The story so far

I’m a qualified librarian working in a higher education institution in the UK, and I’ve decided to try and keep a blog about my experiences of attempting to become a fully-fledged, real live Chartered Librarian (MCILIP). I have been aiming towards this goal for about three years now, and, to be quite honest, I haven’t got very far (as you can tell from the timescale!). I won’t try and explain the vaguaries of chartering and what it means (or should mean) at this stage. If you’d like to read more about it you can do so on the CILIP website.  Perhaps I should just say that CILIP stands for Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals. It is the UK’s professional body for librarians, library assistants and other information professionals.

I started working towards my chartership in 2004, when I got my first job after qualifying as a librarian. This was under the old ‘Route B’ programme. I wrote my original personal professional development plan (PPDP), faithfully collected lots of evidence, attended as many professional development and training sessions as I could, made lots of notes, kept all my meeting minutes, made tables and lists of things to do and was quite optimistic about sending in all my evidence, writing my report and chartering withing a reasonable amount of time.

However, between me originally starting to prepare for chartership and leaving my first job, the chartership regulations changed. I was still planning to hand in under the old regulations, but I got a new job, moved house and got married, and all thoughts of chartering went right to the back of my mind. In the end, I registered under the new, 2005, regulations. At this moment I can’t remember when I did this, but I must find out.

The 2005 regulations require you to have a mentor to guide you through your chartership. I had some trouble finding one, as many on CILIP’s list of mentors already had at least one mentee, and weren’t keen to take on any more, which is understandable. After many emails I eventually found someone to take me on. She is based in Brighton, which is not particularly near to where I live, but we correspond by email and telephone, and are planning to meet up at some point, although this is proving difficult to arrange so far.

I have been pretty bad at contacting her and making the effort to keep her up to date with what I’m doing. I’m definitely not the best example to follow if you’re trying to become a chartered librarian yourself. The title of this blog used to be ‘How not to charter’, but I thought that was a bit pessimistic (although possibly realistic!). Hopefully this blog will be of some comfort to people finding the chartership process difficult, whilst at the same time giving me some much needed motivation to actually get on and do something!