EARLL Development Community
We are excited to announce a brand-new initiative, the EARLL Development Community!
The EARLL Development Community (EDC) is a new network designed to bring early career librarians and established professionals into closer collaboration. We aim to recruit a number of professionals, with a wide variety of expertise across different areas of library services to become EARLL Champions who can support and mentor our members.
How will it work?
We are asking for potential volunteers to spend some of your time to help hone the next generation of LIS talent. The scheme will essentially be broken into three separate areas, where you can volunteer to be involved in any area that interests you (or all of them!)
We'd like to establish an interview scheme to support candidates and help prepare for interviews
We're looking for mentors to share their expertise with our members
Event Speakers
We'd like to recruit potential speakers to present at future EARLL event
Who can volunteer to be involved?
You don’t need to be professionally qualified, although we are ideally looking for people with at least a few years’ experience working in their chosen area. We are looking to recruit from all over the country, most of the work can be completed online so geography shouldn’t be a barrier.
Where do I sign up?
Read about our three core offers below, then please fill in our survey!
Our core offers
Practice Interviews
For professionals interested in signing up to be a practice interviewer, speak at a future EARLL event or offering job shadowing opportunities, please read about our three core offers below, then fill in our survey!
If you are an early career librarian who would like to sign up for a practice interview, please fill in our contact form and we will get back to you.
Job Shadowing
For job shadowing we’re looking for mentors across any area of library services who would like to share their knowledge and expertise with our members.
We are very flexible with how the job shadowing could work e.g. online only or in person.
Obviously, this will also depend upon employers and how much of your time they’re happy for you to commit as well.
Event Speakers
Our event schedule has been interrupted recently for obvious reasons, but we’re looking to get back on track.
We always have a lot of difficulty finding speakers and often find ourselves going down the easy route and looking at speakers who have previously presented at other conferences and events.
The problem with this is that it leads to the same people always being asked and actively hinders our commitment to equality and diversity as many events and conferences reflect the pre-existing biases in the LIS profession.
We have often been frustrated that there are probably lots of professionals who would love to speak but never get invited because they haven’t been invited before and we don’t know to approach them.