This week I’m participating in the Library Day in the Life project which charts the day-to-day activities of library workers at different points of the year. This is the third time I’ve participated; you can see my earlier posts from July 2009 and January 2010. I’m a Resources Librarian at a university library in UK, and work part-time (3 days a week). This will be the last time I complete the project in this role as I have a new job to move to soon (more on this in a later blog post).

Over summer I’ve got two main projects on the go; collection management for the Teaching Practice collection (for trainee teachers), and managing a project working on development of induction activities for the VLE. I also usually have two enquiry desk duties per week, each of which is half a day (this week mine are Wednesday afternoon and Friday afternoon).

Work activities on my desk this week

Today I spent most of the day on the induction project, although I did spend a little bit of time weeding.

Morning activities today included:

• Sorting and responding to emails – nowhere near as many each morning since I recently reorganised my folders and accounts, using my librarian skills to good effect!
• Reviewing induction material sent to me by one of the project team – gave feedback for a few minor amendments
• Moving the HTML content from one VLE topic to another, uploading images to new topic, and changing the structure slightly (splitting a long section up into component parts)
• Adding the complete structure to the new topic (with blank marker pages) to get a better idea of the overall induction package
• Weeding the Teaching Practice collection – finished Music and did the Sport/PE section so just Geography and History to go now

Afternoon activities included:

• Reviewing more induction project material to ensure we’re sticking to the project brief and covering the areas we need without going overboard – a real threat to this project has been creeping into more advanced material, so it’s important we establish and stick to what we believe is necessary information for induction level
• Helping a colleague rearrange furniture – he’s swapped desks and needed to rearrange all his PC equipment (he’s a lucky so and so who has two monitors!)
• Adding some of the quiz questions to the VLE including feedback – remembered I could include images as answer options which makes the screenshot questions easier to understand
• More photographs, screenshots and image editing
• Starting to think about what, if any, files (physical or electronic) I need to handover before leaving – I’ve been at this workplace for almost 5 years, but most of what I have produced is publicly (or internally) available. Hopefully my meeting with my manager next week will help me think about all the things I’ve likely forgotten about!

Probably reads as a pretty boring day, but I’m excited about the induction activities project and want to make it a really useful tool for all our new students, taking into account different starting knowledge points and different learning styles. It’s all starting to come together nicely now so fingers crossed it will be complete before I leave!

If you’re interested in following other librarians, go to the wiki and use the links to people’s blogs, or use the #libday5 search in Twitter. Looking forward to #libday6 when I should be in my new job!

Tweet this

This week I’m participating in the Library Day in the Life project which charts the day-to-day activities of library workers at different points of the year. This is the third time I’ve participated; you can see my earlier posts from July 2009 and January 2010. I’m a Resources Librarian at a university library in UK, and work part-time (3 days a week). This will be the last time I complete the project in this role as I have a new job to move to soon (more on this in a later blog post).

Over summer I’ve got two main projects on the go; collection management for the Teaching Practice collection (for trainee teachers), and managing a project working on development of induction activities for the VLE. I also usually have two enquiry desk duties per week, each of which is half a day (this week mine are Wednesday afternoon and Friday afternoon).

Current to do list (I also use RTM for smaller subtasks)

I took some photos of my workplace today (including the one above of my overall to do list), you can see them all in this set on Flickr. Others have also been adding photos for the project, I find it really interesting to look at where people work.

Morning activities today included:

• Sorting and responding to emails
• Finding examples of different types of material for the induction activities (book, CD, DVD, and chapter from edited book from well known or general study skills material) – always amazes me how long it can take to find a good example!
• Taking photos and screenshots of example materials and example searches on OPAC (library catalogue)
• Adding the images and brief explanatory text to the VLE
• Putting together some multiple choice questions for the induction activities
• Covering the Lending Services Helpdesk for 90mins whilst other staff were at a meeting (this involved selling some withdrawn books and binding materials, issuing reservations, renewing a laptop loan, helping students find books, and helping a student with a corrupt USB drive – oh and cutting my hand whilst guillotining some scrap paper!)

Afternoon activities included:

• Adding more induction material to the VLE (think this will be repeated every morning and afternoon for the foreseeable future!)
• Glancing through the CILIP Defining our Professional Future report, and printing a copy to read soon
• Flicking through the online version of Library & Information Update from CILIP
• Organising my calendar for the next few weeks before I finish this job role (including arranging some meetings with my manager)
• Trying to sort out a crashing issue with Photoshop (using advice from Twitter) before editing images ready for web use – it seemed a little better later on, but still crashed when I tried to open multiple files so more investigation needed tomorrow!

If you’re interested in following other librarians, go to the wiki and use the links to people’s blogs, or use the #libday5 search in Twitter.

Tweet this

This week I’m participating in the Library Day in the Life project which charts the day-to-day activities of library workers at different points of the year. This is the third time I’ve participated; you can see my earlier posts from July 2009 and January 2010. I’m a Resources Librarian at a university library in UK, and work part-time (3 days a week). This will be the last time I complete the project in this role as I have a new job to move to soon (more on this in a later blog post).

Over summer I’ve got two main projects on the go; collection management for the Teaching Practice collection (for trainee teachers), and managing a project working on development of induction activities for the VLE. I also usually have two enquiry desk duties per week, each of which is half a day (this week mine are Wednesday afternoon and Friday afternoon).

Morning activities today included:

• Sorting through emails and responding to a couple of email enquiries (local college librarian re-arranging a visit to discuss inductions and education student researching pedagogy and andragogy for her dissertation)
• Changing loan status of some books which are no longer in such high demand
• Selecting books for withdrawal in the music education section of Teaching Practice (found some gems which I’ll photograph to share!)
• Organising classmarks of books to be changed where they would be more findable from another area (Teaching Practice is usually browsed, not found by searching OPAC, so logical placement in terms of the area of the curriculum it supports is vital)
• Returning books I’ve been too lazy to return and kept renewing even though I have finished with them (librarians are such rebels!)
• Enjoying a lovely slice of gluten free chocolate cake made specially by a colleague (this was definitely a highlight!)

Afternoon activities included:

• Answering a couple of phone and in-person enquiries – mainly just directional enquiries though, no meaty research enquiries this afternoon
• Briefly covering the Lending Services Helpdesk (and helping a lost student find a book)
• Looking at the latest issue of SCONUL Focus – read part of a particularly interesting article about improving support and liaison links with academic staff and researchers
• Discussions with a colleague about changes to the curriculum and how our soon to be developed induction activities can be embedded into the new modules
• Discussions with a different colleague about the progress on the induction activities (this turned into an epic conversation but I think we both had a clearer idea by the end!)
• Drafting some ideas and activities for my areas of responsibility in the induction activities (mainly activities using multiple choice questions with clear feedback at each stage)
• Testing capabilities of the VLE – thankfully inserting images into multiple choice questions is relatively straight forward!

I forgot to take photos today so I’ll be sure to take some tomorrow and add them to the blog posts.

If you’re interested in following other librarians, go to the wiki and use the links to people’s blogs, or use the #libday5 search in Twitter.

Tweet this

Earlier this week I attended a workshop for the Academic Libraries of the Future project, held at Cardiff University. The aim of the project is to examine potential future scenarios within society and how this could impact on academic libraries. Read the rest of this entry »

Tweet this

Earlier this week, myself and Emma Illingworth (@wigglesweets and half of Librarians on the Loose) presented a joint workshop at CoFHE/UC&R Joint Conference 2010 titled “Your library brand and the student experience”. Although neither of us are directly involved in this sort of work in our institutions, it’s something we’re both passionate about and spend time researching, so we wanted to pull this together and share some of what we’ve learnt with others. Read the rest of this entry »

Tweet this

LILAC 2010 conference dinner venue (thanks to @KathR on Twitter)

After LILAC, I said I’d like to write a blog post with some tips for attending conferences; here are my tips from my (limited!) experience at conferences.

Read the rest of this entry »

Tweet this

There’s been quite a lot of talk on Twitter about this year’s New Professionals Conference (hashtag #npc2010). It’s great to see the increase in use of Twitter from last year when I think there was only me and a couple of others using a hashtag I’d made up!

I’m hoping to develop further Twitter support including a list of delegates (more on this later). I’m a bit late in organising it this year but thankfully the conference is on a non-working day so I should hopefully be able to attend, I’m just trying to get this confirmed at the moment.

For anyone else who is wondering about attending but hasn’t booked their place yet, I recently heard about a great competition being organised by CILIPs Membership Support Unit, and the prize is an all expenses paid place at the New Professionals Conference. You can see more details on the competition web page, but the basic idea is to submit a competition entry in any form (essay, video, art, whatever!) which answers the following question:

What would the world be like if information was unmanaged?

I’m looking forward to seeing the entries to this, please do enter the competition especially if you’re keen to attend the New Professionals Conference!

Hope to see some of you there on 5th July.

Tweet this

So, the final day, an early start to day 3; the first session was at 8.45am!

After dragging myself out of bed and checking out of the hotel, we managed to make it across in time for the first session. I chose to attend the session by Alanna Ross and Christine Furno, who discussed their use of active learning to try to improve their 50 minute one shot information literacy sessions, comparing the use of clickers with a traditional lecture style session and a problem based learning approach; unfortunately their results were inconclusive but following further qualitative research they discovered that students did not see this as important due to lack of faculty support – sadly a lot of nodding faces at this point. Moving forward, they hope to integrate the session at the most appropriate time and link it to part of the module assessment by working with faculty.

Read the rest of this entry »

Tweet this

Apologies for the delay in getting this post published, think I may have finally caught up on my sleep now!

Day 2 of LILAC 2010 began with a lovely hotel breakfast followed by a dash (due to the appalling weather!) over to the Strand hotel. The first session of the day was the second keynote of the conference, Dr Karen Fisher from University of Washington. Karen spoke about her research into lay information mediaries (LIMs):

those who seek information in a non-professional or lay capacity on behalf or because of others, without necessarily being asked to do so, or engaging in follow-up

Read the rest of this entry »

Tweet this

What a brilliant start to the conference! After a full breakfast at the hotel, we wandered over to The Strand for conference registration where we were met by hoards of librarians everywhere! Thankfully it was all very well organised and we were able to get registered before heading to the pre-conference sessions. I had chosen a session on RefWorks (reference management tool), where I learnt more about the Telstar project integrating RefWorks functionality into Moodle (contact Owen Stephens, who managed the project, if you are interested to know more about this). I also attended the session on assessment which Amanda Poulton (@rangtang) took (originally planned to be taken by Jo Webb (@webbery) and Chris Powis), and it was particularly useful to discuss assessment ideas in small groups, and hear about some of the innovative assessment ideas from DMU. The final pre-conference session I attended was one I’d been looking forward to and it certainly didn’t disappoint – I can see why the speakers won an award for best paper at a previous conference! Sarah Faye Cohen (@thesheck), Janet Cottrell and Michelle G. Miller spoke about the information literacy support at Champlain College, and measuring the impact. It was really interesting to hear a group presentation from such different perspectives – an information literacy librarian, a library director, and a provost. The main themes I took from the presentation was the need to consider all data when measuring impact and guiding future developments – “data is not always easy to understand, but it doesn’t mean it’s not important”; to find allies amongst faculty/academic staff, celebrate small successes and express gratitude; and to learn to tolerate uncertainty and accept a culture where it is OK for things to not work – I loved the quote “failing often is OK if you can succeed sooner”. You can view the presentation (strongly recommended) on Slideshare.

Lunch followed, and there was a first-timers section to network with others who hadn’t been to LILAC before. The committee were also around at this point to introduce themselves and answer any questions. The conference was then officially opened by Sean Haughey, Minister for State for Lifelong Learning, followed by the first keynote of the conference from Tony Durcan, Head of Culture, Libraries and Lifelong Learning for Newcastle City Council. Tony’s keynote was very interesting – he discussed some of the new developments at Newcastle’s flagship library in the city centre, including some “soft triangular” (plectrum shaped according to Sarah!)  enquiry desks to reduce some of the barriers people face at traditional altar-like enquiry desks. It was interesting to hear that there has initially been a number of concerns and fears from staff about the changes to enquiries, but that now staff preferred the new style of roving support and more informal enquiry desks. Tony also discussed the implications of recent developments such as the Digital Britain report and the DCMS public library review, and how important it is for public libraries to enable access to computing facilities, internet access, and training to support these. He opened with a fantastic quote from The Aspen Institute (2009);

Read the rest of this entry »

Tweet this