My top tips for a painless CILIP Revalidation

I’d been putting Revalidation off. If you’re reading this, it’s likely you have been too. It was one of those things that I knew I should do, but it kept slipping down my to-do list, and I didn’t really know what it entailed, and then the CILIP VLE looked complicated and fiddly. Sometime late last year I decided that enough time had passed since my Chartership and I really should be re-evaluating my personal development, particularly since I had moved up the ladder to a new role at another institution since Chartering.  When I actually looked into what I needed to do, and started to do it, I was pleasantly surprised to find that it was actually a fairly easy process! 

This post assumes that you know what Revalidation involves. If you don’t, go and read Jo Alcock’s comprehensiveblog posts about it. Even if you think you know what you’re doing, go and read them anyway; I found them immensely helpful in getting to grips with what I needed to do. 

Once you’re ready to get started, here are my top tips for making the whole thing as painless as possible…

Bear the criteria in mind when recording your CPD. You need to show you have met the criteria for whichever qualification you are revalidating. Go and read the relevant handbook (the Chartership criteria at least have changed a bit since I Chartered in 2012) to make sure you know what they are. I then copied and pasted them into my document where I was recording my CPD, and added another column to the table I was using where I stated which criterion/a that particular activity met. This will make it easier to identify any gaps, and to write your reflective statement. You don’t have many words to play with (more on this later) so don’t try to pigeonhole in anything that doesn’t fit the criteria. 

Don’t rely on your memory. You’ll remember events you’ve been to or training you’ve done, but going back through your emails, diary, and notes from meetings with your manager or team meetings may remind you of other bits and pieces which have contributed to your CPD. Bringing me to my next point…

…Think outside the box. You already know that things like reading Update and other professional literature, or taking part in Twitter chats such as #uklibchat, count towards your CPD just as much as formal training opportunities do, but examine your everyday activities even more closely. Have you written blog posts about things you’ve done, had a chat with anyone about issues and challenges, or taken on any kind of mentoring or advisor role, however informal, for a less experienced colleague? Even seemingly unremarkable things will have contributed to your development, and these can be included too.

You don’t have space to be anything other than reflective! Remember how hard it was to cram everything you wanted to say into your 1000-word statement for Chartership? Well, this time you only have 250 words – just 25% of that space! It’s all about the reflection. I recommend identifying and using the main keywords from the criteria (easy – we’re librarians!) in your statement, to really draw the assessor’s attention to how you’ve met them, without wasting words on description. Just as you were advised to do with your Chartership portfolio, make the assessor’s life as easy as possible!

And finally…just get on with it! I think it probably only took me a total of about eight hours over a few weeks to get my CPD recorded, write my statement and upload it all. If I’d been in better habits with recording my CPD as I went along, it would have taken me even less time! It’s really not an arduous process, so make some time to become familiar with it, starting putting together your CPD record, and I reckon you’ll find it much easier than you expected.

Do you have any other top tips for a painless Revalidation? Feel free to share them in the comments!

My 10 tips and tricks for a happy(ish) Chartership!

I've just returned from a lovely afternoon at a portfolio-building event in Cambridge, to which I'd gone along to speak about my experience of Chartership. I enjoyed listening to the other talks as well as giving mine, and it was a great opportunity to meet some new people and make some contacts. It was also my first experience of creating and delivering my own Prezi, from scratch, and after some initial tech panics, it seemed to go OK! Here's my Prezi (also embedded below) for anyone else who's interested. If I can help with your Chartership at all, do get in touch; I remember how tough a process it can be and so I'm eager to support others where I can.

Happy portfolio-building!

Reflections on the CILIP Career Development Group National Conference 2011

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

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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.

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

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

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.