I took quite a few notes during the afternoon, but I’m not going to recount them all here – if you’re interested to know more please drop me a line via the comments. What follows are some thoughts about things which are most relevant to me at this stage of my Chartership journey.

Structure
I think it was Karen who mentioned that some people choose to structure their personal statement using the assessment criteria as sub-headings, and this gave me a real lightbulb moment. I’ve rather been avoiding thinking about how to organise my evidence (of which more below), and didn’t even consider the assessment criteria when I put my PPDP together. How I end up structuring my statement is still tbc, but what I intend to do now is revisit my PPDP and break it up according to the criteria, so I can see which elements I’ve covered and what I need to work on.

Evidence
Evidence was a topic which came up a number of times, and this is something I haven’t really begun to address properly. I’ve got a file of paper certificates from courses I’ve attended, an email folder with some stuff in, and a folder on my work computer too. I’ve made some attempt to duplicate the content of these folders, but nothing systematic as yet. Michael recommended an online portfolio builder mahara.me, which looks interesting, but I’m not keen to acquire yet another digital produce to maintain! What I really need to do is get everything together into the same place, which will probably be either Google docs or Evernote as I already have accounts and can access them from anywhere.

Skills audit
I’ve been saying I need to do a skills audit for some time, but haven’t got around to doing anything about it other than downloading a copy of the CPD audit template from the CILIP website. Michael recommended taking a look at the OU’s Safari or the Higher Education Academy skills audit and seeing if either was helpful – on a very brief glance I think I prefer the latter but I need to look into this further, and will certainly give one of them a go. I think this will be useful as it should identify areas which I need to work on, and help direct some of my learning and development activity over the next few months.

The most strongly-emphasised point of the whole event was to be sure that the portfolio matches all the criteria. The fact that the Chartership process is such a personal thing, and that portfolios can vary widely, is quite daunting as it implies a lack of hard-and-fast rules, and judging by some of the questions a number of other people in the room were also struggling with this a bit. Being reminded that there is a set of defined criteria to address has certainly helped me to focus my thinking about my portfolio, and has made me feel more confident about the whole process generally.

This was a fantastic session, and mostly I was far too busy listening and thinking to make any notes, but the following is based on my recollections, things which made the strongest impression on upon me at the time, and one or two things I did manage to jot down. I hope I’m not revealing any trade secrets!

• Basically the idea is to make your CV so compelling that whoever reads it feels that they must invite you to an interview. Information needs to be well-organised and clearly laid out, and there absolutely mustn’t be any typos or other errors – get other people to proof-read for you.
• Everything on the person spec needs to be accounted for so that you tick all their boxes. You should also try to reflect the tone of the job description, ideally use the organisational website to see what kind of person they might be looking for, and use similar language/vocabulary yourself.
• The opening descriptive passage of your CV is super-important as often a recruiter will only read about half of the first page (think about it in terms of what appears above the fold on a webpage). This should be written in the third person and draw on things which are genuinely your key qualities, but make sure that the qualities selected align you with the job spec. 
• In the body of your CV it is important to back everything up with evidence – don’t just say what you do/did but describe your skill, provide a scenario in which you’ve used it, and then outline the success of the result.
• We had quite a discussion about whether or not to include hobbies/other activities – the general feeling was that a carefully-selected example or two can work to your advantage (especially if they further serve to align you with the organisation) but try not to include anything too far-out or banal!
• LinkedIn is apparently being used more and more by recruiters, who search the site for keywords, so making sure that your profile is up to date is crucial. Even if you aren’t currently looking for a new job it’s a good idea to maintain this, as you never know where the next opportunity is likely to come from! Also, if you’re using the site for more general networking purposes it makes sense to present yourself in the best possible way from the outset.

We were also encouraged to make the most of every opportunity for learning, development and networking. Other than events organised by the LISNetwork (some of which I’ll certainly be going to), the programme hosted by the City Business Library also came highly recommended. I was vaguely aware of the latter, and on further investigation I see they offer a fantastic range of events, so something else to keep in mind.

Since attending the session I’ve updated my LinkedIn profile and drafted an opening paragraph for my CV – I realise that this will need to be amended each time I want to use the CV but I wanted to get some thoughts down whilst this was all fresh in my mind! I will also be starting work on the CV for my Chartership portfolio reasonably soon, so this will all come in handy then too, and I’m hoping that putting together a longer annotated CV for the portfolio will help me in organising my information into a good format for future use too.

Huge thanks to Kathy, Susie and Alex for organising and leading this, and for going ahead with the event despite a small audience. I do hope the LISNetwork continues to grow and prosper – maybe I’ll see you there!

Oh, and the four words which will make your CV into a killer are qualities, skills, attributes and achievements. As long as you’ve got some of all of these you should be streets ahead

My current job involves a wide and diverse range of duties and activities. This is great for me as I like to have a lot on my plate, but when things aren’t busy and no deadlines are looming it becomes all too easy for me to flit from project to project and not actually achieve very much. I find it much easier to get motivated when I have a zillion things to do at once, and in weeks where I have just a few things to accomplish I really struggle to get going. So far this year my workload has been pretty quiet, but I found that blogging about my days for #libday8 was surprisingly motivating.

Last Monday morning I drafted my to-do list as usual but with more of an eye to showcasing a good range of activities, which automatically made my week look more interesting. Working through the days, I found myself wanting to finish tasks so I could blog about them too. I’m quite a perfectionist and don’t really like finishing, as I’m always convinced I can make things better if I just spend a little more time looking through them, so I need to remind myself that ‘good enough’ can be perfectly acceptable (especially when drafting things which are going to be picked apart by numerous colleagues anyway!).

I don’t think blogging about all my days is a sustainable practice, but it has made me realise that I need to manage my time better in terms of scheduling tasks across the week and giving myself more deadlines, especially when I have the control to do so. If I look at my to-do list with dread then something is clearly wrong, and if shifting things around makes it all more appealing then that’s a pretty easy win. Of course I’m now wondering why I never thought of this before, but never mind!

Session 1 – Marketing
Pitched by the fabulously enthusiastic Richard, this circled around issues of marketing public libraries in particular. Discussion covered the need to promote services to people who tend not to use public libraries so much (eg. 18-30 year olds); how to go about evaluating the impact/success of marketing campaigns; using visible external advertising eg. billboards and taxis; the need to get communications/design staff onside; the importance of audience research; being clear about what a particular piece of marketing is actually trying to achieve; co-opting loyal enthusiasts as ambassadors; doing small things yourself – eg. visiting community groups. Someone also mentioned the OCLC project to create a union catalogue of Britain’s public library holdings.

Session 2 – CILIP’s Body of Professional Knowledge
Led by Bethan and Liz, this was a structured and interactive discussion about the BPK - whether CILIP actually needs one, what it should look like/do, and how it could do that. We were asked to answer the following three questions on post-its, discuss them with the few people around us, and then feed into a whole group discussion:

• What does BPK mean to you?
• What do you want the revised version to do?
• How will it (the revised version) meet your needs?

As it happened my small discussion group shared broadly the same views – that the BPK needs to be meaningful and practially-applicable, and that there ought to be some kind of formal CPD system for Chartered librarians, perhaps based on the lawyers’ model.  In the wider discussion there was much dissent and disagreement amongst us all, and personally I found the debate stimulating and interesting - it was great to hear some views which were totally opposite to my own, and a few things I hadn’t previously considered either. I hope Liz and Bethan managed to get some useful material out of us, and I’m certainly looking forward to seeing how the project progresses.

Session 3 – Staff training 
Led by Carolin, this was meant to include internal communications too (which was actually why I chose it), but the person who was going to talk about internal comms decided to attend a different session instead! That said, I found it a really lively and interesting session, so I was glad I stayed put. The main issue was how to get training approved when there isn’t any budget available, and I noted down the following top tips:

• apply for bursaries to attend conferences etc - there are lots available and not that many people tend to apply
• join your local CILIP branch and make use of special interest groups too
• keep an eye out for free training – whether via branch/groups or online eg. 23 things
• identify courses/events which would be genuinely valuable for you to attend and make a proper business case for the funding – even if unsuccessful this approach is likely to impress, so you might be lucky the next time round
• own your appraisal process – be proactive about identifying your training needs and identify suitable courses/events if possible
• apply to present at conferences – often this enables you to attend other sessions for free. Offering to help out, live-tweet sessions etc. can also work.

As a more senior staff member, offering to run refresher training for other staff can be helpful, though needs to be done at a time when people will want to attend (eg. during work hours, not evenings/lunch breaks). External trainers really like it if a group approaches them with a course need, venue and participants already in mind – whether this is workplace based or via a branch/group – and if they don’t have to organise a venue, advertise the course, etc. this keeps the costs down all round.

Session 4 – Special collections and social media
I pitched this session and, whilst I did enjoy doing it, for some reason it didn’t come off as I’d anticipated. I had given it quite a bit of thought beforehand, but was slightly derailed by the fact that the people who turned up were rather different to those I’d expected – instead of being a ‘come and find stuff out’ session it ended up being more about people asking me what we do in my workplace and offering suggestions for improvement. So whilst it was a really useful experience for me, I’m not really sure what anyone else got out of it… Plus it was a fairly small group, and the last session of the day. Mostly I was too busy listening, thinking and talking to write anything down, but I did note that Flickr is a really good way to promote in-house image collections, and that engaging with people on Twitter (replying, retweeting etc) is the best way to build communities and generate reciprocal support.

Organisationally-speaking, if you’re going to do social media you need to have a social media policy and make sure everyone involved knows about it and accords by it. There are lots of these out there, so if you need to create one from scratch have a look around and see which ones make the most sense! We also heard about a collaboration between Wikipedia and the John Rylands library - Wikipedia is actively engaging with institutions in order to improve the quality of its content, and the discoverability benefits for the institution (and its library/archive collections, in this case) can be huge. 

As a participant I really enjoyed the unconference format, but as a facilitator/presenter/pitcher I felt rather out of control. Perhaps bizarrely, this has made me more keen to present at events in future, but preferably in a more formal conference setting! Whilst I know I benefited from ‘my’ session I really don’t know if anyone else did, and I had no way of knowing whether any of their expectations were being met. Maybe I should have started by going round the group and asking everyone what their interest in the session was – with a larger audience this would have been dreadful but with the numbers there I think it might have worked well, and would have given me a bit more of a handle on it all. I also wasn’t sure how best to draw in people who weren’t contributing – were they happy to just listen or should I have taken more responsiblity for getting them to speak out?

All in all, a useful and interesting afternoon, with new contacts made and lots of tasty cake consumed. I’ve now got an action list of 3 or 4 take-home points from the sessions, and a ‘must do better’ for my presentation skills, so plenty to work on!

Motive #1 is to create a resource to assist myself when it comes to putting my Chartership portfolio together, but probably more importantly I felt it would be useful to keep a record of this type of thing for future reference – currently I tend to star items in my Google reader and then promptly forget all about them. I’m not 100% sure this won’t simply replicate that process (although the idea is that this will be rather more selective, and include fewer recipes and knitting patterns!), but figured it would be worth a try…

Becoming a departmental liaison 
My role involves some liaison elements, although admittedly not in a university faculty context. I think Wayne Bivens Tatum makes some really good and more widely applicable points in this - I used several of these techniques when I worked in a law firm library and some in my current post too - and all of them are worth bearing in mind.

Top tips for running the perfect event
This is probably cheating as it was written in November last year, but I’ve only just read it so have decided that it counts! I attended the event in question and was intending to blog about it myself, but this post says it all. It was a great evening and I picked up some useful pointers which are definitely worth remembering (especially as I’m not sure where I put the handout from the evening). I was also delighted to discover that I’d ticked quite a few of the boxes with a big event I organised last October

The counter-intuitive benefit of small time blocks
This post really resonated with me, as I am forever putting off starting big things because I’ve decided I need a large chunk of time to work on them and can’t make that kind of space in my diary. I’m definitely going to try this approach.

Tips for getting more organized: don’t
My first (and ongoing) response to this was ‘gnaaagh’ – I kind of see what Michael Schrage is getting at but I’m resisting! It’s certainly worth thinking about though…

Spoon feed them, then give them the spoon, then chuck away the spoon
This. Just, this. Yes. I’d been reading other posts on the topic, but Ned summed up exactly what I was thinking in a far more structured, eloquent, and (importantly) evidence-based way. (I also really liked Lisa’s comment on the post too.)

Give your high performers boring jobs
This one really made me think – I just about agree with it but with the huge caveat that the staff in question should be empowered to try out new ways of doing the tasks, otherwise surely it’s just demotivating.

What am I doing here? (Athene Donald on ‘Imposter Syndrome’)
I definitely suffer from this, albeit in a much milder form that some people seem to experience, so it’s highly reassuring to hear that other people do too, particularly when they’re senior and successful individuals like Athene! I must say I quite like imposter syndrome though, I’m sure that being on edge compels me to produce better work than I do when I’m feeling more confident (or complacent) about things.

How it was for me (Claire Warwick on giving an inaugural lecture)
I really like this post – a fantastic piece of writing. I really wanted to go to this event but had a prior engagement that night, Claire has also posted the text of her lecture here and I’m now even more sorry that I missed it.

To some extent this is because I’m trying to get around to doing a skills audit for my Chartership and I thought it would be useful to have a record of what I actually do with my time! I work in a learned society library, and my current title is Information and Promotion Officer. This encompasses a wide and diverse range of tasks, of which a very brief description follows: in addition to invigilating in the reading room, fetching rare books and archive material and doing enquiry work, I look after journal circulation and cataloguing; I edit the library webpages, newsletter and our blog, and promote events; I represent the library on podcasting, internal communications and knowledge management groups. Outside work, I’m a member of the CILIP London branch committee and co-edit the branch newsletter, and I belong to CLSIG and LLPSLG too.

Like most people, my work life involves meetings, conversations, RSS feeds, and plenty of email, but I don’t plan to document this stuff unless anything particularly interesting shows up – consequently what follows is the edited highlights of my week! 

Monday

• Participated in a video which our HR department are making to promote the workplace mentoring scheme, and completed my application to be a mentor
• Reconciled BL inter-library loan claims & re-submitted some forms which seem to have gone astray
• Did some preliminary work selecting material to feature on some new “browse our collections” webpages we’re putting together
• Finalised details of a visit I’m hosting on Friday
• Proof-read the copy for the next CILIP London branch newsletter
• Received my draft Chartership PPDP back from my mentor, positive feedback but several improvements to make!
• Started drafting a blog post about my experience at #libcampnw
• Some correspondence around an article I’m coordinating for CILIP Update

Tuesday

Rather a quiet day today – a desk session with just a couple of readers to look after, and the library manager was away so I kept an eye on our enquiries inbox but not much came through there either. However, this meant I was able to tick two big things off my to-do list:

• Achieved inbox zero! (Or very nearly – to be strictly honest I have 8 messages left, a couple which I like to keep there for quick reference, and the rest will disappear once I action them.) The size of my inbox has been bugging me for ages, so I’m really pleased to have finally dealt with it.
• Reviewed my annual appraisal targets – interim appraisal time is fast approaching so I wanted make sure I was on top of things. There are one or two things still to address, including something rather interesting which I’d completely forgotten about, but in the main I’m on track.

Having tackled these I kept myself busy with a range of smaller bits and bobs:

• dealt with a subscription-related query from a colleague
• renewed some books for a reader
• fielded enquiries about making garments from spider silk in the C17th, and books on C18th astronomy
• updated a page on our intranet
• did a bit more work for my article

Wednesday

Today has absolutely zoomed past. A quiet desk shift took up most of the morning, along with assisting a colleague in failing to find a couple of boxes (this is what happens when we let our Archivist have a day off!). It wasn’t helped by the fact that we thought we were looking for smallish brown boxes - they actually turned out to be largeish blue/grey ones – but fortunately we eventually managed to get hold of the Archivist by phone and of course she knew exactly where they were. Otherwise just a few other things of note:

• read through the minutes of our last knowledge management group meeting, made a few notes about things I want to follow up, and emailed my team to get their suggestions about one or two points before the next meeting
• finally got around to logging and shelving a pile of annuals for the reference section. This also involved a walk around the building as some departments get new copies of their own, whilst others adopt the previous year’s volume
• learned how to edit audio recordings for podcasts
• checked in some journals
• sent the text of a report I’ve been involved with preparing to our in-house designer, along with some ideas for images to adorn it – I’m not especially confident about matching images to words, so will be very interested to hear what she thinks of them. Usually I rope in one of my colleagues (our picture librarian) to help me with this sort of thing, but she’s flat-out with a massive project at the moment.

Thursday

Another quiet morning in the reading room, during which I registered a new reader and spent some time chatting to her about her research – a side effect of not being so busy is that there’s more time to talk to people and find out what they’re using our collections for, which I always enjoy. I also spent some more time selecting highlights to feature on the website, picking out what I hope is a good range of things to include and drafting some text.

The afternoon was mainly taken up with editing an audio recording for podcasting. I’ve recently joined the team which produces the organisation’s podcast, and a couple of weeks ago I helped to record one of my colleagues talking about a number of the books in our new exhibition. We’re planning to feature a different item from the exhibition each month until it closes – hopefully this will maintain interest in the exhibition as well as providing a regular historical feature for the next few podcasts. The editing software (Adobe Audition) lives on a dedicated laptop, so I was able to take myself off into the reading room (equipped with headphones, naturally!) and get on with the task away from the distractions of phone and email, which was really helpful. The recording session was quite casual, so there were rather more hesitations, deviations and repetitions to weed out than should normally be the case, and it took me over 2 hours to edit 8 minutes down to just under 6! Ideally I still need to lose at least another minute, but I’m leaving it until tomorrow so I can come back to it with fresh ears.

After work I’m off to a training event – “Create a Killer CV” – which I’m really looking forward to. My CV is more-or-less up to date but is very text-heavy and I’ve been wanting to produce a more skills-based version for ages. Without job-hunting to make me do this it’s been very easy to put it off, but the need to produce a CV for my Chartership portfolio has given me the the prompt I needed, and this event came up at just the right time.

Friday

Yet another quiet morning in the library – this week all my desk shifts have been in the mornings and the readers don’t seem to be appearing until the afternoon! I’m not complaining though as I was able to finish drafting the text for the “browse our collections” webpages. I also dealt with a couple of enquiries and nagged two colleagues for blog posts they’d promised to write earlier in the week.

Then Tina arrived to have lunch and a tour of the library and collections here. I absolutely love showing people around, it gives me the opportunity to dust off some of my historical knowledge and enthuse about how amazing the collection here is, and reminds me that I’m very lucky to work with it.

In the afternoon I:

• returned to my desk to find that one of the colleagues I’d nagged earlier had sent me some text for the blog, so uploaded it and sent a copy for internal proofing
• finished editing the podcast (which I eventually reduced to the desired target of under 5minutes by the simple strategy of chopping the end off!)
• wrangled some journal predictions in the LMS
• glanced through the summary of the new RIN report on information practices in the physical sciences
• received approval for the blog post so published it, then posted a link to it on our Twitter and Facebook accounts

In explaining some of the thinking behind the DPLA project Darnton quoted Thomas Jefferson:

“If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation.”

For what it’s worth I think this a(nother) fantastic piece of writing, and just as important today as when it was originally written (source here).

Darnton then went on to acknowledge that whilst access to knowledge has a clear public benefit it is not costless, before embarking on a sustained critique of the failures of the Google Book Search project and the hugely negative impact of the biggest STEM journal publishers on the dissemination of medical and scientific knowledge. The latter point will be of no surprise to academic and serials librarians everywhere, and it’s an important issue to raise – particularly as it provides a neat antithesis to the sentiments described by Jefferson – but in this context I felt it was a bit of a red herring.

Darnton continued to describe the thinking behind the DPLA idea, where they are with it at present, and what will happen going forwards. There is lots of information about all this on the DPLA website, and I encourage you to have a look at it. As I understand it, the essence of the project is to create a single entry-point to digital collections across America, bringing together free-at-the-point-of-access resources from a huge range of places and making them available to all sorts of people.

I can’t even begin to find the words to say how impressive I find this project, and how important I think it might be, but once I began to understand what it was all about I became rather cross that Darnton had begun with the journal pricing problems. Even if all publishers decided to make their digital content entirely Open Access something like the DPLA would still be necessary, for exactly the same reasons as it will be useful for collections which are already free to access.  In our information-saturated world tracking down the right resources to search in the first place can be a huge problem, and federated search across lots of quality resources through an authoritative entry point is always going to be valuable.

I was also a bit disappointed at the end as there was no discussion, just a q&a session with Darnton. Whilst David Baker was an excellent chair, both lining up questions and soliciting comments from particular audience members, I felt it would have been a great opportunity for a wider discussion within the room, and given the mix of delegates this could have produced some fascinating outcomes. That said the questions and points of view raised were all useful and interesting, and they drew out some of the themes of the main talk. (On a slightly irrelevant note I was also really pleased I’d attended an event on copyright so recently as it meant I could understand some of the issues which came up within the talk and in the questions afterwards!)

All in all it was a really interesting afternoon, and one which I’m very glad to have attended, despite my gripes about some parts of it. Darnton was an engaging and interesting speaker, the subject is tremendously significant, and I very much hope that the digital library endeavours on both sides of the Atlantic come to fulfil their potential.

I think what made the day stand out for me was how very good the trainer was – in addition to obviously knowing his subject extremely well (and being a current practitioner as well as a trainer) Peter was a fantastic communicator, clear and jargon- free. He also created a really comfortable environment in which we all felt able to ask questions and contribute our thoughts, and (most importantly) to get out of our comfort zones in presenting our issues for the live mentoring examples we worked on in the afternoon. We also received lots of feedback during the day, both from Peter and from each other, which really helped instill confidence in our new-found skills, and gave us all food for thought and things to work on improving.

I was keen to attend the course as part of my ongoing development of management skills, and because I like the idea of being able to be a mentor myself someday, but I quickly realised that it was going to help me improve my existing mentoring relationships too. I currently have two mentors – a brand-new one for Chartership and a workplace mentor of around 18 months – and I’ve been conscious for a while that I don’t make the best use of the second of these, but haven’t been able to pin down why, or what to do about it. Things I learned in the training course have really helped me to crystallise the vague ‘this isn’t quite what I want’ feeling, and I’m now looking forward to our next mentoring meeting as I have a much better idea of how to deal with it. It has also made me take a hard look at myself as a mentee, and I realised that I’ve been pretty rubbish in some ways, but now I know what to do to improve!

On Monday 9th January I attended a talk given by Charles Oppenheim at the Sekforde Arms (organised by CILIP’s London branch), and on the face of it this definitely fell into the third category. I don’t have a great deal to do with copyright, and when I do have to tackle it my brain cells tend to collapse into small whimpering heaps of mush. However, full of new-found chartership enthusiasm, I decided that it would be good for me and duly signed up.

I was aware of Charles’ reputation and had heard good things about him as a speaker, and had also read some of the press coverage when the Hargreaves review was released so I was hoping that the evening wouldn’t be too painful or go too far above my head, and as it happened I thoroughly enjoyed myself.

I thought that Charles was an excellent speaker, fluent and engaging, and I certainly now have a much clearer idea of the copyright law landscape. I do like the room-above- a-pub format for events as it means that speakers are unable to mess around with presentations and simply have to rely on telling a good story to get their point across, and Charles made excellent use of anecdotes to illustrate his narrative. I think he spoke for about an hour, then spent quite a while longer taking questions from the audience, but I didn’t look at my watch at either end of the talk so can’t be absolutely sure (another clear sign I was immersed in the proceedings!).

In brief, the points I took away from the talk were as follows:

• UK copyright law is in a mess – outdated and anachronistic, it fails to reflect what people actually do with material and is in danger of becoming completely obsolete (for example, copying tracks from a CD you’ve bought to your iPod is apparently illegal)
• The Hargreaves review was commissioned on a totally erroneous basis but nevertheless managed to get beyond this and produce some eminently sensible recommendations.
• The 3-strikes-and-you’re-out rule imposed by the Digital Economy Act is a truly dreadful piece of legislation.
• Most MPs have no idea about IP and copyright issues in the real world.
• Copyright legislation (all legislation, surely?) ought to be based on evidence rather than hearsay and lobbying.
• Hargreaves advocated the establishment of an agency to manage copyright issues for orphan works – reproduction fees would be paid to this agency who would then reimburse the rights-holder if they subsequently emerged.
• Exceptions to copyright law need to be extended: they should cover all media types and be made more generous. E.g.: fair dealing should apply to sound recordings, greater copying for teaching purposes should be permitted, libraries should be allowed to copy AV material for preservation purposes, current exceptions for people with visual disabilities should also apply to those with dyslexia, data mining for academic research purposes should be made legal. Furthermore, legal entitlements should never be overridden by contracts with CLA-type organisations.
• The IPO should be able to give advice on copyright matters, not just administer them, and there should be a small-claims-court type route for SMEs and individuals to pursue copyright infringements.

Charles predicted that although the government currently seems minded to accept most of the Hargreaves recommendations they are likely to be considerably watered-down following intense pressure by rights-holders (thereby making instant mockery of their supposed support for evidence-based copyright law).

Questions after the talk covered the issues around the ownership of the copyright in the podcast recording being made of the session, the benefits of creative commons licenses, the potential problems with creating deep links to 3rd-party websites (if in doubt link to their homepage), and a few other issues I neglected to note down.

Charles concluded with the helpful advice that in general we need to be pragmatic about all of this – the main thing with copyright issues is to use judgement in order to mitigate risk (whilst obviously doing one’s best to act within the law). If in doubt consider the following:

1. How likely is this action to be an infringement of copyright?

2. Assuming it is an infringement, how likely is the rights-holder to find out about it?

3. Assuming they do find out, how likely are they to object? (In practice apparently very few people do object, but it should be fairly easy to predict those who may.)

Charles also encouraged us all to have a look at the call for evidence which the government have released following the Hargreaves report, and to submit our own evidence wherever possible. A number of submissions are currently being prepared by the library and archive community but it is important that as much relevant evidence as possible is submitted, particularly as major rights-holders will certainly be having their say on the matter. The text of the Hargreaves review and details of the call for evidence can be found at http://www.ipo.gov.uk/ipreview

So, what does this all mean for me? At present, I’m afraid, very little. I’ve had a quick skim through the call for evidence and I can’t see anything which I can immediately respond to, though I will have a read through some of the other submissions and see if they set off any useful trains of thought.

That said, I found the evening extremely informative, and as I’m sure I will need to grapple more closely with copyright issues at some stage in my career I’m really glad to have gained a greater understanding into how copyright legislation stands at this moment in time – I feel that I now have an informed perspective from which to view future post-Hargreaves developments, and I’m absolutely certain that having this level of understanding will encourage me to engage further with it all, whereas before I would probably just have muttered ‘eurgh, copyright’ and turned away.

The main difficulty for me is going to be actually writing things up – I really don’t like writing and will do almost anything to put it off. I’m also anticipating some other things appearing to distract me along the way, particularly as this year we’ve decided to take the plunge and try to buy ourselves a home - the perfect pretext for paltry portfolio progress…!

My current aim is to submit my portfolio by the end of the year so I’m going to need to stay on top of it all, hence publicly committing myself with this post! I know that writing about things on an ongoing basis to save myself from having a mountain of material to deal with later on is definitely the way to go, and blogging about things as soon as possible (and within a week of an event taking place) is my first resolution for achieving this.