My Centre for Social Informatics colleague Dr Bruce Ryan has recently been confirmed as a speaker at this year’s annual conference of the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals Scotland. The 2021 conference is a two-day online event on June 7th and 8th. It will bring together library and information professionals from across Scotland and beyond to share knowledge and engage in professional development.

RIVAL project team members Dr Bruce Ryan & Professor Hazel Hall

In his presentation entitled The RIVAL project: how to build a new network from scratch; how to adapt to enforced online delivery, Bruce will be speaking about our Royal Society of Edinburgh (RSE) funded Research Impact Value and Library and Information Science (RIVAL) project. The aim of RIVAL was to create a collaborative network of Scotland-based Library and Information Science (LIS) researchers and practising library and information professionals interested in maximising the impact and value of LIS research.

The RSE funding was primarily awarded to support the delivery of four knowledge-exchange network events in 2019 and 2020. Then came along the coronavirus pandemic. In practice, the first two RIVAL events in July 2019 and November 2019 were delivered as anticipated. However, significant adaptations were required to transform plans for events 3 and 4 – eventually hosted in late 2020 and early 2021 (instead of March and July 2020) – into valuable online experiences to support network development.

On the second day of the CILIPS conference on 8th June 2021, Bruce will explain the strategies that we took to overcome challenges faced in transforming the delivery of Events 3 and 4 of RIVAL. For example, he will cover the vital extra work to guarantee a suitable technical set-up for everyone to participate, and our efforts to maintain high levels of engagement amongst the network members through to the end of the project, even though we could only see one another online. Bruce will also explain how the extension to the project period granted by the RSE gave us time to learn from our experience of online events from March 2020 onwards and apply this in the planning of our own.

Register for the CILIPS conference to learn more from Bruce about the delivery of RIVAL, and from a host of other speakers including six keynotes, (one of whom happens to be a RIVAL network member).