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As professionals, we should always refl ect on, and celebrate, our own growing skills and accomplishments.
INSIGHT
President’s View
Hello and welcome to 2023! T
HE start of any new year always seems to be a useful prompt to refl ect on what you have learned in the last twelve months, and what you may want to do in the next. OK, logically there’s no reason why it’s better to do so on 1 January than on 7 January – or even 19 November, or any of the other 363 dates I could pluck out of the air – but (at least under the Gregorian calendar) – the start of the year is always a useful prompt. As refl ective practitioners, though, we should regularly prompt ourselves to refl ect on our own professional achievements and practice on a regular basis, not just when switching diaries. My experience is that the fuller each new diary gets, the less time I can set aside to refl ect on my own duties and CPD, but it remains important – apart from the importance of celebrating the wins and spotting the areas of your practice you want to strengthen going forwards, I usually fi nd that when I pause to take stock, I discover a number of new skills and responsibilities that have crept in under the cover of “business as usual” It’s always useful to recognise and
refl ect on those changes in our roles – if nothing else, updating everything you’ve achieved and are responsible for is important when it comes to articulating just how much you and your service are doing for your users!
As professionals, we should always
refl ect on, and celebrate, our own growing skills and accomplishments. But it’s also important for us to take pride in our profession as a whole, and the start of the year is a natural time to do that, too: 2023 marks the 125th year since CILIP – as the Library Association – was
January-February 2023 granted our Royal Charter.
Traditionally each new CILIP President takes one of CILIP’s four Strategic Priorities as the theme and focus for their Presidential Year, but my hope for 2023 is to do something slightly diff erent.
The last 125 years have seen manifold achievements in library and information science, and my theme will be to encourage all members to take stock of, and pride in, those accomplishments, and what we have all achieved together. I also aim to use this anniversary to inspire and celebrate the upcoming generations of information professionals who will join us and rise to meet the professional challenges that emerge as we move deeper into the information age. I still remember the excitement I felt the fi rst time I attended a CILIP event at Ridgmount Street – a Social Media briefi ng in 2012 (which feels much more recent in my head than it looks on paper!). That day, simply being “at CILIP” felt unimaginably far from my fi rst tentative encounters with librarianship, working as a lunchtime assistant for my school librarian, Elizabeth Kosinski, and that sense of excitement and awe at being part of something bigger is what led me to become more involved in CILIP, fi rst as a Trustee, then Chair, and now President – if we can capture that same excitement in today’s new professionals, we will all be stronger for it.
The last 125 years of British Librarianship have given us many achievements we can proudly celebrate, but the passion and enthusiasm of our new professionals, and of the students aspiring to enter the profession, deserves celebrating too: it is with them and their successors that we will move forward
John Trevor-Allen is President of CILIP.
and create the future achievements which, in 2148, a far-distant CILIP President will applaud for our 250th celebrations!
But even without casting so ambitiously ahead, 2023 presents an amazing opportunity for a kind of whole-CILIP refl ection, a membership-wide refl ection, on the collective achievements of our profession and of our members since 1898. Together – as past, current, and future members – we are CILIP. We should celebrate our successes together, too. IP
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