‘‘ I
am writing this at Hull station on a cold but bright day in mid-October. Why am I in Hull you may ask? Because yesterday I left my suitcase on the train at Manchester Piccadilly and by the time I realised it was no longer with me, the suitcase was on its own journey to Hull. Today I have done a four hour journey each way to collect it. One point in passing here, always have your name, address and telephone number on your suitcase! As the Pope says, “to err is human...” and possibly I am a shade more forgetful than I used to be. Being open about our mistakes is something that we are, generally, not very good at. The research literature is not filled with examples of things that went wrong or did not work. However I believe that talking about this aspect of our lives is an important part of leadership; being brave and taking risks is all very well but if it goes wrong then that is useful in terms of personal learning, sharing with others and of course, an ideal moment for an “after action review”.
Several of my mistakes spring to mind:
l Long ago, before automation had penetrated very far into NHS libraries I managed a four-site service in a nursing college. We employed library assistants to manage the day-to-day service in each branch and, like most health libraries, we did our own cataloguing. As the only professional qualified member of the team, I did the cataloguing and wrote the record out by hand on paper slips and the library assistants typed the information on 5x3 cards to be filed into the card catalogue. Having carefully recruited a new library assistant for one of the branches I met her on the first morning only to discover she could not type. She said to me, “I was so surprised
October-November 2019
Being open about our mistakes is something that we are, generally, not very good at.
not to be asked at interview...” That moment still lives with me.
l Much later on in my career I got interested in health information and how it might be identified, collected and then made available to patients, carers and the public via an online service. As a fairly new regional librarian I took a regional perspective and wanted to build a resource that was all encompassing from very local to national and included both paper-based resources and electronic. My Regional director of Public Health seemed lukewarm about the idea but she pointed me to a software developer and I found a small amount of development funding and off I went. We built a pilot site, got a smart name for it and began to populate it with resources from across the region. However it soon became clear that there was a vast amount of information out there, that I had not done the market research and that the whole project was not sustainable. Maybe its time will come?
I have other examples from my 36-year career: a job that I perhaps should not have taken, one or two staff that I might have managed differently. Hindsight is marvellous but my point here is that as long as you reflect on what has happened and absorb the learning then even these experiences are valuable. As I reflect on my ten months as CILIP President not everything I have tried to do has quite worked out; having two Presidential themes has been ambitious and trying to reach every corner of the country to meet as many library and knowledge staff as possible has certainly been tiring – see the story about the suitcase above! Nevertheless I have met some fantastic people, passionate about their work, enthusiastic about our profession and excited about CILIP’s future. Most recently I have been to Cardiff (pictured) and Belfast at well-
David Stewart (
president@cilip.org.uk) is Regional Director of Library and Knowledge Services for the North, Health Education England and CILIP President.
attended “meet the President” events. In both cities I was struck by the warmth of the reception, the desire to know more about what CILIP is doing and the clear evidence that working together, across our many sectors, really pays off in lively discussion and debate.
To err is of course human but to work together for a better future is surely a divine aspiration. IP
INFORMATION PROFESSIONAL 17
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