SINTO Members' Day

Today's picture is of the Learning Centre at Sheffield Hallam University Collegiate campus.

On the 19th June we are holding the third SINTO members' day and AGM. We are obliged to hold an annual general meeting and they are inevitably rather dry affairs - although it does mean that SINTO is accountable to its member organisations. The idea of holding a members' day as well is to involve all library staff in SINTO libraries and to develop the concept of a community of librarians in our area.

The theme of this year's event is "Skills for the Future". How will the practice of librarianship change in the next few years? What new skills will we need in order to cope with this change? How can we ensure that we gain these new skills?

The day will start with refreshments from 12 noon and the opportunity to network with colleagues from the region. At 12.45 we have the AGM and just after 1pm we will introduce our keynote speaker Professor John Tarrant. John was vice-chancellor of Huddersfield University and is Chair of Museums, Libraries and Archives (MLA) Yorkshire. In his presentation on skills for the future John will refer to the Demos report Knowledge & Inspiration: the democratic face of culture produced in August 2006 for the MLA.

This will be followed by four short presentations by practitioners. Biddy Fisher, Head of Information Services at Sheffield Hallam University will talk on research on the future of library and information services. Sally Gibbs of Lifelong Learning UK will outline the work of LLUK in workforce development for the sector. Stephanie Taylor who has run courses for SINTO will look at mentoring and networking as essential soft skills and finally I will give a brief account of the new social computing tools provided by SINTO - including this blog. At the end of these sessions there will be a discussion forum led by Bob Usherwood.

Librarians on the whole are very good at doing things right - we take great pride in our professionalism - but we do not always pay enough attention to whether we are doing the right things. The world changes and what we need to do to meet the demands of our users has to change with it. This event gives us the opportunity to sit back and think about what is changing.