I’ve recently been receiving many emails and tweets calling for proposals for the New Professionals Conference 2010 to be held in July at the University of Sheffield; organised by the CILIP Career Development Group, it is aimed at people who are relatively new to the profession. The conference acts as a forum for discussion and debate on current issues from the perspective of a new professional, this year the theme of dicussion is “Proving Your Worth in Challenging Times”. Ned Potter offers quite a nice introduction to the conference in his blog post about submitting proposals for the 2010 conference.
All this talk about the 2010 conference got me thinking about the 2009 event, so I did a little online digging and found a section about it on the Career Development Group webpages, most interesting is the New Professionals Conference Papers page. Here you will find the pdf and powerpoint versions of the papers presented at the 2009 conference, although unfortunately a couple of the pdf files do not work.
The theme for discussion in 2009 was “What is it like to be a Library & Information Professional in the 21st Century?”, something that is probably at the forefront of our minds as trainees, especially for those of us who have decided to go on to study librarianship/information management in the future. I throughly recommend reading the papers avaliable online, they throw up some interesting ideas on a range of issues relating to being an information professional today.
I found Ned Potters “Why Are We Still Defined by Our Building?” particulary relveant and engaging; he discusses the changing role of the information professional and the struggles of the profession to negotiate the stereotypes. Another paper I found very interesting is “New Technologies, New Professionals” by Nicholas Robinson-Garcia, which explores the expansion of web 2.0 technologies in the library sector and the changes it has brought to the profession. He asks what role new professionals can play in this rapidly changing environment. On the topic of professional development Jo Alcock presented a paper entitled, “How to network and market yourself using online tools”; here she discussed the importance of networking at the begining of a career for new professionals. The paper offers an introduction to the various methods avaliable for professional newtorking, covering both the virtual and physical possibilities.
