HUG Summer Meeting 16

Last week was the annual Summer Meeting of the Heritage User Group, held at Conference Aston in Birmingham. I am a solo librarian and do not have many opportunities to meet other library people. I go to the HUG meetings once a year and really appreciate the networking opportunities it creates. This year, it seems networking opportunities are like busses – you wait ages for one and then two arrive at once! The HUG event was the day after the ARLG conference.

I attended my first HUG event in 2011 and they are always useful and interesting days. As always, the morning session featured a member of staff from ISOxford, the LMS developers. The latest information regarding the upcoming My Cirqas app was both interesting and useful. Although the app is free, usage will require Heritage licences so this is something for us to look into. We have long been considering upgrading out licence size and this may be the additional evidence required for our 'business justification' to be approved. 

Afternoon sessions recapped housekeeping practices and widgets. I found the latter session incredibly useful and now feel inspired to utilise the ‘news and information’ widget to display reading lists. It’ll take some time getting my head round it, but Emily Armstrong’s presentation about Hull College library catalogue has shown me it can be done. And do it I will! Reading lists is something I have pondered for ages. I feel it's important to feature them in the OAPC, but I'm just unsure how is best to do it. Within Heritage, we use the groups facility to collate reading lists, and I have wished numerous times there was a specific widget for displaying groups. It would make life so much easier! Unfortunately, there isn't, so adopting the news widget may be the next best thing. Seeing the way another college has done this has really helped me to visualise it.

Whilst there, I met 3 ex-colleagues and had the chance to catch up on the latest developments in their respective institutions. It’s important to keep these connections alive, as well as fostering new ones, and the HUG events are the perfect chance to do that.