Library Camp 2012

Well, it’s been a while since I wrote anything on this blog. A combination of a busy start of Autumn term and being a bit unwell for a while has lead me to fall behind with life in general. However, I managed to make it to this year’s national Library Camp.  It was held in Birmingham again, but at a different venue. Once again it was free to attend and took place on Saturday, which I found really helpful – it’s super-difficult to take time off work at this point in the term! I won’t explain the unconference concept again – see mypost from last year’s national Camp or see the Library Camp website – basically the agenda is set on the day when participants propose sessions, there are no presentations, and it’s OK to get up and leave a session if you think you might gain more somewhere else.

As usual there was a cakecamp running alongside the library stuff. This year I felt confident enough in my ability to bake without poisoning anyone and brought along my vegetarian rocky road (based on the lovely Nigella’s recipe – swap the marshmallows for dried fruit and glace cherries). I was very impressed at the quality of the baking and ate far too much cake, as usual!

I had decided I wasn’t going to propose any sessions, having lead two at Library Camp South West in Exeter in July (which I never got round to blogging about as I flew off on holiday the day after so the moment was lost – apologies!) and finding it very scary and intense and not doing it very well! As usual there were lots of proposals and I found it difficult to decide where best to go; there were some sets of sessions where I would have liked to go to several of them and others where I wasn’t immediately grabbed by anything. I’m not sure I ended up choosing the right sessions every time.

The first session I attended was on swearing – what do you do when someone tells you to fuck off? Expertly led by Sarah, this session was well attended by people from a range of sectors. We discussed how the context in which someone is swearing affects how acceptable or not it is; obviously it’s not when the swearing is directed at staff in aggression, and casual swearing in conversation is not OK in certain environments. We also discussed what kind of training we’d had on dealing with aggressive behaviour and how useful it had been; the feeling was expressed that often the authorities organising the training aren’t aware of the kind of aggressive behaviour library staff can face. We seemed to all agree that there needs to be a policy in place for dealing with swearing and aggressive behaviour, and that we need to know that we have the support of management. This made me think about the policies we have for the online Chat co-op that my library is part of. I work on this service for 3 hours per fortnight, and there are loads of guidelines in place for Chatting, including very clear guidelines on how to handle aggressive patrons. Chat is a strange and challenging environment to work in as it moves quickly and you don’t have eye contact or body language to work with, but I feel confident that I would know what to do if I was faced with swearing or aggression there, due to good, clear policies that everyone uses. This session also made me reflect on the training I’ve had on dealing with aggressive behaviour; it was helpful, but university-wide rather than library-specific, so it didn’t deal with library situations or policies. It was interesting to talk about the differences between sectors – academic library users are essentially stakeholders so they hold a different status to users of a school or FE library, for example, which can affect how we can deal with difficult behaviour; again, it would be helpful to have specific training for our library environment. We are actually going to have a session on “managing student behaviour” from our Library Customer Services team leader as part of our staff development programme next month, so I am now thinking that this will be really useful and will do my best to attend.

The second session I went to was the #uklibchat live session on careers. The “live” element was meant to include live-tweeting it and engaging with those not at Library Camp joining in on Twitter, but patchy wi-fi made this aspect challenging! I took away some useful websites for job-hunting with which I wasn’t already familiar. Someone pointed out that everyone seemed a bit subdued in this session; there was certainly an agreement that there is a huge amount of competition out there for jobs and that it really is tough at the moment to find something suitable. This really brought home to me how lucky I am to have been made permanent in my role recently.

Next, I attended a session on media literacy. I went to this one as I wasn’t entirely sure what media literacy was, but had been hearing a lot about it.  This session was another one where there were attendees from a range of sectors, which I felt really enriched the discussion. We talked about various aspects of media literacy; how to explain biases in newspapers and television news and how to encourage information-literate use of the internet. Many of the attendees were from school, college and public libraries so much of the conversation was about children and young people. Some really good suggestions were made, such as encouraging children to publish on the internet themselves i.e. on blogs to help them understand that copying and pasting from the internet is stealing other people’s work (how would they feel if someone took their blog post without asking or attributing it to them?), getting children to edit Wikipedia pages to show them how easy it is for anyone to do, and creating displays to explain how different newspapers have different biases. What I took away from this session was the idea that maybe I should be talking to school and college librarians and teachers about what kinds of information literacy are taught at school if any, and at what kind of point the first-year students who come to use are with information literacy. We have a limited amount of time with the students – usually an hour, or maybe two, per year, and then whenever they come to the desk or to Chat to ask for help with searching – so it would be helpful to know this in order to help shape our advice and training to make it as useful and effective as possible. I also think it would be great to have some more cross-sector discussions about information literacy in the future, at Library Camps or other events.

After a lovely lunch, sessions began again, and I went off to Michelle’s session on living and working abroad. I had put out a request on the wiki for someone to talk about this, as it is a personal interest and ambition of mine, and Michelle kindly volunteered to share her immense knowledge on this  topic. Michelle has lived and worked in six countries and, while none of this work was in library or information services, she still had loads of advice for making the move abroad for those of us who were interested in it. She spoke highly of working holiday visas, which are offered by Australia, New Zealand and Canada, generally with an age limit of 18 to 30 or 35. These last for one or two years and allow you to work, though the main purpose of your time there should be holidaying. There are also restrictions such as not being able to work for the same employer for more than six months. This is definitely an option I’d consider in the future; I’m not sure whether I’d be able to find temporary library work (the point was made in the session that library jobs are being cut pretty much everywhere, and that in some countries there are laws which mean that a foreign applicant can only be given a job if no suitable citizen has applied for it) but it would allow me to experience living in another country. Michelle has since sent me a link to this useful website about working holiday visas.

We talked about expenses and finding somewhere to live; Michelle explained that she lived in hostels and that this is OK if you don’t mind sharing a room – they are cheap, there may be other people living there rather than just passing through with whom you can make friends, and you can often get your bed free in return for cleaning the hostel or similar. Again, this is an option I would consider in the future, although I do wonder if I’m now a bit old for that!

We also discussed the CILIP LIBEX international library and information job exchange, where you can arrange to job-swap with a librarian or information manager in another country. I have looked at this scheme before, but one big problem with this is that you are supposed to swap homes too – I rent a small, damp one-bed flat so I can’t do this; another participant said she’d been actively pursuing exchanges through this programme but they had fallen through for this very reason – she would need to swap with someone who was in a position to live in a room in a shared house. The other problem would be getting work to agree to it; we are in a challenging position at work at the moment so a swap just wouldn’t be do-able. This does look like a great scheme for someone whose work and living situations allow for it to happen though, and one that I will consider in the future if my situation changes.

I really enjoyed this session – it was good to hear about Michelle’s experiences. Michelle pointed out that waiting for the “right time” to travel is often in vain – there is never really a “right time” so really you just need to do it if you want to. I am very guilty of thinking it’s never the “right time” so this has given me something to think about.

For my next session I decided to go and find out about iPad lending in libraries. We heard about experiences from FE and medical libraries. In the FE library this was as a response to not having enough computers, and in the medical library it seemed to be more to do with the number of electronic journals now read and used by the users. We talked about the benefits of using iPads – as mentioned, they ease the strain on the computer area, if you allow them out of the library then users may find that helpful, and the apps available can be useful – and also the challenges; cost, security, damage, limitations of being able to create work i.e. essays on them, and the need to clear them before loaning them out again. What was surprising for me was that the things that immediately sprang to my mind as being potential massive problems – copyright/licencing issues and security/damage – did not appear to have been big problems so far. I found it really useful to hear about these experiences; I am not aware of any plans at my institution to loan out mobile devices at the moment, but in the future I will feel able to contribute to discussions about this if they arise.

For my final session I chose to learn about web services and widgets, and how library data can be used. I’m afraid I was late to arrive so I missed some of this session and I don’t think I really caught up! The discussion was around ways of using library data to make services more useful, and I think to allow for personalisation. There seemed to be quite a few issues around getting hold of this data, particularly for public libraries. I will look out for other blog posts on this session to find out what I missed, as it sounded interesting!

There ended Library Camp 2012, and it was time to find our way back to central Birmingham and to the pub (I apologise to all concerned for my embarrassing lack of geographical knowledge of my home city – in my defence, I only lived there until I was 18 so if I needed to get anywhere other than my local area or the city centre, my Dad would drive me [as he did that morning!], so I never paid attention!). As I’ve explained in my write-ups of the sessions, I did take away some useful thoughts and ideas. However, I’m not sure I attended all of the right sessions. It’s tricky with an unconference – without a pre-planned programme you need to decide quickly which sessions you are going to attend, and the nature of an unconference means that you don’t know what a session is going to end up being about as you would in a conference session with a presentation and structure. This year we were given leaflets containing a space to write down sessions (space for all of them) and plan your day, which was really helpful, however! What I should have done was write down every session so I could decide whether to leave a session and go to another one.

A few people have commented that Library Camp this year was a bit subdued, and I’m afraid I have to agree. I think that part of this was personal; I wasn’t feeling 100% so I don’t think I contributed to discussions or conversations as well as I do when I’m my usual cheery self – but there was still an air of something. The time of year (busy teaching schedules and the gloom of approaching winter after a rubbish rainy summer) maybe? Or the general economic gloom at the moment? I’m not too sure. Whatever it was, I don’t think it was any fault of the event itself, so I’d like to say a big well done and thank you to the organisers. Maybe next time things will be looking happier.

Library Camp 2011

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.