Librarian group to vote on new name in controversial rebrand

The £35 000 rebrand process, led by Spencer Dubois, has met with opposition from some CILIP members, who had attempted to shoot it down.

A motion was brought at the CILIP AGM earlier this month in a bid to halt the proposed rebrand, but it was narrowly voted down.

Critics of the rebrand had dubbed the rebrand ‘a distraction’ and ‘a waste of scarce resources’.

Annie Mauger, chief executive of CILIP, says, ‘Since 2010, following a wide consultation, CILIP has been changing what it does and how it does it. The rebranding is one important part of a whole series of changes.

‘These changes have two goals – to be relevant to the breadth of information, library and knowledge professions and to make their identity clearer to the world.’

CILIP members will now be able to vote on whether to adopt the new name – which comes with the strapline ‘The Chartered Institute for the knowledge professions’ – or whether to retain the existing CILIP identity.

The vote will be held at the CILIP AGM on 21 September. If the new name is approved, testing of the logo and design options will take place in October and November before the new identity is launched in April 2014.

The proposed new name – Information & Library Professionals UK – is not one of the options that CILIP members were initially consulted on.

These options were: Information UK, Info Pro UK, The Knowledge People, Information Professionals UK, The Information Association and Information Matters UK. None of these initial options featured the words ‘library’.