Goodbye to all that…

Yesterday afternoon, following a handover meeting to the new Chair, I wiped BLA (the Business Librarians Association) off my jobs whiteboard for the last time and although I didn’t shed a tear exactly, it felt like a Significant Moment. In connection with my role as Chair of this association, and formerly webmaster, I’ve written and received something in the order of 12,000 emails over the past 8 years (calculated on the basis of my current BLA folder). That’s 125 emails a month, no wonder I was ready to step down!

Having said that, the BLA (previously BBSLG) will always have a special place in my heart, as my involvement in it has helped me: to grow and develop as a professional; to initiate and contribute to countless projects;  to discover the art of chairing meetings, effective promotion and communication; to learn how to hold successful conferences and training events; provided me with many wonderful contacts and friends within the profession; and, perhaps most importantly, contributed to the securing of my current post here in Cambridge. If I hadn’t raised that tentative volunteering hand in that Hitchin hotel back in 2002, none of that would have happened. So if you find yourself sitting in a meeting or a conference and you’re struggling to decide whether you should raise that hand, I urge you to raise it. You could be missing out on one helluva learning experience that might well shape your career.

One final BLA anecdote. I was on the phone to Keith Walker last week , the BLA’s Supplier Liaison officer (whose job it is to secure sponsorship for our annual confernce and negotiate consortia deals) and I was telling him that I was probably going to find next year’s conference (in Sheffield) hard. I said: “I’ll probably be sitting on my hands, with tape over my mouth”.  His swift deadpan reply was: “Andy, what you get up to in your own time  is your business”

BLA Liverpool 2010 – Day 3

It is my experience that if you’re not fully prepared, and you haven’t thought things through properly, that AGM’s can come at you unawares and bite you on the bum – the Leeds 2008 AGM being a perfect case in point, but I’m not going to drag all that up again (besides the committee is now more transparent than a very transparent thing!) Thankfully my last AGM was BLA Chair went as smoothly as it could have done, bar some initial practical shenanigans with the lectern - the fact that it had a wobbly wheel and was (at first) immovably positioned in front of the main projector screen, so that if we hadn’t been able to get hotel staff assistance to move it my 6ft 4in frame would have blocked half of my presentation. Moral of the story – always get to the room early.

The main body of the AGM took in my review of the BLA’s activities over 2009-10 (our first as the BLA rather than BBSLG): a rundown of the committee year; the name change and rebranding exercise (see CILIP article image – below right); a review of training events; actions taken on behalf members; and policy decisions. Several other committee members also presented, before we got to the crucial election of new officers. Emma Thompson was elected as the new Chair and if her work co-organising this conference is anything to go by she will be tremendous. Natalie Bedford was re-elected as Marketing and Comms and will continue to do a great job, while Stephanie Allen (of Worcester) - who as yet I don’t know - joins the new committee as Training Events Officer.  Rather unusually the AGM concluded with the opportunity to announce the venue of next year’s conference: Sheffield (usually there’s a scary ‘We can’t say yes for definite’ hiatus period). BLA 2011 will be organised by Laura Lewis and Maria Mawson, of Sheffield Hallam University and University of Sheffield respectively, with the support of the committee.

It’s always difficult to know what to include on the last day of the conference other than the AGM and the Members Forum (group and plenary discussion session), but I think the workshops we offered both this year and last are a good fit. This year it was ‘Mindmapping’, ‘Healthy Lifestyles’ and ‘Colour Me Beautiful’. Now I’m ‘in touch with my feminine side’ but wild horses wouldn’t have dragged me to ‘Colour Me Beautiful’! As for Healthy Lifestyles, well to my own amazement I’m actually pretty healthy these days - in fact the healthiest I’ve been since I was 25 due to numerous gym visits and runs home since Christmas. So I was left with mindmapping. Now I could pretend to be disappointed about this but to be fair its right up my street: visual, creative and slightly oddball.

The most significant thing  I learned from this session, was that what I didn’t know about mindmaps was that I’ve been doing them wrong all these years because I’ve never been instructed to make a simple ‘sun diagram’ first in order to brainstorm the project, before trying to categorise my mindmap into content types. Once this was explained and the classical music was put on to aid concentration I was away and really enjoyed myself with coloured pens and random thoughts. The project I chose to tackle via the mindmaps was the proposed BLA Knowledge Base – see my earlier conference post on the subject – @ekcragg did the same, so we must set some time aside in the near future to compare them. I was pleased with the end result and am determined to use this process more in future.

This year’s Members’ Forum, the final session of the conference, saw delegates explore different topics in groups. First up was a question that had arisen during the conference:  how we can demonstrate the  academic impact of the research support provided by librarians? Secondly: how we are dealing with budget cuts  - what are we doing differently, what actions should we take and what aspects of our work are becoming more important as a result. Finally groups discussed and flipcharted ideas for the 2011 conference. Details of the discussion of the first two topics are available on Kirsty Taylor’s Kupu blog.

At the end of the Members’ Forum I thanked this year’s conference organisers, Emma Thompson and Lorraine Richards for all their efforts – and managed to do that very British thing of getting the kiss wrong as I handed over bouquets, planting one square on Emma’s lips in front of all the delegates. Nice. Further embarrassment followed as David Clare (the BLA treasurer) gave a far too kind speech thanking me for my past 4 years as Chair – time to look at the floor so I didn’t catch faces or shed tears. I was surprised how emotional I felt but then I guess I’ve worked with some of these brilliant people on the committee for more than 6 years (such as David Clare (seated right) and Alison Sharman (writing)) and the bottom line is that I’m really going to miss not seeing them as regularly. I received a typically thoughtful parting gift of upgrades for this blog and a bottle of Prosecco. It’s always good to go out on a high, and that’s how I’ll think of BLA 2010.

Minutes taken – hours wasted?

‘A meeting is an event when minutes are taken and hours are wasted’

What words or phrases first spring to mind when you hear the word committee? Ineffective? Waste of time? Politics? Hidden agendas? And what are the chances of them ever being the reverse of this?: Effective? Productive,? Apolitical? With a shared agenda? Well in my experience, slim, however, I’m pleased to say that I do have experience of one committee that in the past 7 years has regularly succeeded to be all of the above: that of of the British Business Schools Librarians Group (BBSLG). Now as some of you may know I’m currently Chair of this Group (and have been for the past three years) but this blog post is not an attempt to blow smoke up my own ****, but rather an examination of why this might be.

BBSLG, as its website accurately declares, exists as a forum for the discussion and exchange of ideas and to facilitate networking opportunities, co-operation and participation in joint activities. Its members are business librarians at institutions across the UK and Ireland. Its committee  is tasked with promoting these objectives, ensuring that connections and communication continues to occur. It also meets in order to organise an annual conference (usually attended by 70 business librarians) and training events throughout the year, discuss the website and deals brokered with database vendors exclusively for the group,  to construct and review surveys, and enagage in a myriad of other Group-related activities.

So why is its committee so darned productive and why are the meetings (held quarterly and lasting around 4 hours) so friendly and, dare I say it, fun? My suspicion is that this is largely down to the fact that we have common goals and objectives – none of us are manoeuvring for position, we all want the conference and other events to be a success and for the worth of the Group to be recognised. Another element is probably just the simple fact that it gets us of out of the office 4 times a year and gives us a chance to share with like-minded individuals and get some perspective on the daily grind, as well as some much-needed breathing space. Indeed, this is perhaps the key function of the whole of BBSLG: the communication of that assurance that none of us are alone and that we are all experiencing the same challenges and problems and if we only share them, then we can often solve them together.

An obvious reason for our meeting success is that every member of the committee has a clearly defined role and area of expertise, be it liaison with database vendors, budgeting, website or marketing and communcation. Another element that is perhaps easy to overlook is the importance of the regular venue for the committee meetings – the cosy 2nd floor meeting room at Aston University Library with coffee and biscuits on tap. I’ve been regularly travelling to that room since the autumn of 2002 and without getting too misty-eyed about it, it feels to me like the home of BBSLG. It’s a place where genuine sharing has taken place, and excellent innovation has been dreamed up.  

Egos do not thrive there, so I have to keep mine in check. I may have a loud voice and hold forth too much sometimes, but as Chair I’m really there to: facilitate the sharing; ensure that the great ideas are seized upon and developed; and ultimately to make sure we’re on course with all our plans.

The one element that I’ve not mentioned yet is the undoubted contribution of the fact that the committee members are all incredibly friendly and open people and, unless the memory cheats, have always been so. Perhaps this is because we’re all enthusiastic about the profession, motivated and selfless enough to use the fringes of our time for this – largely selfless - activity. We all want to be there. We all freely volunteered for this and have not been instructed to attend. How many meetings do you go to simply because you have to? 

To recap, I think the committee works so well for the following reasons:

• Common goals
• Breathing space
• Defined roles
• Complementary expertise
• The right setting
• No egos/selflessness
• The room for sharing and innovation
• Motivation and enthusiasm of committee members

I’m not saying that the BBSLG committee meetings are perfect, but I do suspect that sometimes we drift dangerously near to becoming that ’virtuoso team’ (which sounds so unattainable and unlikely!), that I often hear about in management development training.

Yay us. (Being British that’s about as far as I can go with the trumpet blowing!)

Andy