What we learnt at the ‘Creativity’ Networking session at Talis Insight

As Talis User Group reps, Ann-Marie and I have organised the User Group Creativity Award for the last 2 years. For us, it’s always been a really interesting and inspiring way to see some of the brilliant work and ideas happening across the Talis Aspire community. We felt very lucky to be able to see these nominations!

For Talis Insight 2018 we were also asked to run the ‘TAUG Networking: Get Creative’ session on Day 1. We instantly saw this as a great opportunity to combine this session with our work around the award, hopefully allowing everyone else to benefit from these ideas too.

We first asked those who had submitted a nomination this year whether they would be willing for this to be shared as part of our session (fortunately everyone kindly agreed- thank you all!). We then turned the nominations into posters (and you can see all those submitted this year here ) and dotted these around the room, allowing everyone to have a read, mingle and hopefully pick up some ideas.  People could also add thoughts and ideas on post-it notes to the posters too. Importantly, we wanted to keep this session relaxed and informal as well, as we know how tiring conferences can be!

 
We were thrilled to see so many people pop in, take a turn around the room and discuss all the ideas, as well as just generally catch–up. I certainly heard a number of people say they would be trying some of these ideas themselves, from creating innovative dashboards and developing more pedagogic-themed workshops, through to developing themed reading lists for events at their Institutions.

If you did pop by, hopefully, you found the session interesting and useful- thanks for coming! If you couldn’t make it, do take a look at this year’s nominations – you might just find some inspiration….

This post was written by Talis Aspire User Group Representatives, Polly Harper and Ann-Marie James from the University of Birmingham Library.