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!

ALA Emerging Leaders

Just a brief blog post to share some exciting news – I’ve been offered a place on the 2012 class of ALA (American Library Association) Emerging Leaders program. For those who don’t know what it is, here’s a bit of information about ALA Emerging Leaders:

The American Library Association (ALA) Emerging Leaders (EL) program is a leadership development program which enables newer library workers from across the country* to participate in problem-solving work groups, network with peers, gain an inside look into ALA structure, and have an opportunity to serve the profession in a leadership capacity. It puts participants on the fast track to ALA committee volunteerism as well as other professional library-related organizations.

(taken from the ALA Emerging Leaders webpage)

What it basically means is that to participate I will need to attend the ALA Midwinter event in January (Dallas) where I will be introduced to ALA as an organisation, meet my fellow Emerging Leaders, and join a group to work on a project within ALA. I’ll then work with that group from the end of the conference until June when we will attend ALA Annual (Anaheim) to present our findings. After that, each Emerging Leader is expected to continue to support the organisation – it’s often referred to as a fast track to getting involved in ALA.

It was recommended to me by so many people at ALA Annual last year, and I’m really excited about being a part of it. I can’t wait to meet the rest of the Emerging Leaders (some of whom I’ve already found on Twitter at #el12ala)!

*It is open to non-US residents too! I may need to ask for this to be altered – I wonder if I am the first international member involved in this?

One of my sessions - really enjoyed the conversation at this one

The good

• The people – I met so many great people, put some faces to Twitter names, and had a lot of really interesting conversations with people I already knew. There was a really fantastic mix of people from different backgrounds, with different types of jobs and interests, and lots of different ideas.
• The enthusiasm – there such a buzz to the event the whole day (and the evening before and after!). It really was infectious and wonderful to see so many enthusiastic and passionate people who care about libraries.
• The interests – because there was such a diverse group, you were bound to find people interested in similar topics to you. I had conversations about mobile technologies in libraries; the link between library research and practice and the importance of sharing findings of research; embedding transliteracy (including information literacy and digital literacy) into the curriculum through school, college and university; and what libraries can learn from retail.
• The facilitating – although I was apprehensive about pitching for sessions and facilitating them, I really enjoyed it. I wasn’t sure what to expect at all but thankfully both my sessions were well attended and we had some interesting discussions. I’ll post up some notes from both my sessions to the event wiki in the next few days.
• The collaborative nature of the sessions – both of the ideas that I put forward seemed similar to another pitch so we were able to merge the sessions and facilitate together. I think this was really good both from the facilitator perspective and for people interested in the topic.
• The learning – not only did I learn some library-related bits and bobs, I also learnt a lot about the profession, and a lot about myself too.
• The cakes – although I kept forgetting to get some and only had one, despite the fact that there were a number of gluten free options (yay!).

The bad 

• The complete lack of structure – this was both a good thing and a bad thing. I wasn’t sure how to facilitate my sessions or what people would be expecting. I think it went OK, and the discussions at the sessions seemed useful, but I’m not sure how much long-term value they will have (I’m hopeful the connections they started to foster and the fact most people are on Twitter will mean that conversations can continue).
• The intensity – too much for me! Facilitating two sessions was possibly a bad idea, as I didn’t manage to make the last two sessions – I was mentally drained! There were sessions I would have liked to attend in both slots, but I just knew I wouldn’t be able to concentrate.
• The timetable – as with any conference with concurrent sessions, there were clashes which meant I couldn’t attend some of the sessions I would have liked to as I was facilitating at the same time. Can’t really be helped though.
• The lack of time – although I spoke to a lot of people, there were many people I didn’t get chance to talk to. Some I didn’t even seem to see at all and others I only saw just as I was leaving.
• The poet – it just wasn’t my cup of tea I’m afraid.

The ugly

• My incoherence late afternoon – I was really struggling so I do apologise if I spoke to you around that time and made even less sense than normal!
• My attempt at crochet – it wasn’t pretty. Thanks so much to Sarah for her patience in trying to teach me!

Sarah (blue yarn) trying to teach me (pink yarn) to crochet

Overall it was a really fantastic event – roll on Library Camp UK 2012!