Creative CPD, fines, silence: A day at Library Camp East

Never having been to a Library Camp before, I was very excited to hear about Library Camp East and I put my name down faster than I could roll out my camping mat and get the billycans on the stove. But even when I realised it wasn't that sort of camping, I was really excited and also a little nervous to see how an unconference would work in reality.

The day came when I was very kindly collected from Cambridge train station and given a lift out to Harlow. I'll admit, as we approached Harlow College, I nervously anticipated what the day would be like. Would we be doing trust exercises on the lawn? Building our own issue desks out of macrame? Turns out, it was not a bit like that. Not at all.
 
I had the most liberated networking experience during that Saturday in Harlow. It was liberated precisely because it was not confined to the usual codes and etiquettes of conferences. Now I'm not saying that Library Camps are a substitute for full organised conferences; in fact, the good thing about conferences proper is the level of research being shared. Having returned just last month from IFLA's WLIC2013, I can state with confidence how important it is to have the opportunity to attend professional conferences with formal research presentations. However, Library Camps act in my opinion as the companions of formal conferences, the invaluable less formal setting where hierarchies leave the building and we can share ideas on a flat level structure.

And flat level it certainly was! It was liberating in the extreme to walk into the main hall and sit on the floor with information professionals at all levels of their careers. People then pitched their session ideas and we could just informally choose which ones to attend. Something that I've never been able to do is to walk out of a session if it doesn't work for me and go to another one, but we were encouraged to do this to get the most out of the day. The first session I chose was about creative CPD on a low budget which was really interesting and I got some useful tips including webinars and MOOCs. I then went to a session on fines where we considered whether or not we should even charge them. Debating with very senior people within a flat non-hierarchical environment was refreshing and liberating.

A big thank you to everyone who brought food for the lunch table; it was amazing. And my savoury muffins seemed to go down well as well!

After lunch, I couldn't decide which session to go to and ended up in an inspired write-in with several of my fellow librarian writers. Having the time to plan out my novel was great and having the chance to share my ideas in a supportive atmosphere was invaluable. I always find it hard to talk about my writing, so thank you Rachel for making this possible.

My final session was about silence. Librarians have a funny relationship with silence, often being accused of liking it too much by the public and yet needing to uphold it in certain circumstances in order to facilitate learning within a space. To confront this relationship head-on, we had a positive experience with silence as we sat in a silent room. For 45 minutes, I sat and watched the trees moving in the breeze, sunlight dappling their leaves. The funny thing about silence is that the more you listen, the noisier it gets. I started to hear the traffic swishing on the main roads in town; I jumped when a crow cawed overhead. After almost an hour, I felt relaxed and rested, and it made me realise that we need to make time in this hectic world just to be.

Library Camp for me was a wonderful developmental experience that sits in partnership with formal conferences. Each session that I went to was facilitated by one person, but the feeling was very much one of collaboration. Everyone's views were shared and debated equally. There is something very liberating about that. As I trundled back to Cambridge via Helen's generous lift, I realised that I'd had a very unique experience that day. One thing that I'd change though; next time, I'm bringing my tent and we're doing this camping thing for real!

World Library and Information Congress 2013

Thanks to the generosity of the John Campbell Trust in awarding me a travel / conference bursary, I was able to attend the IFLA WLIC2013 conference in Singapore - my first ever large-scale global conference!

Singapore is such a vibrant place, it's a real melting pot of cultures from all over Asia and India. With over three thousand delegates from across the globe, I knew I was about to get some serious international perspective! After registering, where we were even given complimentary travel cards for the metro, my first session focused on e-books and e-book provision. It was invaluable to be given a perspective on the developments and challenges faced by each continent of the world on this topic straight from my international colleagues. Seeing how much people do with comparatively little budgets and next to no infrastructure is truly humbling.

The main theme was all about the future; future libraries, infinite possibilities. Are we ready for the future? Are our services? Can we even predict how trends will happen? How can we ensure that our collections and our services will still be a part of the information process in a hundred years time? These are difficult and challenging questions to ask, but I found it really inspiring to be able to ask them together with international colleagues without any pre-existing assumptions or fears. It was liberating to gain different perspectives.

Essentially, we need to start to look at resource collaboration where appropriate and we need to think really carefully about how we can best expose our collections to the ubiquitous web search engines.

 Open Access cropped up in several guises: as an aid to collection development in Canadian libraries, as an important tool in research development, and as a bridge between knowledge management and democracy. Subject access and collection management models also came under scrutiny. One newly established library explained how their collections model had been set up and the policy developed. Resource sharing models were explored, such as Taiwan's public library e-books model and the Uborrow scheme set up between several academic libraries in the mid-West of North America.

The British Library explained their project to transform over ten thousand off-air recordings from pure video speech into transcribed text. One of the problems they faced were accents. For example, 'turn-up' was often mistaken for 'turnip.' Retrieval of specific content within videos was also discussed, with several indexing methods proposed.

The future of MARC was a hot topic and much discussed in light of developments in linked data standards. As someone who has recently trained staff across my organisation in RDA, the future of bibliographic standards and models is very relevant to my work. If we accept that, as was proposed at this conference, a large proportion of our users are starting their information search on a web search engine, we need to make our bibliographic data more discoverable by web browsers. It is all about making sure that the library, our collections and our services, are not overlooked. We have so much value to add to the learning experience, we need to start making this more explicit.

On a professional development level, this conference was astoundingly important to me. I would encourage everyone to apply for awards and bursaries to attend international conferences. It has developed me and furthered my perspective on these issues that are affecting libraries now and will most likely continue to offer us challenges and opportunities in the future. What's really important is to recognise challenges and then turn them into positive opportunities. If we can do this, our future libraries will have infinite possibilities.

So a big thanks once again to the John Campbell Trust and to all the volunteers and speakers who made this conference possible! And finally, thanks to my wonderful husband for accompanying me to this amazing place, and for keeping busy when I was at conference sessions without one word of complaint. My very last thanks must of course go to Singapore itself, that steamy tropical multi-cultural technologically plugged-in paradise. Malls, 7/11s and hawker markets - I'll never forget you. So long, and thanks for all the Slings!

Making an impact: the libraries@cambridge 2013 conference

 The 2013 libraries@cambridge conference certainly made an impact on me. I left the day feeling refreshed, revitalised, rejuvenated and anything but rested! Three themes really stood out for me throughout the day: measuring our impact, evaluating what we do and why we do it, and the ever growing need to manage our student and academic partnerships. There has been a lot of debate as to whether students are customers; personally I think that whilst they’re not customers in the commercial sense, they deserve the same if not higher standards of excellent customer care. Partners was a term suggested throughout the day and I admit that I like this idea. We should start to see students as partners in their own learning and adacemics as partners with library professionals to provide strong services that underpin the organisation’s mission. We need to bridge that link between libraries and academics and students; perhaps by seeing us all as partners and by emphasising the benefits of such an approach to each party from their point of view, we can start this process.

Liz Jolly gave a really thought provoking keynote address on the topic of measuring the impact that we as a library service make in terms of the mission and values of our organisation. We librarians are good at collectiong statistical data but how often is what we collect really forming an evidence base? What does footfall really tell us about what goes on with library resources once our users are in the building? 

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dollpants(http://whatismowearing.blogspot.co.uk/2011/01/welcome-to-my-new-blog.html)

We need to colect data that is relevant to our organisational mission. We need to show how library services and resources directly affect student performance and development.

Which led us quite nicely onto Dave Pattern and Graham Stone’s presentation on the JISC funded Library Impact Data Project. This project sets out to directly show correlation between use of library resources and degree classification. The slight problem that I had was that, despite the impressive statistical data, the missing link is always that we cannot know exactly how students use our resources. A book loaned doesn’t always equal a book read. Perhaps the person looking at an ebook for an hour really is reading it. Maybe they fell asleep. We’ll never know! It is a really valuable project nevertheless because even if we have some data showing a trend towards more library use equalling better degree, it gives us a certain level of concrete proof of our impact to take forward to our stakeholders, i.e. our non-librarian managers. We can prove that we make an impact and that our resources matter. However, it would be good to have impact measurement data of librarians as well as library resources; the information skills training that we give does directly feed into the learning process.

Evaulation came again to the forefront of my mind during the breakout session. We were asked to divide into teams and run a shop. The point was quite evident from the start, that there were far too many processes and we needed to evaluate our workflows to ensure the most effective practices were being carried out, but the added role play element gave particpants a freedom to make decisions and speak out. I think evaluation is really important. However, evaluation does not have to mean change. If we evaluate something and consider it the most useful and efficient way, then it should indeed remain.

After a lovely lunch, I was lucky enough to be asked to be on the panel for a talk given by Start Hunt on the future of cataloguing. There is an ever growing mass of things to catalogue in so many different formats and a lot of the data being pulled into library discovery platforms is not traditional controlled data. Because of these reasons, libararians need to accept that the data they provide on catalogues is increasingly not under local control. The issue of workflow evaluation came up again as Stuart discussed the extent to which we should check our records. Comments from the panel ranged from a discussion of the Cambridge Digital Library to concerns over quality and usefulness of data to the need for faculties to have competent cataloguers with sound judgement as records are not always available for downloading. Certainly for foreign languages and films, I catalogue from scratch a lot of the time (and if the records were there, I’d use them!)

We finished off the day with an inspired pecha kucha session. I’d never heard of this means of presenting before so I was interested to see how it worked. It was great to have the opportunity to hear about five diverse things that are all going on right now across our libraries, ranging from environmental concerns and induction teaching to timeline projects, cpd collaborations and pastoral care in Cambridge College libraries. All in all, #lac13 was a great and inspiring day. The main thing that stood out for me was measuring impact and showing how crucial our libraries and librarians are by tying our work closely with the mission and values of the University. And catching up with all the other #camlibs was, as ever, a pleasure!