Wednesday, 7 October 2015

EAHIL+ICAHIS+ICLC Report, 10-12th June 2015 Edinburgh

Wednesday 10th June 
ICLC 
Our conference was held on the morning before EAHIL proper started, in one of the lecture theatres in Appleton Tower, which was the main base for the Workshop. 
See here for links to presentations - https://eahil2015.wordpress.com/iclc-session/ 
*** Main take home messages – if you are running a conference elsewhere make sure that everything is working from a IT/technical point of view and ensure all PPTs are loaded to the system before you start.***

EAHIL Workshop
It started with a plenary from Professor Hazel Hall on the topic of introducing a research-minded approach to professional practice.  She discussed the DREaM project which aimed to develop a formal UK-wide network of Library and Information Science (LIS) researchers. See here for link to her presentation - http://www.slideshare.net/HazelHall/incorporating-a-researchminded-approach-to-professional-practice.  She then formally declared that EAHIL 2015 Workshop was open by ringing a bell.

I then attended a workshop session ran by Margaret J. Foster entitled Introduction to systematic reviews and the role of the librarian.  This was a really useful and inspiring session and she talked in great depth about her work supporting researchers with systematic reviews. There wasn’t all that much hands on work and we ran out of time, but she gave us quite a good overview of her SR methods and how she works with researchers.


The day ended with the welcome reception (cheese, biscuits and prosecco) held in the beautiful Playfair Library Hall of Old College, University of Edinburgh.  We heard a number of speeches from various colleagues of the organisers, and felt warmly welcomed to a very sunny Edinburgh.  


Thursday 11th June
The second day began with plenary talks from Dr Alison Brettle and Dr Johanna Rivano Eckerdal, who both discussed research methods.

The first workshop I attended was on Social network analysis – what, where and how? Louise Cooke from Loughborough University ran the session which I found really interesting.  She talked about how networks exist and form within groups and gave details of free software that you can download to play around with analysing networks.


I then went to the Using action research in practice workshop ran by Hannah Spring. What she described seemed a bit like reflection, but more formal.  They discussed it in terms of making sense of your own practice to gain a deeper understanding and justification of what you are doing.


The afternoon was taken up with the session on Sharing literature search blocks: help develop a cooperative solution.  I’m not sure how much I really got out of this. It did raise an interesting question though in terms of whether we as a team should or could save some search blocks on some of our regular topics.


The Gala dinner was held in the evening at the National Museum of Scotland. It was a lovely meal and then a ceilidh, which I managed to avoid getting involved in thankfully.


Friday 12th June 
The last workshop session I attended was run by an external company called Seeing Stones, headed up by Iain Davison on Communicating with hard to reach audiences.  This was really useful, very interactive and I could really relate it to my everyday work in terms of communicating with non-traditional library users. It touched on finding out what your core values are as a first point of call, as when you know what you believe in decisions become a lot easier. 



Other useful links:
JEAHIL – Memories from Edinburgh issue -  http://eahil.eu/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/journal-3-2015-link-web1.pdf 
EAHIL Workshop website with presentations to download - https://eahil2015.wordpress.com/workshop-presentations-for-download/ 

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