Clinical librarian blog- R&R required!

Good morning readers, how’s life treating you on this fine day? I’m nearing the end of a very busy few weeks, so I’m looking forward to some R&R at the weekend! It’s been busy but productive, and very interesting.

Last week my colleague Rayanne and I were fortunate to go to the International Clinical Librarian Conference (ICLC19)at the Museum of Science and Industry in Manchester. It was a superb conference, with so many interesting speakers, but it was pretty full on. We heard from clinical librarians across the UK, and from beyond- Florida, Queensland, Norway… we attended some excellent workshops, ate some excellent food, and networked with some excellent peers. More about the conference to follow, I’ve yet to review my notes and turn my thoughts to putting what I learned into practice, but I will!

 

 

Here’s the view from the lift in the museum- such a fantastic place to explore.

This week has been full of literature searches (I had 10 waiting at one point…) with lots of work for the ever looming controlled document review group. I’m still wading through some of that, but a day working from home yesterday helped- no distractions other than an unwilling HDAS. This week sees us welcoming John Blenkinsopp to the Trust to lead another Critical Appraisal course, so Friday’s going to be a doozy. He came last year, and we all got so much out of it. We’ve got lots of colleagues from outside the trust attending, so it’ll be another chance to network.

We’ve had interesting time in our reading group, where we were chosen to shadow the Booker Prize, reading the fabulous Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo. Wow, what a great read, thoroughly recommended. Our reading group gives me so much pleasure, I’m enjoying our current read- Silas Marner by George Eliot (there’s a big anniversary coming up, so we’re getting prepared).

Since last I typed, I’ve attended a very useful course called Becoming a Twitter Ninja, which gave me so many ideas (I want to produce videos), and I’ve attended the annual West Midlands Regional Trainer Conference, where I spoke about a project I’m working on with another Forum member. The project’s on producing a repository for teaching and learning materials, and is proving trickier than I first thought. So lots of CPD, and not a lot of time to do anything with the CPD- a continuing theme for me, I’m afraid.

Righto, today’s to do list calls. First order of business is to prep for a journal club- critical appraisal FTW!

Thanks for reading, have a great week.