I've never been convinced by the industry that has sprung up around 'advocacy'. It seems to me second-nature that, if one is part of a profession that does something worthwhile, one would does one's best to stand up for it in public. I always despised passengers, people who contribute nothing but the minimum required of them. I'm not sure I do advocacy particularly well, but I do it. I've always been involved in professional affairs, in trade unions, and in library campaigning. Why is it important, we are asked? Apart from satisfying whatever strange inner compulsion makes me do things like the aforementioned, it seems to me that unless we develop a profession that's prepared to be vocal about what we do, and its value to society, then we're doomed. There are all sorts of ways of avoiding this, of course: hiding in sterile debates about the 'image of the profession', muttering on closed e-mail lists, moaning at librarian-only conferences are but a few.
I'm involved, though not as much as I should be, in Voices for the Library. Is it effective? Others are better judges than me, but we do seem to have made an impact, in spite of our small numbers and, of all but me and another member of the team, our youth. I chaired the Health Libraries Group at a time when health was an area, through the Policy Forum, where CILIP was developing its advocacy work. Heath seemed to be, we thought, an area where lots of different parts of the profession contributed to information provision. I seem to be fated to end up as the chair of organisations. Perhaps it's my grey hairs, but as well as HLG, I've chaired the ASVIN Project Board, the European Veterinary Libraries Group, the Scientific Programme Committee for the Third International Conference of Animal Health Information Specialists, Animal Health Information Specialists (UK & Ireland), Helicon, CoFHE London and South East Circle….[that's enough chairs-Ed]
As for getting published, if I were to have my time over again, I would make more of an effort to write for our professional scholarly journals. I was on the Editorial Board of Health Information and Libraries Journal (HILJ, pronounced to rhyme with bilge) for over ten years, and I now sit on that of the Journal of Librarianship and Information Science. It's a good thing for one's career to publ;ish, of course, but that's not the real reason: it's because it's the only way the profession will learn and grown, like any other. To the extent that we have a body of professional knowledge, it is not in that rather abstract document that sits on the CILIP website, but in the peer-reviewed literature. It's a shame more of us, myself included, don't contribute to it.