Rachel's Big Adventure

Getting back on track with my Chartership portfolio

2012-03-03T08:42:00.000-08:00

It’s nearly a year ago that I registered for Chartership, found myself a mentor, went along to a “Preparing for Chartership and Certification” course and wrote this enthusiastic post about how I could totally do this whole Chartership thing, aiming to be ready to submit by July 2012. However, in recent months I have been feeling a bit lost with it, knowing that I am doing loads of stuff to go into my portfolio and developing personally and professionally, but feeling like I am too disorganised and losing my grip on actually building my portfolio. The first #chartership chat on Twitter in February left me feeling like everyone except me was on top of things, so I decided it was time to do something about it! I booked myself onto a “Building your portfolio” course which was running in Bath on 3^rd March, and designated the 2^nd March, a day which I was taking off work in order to use up annual leave, to my portfolio.

Yesterday was my “Chartership day” and I’m really glad I decided to spend a day looking at my portfolio; I started to sort myself out and feel better about it. The evening before, I had joined in on the second #chartership Twitter chat, and found it much more useful now that I knew I was going to give some time to sorting my progress out. I reflected on my PPDP, realising that I have met several of my development needs already and have lots of evidence to demonstrate this, a couple of my development needs are no longer relevant or applicable because of changes in priorities at work, one still needs more work, and I needed to add several more as a result of changes, both in my role and in my personal ambitions, over the past year. I also looked at the criteria and began to identify where the gaps are in the evidence I’ve collected so far, which has helped me to identify where I still have work to do. I was left feeling like I had made more progress than I realised, I knew what I still needed to do, and I could maybe even make the deadline I originally set for myself.

Today was the “Building your portfolio” course, which I found really helpful and motivating. Nicki and Lizz reminded us of various bits of the regulations, and some tips for building a portfolio in terms of collecting, organising and presenting evidence, and writing the evaluative statement. There was lots of interactivity throughout the morning which I found useful; sharing experiences and ideas with others is a really good way of prompting new thoughts I think. The most useful exercise for me was one in which we took a large sheet of flip-chart paper, divided it into sections for each of the criteria given in the Chartership handbook, and in small groups discussed what kinds of things we could use as evidence for each one. I found this helpful for two reasons; firstly because others in the session suggested items of evidence that I hadn’t thought of, thus providing me with some further ideas for demonstrating that I have met the criteria, and also because discussing the types of evidence for each criterion confirmed to me that I had correctly identified the gaps in my portfolio yesterday. The other aspects of the workshop which I found particularly useful were the opportunities to look at successful portfolios, and to discuss issues, ideas and questions with other MCLIP candidates. The #chartership Chat on Twitter is a great place to do this, but not everyone is on Twitter, and so events like this provide a valuable opportunity to meet and speak with other candidates from a variety of backgrounds.

One of the questions I was still pondering when I turned up at the course this morning was how to organise my collection of evidence; how and where to keep it all? I have a folder at work into which I put any pieces of paper which could be used as evidence, and my electronic evidence is spread out across my work filespace, laptop filespace, and email inboxes – really not organised enough at this stage! Lizz and Nicki gave us several suggestions for this, and as a result of their ideas I am going to try using Dropbox as a place to store all of my evidence. It can be used online in a web browser but you can also download it to sync with your desktop and your smartphone, so it’s a good way of storing documents so that they can be accessed from wherever you are. I will keep the print folder in case I want to add anything for which I have no electronic version, but as you can now submit your portfolio completely in electronic form (hooray!) I am not going to keep duplicate print copies; I will get rid of anything in that folder which I have in electronic copy, and make sure the electronic copy is in my Dropbox.

A few other useful tips that I picked up from today are:

Assessors are now failing portfolios if any of the evidence contains personal data for other people, or breaches copyright. Be really careful to anonymise anything referring to other people, do not reveal sensitive data, and consider copyright laws and good practice. I know that after putting all that work in, I would find it really frustrating to fail on something like this so I am going to check everything really carefully!

Don’t make the assessor think! Make sure your portfolio is clear and well laid-out, and that the evidence you point to in your evaluative statement is easy to locate. If your assessor has to start thinking about how they are supposed to find things in your portfolio, they will begin to look at it in a more critical light.

Don’t make your own copy of your portfolio; it will be sent back to you so you will have a copy to keep.

The Chartership matrix can be a useful tool when you’re coming to the end of building your portfolio, and want to select only the really relevant evidence from what you’ve amassed. Fill in this grid with your various bits of evidence, and then you can easily see which pieces meet all of the criteria; these should be the ones to go in your portfolio.

And finally, as previously mentioned, it is now possible to submit your portfolio completely electronically! It will still need to be in triplicate though, so you will need to send it on three USB sticks or discs. More information on this new development is available on the CILIP website.

I left the course feeling really positive and looking forward to getting back into building my portfolio. We were very helpfully provided with the forthcoming assessment board dates, which has helped me to form a deadline: I would like to have submitted my portfolio by the end of August of this year. My next step now is getting my evidence collected so far into some kind of order in my Dropbox by criteria, and starting to create something that actually looks like a portfolio.

National Libraries Day in an academic library

2012-02-11T05:00:00.000-08:00

Last Saturday (4^th February) was National Libraries Day (NLD) 2012 in the UK. You can find out more on the website, but this was essentially a day for celebrating libraries. Public libraries in particular held events to celebrate.

During the week leading up to NLD, it struck me that we should really do something to mark it at work. Saturday is a tricky day for academic libraries as they tend to be much quieter, staffed with fewer staff and/or open shorter hours than during the week; in contrast to public libraries where, as I remember well from my days as a Saturday assistant, Saturday is one of the busiest days of the week. However, I felt that we should make some effort to recognise NLD in the days leading up to it.

Due to the last-minute nature of my suggestion and that fact that everyone was very busy that week, my colleagues gave me the go-ahead to basically just get on with it! I decided we should put some posters up around the library, featuring the NLD logo, an explanation that Saturday was NLD, and a “did you know” fact about the library. We had four different posters in total, each with a different “did you know”; about our longer opening hours this year, a reference building tool for Harvard which we have just launched (with an iPhone app coming soon), the existence of subject librarians, and our new 24/7 Chat service. My colleague who designs a lot of our publicity and is really good with Publisher created them for me, and I placed them around the library; by the front door, by the self-service machines, and on the door to the IT area.

I also thought it would be good to run a little competition. We have a suggestions box for users to submit comments and suggestions. It’s not very well used, so I decided that for this week we should offer the chance for users to win a box of chocolates if they submitted a comment and included their contact details. I asked my colleague to create some special comments slips, advertising the opportunity to win a box of chocolates and asking the users what they did and didn’t like about the library, which were placed next to the box along with a sign explaining that it was NLD and there was a competition. I set this up on Wednesday, and on Friday also brought in some sweets to place by the box, in early celebration of the day (and to try to entice them to submit a comment!).

On the day itself, my colleague who was on duty (we only have one member of staff in each Saturday) explained to anyone who hovered near the sign or poster by the door about the fact that it was National Libraries Day. It was also an undergraduate Open Day, so it was good that we had some posters and this small display up, for visitors coming into the library. As previously mentioned, Saturdays are quiet for us, and unfortunately we didn’t get that many visitors – Open Day attendees or students – over the weekend. When I came in on Monday all of the sweets were gone, but we only had three comments submitted in the box (only one of which included a name and contact details, so they won the chocolates by default!). I have to admit I am not sure why so few people entered the competition – there was chocolate on offer! Although weekends are quiet, the box was there throughout the Thursday and Friday, so plenty of students came in. I wonder if they just didn’t notice it; they came into the library for a purpose i.e. to get a book, to do some work, to print something off and didn’t pay attention to anything else?

We therefore didn’t manage to generate a large amount of interest in National Libraries Day – with only three entries to our competition, and no member of staff being asked anything about the day. I think this is partly due to me organising things at the last minute; if I had thought about it sooner perhaps I might have come up with some more ideas, and I would have been able to ask colleagues for ideas too. It was also suggested that it might have had more impact if there had been something organised across the whole of Library Service, not just at one small campus, and I definitely agree with this. Not only could all of the libraries have put up posters or displays, but we could perhaps have made use of the library or university website. The suggestion that if there is a National Libraries Day next year, there is a wider promotion across all campus libraries, will be taken to Library Services management by an appropriate colleague.

I’m glad that we did something to mark National Libraries Day, even though it didn’t have much impact. It was a good opportunity not only to engage with library promotion on a general and national scale, but to promote what we offer. It was also useful to gain some feedback about the library from students through the comments submitted, even though there were only three. If we had started planning earlier, and there had been promotion of the day in other campus libraries too, on a Library Services-wide scale, I think it might have been more successful. As I wondered earlier, if students don’t pay attention to displays or posters in the library, how else could we promote something – through the webpages, or is there another way? I think all of this is definitely something to bear in mind for any future events like NLD.

Library Day in the Life, Round 8: Friday

2012-02-08T09:59:00.000-08:00

I start later than normal today, as I am staying past the usual Friday finish time of 4.30pm and have some flexitime to use up too. I arrive at about 9.30, armed with my homemade veggie rocky road to share with my colleagues in celebration of National Libraries Day tomorrow! I also put out some sweets for the students on our NLD display.

I check my emails and respond to one from a friend who is kindly coming to present at one of our staff development hours as an outside speaker, answering some of her questions about what is required and also provisionally arranging for her graduate trainee to come and visit us at the same time. I respond to few more emails and go through the UKSG e-news, looking for anything of interest to me as a campus library journals librarian.

After a quick coffee (and a sample of the rocky road which has gone down very well with colleagues - I am proud!), I finish off the evaluation of previous teaching sessions which I started earlier in the week. Then it’s 12pm and time for an hour on the enquiry desk. I get a few enquiries, about fines and printing. In between these queries, I try to sort out my overflowing email inbox, having received several warning emails about it getting too full, sorting messages into folders and deleting anything I don’t need. I also try to work out whether I’ve migrated everything of my accounts that I need to, in preparation for a forthcoming change in e-resource authentication, and have the odd peek at the Guardian HE Live Chat which is taking place at the moment, on the topic of the role of the academic librarian in today’s HE institution.

I take lunch from 1 until 2, and then catch up with my book classifying. We receive most of our books shelf-ready, but we have a few rules (such as if there are more than six numbers after the point, or fewer than 4 items at that classmark already) which mean that books are passed to subject librarians to check and re-classify if necessary. Occasionally we purchase books from elsewhere which require classification from scratch - I love doing this as it’s like detective work, and so satisfying when you finally settle on a classmark! All of the books waiting on my shelf are shelf-ready ones to be checked. I decide that some can go through as they are, but that I need to shorten or change the classmark for others. Media and cultural studies covers such a wide range of topics that I can be asked to purchase books on pretty much anything, and it’s fascinating to look through them. The books I’m checking now cover topics from social media to gaming to pornography in China!

Next, I sort out the AV reports for last month. At the end of every month I receive a report generated from the LMS which shows the catalogue records for all of the new DVD titles added to our stock that month. I check this report carefully for any misspellings or errors. This is really important as something as simple as a typo in the title of a DVD can render it difficult or almost impossible for a user to find, and if I don’t catch it at this stage it will get lost. Every month the LMS also generates a report of all AV held in our library, which I export to Excel and tidy up into a useable list to be saved in the AV folder on our shared drive, for our records. From this spreadsheet I use filters to create a spreadsheet of DVDs currently known to be missing, and titles which have no BBFC classification; again, I save these to the shared drive every month, as being able to access this information quickly and easily is helpful.

After another cup of coffee (and another piece of rocky road) I’m back on the enquiry desk from 4 until 5. I only have one enquiry, which is about printing. For the rest of the time I try to work out with a colleague what the story is behind a mysterious box of DVDs that has been found in the office, create a spreadsheet of “suspect” missing DVDs – DVDs which went missing without apparently ever being borrowed, so we want to keep an eye on their replacements – respond to some more email actions, and look through a couple of book alerts to see if there is anything we don’t have which, based on my knowledge of modules and teaching areas, my department might want. I also look at what I’ve got on next week and make sure I’ve prepared everything that I need to.

At 5pm I’m finished for this week. Apart from the day off on Monday, this has been a fairly typical week – a lot of different tasks to manage, and one evening shift. About once every six weeks I work the Saturday shift. I don’t teach every week; usually only during October/November and January/February - but this is a typical week when we do have teaching.

Library Day in the Life, Round 8: Thursday

2012-02-02T13:50:00.001-08:00

I’m on the evening desk shift today so it’s a late start for me. I arrive at about 9.50am, make a cup of coffee then sit down for my Chat service shift from 10am until 12pm. We are part of an international co-op to offer 24/7 Chat to our students; in the middle of the night their enquiries are picked up by librarians in the US, and during the day we pick up enquiries from students at US universities, as well as our own. I love doing Chat; you never know what you’re going to get asked and it’s a great feeling to be able to help students on the other side of the world! The chats start flying in and I’m fairly busy; I help students in California with finding statistics and a student in Maryland who can’t access a section of their library website. It’s definitely challenging; you need to quickly read the policy page for the student’s institution to work out how you can help them, and you can’t always access the same databases that they can. They are very grateful though – it’s the early hours of the morning where they are and they’re still able to get some help – and one tells me I am awesome which is lovely! I also help one of our students with referencing. Students are invited to fill in a feedback survey when their Chat ends, and today I receive my first feedback survey from this student, who found the service really useful; so it’s a very successful Chat session for me today!

When I’m Chatting I can’t leave my desk or get involved in anything else, so in between enquiries I do little jobs like catching up with emails, selecting programmes from the Radio Times to select on Box of Broadcasts, and looking through the session plan for a repeat of the teaching I did on Monday.

My Chat session overruns a little, as often happens, but I still have time for a lunch break before teaching at 1pm. I get positive feedback on the session again, and feel like I go through the databases a bit more slowly this time, which is good.

After teaching I return to my desk to read the feedback forms and work through some more email actions, before an enquiry desk shift at 3pm. It’s fairly quiet – the only enquiry I get is about booking a study room - so I finish selecting programmes on Box of Broadcasts and catch up on some more emails. At 4pm I’m off the desk and I take a short coffee and cake break before finishing off my programme selection and doing some more teaching feedback evaluation (see yesterday’s blog post).

At 5pm I’m back on the enquiry desk. I have quite a busy shift this time: I help students to find books and print their work and ask some noisy students to be a bit quieter, as well as getting up fairly frequently to let in students who don’t have their student cards – the doors lock after 5pm and they are supposed to swipe in with their card! In between all of this I do some more teaching feedback evaluation and send some emails. At 6.30pm it’s time for me to close the desk and go home. A security guard keeps the library open self-service only until 9pm.

Later on that evening, I make some veggie rocky road to take into work for my colleagues tomorrow in early celebration of National Libraries Day…hope it turns out well!

Library Day in the Life, Round 8: Wednesday

2012-02-01T13:57:00.000-08:00

I’m on the first enquiry desk shift again so it’s another 8.10am start to get the library set up for opening. While I’m doing this a colleague calls in sick, so, being the person who took the call, my first job of the day when I sit down at the desk at 8.30 is to arrange cover for their issue desk shifts. I and two colleagues are able to cover so that’s sorted quite quickly. Today it’s not long before I get my first enquiry; a student needing help with finding materials on British theatre in the 1980s. I search through some of the electronic databases with them and emphasise the need to think of different ways to describe the search terms. I only have one other enquiry before my shift ends; helping a student with the new online study-room booking system. I spend the rest of the time catching up with emails and making a start on checking a long list of books passed to me by an academic, to find out which we have already and which we need to purchase.

At 10am I’m off the desk, and after a short coffee break I go back to the book list. It takes me most of the rest of the morning to work out what we need to buy and how much it is likely to cost; I share a book budget with a colleague and as I know they have recently put a large order through, I want to check with them that this one is going to be OK in terms of funds! Once I’ve done this I look at an email that’s just dropped into my inbox about a new website which I think might be useful for my students. I am signed up for some Jiscmail lists for media and cultural studies academics, as well as LIS ones, in order to maintain a current awareness of new books, events, websites, blogs etc. in my subject area. My colleague and I have been adding links to useful websites for our subjects to Delicious stacks, and I wonder if this new site might also be worth adding. It turns out it’s not really appropriate. It’s now 12pm and I take my lunchbreak.

At 1pm I am back on the enquiry desk for an hour. This shift is a bit busier; I deal with enquiries about renewing an Inter Library Loan, extending a loan for teaching, booking rooms and accessing online journals. I go back to my office at 2pm and spend an hour working through the evaluation forms from some teaching that we did last week, analysing and summarising the results and comments into a useable document. After a short coffee break at 3pm, I send the big book order from this morning through to my colleagues who do the ordering, and then put up the National Libraries posters and signs that my colleague designed yesterday around the library. I’ll explain more about what we’re doing and maybe add some pictures in Friday’s blog post! I also email round the team to explain what we are doing for NLD, as it has all been a bit last-minute!

From 4 until 5pm I am covering the issue desk. It’s quiet – Wednesday afternoon usually is as it’s sports afternoon – I pass holds to a couple of students and answer a couple of queries about loan limits and fines. I don’t usually work on the issue desk so it’s nice to have a bit of a change of scenery and perspective! In between enquiries I start going through the Radio Times to look for anything I think we should record and add to library stock via the off-air recording service, and also for programmes to select on Box of Broadcasts, a fantastic TV and radio streaming database to which we subscribe. I do this every week and I select loads of stuff on BoB. Now that we have BoB I don’t request much to go on disc; mainly films for which the playback quality might be important. I don’t get all the way through so this will be one of my first tasks to complete tomorrow morning.

Library Day in the Life, Round 8: Monday/Tuesday

2012-01-31T12:07:00.000-08:00

I’m an academic librarian working in a small campus library of a UK university. I’ve been working here for nearly 15 months now, and it is my first professional post since finishing my MA in 2010. Working in a small campus library, I have a number of responsibilities; I am a subject librarian for Media and Cultural Studies, I look after our journals and AV stock as well as some other acquisitions duties, I line-manage a member of staff, contribute to the management of the library, and work on the enquiry desk, amongst other things. If you want to know more about who I am, what I do and how I got here, feel free to look at my Library Routes post. I’m taking part in Library Day in the Life Round 8 mainly because I’m nosy and like to read about what others get up to! In seriousness, I hope that it might be useful for someone considering a career in LIS work, or LIS students who are trying to decide which path to take. As usual I am going to blog a week rather than a day, as this will be more representative of what I do.

I had the day off on Monday, to use up time accrued from working last Saturday and flexitime, so this time my week starts on Tuesday. I’m on the first enquiry desk shift of the day so I arrive at about 8.10am to make sure everything is switched on and that the library is ready to open when I take my seat at the desk at 8.30. It’s very quiet and I don’t get any enquires during this shift. While I’m on the desk I catch up with emails after having the day off yesterday. I then email round some of my colleagues to suggest that we do something for National Libraries Day which is on Saturday. After that, I do some final preparation for the teaching I am delivering later this morning. It’s a session for undergraduate History students who are about to carry out group projects for which they need to use electronic resources only. The subject librarian for History has planned the session so I’m going through the various databases to practise the searches and make sure I know what I’m doing.

My desk shift finishes at 10am. After a short coffee break I go through various letters from journals publishers. They are all renewal notices so I check that we have renewed or cancelled through our subscription agent. I do some final preparation for teaching then deliver the session. It goes quite well though I possibly speed through it faster than I should! The feedback from the students and accompanying lecturer is positive though. Teaching finished, it’s time for another hour on the enquiry desk. I deal with a few enquiries on this one; helping students to book a study room using our new booking system, answering questions about inter library loans, and trying to trouble-shoot an IT problem with a disc not playing in a computer. In between enquiries I ask a colleague to help me create some posters for National Libraries Day, do some housekeeping and work through actions from the emails I went through earlier.

At 1pm I am off the desk and it’s lunchtime until 1.50pm, when I make sure that the teaching room is set up OK and that the guest speakers for our 2pm staff development hour have everything that they need. I am a member of the library-wide Staff Development Group and I help one of my colleagues to run the staff development hours at our campus; this is an hour-long informal training event which takes place fortnightly, to ensure that staff manage to take part in staff development on a regular basis. Today we’re hearing from colleagues from elsewhere in the university who work with the international students, supporting all aspects of their experience as a student here. It is really interesting to hear about the things that they offer, and they suggest ways in which library staff can help our international students to settle into university life.

At 3pm I have a quick coffee break then send out an online survey to those who attended the staff development hour, to gain feedback on what they enjoyed about the session and whether they found it useful. We do this after every session and it helps us to plan future sessions. I then spend the rest of the afternoon answering a query from a student who is trying to find material for their dissertation on a couple of television programmes, one of which there hasn’t been much written about. I send them details of databases to use, and explain that they will need to search more broadly. I don’t have much information about their actual research question so I encourage them to get back to me so that I can help further if needed. My colleague whom I asked for help with National Libraries Day stuff also appears to show me the fab posters he’s made – I’m looking forward to putting them up tomorrow!

Visit to the BBC Bristol Library

2011-12-17T08:20:00.000-08:00

Through SWRLS/CILIP I recently had the chance to visit the Library at BBC Bristol. The Library consists of the main Information and Archives, and the Natural History Unit.

The archives are mainly multimedia; they do have some books and journals but these are kept in closed stacks. They keep an archive of footage for two reasons; so that it can be re-used, and so that footage that is filmed for a programme but not used in the final version can be kept.

All of the staff to whom we spoke emphasised that the archives were in a massive period of change, mainly technological. As filming and production have developed, the format in which material arrives into the archives has changed, and they are moving towards digitising material so that is it available at researchers’ desktops, enabling them to do their own searching through the archives.

It was fascinating to gain an insight into the world of the Natural History Unit archives. It is such an amazing and precious collection; one example being that a certain species of frog has only ever been filmed once before it became extinct, and the only existing copy of that tape is in this archive! The NHU archive currently contains about 100000 VHS, and they are looking to digitise all of these eventually, becoming a tapeless archive. They have so far digitised only Planet Earth, and we were shown the database in which these digitised copies are stored and catalogued, which is fairly easy to use and thus accessible to researchers and any other non-LIS staff who might need to use it. Digitising the rest of the collection and adding it to the database is going to be a massive and lengthy job; Planet Earth alone took 5 people working on the project full-time 3 years to complete!

Aside from digitisation, the biggest challenge faced by the NHU archive at the moment is the format of the material that they are receiving into the archive; they are sent films on hard-drives which contain large amounts of material requiring accurate and detailed metadata to ensure that everything contained within them is discoverable.

Information and Archives is also facing challenges. As well as the multimedia material itself, there is often a lot of paperwork associated with the programmes made at Bristol i.e. compliance and clearing forms which also need to be stored and easily retrievable. In order to respond to this challenge, the librarians have recently become media managers, and they try to ensure that there is a media manager within each production team as soon as a programme is commissioned, so that they can liaise effectively with the team, advising on what needs to be done from an I&A point of view and finding out what the Archive is likely to be receiving. This in itself has been quite challenging, but they are starting to see positive results, and they now have production managers telephoning to ask why they haven’t yet got a media manager for their team!

Similar to the situation of the NHU archive, another challenge faced by Information and Archives is the format of the material that they receive. Whilst they are receiving material in modern formats, the Archive also contains older material in sometimes out-dated formats, and they need to have the knowledge and equipment to be able to access any of this material; they not only have the challenge of adapting to new technologies, but of remembering how to use the old ones.

We were shown the catalogue, and the work that the team is currently doing to turn it into something more accessible. We were also shown some of the databases that they subscribe to; these include databases to search for experts who would be willing to appear on television or radio, to find music to accompany programmes, and to find out how to pronounce things! Additionally, a database makes all programmes from 2007 onwards available on all staff computers. They also subscribe to some databases more familiar to those of us in other sectors, such as Nexis. The research and reference role of Information and Archives has transformed over time; while it used to be very much about doing research for production, it is now about centralising material and training people to do their own research.

I really enjoyed finding out about the work of a sector about which I knew nothing. It was interesting to discover the specific challenges faced by the BBC Library, and I was also struck by how similar some of them are to those faced by other libraries; for example, the efforts made by the media managers to effectively liaise with production teams by becoming embedded in them is very similar to the ways in which many academic librarians are trying to improve liaison with academic departments by forging closer links, and sometimes becoming embedded in the curriculum. I came away with a good knowledge of the work done by a library in the media sector, as well as the main issues that they have to deal with, and the ways in which these challenges are different and similar to those faced by other sectors.

Returning to Sheffield

2011-11-26T09:18:00.000-08:00

I’ve been a bit delayed in writing this post – the CDG National Conference took over!

A couple of weeks ago, I was invited to speak at a careers event organised by Carly Miller, New Professionals Support Officer at the Yorkshire and Humber division of the CILIP Career Development Group, for the current MA Librarianship students (and any other local new professionals who wanted to attend) at the University of Sheffield. It was strange being back in the department and speaking in a room in which I used to sit for lectures, but it was a fantastic experience; it was lovely being back there.

We had a really good turn-out – I’d guess there were about 15 to 20 students there, despite the fact that it was at 4.15pm after a full day of lectures. They were a great audience; attentive and engaged. Carly started by talking about her professional journey throughout the MA (she finished it this year) and afterwards. Carly did loads during her MA; working, volunteering and organising social events and visits to mention but a few activities! She did a great job of encouraging the students to get involved but also warning them not to try to do too much. Carly also had lots of tips on job-hunting, applying for conference bursaries and the like, and what to do if things aren’t going to plan.

Next, I talked about the LIS New Professionals Network (LISNPN). Some of the attendees had used it, some had heard of it but not used it, and others were not familiar with it at all. This is what I had predicted (hoped for!), so I planned my presentation to both introduce it to those new to it, but also to offer suggestions for other ways in which to use the site i.e. contributing to the blog as well as using the forums, and to hopefully encourage non-frequent users to become more involved. I didn’t see any glazed-over faces during my presentation, so I think I was successful! I also introduced myself in terms of my job, so that anyone interested in working in academic libraries could ask me questions about that too.

The final speaker was Angela Greenwood, who is a librarian at the Information Commons at Sheffield and the National Fairground Archive at Sheffield. Angela told the attendees about her route into librarianship and the work that she does, in the Archive in particular, which looks amazing!

I really enjoyed being a part of this event. It was great to meet some of this year’s MA students, and to be able to give something back to the department from which I took so much. I would really like to be involved in an event like this again, and have offered to help the department out in any way that I can in the future.

This is my presentation if anyone is interested.

The LIS New Professionals Network (LISNPN)

View more presentations from rachel_s_b

Reflections on the CILIP Career Development Group National Conference 2011

2011-11-24T13:31:00.000-08:00

The 21^st November saw the CILIP CDG National Conference 2011 take place in Bristol. I was lucky enough to have been asked as a local CDG committee member whether I would like to help out on the day. When I accepted the invitation, I expected to be purely a kind of runner on the day, but I actually joined the organising committee for the final stages of planning the event, which was a great experience.

I started off the day meeting and greeting in the venue reception – it was fun to be the friendly face of CDG as attendees arrived! Once everyone was seated it was time to take on my main role for the day, as a kind of official conference Tweeter; reporting on the conference using the #cdgpp hashtag and monitoring the tweets coming through on it. I have tried to Tweet from conferences in the past and found it difficult to do so at the same time as making good notes; however, having thrown myself into it this time, I’ve found that my Tweets act as fairly good notes in themselves. If you want to see what was being said, you can see the Twitter archive here. Quick tip if you’re looking after the Twitter side of things at a conference; remember to set up an archive with Twapper Keeper or similar before the event – as far as I know there are no tools that capture Tweets from before the archive for the hashtag was created. It’s really useful to have this archive; non-Tweeters can then catch up with what was said on Twitter.

The theme of the conference was the Practical Professional, and this was reflected in an excellent set of papers on a range of topics. Amanda Poulton kicked the day off with a presentation on changing sectors, something which several of the speakers had done. Amanda has worked in NHS, academic and public libraries, from which she has gained a broad range of skills and experience. She emphasised the importance of researching your target sector if you are wanting to move; from seeking out contacts on Twitter to arranging visits to a relevant library service. Amanda’s presentation introduced a theme which ran throughout the day; the transferable nature of many professional skills. To illustrate this, she showed us some snippets of job adverts, asking us to identify which sector they were from; this was not as easy as you might expect. The different adverts were asking for similar skills and experience i.e. liaison and enquiry work. Our professional skills can be applied across the sectors; it’s up to us to demonstrate this when applying for a job in another sector

Next up was Emily Hopkins, who discussed the challenges for a library service in the NHS, with the recent restructure and other changes having a big impact. Emily came into a newly merged service as a library manager. The issues she has had to deal with range from maintaining a virtual reference service whilst the print stock was in storage for six months (emphasising the importance of professional skills; with these, the staff were able to keep the service running with no stock!), to losing users, gaining new potential users, and numerous IT problems! The library had to re-assess its whole strategy and collection development policy in order to ensure that it could provide the service now required. Emily emphasised this need for all library services to be constantly re-evaluating services in times of change, to ensure that it remains useful and relevant. Emily also echoed Amanda’s thoughts on the importance and transferable nature of professional skills.

Katie Burn and Kirsty Whitehead then spoke about being “career chameleons”. Both are currently on extended secondments in the Information Directorate at the University of York; Kirsty as an academic liaison assistant and Katie as an executive officer for refurbishment (!). Both of them emphasised the need to be flexible when looking for your next career step, but also the necessity of maintaining clearly-defined goals; what is important to you – what factors have to be in place for you to be happy? They also continued a theme which began in Emily’s presentation; treating challenging situations as a positive opportunity to develop new skills; in this case, being in fixed-term positions. This rang true with me as I am also on a fixed-term contract; I am saddened by the prospect of having to leave my job (and obviously worried about being unemployed!), but rather than dwelling on the negatives, I need to be focusing on what I am getting from this job, which has been fantastic experience. Katie and Kirsty offered several other useful tips, including the need to be able to say “no” or admit that you have too much to do, and the suggestion that we should all be looking at job adverts even if not actively job-hunting, in order to remain aware of the skills currently required in the LIS workplace. A major theme through this presentation was change – the fact that it happens frequently and significantly, and the need to treat it in a positive way – and I think this was reflected in every paper of the day.

The next speaker was David Clover, who discussed “thinking big” when it comes to career development. David argued that a planned approach to professional development is necessary – where do you want to be, and how will you get there? David suggested that our CPD goals should be big, ambitious, scary and exciting. Sometimes you will need to take risks, and sometimes you will need to invest your own time and money in things. David shared his experience of applying for the Travelling Librarian award. He was unsuccessful, but as the panel liked him they offered him a smaller grant which went towards a trip to the USA to visit libraries there. David was successful in persuading me, and, I’m sure, others, that we should be thinking big; you never know what will come of it. Another comment from David which stuck with me was that we should be setting our own personal goals rather than relying on the formal appraisal systems in our workplaces; our employers probably don’t care where we’ll be in 10 years’ time as it quite likely won’t be with them! A lot of us will have created development plans for Chartership, and David suggested that we need to be continuing to maintain these plans after we’ve Chartered, in order to keep our professional development on track.

Phil Bradley was up next, with a fast-paced and thought-provoking paper on social media. Phil argued that search engines can no longer cope with the amount of information available online, and that we will need to in the future find things using social media. Phil emphasised his belief that organisations which block social media are damaging themselves by doing so. Social media is a new kind of resource which we should all be using – and we should be moving from one network to another, in the way we would move from one traditional resource to another, to meet our information needs. Social media, argued Phil, is now far more useful than mailing lists or websites; Phil uses people for information, not websites; he pointed out that seven of the top ten results in a Google search for “CILIP CDG” are social media (including my blog – I had no idea!). He emphasised the importance of having a presence on social media as LIS practitioners, as that is now where people go to ask questions; we need to show that we are credible sources. If we aren’t there, someone else will be, and it will be them who appears credible, not us. I was already convinced of the importance of using social media, but Phil’s presentation did make me realise just how important it is. He also convinced me to go back and give Google Plus another go, as he was so insistent that it was something we should be using.

Next came Katherin Schopflin, who spoke about the role of a knowledge manager. I didn’t really have any idea about what a knowledge manager was or how they differed from a librarian, so I found this presentation really helpful! Simply put, Katherin told us, a knowledge manager organises not only information, but also the stuff that is in people’s heads. Many of the skills required and duties of the job are very similar to those of a librarian, but organising knowledge as well as information requires tasks such as skills audits to be carried out. Katherin explained the benefits of being a knowledge manager, being at the heart of an organisation, but also the challenges faced; namely that the role can be ill-defined and it can be difficult to demonstrate value.

After lunch, we did a bit of speed networking, which involved rotating around the room forming groups of threes, and spending three minutes in each group telling each other about our jobs and what makes us unique – a difficult question which I wasn’t really able to answer! This was however a great opportunity to chat to some attendees whom I hadn’t yet had chance to meet.

Miggie Pickton kicked off the afternoon session with a presentation on providing services for researchers at the University of Northampton. Her role was newly-created, with a basic brief to provide services to researchers; she decided that her aim should be to “be useful”. Miggie carried out a survey of researchers’ needs, which provided an evidence base for developing the library service; Miggie emphasised the importance of having evidence to work from. She also made an interesting point which hadn’t occurred to me; it’s not only a good idea to carry out your own research to inform your service, but it also improves your credibility with the researchers with whom you work. When I began to think about it, I realised that, actually, my experience of carrying out research and having it published in a peer-reviewed journal could allow me to better understand the needs of academic staff and other researchers, having been through the process myself.

Emily Hopkins then returned, with Tracey Pratchett and Gil Young, to talk about “negotiating the scramble net” of a LIS career from the perspective of librarians in their 20s, 30s and 40s. The really interesting bit about this presentation was that all three of them had had very similar experiences. The themes brought up by the previous speakers were again echoed; the need to be flexible and ready for change, and to see challenges as opportunities. The transferable nature of our professional skills was again emphasised, and all three speakers encouraged us to develop networks and contacts both inside and outside of work; a peer support network can be extremely valuable, which is something that Gil Young highlighted in particular when sharing tips for surviving redundancy – if you tell people that you’re job-hunting, you increase your chances of hearing about something suitable. Another great tip from Gil was to keep your CV up-to-date in case you need it; if you suddenly find yourself in the position of needing to find a new job, you may well not be in the positive mindset needed to produce a good CV.

Next up was Jo Myhill, with my favourite presentation of the day (being part of the organising team I didn’t get a vote for best paper though!), about being visible. Jo started off her presentation by speaking from the very corner of the room without the microphone, to illustrate her point, which I thought was a really effective opening. Jo leads a team of academic liaison librarians at the University of Bedfordshire, who were suffering from a lack of visibility when they moved off the front desk. Jo’s vision of being visibly is not just about physical visibility, though – there is a huge emphasis on virtual visibility too. They worked on improving visibility on their webpages, from putting photographs of the subject librarians all over the Library website, to creating blogs with an element of personality (one of them now has 500 followers!). There is also a focus on branding when it comes to visibility; the team has a logo saying “academic liaison librarians” which goes on everything. I really like this approach – it helps to ensure that students know what an academic liaison librarian is.

Last but certainly not least came Lizz Jennings, talking about “every flavour career beans”. Lizz was another speaker who had moved between sectors and, like the previous speakers, she emphasised the fact that there are core aspects of library and information work that are found in every sector; our skills are transferable. Lizz also recommended, like David, maintaining a structured and planned approach to professional development, even if you’re not working towards ACLIP or MCLIP. Lizz made the very good point that sometimes you can find yourself with too much on your CV, especially if you change sectors; knowing how to be selective in highlighting your skills is a skill in itself!

The delegate vote for best paper selected Amanda Poulton as the runner-up and Katie Burn and Kirsty Whitehead as the winners.

I found the ideas around career development expressed throughout the day really helpful for organising my own thoughts and ideas. It helped me to realise the importance of a planned approach to professional development; I think it is very easy to find yourself doing anything and everything in the name of CPD, and not really working out why you are doing something or how it will help you progress. Beginning Chartership has forced me to make a plan, but I think I could still be a lot more organised in regularly reviewing my plan and looking at what my evidence actually says, so I am going to make the effort to do this. I also found the emphasis on viewing challenges in a positive light as opportunities useful, particularly in relation to secondments, fixed term contracts and redundancy; as the end of my contract draws closer, I find myself starting to worry about what will happen next, but the speakers at this event persuaded me to focus more on what I have gained from my time in the role, what contributions I can make in my remaining time there, and what I can take forward to my next role. I am going to take Gil’s advice and make sure I keep my CV totally up-to-date, so that it is ready when I need it.

I really enjoyed being involved in the organising of the day, which has sparked a desire to become further involved in organising events. I’m really pleased that the CDG national events team is happy to keep me on, and I can’t wait to get involved in organising the next conference.

Library Camp 2011

2011-10-10T12:58:00.000-07:00

On Saturday 8^th October, I attended the first ever UK Library Camp. You can find out more on the website, but to briefly summarise, Library Camp is an un-conference which operates on concepts of Open Space and the Law of Two Feet; attendees are responsible for their own learning and contribution, setting the programme and taking themselves to wherever they can best participate. I decided to go because it was a free event taking place at the weekend, meaning minimal total costs and no time off work required, because I was intrigued by the un-conference concept, and because so many other members of the LIS community would be there. I was fairly nervous about it as the day drew closer; the delegate list was overwhelming and I was worried I wouldn’t feel able to talk to people, and, with no programme set beforehand, I didn’t know what to expect from the event itself, which made me a bit uncomfortable – I usually like to look at what’s on in advance, to start deciding what to attend and to think of questions I might want to ask.

However, I found the event to be a really enjoyable and inspiring one. Hot drinks and loads of cake courtesy of some talented attendees made for a relaxed atmosphere which made it easy to talk to people. I think it also helped that all name badges were self-made (some very elaborately!), which meant that we could put whatever information we wanted and thus express our identity in the way that we felt most comfortable, which makes for much easier conversation openers than the usual corporate-looking name and job title badges that are often supplied at conferences. As a heavy Twitter user, I found it helpful that most people put their Twitter IDs fairly prominently on their badges – you then “recognise” people and it was lovely to finally meet some people whom I have spoken to on Twitter for ages but not yet encountered in real life. However, this must have been really intimidating for people who weren’t on Twitter. During the introductions, loads of attendees introduced themselves by first name and then by Twitter name, demonstrating what an integral part of our professional and personal identities it can be for those of us who use it; again, if I weren’t a Twitter user I think I might have found this alienating. I don’t think I spoke to any non-Tweeters but I hope that those who were there were made to feel welcome.

Despite my initial trepidation about how well deciding the programme on the day would work, it actually worked really well. People were very forthcoming in pitching ideas for sessions, which was done by standing at the front and describing your idea in less than 30 seconds; if other attendees were interested, you wrote it on a post-it. The organisers then did a fantastic job of putting together the post-its into a programme for the day, which ran like any other conference; multiple sessions running at the same time, in 45-minute slots throughout the day (but with no repetition of sessions).

The first session I attended was about cataloguing and classification. I do a bit of cat and class in my job and really enjoy it, and I’ve been interested in information retrieval since I studied it during my MA, so I thought it would be good to join in a discussion about it and hopefully learn something new. The attendees were a mixture of cataloguers, systems librarians, and people like me who do it as part of their role. I have to admit that a lot of what was discussed went over my head, as I don’t know a huge amount about cataloguing standards and interaction with systems, but there were a few points raised which made me think. There was a lot of discussion about adhering to standards and creating records which are useful for our users; does strict adherence to cataloguing rules always result in the best records? Being responsible for overseeing the cataloguing of our AV stock, I quite often find myself looking at how we have always done something versus how various guides say we should do something versus how it’s most sensible to do something, and recently I’ve come up with what I think is the most sensible way to catalogue TV series; it might not be the absolutely correct way but it’s the way that will be most helpful for our users, which I think is the important thing (I realise it is not always easy or appropriate to tweak cataloguing rules for all material or in all libraries though). This discussion made me think that I should perhaps look at some of our other AV cataloguing, to assess the usefulness and clarity of our records and check that everyone is following the same rules.

Another issue which came up during this session was that of achieving serendipity online; how can we replicate browsing the physical shelves in the online environment? I’d be interested to follow any work on this. Finally, we ended the session with the question of whether we all enjoyed our cat and class roles (we all did, whatever they were). The Hi-Vis Cataloguers blog was mentioned, which I have looked at recently and will definitely continue to follow.

The second session I attended was on modernising public libraries and maintaining a service despite staffing cuts. I went primarily for the latter aspect of the session, as this is something that is affecting many across the LIS world – and indeed the attendees confirmed that in public, academic and special libraries alike, people are having to redistribute workloads and take more on as staff leave and are not replaced. It was also interesting to listen to the discussion about public libraries; I was late to the session and missed some of it, but when I arrived, people were discussing the problem of demonstrating the social returns on services – it is not something that can be easily shown in numbers, or at least, not in the types of numbers that councils ask for or pay attention to. There was also discussion of whether libraries adequately sell themselves, the problems of shared services (particularly in putting public libraries into school libraries – this throws up all sorts of issues, from stock management to opening hours to security), and the potential negation of the library as a neutral space if it is sharing space with a council building, for example.

Lunch provided another good opportunity for talking to people, and doing some learning too – thank you to the extremely knowledgeable Jo Alcock for the impromptu lesson on QR Codes and Foursquare that she gave a few of us!

My first afternoon session was on the question of what libraries can learn from retail, hosted by Jo Alcock and Anne Martin. Both have recently written on this topic – Jo’s blog post is here. Some researchers have examined the “science” of shopping, observing people’s behaviour in shops and using that to inform design and practices in retail. Jo and Anne suggest that we can do the same in libraries. This was a really lively session – so many people in attendance that it was standing room only for the late-comers – and loads of good ideas were being thrown around. Some which particularly grabbed me were providing shopping baskets/trolleys for people to use in the library (people are more likely to stay and browse if they’ve got somewhere to put the books they’ve found), ensuring that there are enough chairs etc. (people won’t stay if they’re not comfortable), and utilising the staff who users encounter out on the floor – often these are the most visible staff in the library. This last one seems to be obvious, but I worked as a shelver on and off for several years and I experienced varying levels of instruction from my supervisors about how I should be interacting with users. I was always comfortable with using the OPAC as a student, and was happy to help other students out with this, for example, but some of my co-shelvers were less so, and as there was no expectation on us to answer queries, would always refer students to the desk. I think we should be trying to look at the library from a user’s perspective and work out who and what they’re seeing, and make sure staff are ready for that. One American library apparently has one day per year when library staff go and use the library as patrons, and I think that’s a good idea. I definitely came away from this session with the opinion that libraries can indeed learn a lot from retail, but I would want to be careful about which aspects we want to take; for example, it was suggested that libraries could have staff to approach users at the shelves and offer help, in the way that assistants in shops do, but personally I hate this when I’m shopping, and would be reluctant to introduce this in my library (roving help is of course a good idea but I wouldn’t want us to be actively approaching students).

The next session I attended was also especially relevant to my current role; liaising with internal stakeholders and embedded librarianship, with a cross-sector perspective. Laura Woods began by telling us about her experience of becoming embedded in a team at the law firm where she works; becoming a member of the team, physically sitting with them for a period of time each week etc., and from there we discussed the various issues around liaison with our stakeholders in both academic and special libraries. The issue of names came up fairly quickly – what is our job title and how does that affect how stakeholders see us – but the suggestion was made that it doesn’t actually matter too much what we are called, as long as it makes sense to our users and stakeholders; as long as they know what we can do for them. I would definitely agree with this; as someone pointed out, it’s not “the library” who can help them, it’s a person within the library, and I have found that, as academic staff (our stakeholders) have gotten to know me by name, the more willing they have been to contact me to ask questions about anything to do with the library. We also discussed ways of reaching out to our stakeholders, with participants relaying their experiences of taking the library out to them, using online networks such as a section on the intranet, blogs, and online bulletins, and creating a library “brand”. It was interesting to discover the similarities between the problems faced by the different sectors – making sure the stakeholders know what we do and how we can help, and getting the library “brand” past Marketing, for example – and also to find out about liaison with stakeholders as a librarian in a firm or company; a sector I didn’t know that much about previously.

For the final session of the day, I chose social media. A couple of social media experts offered one-on-one help to anyone who wanted advice on using any aspect of social media, while the #uklibchat team led a discussion on their experiences of running the chat, asked for our feedback, and facilitated a more general discussion on professional use of social media. I’m a heavy social media user and didn’t particularly learn anything new from this session, but I was interested to hear other people’s reactions to #uklibchat (a fortnightly Twitter discussion based around a theme and questions within that theme, which can be anything to do with libraries), and it was a good opportunity to share my own thoughts. Some attendees mentioned other Twitter chats that they had come across, and I intended to ask whether anyone would be interested in a #chartership chat but I didn’t get the chance; I’ve had some interest expressed already so I think I will go ahead and organise that though (do let me know if you think this is a particularly good or bad idea!).

Overall, I thought that the day was really successful and stimulating, and I think I benefitted from attending. The most useful sessions for me were the one about learning from retail and the one about liaising with stakeholders, as these provided me with ideas which I could put into practice in my current role. I did however also enjoy following up my personal interests of cat and class and social media, and having the chance to hear about people’s experience of maintaining and modernising public library services, a sector about which I do not often get the chance to learn so closely. Library Camp definitely helped to enhance my understanding of the LIS profession as a whole, as well as providing me with information which I could put to practical use at work. I also enjoyed, as ever, having the chance to talk to old friends, people who I only ever see at conferences and events, and new people. I suspect that I did miss some sessions which would have been useful, but it was very difficult to make sure I attended the best combination; with the programme being posted on a massive board in the café area on the day itself, it was difficult to spend much time studying it due to everyone trying to do the same thing, and obviously you don’t have the chance to look over the whole programme in advance. I did consider taking a photo on my phone of the board, but it was too big and the writing too small for that to be possible. If I were to attend a similar event in future, I think I would try to look ahead when looking at the board, rather than only looking at the next set of sessions, to try to make some kind of plan for myself.

Library Camp was run really well by the organisers, and I was impressed at how effective the un-conference format was. It does however rely on the people attending being willing to pitch ideas, facilitate sessions effectively, and get involved in discussions, so anyone organising such an event would need to be sure that this would happen. I would love to attend it next year if it happens again. One thing I would say, however, is that it seemed to be advertised on Twitter and not really anywhere else. Tickets were snapped up quickly by those who were on Twitter during the day; I signed up at lunchtime and emailed a couple of colleagues about it. When I later went to email other colleagues, the tickets were sold out. I do feel that non-Tweeters and those who can’t use Twitter during the working day did perhaps miss out (although there was a waiting list, which was a good idea), so I hope that next year this might be something the organisers consider.

Next time I would like to get involved a bit more. I only spoke at any length during the liaising with stakeholders and social media sessions; in the others I felt unsure about contributing, or unable to get a word in. Some facilitators tried to ensure that people didn’t speak over each other by using a foam ball which you had to be holding to speak; while this was a good idea, much hilarity ensued due to the lack of throwing and catching skills in the room, which, along with trying to dodge the ball when it came flying towards your head/coffee, could be a bit distracting! I think I would try to ensure that I contribute more next time by pitching an idea and volunteering to facilitate a session, thus forcing myself into a position where I had to speak! I would also think in advance about how I might run a session in order to give everyone the chance to join in, whether by using flying objects, or something else.

Another thing which I took away from the day was wondering where else the un-conference concept could be put into practice. We are currently looking into a library-wide staff development event, and I am wondering whether we could work Open Space into it somewhere. I have definitely been left with a lot to think about! A big thank you to organisers and attendees, who made the day so successful. If you want to know more, spend some time looking round the Library Camp wiki.

New Year Resolutions

2011-09-06T13:45:00.000-07:00

Those of us working in education have two New Years; the usual January one, and the start of the academic year in September. Having spent most of my life studying, and all of my non-student years working in academic libraries, the new academic year has always been a time of changes, new directions and new starts, and so I always feel more inclined to make resolutions at this time of year rather than on the 1^st of January. This year is no different; it’s my first September as a fully-fledged librarian and I am full of ideas and plans for the near and slightly more distant future. I thought it would be fun to share my New Year Resolutions and to find out if anyone else is making any. I also hope that by writing them down and putting them in the public domain I will be more likely to stick to them!

Get back on track with Chartership

I felt really positive about the process when I registered for Chartership back in March, but since my initial burst of finding a mentor, attending a “preparing for Chartership” event and writing my PPDP, I feel like I have lost my way with it. I know that I have been doing loads that can go in my portfolio, and I’ve been reflecting on my blog about everything I’ve been doing, but I still feel like I’m not really getting anywhere with it. I have now decided to try to get back on track and do my best to meet the deadline I originally set for myself, which was to be ready to submit by next July. I think I need to do this by speaking to my mentor a lot more, actually putting things into physical and electronic folders of evidence rather than letting them drift around the internet or my desk, and reading the Chartership Handbook and Building your portfolio again.

Get really good at teaching!

I really enjoy teaching and it’s one of the reasons I went into academic librarianship, but I haven’t yet had the opportunity to do a huge amount, or lots of sessions in a short space of time, which I will probably be doing when term starts. I have a few ideas about how we could improve our evaluation procedure and hope to be involved in planning sessions, as well as delivering lots of them, and fully intend to work hard and get really good at teaching!

Catch up with CPD23

I will do this. Honestly! I want to finish the programme and I want to do it properly and thoroughly and to take something valuable away from it.

Become more active in my roles outside of work

I’ve been a New Professional Support Officer for my local CILIP Career Development Group for a while, but haven’t really done that much for various reasons. This year I want to be more active in reaching out to local new professionals, organising events, socials and training if possible, and really demonstrating what CDG can do for them. I also have lots of ideas for the LIS New Professionals Network (LISNPN), for which I have recently taken more responsibility, and I want to make sure I put at least some of these into action.

Blog more, about a wider variety of things

I only started blogging this year and, whilst I think I have written some good posts, I’d like to blog a bit more frequently, and on a wider range of LIS-related topics. I have loads to say about new professional-related issues, but I am not just a LIS new professional, I am a general LIS professional too. I also enjoyed branching out a little when writing about my “seven books that changed the way I see the world” recently, so I’d perhaps like to write on some broader topics too.

Apply for more sponsored places/bursaries

I only developed the confidence to apply for sponsored places and bursaries to conferences this year, and it has served me really well; I had a fantastic time attending Umbrella 2011. I intend to keep an eye out for further similar opportunities to attend events that I probably couldn’t otherwise.

Start thinking about the future

I suppose some of my other resolutions, such as getting on with Chartership and blogging more widely, feed into a general desire to start preparing for the future. My current contract ends next July and I feel that I should now be starting to think about what happens next, as time passes very quickly and it’s best to be prepared. I’m also starting to come to terms with the idea that I won’t be a new professional forever (although that breaks my heart!) and that the time is approaching when I need to start thinking about what my professional identity will become.

I’d love to hear about your New Year resolutions if you’ve made any!

Are we asking our academics what they think of the library?

2011-08-03T12:23:00.000-07:00

Recently, an academic (who is also a librarian) wrote a post on the Social Justice Librarian blog on “how academic libraries annoy academics”. It was linked to by several people on Twitter and so I’m afraid I don’t know who to credit for bringing it to my attention. The author centred their post on an experience with their institution’s library, in which they couldn’t find a book which was supposed to be available, after spending time logging into and searching the OPAC and hunting on the shelves for it. They used a “report problem” link on the OPAC page to explain that the book didn’t appear to be on the shelves after all, then returned to their office to an email explaining that they needed to report circulations problems in person at the desk. This left them feeling irritated about using the library; they had found the experience frustrating and unhelpful due to the systems in place. The reactions to this post were mixed; some blamed the author for not going to the desk to ask for help while they were in the library, while others agreed that academic libraries need to assess how well their systems are working, and that if they are not working well then that’s the library’s fault, not the user’s. Katie Birkwood wrote an excellent and thorough blog post which covers much of what I would like to say on the topic; if academics are having these kinds of experiences in the academic library, then we are “doing it wrong” and we risk alienating our academic colleagues.

The whole blog post has made me think about my library’s relationship with the academic staff who use it, but one section in the final paragraph set my chain of thought in motion to the point of writing a blog post on the topic: “Maybe academic libraries aren’t concerned with how the power faculty at their institutions perceive them. Maybe it’s all about the students and the have-nots of academia these days. Maybe it should be. I dunno.” Academic libraries are extremely student-centred. My library service, and I’m sure others too, put out surveys to find out how students feel about the library. We take into account comments made about the library in the National Student Survey, and improve our service accordingly. We have a comments and complaints box into which students can drop quick notes on anything they want to mention. Scan the professional literature and you will find plenty of case studies and papers which focus on student experiences of the library. My library service’s core values document and my institution’s objectives both emphasise the importance of a good quality student experience. Students are the centre of our attention, and, as the author suggests, they should be. University is an extremely expensive financial investment for students, and they rightfully expect services within the institution to provide good value for money. However, in our efforts to provide an excellent service to our students, are we forgetting to ask what our academics think about the library?

Our academics are not paying for a service in the same way that the students are. They are paid to be a member of the university. However, a library, any library, is there to serve all of its users, and academics invest a great deal into an institution; where would the university be without their intellectual and emotional contributions? Perhaps, then, we need to be taking more time to address their particular needs. I feel that, in my library, we have good relationships with staff in the departments that we support; my colleagues and I share a belief in the importance of effective academic liaison. Since reading this blog post, however, I have begun to question whether this is enough, for a number of reasons.

Firstly, just because they feel happy to talk to us about stock needs for modules, book orders and teaching sessions, does that necessarily mean that our academics feel able to talk to us about other aspects of the library? Would they expect us to be able to sort out problems with circulation of stock, for example, or might they think that that’s not an aspect of academic liaison? Would it even occur to them to ask for help with or make comments on their own personal use of the library, or might they presume we are just there to help them in terms of their teaching? With the pressures of marking coursework and exams, meeting research deadlines, supervising and teaching, do our academics even have time to contact us to talk about something which isn’t working for them? Or will they just find an alternative solution, as the author did? We cannot presume that, just because the academics with whom we liaise fairly frequently do not tell us that they have a problem with the library, everything is working well for them.

There is also the issue of whether we are reaching all academic staff in our liaison work. Some academics are bigger library users than others, depending on the nature of the modules they teach, and their own personal work. Some engage with their academic librarians more than others. Staff leave and new staff take up positions on a yearly basis. Some will be away from the institution for a significant period of time on research leave elsewhere, and so may not need or be able to come into the library or contact staff. Academic staff who don’t know us very well might not feel confident about putting forward a complaint to us, or even know that we could help. Again, just because we don’t receive any complaints from academic staff about the library, this doesn’t mean that we are offering a satisfactory service.

Additionally, it is near-impossible to measure library non-use. We just don’t know how many, or how frequently, academics are using other sources for their information needs without considering the library. We basically have very little idea about how useful the library is to our academic staff.

All that I’ve just suggested about academic staff and library usage – the possibilities that they don’t know that librarians could help, perhaps don’t feel able to make complaints, or don’t necessarily use the library as a source for research and academic support frequently or at all – sounds very familiar; they’re all issues that came up in my dissertation project on student perceptions of academic library staff. Even though students and academics have different information and research needs, some of the potential barriers to effective and satisfactory use of the library sound fairly similar – so why not try to find out about the needs and experiences of academics in the same way as we do with students? I am sure that there are some academic libraries out there who are surveying their academic staff, gaining feedback and improving the library service for academics and researchers as a result, actively asking their academic colleagues how the library could be more helpful. I really think that all academic libraries should be thinking about doing the same. Of course, there are difficulties in work like this – time being a major one – but if academics are having experiences like the one the author of the blog post in question describes, then we are not providing the service that we should be. If we want to try to ensure that academic libraries do not irritate any more academics, then we can’t afford not to find out, and act upon, what they think of the academic library.

Seven books that changed the way I see the world

2011-07-31T06:56:00.000-07:00

The idea for this post is shamelessly pilfered from SaintEvelin and Bobbi L. Newman’s blog posts, which immediately made me try to work out which seven books changed the way that I see the world! Thank you to both of them for such inspiring thoughts on the topic, and I hope that they don’t mind that I have written my own version.

I’ve found it quite difficult to select my books. As an avid childhood and teenage reader, an English Literature graduate, and now an embarrassingly lapsed reader who rarely finds the time to read fiction, but still enjoys it, I have read a lot of books. I think that most of them have changed the way I think about things in very tiny, subtle ways and that, collectively, the books that I have read have shaped the way I see the world. It’s a challenge to try to pick out the ones that have had the most individual impact, and I am sure that there are more than these seven.

Journey to the Centre of the Earth, Jules Verne

I can’t remember how old I was when I first read this, but I was young – maybe eight years old? I’m pretty sure it was the first book that I ever read that could be classed as “science fiction”, and it totally grabbed me. I had been reading non-fiction books about volcanoes from the children’s section of Kingstanding Library in Birmingham since I was about four or five years old, and was absolutely fascinated by them (those of you who know me will know that I remain a frustrated wannabe volcanologist to this day!). The idea of journeying to the centre of the earth, via volcanoes, exploring the Earth’s core, and what might be found down there (I won’t tell you in case you haven’t read it – go and read it!) was an amazing one to me, and this book boosted the vivid imagination that I had as a child. It sparked an interest not only in science fiction, but also in the possibilities of real-life exploration of our planet, and reinforced my desire to have a job playing in volcanoes when I grew up! I re-read it several times as a child and I think another re-read is long-overdue, particularly as I hope to visit one of the volcanoes featured in it in the not-too distant future. It also introduced me to the work of Jules Verne, much of which is excellent, though this remains my favourite.

The Chalet School series, Elinor M. Brent Dyer

I’m cheating a bit by choosing a whole series rather than a book, but there is no one particular book that I can pick out. It was the books near the start of the series, when the school was based in Austria, which most had an impact on me. I read them as a child and they introduced me to the European continent, sparking an interest in the countries and the languages. I was fascinated by the multilingual nature of the school and its pupils and staff, who came from all over Europe, and who were expected to be proficient in multiple languages; the school had two English, two French and two German days per week, where teaching and conversation were to be done solely in that language (on Sundays they could speak whatever language they liked). I learnt my first bits of basic French and German (words for greetings and meal-times etc.) from these books, and couldn’t wait to start learning the languages properly at secondary school. Sadly, when I got there, I didn’t in the end take to German, but I loved French and Latin, and have, as an adult, started trying to pick up Spanish. I really believe that my love of languages and desire to visit different European countries first came from these books. Towards the end of series, the school is based in Switzerland (it had to move around several times due to circumstances such as the Nazi Party coming to power – these books really engage with the context of the time in which they were set). When my first ever opportunity to travel abroad arose when I was 11 years old, it was to go to Switzerland – I remember being hugely excited, in part because the books made it sound beautiful (I wasn’t disappointed).

Buxton Spice, Oonya Kempadoo

This is another book which sparked an interest in another area and culture of the world. This was the first book that I read during a module on Contemporary Caribbean Women’s Writing during the first year of my undergraduate degree. It is set in Guyana, and really evokes a sense of place. Since reading it, and subsequently other books from Caribbean countries, I have been fascinated by the Caribbean. After this module, I originally planned to do an MA in Postcolonial or Caribbean Literature and then a PhD in the same subject; obviously, that hasn’t happened, but I wouldn’t rule out the possibility of it ever happening. The interest in the Caribbean aroused by this book has affected my reading choices, my own writing, and has added a load of countries onto my list of places to visit. Prior to reading Buxton Spice, I didn’t have much interest in visiting the area – I thought that all there would be to visit were the usual holiday resorts – but since then I have had my eyes opened to all the possibilities of places to explore there. For me, having plans to travel and a travel “wish-list” enriches my life, and so this is why I would say this book was life-impacting, by adding to my list.

1984, George Orwell

This was the first dystopic novel that I read, and it prompted me to seek out more of them. I am fascinated by natural disasters (volcanoes, earthquakes, tornadoes etc etc!), the various dangers to us that are out there in Space, and I always like to consider the worst-case scenario when it comes to the destruction of society or the planet (I’m not sure what this says about me!), so dystopic literature really appeals to me. This book changed the way I see things because it demonstrated to me the power of the creative human mind to predict a possible future, or a worst-case scenario which science doesn’t always consider. When I was at university, my housemates who studied sciences predictably asked what the point of studying literature was. My reply was that writers, good ones, have the ability to predict a possible, likely future, based on their perceptions of what has happened in the world so far, and their ability to take these and imagine how the future might develop. Writers can see and consider things that scientists might not, and 1984 is an example of the power of imagination to look ahead into the future. While the scientists were busy developing technology (an important thing to do, of course, I’m not saying it isn’t), writers such as Orwell were thinking about the development of society.

Ariel, Sylvia Plath

A collection of poetry rather than a novel, but I feel it still counts as a book. Ariel inspired me to start writing poetry properly. I’d always written silly little poems throughout my childhood, and then songs during my teenage years of wanting to be Alanis Morissette. When, as an older teenager, I read this collection of poetry, it really showed me how writing poetry is a delicate, difficult craft in itself, and absolutely not the easy alternative to writing prose. It made me realise that writing poetry is not a case of scribbling down some words when inspiration strikes; you have to sit down and work on it, re-write over and over again, constantly question the effectiveness of the images and the impact of the words. It is hard work, but a well-written poem can have a massive impact on the reader, as do most of the poems in this collection. After realising this, I began to write poetry that was actually alright. I’ve let my writing slip in recent years, but I will go back to it, and when I do I will pick up Ariel again, as a reminder to myself that I will need to work hard.

Frankenstein, Mary Shelley

This maybe didn’t change the way I see the world in general, but it changed the way I see literature. I read this during my first year at university, and was completely blown away. It is the perfect novel. Absolutely perfect, in the way that it is written, it the way that it deals with different layers of themes, in the images and the sense of time and place. I cannot believe that Mary Shelley was only 18 years old when she wrote it, because it is just phenomenal. I have read many amazing books before and since, but none of them have struck me as another example of a perfect novel. I recommend you read all of the books on my list, if you haven’t already, but if you only choose one, make it this one.

The Vagina Monologues, Eve Ensler

I picked this up for £3 from Musiczone (remember Musiczone?!) when I was 15 and first interested in feminism. It felt a bit rebellious too, buying and reading on the bus a book with “vagina” in the title! Any childish thoughts like that, however, disappeared when I read the book. It made me realise that the vagina is actually a far more complicated thing than just a bit of the body; it symbolises a lot, and talking about it can be funny, sad and enlightening! This book developed my interest in gender and feminism – it’s probably the first thing that made me decide to define as a feminist, and feel able to explain why - and I have read it many times since. It has also boosted my confidence in talking about gender and feminism. Last year I performed in the stage version of The Vagina Monologues at Sheffield Students’ Union, and that too was life-impacting; being involved in the text and one of the people who brought it to life for an audience was an amazing feeling, and everyone who I spoke to who attended absolutely loved it and had a great time.

Writing this post, and reading the posts that inspired it, really demonstrate the power of books! I’ve also enjoyed writing this very much; perhaps I should write about literature more.

What do you think? Did you have a similar experience with any of the books I’ve chosen, or did they leave you cold? What books have changed the way that you see the world?

Library Day in the Life, round seven: Tuesday

2011-07-26T11:22:00.000-07:00

It’s going to be a very short blog post today, as much of what I did was very similar to yesterday, and I don’t want to repeat myself. So here’s a couple of the other tasks that I carried out.

Selecting off-air and BoB recordings. Every week I go through the Radio Times and select programmes and films that would be useful additions to stock. Once upon a time I would send them all through to our off-air recording service, who would record the programme and then send the disc to me, to classify along with our commercial DVDs. However, we now subscribe to Box of Broadcasts, which has really reduced the need to record things. It’s a streaming service which allows subscribers to select things from the week ahead to record, which are then added to the BoB archive for any subscriber to watch; so if someone from another subscribing institution has selected something to record, you don’t need to, as it will become available to all. Most of my selection is now done on BoB; this way, the programmes are available to a large number of students at any one time, and they can watch from wherever they have a computer and internet connection, neither of which is true of a DVD in the library stock. However, I do still send a few things through to be recorded onto DVD and added to stock; our Film students often analyse aesthetic aspects of films, so we want our film recordings to be of high quality, which, being a streaming service, BoB recordings sometimes are not.

Classifying DVDs. I have been getting behind with classifying recently, as I’ve been focusing a lot on journals, so today I decided to spend some time on the growing selection of DVDs on my classifying shelf. We usually purchase DVDs from Amazon, and, as I’ve said, we get discs sent through from the off-air service, so classifying is done from scratch. I add a classmark (cinema films all go at the same classmark, with cutter letters from the start of their titles), subject headings, geographical headings, general notes such as the presence of bonus material, and parallel titles, if any. I enjoy classifying DVDs – they’re interesting, and I have found that my knowledge of film has really grown since I started my job (though I think my parents found it annoying when I was home for Easter, and I piped up with “I’ve classified that!” every time they suggested a film to watch!).

I also agreed a date for a Staff Development Hour that I am going to deliver up at the main campus during the next academic year, on the research that I did for my dissertation and consequent journal article. Staff development is viewed as really important by Library Services, and there are fortnightly Staff Development Hours at each campus during term-time. I have delivered/helped to deliver a few already, so I’m looking forward to this one, although I think it’ll be a while before I get chance to sit down and plan it.

Library Day in the Life, round seven: Monday

2011-07-25T11:34:00.000-07:00

I’m sure those of you reading this are familiar with the Library Day in the Life project, but if not, then you can find out more here. Basically, twice a year library staff and students blog and tweet about their day or their week, to provide an insight into the many different roles that we have. I began participating during the last round, in January of this year. Last time, I wrote very detailed, realist accounts of my days over the week, hoping to bring the reader into my day as far as possible, to give them a sense of my workplace life. I think this was a good approach, but I don’t think I need to repeat it each time, so for this round I am going to write short blog posts of each day, highlighting the main things that I have been doing. If you want to know more about anything, please feel free to ask in the comment section!

I am an Assistant Librarian working in a small campus library. My role covers several aspects; I have responsibility for management of journals at this campus, some acquisitions functions, classifying and maintaining the AV collection, and subject liaison for media and cultural studies. I also line-manage two members of staff, and contribute to the overall management of the library. I don’t tend to do a bit of everything in one day; usually I’ll be concentrating mostly on something within one of my roles.

Because of the different parts to my job, I don’t have a typical day, so I will blog each day for the rest of this week; a week should be much more representative of what I do.

Some of the things that I did today are

Line management admin. I didn’t realise before I started my role how much time line management can take up. As well as meeting with the staff you line manage, you need to write up notes from your meetings, carry out appraisals, and other one-off things. It’s really important to make the time to do the writing-up as well as the actual contact time. We’re in the middle of appraisal season at the moment, and it’s really helpful to look back at what the two of you have discussed in the past, what their achievements throughout the year have been, etc.

Desk shift. During term-time, the librarians and senior library assistants work on the enquiry desk, and the library assistants work on the service desk. However, at the moment it is vacation, so we are only running the service desk, and all of us take turns there. During my hour on the desk today, I helped a student use the photocopier, issued some Inter-Library Loans, took some fines, and emptied the book bins from the self-service machine. There aren’t many students around so there isn’t a great deal to do on the desk at this time of year; I take some other work out with me to do.

Created a spreadsheet of journal fund codes. I spend a lot of time creating, updating and working with spreadsheets, particularly in the journals side of my role. I can’t say it’s my favourite bit of my job! It is however, very necessary – we need accurate records – and it’s quite rewarding when you get a spreadsheet finished which is going to be really useful! Today, I’m mapping old fund codes to the new ones coming in this year, in anticipation of the main renewals (the journals for which the subscription runs from January to January, which is most of them) which we will process in a couple of months. It takes a lot longer than I anticipated, partly because I have to double-check a few which are moving to a fund code within a different subject, and partly because I don’t hit on the most efficient way to do it until I’m nearly at the end – sigh!

Attend Campus Management Group meeting. The librarians and senior library assistants – 6 of us in total – try to meet every fortnight to discuss what’s going on in the library, make decisions about priorities, iron out any problems etc. Today we start to talk about plans for the new academic year; rotas for the coming term, and how we’ll be involved in Welcome Week.

Pricing up DVDs to purchase. I basically look up each title on my list on Amazon, Play.com and Moviemail, to find out where is cheaper, and put them all into another lovely spreadsheet!

I arrived home to an email from my Chartership mentor, asking how it’s going. I have been rubbish with my Chartership recently – time to ‘fess up…

Further reflections of a first-timer at Umbrella 2011: Day Two

2011-07-21T13:27:00.000-07:00

I was very fortunate to have received a sponsored place to Umbrella that covered the whole conference, so I was able to attend the second day too. I began by attending another session within the Technologies and access strand, which looked at user information seeking. The first of the two speakers was Professor Nigel Ford, from The Information School at the University of Sheffield, who discussed Technology, personalisation and librarians. I always enjoyed Nigel’s lectures when I was doing my MA at Sheffield, so I was really looking forward to this presentation, which was just as engaging as I had hoped. Nigel talked about the need to learn about our users’ information needs, their information-seeking behaviours, and the effectiveness of these behaviours, in order to develop effective user models which will allow us to help them navigate the various complexities of information, and search tools to become “smarter”. He called for LIS “researchers” and “practitioners” to work more closely together, in order to achieve a “critical mass of knowledge” on information behaviour. As a practitioner who would like to become a researcher whilst also remaining a practitioner, I was pleased to hear someone like Nigel argue for the need for the two domains to meet more effectively, and support evidence-based research methods. Another thing which I took away from Nigel’s presentation was an interest in the PATHS project, in which researchers are looking at users’ “paths” to information in the digital collections, with the aim of creating “paths” which can be used as learning objects themselves. I look forward to hearing more about the progress of the project.

The second speaker was Ian Rowlands, from the Department of Information Studies at UCL, who presented on The Google Generation: understanding information-seeking behaviours in the digital environment. Ian told us about conducting Deep Log Analysis (DLA) on server logs to find out how users reached a particular site, and what they were doing once they entered it. Although DLA has its weaknesses, such as lack of contextual information about the user’s task or motivation, Ian explained, it is also a strong method of assessing what people actually did (not what they think they remember doing). He also discussed research carried out in the Department of Information Studies for JISC and the British Library, which looked at the information behaviours of the “Google generation” (those born after 1993) in order to try to discover whether there are fundamental differences between the behaviour of this and previous generations, to which HE will need to adapt. They found that there are issues around information literacy amongst young people, but that this is nothing that we didn’t know already. Finally, Ian discussed a web behaviour test that was developed by the Department in conjunction with the BBC, which attempted to discover what motivates users to click on a website from a list of search results; implicit trust in the search algorithm, perceived authority of the information provider, or something else? Users were presented with search results which contained no contextual information about each result i.e. no URL or site name or anything other than a few lines of text from each site, and then search results which contained no information about the content of the page, but did contain information such as name and provider of the site for each result. The research results are not yet ready but I am interested to find out what they discovered. Both Nigel’s and Ian’s presentations were on topics which I really enjoy learning about and discussing, but with which I haven’t really had chance to engage since I finished my MA, so it was great to hear about the projects that they have been working on. In fact, both made me wish that I was back at library school and attending lectures like these every week!

For the next session, I turned my attention to the Libraries in the Big Society strand, and the subject of Volunteers in Libraries. I’m sure most of you have read the reflection on this session by Jill Howard, CILIP’s Policy Officer, which has been interpreted by many as a statement of support of volunteer-run libraries from CILIP. There was a theme of positivity and enthusiasm about volunteers in public libraries throughout; I couldn’t work out if this was because the speakers genuinely believed in the use of volunteers, because they were restricted in what they could say, being public library staff, or because they felt they had to deliver a positive session as part of Umbrella. I suspect it was a mixture of all three. This session wasn’t what I expected; I was hoping for more of a discussion and maybe a debate about volunteers in public libraries. Mike Brook of the West Berkshire Council Library Service opened the session, reminding us that volunteers have worked along paid staff in some libraries for years – for example, helping to run the housebound service – and arguing that the work that volunteers do must be strictly defined. Mike felt that the idea of community-run libraries is one that will die out, and believed that we will “see off” the threat whilst developing “positive strategies” for volunteers to work alongside paid staff.

Tracy Long, Dorset Library Service Manager, then told us about Dorset’s use of volunteers, who collectively offer 8500 hours per year. They are used to help run the Home Library Service, help out with the Summer Reading Challenge, and to keep some libraries open for longer after opening hours were cut by the Council in 2006. Tracy emphasised that the characteristics of a community really impact on how libraries can use volunteers; in some communities it will be more difficult to recruit volunteers (and good ones) than in others. Tracy Hager, Area Children’s Manager in Wiltshire Libraries, wrapped up the session with a presentation on the use of volunteers for the Summer Reading Challenge at Chippenham Library. Tracy argued that they need volunteers in order to be able to engage effectively with the readers. Prospective volunteers attend informal interviews, during which they are asked about their experience of working with children and their knowledge of children’s books, and receive training once they are accepted. Whilst some of the volunteers were reliable, effective and good at their role, others didn’t turn up on time, were too shy with the children, or were evidently only doing it for something to put on their university applications. Tracy calculated that she spent 35 hours over 6 weeks on managing the volunteers, and said that this was too much and that their procedures needed to be refined.

As I’ve said, I was hoping that the speakers would engage more with the issue of volunteers potentially taking over libraries, but I do appreciate that, as public library staff, they would feel under pressure to not be seen to criticise any plans that their service might have. What I did take away from the session was that, although when working under careful supervision and in conjunction with paid staff, volunteers can be helpful for projects such as the Summer Reading Challenge, recruiting, training and managing volunteers involves a lot of work, and that things can go wrong very easily; for me, this really brought home the naivety and short-sightedness of those who believe that public libraries can be simply handed over to volunteers.

For the final session of the conference, I visited the theme of research in the Skills and professionalism strand. The first speaker was Professor Paul Sturges of Loughborough University, who spoke on Imagination and LIS Research. This was a really inspiring presentation. Paul said that, as someone heavily involved in peer review, he sees a lot of research-based papers, and that the poor ones were often bound by convention. He argued that imagination potentially has the capacity to transform the LIS research discipline; we need imagination for defining our research topic (is this a question that you really want to answer?), the use of theory (do you really need to import theory from philosophy? Do you need any theory at all?), the literature review (it should be used to stimulate your ideas, not list everything ever written on the topic), the methods (LIS research all too often relies on “the survey”!), and interpretation of results - discussions and conclusions are often poor because the author is exhausted from the research and just wants to get the thing finished! Paul also argued that we should be looking outside of the LIS literature for our research, citing a LIS research project in Malawi where the use of agricultural science literature uncovered the spiritual aspects of information seeking amongst farmers there, as well as arguing for the use of imaginative methods when studying perceptions; his example here was of some LIS researchers investigating children’s perceptions of public libraries by analysing posters created by children for a library contest. Paul’s talk got me really thinking about breaking convention in research, and I began to feel really excited about all the possibilities for the research I would like to do. I will be keeping my notes from this session close to hand, to remind myself not to fall into the various traps of lack of imagination; I think that my weak points are the literature review – feeling that I need to find and discuss absolutely everything relating to my topic – and the research method; I have to admit that I am one of those people who goes for the survey, every time! I think my lack of imagination is down to a mixture of lack of experience in research, and the feeling that I need to be really “academic”, so, just as it was really reassuring to hear Nigel Ford support evidence-based, practitioner research in the earlier session, it was great to hear advocacy of creative research methods from someone who is so experienced in research.

The second speaker was David Streatfield, from Information Management Associates, who discussed Cutting edge research: proving our worth or worth proving? David talked about something that I hadn’t come across or thought about previously, which was the increasing politicisation of research. Research assessment frameworks in HE assess academic research output on set criteria such as number of journal publications (what about academics in disciplines which make use of blogs, for example?). Quantitative research is favoured over qualitative research by policy-makers. Setting measures for success risks distorting the research process. David argued that LIS researchers must respond to this challenge by making the case for more rigorous qualitative research and assessment of services. Like Paul, David wanted to encourage LIS researchers to adopt a wider range of research methods, and both of them convinced me that if I am going to get involved in research, I need to do it creatively.

The conference finished with the CILIP Libraries Change Lives awards. All of the nominated projects appeared to be making a real difference in their communities; you can read more about them here.

Overall, attending Umbrella 2011 was an engaging, interesting, educational, informative and thought-provoking experience. It’s difficult to say what made the biggest impact on me; I think I left with some new thoughts on aspects of my role (teaching, information-seeking, interactions with the student body), some knowledge of the wider profession outside of my role (public libraries, repositories), and enthusiasm to take some steps towards research. I also really enjoyed the opportunity to meet new people within the profession, including experienced professionals as well as other new professionals. The Umbrella Conference describes itself as an event for those “at all stages of their careers”, and it certainly appeared to live up to this claim. Most of the other new or newer professionals that I met had, like me, won bursaries or sponsored places to attend, and I was really pleased that so many CILIP branches and Special Interest Groups offered these; they gave so many people the opportunity to attend who otherwise probably wouldn’t have been able to. Umbrella is expensive, and I did wonder whether there were things that could have been done to make it less so; I couldn’t help wondering whether we really needed a gala dinner with a red carpet and waiters with trays of drinks and a string quartet, for example. I am not an expert in event organisation and I have no idea what impact the dinner would have had on costs, but reflection is supposed to be honest, and that is a thought that crossed my mind. However, the organising committee did a fantastic job, and I would like to end by thanking them, and also thanking the CILIP South West branch who sponsored my place, for an amazing experience.

Reflections of a first-timer at Umbrella 2011: Day One

2011-07-19T12:42:00.000-07:00

I was lucky enough to win a full residential bursary from my local CILIP branch to attend this year’s Umbrella conference. This was my first ever Umbrella, and it was a fantastic experience, although very overwhelming. I’ve never attended a large conference before, and I didn’t quite know what to do with myself. I regret not talking to more people, but it didn’t feel like the kind of conference where I could just go up to people and introduce myself. However, I realise I need to broaden my horizons beyond the world of the New Professionals Conference (taking my own advice about establishing dialogues with experienced professionals I suppose!), and that next time I just need to be braver. I did meet several new people who recognised me and/or who I recognised from Twitter, and caught up with some friends, acquaintances, and folk I had met previously in various different ways, so I didn’t fail entirely at networking (and I did attempt to increase my own accessibility by writing my Twitter name on my name badge, as did several others!).

The theme of the conference was New structures, new technologies, new challenges – how can we adapt to an age of austerity? Sessions ran under six “strands”: Skills and Professionalism, Promotion and Advocacy, Technologies and Access, Libraries in the Big Society, Digital Inclusion and Social Change and Workshops: Skills and Techniques. I had originally intended to try to go to something in each strand, but there were two sessions in one strand (Technologies and Access) that I really wanted to attend, so I only made it to sessions within five of the six strands (I missed out Digital Inclusion and Social Change and look forward to reading some blog posts from people who did go to some of those sessions). Between sessions there was an exhibition with stands from various LIS-related groups and organisations (with plenty of freebies – I have SO many bags now!) and a poster competition.

The conference opened with a keynote speech from Gerald Leitner, EBLIDA (the European Bureau of Library, Information and Documentation Associations) President and Secretary General of the Austrian Library Association. EBLIDA lobbies for European libraries and has recently focused on influencing copyright law in Europe. Gerald told us that European librarians are watching UK librarians fight against the threatened cuts to libraries, education and culture that we currently face, and reiterated that libraries are now more vital than ever. He argued that we need to work together to create a framework for libraries in the European Union. I found this speech interesting because I’d never considered the potential impact of EU law and policy on UK libraries; I don’t recall it ever being discussed during my MA. As Gerald pointed out, the EU actually offers a tremendous opportunity to create guidelines and a support network for libraries in the UK and the rest of Europe, and perhaps we should be lobbying our MEPs as well as our MPs if we are not doing so already.

It was then time for the first conference session. I chose to attend Effective Teaching Skills, which was in the Workshops: Skills and Techniques strand. Teaching is one of my favourite aspects of my job and is something in which I’ve always been interested; it was one of the things that attracted me to librarianship. I haven’t, however, had much chance to do it yet; I started my current job last November, after the bulk of the teaching was over. I’ve done a few classes, but I am keen to develop my teaching skills (this is in fact one of my objectives in my Chartership PPDP) and, with September just around the corner (sorry!), this seemed an ideal opportunity to get back into teaching mode. The session was delivered by Chris Powis, who is highly engaging and knowledgeable on this topic. Chris began by reminding us that teaching and learning occurs in our interactions with users at the enquiry desk, in drop-in sessions and through any kind of learning material that we produce, not only during inductions and classes. We are very much teachers, but many of us are not trained to teach; as Chris pointed out, library school curricula tend to focus on information literacy rather than practical teaching skills (during my MA we were offered one two-hour optional workshop on teaching skills, with limited spaces), so our teaching role can be challenging (and is not always accepted by non-librarian colleagues). A big problem that can be faced by those of us who teach is that the expectations of those whom we are teaching are often too high – expecting us to give them all of the answers – or too low (this is a library session – it’s going to be boring!). Chris warned us not to fall into the trap of holding these same expectations ourselves i.e. if we expect our students to be bored, we’re going to deliver a boring session! Chris ran through the importance of appealing to different learning styles, being inclusive, and making your teaching innovative, varied, active, challenging, relevant, interesting, and a performance (whether we like it or not, we are performing when we teach in front of a class, and some people take to this much more naturally than others!).

We then spent the rest of the session in group discussions, sharing our experiences, ideas and tips, talking about what worked for us and what we found most challenging. It was really interesting to hear about teaching in other institutions and organisations, with different sets of users and different kinds of resources, and some of the people on my table had some great ideas for teaching methods and activities, which they very kindly shared with the rest of us. I found this session both useful and inspiring; I came away feeling enthusiastic about throwing myself into the teaching that will come with the new academic year, and armed with a few tips and tricks which I will think about how we could potentially incorporate into our teaching sessions.

The second session was within the Promotion and Advocacy strand and consisted of two presentations. The first was Not Just Bars and Gigs: Working in Partnership with the Student Union from Linda Smith of Nottingham Trent University. Linda pointed out that members of the SU executive are ideal advocates for the library service, as publicity from the student body itself is the best kind. At Nottingham Trent, the Library and the SU have reciprocal arrangements in place; space in the Library foyer can be used by the SU for online voting in their elections, and by SU clubs and societies, and the SU provides publicity for the Library in a number of ways, from traditional marketing i.e. adverts on the SU website, to campaigns such as promoting appropriate behaviour in the library. Working with the SU has also allowed the Library to identify things that the students want in the library space, such as water coolers and lockers. It sounds like working in partnership with the SU has been really successful at Nottingham Trent, but I’m not sure how easy this would be to develop in my own small campus library or overall Library service (currently split over five sites); there would be issues of coherence and consistency I think. This is something that Linda highlighted as a challenge that they face every year, when the membership of the SU executive changes; some students are more keen than others to work with the Library, and they possess different skills, attitudes and ideas. I was interested to know whether Nottingham Trent ever use the SU to collect feedback from students about the Library service; Linda said that they didn’t, but I think if I were ever involved in developing a partnership with the SU, this would be an idea I’d like to explore – would students be more likely to respond to a survey or request for feedback from the SU than from the Library, I wonder?

The second presentation in this session was Centre of the University: Integrating services for students at Kingston University, by Karen Belsham. Karen told us about how space is being shared at Kingston; services such as a café, general reception and drop-in areas for academic departments have been integrated into the Learning Resources Centre space. The LRC now has a service desk which is basically a call-centre offering both IT and library support, and services such as replacement ID card printing and other student documentation printing, such as letters for council tax exemption, are also on offer in the LRC. Karen explained that the focus is always on the student experience – trying to make things as simple as possible, particularly for new students – and argued that the LRC is an ideal space in which to integrate these services; the students know the LRC, they use it, and it has longer opening hours than other university services and departments. I can see how this is a really good idea; students expect us to be able to do more than traditional library support, and they want value for the money that they are spending on their education (with the forthcoming massive tuition fee rises this attitude is only going to become even more prevalent), so it’s great if we can find ways to make the student experience run more smoothly, particularly when they first arrive. However, as Karen pointed out, integrating other services into the Library places a lot of pressure on Library staff, who will need training in these new aspects of their role, and will need to be able to offer high quality support in a number of different areas. It can also impact on professional identities and professional boundaries. Concerns about impact on staff were raised by those who asked questions at the end of Karen’s presentation, and I think it’s something which would need to be thought about very carefully and thoroughly, with plenty of consultation with the staff affected, before any integration of services took place. I suppose it’s about getting the balance right; providing as excellent and comprehensive a Library service as possible, whilst not overburdening staff or changing their roles to an unreasonable extent.

For the final session of the day, I chose to attend a session on repositories and storage, which came under the Technologies and access strand. Repositories are something about which I am pretty much clueless, but which I really feel I should know more about! The first of the three presentations was on Open Access and Institutional Repositories: the University of Glasgow experience, from Susan Ashworth, who told us about Enlighten, Glasgow’s repository. A University Publications Policy was introduced in 2008, which requires academic staff to deposit the full text of their research publications in the repository. There was some concern from staff about issues such as what should go into the repository, and whether they would be breaking copyright, but with support and advocacy from the librarians working on the repository, their attitudes towards open access publishing and Enlighten became generally positive. Jacqueline Wickham from Nottingham University then discussed Research repositories: the role of library staff in their management. Jacqueline gave us some idea of the skills required by library staff working on repositories, from metadata creation to knowledge of access rights, and suggested that perhaps library school curricula should be focusing more on these areas. I found these presentations really informative, as I had only vague ideas about how a repository works, and both gave me a good idea of the whole process. Although I currently have nothing to do with my institution’s repository, I think it’s useful for me to have a general idea about how it works, in case any of the academic staff with whom I liaise ask me about it, and, as I hope to do some of my own research in the future, I might find myself depositing work in an institutional repository at some point.

The final presentation of this session was from David Errington, on Collaborative storage for Newcastle University. With so much focus on repositories, I think it can be easy to forget about the physical storage that libraries still require, so it was a useful reminder to hear about Newcastle’s offsite store, which contains a mixture of Library material and other institutional material. David and his colleagues hope that it can become a kind of Research Hub that can accommodate academics who want to access the material there, and I think that this is a great idea; as I said, it can be easy to forget about the physical stock, and for several of the arts and humanities subjects that my Library supports, print material remains important for research.

With Day One of Umbrella over, it was time to head off for the gala dinner and a lovely after-dinner speech from Bonnie Greer. I learnt loads, and Day Two was just as informative and engaging, but as this post has become long enough I shall reflect on the second and final day of the conference in my next post.

Why we need to be talking about the LIS new professionals "clique"

2011-06-23T12:53:00.000-07:00

Wow – what an incredible week. The aftermath of the New Professionals Conference is proving to be as lively and exciting as the event itself. I’m still not quite sure how it happened, but last night the reaction to my suggestion that the online LIS new professional community might be perceived to be a “clique” exploded on Twitter. At one point pretty much every tweet I could see in my stream contained the word “clique”. It even picked up its own hashtag (#cliquegate). It was overwhelming and extremely surreal to see such a public debate amongst so many people (both new and experienced) on something that I had said. I found myself apologising for it, which I would now like to retract – I am not at all sorry that I got people talking about the “clique”. The reactions to the idea that we might be a clique were often emotive and defensive, ranging from bewilderment to anger. Many (again, both new and experienced professionals) felt that it was an unfair perception, and that the fault lay with the person who saw us in that way, not with us.

I’m not going to discuss my thoughts on whether we are or are not a “clique”. That has already been done eloquently, thoughtfully and thoroughly by a number of people, in blog posts (by Michael Cook and Stevelin), the Twitter debate which still continues as I type (albeit much less furiously), and the discussion on the LISNPN forums. What I would like to propose is that we need to accept, whether it’s true or not, that somebody perceives us to be a clique, and then we need to move on in whichever way we see fit.

For anyone who is not aware of the context to the “clique” issue, it arose from the paper that I presented at the CILIP CDG New Professionals Conference on Monday. As part of my paper I presented some small-scale research in which I attempted to discover some experienced LIS professionals’ perceptions of new professionals. Two of my 35 respondents expressed some concern about “exclusivity” in the online new professional community, with one respondent saying that, although they thought they might still fall into the new professionals category themselves, they did not “identify with the current clique”. I suggested that this should be a concern for us, as it is something which could be creating a barrier between new and experienced professionals, and argued that we need to take the lead in engaging with our experienced colleagues, in order to break down such barriers for the good of the profession as a whole.

One of the criticisms of my findings is that we shouldn’t take the thoughts of one person out of 35 in a survey to be a sign that there is a problem. I said right from the start of my paper that we could not draw any firm conclusions from my survey; with such a small number of respondents, we cannot take the opinions expressed to be representative of those of experienced LIS professionals as a whole. However, the fact remains that someone feels that we are a clique. It is possible that they are the only LIS professional in the country or in the world, or maybe one of two or three, who feels this way, in which case I might agree that they are over-sensitive. But it is also possible that one in every 35 experienced LIS professionals holds this perception, in which case we have a big problem. I suspect that the true figure lies somewhere in the middle of these scenarios. Let’s not forget that the only places in which I distributed my questionnaire were Twitter and the LIS-LINK Jiscmail mailing list, meaning that many of the respondents were probably Twitter users and thus more likely to feel involved in the general online LIS community; is it not possible that there could be many people who feel that we are a clique who did not even see the survey?

Whether we like it or not, the fact remains that someone, who is potentially one of us, sees us as a clique which they cannot infiltrate. I can understand why people feel upset about this; I know that we are a friendly and welcoming group, and I am also one of the many people who puts much of their spare time and effort into helping to maintain this absolutely amazing online community. I was disappointed, upset and concerned when I found the word “clique” in my survey data. I also hate the idea that I am part of a clique because the word makes me think of the popular groups at school, whom I would scurry past as quickly as possible for fear that they would turn their withering, disdainful gaze on me. I am also not accusing any individuals of being cliquey or unfriendly. I am simply reporting what I discovered, and arguing that we cannot dismiss it simply because we don’t like it or because lots of people think otherwise. We know that is easy to join the community on LISNPN and Twitter because we have done it, and we felt confident enough to do it. But do you not remember how daunting Twitter was when you first joined? Can you not imagine how it could be even more daunting for someone who is not hugely confident with the internet or social media in general? When many of us joined, the community was still in its infancy – can you not imagine how someone who wants to join in now might feel?

The argument that there is no room in the profession for someone who lacks confidence and feels unable to get involved has been made. I agree to an extent. However, people often need help to build up this point, and we shouldn’t be immediately banishing anyone for whom the confidence to express their ideas and take action doesn’t come naturally – librarianship is not The Apprentice! I have only become an extrovert in the past few years, during which my self-confidence has grown immensely for various reasons. Confidence can be developed and the ability to engage can be learnt. People may just need some support to get there.

Another point of view that has been expressed is that we have more important things to worry about than people feeling excluded from the online community. I am not denying that our profession is facing some massive obstacles and difficult times, and I do not for a second want to undermine the physical, mental and emotional energy, not to mention the time, that several people in particular are investing in trying to make a difference. However, I would argue that this perception of us as a “clique” is an important issue that some of us should be trying to deal with. Alice Halsey, Simon Barron and Biddy Fisher reminded us at the New Professionals Conference that advocacy starts on a personal level, in the way that we conduct and represent ourselves as librarians to the people we meet. Megan Wiley then pointed out that, in times of cuts, it is more important than ever for us to be communicating our own worth. So, I would argue, the perceptions that people have of us are actually really important, and for me this includes the perceptions that we hold of other people in our profession; if someone views a particular group of librarians as being a clique, then someone within that group needs to try to change that. I feel that this could be my contribution to library advocacy, and, although I may not be doing anywhere near as much as those people involved in major advocacy campaigns, I could still help the cause. In challenging times, the LIS profession needs to be a united one, in which members support each other, and in order for this to happen we need to deal with any conflict, mistrust or negative perceptions within the membership.

While I do not apologise for raising this contentious issue, I do apologise for anything I’ve said that has made anyone feel offended or undermined. I cannot ignore the perception that was expressed in my survey. As I said at the start of my post, I feel very strongly that we have to come to terms with the fact that someone thinks we are a “clique”, accept it, and move on, in whatever manner we feel appropriate. For me, this is to try to do something about it. I started today, when I fed back material and issues from the New Professionals Conference to a group of colleagues during an internal staff development session. I addressed the issue of the clique head-on, and asked them to accept any offers of getting involved with us. My next steps will be to think and put into action other methods of engaging with people outside of the new professional community, as I suggested in my paper. It is, however, up to you how you want to proceed. I hope that some of you will join me in trying to ensure that we are not seen as a clique. I expect that many of you will feel that your time is better spent elsewhere, and that’s fine too. I continue to believe that we need to break down barriers for the good of the profession as a whole, and I feel that this is the first barrier that I should tackle.

Reflections of a first-time speaker

2011-06-22T04:14:00.000-07:00

As I said in my previous blog post about the New Professionals Conference 2011, I was lucky enough to be selected as one of the speakers. This was my first proper conference presentation; I’d submitted a proposal, had it accepted, had written a paper, and was standing in front of approximately 60 or 70 expectant faces, with a PowerPoint, lectern and microphone. This is quite a difficult post to write, as I have very conflicting feelings about how things went; part of me is absolutely buzzing, and part of me is disappointed in myself. I worked so hard on my paper, and received some great responses from people, but I feel my delivery could have been much better and didn’t do justice to all the work I’d put into it. I am unsure whether I should publish this post, not just because I can’t decide how I feel, but also because I don’t want to come across as fishing for compliments. That is absolutely not the case. I’m supposed to be reflecting on my experience, and reflection is all about being critical and honest, so that’s what I’m doing.

Anyone who has been anywhere near me in real life or on Twitter over the past couple of weeks will have known that I was nervous! Really nervous. I get nervous before teaching or presenting. When I’m teaching, the nerves usually go away quite quickly once I get into it. The same happens when I present to colleagues. But when I’m presenting in an environment where a lot rides on how well I present, i.e. a job interview, the nerves stay with me, and try to infect my voice, my legs, my hands and my brain. So I didn’t have a track record that suggested I would be miraculously OK once I got up on stage! But I thought I might be. I was extremely well-practised. I’d done a final run-through before leaving the hotel room that morning, in front of the mirror, and I was pretty good. I was feeling nervous still, but confident that I could control the nerves. I’m not sure what happened, but this wasn’t the case. I remember how fast I spoke (I speak fast normally and I make a conscious effort to slow down when I’m presenting, but that went out the window). I remember falling over words. I remember trying to make my posture relax in the hope that this would make my brain relax, and I do think this started to work towards the end. As soon as I got off the stage, I wanted to go back up and start all over again and get it right. I was immediately disappointed in myself; I had worked so hard, had some great material, and I felt that I had spoilt it with my nervous, rushed delivery. I also felt that I had spoilt any chance of being asked to speak at other events. Several people have mentioned that speaking at one event like the New Professionals Conference has led to them being asked to speak at others, and, as nervous as I get, I do want to do more speaking, and presenting of my own research. I had hoped that yesterday would be a way in for me, but, to be honest, based on my performance, I wouldn’t ask me to speak at my event!

I’m not sure what I would do next time about the nerves. I rehearsed thoroughly and took Bach’s Rescue Remedy beforehand! I think maybe what might help would be to go and look at the room in advance, stand on the stage, work out how I’m going to hold myself and how I’ll stand in relation to the computer screen and a lectern if there is one, work out whether to hold my cue cards or put them on the lectern. I didn’t do this this time, and I think that might have been a mistake. I went in blind, and didn’t go anywhere near the stage until it was my turn to speak. I think another problem that I had was that I had a lot of material to squeeze into twenty minutes, so I think the presentation was always going to feel a bit rushed, even if I spoke slowly. Next time perhaps I need to be more realistic about what I can achieve in the time available, and adapt my proposal accordingly at an earlier stage.

However, as I said, despite a twinge of disappointment, I am buzzing! Despite my delivery of my paper, I received loads of positive responses to it, both to my face and on Twitter. Attendees appeared interested in what my survey brought up, and were tweeting as I spoke. My discovery that there was a perception of new professionals being a “clique” has sparked some discussion, and at least one blog post on this specific issue. Interest in what I said is still fairly high on Twitter several days later, including amongst those who didn’t attend the conference, which suggests I have made some kind of impact. The evidence-based nature of my paper was praised, and several delegates have told me that they found it relevant to their professional lives. I have been asked if I will be publishing a full written version of my survey results and paper and the answer is yes, I will! I am inspired to carry on writing and doing my own research, and the vague idea that someday in the future I could be a practitioner-researcher is becoming far more concrete and immediate a possibility. One of my objectives in my Chartership PPDP is to publish and to speak at conferences, and I am going to continue submitting paper proposals, both for written work and conference presentations. I intend to get better at speaking; practice makes perfect, after all! I will take the steps I mentioned above to try to minimise the nerves, and I will keep trying. OK, maybe no one is going to come knocking at my door asking me to speak at their event just yet, but that’s fine; I’ll just keep on submitting proposals and seeking out speaking opportunities myself.

I hope this post isn’t too self-indulgent. Perhaps it belongs in my Chartership portfolio as a private reflection. I think I am going to publish it; my suggestions for how to do things better next time might be useful for someone. I am feeling far more positive than negative about it now, and writing it all down has helped with that. Overall, speaking at the New Professionals Conference 2011 was the most amazing, exhilarating experience, and I would encourage anyone who is considering submitting a conference paper proposal for the first time to go ahead and just do it!