Reflections on CILIPS26: Why Libraries Matter

Category: Blog

Eilidh Mclean, Information & Knowledge Officer, NHS Grampian

I was grateful to receive a bursary from the Specialist Libraries and Archives Bursary, which made it possible for me to attend CILIPS26 across both days. While I expected a rich programme of speakers and ideas, I did not anticipate how coherent the experience would feel. Across sessions, disciplines and styles, the same underlying question kept surfacing: what is the role of libraries in a world where knowledge itself feels increasingly contested?

Many speakers and conversations challenged the idea that libraries are neutral, particularly in the way terms like safe space or third space are sometimes used. Libraries sit within systems shaped by power, access and exclusion. Grace Blakely’s keynote on the Monday evening addressed this directly, and others, including Mairi Kidd, evidenced it in different ways. Concepts such as Reading for Empowerment or Reading for Rage hold far more energy and possibility than the now rather tired Reading for Pleasure. There is a persistent challenge to think more critically about who we reach, how we communicate value, and whose needs remain invisible. Libraries for everyone is not a simple aspiration. It is something difficult, and at times uncomfortable, to create and sustain.

Professor Kathleen Riach explored how our spaces and practices can unintentionally reflect assumptions about who libraries are for. What we sometimes describe as neutral can carry subtle exclusions, for example for women experiencing the menopause. She introduced the M.A.P.L.E approach to workplace inclusion, a tool that opens up conversations about adjustments that can reshape how people experience library environments, both as staff and as users. This grounded the idea that inclusion is not abstract. It is enacted through design, behaviour and everyday decisions.

Alongside this, there was a strong thread around professional expertise, particularly in relation to information work. Joshua Cheyne described searching as a diagnostic process, which resonated strongly with my own experience in a health library context. The initial question often masks a more complex or different underlying need. Some of the most valuable work happens not in retrieving information, but in reframing the question itself. Seeing this articulated so clearly reinforced the importance of recognising and valuing that aspect of our practice.

Questions of trust, authority and evaluation ran through several sessions, particularly in relation to generative AI and the wider information environment. Amanda Brennan positioned the current moment clearly: when plausible answers can be produced instantly, access is no longer the main challenge. Instead, the issue becomes how we recognise credibility and quality, and how we support others to do the same. Society, communities and individuals are all navigating new understandings of how information is created and shared. Within this, who gets to define what counts as reliable knowledge? Librarians have an opportunity, in this period of flux, to position themselves as active leaders, modelling critical thinking and supporting informed judgement.

This sense of responsibility becomes more complex when we no longer share the same starting point on what counts as evidence or credibility. Yvonne Eadon’s discussion of conspiratorial thinking and misinformation points to the limits of traditional information literacy in these contexts. Librarians have long celebrated the internet for widening access to knowledge, moving it beyond traditional gatekeepers, including ourselves. Yet there is a quiet unease in seeing how that same openness can enable misinformation and conspiracy thinking. It is not a tension that feels resolved, so much as one that is lived with, part of the everyday realpolitik of information. In this context, the idea that libraries are for everyone becomes both more important and more challenging, as we learn to sit with our own discomfort while still holding the space as open and welcoming.

A picture of CILIPS 2026 would be incomplete without painting joy. Robin Ince riding shotgun on the mobile library. Margaret McDonald and Nathanael Lessore creating worlds that young people connect with. Mairi Kidd drawing in those who do not find reading easy. There were many moments that resonated, linking to different stages of my career, including where I am now as a health librarian supporting access, learning and participation. It is easy to think of specialist librarians in narrow terms, as information handlers. In reality, the role is much broader. We help people connect, learn and feel part of something, while working within and trying to influence the systems that shape how knowledge is shared, understood and trusted.

I am grateful to the Specialist Libraries and Archives Bursary for the opportunity to attend. More than any single session, it was the accumulation of ideas across both days that made the experience so valuable, and which continues to shape how I think about my practice.