Learning ALL THE STUFF..and showing people we know about it

Land Registration (Scotland) Act 2012 seminar notes

TUPE update notes

Because my new role means that I'm regularly asked do to legal research, it also means that I need to make sure that my level of general knowledge of a wide range of legal topics is pretty high, and that it stays high. Helpfully, my employer runs in-house training sessions on all sorts of things, for all sorts of departments, and these seminars are also open to a range of staff. That means that my colleagues and I can take the chance to get some excellent information from speakers on relevant topics, both drawn from our own staff and from external experts. I've been learning about land law, employment/company law, and there's some environmental training coming up soon too.

These sessions are interesting on multiple levels - it's great for me to be able to have access to the level of professional training that the solicitors have, which helps me get my knowledge up to a higher level, but it's also allowing me and my colleagues to get out of the library and meet staff, even those that don't currently have any work they need me to do for them. As we are an internal department, we don't have any help in marketing our service to our users to increase engagement and awareness of what we offer - the Marketing department's time is taken up with promoting the skills and knowledge of the solicitors to external users (although I have heard of an information service in a law firm that Marketing used as a test for an internal publicity campaign). That means that if we want to publicise our service internally, we have to do it ourselves. By going to these internal training events, we're raising our visibility level within the firm, putting our faces to the "Information Services" department, making ourselves approachable, and showing that our knowledge on legal topics is as current as it can be. When you're a librarian in a commercial environment, you have to make your own opportunities to promote the service!

Reinventing the wheel

I noticed an advert on the TV during the summer, and while watching it, I found myself becoming increasingly more irritated by its content as it went on. Then, not long after that, I saw another advert along the same lines, for the same group. I was reminded of my reaction to viewing those adverts last weekend, when I attended Library Camp Glasgow. One of the sessions I took part in covered advocacy, and what can we do to better promote the profession. The existence of these adverts is evidence of, to me, why we need to continue to work hard to show the wider public that "librarian" does not (and never has) equal "timid person who stamps books and says shhhh a lot".

So, this is one of the adverts that so annoyed me, for Barclays Digital Eagles:

Now, I'm not disputing the fact that the concept is great: Barclays are funding people specifically to assist those who don't have the skills needed to make full use of the internet, and the many opportunities it off…

Moving house

I've got a new home, over at Wordpress. Find me there in future, at dumplinginahanky.com.

👋👋👋😊

Relaunching a library service

What do you do when you decide to do what is verging on library-based insanity, and basically scrap your current library service, and relaunch everything - physical layout, LMS, and classification system? In my case, spend a year, planning, developing, preparing….and then a frantic few weeks hauling stock!
The background to this apparent madness is this: when I took on this role I inherited a library using a layout that didn’t seem to make sense, a classification system I wasn’t familiar with, and an LMS that had been in place for 20 years but didn’t seem suited to our needs. As I was new to the library, a major part of the time I had available while settling in during my initial few months was dedicated to exploring how well these things were working, both for users, and library staff. I had the benefit of my colleague also being new to the library, only a few months after me, so together we looked at these issues with fresh eyes.We came to the following conclusions: The physical layou…

Anonymous said…

If going to fee-earner training is too daunting start with the trainee training, it's often more structured and can give a real insight to their work. I have found knowing more about what the trainees are doing is helpful in know when they might need support. And attending their training still fulfils much of the marketing aims outlined in this post

5 March 2014 at 10:28

Dumpling said…

There isn't usually a separation between fee earner and trainee training here, other than for non-legal skills like presentations, where they get specific tailored support. The trainees attend the seminars designed for fee earners - all the training sessions are open to all staff, although some are targeted more at specific teams, and are very specific to the technical legal work those teams do, so it wouldn't be a good use of my time to go to those events.

5 March 2014 at 10:34

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