Category: Local Studies Toolkit

Local Studies Toolkit…. watch this space

tonypilmerLeave a comment

Need some advice or top tips on all things local studies? Over the last two years a band of local studies librarians and associated hangers-on have been working away to produce the Local Studies Toolkit.

The aim of these pages is to produce a freely accessible online guide that will help and inspire local studies professionals and para-professionals to provide an excellent local studies service within their authority. 

Over the next week or two we will releasing the first versions of different sections of the guidance as blog posts. More will then follow in the coming months.

As of this moment, the only page published is a very boring introduction, but you can see the project unfold by following us on Twitter and Facebook, or just keeping an eye on our Toolkit homepage.

The toolkit will be a collection working documents for the entire community, so we need your help. If you have any questions, comments, suggestions, examples of best practice that you wish to share or, even better, completely disagree with points in this guide, please let us know. Put a comment at the foot of the appropriate page or send us a comment. This guide will only be as good as the contributions you make.

Local Studies toolkit

tonypilmerLeave a comment

There has not been any published guidelines for delivering and developing Local Studies collections and services since the late 1990s. The Local Studies Group of CILIP, which is an active Special Interest Group, is now looking to create an online toolkit for Local Studies Librarians and other colleagues who work with Local Studies Collections.

We are hoping to create guidance and signposting for a variety of Local Studies Sources, including digital outputs; as well as case studies of Local Studies activities that engage a wide range of audiences both in the community and digitally, sharing knowledge and good practice. The toolkit will be available through the CILIP website.

As this will effectively be the first such toolkit and guidance published for 20 years this would also be an excellent career development and CPD opportunity for CILIP members working in Local Studies. We are looking for 3 to 4 colleagues to help us and we will look to build the toolkit gradually. The time commitment will mostly be deskbound with email or Skype correspondence between group members, with very occasional meetings. If you would like to be involved or want some more info, please contact Terry Bracher – terry.bracher@wiltshire.gov.uk or Tony Pilmer. We would love to hear from you.

We want to write a Local Studies Toolkit & we need your help.

tonypilmerLeave a comment

Looking for advice or inspiration for your work? In recent years LSG has helped by organising training and propagating material through our journal, blog posts and tweets, but now we want to do more by putting together a local studies toolkit. Our aim is to….

To produce a freely accessible online resource that could guide and inspire local studies professionals  and para-professionals to provide an excellent local studies service within their authority.

Enough of the management talk I hear you cry, what will it look like in practice? Well, at the end of the day we would like to produce a mixture of the old local guidelines and signposts to the best online advice on local studies subjects. So if you were thinking about doing an oral history project, we’d have something like…

  • lots of links to the excellent material on the Oral History Society website,
  • examples of some projects from local studies collections across the country
  • papers printed in the Local Studies Librarian
  • blog posts
  • some reports, templates and advice from those who have done similar projects in the past.

We’d also have sections on the bread and butter of local studies work, such managing map or newspaper collections.

So what can you do to help? Well, we need your recommendations on what is hot and what is not.

  • What resources can you not do without?
  • What projects have been inspirational?
  • Can you share templates or policies?

Let us know by completing this survey:

[You can also visit the survey via this link: https://goo.gl/forms/BpE0Whsdv0HTjoQB3]

Have a bit more time and what to help a bit more? We want to have a look at each authority website in the UK and find the best projects to highlight. So we have split up the country and are looking for volunteers to spend a couple of hours going through websites and recording what they find. Interested? Send us a message via the LSG blog.