On Tuesday 27th October, I’ll be delivering a half-day online workshop for the UK’s library & information association CILIP.
In “New Measures, New Metrics“, we’ll be sharing tools for understanding, measuring, and evaluating the impact of library and information services.
Join me for a three-hour participatory session exploring new ways to define, capture, evidence, and act on the difference that information professionals make to the communities they serve.
“Group dynamics are ‘like an iceberg – you see some of the relationship on the surface and then there is also everything beneath the water. There are the explicit, seen, and formal aspects; then all that is implicit, unseen, unspoken, and even unconscious.'”
The second instalment of “Scripturient”, my new quarterly column for Information Professional magazine, is out now.
In this series, I’m looking at how we can push the boundaries of literacy in the 21st century, to encompass new areas of representation. What does it mean to read the future? To read risks? To read the forces that underpin our relationships and drive us psychologically? To read the signs and signals which exist in the natural world?
The latest instalment explores questions of “psychodynamic literacy”. If we were better at reading the forces that shape our relationships, could we rewrite them to get better, happier outcomes?
I talked to two expert practitioners, a leadership coach and a mediator, to find out more. Find out what they had to say in the article (PDF download).
The first instalment of “Scripturient”, my new quarterly column for Information Professional magazine, is out now.
In this series, I’ll be looking at how we can push the boundaries of literacy in the 21st century, to encompass new areas of representation. What does it mean to read the future? To read risks? To read the forces that underpin our relationships and drive us psychologically? To read the signs and signals which exist in the natural world?
Join me, over four instalments in 2020, to explore some of these questions in the pages of Information Professional.
You can read the first column, which covers futures literacy and risk literacy, in this PDF download, or in the text below. Read more
The upcoming general election is a big one for English libraries, as well as the nation at large.
It’s a serious test of Libraries Deliver, the national campaign to advocate for public libraries which was launched by the UK library association CILIP in association with the US organisation EveryLibrary. I don’t know much about the American campaign, or how it ports over to the very different environment in which British public libraries operate; it’s definitely the sort of moment at which one wishes that the information sector benefited from the attentions of an independent and questioning press.
In the UK, Ian Anstice at Public Libraries News does a great job of chronicling changes in the sector and navigating the fractious debate about public libraries’ future. CILIP’s own Information Professional is always a useful read, but is of course an organ of the library association itself. British librarians will also be found reading the interviews and features hosted by Princh, a Danish company offering cloud printing solutions to the sector. I’ve chatted to the Princh team before, at the suggestion of trusted peers and colleagues, but it’s always felt somewhat strange that such a significant platform for sharing librarians’ ideas is really a marketing campaign by a library supplier, where the library workers offer their thoughts for free and the Danes benefit from clicks, pageviews, and trickle-down prestige which they hope will earn them some money. It’s interesting to reflect on how questions of agendas, authorities, and funding surround the flow of information and news even within the information profession itself.
All of which brings us to the ongoing question of ‘fake news’, or the bundle of phenomena and practices including misinformation, disinformation, trolling, poor information literacy, and general carelessness which get lumped under that unfortunate label. Read more
There’s a discussion with me in the latest edition of Information Professional, the magazine of the British library & information association CILIP.
Journalist Rob Mackinlay and I talk about foresight, strategy, scenario planning, and creating alternate forms of value beyond the merely financial.
Check out the full interview here as a PDF download or head over to the Information Professional website.
matt finch / mechanical dolphin 
