Been a few weeks since my last post but with so much on it's been hard to take a second! As well as seeing my mentor and reviewing my progress I have also been progressing the learning in my library authority via planning and various training and visits.

As part of the marketing team we visited another authorities new library to see what inspiration or ideas we could pick up. This visit definitely proved how much of an improvement that good lighting and signage makes to a libarary. I felt that in terms of other junior and learning activities they were no better (and worse in some ways) so the visit was mainly useful for a design perspective.

I also went to Glasgow for an Information Literacy day ran by the Scottish Info Lit Project. This was interesting in terms of some of the talks showing ideas for learning opportunities and to get a feel for how other people are dealing with information literacy. I still feel that the area is prone to being ambiguous and this was shown by talks varying from accessibility apps to reports on prison learning.

The main task at the moment in the authority is to create a new learning plan for September. The involvement of the local college still hangs firmly in the balance and this may mean a variety of new provision is required. One key way of doing this is to become an ILA provider allowing us to bring in funding to help run our own courses. To start the ball rolling myself and my colleuge have visited another authority who does this and I have sent out best practice questions to others. This idea sharing has been invaluable and has been extremely interesting in allowing me to see how other authorities operate that are similar. My plan now is to apply to ILA and start looking and the inticacies of putting plans in place.

I have also been looking into other areas as part of my partnership working. As part of the learning sub group I attend I have been looking into the possibility of creating a database that would map learners achievemnets in the local area. This is an area I am definitely a novice in so I have forund it beneficial to have looked into it. Clearly setting up secure multi access databases has clear legal and technical implications and is something I will continue to look into.

I have also had some training this month into online reference services as I felt my hand on experience of these was not as strong as it should be. I realised however that I knew more than I thought and was encouraged by this!