ARLG In Newcastle - Day 1

I'm at the CILIP ARLG conference till Wednesday, it is the first annual meet up of the newly merged Academic and Research Libraries group. I'm not going to do a detailed blog but I wanted to put down some thoughts while they were still fresh in my mind.   


 Some highlights include :

• the keynote speakers pie chart which broke down the way students £9000 fees are spent, apparently libraries only get 4% which surprised me. John Holden got a lot of negative comments on Twitter (mainly for suggesting we don't tweet and showing us what he described as sensitive information) but at least he stuck to what he knew. 
• The Paul Jackson's (from Demco) spectacular rendition of Hallelujah during the lightening sessions, I believe it is on you tube already. 
• My first workshop on PDA which made me really think twice about introducing the service without first limiting the service. The amounts Nottingham were talking about put our book budget to shame and while they are a HE organisation I'm not sure how we would cope with the demand it might generate. The lesson seems to be profile, profile, profile and then profile some more!
• Winning the quiz! (still not sure how that happened) 
• Getting to, for the first time ever, approach vendors knowing we will hopefully have some serious cash to spend in the next year. 
• Philip Bradley assuring us that CILIP would harden its stance on volunteers in libraries, something very close to my heart.

I also attended a workshop on writing for Twitter and while it was interesting I'm not really sure what new things I got out of it. When I signed up to the workshop I had just started Tweeting and my understanding of it as a promotion and marketing tool has increased independently since then. The other problem is that at work Twitter is blocked and the College account controlled by marketing so unless I can put together a compelling business case my Tweeting is going to remain purely personal. 


 Generally though the conference so far has been great. It's nice to see a lot of familiar faces from COFHE last year and to not feel so much of an newbie as I did then.