Aberdeen Adventures

Just returned from a very productive RLUK conference in sunny (yes, really!) Aberdeen.  The Thursday afternoon featured a session about the Unique and Distinctive strand.   I discussed progress so far; the OCLC and UK folks working on the Survey outlined some possible recommendations to be made in the Survey report.  We then had fun with stickers, choosing the recommendations that we thought most important and discussing them.  This led to lots of thought-provoking debate.

I’ll try to blog about some of the issues that cropped up over the coming weeks.  I also had many conversations with other delegates which helped inform this project.

Very grateful to all who took part and to Chris Banks, Siobhan Convery and their colleagues for wonderful hospitality and tours of their stunning new library.

See you in the Silver City

The Unique and Distinctive Project has its own strand at the forthcoming RLUK Members’ Meeting.  The venue?  The amazing new University Library at Aberdeen (get a taste of the building from this Guardian article and, yes, there will be tours on offer!).   The date?  2pm 29 March 2012 .

Wow! Shiny! University of Aberdeen's new library seen alongside the existing Queen Mother Library - from chrisabanks flickr stream (all rights reserved).

The session will be a chance for RLUK Members to find out where we are with the Project at the half-way point (eek!) and to feed in their own ideas and experiences.  In particular, we will be sharing the fascinating findings of the OCLC/RLUK Survey: really high-quality data about the reality of our special collections.

I look forward to seeing and chatting to lots of interested people and to some exciting discussion about the futures for our fantastic collections.  See you there?