Government Libraries Section - LAI

Government librarians at the heart of government! We were delighted to hold an in-person meeting in Leinster House last week. Thanks so much to the Oireachtas library team for hosting and giving us a peek at your beautiful reading room.

Image of GLS members with event organisers standing in front of screen.

GLS members Mairead, Jean and Shona were in attendance at last week’s Knowledge Management Network meeting, a forum for members of public sector organisations to share knowledge, experience, expertise and best practice. Shout out to Jordan Murphy and Ronnie Buckley for hosting a brilliant event!

Records management is a team effort. Get a representative from each team in the organisation to be a champion for records management. They should have a good understanding of their records, how they are stored and the retention periods. The representatives can meet regularly to share experiences

Gaining buy-in from senior management is key to successfully embedding good Records Management practices. If a particular business area or team is experiencing issues implementing good practice, sit down with them to explore why this is so, and help them to come up with a process that works for their needs. Often good practice is about navigating organisational culture and human behaviour, rather than just developing good policies and procedures

1. Create - Understand why you're creating a record and use that to drive how you manage it; choose concise, objective, meaningful and standardised naming conventions; use version control to avoid duplication and review schedules to manage timeliness. 2. Organise - classify in a systematic way and store in secure or collaborative digital paces depending on who needs access. 3. Dispose - review your retention schedule and archive or dispose in a secure manner as per policy.

For July, the GLS is sharing tips on Records Management and Archiving. We hope you can put some of these into practice in your own organisations.

When trying to engage users in information literacy training, always try to tie it to some real part of their life, whether that's professional, academic, or personal, so that they can see immediate tangible benefits to these skills

Running a journal club is a great way to get staff reading and critically appraising literature.

This month we're sharing GLS member tips on Literacies and Learning. We hope these can provide some learnings too!

Group of members of GLS standing beside shelves of books

This week, GLS member were delighted to get an opportunity to tour the Department of Justice and their Censored Books Room. We also got a peek at the Minister's office! A really fascinating visit!

Seek ways to support staff in your organisation to share their knowledge. E.g. facilitate 'knowledge share' sessions for different business areas to share their expertise, or for projects to feedback to staff on key learnings. Another example may be to facilitate staff members to share learnings from conferences and seminars. GLS Member

Build Knowledge Management Strategies that help: 1. Convert tacit to explicit knowledge 2. Demonstrate the value of KM 3. Make knowledge easily discoverable 4. Foster collaboration 5. Take account of culture, people, processes and technology as an enabler, NOT the solution. Mairéad McKeown - Knowledge Manager, Bord Bia

For May we are sharing GLS member tips related to Knowledge Management. Check them out below!

Ensure policies for different information areas such as collection development, copyright and records management reinforce each other and that your expertise provides input into the review and development of policies (if not under your ownership)

Ensure policies for different information areas such as collection development, copyright and records management reinforce each other and that your expertise provides input into the review and development of policies (if not under your ownership)

The next area of CILIP’s Professional Knowledge and Skills Base wheel that we are sharing GLS member tips from is Information governance and compliance.

GLS member Amy Bond from Bord Bia presenting at #ASL2025 today. An incredibly informative and inspirational day!

The GLS recently contributed to a @libfocus.bsky.social blog post outlining tips from our members. Each month we will highlight some wisdom from key areas. Here are some nuggets focused on information exploitation and use.

We're delighted to be on Bluesky to connect with librarians and other library groups! Big thanks to @martinoconnor.bsky.social for his Irish libraries starter pack to help us get going!