CILIP rebranding and professional futures

Things have moved on quickly since I first drafted bits of this post (I’ve been away from home) but its still useful for my own reflections on what is happening…

Back at the start of the year there were a number of events which considered the future of the ‘information profession’.  I had planned to blog my thoughts on the topic at the time but did not get around to it.  However, the recent CILIP survey related to a proposed re-branding and the resulting outrage/discussion got me thinking about it again.

Firstly, some personal background:

When I first joined a (law sector) information team the suggestion was largely that CILIP would be irrelevant to me.  When I completed my MA, the lecturers were far more positive about the organization, the message I took away was very much “you get out what you put in”.  As a result, once I was in a ‘professional’ post, I was keen to get involved and volunteered for the local professional development group’s committee.  That committee was not short of members so I eventually joined the local branch committee instead.  After a couple of years I then stepped down as I could not commit the time due to starting an MSc course.  When on the committee I performed the “communications officer” role and can testify to problems with the current CILIP brand, website, typeface, etc from that role in setting up new web pages, Twitter feeds, etc.

Therefore, within a relatively short space of time, I had gone from graduate post, to postgrad student, to active member and through to completing another course and being a lurker.  Partly due to my work, the changing workplace and that second postgrad course I now have a quite complex work profile, as mentioned in previous posts CILIP (even though it is an umbrella organization aiming to cover a wide array of roles) is only one of a number of organizations that relate to my professional identify.

Thoughts on professional futures and CILIP’s rebranding:

The CILIP president’s blog post on the rebrand hints at some major issues with the organization:

One of my responsibilities as CILIP President is to act as a conduit between members and CILIP Council and senior staff…in the interests of transparency that the first I knew of the contents of the survey was when it was presented to me last Friday afternoon

A lack of harmony between members, staff and the complex setup of groups, branches and council seems to foster a lack of genuine collaboration within the organization.  The second point, on the President not having seen the survey in advance, seems particularly odd and indicative in that a person who holds that position is not involved from the offset.  Yet that would be wrong too, CILIP should be as strong as its members – not offering them a longer list of suggestions for something as important as the organization’s name seems odd at best and against the membership at worst.  The one thing I do hope for is that any new tagline recognizes what the organization represents “members of the information community” not representing “for the information community”. Whilst advocacy is a key part of CILIP’s role it should not be seen as distinct from its members/staff.  I know there are legacy issues about not being a trade union but the gap between CILIP HQ and members threatens the organization, in my opinion, more than downsizing in public libraries, off-shoring in corporate libraries, Higher Education budget cuts or any other challenge.

The President’s blog post later mentions that the current governance review will hopefully resolve some of these issues.  However, I don’t see why the idea of the re-brand has had to come so out of the blue.  Yes, the world and the CILIP organization are changing, yes the CILIP brand has always been questionable and, yes, it will continue to be so.  My main concern really is that, as a professional organization, crowd sourcing possible names would have been just one example of making it more democratic, as the organization should be, than a survey on suggested names.  Although it is important to point out that the difference between ‘survey’ and ‘vote’/’election’ seems to be lost of some members.

So, overall, I’m not against a rebrand but I do not think it is the correct time economically (the £35,000 budget being at least 180 members annual fees if my lazy maths is correct)  and it certainly has not been handled in the correct way even though there are not a lack of good examples in related sectors.  JISC, for example, has a lot of shared interests but whilst it has improved itself they have been a mix of internal improvements (better website, etc), crowd sourcing (which services could be stopped) and funder/owner led (HEFCE changes, etc).  JISC has not always done this perfectly, but better than CILIP seem to have managed at least, and JISC was/is a more complex beast.  CIPD, for example, has a very clear voice and has its opinions voiced through the media, by those in positions agreed with the membership, more efficiently than CILIP seems to manage.

What for professional futures?  The point which has concerned many is that the survey’s proposed names all drop the ‘library’ word with “information” staying or both replaced by “knowledge”.  This seems a mistake, surely any future proofing of the, once, ‘Library Association’ brand has to maintain the L word or it loses its relevance/grounding?  Also the suggested names were awful and I did comment to this effect on the survey before the Twitterati backlash – ‘The Knowledge People’ sounds like a recruitment agency, ‘Information UK’ like a government agency or freedom of information watchdog [apologies if I’ve got those names wrong].  The President acknowledges this so, again, why bother with the survey step before crowdsourcing?  This said, the term ‘library’ is far from popular, as pointed out by the President.  Indeed at the CLSIG event earlier in the year an information scientist made it clear in the Q&A they didn’t feel associated with CILIP and disappointed that a ‘future of the profession’ evening was a talk about CILIP’s future (and I am pretty sure Francis did not mention a rebrand).  There remain questions here over the original foundation (i.e. it wasn’t just the Library Association) and as such the original purpose of CILIP is still being questioned, as such it doesn’t fill you with any confidence that a rebranded CILIP will be any better than the current.

Back a few months (around the same time as the CLSIG event) and AIIM was running a webinar to report that its members had completed surveys saying they chose a preference for the title “Information Professional”.  Now this is ‘CILIPs territory’ so to speak and you could well say that with today’s specializations the ‘library’ component is all that keeps CILIP unique from AIIM, BCS, etc.  Indeed there was an interesting suggestion in the AIIM session that effectively IT professionals want a rebrand and that rebrand is some BCS/CILIP hybrid in terms of UK organizations.  Personally I fear that, in the globalized workplace, CILIP should be branching out to the international groups it already has relations with or risk losing relevance for those within the changing workplace.

Finally, for now at least, is the point about CILIP dropping the ‘chartered’ tag.  I suggested in the survey that this is a clear mistake, it is the one thing which keeps an organization above an informal learning and networking organization.  Any dropping of this would, I fear, suggests a deprofessionalization.  If you deprofessionalize CILIP then there is far less value in it is an umbrella organization and there would be fewer reasons for keeping the expense of the parent organization and not simply branching off the special interest groups into their own organizations.

Overall, it is difficult to reposition an organization, especially one that arguably is not needed, but considering the predictable feedback it is odd that the exercise has been conducted in such a way.  There is also a risk of underplaying the public’s understanding of the ‘librarian’ role – I hold that title in my job title, partly because my employer still associates it with a certain skill set.  ‘Information professional’ may be a professionals’ identity but I would doubt it holds such a sway.  Ultimately the answer may be for CILIP to be far less inward looking in preparing rebrands and future advocacy and instead ask the likes of the BBC and major employers what make sense to them.  This would be a sensible suggestion to other groups too, for example, and to show I’m not just picking on information professionals, ‘Instructional Designers’ disagree over their identity too.

A Future For CILIP?

One thing that does seem to be emerging from this is a re-invigoration of CILIP as the training/accreditation body – their own website release stresses some of the things in the pipeline:

some new offers have been launched, including the Professional Knowledge and Skills Base and others will follow – such as a new qualifications scheme, new accreditation of courses and a new virtual learning environment on a refreshed website.

This might work provided the organization recognizes the potential for members, and their employers, to influence the agenda and the PKSB, training, etc. keeps up with change.

Another key item, for me, would be to move Umbrella from its biannual setup to something different.  A free event with paid for sections would be best – especially considering the success of CIPD, Learning and Skills, etc. in this regard.

Some more pointless stats

Following on from the dubious numbers in my Google Reader post, Slideshare have recently been kind enough to hint at what is possible via their pay plans by emailing me (on April 29th) stats on views of my presentations:

  1. Questionmark vs Blackboard for online tests – 778 views
  2. Whose education is it anyway? – Blackboard UK User Group 2010 – 566 views
  3. Supporting the transition from the physical to the virtual classroom – 480 views
  4. Using Blackboard for Pre-Entry Diagnostic Testing – 333 views
  5. ALT-c 2011: Breaking the ice, an instructional design approach for institutional growth – 252 views

These basics stats are also available via the ‘My Uploads’ section – my most viewed item being Pdp: Its Role And Implementation In The Law Curriculum as of today (926 views).

In total my 7 Slideshares have been viewed 3503 times (as of May 10th).

An issue here is how Slideshare deals with sites such as docs.hut effectively copying the resource.  Therefore, whilst there is some use in such statistics and analytics there is little value without some narrative from the users engaging with them, unfortunately a lack of comments means this is tricky to say the least.  Slideshare do offer some further functionality but there are clearly issues here – for example the best interaction around a presentation I have had is perhaps the ALT-c 2011 one above whilst its numbers in terms of views are not great.

When LinkedIn recently took Slideshare content and worked it directly into your profile I removed the presentations, whilst I am happy for these to be shared they are very much of their time and I would not necessarily recommend them as examples of my work.  I see Slideshare as something of a historic evidence archive of my development rather than examples of the kind of work I would produce today, another example where it is useful to keep different social and web tools separate for different use cases.

Cheerio Google Reader

So I’ve taken the opportunity of a long holiday weekend to jump ship from Google Reader.

My final solution has been to move:

  1. most audio subscriptions to iTunes.
  2. other RSS to The Old Reader – this seems fine so far, a little annoying that imports come in as unread but otherwise not too bad.  The mobile version (on my Windows 8 phone) seems good enough.

For the record, my Reader stats were:

  1. 1682 subscriptions (The Old Reader said it imported 819 so I’m hoping that is ignoring dead ones rather than losing any)
  2. 42 tags/folders
  3. Over the last 30 days I had read 629 items, clicked 54 items, starred 0 items, and emailed 12 items.
  4. Since April 12, 2007 I had “read” a total of 178,020 items
  5. 8 starred items:
    1. Eradicating the Stigma: HR’s Future
    2. Rethinking Human Resources in a Changing World
    3. How Poor Leaders Become Good Leaders
    4. Nine Rules for Stifling Innovation
    5. Student Loans – sale of ‘mortgage-style loan book’
    6. What is a private university?
    7. The ePortfolio Idea “Forking”?
    8. A comment I made on a blog

Revisiting some old notes

I am something of a hoarder – I tend to keep things and this includes materials from old courses.  As you would probably expect, I rarely look at these.  However, I recently decided to have a look at some old notes I found in one of my bags (I think I put them there to read on a train but never did).

I think looking back at the notes we make is a very useful experience in reflecting on our personal development, for example, it often shows when/how I was first introduced to a term or acronym and can be viewed in comparison to current practice to reflect on professional development.

Quotes from texts also help remind us of fundamental knowledge and perhaps where we are not doing what we should!

From these particular notes, mainly on instructional design and online learning, some bits jumped out:

  • The role of the professor is “master-guide” (Hype Versus Reality on Campus: Why e-Learning Isn’t Likely to Replace a Professor. Any Time Soon, by Brent G. Wilson and Lee Christopher) – useful in the MOOC debate.
  • Knowledge management is “how groups of people make themselves collectively smarter”, i.e. like training but not for the individual, in this instance knowledge is “a capacity to act” so KM is helping people make better decisions (Knowledge Management: From the Graveyard of Good Ideas, by William Horton)

Above are from the The e-learning handbook : past promises, present challenges / Saul Carliner and Patti Shank, editors.

  • “There are seven good reasons why portfolio-building is helpful:
  1. as a tool for self development;
  2. to asses prior learning;
  3. to gain accreditation;
  4. to share good practice;
  5. to evaluate training;
  6. to enhance performance;
  7. to change a culture.”

The above is from Warren Redman in 1994 (Portfolios for Development: A Guide for Trainers and Managers) but these points remain fundamental.  The arguments for and against ePortfolios must always remember these essential items.

Redman also made the following points which could easily come out of a L&D article of 2013: “increasingly there is a recognition that the key attributes needed by people in a constantly changing work environment are:

  1. flexibility;
  2. self-motivation;
  3. communication skills; and
  4. a willingness and ability to develop new skills”.

In looking back at our professional roots, such as these old notes (I think I made these about five years ago) we recognize the value in not repeating the mistakes of the past and also helps us remember that ‘new’ ideas are often not really new at all.  One advantage of the academic route into a profession is that, via literature reviews and other approaches, you can be familiar with historic projects and theory/practice development.  One fear in a less-university led world would be that historic knowledge is lost to information overload and we fail to build on the practice of the past.

Remember when ‘Wikis were well wicked’?

[I drafted a long post about this a while ago, inspired by the alliteration and the Beastie Boys, but never posted it – this is an abbreviated version]

A while back it seemed Wikis were the answer to many of our ills – breaking down the barriers of web design, enabling creation of knowledge bases, an easy way to capture tacit and crowd-sourced content.

Social media and mobile, and MOOCs in HE, seem to have stolen the thunder of Wikis in more recent times.  Wikis indeed have probably just become a standard tool amongst the suite available to educators, knowledge managers and other professionals.  Their flexibility however means they remain a tool with huge potential.

It is then of interest to see the launch of Wikispaces Classroom a few weeks back – a wiki combining tools (such as ‘Projects’) to effectively build a LMS out of a long standing (as Web 2.0 tools go) product.  The below video introduces Classroom and does mention (toward the end) how it might be seen as LMS-lite functionality.

Seems like a great example of a c.2005 buzz tool evolving but maintaining their original spirit [well Wikipedia says it launched then so that was a good guess].  In my old role I maintained a departmental knowledge base on Wikispaces (my handover was effectively just a case of tidying this site up) – compare that to Rypple (that I used for feedback/ratings/team management in that role) which has now evolved to Work.com within the Salesforce suite and you get two quite different models of online tools evolutions.