Summer's swan song

Today it is September. Those long, balmy, (often rainy) August days are far behind us. Those days when the English sun would shine from dawn til dusk over quiet libraries, closed lecture halls, a canteen with reduced opening hours. Order and calm reigned supreme over our faculties and spires, our parks and gardens. We had such plans. We would manually upgrade all our short bibliographic records. We would catalogue our backlogs. Every shelf would be checked. Every reading list scanned. We might even be able to - wait for it - sort out the 'store room.'

And what happened? The summer we envisaged in our minds back in June went on forever. Day after day of heat and quiet and time. Buckets of time, stretching out over the weeks until the time that no one could then  even imagine being real - the Start Of the New Academic Year. But the summer we saw in our minds in June was not the true being of reality; oh no, this Summer was a trickster, a prankster. She made us think she went on forever in the hot sunny days characteristic of June, July and August in England that exist only in the nostalgic memories of our childhoods. Instead of this majestic Summer, where everyone goes on long picnics and still manages to complete multiple big projects, we got summer - one rainy season followed by burning hot days where time manages to go quickly and slowly at once. And before we've had time to process where time has gone, it is September again and we're seeing on the horizon the SONAY riding out to meet us on the plains of the campus.

As the law of time goes, September will see us simultaneously riding out to meet the Start Of the New Academic Year and leaping off our metaphorical horses to run back to our projects that we planned to complete over the summer. After the quiet that has reigned supreme over the library and the campus, after two months of closed lecture halls and empty classrooms, I am waiting for the rush. Our students bring our campuses to life, their cycles lining the streets and their coats all over the library give us concrete proof that they value what we're doing and why we're here. If they didn't, they wouldn't be here, and we would have little point as libraries and librarians. And whilst every single short bibliographic record might not have been upgraded this summer, I suspect that we all completed projects and sections of bigger projects. That is what is important.

The summer always goes faster than we expect. I start missing our students in August. Every book in our library might have been shelf-checked and in the right place, but I miss our students coming in and browsing everything. I miss the clutter and the whispers and the bags and the illicit mobiles. A library should be alive and without readers it is dead. It has no point. One major thing that I have accomplished this summer is forging better links with our academics. I am now attending a big meeting for new students at the start of term to introduce the library and our services and I have been invited to resource meetings for one of our graduate degree programmes. Things are exciting, dynamic and fresh. There are challenges too, of course, but I like a challenge. When the SONAY rides out towards us, I'll be the one at the front on the big white charger.

ARLG Conference 2012: Get Out [Of The Library] More!

Being awarded the Alison Northover Award allowed me to attend my first large national conference, namely the ARLG Conference 2012, in Newcastle, June 25^th – 27^th. The conference, entitled ‘Great expectations: what do students want and how do we deliver?’, explored several extremely topical themes surrounding the rise of tuition fees and the expectations of our students within a time of general austerity in the information services sector.

Throughout the conference, from the keynote speaker to the final workshop presenter, the concept of the student as customer raised its commercial head. Opinions differed wildly; some argued that if we start calling our students customers then they will behave like customers, expecting a good degree as their product purchased for the cost of for example £27, 000. Others put forward the argument that, if we’re committed to providing excellent customer care, why not call our users customers? A compromise emerged in the form of the terms ‘member’ or better still ‘partner’, encouraging open dialogue between staff and students.  The best analogy I heard is that of gym membership; you can pay your fee but that doesn’t automatically make you thin. Paying more for your degree doesn’t give you an automatic right to a good result.

Main exhibition room

(care of http://www.cilip.org.uk/get-involved/special-interest-groups/ucr/pages/joint-conference-2010.aspx)

However, like it or not, I think that the rise in tuition fees will change student expectations. Despite protestations to the contrary from speaker Paul Abernathy, president of Liverpool John Moores' University student union, paying such vast amounts of money will commercialise the student experience. This is not necessarily a bad thing as long as it is managed and facilitated appropriately. Paying almost thirty thousand pounds will not guarantee you a first, but it will give you a more assertive voice. It will make students less willing to accept decisions taken by library staff purely on the basis that a librarian considers the student request to be inappropriate or not how this particular librarian thinks a student should be conducting their learning experience. We have to face up to the fact that we cannot ignore our students; they have to become our partners with a voice that is respected and heard. This is a good thing. It will make us more relevant and it will ensure that we are doing what our students want us to do. Otherwise, what’s the point? If we sit staidly in our ivory towers and refuse to demonstrate Google Scholar because we know a better place to go to for information, we will be bypassed. This has been going on since the birth of the search engine made people generally more assertive in researching their own topics, but it will increase in the future.  It might be true that Literature Online has a better data set but we as professionals need to manage these situations well. We demonstrate Google scholar, then we mention LION. We must pick our battles.

Which leads well onto the second big theme of the conference; ensuring that we market our products and services well through continually stressing the benefits of the library and librarians over the supposed ease of Google et al.  Kay Grieves and Jan Dodshon from the University of Sunderland gave a vitally useful workshop detailing a seven stage strategic marketing plan to fully embed the library service within the consciousness of every single student. They based this toolkit around the concept that every student needs to feel a sense of ownership within the library service; dialogues were stressed as a vital means of ensuring that this happens. Feedback should be collected regularly but we also need to encourage dialogues about library services between students, whether via a web 2 tool or in real life on a comments board. If something is truly impossible, we need to start explaining why. We can’t go to a staff-student liaison committee and just say that requests are impossible anymore. We need to explore and explain, to communicate and convey. For example, in my library we have had requests for 24/7 opening. I would dearly love to offer this provision but unfortunately we have no security to protect our students after hours. Their expectation is for 24/7 opening; we mitigate this through dialogue. This is how we need to start dealing with rising student expectations.

After all, how do your students know that your service isn’t necessarily richer due to their higher fees? I can see it now: “I pay your wages, why can’t you stay here until later in the evenings?” Some say it with MPs; “I pay their wages and they’re fiddling their expenses?” If we explain, we can deal with this situation well. We could even turn our students into ambassadors for our service, canvassing for higher budgets and rallying against staff cuts. We could do this. But only if we explain things well via open dialogues.

The final theme that came out of the conference was all about how we can measure the impact of the library service on the overall student learning experience. How does what we do improve what they do? We need to collect evidence. Every time we run a training event, we need to gather feedback and ask the right types of questions to be able to match responses on to  the learning and skills outcomes of our faculties and institutions. This gives us harder evidence than purely anecdotal quotes, although it is still only a perception and only goes some way to justifying the need for the services that we provide. Essentially it comes back to gathering feedback, although this time it is for a slightly different purpose.

The three days were a genuine whirl of new ideas, new projects, new people, a great quiz, a lovely gala dinner at the Baltic, some wonderfully inspiring workshops and some very inspiring people. A particular mention should be made of the Serious Play workshop hosted by Andy Priestner and facilitated by Libby Tilley; if you ever have the chance to do it, grab it quick! It’s a really interesting experience that can tell you a lot about your thoughts about people and services that you didn’t already know. And finally, a big thank you to the ARLG committee for organising such a great conference and for awarding me the Alison Northover Award. Since returning to my institution, I have already had approval for a new information skills marketing campaign to launch in a few months and I will be attending a big departmental meeting for new freshers in October in a bid to become much more outward facing. My motto for the academic year 2012-13: get out [of the library] more!

Not so cool but definitely a librarian

After reading the excellent blog post over on Library Wanderer's blog, I started thinking about the image of librarians and the ways in which we're going about our advocacy campaigns. Stereotypes of librarians still pervade our society's popular consciousness. Only recently, there was *that* Helena Bonham Carter video, the term 'librarian' is bandied about in the news as a metaphor for out of date outmoded thinking, and only recently a friend of a friend that I met for the first time said 'yep, you look a bit librariany.' These images are all around us, but what exactly do they mean, and what do they say about society's relationship to libraries and librarians?

What a librarian looks like 

 

 

Most people know that librarians often don't look like Marion the Librarian or Helena Bonham Carter. Yet, there is this cultural stereotype to which people automatically refer. That is the point of the This is what a librarian looks like tumblr. I don't think it's trying to prove the 'hey, we're librarians, but we're cool and wacky, right?' line of argument. I think it's trying to show that librarians quite often look very different from the stereotypical image. Where it falls down is when librarians are in fancy dress, or doing some wacky hobby, or when of course they look a bit like a stereotypical librarian. Stereotypes are around for a reason and whilst the librarian stereotype has inflated to a point beyond reality, the roots of the stereotype must have originally come from somewhere. This could well reflect the changing nature of the profession; in the past it was dominated by bookish types who wanted a quiet life guarding collections and now it is filled with boombastic bubbly blondes who want to promote resources and engage with users. I suspect that this clean-cut division isn't true either. People who like to read are drawn to librarianship but then again, there are readers in every profession. And librarianship isn't about reading books; it's about uniting our users with their information and showing them how to use it for maximum output. The public link librarians with books because it is the easiest way to contextualise what we do, but think of all the librarians in libraries who never see a physical book at all.

It comes down essentially to advocacy. Instead of focusing on these stereotypes, I think we should be focusing on what we do and how we do it well. Every profession engages in advocacy, but some need it more than others. We need to be more transparent and explain to people what we actually do. Challenge the person at a party who looks at you with envy, saying 'it must be lovely to read all day.' 'Well, yes it would,' I replied to this friend of a friend who thought I looked librariany. 'Unfortunately, what with making online records for all our new acquisitions, updating our social media presence, responding to emails, helping a user with a complex ejournals access problem and planning a new information skills session, I can't say I'd have the time.'

Quality of Qualtrics

I recently went to a training course in Qualtrics, a survey design software package that allows so much freedom in the customisation and personalisation of your surveys.

I was really impressed with what I learned. Qualtrics has hundreds of question types, you can embed different media into your survey, and you can do some very clever tabulation of responses to different questions to spot patterns and trends as they emerge. And the best part is that the computer programme does most of the statistics work, leaving you free to analyse and act on the results.

Every member of my institution has access to Qualtrics during a trial period; I'm definitely going to explore it fully. With more functionality, and the ability to customise more fully, than SurveyMonkey, this is definitely something worth investigating.

The Gift of a Prezi

Last week, I had the most exhillerating experience of my career so far: my colleague and I ran a training session for online resources to all the second year undergraduates who are preparing to go on their year abroad.

The year abroad is a compulsory requirement for our undergraduates; they spend their third year in another country either studying or working. They do a wide range of things, from working in a Peruvian school to working at the Hague or studying in Heidelberg. The one thing that they must all do by the end of their year abroad is complete a year abroad project. For this project, they need resources - books, articles, dictionaries - essentially, information. This can panic our students - they can't borrow library books for a year, what will they do for resources? Which is where this session came in very useful.

I have been running one-to-one information literacy and skills sessions for several years and in previous roles I have given training to subject groups on electronic resources and evaluation. Never before has it been on the scale of 140 students; it was an amazing experience. Working closely with my colleague for several weeks before the session was a really useful experience; although we did not always agree, we worked together to reach compromises and solutions which fit us both. We worked out how we would hang the information literacy strands off the framework of discovering resources: we plumped for off-campus access explanation, finding information, analysing information, storing your resources and references. These strands hung from the practical skills framework of finding and using ebooks, ejournals, LION and Web of Knowledge, bibliographies, other resources such as encyclopedias and dictionaries, concluding with different reference management options. We used our website as an aggregator; this page is the one-stop place to come to to find everything else. It went down well. I had some great feedback from students and the staff found it helpful too.

Thus our dynamic Prezi presentation served two vitally important purposes: it reassured our students that, although they will not be on campus next year, they are still supported by the University's ample resources and it also raised the profile of the library amongst our academic colleagues. This advocacy is vital to ensure our continued value as a library service at all levels of our institution. I thoroughly enjoyed preparing and running the session - I can't wait to develop in this area in the future.

Library Tours

As the year turns again towards Spring and I once again offer my apologies for the blogging pause, I've been thinking about library tours. There's been a lot of talk lately about library tours. Who do we give them to? How do we do them? And what do people think about them?

This is the library in which I work. A few weeks ago, I gave a library tour to a group of library and information professionals from across the East of England. I organised a day of tours and visits which included a college library with special collections, a busy faculty library, and a different type of academic library service. The aim was to give people outside the Cambridge academic sector the opportunity to see how things work and how different the different types of libraries really are. They serve different resource needs. The aim was fulfilled as participants came from Norfolk and Bedford and several different sectors were represented.

Organising the day was quite a lot of work. I prepared packs including maps on how to find the different libraries, I thought very hard about what I wanted to show and tell, and I collated feedback from participants to evaluate the event. Yet the whole experience of event management was a real development opportunity for me and my tour participants gained a lot from seeing other libraries and other ways of running services.

I think this is the key: library tours given by information pros to information pros need to be different to other types of library tour. We all work with information - we know how Boolean works! We might have a deeper interest in a library's in-house classification scheme than the average student. We might care about which Library Management System is used or how the use of ebooks is affecting print loans. We need to tailor our tours. And whilst it's true that it can become a lot of work for the tour-giver, giving a tour to fellow professionals taught me a lot about confidence and dealing with difficult questions!

So today we have another tour organised for our colleagues within the libraries of Cambridge's Colleges. I'm also giving a tour to some tweeple later on in March. By giving tours, we can reflect and muse on our policies and procedures as we explain them to others. It helps to keep us fresh and our services as relevant to our users as they can be. And giving reciprocal tours to colleagues across the profession is a great way to engage in CPD during economically challenging times!