Social networking and CILIP

Biddy Fisher is speaking to SINTO tomorrow on the subject of Our Professional Journey. She will be speaking about CILIP and its future - indeed the future of the profession as a whole - and the Defining our professional future programme.

This will be a traditional face to face meeting. People will take time off, travel to a fixed location, and gather in a room with other librarians to hear directly what Biddy has to say and ask her questions. Such meetings are I believe, of value and enable participants to interact with the speaker in a way no other format can match. However it is for many an old-fashioned format. Why get together in person when you can achieve the same results in a virtual world.

For many people the Defining our professional future debate has been carried on through the medium of social networking.
An interesting example of this is the short podcast on the blog of Nicola McNee in which she gives 5 ideas on the future of CILIP. Now Nicola strikes me as the sort of person who is not seduced by technology for technology's sake. She is not interested in the latest gadget or gimmick just as something new. She uses social networking tools such as blogs and podcasts because she finds them to be useful for professional development and discussion.

What interests me is how CILIP in particular and the profession at large is responding to these new tools. In his book Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age, Clay Shirky argues that just as the printing press transformed society, the internet has 'removed the barrier to universal participation and revealed that human beings would rather be creating and sharing than passively consuming what a privileged elite think they should watch. Instead of lamenting the silliness of a lot of social online media, we should be thrilled by the spontaneous collective campaigns and social activism also emerging.'

How does this impact on CILIP? Does the fact that librarians such as Nicola and many others are now comfortable with social media mean that the whole structure and process of CILIP can and should change? Should decisions be made not by a Council but by the direct input of individuals? Can we envisage a Wikiorganisation?

These are not rhetorical questions. Perhaps the answers should be no! What would the profession loose if we moved to a new model? Would the old privileged elite be replaced by a new privileged elite. What about the digital divide in the profession? Will the professional silliness of a lot of professional social media swamp the voices of reason and intelligence? If we replace face-to-face debate with a babble of individual voices speaking in isolation don't we loose something of value?

These issues have to be considered. The recent speech by the Culture Minister Ed Vaisy on Re-modelling public libraries was made available by DCMS on the Write-to-reply website with an invitation for public comments. Is this a forum that CILIP and the profession should be using to get their message across to the Government or is it just for uninformed chit-chat? There may be other and better ways of lobbying the Government that CILIP can use. Could individual comments by librarians on Write-to-reply actually harm our case or is this the model for the future?

I seem to have used a lot of question marks! My point is that social media is not just a new way of communicating. It has the potential to change the way in which organisations operate and we need to be aware of that.

Wallflower at the party?

How social are librarians? Are we the life and soul of the party or do we hide in the corner? I am really thinking about our role in social media initiatives. SINTO has recently run events on Social Computing covering wikis and blogs and we will be running a follow up seminar on tagging, social bookmarking and social networking. There is a great deal of interest in these subjects but are there any role models out there?
Information World Review recently featured two bloggers who asked the same question and provide a model. Stephen Dale, a knowledge and information expert at the Improvement & development Agency writes a blog called Dissident. The aim of this is "Introducing Social media tools and 3rd generation knowledge management techniques into local government. Tackling the silo working practices and resistance to change that contribute to inefficiencies in the public sector" In a recent post he asked why librarians weren't taking a higher profile in promoting tagging and social bookmarking?
The Business of Knowing is a blog from Helen Nicol who lives in Sheffield and works in Leeds. Her main area of interest is Enterprise 2.0 - how social computing can help businesses. She recently drew attention to the impact of blogging on offline relationships. "I've noticed recently that my involvement in blogging, particularly internally, is having a real, positive impact on my face to face work relationships... We've connected on a level that has increased the degree to which we share knowledge and experience, the degree to which we collaborate. This isn't necessarily on a blog, it's because of a blog."
Clearly the situation is different in the different sectors. Many academic librarians have embraced blogs and other social network tools and are promoting tagging etc as part of information literacy training. I expect that they are also developing offline relationships with academics in their organisations.
In public libraries the situation is more difficult. Librarians are only just beginning to embrace web 2.0 technologies and local authorities are less eager to embrace or encourage these technologies as Stephen Dale points out. Also there is a different relationship between the librarian and their users and the librarian and their colleagues in the authority. I suspect that there are few local authorities where the library service and library staff are seen as being central to the operation and success of the authority. It is a valuable service to the public and part of cultural services but not always a resource for the organisation. In this context it is hard to think of examples of librarians & information professionals using internal blogs to develop better face to face relationships in the way described by Helen Nicol.
Librarians often complain that their role is not recognised and that they don't have a dynamic image but like the wallflower at the party the answer is to get up and circulate. And perhaps one day local government will have the Enterprise 2.0 tools that businesses are adopting.