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there was *that* Helena Bonham Carter video, the term 'librarian' is bandied about in the news as a metaphor for out of date outmoded thinking, and only recently a friend of a friend that I met for the first time said 'yep, you look a bit librariany.'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! 

An Apology and a Resurgence

Firstly, an apology. I am afraid that my blog has, in recent months, suffered the same fate of all of my adolescent diaries and been left to gather cobwebs in some long forgotten corner of the spare room. However, today marks the beginning of my virtual resurgence of the blog. I offer no promises though on the regularity of content.

This time of year, when the balance of light and darkness moves and everything appears tinged with an eldritch air, is a time of reflection. After a summer fraught with building works, followed by a busy start to the academic year, we are now half way through the term. As the cycle of the academic year moves towards the end of the first term, we can reflect about what we have done well and what we can do better next time. I was particularly struck by Miss Julie’s blog post about librarians weeding themselves. If we had to apply the same rules to our profession as we do to our stock, how would we look? I think it is true that we have to constantly reflect on our skills and behaviours and evaluate how we do things.

I am currently going through the process of Chartership and, as such, have been encouraged to analyse myself and my workflows. Why do I do this? Is this the best way of doing this? How can I be more efficient? How can I better serve my institution? How can we make sure that our information service (and that’s what it is, a service with readers as customers) supports the mission of our institution as best as it possibly can? These are all crucial questions to ask. The answers can range from evaluation of workflows to experimenting with changes in some areas. I don’t believe in change for the sake of change, but I do think that we need to be constantly reflecting and evaluating our service and our procedures.

If I ever start to show the signs of a MUSTIE, someone please tell me! Happy Halloween everybody.

Librarianship, Qualifications, Careers

For Things 10 and 11 this week, I am blogging about my route into librarianship and my experiences thus far in the profession. Like most arts graduates, I was unsure of my career path after University. In my naïve and youthful state, I had imagined that it would be perfectly feasible to walk from my graduation ceremony into a publishing house who agreed to publish my first novel right there and then. Or perhaps I’d walk into the editorial office of the Guardian and be swept away on a magic carpet of opening nights, films festivals and cocktail parties.

Reality hit hard soon after I had relocated to Cambridgeshire as I began the inevitable rounds of administrative temping. I found myself in an administrative role in an academic environment, a good job which would have been stable enough to secure my future. And yet. Every time the word ‘library’ was mentioned, I would wonder. Ponder. I remembered my childhood days of “playing” at being a librarian. I confess, I even set up the “Friendly Lending Library” with my own books and made library cards for my readers. Not a family gathering went by without my relentless recruitment of new patrons from amongst the guests. In junior school, I became a pupil librarian. This was back in the day, with catalogue cards and manual issue.

It is odd therefore that as an adult these memories took a while to surface into the basis of a real career. It was when I really started considering what to do with my life that librarianship called to me. I am passionate about connecting the reader to their desired information and helping them to learn the skills to find and use quality resources. I left a permanent well paid administrative post to move into a junior library assistant role and I am extremely glad that I did. I have a grounding of library work at all levels, something that helps me to empathise with junior staff in a way that I suspect would be difficult if I’d not had entry level experience. I have been lucky in my career so far in that I have worked in a diverse variety of libraries in all three parts of the Cambridge tripartite system, before finding my feet in my first professional post.

I decided to begin the Aberystwyth course via distance learning after working for one year as a junior library assistant. I was sure that this was the career for me and I wanted to become more engaged with the LIS sector. I had the opportunity at that point to move into a SCONUL graduate traineeship which helped me to develop myself and to view myself as a professional practitioner. The Aberystwyth course appealed to me for several reasons: it is progressive, it ties together theory and practice, and it is affordable. I was able to apply my learnt knowledge to the workplace in order to see the limitations of theory and the practicalities of librarianship. As a keen Open University student, the distance learning world was not unfamiliar to me and I enjoy setting my own deadlines.

I completed the MSc in Library and Information Science in September 2010.
I am currently working towards my Chartership. The process is already teaching me a lot about reflexion and service evaluation. I have been in my current post as Assistant Librarian managing three collections for just over three years. Let's see what the future will bring.

DREaM Conference Report

The “Developing Research Excellence and Methods” project launch event “Out of the Comfort Zone”, held at the British Library on Tuesday 19th July 2011, highlighted some important issues surrounding Library and Information Science research. As a recipient of a sponsored place at the launch event, I was extremely interested to hear more about the challenges and complexities of LIS research and practice. I would like to give my thanks to TFPL Intelligent Resources , Sue Hill Recruitment and Glen Recruitment for enabling me to attend this conference through their support of sponsored places for new professionals.

Professor Hazel Hall opened the conference by outlining the main aims and goals of the DREaM project. The project, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the LIS Research Coalition, aims to develop a formal network of LIS researchers and practitioners in order to build the capability and capacity of LIS research. The goal is to raise the quality and perceived importance of LIS research across disciplines in order to build a foundation for long-term inter-disciplinary research collaborations. The project consists of this launch conference, three workshops throughout the year where cross-discipline research methodologies will be analysed in detail, and a concluding conference in July 2012. Hall spoke of a ‘cadre’ of committed individuals that the project aims to bring together. After the concluding event next year, it is vital that there remains a core group of professionals who are committed to the aims of the project.

Professor Blaise Cronin then gave an insightful and interesting keynote speech on the historical and current problems surrounding LIS research. Collaboration appears to be the key to strengthening confidence. Cronin took us on a history of LIS research and asked whether there really was a Golden Age for our discipline. The problem is that LIS research has for too long been seen by researchers in other disciplines as a hobby, rather than a rigorous and scientific discipline. Take for example the area of information behaviour. This is a logical area in which LIS research should collaborate with educational and cognitive psychological research. Yet the body of LIS research is often overlooked. Cronin asks us to ask why. He suggests various reasons, including the lack of metadata analysis and the weak experimental design of much LIS research. Citation analysis shows whether or not articles are being cited outside the LIS sphere but I would be cautious about drawing too many conclusions from such a figure. After all, information behaviour is an area which is of great interest to practitioners in many fields. A lack of citation figures does not mean than these articles are not being read. Cronin asks us to look at methodologies from other disciplines, for example evidence-based practice, to evaluate their usefulness within LIS research. By using different methodologies, it is possible that the research output will be perceived as more reliable by other disciplines. The ‘One Minute Madness’ session that followed was really interesting as delegates heard about a number of various projects currently taking place in the LIS field.

After an exquisite lunch, we moved into our selected breakout groups . With my focus on developing and maintaining networks, I was fortunate to attend the session ran by Professor Gunilla Widén on the topic of network development in the Nordic countries. Despite their differences, the Nordic countries historically feel a wealth of commonality between them. There are established trends of formal co-operation throughout the Nordic countries, built on common values and willingness by all to develop Nordic competencies and competitiveness. This established collaboration smoothed the path to establishing networks in the LIS sphere. However, there are also problems. A delicate balance has to be maintained between national, Nordic and international interests. Different emphases and different personalities also bring challenges. Yet together they promote the Nordic countries as a whole much more strongly than they could do individually.

For me, the discussion that followed the breakout session was one of the most important parts of the day. One member of our group asked why there was such a gap between research and practice, a question that sparked intense and passionate debate. Some felt that there was little practical relevance in research. Others stated that research was not lofty and irrelevant to practice but instead was crucial to helping practitioners to solve problems. Yet it is true that research output often does not affect organisational practice, a point which was used by some to state that practitioners were thus not engaging with research. I put myself well and truly out of my comfort zone by jumping in and stating that this was often not the case. As a practitioner, but also as a new professional, I certainly engage with LIS research. However, organisational culture and the constraints of practice limit the extent to which research can be implemented. It is important not to assume that, because things are not rapidly changing on the ground, research is not being evaluated by any practitioners. The discussion veered then onto networks. What drives a network after the funding runs dry? I am a part of several networks, including CILIP’s Career Development Group and my area specific German Studies Library Group. I participate in these groups, I give my time to attend events, I am on the committee of CDG in the East of England. I do it because it is valuable professionally. It develops me as a person and as a professional. I am doing something useful and creating a network of practitioners. There is no financial incentive and yet I and my fellow members are committed and enthusiastic enough to establish and build a network.

Dr Dylan Evans gave the closing keynote speech, which was interesting and fascinating. His career spans a number of roles and disciplines, which makes him the perfect candidate to speak about inter-disciplinary collaboration. Collaboration encourages creative thinking as preconceived knowledge and assertions are washed away. In order to become cross collaborative, we must engage with other disciplines and move forward into other spheres.

The two main themes that emerged from the day concerned the need to assess the current situation with LIS research and research methodologies whilst exploring how we can establish a formal network of LIS researchers and practitioners. Discussing the gap between research and practice was a crucial part of the day. Collaboration between researchers and practitioners is the first step to closing this gap within our own profession before we move forwards into cross-discipline collaboration. This is achievable by networking to understand the perspectives and challenges that researchers and practitioners face. I sincerely hope that through the course of this year, the first steps towards this mutual understanding can be taken in order to move forward in establishing a formal LIS network. Research should inform practice but practical problems should also determine the focus of the LIS research landscape to an extent. Understanding each other is the first step towards the formation of a solid permanent network.