As mentioned in an earlier post, CILIP recently held an Open Session to enable conversation about the use of Web 2.0. Many others have blogged about the event, but I thought I’d add my thoughts too.

I was particularly pleased that in between enquiries and other work-related tasks, I was still able to follow much of the conversation by using Twitterfall to follow any Tweets tagged with #cilip2. As it was an open session, the tag had been promoted before the event and the use of Twitter/live blogging was encouraged. There were some “official” bloggers including Matthew Mezey who blogged about the session on the Update blog. There were also people in the room who were using Twitter to share discussions from the session. There was no live audio or video feed of the event but Brian Kelly reported on how he has learnt from his attempts and this is maybe something that could happen in future.

It was excellent to be able to participate via Twitter despite the geographical spread and it also enabled me to find more librarians on Twitter. The discussions surrounding professional issues (which I followed and participated in on Twitterfall) started well before the event, and it was great to see such a strong community who are passionate about the future of the profession. Dave Pattern produced a list of all the tweets tagged with #CILIP2 and used these to create a Wordle cloud:

#cilip2 Wordle cloud

The actual event centred around the talks from Phil Bradley and Brian Kelly, followed by discussions about how CILIP can utilise and support the use of Web 2.0. I felt honoured to be featured in Brian Kelly’s talk as one of the librarians of the future – he mentioned different Web 2.0 tools I use for professional purposes such as blogging, microblogging and social bookmarking. Both Phil and Brian spoke about how CILIP should be key players in supporting the use of Web 2.0, and I hope CILIP take on board the requests for embracing the technologies. It was also pleasing to hear mention of how CILIP could help explain how and why to use these technologies within libraries and offer support to train staff to enable them to use them in a professional context.

I haven’t heard of any concrete outcomes of the event as yet but the discussion should help shape future CILIP policies hopefully and I think it’s incredibly positive that CILIP are involving members (and non-members) more and hope to see this sort of transparency continues. CILIP are currently involved in a survey on the use of professional networkings and social media websites, I’m hoping this data will also show which areas are currently being used and which could potentially be used.

In related news, I noticed a brief news article in the most recent edition of CILIP’s Library and Information Gazette about the new CILIP communities website which will add social features to the community. It was due to be launched yesterday but wasn’t live when I checked yesterday morning. It seems to be live now however, although I admit I haven’t had much chance to explore it yet. I hope it will be similar in functionality to America’s ALA Connect, which I recently read a review of and sounded great.

Let’s hope this is the start of a more transparent CILIP and a professional body to be really proud of.

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