Issue 17, April 2014 (1)

Lightning Talks at UKC and reviving the CILIP Kent group
The Lightning Talks event held on the 13 th January
was set up by Maria Centrone, Lending Services
Supervisor at the University of Kent. The
purpose was to share the interesting and innovative
work taking place in Kent libraries. A
lightning talk is a 5 minute presentation with an
opportunity for questions at the end. The
attendees at the event were also encouraged to
consider resuscitating the CILIP Kent group and
so there was a closing talk from CILIP staff on
how to run local groups.
Over 30 people attended the event. The majority
worked in Canterbury or the wider Kent area
and others lived in Kent but worked in London.
I wanted to attend the event for several reasons
– firstly to support Maria as I was her mentor
during her CILIP Chartership application, secondly
to meet other librarians from Kent and
find out what projects they were working on,
thirdly to register my interest in joining a new
and improved CILIP Kent group and, finally, an
opportunity for me to present to other librarians.
In my current and previous jobs I have presented
to students, school pupils, academic
staff, work colleagues, international scholars,
nuns from India on holiday in south east London
(long story…) but I have never presented something
about librarianship to a room full of librarians.
There were 7 lightning talks scheduled covering
a range of topics.
First off the mark were Ian Badger, Learning and
Teaching Librarian and Nick Ross, Gateway Services
Manager from University for the Creative
Arts.
Ian and Nick spoke about the merger of the library,
careers and employability, counselling
and student advice services. Ian mentioned
that in his new role as Learning and Teaching
Librarian he no longer orders stock or carries
out stock editing as it is now all managed centrally.
It was particularly interesting to hear
that the newly formed team had undertaken
training on emotional intelligence and also on
the topic of assessing boundaries - as enquiries
about library stock are very different to enquiries
about disability support or counselling. The
team needed to know about helping the different
students and making sure they weren’t going
‘too far’.
Second in the running order were Jane Gallagher,
Senior Special Collections Assistant,
Kathryn Gerrard, Stock Co-ordinator and Kirsty
Wallis, Library Assistant from the University of
Kent (UKC). Their talk was titled “Innovation
through discussion: the LibChats story”.
The trio, who are all working their way towards
their postgraduate library qualification, spoke
about the Kent LibChats series they had set up
at UKC. LibChats were developed as a way to
share good practice, discuss innovation in the
library, showcase projects and share information
across library and IT teams at UKC.
The library at UKC is part of a converged service
with IT. Staff wanted to meet colleagues informally
and combine the meet up with professional
development. The LibChats follow a similar
format of a talk delivered by a member of
the in-house team or an invited external, followed
by tea and cake and then rounded up
with a discussion.
Talks have covered topics such as information
literacy, school libraries, mobile technology, inductions,
relationship management and reclassification
projects. An article about the Lib-
Chats story is due to be published in a future
edition of SCONUL Focus. Each event is live
tweeted and this has generated much interest
from local librarians and lately the events have
been opened up to non-UKC staff.
Justine Rush, Faculty Liaison Librarian for Humanities
at University of Kent (UKC) presented
on “Library induction at University of Kent”.
Like many other libraries UKC are always trying
to make their library inductions informative and
attractive to undergraduate students. As a fellow
liaison librarian, I know that this can (cont.)
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