SCONUL Award for Staff Development

The SCONUL Award promotes and supports innovation and good practice in staff development. Its aim is to help you realise an individual, team or institutional staff development initiative or idea.

This may be:

• Researching, writing or getting a piece of work on staff development published
• Staging a development event
• Supporting a new or interesting initiative in your institution
• Exchanges or visits to other libraries
• Delivering a paper at a conference or similar event

The closing date for entries for the 2004 award has just passed. The winner will be announced later this year.

Previous winners

• The Open Rose Group won the 2003 award by addressing best practice in service provision for disabled library users. It comprises library staff from eight universities: Bradford, Huddersfield, Hull, Leeds, Leeds Metropolitan, Sheffield, Sheffield Hallam and York. The application was co-ordinated by Alison Lahlafi, Customer Services Manager (Operations) at Leeds University Library
• Lindsay Martin of Edge Hill College of Higher Education won the award for 2001 for her project on embedding virtual learning environments in the Information and Media Services Staff Development Programme.
• Claire Barnes evaluating the cross-sectoral Tayside & Fife Library and Information Network (TAFLIN) training programme (the full text of this report is available as a Word document)
• Louise Cole looking at training for supporting distance and off-campus learners.
• Moira Fisher and Sandra Charles who looked at training for supporting users with disabilities.