In November, we attended the first Relationship Management in HE Libraries conference. This was attended by librarians, mostly in subject/academic liaison roles, from across the UK and overseas.

We were attending both to learn from the conference, and to deliver a workshop on some of the engagement activities we have trialled with the Schools we support.

One of the first things we did at the conference was try to come up with a definition of relationship management (or RM), which was surprisingly difficult!

Pictured is just one of many definitions we came up with. For the most part, the conference focused on managing relationships with academics and with the Schools, but we think it's important to remember that we are all engaged in relationship management. Anyone who has to work or liaise with another service, another department within CLS, or another team, is engaged in relationship management.

If you'd like to know more about the conference overall, both of us have blogged about it, and there are Storifys of all the tweets from the conference available - we'll circulate links.

For today, we wanted to give an update on what we discussed during our workshop.

The workshop was in two parts: first, we outlined what approaches to engaging with students, staff and researchers we had tried, and how successful we'd been.

For the second half, we asked delegates to adopt the personas of different types of library users (e.g. academics, students, PhD candidates) and assess the engagement activities we'd outlined from the points of view of each user type.

If you'd like to know more about the activities discussed here, there is more detail in the presentation we delivered at the conference: http://bit.ly/RM-prezi

Several people from other institutions had tried one or two of the approaches we discussed, but no one else had done the range of things we'd attempted. That's something we should be proud of - we have a reputation in the library community for being innovative!

Coordinate with Research & Enterprise to ensure a comprehensive offering.

Suggestion from another institution - could be less intimidating for new students to ask their peers for help?

Possibly in the afternoons/evenings

Another institution had tried this. Encouraging students to bring a friend along to one-to-one appointments with their librarian increased uptake, made it less intimidating, and was especially beneficial for international students.

This would be particularly useful for PGRs, distance learners, part-time students, and others who are not often on campus.