Chair’s annual report 2014-15
Introduction
This has been a year when we have seen a number of colleges merge, services re-structured and slimmed down, staff moved around and, sadly, in some cases, lost from the sector. We decided that the best approach to supporting our members is to help them to remain positive, to focus on continually raising the standards of library and learning resources provision, and to be proactive and also responsive. In this way services would become ‘indispensable’. One of the presenters at our London event told us ‘we never say “that isn’t our job”’.
As always, we created an annual plan and this year, for the first time, we also created a three year plan. This helped us to focus on longer term strategies and also motivated us to think that CoLRiC will still be here in three years’ time, whatever life throws at us!
Our plan this year included:
Sponsorship of our events to help enhance them with additional materials and to provide an opportunity for delegates to meet different organisations which might be of interest. Some of our delegates said this was much appreciated as they don’t always have time for investigating new services and this gave them an ideal chance to meet suppliers – and over a nice lunch as a bonus!
Marketing of the various aspects of CoLRiC. We see this as a vital means of letting you know what we do, for example, through our new online newsletter – Quality Impact. To be kind to the environment and to avoid wasting your valuable subscriptions we have moved to using electronic means of communication as much as possible; however we realise that in some cases hard copy may be more appropriate and we will continue to make this available.
We also contact Principals to let them know what we can do to support libraries and learning resources in their colleges. And we keep in touch with other relevant organisations to help share best practice which, in turn, we can share with you.
Surveys to help you assess your service and benchmark against others in the sector; particularly helpful, of course, if you are being inspected or peer assessed. We again ran the annual PII survey, but also this year, a survey of library resource services in sixth form colleges. It has been some time since we undertook the first sixth form college survey in 2006 / 2007 and we felt it was now timely to carry out another. We are planning a similar survey for FE colleges early next year.
Awards to celebrate the best in your services, to help you achieve recognition within your own colleges, or beyond in the sector. In alternate years we sponsor an AoC Beacon Award and 2014/15 fell in between Awards; we are currently in the round for the 2015/16 Awards.
We also offered this year our second set of Best Practice Awards – again proving very popular judging by the number of submissions. We received entries in three categories and saw some excellent projects. We were delighted that the winners were able to speak about their projects at our events in London and Birmingham and were presented with their awards. Delegates had lots of questions for the presenters and they were keen to share good ideas.
Peer assessment to provide an objective view of services who undergo the process. A number of colleges this year have registered to obtain the criteria against which services are measured. Many have used this to carry out a self-assessment and some have gone forward through the whole process and now have a report giving detailed feedback from our experienced assessors. Some services use this as evidence for inspections or other college assessments.
Events in London and Birmingham, this year focusing on sharing good practice about what is working well and exploring strategies for coping when times are tough. As well as hearing from the Best Practice Award winners, delegates learned of some varied approaches to information literacy by different types of college and how one college has fought through some difficult times to emerge as a fresh and progressive service. We had some excellent feedback and are already planning next year’s events, so look out for these.
Exemplar papers to provide a set of online resources in the members’ area of the CoLRiC website. During the year we built up a large collection of job descriptions and are now considering other topics for collection and development.
And finally!
As always we are keen to learn what you would like from CoLRiC as we strive to be relevant to you and your services. At our events we always gather feedback, but you can also contact us in a number of ways to ask questions and make suggestions. Please get in touch – we will be delighted to hear from you!
Margaret Phillips, Chair of CoLRiC, September 2015