Earlier this evening I attended a free online webinar hosted by SirsiDynix; it was based on advocacy in libraries and was presented by Stephen Abram. I thought I’d share a summary of the presentation for anyone interested. Read the rest of this entry »

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As some of you may know, escaping the echo chamber has been a concern of librarians for a while now. American library bloggers, and more recently UK library bloggers, share their experiences and discuss innovative ideas for developing their libraries, whether they are public, academic, law, health or special libraries. For approximately four or five years now, I’ve been reading about all these fantastic developments and joining in conversations with other library and information workers in the profession.There’s some great stuff happening and some even greater stuff being developed for the future.

And yet, we find ourselves in the unfortunate position whereby libraries are facing closure threats, funding is being cut drastically, and staff are facing redundancy. Obviously, these new stories are due to the economic climate, but why are libraries suffering worse than some other areas? Is it because libraries aren’t seen as important as some of the more vital areas of public spending such a healthcare and education? Possibly. Is the problem exacerbated by the lack of communication outside of anyone working in the profession or our regular users? I think so.
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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).

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!

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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).

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.

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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.

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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 »

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The day after the Librarians as Teachers event was a similarly themed event focusing on a different element of the librarian role – Librarian as Researcher.

I wasn’t able to attend this event, but I followed it via Twitter thanks to @LISResearch and @lenocsor. You can see the tweets in relation to the event at the TwapperKeeper archive. Obviously, I didn’t get the benefit of attending the day’s events but I did get a flavour for the discussions and could follow up links mentioned and view presentations online.

I’m a keen advocate of research, making evidence-based decisions wherever possible. I’m involved in my own research as a librarian (for work-based projects and to inform elements of my job role), and I also spend my free time researching areas of interest -sometimes for articles, presentations or blog posts; sometimes just to increase my understanding.

One of the things I was really impressed by at LILAC 2010 was the emphasis on research-informed information literacy teaching, using both existing research and conducting original research to help make decisions about the approach to teaching.

Commitment to research by librarians is something I’d love to see more of, but I think all too often it’s overlooked as other activities take priority. Read the rest of this entry »

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Last week I attended a really interesting event hosted jointly by University, College and Research Group West Midlands and Career Development Group West Midlands. Librarians as Teachers: the New Professionals? was a very popular event, with delegates travelling from across the country to attend. I was invited to join the panel for a debate at the end of the day, presenting the opinion of a new professional.

You can see a programme of the day including presentations and supporting material, and view other blog posts covering the day, or view the archive of tweets, but I wanted to share some of the themes raised during the event which I’ve been contemplating since.

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I think for anyone reading this blog, you probably know I’m an avid supporter of the microblogging platform Twitter, but there have been some interesting points made recently about tweeting during events, and it’s something I’d like to discuss (particularly apt at the moment as I’m “Twitter Officer” for the upcoming New Professionals Conference in July!).

The focus for this post is on tweeting at events, not tweeting in general. My own experiences have taught me that sometimes it is acceptable (and encouraged) to tweet during an event, and sometimes it’s frowned upon. I’d also like to make it clear that of course it is unacceptable to tweet about confidential matters and therefore inappropriate to tweet internal meetings to an external audience, or to tweet any information which is sensitive or confidential.

More recently I’ve been discussing the issue of whether or not to tweet at events with my boyfriend Chris (yes we are proper nerds and spend a lot of our free time discussing such things!). It seems it’s quite a complex issue with a number of misunderstandings, as unfortunately experienced by WoodsieGirl recently. There’s been an interesting debate over on CILIP Communities today which I’ve been following with interest, and I thought I’d share my own views and some of the arguments for and against tweeting at events. I hope to present a balanced view, although I do admit up front that I personally sit firmly in the camp who advocate tweeting at events, for the moment anyway.

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Defining our professional future is the new term being used for the “Big Conversation” that CILIP are having this year with their members and non-members, to establish where information professionals may be in the future and how the professional body can continue to support the changes. I’m attending a local focus group tomorrow and have been gathering some thoughts on the three key questions, but thought I’d jot them down on the blog too.

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