Information Scotland The Journal of the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals in Scotland ISSN 1743-5471 Issue contents | Journal contents | About the online edition of the journal December 2004 Volume 2 (6)

Member services

What's happening on Slainte?

There's now even more on your professional website, says Emma Jones.

SLAINTE, the website of both CILIPS and SLIC, has recently launched a new service for its members. Special interest groups and other events organisers can now submit details of events online, through a user-friendly interface. Members can sort events with a selection of 'limit' buttons. With the number of seminars, courses and workshops rising significantly over the past two years, the new set-up makes it easy to find events of interest and within specific locations.

The new database-driven calendar, developed by the Centre for Digital Library Research (CDLR), allows members to view events being held in a specific town and/or organised by a specific group. You can also display events from the previous 30 days. This 'previous 30 day' limit can be useful for finding out about events you may have missed or as an aide memoir.

Limits can be used separately or together. So, if you limit by Organiser (CILIP) and Town (Dundee), you will currently find out about the forthcoming seminars in the 'Effective School Librarian Series', Making the most of Medline/PubMed and Essential skills for LIS.

Help buttons are available on each page of the new calendar, to assist organisers in submitting details. To ensure consistency and maintain control of the events displayed, all submissions are checked and authorised before being made live.

Events submitted by groups and organisations affiliated to CILIPS will find their events listed in Information Scotland's events diary, reaching our 2000 plus members in Scotland. Commercial event organisers may also advertise in Information Scotland, at a charged rate (email: cilips@slainte.org.uk for further information).

The new calendar is currently listing events running until September 2005, with events from groups and organisations such as Netskills, JISC, TFPL, Grampian Information, Career Development Group (Scottish Division), NHS Education, Cosmic, LocScot , CILIP, CILIPS and SLIC.

The calendar is a unique resource for Scottish Information Professionals, bringing together events from a host of organisations in one spot. We hope the calendar will become an essential reference tool for Continuing Professional Development for staff at all levels.

SLAINTE has undergone considerable change in the past two years, from the colourful orange, blue and yellow display of the previous incarnation of the site to the cleaner, simpler interface we have today. The site now attracts on average around 28,300 page views a year.

SLIC/CILIPS projects and useful resources are regularly spotlighted on the home page. In October/November we highlighted the website of 'War Detectives' (www.wardetectives.info), developed by SLIC in partnership with the Scottish Museum Council and Learning and Teaching Scotland, supported by the Big Lottery Fund, as part of the 'Their Past Your Future' project. War Detectives will fund primary school children to investigate the experiences of the older generation in their communities during World War II, creating online resources to share with other schools. Content from the War Detectives projects will be added to the site during 2005.

SLIC Project areas include:

• Readership Development: a useful resource for those undertaking reader development promotions, providing a wide variety of links to external sites and advice.
• Further Education Network: access the full text of the FE service development toolkit: 'Resources and services supporting learning'.
• Peoples Network: documentation and presentations from the Peoples Network roll out. Highlighting best practice through the Bill and Melinda Gates funded 'Making a difference – Libraries, ICT and Social Inclusion' project report.

Areas being developed in the SLIC section of SLAINTE under the heading of Library Issues include:

• Access and Equity: selected sites offering guidance on accessibility issues and equality of service provision.
• Freedom of Information (Scotland) Act 2002

Other Services available though SLAINTE are:

• Scottish Library and Information Resources Online: the e-version of CILIPS annual directory of library and information services in Scotland. Searchable by location, name of organisation and contact name. Accessible from the homepage through the SLIR online logo.
• Information Scotland Online: the online version of this journal, maintained by Sapiens at CDLR, found in the publications section of the site.
• SLAINTE's continuing professional development catalogue: accessed via the 'search button' on the homepage (http://www.slainte.org.uk/), providing access to evaluated resources for the library and information community.
• The websites of both the Community Services Group Scotland and the Multimedia and Information Technology Group Scotland. Both sites can be found in the CILIPS area on SLAINTE, under 'Special interest groups'.

In the coming months we will be looking at promoting special interest group and branch newsletters, so if you belong to a group and need an online presence for your newsletter please get in touch.

As SLAINTE continues to be developed, we welcome your feedback on current content and suggestions for future areas.

Emma Jones is Information Resource Officer, SLIC/CILIPS (slic@cilips.org.uk)
www.slainte.org.uk

Information Scotland Vol. 2 (6) December 2004

Information Scotland is delivered online by the SAPIENS electronic publishing service based at the Centre for Digital Library Research. SLAINTE (Scottish libraries across the Internet) offers further information about librarianship and information management in Scotland.