Thing 7: Face to Face Networks and Professional Organisations

I have been a member of CILIP since my student days (rather scarily over 20 years!). It's much easier to keep up to date with CILIP and feel more involved since their presence on Twitter and LinkedIn. I think I've only attended a couple of actual training courses at CILIP HQ, and those were during previous posts - the costs of their courses are quite prohibitive to NHS Libraries! It's good to see the East of England branch getting more active on Twitter and Facebook - I hope I will be able to attend more local courses / events in the future.  I feel I get more from my membership of Health Libraries Group - the bulletin is useful and I was fortunate to attend their conference in 2008.

My most useful networks are my local ones. I'm a founding member of EEHIST (East of England Healthcare Information Skills Trainers) and we meet four times a year. We work collaboratively on projects such as our collective pre and post training evaluations, and our set of "Searching the Evidence" training guides plus the meetings are a good opportunity to discuss issues and share solutions and information.  EEHIST is a special interest group (SIG) of the East of England Health Libraries Network, and I have recently worked with other colleagues from the network on redesigning our website EEL.

I would have liked to attend the Cambridge meetup but had prior plans that evening, and the online chat was scuppered by the death of one of our guinea pigs! I'm not a natural networker, but will try to make any future meetups.