A week of conferences

Last week SCL attended the Conservative Party conference in Manchester and the PLA Conference in Bristol

I’m just recovering from a very busy week dashing around the country. I always take too much with me and end up struggling with heavy suitcases and bags. Big thanks to Cath and Sarah who helped me on and off trains!!
Wednesday morning saw us in Manchester at a breakfast briefing for the Conservative Conference. It started at 7.30am so we were able to navigate our way into the “secure area” of the city with ease. The Police were very helpful, the guns a little scary – but its good to know we were safe.
Ed Vaizey MP – shadow minister for culture and tourism kindly hosted the event for us. It was a very successful session with a general discussion and debate on public libraries and their impact on people’s lives.
Once that was over – it was back to Manchester Library to collect our bags and head for the station. Nicky has some brilliant staff there who looked after us and even ran after us with a forgotten bag. I look forward to seeing how their 60 million pound transformation works – so exciting to see another major capital investment in public libraries.
PLA was as always a good time to catch up with everyone,meet some new people and be inspired to think differently. Highlights for me were hearing Liz Forgan’s speech (Arts Council). Truly inspiring. It was really good to hear from our new Minister – Margaret Hodge MP and we look forward to further discussions about the Review. The Public Library Building Awards were very exciting with Newcastle sweeping the board – I hope that Tony got all the awards home safely. Gervase Phinn at dinner was wonderful – must get him to come to York for an event. The last day we heard from John Fisher from Citizens Online and Andrew Knight from Hillingdon. Both speakers really made me think and left me with clear messages about how to engage with people.
I am Programme Director for PLA 2010 in Leeds. So I was also making notes and learning from Kate Davenport’s excellent example.
So I now look forward to a week of getting back to reality! We are closing our central library on 31 October for a transformation so lots still to do there.
I hope to go to Northern Ireland soon to see what they are doing – I visited Wales SCL In August and was so impressed with the way they work together.