Thing 6 (Part 2)

Moving onto the rest of Thing 6 this week, although as a quick aside, Karen Blakeman's latest newsletter (here is her blog: http://www.rba.co.uk/wordpress/) mentioned www.paper.li, which is a brilliantly simple way to read your twitter account!  Trawling through twitter can be a bit of a chore, and this turns it into a newspaper that's a much easier read on your screen. I could see it being used to present news and commentary in areas of interest to a wider audience.  I'm still investigating it, but you can rename it suitably, and add Editor's comments, publishing weekly, daily, or twice daily.
Back to the Thing!
LISNPN  - This is short for the LIS New Professionals Network - so ideal for me.  One of the first things that you see on the homepage are the forums - and the most important thing about forums is that they are active!  These are - not horrendously so, which is just as well, but it is obviously used by a number of people.  I've had a quick look at the download section, which has how-to guides, a couple of  which look excellent. Definitely one to keep on my "to be checked regularly list"!

Librarians as Teachers network - This isn't really of use to me at the moment, but I should be providing training in the future, and I will come back to it then, as I have no experience of this! Although started for people doing teaching courses, it's aimed at anyone with an interest in the area, and really that will probably be anyone looked to advance their professional development.

CILIP communities - I'm not a member of CILIP, although the library does have membership.  I will probably join next year, as I can definitely see the benefits.  There are a lot of CILIP-related posts, and a lot of different groups that you can join which look to be of interest.  There don't seem to be that many comments or replies, but those there are do look useful.

WHELF - Wales Higher Education Libraries Forum

The WHELF (Wales Higher Education Libraries Forum) Annual Report for 2010 - 2011 is now available: http://whelf.wordpress.com/annual-reports/.
This year's report, covering the period August 2010 to July 2011, gives more evidence of how the happy cooperation between Welsh academic libraries can achieve impressive results for students, staff and others, at a time of unprecedented uncertainty and financial strain.
Sharing information resources has always been one of WHELF's ambitions, but the conclusion of a deal with Oxford University Press on electronic periodicals is a big step forward for researchers in Wales, and opens the way to similar deals with other major publishers in future. Similarly, helping students to discriminate in their use of information has long been a concern of librarians, but the new Welsh Information Literacy Project, admired throughout the UK and beyond, has done pioneering work on integrating such skills in teaching and learning. A third example is digitisation, where again it is possible to achieve far more collaboratively on an all-Wales scale than would be conceivable through individual, competing activity.
[Andrew Green, Chair of WHELF]