at the Party on the Pier – a nice antidote to some of the boring librarian stereotypes still doing the rounds.

Wednesday opened with Sir Nigel Shadbolt’s keynote, ‘The opportunities and challenges of open data’. A thought-provoking talk, it shed light on everything from the Human Genome Project to the number of bus-stops in the UK. Following that, I attended the ‘Tools to help you build you career’ talk in the gorgeous King William IV Room at the Brighton Pavilion. It was based around using the new version of the online PKSB, and helped allay some of my nervousness about how to best use it for chartership when the time comes. Then it was Laura Venning of the Reading Agency, explaining how their forthcoming toolkit can be used to advocate for your library’s role in promoting everything from personal health and wellbeing to cultural and economic benefits to society.

The final speaker at the conference was Lauren Smith, whose closing keynote was in some ways the counterpart to Scott Bonner’s opening speech. Both covered the ethics of librarianship, but Smith focused on the current situation for public libraries in the UK. She used the talk to challenge us to ask ourselves how we can help our communities; to be impartial without being apolitical, and to unpick the systems we are part of when they perpetuate social injustice. Although it was just as inspiring as the opening keynote, it was also something of a bittersweet – if necessary – way to end the conference.

All in all, I’ve come away with armfuls of leaflets, a stack of notes to follow-up when my dissertation is done and dusted, a head buzzing with ideas, a list of new people to connect with, and a taste for beetroot salad (the catering was phenomenally delicious). But perhaps most importantly, I have a new conviction in my chosen career, and a strengthened resolve to fight for the future of libraries.

Wallpaper in the King William IV room