Copyright for library staff, and a bit of networking

Yesterday I attended a course run by AULIC (Avon University Libraries in Cooperation) on “Copyright for library staff”, led by library copyright guru Graham Cornish. I have recently been given responsibility for copyright issues in my campus library (although there is a librarian responsible for copyright across the whole library service, so I’m in no way alone on it, happily!), so when this course came up I thought it would be helpful to attend, as I knew nothing about copyright, and we recently had a somewhat complex enquiry from a student wanting to use AV material in her dramatic performance, demonstrating that it is something that we need to be aware of. 

The course lasted a whole day, during which Graham took us through copyright and how it applies to us, clearly and thoroughly. He began with an overview of copyright - what it is, what the various laws are, what is covered by copyright, what rights owners/authors have, and the concept of fair-dealing – before moving on to “library privilege”. He explained the various licences under which libraries run their operations, discussed the issues that arise in the digital world, and all along encouraged us to ask questions, which were all answered. His knowledge of copyright and how it works in and affects libraries was breath-taking. I now feel that I know a lot more than I did, and, importantly, that I know where to find the information that I’ll need to answer copyright queries. 

Something that the course really demonstrated to me was how important copyright is in academic libraries, and how much it affects our whole operation; it’s not just a case of putting up a poster telling students they can photocopy x% of a book.  Copyright impacts on every aspect of the day-to-day workings of a library, from inter-library loans to storing past examination papers digitally, and I feel now that it is really helpful to have some knowledge (or at least to know where the find the relevant information) of copyright, whatever role you have in the library. I shall certainly be taking what I’ve learnt back to work with me – I and a colleague are planning to write a basic guide to AV copyright at some point during the summer – but I also think it will be useful for my work in a broader sense, in helping me to understand how the general operation of the library works.

I also wanted to write about a little bit of networking that I did afterwards. I didn’t speak to many people during the course itself – I think the layout and size of the room wasn’t very conducive to networking – but I did meet someone who I follow and have spoken to on Twitter. I ended up going to the pub with them and a couple of other people it turned out I also follow, some other colleagues/ex-colleagues of theirs, and someone who I met at the Chartership course a few weeks ago. When it comes to networking, I am a firm believer in using purely social events, such as going to the pub, and talking about things other than libraries (on Twitter as well as in real-life), to make friends, rather than simply acquiring “professional contacts” in a more formal, exchanging-business-cards-at-a-conference way; I look forward to seeing them again, and I shall definitely get on with arranging that Bristol/South West LISNPN social!

Difficult behaviour and good customer service

Difficult behaviour is something that anyone working in any kind of role where they interact with customers will experience, and libraries are no exception (I shall say now that I use the phrase “customer service” when referring to libraries – I know some don’t agree with the use of the word “customer” but, in my sector at least, our users are our customers). I’ve experienced argumentative, upset and aggressive users in pretty much every library job I’ve had. I’ve been thinking about this this week for a couple of reasons: over  the past couple of weeks I’ve dealt with a few argumentative to mildly aggressive users – it’s a somewhat fraught time of year for students, with coursework and undergraduate dissertation deadlines looming – and on Thursday I attended a course about dealing with aggressive behaviour. I feel fairly confident about dealing with such behaviour, and my main concern is ensuring that I continue to deliver good customer service even when I have to say or do something that the user doesn’t like or agree with. I think that the balance between being firm, and being abrupt, can be a delicate one, and that it’s important we don’t let our behaviour be influenced by the aggression or emotion that we’re facing. I hoped that Thursday’s course would help me to ensure that I continue to get this right.

Although I’d already covered a lot of the material in previous training, the course was indeed helpful. It was useful to share and discuss experiences with members of staff from other areas of the university, and the trainer gave some really good advice. The tip that I am definitely going to remember in future is to try to ensure that you don’t cast the user as unreasonable: for example, rather than go straight in with “you can’t do that here”, start with “I’m sorry, you might not have seen the sign, but you can’t do that here” (even if the sign is massive and obvious!). I’m going to use this one if I have to speak to students about noise levels in quiet areas, or phone calls in the library. And of course, we presume that the user is just ignoring the rule or being thoughtless; perhaps they genuinely haven’t realised that the library is any different to a shop or other public space where they could use their phone? Either way, I think this tactic could help to avoid situations becoming difficult.

Something, however, that I wasn’t entirely comfortable with, was the suggestion from many of the other course attendees, and the trainer, that we should, when dealing with  a user who is acting aggressively, tell them that we won’t be spoken to in that way. I realise that in some situations we may need to take such a step to attempt to stop a situation escalating, and also to begin protecting our personal safety, but I do think that this must be used carefully. I often watch the repeats of Airline on weekday evenings (don’t worry, this isn’t going to turn into a post about my terrible television viewing habits!). If you’re not familiar with Airline, it was a reality television programme about airport staff. The check-in desk staff, as you’d probably guess, have to deal with difficult behaviour on a daily basis. Sometimes this is dealt with very well, but at other times I am appalled by the level of customer service offered, and often this is when a member of staff refuses to continue to speak to a customer, because they perceive the customer to have been too rude to them. For me, that is patronising towards the customer, and is only going to cause the situation to escalate (and on Airline it pretty much always does make things worse). Obviously, if the customer has been threatening violence, or throwing personal insults at the member of staff, they should say something about the customer’s behaviour; but there are surely better ways to explain that they need to treat you with respect than to simply refuse to talk to them. I have never  asked a user to speak to me more politely, or told them that I won’t continue the exchange if this doesn’t happen, and I have had some fairly hostile words thrown at me (not in my current role, however). Perhaps this is a case of me being too “nice”. Or perhaps in the past I wasn’t confident enough when dealing with such behaviour, and if faced with it now would find myself explaining that I won’t be spoken to in that way. However, I still can’t help feeling that this is one example of how we need to be careful that we maintain a good level of customer service when dealing with difficult behaviour. 

I expect that we will experience further incidents of difficult behaviour as we head deeper into a very busy and stressful time of year for students; I’m hoping that the course, and the reflections that it has provoked, will help me to deal successfully with incidents that come my way.

Perhaps Chartership isn’t that scary after all!

As some of you might know, I’ve been thinking about Chartership for a while – since I started my job back in November in fact. I’m always looking for the next thing to do to develop and progress, and Chartership seemed like the logical next step. After a couple of months of reading and re-reading the Chartership instructions and information on the CILIP website, and panicking about the whole finding a mentor business, the various acronyms that kept cropping up, and the sheer scale of the thing, I recently decided it was time to jump in at the deep end, and send my registration form off then start the hunt for a mentor. 

I was lucky in that the first mentor I emailed was happy to take me on. She works in the same sector but in a different university – after taking advice from various people on the pros and cons of having a mentor in the same organisation, versus one from outside, I decided that it would be more helpful to select a mentor who didn’t work for my university, in order to avoid the risk of inadequate explanation or evaluation in my portfolio due to them understanding the context behind things. We had a telephone conversation earlier in the week, which was very successful – we seem to be on the same wavelength and I entirely trust in her abilities as a mentor – and we decided to progress with the mentoring relationship. 

It’s been a fairly Chartership-filled week, as yesterday I attended a “Preparing for Chartership and Certification” course run by the CILIP West Country Career Development Group. Attending one of these courses is, I believe, a requirement for Chartership, and I decided to do it sooner rather than later, in the hope that it would help to make everything make sense to me.  It was a really useful day; a good mix of presentations outlining things like the assessment criteria and the types of evidence that can go in your portfolio, group activities such as identifying skills and sources of training together, which I found really helped to get me thinking about my own skills audit and Personal Professional Development Plan (PPDP), and opportunities to network with the other attendees – exchanging contact details with people working in other types of library or information service may potentially be helpful in arranging visits to other libraries, which will contribute to our understand of the wider profession, one of the Chartership assessment criteria.

I won’t write a detailed account of the day, but I will share just a couple of the many useful things that I found out:

• Your local CDG Candidate Support Officer (CSO) can help with pretty much anything to do with your Chartership, from helping you to construct your PPDP, to resolving problems in the mentor/mentee relationship. I knew from my own involvement on CDG committees that each had a CSO, but I was unaware of the extent to which they can offer help and advice. I fully trust in my mentor’s ability to help, but it’s good to know that there is someone else who can cast a second eye over my PPDP, or can answer any questions that I feel are too daft to put to my mentor! You can find your local CSO on the CILIP website.

• Blogs can be used as your evaluative diary. We were told that keeping some kind of diary, in which you evaluate your recent activities, will be really helpful when it comes to writing the evaluative statement to go with your portfolio, and that we should use whatever kind of diary or record works for us, including blogs. I suspected that my blogging would be useful in keeping my reflective/evaluative writing skills up to scratch, but I thought I would need to record things in a separate space for Chartership; it was good to find out that I can continue to blog about what I’m doing as a means of evaluative recording, as this is the format that works for me, and I don’t want to completely separate things off as being “Chartership” activities – everything I do over the next year or so will be contributing to Chartership.

The main thing that I realised after the day was that, in fact, I’m actually doing a lot of the things required for Chartership already; keeping records of activities like the teaching that I do, and other things that I get involved with, as well as a “staff development log” of in-house training that I attend and what I’ve gained from it, reflecting upon and evaluating activities and events through blog posts, collecting evidence i.e. feedback from teaching sessions, furthering my professional involvement through committee membership and publishing work in the professional press, and ensuring I develop my understanding of the wider profession and my place in it, through reading about what is going on in mine and other LIS sectors, and keeping up-to-date via blogs, mailing lists, and Twitter. So now, Chartership doesn’t seem like such a huge, scary prospect! Yes, it’s a big thing, a long process that will require hard work, enthusiasm, dedication and organisation, but I feel now that it is completely do-able for me. This weekend I shall start work on my initial PPDP draft, and I am looking forward to getting stuck in and getting on my way with Chartership. I really encourage anyone else in my position to just go for it – get registered, look for a mentor, go to a “preparing for Chartership course” (list here, or keep an eye on the events page on LISNPN), and don’t be scared or intimidated – as I discovered, you’re probably in a Chartership frame of mind already.

Reflections on my first solo teaching session

Last week, I had my first chance to do a teaching session by myself. I have taught before – during my graduate traineeship, many of the librarians kindly involved me in their classes, giving me the opportunity to demonstrate search techniques, databases, the library catalogue etc. to groups of students, and to help out in hands-on sessions, and since I have been in my current role I have observed classes and taught jointly with a colleague. This, however, was the first time I would be standing up in front of a class and giving a whole session by myself; two sessions actually (the same one twice in a row to two different seminar groups). To make it all even more new, one of my colleagues was coming in to observe the first session; I have never been observed before (I’ve never done enough in a session to be worth observing before now!). While I was excited – the teaching aspect was one of the things that first attracted me to academic librarianship way back in my undergraduate days, so it’s been a long wait to get to this point! - I was also extremely nervous. What if the students got bored and started talking to each other over me? What if the tutor accompanying them was totally unimpressed with what I was demonstrating? What if I got something wrong, or one of the searches didn’t work as it should? What if they ask me to demonstrate a database I’d not used before, or to perform a search that I hadn’t tested? What if I talked too fast or gabbled, as I usually do when I’m nervous and there are a load of people looking at me? What if they all said “the librarian was rubbish” (or worse) on the evaluation forms they filled out in the end?

As it turns out, the sessions went absolutely fine – I’d even go so far as to say that they went well! Here is what I learnt about the aforementioned things that were making me nervous:

• Most students will pay attention in a session directly related to their assignments, even if they’re not particularly interested in learning how to refine their searches, or even in the assignment itself! They are paying a lot of money to go to university and most of them want to do well. Library sessions are teaching very practical things – in this case, demonstrating a list of databases that the students had been asked to gather primary sources from for an assignment – and, while you can make the session more engaging by doing things like showing the students the most clever and helpful bits of the databases , and inviting them to ask questions or start a discussion, it does really come down to a) how interested they are in doing well and b) whether they can see how what you are showing them will help them achieve this. I very much subscribe to the theory that library sessions relevant to what students are studying at that time are the best kind, and I made sure that I emphasised at the start of the session that the reason they were here was so that I could show them how to use the specific databases that their tutors wanted them to use for their forthcoming assignment, not just so I could show them general search techniques.

• It’s OK to talk slowly! Knowing that I am prone to gabbling, I made a conscious effort in the first session to slow down and think about what I was saying. As the session progressed, I realised that this was fine! Yes, the students were sitting there, looking at me expectantly. But they weren’t about to start heckling me if I let a couple of seconds go by without speaking; what they were expecting was an informative and helpful session, however I chose to deliver that. By speaking slowly and thinking about things, I was able to give them clear explanations of what I was demonstrating. It also made me feel considerably more relaxed, and by the second session I was feeling completely happy and comfortable with what I was doing.

• Don’t panic if you’re asked to perform a search that you haven’t practised! Yes, the reason we plan searches before teaching sessions is to enable us to demonstrate certain features of databases, or how to refine searches. But as I mentioned earlier, it is generally agreed that sessions that are relevant to what is being studied are the most effective and successful in engaging the students. This is also a chance to be really helpful; one student had tried a search for her topic in one of the databases already, and had found nothing. I was able to show her how she could use different keywords and refine the dates of her search, and we found some useful material. Also, most students understand that not every database will yield something for every search, and that you sometimes have to spend quite a bit of time refining or changing a search to find anything (this can even be the case with Google!), and so they won’t think you’re useless if you can’t produce a list of perfect, full-text search results, straightaway!

• Analysing feedback can be really helpful. We ask students to fill out short evaluation forms at the end of every session. I was tasked with analysing the forms from my sessions and the other sessions that week. Although it can be time-consuming, I do think it’s worth sitting down and doing a content analysis of the feedback (even if it brings back memories of analysing dissertation data!), to work out how many people said what. Flicking through the forms, you might see lots of mentions of how useful learning search techniques was, but if you do a proper analysis, you might, for example, find out that the most commonly made comment within that was that they found learning about wildcards and truncation the most useful aspect of the class, which can inform future sessions. 

The feedback from my sessions was overwhelmingly positive, with many students saying that the databases had been clearly and effectively explained and demonstrated, which I was really pleased about due to my efforts to speak more slowly and not to gabble nervously. The students appeared to have found the session helpful for their work, which was really rewarding. I’m sure I will continue to learn more about teaching the more that I do it, and I really am looking forward to the next time.

Library Day in the Life: day five

The usual start to the day; arrive at 8.15am, check my emails, and then check that everything is switched on and ready for when we open. The member of academic staff who wants a television series recorded every week has responded to my email in which I suggested that Box of Broadcasts would be ideal for this, and is happy to give it a go, which is great. I look through a publisher’s alert that I’ve received, and find a book which I think could be useful for the department I support; I email the library rep, the member of academic staff in the department who acts as the main liaison with the library, to ask if they’d like me to purchase it. 

One of my colleagues then appears with a query about how I’ve classified a new DVD that they’re processing to put out on the shelves; I investigate, and decide to change the shelf-mark. Next, I do some final preparation for the class that a colleague and I are teaching this afternoon; I want to be entirely sure of what I’m doing. I go through the database I’m going to be demonstrating, and in my head I practise what I’m going to say. Once I’ve finished my preparation, my library rep has replied to say that they would like to order the book that I suggested, so I send that through to my Acquisitions colleague.

After a quick coffee, I’m on the enquiry desk from 11am until 12pm. There’s quite a few students in the library, but they don’t appear to need my help – no one asks me anything for the whole hour! I spend it noting my desk shifts for next week in my calendar, responding to some emails, and classifying some DVDs. 

After lunch, it’s time for our teaching session. It’s a 40 minute class for first year students, demonstrating how to search for books and journals, and use a couple of the key databases to locate journal articles. I’m nervous, as this is my first teaching session in this job, and is, I suppose, my first proper class; during my graduate traineeship, I did a bit of teaching, doing things like short demonstrations of the library catalogue or a database, but this was always part of someone else’s broader session. This time, the class is mine and my colleague’s, jointly, so it’s the biggest bit of teaching I’ve done so far in my career. About eight students attend (about the number we were expecting). I don’t think I do very well – the nerves get to me – but my colleague is great, and we keep to time. I feel a bit rubbish about my performance afterwards - my colleague tells me I was fine, but I presume they’re just being nice! – but when I read the feedback from the evaluation forms the students completed, they seem to have found the class useful, informative and relevant, so perhaps I didn’t do too badly after all. I’m sure I’ll improve with practice. There are some more classes coming up in a couple of weeks’ time, and I expect I’ll be going it alone with one of them at least. I do enjoy teaching so I hope I get better at it. If anyone has any tips for controlling nerves when teaching, I’d love to hear them!

I’m on the enquiry desk again from 2pm until 3pm. I don’t get any enquiries, but I do give out some holds. While I’m on the desk, I look at some of the evaluation forms from all of this week’s teaching sessions; my colleague and I have been tasked with summarising the feedback from all of the classes, so we’ve split the forms up between us to summarise, and will create a final summary together later. The feedback is overwhelmingly positive, with most students saying that they found the sessions informative and useful.

Once I’m off the desk, I make a cup of coffee and then my colleague and I collate our student feedback summaries, which are pretty much identical. After sorting out a couple of AV admin-y tasks, I spend the rest of the afternoon looking at a list of books which a graduate has offered to donate to the library. We do appreciate it when people want to donate material to us – it’s a lovely gesture - but processing donations can be very time-consuming, so we ask for a list and only accept the ones which will be really useful. I look at whether we have any of these books already, and what the subject matter is, to determine their usefulness. There are a few on the list which I think will enhance our collection.

Just before I leave at 4.30pm, a couple of emails come through from our journals subscription agent, concerning access problems I was trying to solve earlier in the week; it looks like at least one of these problems has been sorted out, hooray! I have a quick look at my schedule for Monday, and then head home to start my weekend.

So that has been my week. It’s been fairly representative of the different aspects of my role, and the work that I do, with the exception of evening or Saturday morning enquiry desk shifts; most weeks I will do at least one of these, but we don’t have set days – we all do the same amount of evenings and Saturdays per term, rather than per week, so some weeks I will do more than one, and other weeks, like this one, I’m not rota’d on to do any.

I’ve really enjoyed reading other peoples contributions to Library Day in the Life round six this week; it’s so interesting to have a glimpse into what other people do in their many different jobs. Thank you for reading!

Library Day in the Life: day four

My day begins in the usual way; arrive at about 8.20am, check my emails, and check that the computers and printers are switched on. I respond to an email about my availability for teaching over the next few weeks, and then it’s time for a shift on the enquiry desk from 8.45 until 10. I receive a few enquiries; loaning out the laptop and digital voice recorder that we have for students with particular access requirements, booking students into the study and viewing rooms, and finding a book for the alternative formats team at the main campus. In between dealing with these, I plan for the update that I’m having with one of the people who I line-manage later, finish classifying all of the urgently-needed books for my subject that we’ve received so far, and look through a publishers’ alert for any potentially useful books to suggest to my department. 

After a coffee break, I have the aforementioned update with one of the people I line-manage. These meetings are supposed to be fairly informal catch-ups that are held monthly. Being so new to line management, I’ve not held one of these before, although I have had appraisal training. I think it goes well; I try to incorporate the good aspects of the line management I receive now and from past managers. My colleague is happy with the objectives that we set for them together.

When I get back to my desk, I start looking at my journals contribution to a forthcoming display that I started yesterday, until a colleague asks if I know anything about EThOS; they are trying to help a student access a theses over the phone, and it looks like the student needs to pay to download one, even though we thought it was open-access. I investigate, and discover how to download for free. My colleague has worked it out too by this point, but I’m glad I looked at it too as it’s good  to know how it works; with the British Library experiencing problems which are affecting the document supply service, we are recommending that students use EThOS to access theses.

I carry on with the journals task I was working on, before taking my lunch break. After lunch, I sit in on a class that one of my colleagues is teaching; a 40 minute session introducing first years to using the catalogue and e-library to find books and journal articles, the same session that another colleague and I will be teaching together tomorrow. I’ve been observing as much teaching as possible over the past few weeks, to ensure that I know what I’m doing when it’s my turn. The class goes well; the students engage and ask questions. Afterwards, I spend some time looking through the evaluation forms that they completed at the end. Their feedback is really positive (my favourite comment: “it was all brillo pads”!), and they seem to have found the class useful.

I then get together with my colleague with whom I am teaching tomorrow, to work out how we’re going to split the session up and talk over any concerns. The session plan is easily divided between us, and we decide on who is doing what fairly quickly. I’m looking forward to doing some teaching!

Next, I look at an email I’ve just received about AV stuff; Box of Broadcasts again, mainly. I’m really confused about the information in it, and ask my line manager, who is really helpful and clarifies things for me; I try to work independently, but I’m still getting to grips with all of the different bits of my job! Once that’s dealt with, I spend some time looking electronic journals access; one simple email prompts me to check something, which uncovers some potential access problems – this task takes me longer than I anticipated! I sort it out as best I can; I’ll need to look at it again closer to the time when I think the problem might arise. I make a cup of coffee and finally get round to reading Philip Pullman’s amazing speech defending libraries (you need to read it if you haven’t already). 

I then do a few AV admin-y tasks and read some meeting minutes that have just been circulated. Next, I type up the notes I made during my update with my line-managee (I think that should be a word – less of a mouthful than “person I line-manage”!) this morning, and send the document to them to check that they agree with what I’ve written.

I end my day by dealing with an email from a member of academic staff in the department I support, who wants a series of programmes recorded and put in the library. I reply, explaining that Box of Broadcasts would be perfect for this – the programmes will be available for students to watch in a much shorter time than they would be if I request it as an off-air recording, and students can watch them at their leisure, in their own time, without having to fight each other for the one DVD copy – and offer to ensure that the programmes are recorded, and to send a direct link to the staff member as soon as they’re available to view. Hopefully they’ll be willing to give it a try. Now it’s 5.10pm and time for me to head home.

Library Day in the Life: day three

My day begins much the same as yesterday; arrive at about 8.20am and check my emails, before heading upstairs to check that everything is switched on and working before we open. I then have a look at the session plan for the class that a colleague and I are teaching on Friday – my first teaching session in this job – and work out how we might divide it between us, before reading the inclusive teaching checklist which has recently been circulated, which sets out how we should ensure that students with access requirements are able to attend and participate in classes.

I then have another look at the agenda for the subject programme meeting this afternoon, and ensure that I am prepared to both demonstrate Box of Broadcasts, or to talk about it if for any reason I don’t get to do a demo. Next, I flick through the two most recent issues of Viewfinder, the journal of the British Universities Film and Video Council, which are always passed to me before going on the shelves, so that I can look to see if it contains anything useful relating to the AV aspects of my role. In one of the issues, there is an article about copyright which directs me to a website which might be useful in the near future when we look at creating an AV copyright guide, one of the things on my AV to-do list. 

I have a quick coffee break, then look at the list of journals tasks that I and my journals colleague identified in a meeting last week as needing to be done soon. I’ve already completed a couple of them, and I start on the others. They’re mainly concerning access for titles for which we have a new electronic subscription this year (calendar year, not academic year – most of our subscriptions start in January), and queries about missing issues and cancellations. Sorting out electronic access to journals can involve several different things; I won’t list them all, but today I supply our IP address range to one publisher, and check the licence agreement for another to ensure that we can allow students on all of our campuses to access the title. I also solve some of the renewal/cancellation mysteries, by checking our catalogue records, our orders, our renewals spreadsheet and invoices. 

I’m on the enquiry desk from 11am until 1pm. It’s unusually quiet for this time of day, and I only deal with a few enquiries; renewing books over the phone, lending headphones for the computers, and trying to help a student find a book that they want for personal interest (we don’t have it, but I suggest the public library!). In between these queries, I continue some of the journals work I started before I came on the desk, and then do some book classifying; a load of books needed urgently for a new module in my subject this semester have just arrived. 

After lunch, most of my afternoon is spent at the subject programme meeting I’ve been preparing for. Most of the meeting is spent on agenda items relating to module design and teaching etc., which are not directly relevant to me, but which provide good context for my subject liaison work. I’m glad that I prepared to speak about Box of Broadcasts without having it up on a screen, as due to various pieces of malfunctioning AV equipment, I’m not able to demo it. It’s actually really difficult to talk about it without being able to show it! I’m not sure I do a great job, but the members of staff who came to a demo in the library a couple of weeks ago enthuse about it to their colleagues, and, even though I struggle to explain some aspects without being able to demonstrate, everyone seems really interested; they ask lots of questions, and I’m asked to email them all with a link when it launches next week. I encourage them to have a look at it when it’s available, and urge them to email me with any questions. I think my first attendance at a programme meeting is successful!

By the time I get back to my desk, there’s not much of the day left. There are quite a few emails sitting in my inbox, so I catch up with those. One of them is asking me to devise a journals-related contribution to a forthcoming display; I do some preliminary work on this, before it’s 5pm, and time to go home.