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.