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The 2023 Mercian collaboration conference<\/a> was hosted at the University of Birmingham Exchange conference centre, in September 2023. The theme of the conference was ‘Putting change into action: development, diversity and drive<\/strong>‘ and two LLS University of Leicester (UoL) colleagues, Alex Marshall (Content Discovery Manager) and Sheree Dewey (Content Services Manager) were both first time attendees at this conference, and both have said what a valuable and useful conference it was. In particular, they commented on how varied the programme <\/a>was, covering a range of interesting themes and topics. Conference materials from the event can be viewed from the conference Website<\/a>. Alex’s reflections from the event<\/strong> It was my first time attending an in-person event since 2019, and it proved to be a great opportunity to catch up with friends and colleagues. The weather was surprisingly warm, but we kept (mostly) cool in the wonderful venue – The Exchange in Birmingham. The day began with an engaging keynote from Ben Davies (Chimp Management) who gave us some tips for managing change effectively using the Chimp Model. We then moved onto the breakout sessions, where we were spoilt for choice! In the morning, I attended a very interesting session with Lara Skelly (Loughborough University), who demonstrated some of the techniques she is using to make weird and wonderful resources accessible. This was followed by a workshop led by Georgina Dimmock and Fiona Watkins (University of Northampton), where the group shared their experiences of systems support in libraries and discussed whether Systems Librarians are an endangered species (thankfully, the consensus seemed to be ‘not yet’!) And then, after a delicious lunch, I heard about Birmingham City University’s experiences of conducting UX projects for discovery systems, and picked up some useful practical guidance on how to build a business case from Anna O’Neil (University of Warwick). The final session of the day was a round table discussion, where the panel gave their opinions on various topics around the conference’s theme ‘Putting change into action: development, diversity and drive’. This was my first attendance at a Mercian conference and it was a very engaging, useful and busy day.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It was so good to touch base with so many of our Midlands colleagues. so many people I hadn\u2019t met before at other events, but also some colleagues I hadn\u2019t caught up with in a while!<\/p>\n\n\n\n This variety of sessions and speakers as well as the interesting and topical round table discussion at the end of the conference ensured that this day went past in a flash! Would highly recommend attendance to other UoL colleagues in future. And I take away some top tips\/observations\/experiences to apply in future I am sure.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The 2023 Mercian collaboration conference was hosted at the University of Birmingham Exchange conference centre, in September 2023. The theme of the conference was ‘Putting change into action: development, diversity and drive‘ and two LLS University of Leicester (UoL) colleagues, Alex Marshall (Content Discovery Manager) and Sheree Dewey (Content Services Manager) were both first time […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":268,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[68],"tags":[70,69],"class_list":["post-1336","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-staff-development","tag-mercian","tag-staff-development"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/library\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1336","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/library\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/library\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/library\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/268"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/library\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1336"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/library\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1336\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1349,"href":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/library\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1336\/revisions\/1349"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/library\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1336"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/library\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1336"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/library\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1336"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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Overall, it was a great event, and I came away with lots of new knowledge and ideas.<\/em><\/strong>
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Sheree’s reflections from the event<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n\n