Neurodivergent Library and Information Staff Network

Hi all! We’ve had a busy few weeks at NLISN, especially with our conference, welcome to our July newsletter 🙂

We had our first ever conference last week in Leeds, we’re collecting feedback, working out how everything went, so expect a short conference report next time round. But for now, everything seemed massively positive, lots of lovely things shared by our Keynote, Ausome Charlie* and all the other presenters, with very positive comments on the days themselves. Hopefully we’ll be able to do something similar next year too. We’ll put some more materials on our conference page over the next week or so.

The NLISN committee has expanded slightly, with new members just starting to settle in, so we should be set up for even bigger and better (and more organised) things over the next 12 months.

We’ve exciting plans for events, in-person and online, soon too. The events team thanks you for all the feedback you have shared as part of last year’s events evaluation, we are currently looking through your comments and using them to help plan our events for next year. We are also happy for you to reach out if you would like to speak online about a topic you feel would be of interest to the network. This can be based on research, work related initiatives and practices, or personal experiences as a neurodivergent person in the LIS sector. You can take a look at our Past Events page on the NLISN website to see the range of topics previous speakers have covered. If you would be interested in speaking at an event please contact Maria King (m.o.king@leeds.ac.uk) and Caroline Ball (caroline@openbookcollective.org)

We are excited to announce a new addition to our Case Studies webpage, where Abigail Martin describes how her recent diagnosis and discovery of NLISN has helped in her personal and professional confidence as a neurodivergent library worker.

Feel free to read her story and others’ on our webpages.

Do you have a story to tell around your experience with NLISN? If so, please get in touch.

A sneak peek for future news now, we’ll start doing training for organisations and other groups around neurodivergence related topics very soon – look out for details on our webpages over the summer! We hope this will raise a certain amount of money over the year to help subsidise things like the in-person events and conference, as well as much needed training and awareness for allies and whole library teams. Get in touch if you think your organisation might like to book us!

*If you’d like to book Ausome Charlie or one of her colleagues to talk at your workplace, see Ausome Minds.