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When we live by our values and are rewarded for this by showcasing those values in action, everyone in our individual spheres of influence benefit.
INSIGHT
Disability Network
Sharing values and positive influences on information professionals
ATTENDED a great talk as part of the Queen’s Reading Room at Hampton Court Palace on The Perfect Crime: with Ian Rankin, Lee Child and Ann Cleeves:
www.hrp.org.uk/hampton-court-palace/whats- on/the-queens-reading-room/#gs.a35m4i. The speakers were fantastic, and all highlighted the importance of libraries, which was wonderful to hear. There were great questions from the audience, including one from a community Librarian, asking why large print books and books in other formats were so expensive. For many housebound residents reading is an important activity. However, for older readers with arthritis, or Parkinson’s they can find it hard to hold books. Yet, they don’t have the skills to download audio books.
Award
Being aware of these kinds of issues and mitigating to help can make such a difference to readers. It’s the kind of knowledge that we hope to highlight in our Disability Network Award. We will be sharing all the details about how you can get involved very soon. We would encourage you to think about meaningful actions you have taken which supports disabled people; either disabled staff in your LIS or your disabled end users.
Thinking about the award made me reflect on the best thing I had ever won. At school we were always awarded book tokens and I remember wining for being “Best All Rounder”. It meant a lot to recognised.
Maybe the best thing you have won wasn’t of any great monetary value, but it meant a lot to you. Perhaps it was a
June 2024
surprise or maybe was something that you actively chased.
Being recognised is always a thrill as it demonstrates that we are being “seen” and “heard”.
Values
When we live by our values and are rewarded for this by showcasing those values in action, everyone in our individual spheres of influence benefit. I’m the Manager of a small library service, and it is easy to perceive that LIS’s with more staff, money and resources are the “bigger players” with more chances of winning bids, innovating or being recognised for best practice, simply because they have more people to do more.
Sometimes it is difficult to get a smaller voices heard.
However it isn’t impossible. Our aim as a network is to showcase, as part of our inaugural Disability Network Award, the value that colleagues provide to the work that LIS services do to support people with disabilities. This may be small or large. Essentially we want to show that LIS professionals care about disabled colleagues and end users, and that this is reflected in projects, or other actions to make changes and improve experiences.
Influence
As a Disability Network we believe it is incredibly important to shine a light on good practice that has a meaningful and positive influence on information professionals or end users accessing any library, knowledge or information service.
It may be listening and learning, changing practice, design or training.
Morag Clarkson and Catherine McLaren are Co-Chairs of the CILIP Disability Network.
These activities could be potentially then be replicated in other services. Larger projects might have a bigger message to share that other LIS’s can aspire to.
You can contact us directly if you would like to be involved as a judge at
info.disability@cilip.org.uk
We are always delighted to have new members join the committee and we look forward to hearing from anyone who would like to help with events and marketing. Contact us at info.disability@
cilip.org.uk IP
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