Member Services

Information Scotland

Over the past couple of years, the Council has been increasingly concerned about the decline in advertising income which is needed to sustain Information Scotland. In addition, the web 2.0 developments indicate that many members prefer to receive news and information in a different way. In October the decision was taken to transfer the journal to an online edition with regular newsletters for members. Members can access the e-journal via the new CILIPS membership online website and it features all the main articles.

Slainte

Gillian Hanlon has taken over from Penny Robertson as (Acting) Senior Information Officer and is keeping up developments with SLAINTE. Richard Palmer has joined the Information Team. Changes have continued to the website and the range of web 2.0 services. The team have also launched SLIC and CILIPS web 2.0 Guidelines.

CILIPS has led the way in development of services such as web 2.0 and SLAINTE now uses a suite of web 2.0 services and has recently been recognised by the International Federation of Library Associations as world leading.

Slainte 2.0 services include the Scottish Libraries Blog, Del.icio.us bookmarks to find electronic information and resources, flickr and Slideshare to share images and presentations and the YouTube channel currently features a series of How to start using.. videos on YouTube, twitter, and blogger and a demonstration of the AskScotland virtual reference service. All these services have been brought together using Pageflakes, an aggregator service. More information at slainte2.0.

These services offer a different level of interaction with members than has been possible in the past. For example, the Annual Conference had a twitter amplification using a hashtag, #cilips09, and these were streamed to Slainte’s homepage using CIL (Cover it Live). This allowed delegates to add updates for interested followers not at the conference and to discuss issues with each other. CILIPS Council meeting in October also featured regular tweets as decisions were made.

Reading Roots

An innovative website to attract new readers was launched in March 2009. Reading Roots is supported by the Public Library Quality Improvement Forum and was developed by SLIC and CILIP in Scotland, with participation from all Scottish local authorities. The website featured 300 Scottish titles across 14 reading lists drawn from a broad range of themes and almost 60% of the titles from Scottish publishers. Titles included in the promotion saw increases in issues of between 300 and 7200%.