The book was recommended by my manager, as Nikki used to facilitate workshops with Evidence Base (my workplace). I’ve heard tales of some of the interesting things she did in workshops and was really looking forward to reading the book. The book begins with an overview of facilitator style, as well as considering different learning styles and how you can ensure you have variety in your session to accommodate different styles. A main focus of the book is on whole-brain learning and engaging participants throughout. I have to confess, some of the ideas were a bit too extreme for me (particularly BrainGym which is recommended a lot throughout the book but I just can’t see me bringing exercise into my sessions!) but there was a lot I took from it. Some of the most useful tips for me included:

• Give adequate breaks
• Use music (useful for background during exercises and to evoke a certain mood)
• Consider theming the session (utilising metaphors and help bring different parts of the workshop together – Nikki even suggests fancy dress but I think that’s another tip I’ll give a miss)
• Plan the timings and structure for the session before creating materials
• Utilise the space your workshop is in, particularly if it is a full day workshop (participants will appreciate a change in environment)
• Think about zoning different areas of the room for different activities to help get people into the right mindset

Although some of that may sound like common sense, putting it into practice isn’t always straight forward. I have put a lot of thought into the structure and activities in the seminar I’m giving tonight, but as much as I tried I just couldn’t come up with a theme that would work and not be cringeworthy! I also discovered this morning that my requested layout (cabaret) couldn’t be provided so the table activities I had planned will have to be adapted on the fly depending on what the room is like when I get there. I’ve also struggled to get music in time – I do of course own music but not any suitable for playing at public events. The planning did seem to go well though – I spent a long time sketching ideas (I also tried mind mapping as recommended in the book but reverted to lists as that’s how my brain works!) before committing to creating the materials or presentation. This meant the material came together really quickly as I knew exactly what I needed. No more rearranging slides and frantically searching for images the day before the event.

I’d recommend the book to anyone involved in delivering workshops or training (including information literacy), but a lot of the ideas are more suited to a creative mind (which sadly I don’t have). I’m definitely going to try to add more variety into future workshops though and we’ll see how this evening goes to see what worked well and what to ditch (or work on).

My focus group toolkit

One of the things I’ve learnt to do in my job as a researcher is to facilitate focus groups. I’ve attended a number of focus groups with colleagues now, so last week it was time to be responsible for facilitating one myself. Encouraged by my chartership mentor, I decided to reflect on this on my blog as I know many librarians are involved in focus groups and it tends to be a key area people are interested in advice on.

Context

We do focus groups for a number of different reasons; some of these have been when working with users on our external projects, but we also do research on behalf of the library so we run surveys and focus groups to find out library users’ views on particular topics. At the moment we’re running focus groups to discover more about what students think about the library’s ebooks – exploring topics such as their use (or non-use) of ebooks and why, the things they like about ebooks, and the things that could be improved.

Why focus groups?

We use focus groups when we want to further explore some of the key issues in an area. Often a focus group will be an activity done in combination with other research methods. We’ve used them to inform surveys, and we’ve used the results of surveys to identify areas to explore through focus groups. The main advantage of focus groups is the vast amount of rich, detailed information that can be gained from a relatively short period of time. There’s also the additional advantage of participants contributing to other’s ideas – sometimes one member of the group will mention something and this will spur on someone else to comment or develop their own views. It’s also a really useful way to get a feel for the general consensus on a certain topic – you can instantly see which areas people tend to agree on and where there are varying or opposing opinions. Focus group situations can be used to test the waters of an innovative idea – they’re a very quick way to get feedback on potential ideas.

What are the disadvantages?

As with any research, there are a number of things to be aware of when using focus groups. The main one is that of sampling – the focus group will usually only be a very small sample size so even if your group agree 100% on a certain topic, this still may only represent the views of a small subsection of your population. You’ll also need to consider the type of people wanting to come to a focus group as it is often a self-selecting method – often these people have strong views they would like to share which is useful but may mean more extreme views (which could be positive or negative) than your whole population.

Planning the focus group

The first time I was involved in organising focus groups we sent emails to the list of people who had indicated interest and asked them to choose which date and location they wanted to attend from a list of around 5 options. I work with two research support staff and we all have access to a shared email inbox so between the three of us we organised the attendees for each session making sure we capped the numbers so we didn’t get too many in a group (10 is our maximum), but also that we didn’t run any with only one or two attendees. We used shared documents in Sharepoint so that we could see lists of attendees for each session and we used those lists when we needed to contact groups to confirm details. I thought this system seemed straight forward enough, but in reality it was a logistical nightmare! We were constantly checking which emails had been replied to, who was doing what, and whether or not the Sharepoint documents had been updated.

This time around I tried to shift some of this administrative burden away from us by using Eventbrite for the bookings. We set up details of the different focus groups as private events (i.e. you can only find them if you have the link) and included the relevant sign up links with the emails that went out to the students. There were still a few problems with people wanting to switch groups or cancel but it was a lot easier to keep track of via Eventbrite. It also meant we could see at a glance how many we’re signed up for each group (we ended up cancelling a couple due to low numbers), and it enabled us to easily contact the attendees for each session through Eventbrite (therefore also storing a record of the message). Using Eventbrite also meant we have been able to check people in at the focus group using the iPhone app which is really straight forward.

During the focus group

Until I tried facilitating a focus group I had imagined that it was a relatively straight forward task that only needed one person. This assumption was wrong! You definitely need two people, and if you have to do it alone you really need an audio recorder. As a participant or in a supporter role (i.e. not the main facilitator) I am able to make comprehensive notes I could use to write up the focus group. As a facilitator however you really do need to spend all your attention on the conversation – encouraging people to join in, watching people’s body language and visual cues to see if they have something to contribute or they agree/disagree with what is being said. You also need to always be one step ahead to think about what you want to get out of the conversation, though of course there are times when you’ll want to explore a new issue more deeply. At one point in a session last week I wanted to ask an additional prompt question but I lost my train of thought, and that was without even trying to make notes! Fortunately I had one of our research support staff with me to take notes and I’d certainly want that support there in future.

After the focus group

It’s important to let the participants know how you’re going to use their information and make sure you do so in that way. You’ll also probably offer your participants an incentive (we find Amazon vouchers work well!) so make sure you deliver on that within the defined timescale – that way they’ll end on a good note and hopefully want to come back for future focus groups.

Lessons I have learnt

The main things I’ve learnt from my experiences so far include:

• Consider carefully how you will arrange bookings (I would strongly recommend a system like Eventbrite)
• Send a reminder close to the session to remind attendees and let them know what they will need to bring (this also acts as a reminder for some who may need to cancel at the last minute)
• Aim to have at least two members of staff facilitating – one to guide the conversation, one to take notes
• Get the right equipment and have it prepared the day before the focus group – key items include audio recorder, notepad and pen (or iPad in my case), signs for the door, attendee list (or iPhone app), question guides, and a crib sheet for the introduction to make sure you don’t forget anything
• Explain the purpose of the focus group during the introduction and encourage an atmosphere of openness (we make it clear at all our focus groups that we will not be offended by any negative comments and we will anonymise comments so they are not attributed to a specific individual)
• Prompt the discussion but try to take more of a backseat – you want the majority of the conversation to be from the attendees
• Be ready to let the conversation take a slight diversion, particularly if an area emerges that many of the participants seem keen to discuss
• Aim to ask predominantly open question to encourage discussion, but if you do have some specific closed questions try to get responses from everyone so you can get an idea of the proportion of the group for each viewpoint
• Allocate plenty of time for the focus group (we usually schedule 2hrs – they often take less than an hour but the extra time means we have scope to explore more deeper if needed without taking up more of the attendee’s time than you specified)

What next?

I’m glad I’ve had the opportunity to develop skills in facilitating focus groups and certainly imagine its something I will continue to do more of. They’re a really good way of getting useful feedback and people’s honest opinions, and a great way to involve the community in helping shape the future. The students who attend our focus groups seem to really appreciate having the opportunity to feed into our future planning and it’s certainly something I hope we can continue to offer for our library. It’s also a really useful method to utilise in a number of our external projects – we’re often involved in evaluation and focus groups are one of the ways we can get people’s opinions. I feel confident that I can now facilitate a focus group but I need to continue to develop my skills in getting the most out of the conversation (i.e. guiding and prompting but not leading the conversation).

Just a short post today as it’s Friday evening and I have a friend coming to visit. I’ll just give a brief overview of today’s tasks:

• Worked on the Emerging Leaders project (gave feedback on survey and added liaison details into our contacts spreadsheet)
• Updated the contact list of JUSP libraries in Surveymonkey (new libraries are joining all the time and I add them into the contact list monthly) and scheduled a feedback survey to go out to them next month 
• Had a catch up call with my manager (we don’t usually have these daily but have a lot of little bits we’re working together on at the moment and this is the easiest way to update progress)
• Had a Skype call for the m-libraries community support project with the programme manager at JISC – this was really useful and we discussed future activities such as a community event, the community website, and the m-libraries conference in September
• Produced a document outlining our ideas for the m-library community event 
• Updated the Twitter guidelines for JUSP based on feedback from the project team
• Wrote a blog post for the Evidence Base blog reporting on the LIS DREaM event I went to on Monday

Hope you have found this insight into my week interesting. My work varies every single day depending on the projects we’re working on. It’s a nice mix at the moment – two external projects and some internal research for the library. 

Today I was working from home which usually means I can get a lot more done, but today my brain seemed to be on slow mode. I did get things done in the end but I worked into the evening to get everything done, which I’m really trying to get out of the habit of doing. My to-do list also seemed to grow rather than shrink today – I’d get one task done and need to add another two or three! So what did I actually do today?

My day began with some sorting and planning – prepping for a couple of calls, organising my tasks, and keeping project documentation up-to-date. Then I had a call with my manager where we discussed things we’re up to at the moment – project progress for the m-library community support project and JUSP, and some focus groups we’ve been asked to do on e-books for our library (based on the results of a library survey we ran at the end of last year). We started planning these and I suggested using Eventbrite to organise the booking. Last time we did focus groups the administration was a nightmare – we have two part-time support staff but this doesn’t cover the full week so I was also responding to some of the messages. It got very confusing with three of us trying to organise the participants and the sessions they could attend (and especially when we had to cancel one of the sessions), so I’m hoping Eventbrite might make things simpler. 

Lunch next, which I always enjoy at home because I can have something other than a jacket potato (today I had gluten free pasta with tomato and mozzarella sauce) and watch some TV (today I watched a very emotional episode of One Born Every Minute). 

This afternoon started well – one of the senior managers noticed my news in the recent library newsletter about being an ALA Emerging Leader and wants to feature it in the wider University newsletter. Could be useful for the Chartership portfolio!

We’re currently finalising some use cases for the JUSP project to demonstrate how libraries are using the service. We visited a number of libraries last year, and interviewed more over the phone/Skype. After writing up each library’s interview as a case study, we decided that they would best be presented as use cases. They are now written up and we’re getting approval for use of quotes from the libraries involved. I made some amendments based on one library’s feedback today. 

Then it was time to make the edits to the report write up of the m-library support project fact-finding survey. Some grammatical and formatting changes, and some additional quotes added in to demonstrate some of the examples of current m-library initiatives. 

I also tidied up my Chartership evidence submission form. I’m using a Google spreadsheet so that I can add things easily from anywhere with web access (I have a copy of the form starred in my inbox and can also access the form through my browser on iPhone or iPad). I had columns for what area of my PPDP and what marking criteria each piece of evidence supports, but this was a free entry text box. I’ve now added each option as a checkbox so I can just tick the box and easily check what information I have for specific areas. It’s working well for me so far (I’d be happy to share or give more details if anyone is interested). 

Tomorrow I have a couple more calls (are you noticing a theme here?!) and hopefully some work-related blog posts as I’m falling behind (it’s unfortunately something that always slips to the bottom of the to-do list as it’s not as essential as other tasks, but I still need to make time for it).

Day in the office today – which ironically usually means I get much less done (too many interruptions and errands). It took me longer than expected to get in this morning (had forgotten what traffic was like during peak times!) but I travel by public transport and always have my iPad with me so I can work on the way in. I finished drafting comments for the report I’ve been reviewing during the journey, and caught up with news on Twitter.

When I arrived at work I found a lovely surprise parcel of goodies from Lisa Jeskins who is part of the LILAC Conference organising committee. I’d been telling lots of people how much I love the LILAC conference whilst I was at ALA Midwinter last week so had joked that I should be on commission. Lisa clearly thought I should be so sent me these:

I’d also had some new stationery delivered so I had quite an exciting start to the day (I know I’m sad but I love getting new stationery!). After a quick catch up with my colleagues, we decided to bring forward a discussion we were planning for next week (it’s rare that we are all together). We’re getting our communication in order and have devised a new system to help share news from our department with the rest of the library and with those external who are interested in our work (most of our work is external). Internally, we’re using the library newsletter whilst externally we have an Evidence Base blog (and may later set up a MailChimp mailing list once our new website is sorted). My colleagues aren’t very familiar with blogging so I agreed to help them get started and provide some informal training for them. Unfortunately we had many hurdles (it seemed to take ages to get their accounts sorted!) and then we got interrupted by an IT guy so we didn’t get as much done as I’d have liked.

I went out for lunch with Damyanti, but we went slightly later than expected and lost track of time whilst we were there so I returned back to work later than expected. Oops! Time for lots of grovelling to manager and quickly preparing for a project Skype call – I’d done my own preparation but hadn’t had chance to discuss with my manager. The call was for the JISC m-library community support project, and we’re at the point now where we know broadly want people want from an m-library community and we need to make decisions on how we can best deliver that. It was a productive call and I certainly feel a lot clearer about our activities for the short term at least. I’ve been interested in investigating how libraries can utilise mobile technologies for a long time, and I’m really enjoying working on a project I’m so interested in. There’s lots of really innovative work out there and we’re hoping to be able to share this with the wider community to prevent duplication and help drive developments further forward.

After the call (and after adding actions to my to-do list and tidying up project documents), I did a bit of work on the Twitter account for another project, the Journal Usage Statistics Project (JUSP). We’ve had a Twitter account (@JUSPSTATS) for a few months now but we haven’t been using it often, partly as it didn’t really have clear ownership or purpose. I’ve worked with some of my colleagues on the project to discuss our intended use and have developed some guidelines. Today I shared them with the rest of the project team, answered some questions about Twitter use to a colleague who is new to it, and set up some saved searches on Twitter to keep an eye on. The Twitter search interface is a lot better than it used to be and seems to work well – I didn’t know it was so easy to set limits such as language and geography in addition to keyword and phrase searches.

That took me to almost the end of the afternoon – there was just time for a few emails and actions to be added to my to-do list regarding the JUSP project, then I visited the library general office to return the travel insurance card (I took it to Dallas for ALA Midwinter) and headed home. Thursday and Friday I’ll be working at home so hopefully able to get some real work done!

Today was another continuing professional development event for me, again in London. This time it was a joint event organised by CILIP in London and Library and Information Research Group (LIRG) on Writing for Publication (which I will share the notes from later). It was only a 3hr workshop but the style of learning really suited me – there was lots of discussion time and it was fairly informal with questions welcomed throughout. I didn’t necessarily learn anything ground breaking (although knowing the publication process from the journal editor perspective was useful), but it reinforced a lot of things I should know but seem to forget when I have a writing task and a barrier stopping me doing it.

The workshop finished at 1pm, so after lunch at my favourite place in London for gluten free food (Planet Organic), I got a train home. During the afternoon I worked on the train – mainly catching up on and organising emails, thinking about my writing homework (there is a follow up session in a couple of weeks), catching up with my boss, and reviewing the m-library report we need to get finalised soon.

I got home at about 5pm and worked a bit more during the evening. Because I’ve been travelling a lot over the last couple of weeks, I’m not as up-to-date as I like to be with responding to emails, reading RSS feeds (I’m way behind and might have to hit mark all as read even for my favourites folder) and managing my to do list. As a mobile worker, I do sometimes find it difficult to switch off from work. I can’t just leave my office/workplace and stop work for the evening, and I like to leave it in as tidy a state as I can before the next day (no half finished tasks). After yet more emails, I spent some time sorting out my mailing lists and filters so that my inbox doesn’t get overloaded (this is a particular pain at the moment as many I subscribe to are US based so they fill up in the evening due to the time difference).

I also did a bit of work on my ALA Emerging Leaders project – my team and I need to finalise the questions for our survey soon and start sending it out to people. We’re using ALA Connect to share documents and hold discussions (including our virtual meetings). This way our project mentor and our ALA staff contact can also see our progress and help us when we need it. This evening I added a couple of new documents onto the wiki style software so that we can all work together on finalising the survey.

Tomorrow I’m actually going into the office at the university. Looking forward to seeing some colleagues

Just a brief post – today I attended the LIS DREaM (Developing Research Excellence and Methods) workshop 2, this time held in London. It was an early start (left home at around 6.40am – too dark!), but it still amazes me that I can be in London by 9.30am and at an event before 10am.

On the train journey I worked on a draft of one of our reports (for the m-libs support project), and sorted through work emails.

The event itself was 10.30am until 4.15pm at the British Library.

I have to be honest; it wasn’t my favourite research event as the topics weren’t very relevant to my interests or current research areas and I struggled to see how some of it could apply in practice in libraries/LIS research. I did find some of it useful – I enjoyed the session on webometrics and might do some further investigation into what can be done with sentiment analysis from online social media (e.g. using tweets), and I enjoyed hearing about other attendee’s research/ideas in the unconference half hour. I’ll write a full review of the workshop later this week.

Having coeliac disease means its always a bit of a gamble with conference food (I have to follow a gluten free diet), and the lunch was, as is often the case, pretty disappointing but in the afternoon I got my own special gluten free cake!

Once the event finished I checked into my hotel (staying over as I’m attending a writing for publication workshop on Tuesday), and after a quick catchup of work stuff via email I headed out to catch up with some lovely librarian friends from London and enjoyed a nice meal followed by some cocktails. Great end to the day!

I know a number of people said they were interested in viewing it so I’ve included the details below. I have also added it to my publications page.

Strategic marketing in academic libraries: an investigation of current practice

Purpose
The purpose of the research is to investigate strategic marketing in academic libraries, incorporating elements of organisational orientation, strategic planning, and processes and procedures to support these.

Aims and objectives
The aim of the research is to build on existing literature, extending the knowledge of current practice in a relatively unexplored area within UK academic libraries. The objectives of the research are to identify key considerations for strategic marketing in academic libraries; to critically evaluate current theory on the subject; to explore current practice; and to formulate recommendations of best practice.

Methods
A mixed methods approach was chosen, using survey and case study strategies. An online questionnaire was used identify trends in current practice, whilst telephone interviews enabled more detailed exploration. A geographical sample, university libraries in the West Midlands, was chosen due to convenience. All nine libraries were invited to participate; one chose to opt out whilst one did not respond. This resulted in seven libraries participating in the questionnaire, with five of those also participating in an interview.

Results
The key considerations for strategic marketing in academic libraries emerging from the literature included market orientation, marketing planning and customer relationship management. Results showed that though market orientation is seen as a useful approach for libraries, the topic is relatively unfamiliar to librarians. Responsibility for marketing
planning varied across the libraries interviewed, though all but one utilise groups to bring experience from different areas of the library. All participating libraries have some form of marketing plan and engage in customer relationship management activities, however formal procedures and embedding into service planning was not evident.

Conclusions
Strategic marketing in academic libraries is of clear relevance to today’s economic situation, and the research highlights the need for raising awareness of such issues and considering implications and barriers to practice.

The item record is available in Aberystwyth University’s Cadair repository with the full text PDF linked from the item record.

EDITED TO ADD: This is likely to be my final blog post before Christmas this year, so I’d like to take the opportunity to wish you all a very Merry Christmas! If you feel like doing something fun over the festive period, why not enter the Festive 24 Things 2011 quiz?

Last fun duty of my year as SLA Europe president: about to chair today’s #elt2011 with @joeyanne @obnoxiouslibrn @kwelle #online11

— Sara Batts (@Batty_Towers) November 30, 2011

I think the panel discussion flowed well – there was largely agreement across the board on a number of different factors, suggesting that libraries across Europe are at a similar stage with social media (the panel had representatives from UK, Germany and The Netherlands). There were some really interesting examples from my fellow panelists – one example of Yammer being used for internal communication (in an international organisation with staff dispersed geographically), and one example of Facebook being used by a University before students arrived to help answers queries and help them begin to make friends.

The main messages I took from the session were that libraries and librarians should experiment with social media to see what works, and should aim to understand more about their users as no two libraries will use social media in the same way.

You can see the tweets from the session at the #elt2011 hashtag (thanks to @WoodsieGirl and @EBSCOUK for such comprehensive tweeting!) and there is a write up of the session on the SLA Europe website.
As mentioned before, I decided to get  information for my section of the discussion via a brief survey – many thanks to those who gave feedback. The main themes emerging from the results of this are shown below.

Social media use in UK libraries

• Many using Facebook and Twitter.
• A number using blogs, Flickr and delicious.
• Diigo, LibraryThing, FourSquare and Vimeo being used but not as common
• Few starting to create Google+ pages
• Some using for staff communication (e.g. Staff blog, wiki, Yammer)

Integration of services is becoming more common as is utilising one to many communication channels to feed from one place to another. One example of this is using RSS feeds to create a Netvibes site which sends out current awareness emails via Yahoo Pipes and Feedburner.

Difficulties in social media implementation in UK libraries

Strategy

• Management resistance (not used to informal conversational style and concerned about image it portrays).
• Balance between experimentation and the ‘just do it’ approach and the careful considered approach with policy, structure, branding etc.
• Restrictions of social media policies.
• Being seen as something distinct as separate rather than a core part of service.

Staff responsible

• Buy in from staff and lack of knowledge – one commented that they have colleagues who are scared of social media; another said it was considered trivial in their library.
• Risk of relying on just one member of staff.
• Keeping content fresh.

Infrastructure

• Access blocked in some libraries.

Users

• Lack of uptake from users.
• Concerns about negative comments.

Time, time, time – this was a common theme with competing demands in UK libraries at present.

Qualities needed for librarians using social media

• Appropriate style (formal/informal – ‘the personal professional’).
• Ability to judge tone and mood.
• Filtering and selecting information to share.
• Willingness to try new things and take risks.
• Flexibility and open-mindedness.
• Communication skills.
• Knowledge of users and different platforms.
• Determined/tenacious/enthusiastic.

This was summarised by one respondent – “The qualities any good librarian should have!”

Factors contributing to social media policy success/failure

Factors leading to success

• Promotion.
• Flexibility and trial and error to find the right fit for users, message and library.
• Social media embedded into library service.
• Sustainable approach (not just one person).
• Actively seeking comments on library to get feedback.
• Timely and appropriate content.
• Engaging, varied content (photos, videos, questions).
• Integration with other library media.

Factors leading to failure

• Using social media to broadcast (should be two way not one way communication).
• Failure to respond to comments/feedback.
• A poorly implemented strategy (worse than none at all – for example a Twitter account which only broadcasts and ignores requests for information will give a worse impression than no account).
• Not enough staff with access to account (therefore not timely responses)
• Too much focus on strategy rather than doing – need to experiment to try things out.
• Focus on tools rather than outcome – should focus on desired outcome.
• Not kept up-to-date.
• Over or under moderation.
• Facelessness.

Thanks again to everyone who fed into this.

Pass with distinction

I didn’t expect it to take me 5 years to complete, but I’m glad I stuck with it and finished (if you read my earlier blog post about Belbin’s roles you’ll note that I’m a completer-finisher by nature so not finishing things really frustrates me!). Although I grew to dread working on the course (particularly the dissertation which dragged for 3 long years!), I do feel proud to have completed it and to have come away with a distinction.

I got some very positive feedback on my dissertation which I’m really pleased about – especially given the fact that I’m a researcher in my day job now! I am now contemplating repurposing it into a journal article, which is something I might look at in future (it was on strategic marketing in academic libraries). I believe a copy will be added to Aberystwyth’s institutional repository (Cadair), so I’ll post a link to it once it’s online.

For now though it’s time to celebrate!