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!

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.