There’s a great deal of guff talked about leadership these days. It’s an epidemic. Even a shift supervisor in a fast-food restaurant these days is a leader, it seems. Whether or not one subscribes to the modern cult of leadership, the proposal that goes to an Extraordinary General Meeting of CILIP on Thursday 23rd March…

Nick Poole, CILIP Council member and former Tresurer, has made the assertion at Public Libraries News that CILIP’s Governance Review, on which we vote at Saturday’s AGM, was conducted ‘in plain sight’. Not so. I have commented as follows, ‘I am afraid that Nick Poole is simply wrong when he says that the discussions on…

The influential Public Libraries News site has published statement from two past Presidents on the CILIP governance review. Tom Featherstone and Bob Usherwood. ‘CILIP members are rightly proud of the part they play in maintaining democracy and want their professional body to reflect democratic principles. For many members, the governance proposals under discussion do not…

I commend to any reader interested in the affairs of our professional association this blog post by Brian Kelly on his UK Web Focus blog, Wikipedia, Librarians and CILIP. Brian has been encouraging library and information professionals to get involved in editing Wikipedia. He pointed out that CILIP’s Wikipedia page contained membership information from 2012…

The late Tony Benn in the years when he left parliament in order to devote his time to politics devised five questions to ask anyone who exercises power. They were these: What power have you got? Where did you get it from? In whose interests do you exercise it? To whom are you accountable? And…

I promised I’d reply to Martyn’s comments on my post about CILIP’s governance review. I’m grateful for the reply. I think Martyn is a good Chair of Council, and is trying to move Council in the right direction, towards more openness.  1. On democracy: Martyn says that to have a third of the seats on…

Today I e-mailed Martyn Wade, Chair of CILIP Council, to say I was resigning from CILIP Council. At the Council meeting on 8 July we debated, for the first time since I was elected to Council, the Governance Review proposals.  I have written before about the Governance Review, and once more here: http://www.roper.org.uk/tr/2013/07/cilips-governance-review-update.html This review has been…

Why is there only one Monopolies Commission, wits used to write on lavatory walls. In a similar vein, Leon Bolton, in a thoughtful blog post, suggests that the lack of competition may be a cause of CILIP's difficulties. I'm not sure I agree. There is competition. To take my own case, I am a member…

What did I expect? My view of CILIP Council, and of the LA before it, is strongly coloured by Edward Dudley’s sketches, latterly appearing under as his Clip Board  column. Edward’s Runyonesque prose evoked a world of Determined Ladies and Retired Layabouts. I was particularly disappointed that the toast to Peace and Progress, drunk, according…

I’m in a student room in Oxford, ready to attend a CASP critical appraisal training course for the next three days. I’ve just eaten moules-frites, followed by cheese, in a French restaurant. Every other customer was, like me, a solitary middle-aged man, with a book open in front of him, here a tract on old…

After posting the raw data of the tweet archive yesterday, I’ve used the visualisation tool developed by Martin Hawksey to put together a dynamic view of tweets using the #CILIP2014 hashtag. It updates every two hours. See it at: http://tomroper.me/1db0Qji

Ballot papers go out today for the election of CILIP councillors for 2014. Last night I and the other five candidates took part in a hustings event at CILIP headquarters in London. It was a curious experience — we knew that the sound and moving pictures were being transmitted to thousands in their homes, but…

 It being Cesarewitch day (try an each way bet on Chiberta King, by the way) here are the runners and riders for the CILIP Council election. No one stood for Vice-President, which is a poor show, though perhaps a recognition that the post, and the President’s, seem to lack power at the moment. But at…

I submitted my nomination today, proposed by Gary Birkenhead, Roger Farbey, Veronica Fraser, David McMenemy, Donald MacKay,  Rónán O’Beirne and Lauren Smith, though only five of those names will appear on the official literature. This remarkably handsome photograph accompanies it, together with the following text I ask for your vote in the 2013 elections to Council because I…

There’s a gibbet in Ridgmount Street, and from it hang the bodies of people who stood for election in CILIP, promising to change the organisation. It’s an awful warning, but in spite of that, I am putting myself forward for Council. I don’t do so believing that I can do any better; but I do…

CILIP’s AGM took place in the splendid and insanely popular new Library of Birmingham. I was privileged to enjoy a tour after the meeting, conducted by John Kirriemuir, who has been using the library intensively since its opening. There are some photographs on Flickr. The meeting itself was no less remarkable. Most importantly, we passed…

Rebranders, take note: it rarely sounds convincing if you threaten people who light-heartedly question what you're trying to do. So John Dolan's statement, the latest salvo in the propaganda war to try to convince CILIP members to embrace Council's proposal that we rename ourselves as ILPUK, that anyone who makes jokes about it is  'betraying…

Last week was the CILIP Sussex ramble. Now something of an institution, a group of us meet on an August evening at the Cricketers in Berwick, walk over the fields to Alfriston, taking in Duncan Grant, Vanessa Bell and Quentin Bell's murals in Berwick church,  have a drink in the Smugglers, and return to the…