HLG on Tuesday

Day 2 and I attended the conference, starting off with a National Library of Health breakfast meeting, though there was little new since their round of roadshows over the summer, onme of which we hosted at BSMS. The morning keynote speaker was Frank Dobbs, who gave us an insight into diagnostic thinking, followed by Karin Dearness, who told us about NICE and how they produce their technology appraisals, and Hilary Ollerenshaw and Caroline Plaice from North Bristol NHS Trust who showed off their knowledge4health project. One thing that struck me about this and another paper later on was that these local portals are probably very much what the National Library for Health might look like if localised.
I see I’ m not the only delegate blogging the HLG conference: the loopylibrarian is also at it, and is much more up to the minute than me and pithy.
After coffee, I attended a rather over-crowded session on information skills training given by Anne Parkhill of Monash from Australia.
Then an agreeable lunch and a visit to the General Register Office in Belfast for a little family history.
In the afternoon I attended a session on developing librarians skills, made up of papers by Linda Ward of Leicester on teaching critical reading, the inimitable Andrew Booth on the e-learning lessons of the Folio programme and Ursula Ison on using action learning sets in the West Midlands. After tea, and another search for a wireless signal outside (one could just be had on the benches outside the Waterfront Hall), to a session on future proofing the profession where the recommendations of the CILIP Health Executive Advisory Group were discussed (which were to go before the CIILIP Executive Board on Thursday, so very timely). After a presentation by Jackie Lord on the recommendations, we split into groups for discussion, which was animated, though we failed to cover all the questions set for us by Jackie. The group I was in concentrated on the old chestnut of the plethora of groups that health information professionals have formed; I’ve never been sure that this is actually the problem that people claim it is. The tendency to form groups to reflect different specialisms, employment sectors and subject interests can be seen in all professions, and people don’t form organisations with all the attendant work for frivolous reasons, but because they meet real needs and have real things they want the organisations to do. Of course organisations can ossify and outlive their usefulness; but if that is the case, in the end they die. People are rational, and in the main will not devote time and energy to keeping things alive that should die.
The other difficulty I have is with the very idea that we need to future-proof ourselves: at best this sounds unnecessarily defensive. The task of our profession when looking forwards is, it seems to me, is not to make sure that our children and grand-children can grow up to become librarians who work exactly like us, but to look at what a changing world will need. If we can lose some of the more humdrum and mechanical tasks that we are traditionally associated with, so much the better; it could free us to rediscover the scholar-librarian, someone who both organises, but more importantly plays a part in the creation of, knowledge. I mean knowledge here in every sense: not only the scientific/biomedical knowledge with which I am most closely professionally associated, but the creation of literary and artistic works, and so forth.
In the evening, after the odd experience of trying to get a before-dinner drink in a champagne bar which only opened during the day , to Belfast City Hall for a reception and dinner. It seems to me the most magnificent City Hall I have ever been in, even more impressive than Manchester. It’s a monument to the great days of Belfast, when the city was the leading industrial force in Ireland. After dinner Muir Gray spoke, and paid tribute to Veronica Fraser who is moving on from the post of NHS Libraries Adviser, making a presentation to her to which Veronica replied with a graceful speech enlivened with some fine swipes at civil service jargon.