Our thanks to Raymond Pun who kindly accepted to offer a review of the SLA Spring Social event, which was sponsored by CB Resourcing and took place earlier this month in London. Raymond is the first year student success librarian in California State University, Fresno. He has been an SLA member since 2015.
A few weeks ago, I had the opportunity to attend and present in the UKSG conference held in Bournemouth. The conference was well attended and organised, mostly academic librarians, publishers and vendors were present in the conference to talk about scholarly communications and research data and assessment in the state of academic librarianship.
After the conference, I had a few days to visit London and fortunately the SLA-EUROPE Spring Social took place around the same time of my trip. I had RSVPed for the social about a month ago because I knew the timing would work. I found out about it through its Twitter handler (@slaeurope) and knew I had to be there since I am an SLA member.
I did not know what to expect and I did not know whom I would end up meeting. It was actually a lot of fun and I met a lot of interesting information professionals in London. It was a packed event and there were many professionals from all kinds of backgrounds – mostly from business, corporate and commercial affiliations: I met Ms. Kate Arnold, former SLA President (2014) and CILIP Vice President (2016), Ms. Penny Leach, Chair Elect for the Leadership & Management Division of SLA Europe for 2015, Ms. Victoria North, Chair-Elect of the SLA Legal Division, and Ms. Helen Lippell, Search and Taxonomy Specialist.
We had different and insightful conversations – some focusing on the SLA conference in 2016 and some on the state of special libraries in UK. It was real treat to hear from UK colleagues on what SLA means to them. I will be attending the SLA conference to be held in Philadelphia this June and will be seeing some of them there too.
I found the Spring Social to be well organised and very helpful to bring professionals together and learn from each other and share information. For someone coming from the U.S. to attend an SLA event in London was really unique because I get to learn more about SLA members in London and really witness how SLA can bring people together from all parts of the world.