Glasgow Women’s Library is a vibrant information hub housing a lending library, archive collections, contemporary and historical artefacts relating to women’s lives, histories and achievements. It delivers an innovative Lifelong Learning Programme, an Adult Literacy and Numeracy Project and a dedicated Black and Minority Ethnic Women’s Project.

We are seeking to recruit committed, imaginative individuals with the vision to develop and manage ground-breaking services in a unique environment.

Archivist

Salary: AP5 SCP 32 (£27,102 per annum)
Full time: 35 hours per week

An exciting and challenging post, we require a qualified and highly motivated Archivist to catalogue, preserve and make accessible our various archival collections and train volunteers in archive related skills. You must be a graduate with an appropriate professional qualification, with hands on experience of archive (and preferably library) management systems and a sound background in cataloguing archival collections. You should enjoy working with a broad range of people, be a confident group leader and have an interest in women’s history and achievements.

Fixed term contract, this post is funded by the Heritage Lottery Fund for 3 years.

Archivist Job Description and Person Specification
Archivist Application Form (Word doc)

National Lifelong Learning Development Worker

Salary: AP5 SCP 32 (£27,102 per annum)
Full time: 35 hours per week

A Development Worker is sought to join our Lifelong Learning Team. We are looking for enthusiastic and resourceful individual to be responsible for the development of a new project to expand our Lifelong Learning Programmes into other areas of Scotland, drawing on our collections and resources as part of our Lifelong Learning Programme. The successful candidate will have extensive knowledge and experience of Lifelong Learning, working with diverse constituencies of vulnerable and socially excluded women and a proven track record of utilising networks and partnerships effectively.

Fixed Term Contract until 31st March 2011.

National LLL Development Worker Job Description and Person Specification
National LLL Development Worker Application Form (Word doc)

Administrative Assistant

Salary: AP2 SCP 19 (£18,319 pro rata per annum)
10 hours per week

We are looking for an enthusiastic and resourceful Administrative Assistant to provide administrative support to the National Lifelong Learning Programme. The post holder will have fast and efficient IT skills and be proficient with Microsoft Office.

Fixed Term Contract until 31st March 2011.

Administrative Assistant Job Description and Person Specification
Administrative Assistant Application Form (Word doc)

Non Executive Board Members

GWL is going through exciting times, with expansion in its staff team, forthcoming relocation to the Mitchell Library and current scoping of the potential to attain national status. We are keen to recruit new members to our Board of Directors to help us realise our ambitions. As well as contributing to the Board’s role in vision-setting, strategic development and the ensuring of public and statutory accountability, we are particularly keen to hear from those experienced in marketing, media/public relations and/or fundraising. You should be passionate about the positive role and potential of learning, libraries and cultural organisations in people’s lives and be happy to become a committed ambassador of the Women’s Library.

BOD Member Role Profile and Application Form (Word doc)

These posts are open to women only and are exempt under Section 7 (ii) d & e of the Sex Discrimination Act 1975.

More information about GWL:
History and Background
Staff and Management Structure

The deadline for applications for all these posts has now passed.

Closing date for completed applications for all posts: 5pm, Friday 8th May 2009.

Twenty nine people attended and a further twenty three sent their apologies.

Dorothy McLelland, Chair of the GWL Board of Directors, outlined another exciting and successful year for GWL, reporting that in our core activities, we saw the consolidation and further development of the projects that form the heart of our work: the Lifelong Learning Programme, Adult Literacy and Numeracy Project and Black and Minority Ethnic Women’s Project.

Learning at GWL

The Lifelong Learning Programme, with its continuing key themes of Living Histories and Active Citizenship, is as innovative and popular as ever, directed by Adele Patrick and supported by Laura Dolan. In the last year we saw an increase in direct learners to 747 – an increase of nearly 20% on the previous year, with no increase in our funding! (The cost is a mere £30 per learner over the course of the year).

The work of GWL’s Women Make History project continues to thrive and inspire, with its West End Women’s Heritage Walks once again being sold out at the West End Festival, and delivered to a number of groups and international conference delegates by request.

We also developed a walk on ‘Women and the Abolitionist Movement’, commissioned by the WEA, and have now been commissioned to create a walk on ‘Women and the Merchant City’. A further walk on ‘Women in the Necropolis’ will be developed next year in partnership with the Friends of the Necropolis. The Women Make History volunteers are developing a DVD and continue to work extremely hard on the project, and we would like to thank each one of them, especially Kirsty, Jean, Valaine and Anne.

We offered workplace learning and placement opportunities to 18 women this year from a diverse range of organisations such as Rosemount Lifelong Learning Centre and Strathclyde University.

We are very pleased that such is the success of our Lifelong Learning Project that the Scottish Government is funding GWL until 2011 to start to deliver some aspects at national level – this work will start next year.

The Adult Literacy Project, developed by Kay McKie and Pauline Healy provides one-to-one and group learning to women who want to develop and improve their reading, writing, spelling or number work.

The project worked with 82 learners during the year on individual learning plans designed to ensure that the learners set their own goals and determine how they can make a lasting difference to their own lives.

We are very proud to be one of three finalists short listed for an award in the Student Learning category at the Scottish Further Education Unit Awards for our joint project work with Stow College and the Wayside Homeless Centre, where we have been providing ALN support to learners undertaking an Introduction to Social Care course. At the Awards ceremony on 25th November, we were ‘commended’ in the most competitive category, with over 90 entries submitted to the overall competition.

The BME Project has flourished during the year under the development of Syma Ahmed, working with 357 learners and 14 BME women volunteers. Our partnership with Langside College sees the provision of ESOL (English Speakers of Other Languages) Classes to an additional 90 women per week.

The collection of migrant women’s stories, oral histories, intergenerational studies and reminiscence projects have all been central to our work and other events include film nights, discussions, story telling and performance.

GWL Development

At strategic level, GWL secured further funding from the Scottish Government to enable us to continue to progress GWL’s formal adoption of national status as Scotland’s only Women’s Library and we are working with Museums Galleries Scotland to achieve status as a Recognised Collection of National Significance.

Importantly, this year saw first major funding award towards relocation to the Mitchell Library, in the form of our Heritage Lottery Fund grant.

The GWL Team

It was with great sadness that this year saw the resignation of Val Atkinson from the Board of Directors in order to pursue study at Glasgow School of Art and we would like to thank Val for her input into GWL’s work and wish her every success.

We continue to build a happy, strong and confident GWL team and feel confident that, with the continued involvement of our volunteers, users, learners, supporters and partners, we can realise our vision for the future – we look forward to another exciting, challenging and successful year ahead.

Some latest developments are included in a new issue of GWL News, and the Annual Report will be available in January.

GWL’s Strategic Development Manager, Sue John, updated the meeting on our relocation developments and the necessary remaining formal business was undertaken, with the re-election of the Board and re-appointment of GWL’s Auditors.

Sue John then launched GWL’s new Women on the Shelf initiative and concluded that support for GWL has never been more crucial than at this time as she encouraged everyone to become Friends of GWL and to support our Women on the Shelf initiative.

Refreshments were served as we all enjoyed watching (again!) GWL’s appearance on ‘Reporting Scotland’ in July and saw a presentation of images of the many GWL events from the past year.