Annual report 2001
This year has seen a lot of new faces on the Committee, including the arrival of Anne Murray (Cambridge), Julie Parry (Bath Spa), Nick Bevan (Birkbeck) and Mike Day (UMIST). It will also see the departure of one of its longest serving and hard working members, Sue Clegg (Roehampton), who has also been Secretary for the last few years. Sue has made a major contribution to the work of the Committee from right back in its COPOL incarnation. She will be very badly missed but goes with our gratitude and very best wishes.
Events and Courses
A rather mixed bag of success and not so successful activities this year. Training Together 7 has still not materialised but we now have a project leader to try and deliver an event in Spring 2002. The UCISA joint venture on project management has not materialised either. Managing for Strategic Change did run attracting a full cohort of 24 delegates and a waiting list. Sadly the event was far from successful with some serious problems in the first module. This was rectified s to some extent in the second module but is now the subject of debate to consider the future of this kind of activity.
We did continue to support both Making Management Work and Introduction to Management including leading a session at the latter, and we continue to explore the need for an event to bring together a wider range of "Deputy Librarians" but have not yet reached any conclusion.
The SCONUL Award
The SCONUL Award for 2000 was presented to Claire Barnes (Abertay) for her project to evaluate the cross-sectoral impact of training in the Tayside co-operative TAFLIN. Her excellent report has now been received by the Committee. The decision to continue with the Award at the level of £1000 has been enormously successful with 9 applications for this years Award all of which appear to be of very good quality.
Other Activities
We have taken an active role in discussing the future of the Postgraduate Vocational Awards (formerly bursaries) with AHRB. The Chair and Martin Myhill from Exeter attend a consultation day and made a number of forceful points that were supported by the Library Schools. This has been followed up by representations from the Secretary and Martin.
The ILT and ISNTO have been rather quiet and so little has happened in either area but the HIMSS Project has been active and both the Chair and Secretary have attend meetings as well as the workshop to devise a suitable analysis tool for the project
Ideas for two new SCONUL Working Papers are progressing one is to gather together collections of Staff Development Policies from institutions and the other to update the Structure Charts publications. Part of the discussion was a round how feasible it would be to produce a genuinely online version on either of these. "How to organise a Staff Development Event" is due for publication shortly.
A great deal of work has been done on the ACoS Web pages by Jackie Skinner (Reading) who kindly volunteered to manage them for the committee. We are now exploring ways in which we can make the most effective use of the pages to support SCONUL members.
Pat Noon
Chair
October 2001