The Conference
I was sorry to miss the CILIP Wales Conference this year, my kind of thing, I like anything professional development orientated in theme. The Conference was themed around leadership this year. So I did the normal – read all the tweets, had a look at all the presentations available on the website… Usually that’s as far as it would go.
The Afterlife
However this particular conference outlived its normal boundaries when Jo Alcock came up with the notion of a library leadership reading group reading through various leadership texts and articles and convening to discuss by Twitter of an evening. See her blog post outlining how this works.
The Discussion
Various folk joined up for this initiative, myself included, first text was selected (Leadership and the New Science), and the first discussion was held. As a text overall it perhaps wasn’t doing all that much for many of us. It certainly had far more particle physics and chaos theory than I would normally have expected! But the general discussion on it, and on issues arising off it, was interesting. See Jo’s storify post for some highlights.
Text two was Primal Leadership, discussed earlier this week, a very different approach to the subject concentrating on emotional intelligence, how people learn and develop skills, and relationships. This text went down rather better in the main.
Variety
What I like about the Reading Group is the variety in what we read and in the views expressed.
There are things on the crowdsourced list I’ve never heard of, things I’ve read and enjoyed years ago, things I’ve meant to read but never got round to. Also things left to myself I know I wouldn’t go anywhere near. I fully expect to find things I really like, things that I really don’t, ones that make little impression.
Similarly the viewpoints expressed sometimes converge, sometimes challenge, often offer different perspectives because the folk who participate will change depending on who can make it and because we all do wildly different jobs in different places and subjects. It makes it rather fun.
Sourcing Texts
My usual approach once the group has selected what next is to check the various libraries I’m a member of first. If they don’t have then I source a very cheap secondhand copy of whatever is being discussed book-wise through the likes of Amazon Marketplace or AbeBooks. For books there’s six weeks between discussions, for articles a fortnight. Next text chosen at end of each session.
Keeping it all together
To be perfectly honest I prefer to just make notes as I read and then if I wasn’t much fussed by a text it shunts directly into the charity shop (alas New Science!!). The notebook will have anything I want to retain from all the texts, or remember for the Twitter discussions re. Basically one notebook keeps it all together in one place, which is more useful for me, and will help as texts accumulate. I also find it fairly important to just get ahold of and start whatever we choose directly after the last discussion before I forget or get diverted to other things and thus suddenly find myself wincing at calendar and doing a last-dash inelegant attempt the day before to get through it!
Next reading
The next text to be discussed is an article on Developing Core Leadership Competencies for the Library Profession which is freely available, it’s being discussed on 15 October at 7pm under the normal #llrg hashtag.
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