University Science and Technology Librarians Group Meeting #USTLG

So, I went to this yesterday. It was in Newcastle. For a bit of context this is a twice-yearly meet up for University Science and Technology Librarians to exchange information and share examples of good practice. I’d seen the call for speakers go round on the mailing list and I volunteered to do a presentation on my first couple of years in this my first professional post; making it my own, which was accepted. I also wanted to take this as an opportunity to get some tips and advice from other librarians in similar subject and liaison roles.
Not only was the first time I’d attended one of these meet ups but also my first time to Newcastle – imagine that! I had to restrain myself from not having a little yelp of excitement when I got a glimpse of the Angel of the North from the train!

I arrived into Newcastle on Sunday evening, had a little walk about to find my hotel for the night – a Travelodge near the Quayside, and after a couple a practice runs of my presentation I watched a bit of the Twilight saga film that was on, wondered why the boys in it were mostly topless in their scenes, got confused about werewolves and vampires and how Bella fitted into all of it (she basically gets to do smooching with boys  – a vampire and a werewolf with no tops on!) and then had a bit of a broken sleep with people coming back from boozing and being all loud – on a Sunday! Who’d have thought it?!
I was also disappointed that there was no peppermint tea at this Travelodge and those of you that know me will know that I normally take my own with me, but I’d forgotten this time. Anyway, I went and asked at reception and they very kindly showed me their whole selection of fruity and standard tea, but no peppermint! Thankfully Timothy Collinson @timpaa came to my rescue the following day with two peppermint tea bags from the superior hotel they were staying at

Anyway, Monday morning arrived and I made my way to Newcastle University, Robinson Library and then to the research hive where our day was being held. First impressions of #USTLG? They are a really friendly bunch. I recognised some people that I’d met at other events @georginahardy @kirsty_thomson @timpaa and Tracy Ainsley from CDG activities and there were of course lots of new people to meet.

In this post I just want to give you an overview of the day, some of my highlights and things I want to follow up on.

In terms of my own presentation, like the New Professionals Day doing this was another opportunity to restore my confidence in my presenting abilities and again I’m glad I went along and did it, even with slight technical hitch of my slides not working from the file saved on my stick. I’d put the slides together in Google Docs so the original was on there. Fortunately the Internet was working without any problem so I was able to do my presentation from that version. Phew! You can have a look at the presentation; The Environment and Technology Librarian – a new professionals perspective, making the role your own on Slideshare.  I concluded the presentation by asking my more experienced USTLG colleagues to share one piece of advice with me to help me to develop my role further – this was requested in tweet or post it format. I didn’t get a full house of responses – but here are a selection of the post it ones I got…

Enough about me, to back track a little bit, the day was opened by Moira Bent, someone who I know through reading her articles and reports about information literacy. Her introduction was followed by a welcome from the Librarian at Newcastle University, Wayne Connolly and now here is a summary of the rest of the presentations and what I found interesting about them.

Jenny Campbell, Newcastle – So what does it mean to be a subject librarian?
In addition to getting an insight into the work of a subject librarian at Newcastle University I enjoyed hearing about the different roles within the role that Jenny identified and could certainly relate to most of them:

• Teacher
• Research support
• Explorer
• Subject specialist
• Counsellor
• Financial manager
• Politician
• Project manager

I was also interested to hear about the use of Netvibes and other social media for current awareness services and will follow up on that when I get back to base.

As is the case for so many of use we’re seeing supporting researchers as a growing area and how we respond to this to provide the required support is, how we decide what that provision should be, how and when we deliver it and how and when we review it are all important questions.

Another area that caught my attention, which I realise is not unique to Newcastle is patron driven acquisitions for print and ebooks. This isn’t something that we currently do at Brighton, but it’s something I’d like us to investigate and perhaps trial. Again, something to follow up when I get back.

I really like the idea of employing students to observe the behaviour of other students using the different study spaces of the library and to gather student opinion at Newcastle. An interesting outcome, which Ian Young from Leeds University echoed was that although there was a request from students for more study space they specifically want quiet space, not social learning space. This led on to a bit of discussion about what to call different study areas in the library and how people interpret quiet/silent etc.

Newcastle has also recently had a refurbishment in the Robinson library and as a result a fair amount of stock has been moved to Newcastle University Research Reserve – in Gateshead. Not just storing library materials but other university materials, HR records etc. A good project for the Library to be involved in and good for the library to be managing this space. I was interested to hear that people can access and study in this reserve and I’d have liked to heard more about how this is managed, given the range of materials stored there, but we ran out of time.

Liz Martin, De Montfort – Embedding information literacy teaching in science and engineering

A good summary of where they were with information literacy teaching at De Montfort for Science and Engineering and to compare it to where they are now. Highlights for me with this presentation were:

• E- induction – This is sent out for people to complete before they even start their course. They can dip in and out, but have to answer questions on each section – this is before they start – late August. No reward at the end, no sanction if it’s not completed. It’s available all year round so if they haven’t done it when they start then they can when they get there.
  This is something I’d like to find out more about and see if it’s effective in getting across those operational aspects of using the library and our services.
• Self guided tour – This is the follow up to the e-induction.
• Information literacy – Liz sees all the first years for two hours – embedded in the module, which is a design project which involved a group presentation and report. She is listed on the module as one of the academics.
  Have to show evidence if research and IEEE referencing.For the Technology students – studies in media technology two, one hour sessions. Liz gives the title and they plan the assignment from there. People turned up because they are given the assignment title!
• Postgrads – two hours for induction. Four hours in their course. I would have liked to have heard more about what’s involved in this, but again, time was of the essence!

Liz went on to say how she got involved in these sessions. Some of it was by chance and other routes included management boards, specifically about plagiarism and referencing as this was from External examiner feedback.

Steve Lee, Glamorgan – Making yourself indispensable – Science Community Librarianship
I’d spoken about wanting to become more embedded in my department with my activities as a subject librarian and Steve went on to explain why becoming an embedded librarian wouldn’t work for his and that this isn’t the way to go for all subjects – if there are lots of subjects then how can you embed in all of them?  For specific subjects then he thinks it could work.

However as Steve went on to tell us about his activities and how he is involved with his subject areas I was convinced that he was in fact embedded! Not necessarily physically within the department or organisationally as part of the faculty, but with the activities he is involved in supporting his students and academic colleagues, in my view he is definitely a key part of the team!

Steve’s message was that we should make the lives of our user communities easier by getting out of the library and meeting our users. We should be asking what they want out of the library and with any problems identified try and work with them to see if there’s a plan of action.

Steve also pointed out that our customer needs are different to our own and that we should recognise and respond to that. He also pointed out that we need to trust our user communities rather than expecting the worse case scenario.

There was a section about librarians as facilitators rather than doing things for people. Steve gave an example of us skilling the academics with our content and skills to deliver information literacy sessions rather than us repeating the same sessions year on year. He also pointed out that it was important to review this content with the academics and make any necessary changes.

The thought that instead of being a constant, always there, we should go in and once our job is done – get out and stay out until you need to review needs/wants of user communities!

Steve runs surgeries in the teaching areas during term time for half hour slots. This means he is there regularly at the same time slots to answer any queries, in their working environment.

It was good to hear about another student and academic engagement from a different perspective and I like the idea of getting out into our user communities. I do this already but through modules and meetings rather than specifically to troubleshoot and help with queries.

I would have liked to discuss more what we mean when we say ‘embedded librarian’ and the implications of this term. I feel like I could be doing more in terms of outreach and this sort of community librarian activities, but it’s how to fit it all in!

All of these activities though I see as embedding the librarian in the workings of the department, whether we are physically there or not.

Jenny Brine, Lancaster – From soviet studies to science and engineering

This was a really interesting presentation from Jenny reflecting on her career path, the transferable skills gained and influences along the way. Hearing about how Jenny has got to be in the role that she has now was really interesting. She’s done ever such a lot! So, here is are some of my highlights from her presentation.

Jenny started out as a research associate, embedded in the department and therefore a member of a research team rather than a traditional librarian post which highlighted differing views of what a librarian is. Her subjects there were around Soviet Studies.

Working in interlending and document supply is useful for seeing where the gaps are in our collection as it’s about what our library doesn’t have. In her experience it also gives a good picture of university research and there is the opportunity for direct contact with researchers.

When it came to learning about new subjects as she moved into different posts Jenny used the knowledge of her nearest and dearest in some instances; her husband is a doctor working in the NHS and her two sons are doing PhDs, so there was a good opportunity to get an idea of how a research group works and how they share resources. Jenny found that there was a lot of peer to peer sharing of information and finding resources rather than going to the library or contacting their librarian.

A recommendation to get up to speed with subject knowledge was to read study skills books for new subjects to get a flavour of what the students undertake.

Jenny also made some useful suggestions for USTLG to develop:
- area on website for reports and articles about being a science an technology librarian
- links to useful websites and equivalent groups
- lists of study skills books
- mentoring for new science and technology librarians

All good suggestions for us as a group to take forward.

Selina Lock, Leicester All change! Restructuring academic liaison

Selina took us on a restructuring adventure, the circumstances around it and explained some of the implications this restructure has had on her role and what she might expect from her new role. Selina took us through the reasons for restructure:
- develop research support
- extend, improve and develop online and blended training in information skills
- develop special collections/ digital humanities
- maintain a named contact for each department

She also highlighted the new structure:
- learning and teaching team
- research support team
- across the two teams there are subject clusters

This new structure comes into place on 1st June. A new addition to the learning and teaching team is a manager and two senior library assistants for subject librarian.

I wonder if this move to learning and teaching and research teams is becoming the norm?

It would be good if Selina could come back to USTLG later this year or next year to let us know how things are panning out.

Kirsty Thomson, Heriott-Watt – Hiding your library training in other classes
Kirsty is sneaky! Well, not really, but she did have some good ideas and examples of the approaches and activities she had tried to try and improve students information literacy. She spoke early on in her presentation about ‘optimism bias’ based on the work of Tali Sharot and then moved on to tell us aboutthe work they’ve done in getting the library skills into the introduction to essay writing module, which was in week 2 and 3 of course. This involved looking at writing styles, group work exercise and the activity related to that. Eg. Which texts would you use for academic writing.

Following on from this they also looked at when to reference. This was an activity in pairs and looked at how to recognise when you’re using quotes, other peoples ideas.

The  Introduction to essay writing sessions hid the info literacy aspects within it. Kirsty advised that this makes library and informatin skills more relevant to what they’re doing. More real.

Essays are submitted using Turnitin and then there is a follow up session recapping on what was covered. Kirsty has also had an input on careers sessions covering topics such as researching employers.

So like others today Kirsty worked collaboratively with colleagues in the effective learning team. More advice followed:

Think carefully about what you’re calling your classes eg. Using evidence in your assignment.

Kirsty also had some tips:
- don’t give up on the idea too quickly, but be ready to change classes that aren’t working.

-Link library skills to a assignment. Gives a bit more context.

Tony Wilson, York-  Widening participation: building on the role of the science librarian

I was lookimg forward to hearing from Tony about this aspect of his role. Tony is a liaison librarian and he took on an  unofficial role as the library widening participation coordinator.

TheLibrary was invited by the university widening participation to  assist in putting on an event with the WP office as well as learning enhancement team and others. Involved in developing independent learning day.

This was June 2009 and repeated in September 2009 for specific schools.

The Library session was called researching and evaluating information. Additional sessions included academic writing, referencing, academic integrity, tour of the library, library challenge, chance to talk to student ambassadors.

Tips:

-Make use of the student ambassadors with these events.

-Aim to work more closely with other university departments.

As Tony pointed out as this aspect grew and developed it became too much for one person

Then the requests came for extended project qualification ( EPQ)- universities are considering this for entry.

Typical content for researching and evaluating information workshop
- sources of information
- effective searching
- Getting the most out of google
- evaluating websites
- the hotseat – describe the ‘term’ without using the word.

Not just 6th forms! Some stuff for school age and primary schools.
Currently investigating new exercises and materials for these events. Collaboration with teachers.

Why do this?
- gives a good insight into pre university student skills
- find out about wider, free resources
- help WP agenda
- widening participation is now a key part of the library activities. Iexpected that this will become a standard part of an academic liaison.

I’d spoken to colleagues at Sussex about their work with the EPQ and other activities with school/ college groups and that was after hearing about it at the first Brighton Libteachmeet which was just short of a year ago. Again hearing from Tony about this has once more sparked my interest in this area.

We’re already involved in a number of projects and so I can’t imagine doing anything about this practically at this time, but certainly something that I think is important and would be good to devote some time to, even if it’s just to find out about what happens centrally with WP and where we could add to those activities.

So there we go, a very quick round up of my day at #USTLG.

Maybe my chartership post will be finished soon but we’ve the reflective writing session and the first Sussex tweet up tomorrow…

New Professionals Day 2012 #CILIPNPD12

I attended this day as a participant and workshop facilitator and was delighted to catch up with some ‘established’ new professionals as well as meet some ‘new’ new professionals.  There was a really positive, lively atmosphere throughout the whole day with a load of enthusiasm and wonderful inspirational speakers.

Although I feel like one of the established of the new professionals crew, in that I’ve got a year and bit left of being within the 5 years into the profession time scale,  I really enjoy coming to these events; I find them very refreshing.

So, not surprisingly the overall theme of the day was being a new professional and the offshoots from that; continuing professional development (CPD), getting a job, managing your ‘brand’, developing new skills, demonstrating how you meet the criteria of doing the job you’re applying for.

Annie Mauger opened the day followed by Ned Potter with another insightful and eloquent presentation on your ‘brand’, with a book coming out; Library Marketing Toolkit Ned is clued up in this area.
There was a clear message from keynote speakers Bethan Ruddock and Ned that as new professionals we shouldn’t try and strive to be ‘super librarians’ or emulate others. We should focus on our own aspirations and strive to what we want to achieve. Those of you that have had the pleasure of a Ned Potter presentation will be familiar with his relaxed, engaging style and another key message that came out of his talk was ‘Don’t panic’. Bethan reiterated this point in her session in the afternoon during which the focus was the subject of her book; the New Professionals Toolkit.

Wonderful advice, but that’s coming from two highly successful information professionals still early on in their careers.  For someone like me that still only has a loose fitting plan when it comes to my career and where I want it go, it’s easy to feel somewhat overwhelmed by the success of your peers. Finding my place in the profession is taking some time, but that’s ok. That’s pretty much reflected in all the other aspects of my life too!

I do value their advice in concentrating on what you want to achieve and consider how much of yourself you want to invest in your career and I hope that came across in my workshop which very broadly looked at CPD, what it is, why it’s important and how to go about it. The slides and scenarios from the session are available on Slideshare. As people had to sign up to my session I asked them in the days leading up to the New Professionals Day participants received an email asking them to post on a Wallwisher what they would like to get out of participating in the workshop.

I think we at least touched on some of these things in our discussions. There were several key things that I wanted participants to get out of the session:

• CPD is a really personal thing and can vary hugely from person to person.
• It’s useful to have at least a loose fitting plan for CPD in terms of outcome and how you will get there.
• We already know a lot about the tools and approaches available to plan, action and record our CPD activities.

On the final point, this really came out with participants; they all contributed to discussions, some a little reluctantly, but it was clear that they all knew about the tools, approaches to CPD and could apply that knowledge to the different scenarios each group was discussing.

I was pleased that my workshop was in the morning as that meant I could concentrate on the afternoons activities without worrying about my own session. Facilitating this workshop, I was even more nervous than usual as I’d not been well the day before and I think I still had a hangover from the interview presentation that I’d done back in April and then not got the job. I know that seems silly, but the week following that presentation I had to do an overview of a new reading list software we’re at the stage of rolling out to academics to a fairly large group of colleagues and that for me was a disaster! I was so uncomfortable and out of my comfort zone and so I’ve been worrying about presenting and facilitating sessions since. I’m surprised about how much those two occasions affected me. So, based on that added weight to doing the workshop at the New Professionals Day as well as lack of sleep and being ill the day before I was even more nervous than usual. It’s been a strange couple of months! I’ll be interested to see what feedback I got about the session.

So back to the New Professionals Day programme. Following my session I went along to a session facilitated by Lisa Hutchins and Richard Hawkins about the more non traditional information professional role – the cyber librarian. This was a really good introductory session to this aspect of information work with a couple of discussions about websites we hate and why and a matching exercise of activities carried out in a physical and digital library which demonstrated the similarities in these two areas of information work.

Following a lunch time bit of fresh air and a good chat with Megan Wiley about international job exchanges we got stuck into the delights of the afternoon starting with a great double act from Abby Barker and Simon Barron about the role of an E-Resources Librarian. It was interesting to hear from two people with the same role how they ended up in their respective roles and the similarities and differences of a role with the same/similar job title. I’m always a bit in awe of the E-Resources Librarian. I mean, I have a good basic understanding of their role, but when it comes to the nitty gritty of licences, authentication and so on, I’m not there! I’m not surprised our E Resources Librarian Sarah is so delighted to be getting an Assistant, it’s ever such a lot for one person, given that it’s constantly growing and evolving.

Bethan was up next with her talk on the New Professionals Toolkit which I have no doubt will be up there on the Facet best sellers list!

Phil Bradley closed the day as CILIP President and spoke about why we as information professionals need to be involved in social media, how search is changing and why it’s important we are in on it. He comes across as quite forceful in getting his message across, highlighting why it’s important we take on board and act on what he’s saying about social media and search and how we need to be involved in it.

All credit to Richard Hawkins and Matthew Wheeler for organising the day. Like I say it was a really good refresher for me and a great opportunity to catch up with colleagues I rarely see in real life and to get my presentation/workshop confidence back on track.

All the presentations from the day can be accessed from the CILIP website as well as the archived tweets using #CILIPNPD12

Also, sorry there are no pictures in this post. I didn’t take any on the day. Silly!

Next up a bit about the University Science and Technology Librarians Group meet up.

Brighton LibTeachMeet number 2 #btnlibtm

Last week saw the second Brighton LibTeachMeet held at the Audrey Emerton Building which is part of the Brighton and Sussex Hospital. Mell Davies @medav was the mastermind of this one, the theme ‘Outreach, marketing and promotion’ and kept us all in order brilliantly. I decided to do a 5 minuter on our contribution to National Libraries Day 2012 activities, my presentation can be viewed on Prezi and others from the evening are also available from the Brighton LibTeachMeet site http://www.brightonlibtm.info/

It was good to go along and speak rather than having the worry of organising, although that was pretty enjoyable last time, but I never really felt like I got into things properly as I was too busy wondering if everyone was ok and enjoying it and getting something useful out of attending. Still as a presenter 5 minutes is no time at all! I really like the libteachmeet setting for getting together people from across the sectors in the local area. I think they are brilliant for an ideas exchange and great for networking if there’s the time!
There were some technical hitches which Mell handled brilliantly and that was more the restrictions of the orgnisation and different versions of software more than anything else. We did want to stream the evening and Richard Hawkins @usernametaken10 from CILIP came along to try and set this up but we couldn’t get that sorted. He did however do a presentation on how to do this ourselves which is definitely something to consider for future events.

I was pleased to see Louise Sugden from Brighton and Hove Public Libraries there with one of her colleagues. Louise and I worked together on the National Libraries Day stuff so it was good to catch up albeit briefly and now we’ve had academic and medical/health librarians organising maybe the public library crew will do the next one?! That would be ace

Anyway, short and sweet, that’s it.

Byeeeee!

 

 

 

Green Week @UoB – what did we do?

Each year the University’s Sustainability in Action team organise Green Week. This year activities took place the week 5th-11th March. There were a lot of activities going on during the week and to participate in Aldrich Library hosted the Climate Connections Exhibition. In addition to this and along with St Peter’s House Library we also made some efforts to reduce energy consumption by offering some energy saving tips to our users:

• Unplug your laptop once it is charged
• If you can use the stairs then don’t use the lift

In addition to encouraging our users to take some energy saving action we turned on only two library catalogue PCs and the map PC per floor. We were hopeful that these small steps would make a difference to our energy consumption. Unfortunately we used more energy during Green Week than the week before! Imagine that!

I don’t know exactly why we used more energy even though we took steps to reduce our energy consumption, but if we look at the total number of people in the library over these two weeks we can see that the more people that we had in the more energy was consumed.  During the week before Green Week, 27th February to 4th March we had a total of  11824  people in the library over that week. During Green Week, 5th March to 11th March we had a total of 12467 people in the library. This could mean that more energy was consumed due to more PCs and/or laptops being used, more printing being done, increased use of vending machines, desk lights, and more transactions going through the Help Desk and Self Service machines.

We’re waiting to see how things went at St Peter’s House library and then we’ll start to come to some conclusions.

I think it’s important that we participate in this kind of University wide campaign to show that we are indeed central to the University as well that we’re trying to reduce our carbon footprint by 50% by 2015 as well as meet other sustainable development targets set out in the University’s  Sustainable Development Policy. This is another example of a collaborative project, working with colleagues in Information Services and in the Sustainable Development Unit team as well as the University’s Environmental Manager. Colleagues at St Peter’s House library shared posters they’d produced offering energy saving tips. Our Environmental Manager briefed us on using the web based programme we have to monitor our enery use and how we could use it to look at different date ranges etc. It was an interesting activity to be a part of and it may mean the resurgence of Aldrich Green Team! We’ll have a look at the report at our next planning meeting I  imagine and see where we can go from there. I wonder if it would make any difference to students if we told them how much energy we use week on week, how much it costs and what we can do to try and reduce our energy consumption, save some money and make a difference to our carbon footprint. We’ll see.

Information Services was involved in Green Week further with the grand opening of a new data centre! I went along and I know this makes me sound like a right geek, but it was pretty exciting. The result of years of work by my IT colleagues means that we’re now running a more efficient and environmentally friendly data centre. My colleague Katie Piatt got a picture of the ribbon cutting ceremony http://yfrog.com/odg8xfeej

So, there’s still a lot that can be done to make the University of Brighton a more environmentally friendly and sustainble university but we’re definitely making progress and I hope that the libraries can continue to contribute to this agenda.

If you want to know more about sustainble development at the University of Brighton please have a read about the work of the team at the Sustainable Development Coordination Unit.

 

National Libraries Day 2012 #NLD12 – what happened next?

So I thought I hadn’t written a post about this, but as it turns out I did This is just a short one to introduce the short report I wrote about our activities.

I think the most important thing that we need to do is show the students what we’re doing with their feedback – a you said, we did type thing. That’s the next bit to do. I think that will see the project through to the end.

Anyway, here is a report which summarises what we did and the feedback we got.

National Libraries Day 2012 – a report

 

Library Day in the Life #libday8 – Day 2 and Day 3

This is a double poster for Tuesday and Wednesday describing activities, tasks and achievements.

Tuesday
Yesterday, Tuesday I was #latenightlibrarian so came into work at about 1pm, well a touch after because I was waiting for the washer to finish! Anyway, yesterday afternoon was mainly filled with checking reading lists, ordering books, chasing up books (that are needed for semester 2, which starts next week), ordering DVDs for ‘Green Week‘  stuff and the like as well as few loan status changes. I also spent some time contributing to discussions on how our library team can be part of ‘I heart my education’ week which is an initiative being organised by the Students Union, which I mentioned yesterday.

We’re still getting comments through our request for feedback – what do you love, what needs improving that we’re doing as part of our National Libraries Day stand #NLD12 which is great. Hopefully we can follow that up with a you said, we did type thing and try and get some expectation management in there too, in terms of in real life how long things actually take and why we can’t just buy everything from Amazon and why we can’t be open 24/7 all the time at the moment. That kind of thing.

The Help Desk was pretty quiet last night so took that as an opportunity to catch up with some reading around my subject areas, in this case for module GY152 – contemporary human geographies and GY358 political ecology: geographies of environment and development. I like to try and get a bit more familiar with what they’re learning about so I can better advise/direct them to resources.
I ended up sending a bit of strongly worded email to a lectuere about a load of PDFs of articles posted on the VLE, no idea where they had come from, if we acutally subscribe to them, the usual copyright infringement stuff!! Blimey! Anyway, then felt really bad this morning when I got a reply, but I was cross about it, especailly because they know the deal with this sort of thing. We’re getting that sorted out and tidied up now though so we are no longer being naughty copyright infringers. Phew!

For the most part everyone was in with their heads down getting on with stuff, although we did have to ask two lots of people not to bring in stacks of pizza. My colleague was right, Tuesday night is eating night! I normally work a Wednesday evening and we never have this. It’s funny. It’d be interesting to do some sort of observation on behaviour and atmospehere in the library on the to see if patterns do come out, but that’s probably not going to happen really!
As well as pizza and noise patrol I also had a little look to plans for the Career Development Group conferences this year, more about that for Wednesday though which is coming up…… now!

Wednesday
This morning started off with a trip to the dentist where I was praised about my healthy gums and teeth, which is brillers because I’ve a load of fillings in my back teeth so to hear they’re doing ok is always good. I got in about 10 and did the usual email scan and sort out what needs answering, what needs some actual work and what can be binned. I tweeted some stuff  from our subject twitter account from an IWA publishing ebulletin I get which will be particularly useful for any of the environmental sciences crew that are intersted in water stuff. Ordered some more books from requests that had come through then went off for our first call to plan the Career Development Group conference stuff for this year. We used a service new to use which allows us to record and share the recording of the call, that was Yo Conference http://www.yoconferencecall.co.uk/ It worked so that’s ace and good to be able to go back to it. I wish I could say more about our discussions, but can’t really until we’ve firmed up our plans. I’ll be sure to post more information as and when I can and hopefully get a bit of a discussion going about things.

Moving on from that and I got an email reminding me about the next Brighton Libteachmeet which is happening on Tuesday 20th March. Any South Easters out there should come along and maybe even do a session that’d be fun and interesting.

This afternoon I was supposed to go to a workshop on Intellectual property and copyright, but unfortunately that got cancelled because of illnees which is a shame as I can’t make the rescheduled date but I’ll be keeping my eyes out for others. Instead I made progress with sorting out readings on the VLE for a module and helping with a couple of enquiries from the Help Desk before a visit from a new lecturer for human geography. It was lovely to have a chat with her, find out her area of teaching, tell her about all our services. She’s particularly keen to make key readings available via our VLE but also to get the students to find the ones that will supplement them, which sounds like a good balance of giving them the materials and them having to look for resources themselves. Ace. Semester 2 starts next week so I may well have a busy few days scanning and linking!

Also got permission to go to the Back to the future and into the cloud: JIBS User Group workshop and AGM so booked onto that which is 24th Feb. Anyone else going?
Final task for the day was a short meeting with colleagues to firm up our plans for ‘I heart my education’ week and I’ve got some actions out of that meeting too. We’ve a fairly short timescale for this so we need to get cracking really. No doubt it’ll all come together, it always does! Anyway, the focus on the 13th is ‘I heart quality resources’ so we’re going to focus on the many different ways the students have to contact us, highlight what we can help them with, what they have access to as well as promoting our wonderful finding journal articles and EndNote Web workshops. We’re also going to have a handout/poster about evaluating resources to make sure they are quality and we’re hoping there’ll be some quality street kicking around somewhere Another opportunity to pull together as a team, share the load to make things happen. So far, so good.

That brings me to the end of another day. Tomorrow I’m on first Help Desk session at 8.30 and I’ve got myself in for RFID tagging too, we still have some way to go with that, but we’re getting there. I also need to revisit some work I’ve done to help populate our Knowledge Base provided by RightAnswers and that is too make sure the answers are there as well as starting to create some sort of taxonomy as well.

Oh and big news that I can’t believe I haven’t mentioned, we’ve got a library ipad! Imagine that. It’ll come in useful for stuff like ‘I heart my education’ week and give those staff that haven’t got smartphones, iphones etc the chance to have a look and see how things work. Good stuff.

Right, that’s it until tomorrow now. How is it nearly Thursday?!

Ok bye.

Emma

Library Day in the Life round 8 – #libday8 – Day 1

Looking at this blog it looks like there’s been no activity for months. Wrong! There’s been loads of activity and a number of blog posts sit in draft form waiting for me to finish them. It’s a shame really because I don’t want to abandon them but the stuff that’s in them has been and gone, still I think there’s value to finishing them for my own sake really.

Now we’re into 2012 and the next round of Library Day in the Life is a perfect opportunity to start blogging again. So, here we go. Yesterday felt like a bit of a non day if you know what I mean. I got things done, but didn’t feel like I’d really achieved anything. Anyway, the big thing yesterday was to get our stand up for National Libraries Day 2012 #NLD12 which we did after only a few weeks planning. A few weeks to organise an information stand I hear you say? Well, yes. It actually takes a fair bit of organising, liaising, getting people involved that sort of thing. I’m keen for us to be involved in this sort of awareness raising campaign as it gives us the opportunity to think what other resources we can highlight to our users. In this case we’ve gone for reminding them what they have access to through us and we’ve teamed up with Brighton and Hove Libraries to promote their services to our students and hopefully encourage them to join their public library.
So what are we actually doing? We’ve got an information stand in the library for this week leading up to National Libraries Day 2012 itself which is on 4th February. One part of the stand is for our staff, students etc to give us feedback about our services – I love my library because…. My library needs to improve…. that’s the idea. There’s a prize on offer for our favourite bit of feedback and in just a day our little feedback box has been emptied, so that’s a good start. Our users have many forums to contact us, speak to us, discuss concerns, suggest improvements, and this is just another way of doing those things.
On Friday we’ve a member of staff from Brighton and Hove Libraries coming to staff the stand so that any of our lot can ask any questions they have about the public library service and joining. I’m ever hopeful that she’ll get some people talking to her! We’ve advertised it through our usual channels and I’ll put a reminder out there later in the week.
So that was the setting up of the stand which in itself was a good opportunity for colleagues to do something together, show support and belief in an idea so that was good as well.
Doing this kind of thing also meets some of the values set out in the University corporate plan to meet our aims. Particularly I think we’re feeding into the following values:

• engagement • with the cultural, social and economic  life of our localities, region and nation; with international
  imperatives; and with the practical, intellectual and ethical  issues of our partner professions.
• collaboration • being a good partner, locally, regionally, nationally and internationally; being responsive as well as proactive; delivering what we say we will do.

By sharing these values we’re definitely adding to the following aim:

• student and staff experience • aim 4  to provide an experience of higher education that is challenging and enjoyable for its students and staff; that embodies equality  of treatment; and that equips its students to be socially purposeful professionals and citizens.

As well as this I did some book ordering, checked some reading lists and went to a planning meeting for our library. Some interesting project updates – particularly with RightAnswers which is a knowledge base that we’re in the process of populating for use on Help Desks and for users to use independently to find information, answers to their questions. There’s still work to be done, but we’re getting there. Another event to plan for is in conjunction with the Students Union the week of the 13th February which is I ‘heart’ my education week. We’re not sure how or what we will contribute to this yet, but I’m sure it’ll be great.

Today, Tuesday I am #latenightlibrarian and one thing I definitely need to get back into today is tagging! We were supposed to have finished today, but we’ve still got some to do. I need to put some time in my calendar to make sure I do some. I’ll leave it there for now and will give you a round up of today later on.

Ok bye…
Emma