Neurodivergent Library and Information Staff Network

The sun has started to (shyly?) appear, the nights are getting lighter, birds are singing outside the window as I type this, it must be Spring! Oh, and time for the NLISN March update / newsletter.

We’ve just had another great online event, “Neurodivergence and Entry into the LIS Profession” on the 18^th March. If you want to catch up with it, those speakers happy for their slides to be shared and recordings of their talks to be more widely broadcasted, will have their materials available on our website over the coming days.

The same applies to the great talk Clare Camp gave just after our last update (25^th Feb) on “The experiences of neurodivergent professionals working in academic libraries: recommendations for practice”, her talk is live now. We always share whatever we can on our events pages, but are aware that our presenters often talk about personal experiences that they may not wish to be shared widely, so come along to live sessions to avoid missing out.
Next one is on 23^rd April, “Fitting in and standing out: Experiences of Autistic Librarians in Ireland”, with Grace Dolan sharing her research findings. Bookings are open now!

Another reminder of our call for submissions for our first, in person, two day conference in Leeds, you have until 2^nd April to submit something to us! We can promise a neurodivergent friendly experience 🙂 Lots more information on the conference is available on our website, we will aim for a draft programme by the time of the next newsletter mid April. There is a space open to help organise the conference if anyone wants to help out – email Andy by the start of April if you’re interested.

We had a small number of people expressed an interest in group coaching after the last newsletter, but probably not enough to launch something in the short term – so it’s a “wait and see” on this, we’ll make a decision over the summer whether to go ahead or not.

A group of us have been hard at work writing up results of our big survey we ran last year, hopefully there will be several journal articles appear over the coming year, but how about a tiny sneak peak at one of the things we found? Most (self-reported) neurodivergent library workers are Autistic (55%), ADHD (51%), or often both (almost 50-50 chance of being both if you’re one of them). So if you’re an AuDHDer, you’re definitely not alone out there… everything we write up will end up OA (open access), so you’ll get to see lots more results in the future!