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Reflections on CILIP Conference 2023

Librarianship student Lottie shares her thoughts about this year's CILIP conference.

This year I was lucky enough to receive an iSchool bursary to attend the 2023 CILIP conference in Birmingham. The annual CILIP conference is the UK’s leading event for library and information professionals and felt like a good first conference for a new professional to visit given the breadth of topics explored and job diversity of the delegates attending. I was also curious about the theme of this year’s event which centred around issues of leadership, emerging talent and wellbeing.

Day one conference timetable and my badge!

This was my first conference post-pandemic and my first event in the library and information professional sphere. I was apprehensive about attending as an MA student but once I arrived and began chatting to fellow delegates, any anxiety I had about my professional status was quickly dissipated. In fact, I would go as far as to say that these informal connections that were forged in the exhibition hall, over lunch or while refilling my coffee cup were the most valuable part of the conference. The way the event was planned meant that there was plenty of time between talks to reflect with others on what we had just heard, swap our thoughts about emerging themes and even share predictions on the upcoming Women’s World Cup! I found this to be hugely beneficial in boosting my confidence and made me realise just how much I had missed this type of human connection in the years since March 2020. It is something to seriously consider in an increasingly hybrid world of work and I myself will definitely look to ensure I can visit my future workplace in person at least a few days a week.

iSchool alumnus Sam Wiggins talking attracting, retaining and developing talent

Of the talks themselves, I tried to go to a range of topics relevant to my recent months of study and future areas of interest. These included keynotes about leadership innovation and the future of academic libraries, as well as sessions on emerging library leaders, EDI and green libraries. It was also great to recognise some of the speakers as people who had spoken so passionately about these issues as part of the Academic and Workplace Libraries module such as Masud Khokhar, Nick Woolley and Sheffield iSchool alumnus Sam Wiggins. I came away from sessions full of inspiration and new ideas and look forward to taking my new found confidence as an aspiring librarian into the world of work. You can find all the conference presentations here.

Dissertation-relevant themes and supervisor namecheck!


Masud Khokhar explaining how academic libraries must own the transition from information to imagination

Lottie Needham
MA Librarianship
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