CILIP Big Day 2012 – Speaker six – Phil Bradley’s Presidential Address

Phil noted he’d been asked to give something visionary and joyful, but was going to go for grumpily visionary instead.

He started by outlining some recent CILIP activities and developments re what CILIP has done and where it is now.

He launched the new Professional Knowledge and Skills Base (PKSB) which replaces the former Body of Professional Knowledge. He noted this showed why volunteers can’t run libraries.

Phil said job substitution was fundamentally wrong. He referred to Ged’s speech earlier in the day and took up some of his points. The Olympics example was about a very specific event for a short period of time, it wasn’t about continually and continuously having to rely on volunteers. While volunteer firemen were obviously very different in role to us, the PKSB had at its centre ethics and values, and that was a fundamental difference between staff and volunteers.

Phil talked about the CILIP Carnegie and Greenaway Awards, the Carnegie won this year by Patrick Ness for A Monster Calls with its illustrator getting the Greenaway Award too. 90,000 children participated in the shadowing scheme, they posted over 14,000 reviews.

He talked about New Professionals Day and the need and value of getting people involved.

He talked about some CILIP activities for next year, including the website refresh and VLE.

Phil then went on to say that library misery headlines were common currency in the press, the profession was undergoing radical change, things were changing for everyone faster than ever before, not just our sector, but publishing etc.

This was the new normal. We needed to move the profession ahead in other ways. Campaigns to save libraries do a great job but save libraries is not a strong message. Politicians don’t care, have no interest, think we’re weak. Petitions are taken to politicians by people who think libraries are important, but if politicians thought we were important they would come to us. A headteacher can close a school library, they don’t have to ask the parents their opinion first.

Phil said we need to change the conversation. The need to improve and redevelop libraries was a more powerful approach. Have to make organisational heads care about improving, need to get people to look at the end results not the inputs.

He quoted Lankes article in September CILIP Update about great libraries building communities. Libraries needed to be seen as central and embedded into whole community, our existing community is not enough, we need the community we don’t have as well, this makes us more powerful.

He gave some examples he’d heard about at IFLA Conference this year, about librarians who go out into the community to events and just set up shop and answer things. He talked about using social media to spread messages, about librarians being involved in building communities.

He talked about a recent visit he’d made to a prison library and the feeling of worth that librarians give, there is rare equality in being able to talk one on one about a book for prisoners and enable them in ways that volunteers could not.

He talked about a politician who held that borrowers should come into a library physically to borrow ebooks to show footfall and the lack of logic in that.

He said the purpose of the library was to be central to the community and we have the knowledge and power to do that. He talked about other parts of the world building libraries and investing in them to strengthen the public good.

He said our messaging was wrong, talking about books doesn’t work as a standalone message. Libraries are places people go to question and work to answer difficult and dangerous questions. Librarians give specific answers to exact questions, not general results from Google. We have ethics and morals so are best people to evaluation sources and their information content. A library should be a dangerous place to be which is why politicians don’t like libraries.

He suggested a response to the traditional party question of what we do for a living should be that we work in a dangerous environment in which we’re trusted to help.

Phil talked about the future. We know what is going on, it’s all information, need to build communities, the book is one tool, one technology, as part of that. More and more information can be put into smaller and smaller amounts of space, but that’s not what it’s about.  Need to get out and about and push at what we’re doing or we’re dead.

He said we need to get worried and move from our comfort zones and move on and learn from, we deal with information so we’re in a good position to do that.

A modern library is about results and activities, he doesn’t care if it’s bookless or not, it’s about skills, abilities, improving communities.

So he said we need to advocate, lots of people say ‘CILIP should b ‘x’’, but CILIP is all of us. We need to believe, not ‘just’ a librarian, we enable and help save lives.  We need to challenge and change, there’s more to a library than books, we need to fight challenges head on. We need to not take crap. We need to empower communities we work in, by doing so we empower ourselves, we work together for support, professional associations are part of that. A librarian is the highest form of life and can change the story. The goalposts have changed, we work with our communities and have a moral and ethical approach.