Happy holidays to you all – it’s the end of another year! Here at SLG we are busily planning another year of wonderful events for you. It is also time to look back on what’s been going on during this past year with SLG. And a reminder – we are all volunteers, and do this on top of our day jobs, so I am doubly proud of all that we have achieved!
One of the major things we have done this year is to relaunch all of our media – socials and our website. Thanks to Gareth Evans, who is our Social Media and Web Officer, our website has been moved to a new site and been totally redesigned. We love the new clean feel, and this one has clear ownership, unlike the other which was built on top of another website we inherited, with an owner we could no longer contact. Gareth has also refreshed our social media offering, and we can now be found mainly on BlueSky and Linkedin. You can see all of our links at the bottom of the website, and please connect to us there.
2025 has been a year where we have concentrated on and increased our webinar offerings. We have made as many of them as possible free for members, to add value to your CILIP membership, and others we have run at a low cost, recognising that many school librarians have to pay for their own CPD. That is why virtually all of our webinars are in the evenings or on Saturday mornings, as we know how difficult getting time in a day for a solo librarian is.
We run free webinars for anyone working on their Chartership submissions, and post all of the recordings to our website so that they are accessible afterwards. Please see our training pages for these: https://cilipslg.com/training-page/ You will also find on that page links to other past free webinars, including a series on Censorship which we recorded in 2023 but which is still – and even more – applicable today. To access these free you need to be a CILIP member – or if you are a member of SLA, you can access them free when logged into their site.
At the start of this year, we ran a very important webinar about having a collection development policy in your school which makes reference to your withdrawn (not weeded) books, what procedures a school needs to go through and by whom. This is more important than ever, and in light of The Librarians film (available on BBC iPlayer), please make sure that you have one for your school, approved by Senior Management. Believe me when I say, without going into detail, that this is already starting to happen here, and we have been in support of librarians dealing with this very topic. If there is enough demand, we can re-run the webinar next year.
We also ran a hugely popular webinar on Teaching Skills for School Librarians, run by Bryony Hart and Carol Webb. Bryony is a teacher at the school where Carol worked, and many attendees valued the input of a teacher, as this aspect is something that teachers are taught how to do when they are trained, and we are not. Bryony is taking another webinar on January 10th on Behaviour Management for School Librarians, details on our upcoming webinars page: https://cilipslg.com/upcoming-training-events/
If you are a CILIP member, do remember to sign up for the SLG newsletter. It is completely free to sign up to these, you can belong to as many groups as you wish to. But a crucial thing to remember is, that if you access the newsletters page on the CILIP website, it resets ALL of your choices, so you will have to select all of your choices again. But well worth it as our half termly newsletter is packed with information, as well as upcoming training and webinars.
I hope you all have a restful holiday, when it comes. If you would like to contact me about anything at all, please email me on chair.slg@cilip.org.uk
Caroline Roche, Chair CILIP SLG
The current SLG Committee, pictured in December, enjoying a Christmas meal after an in-person committee meeting in London.