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Poster for #iaml2011

2011-07-23T11:57:00.001+01:00

The IAML International Conference is running from tomorrow until next Friday in Dublin, and I've been lucky enough to receive a Music Libraries Trust bursary to attend.

I'm doing a poster session on Tuesday, based on an assignment I did as part of the MSc Information and Library Studies in Aberystwyth (click to view pdf).

I'm looking forward to the conference and to catching up with what's been going on in music librarianship recently! I'll probably blog about some of the sessions during the week.

CPD23 Blogs and Blogging

2011-06-26T21:45:00.003+01:00

Thing 1
I started this blog last year as part of two 23 Things programmes, one run by the Cambridge University Medical Library and the other run by a team of librarians from different libraries in the university. At the time, I had only been in the UK a few months, working a few hours a week at the Medical Library and knew hardly anyone in Cambridge, let alone the UK library scene. How things have changed! Participating in these 23 Things programmes led to me very quickly getting to know people here by following other local blogs and from there starting to follow other library blogs, getting involved in what was going on (like TeachMeet for one!), presenting at conferences, getting involved in the local CILIP branch and starting a full time role as Assistant Librarian of a faculty library here in Cambridge.

I've already talked about the start of the CPD23 idea, but have been trying to decide whether or not to follow the programme myself. I'm on the home stretch of my librarianship masters, which I've been doing by distance learning for *ahem* a while, so finishing that is absolutely my priority this year, but I couldn't resist joining the fun. I love the idea of building more of a community with other info pros both nationally and internationally. I think I'll follow other the progress of some other participants and dip in and out of actually posting as time allows. I can always do the other Things next year when I've finished the masters!

Thing 2
So I've been looking around the blogs so far and loving the variety! I started with the Irish bloggers (including not one but two other Niamhs - see, it's a totally normal name!), then clicked through some of the countries with only one or two participants, then followed links to some of the blogs mentioned by these participants, commenting here and there along the way. I agree with the people that said that the commenting will be more useful as we progress - I certainly found that last year. We've now added a blogroll to the left hand column (screenshot above) which just lists the 25 most recent blog posts by CPD23 participants, so I plan to dip into that as time goes on to discover more blogs on a regular basis. I've added some of the blogs to Google Reader, going by people whose writing styles I enjoyed rather than sector or geographic criteria. A random sample of these include:

Quick tip!
For anyone, like me, who made the mistake of upgrading to Firefox 4 before checking that it wouldn't break or move stuff (like that RSS icon that I absolutely relied on), there is a solution. If you right click on the toolbars you can customise it to add the RSS icon back in and to move everything else back where they belong. It doesn't fix the fact that the Delicious toolbars are broken, but at least I can now subscribe to blogs again!

23 Things for Professional Development

2011-06-21T20:47:00.003+01:00

What happens if you cross 23 Things programmes with CPD?
This time last year, I was working my way through not one, but two 23 Things programmes - one specifically for staff of Cambridge University Medical Library and one for library staff in any of the (many) Cambridge University libraries. Around about the same time, I attended the New Professionals Conference in Sheffield and came away even more inspired and enthusiastic than ever. So enthusiastic, in fact, that I got thinking about what I could present about at such conference. It occurred to me that the 23 Things model would work really well for new professionals, and seed of an idea was planted.

The idea developed...
Back I came to Cambridge, and started discussing this idea with Katie Birkwood, who (luckily for me!) agreed to get involved. A group of us got together, ranging from Graduate Trainees to library school students to fully qualified and more established information professionals to thrash out the idea some more. We quickly came to the conclusion that running a 23 Things programme just for new professionals would mean that some of our slightly less new colleagues would feel that this programme wasn't for them and we'd lose the advantage of professionals at all levels sharing their experiences. 23 Things for New Professionals became 23 Things for Professional Development and #cpd23 was born. Most of the original team work at one or other of the libraries of the University of Cambridge, but we thought the project would really benefit from input from people from outside our little echo chamber and we're very excited to have Jo Alcock, Bobbi Newman, Laura Woods, Bronagh McCrudden, Emma Illingworth and Sarah Ison on board.

A confession
I've had to take a bit of a step back from #cpd23 because I absolutely must finish my MSc this year, but there's a wonderful group running the programme. Huge thanks to all of you for planning, writing and promoting the programme, tagging hundreds of participant blogs (500+ so far) and all the rest of the work that's going into putting 23 Things for Professional Development together. Extra thanks to Katie for doing so much of the organising and introductory posting, Helen for doing the #npc2011 presentation, Claire for agreeing to present a poster at CILIP's Umbrella Conference and Charlotte for volunteering to do an hour-long webinar with NCompass Live (Nebraska) tomorrow afternoon! The response has been incredible, I'm really looking forward to following the developments.

Cloudworks

2011-04-29T16:49:00.006+01:00

Several weeks ago I mentioned that CARET are organising a 13 Things for Curriculum Design programme in Cambridge. I haven't done any more about it because life got in the way a bit (the whole dissertation proposal thing and the whole co-presenting with Katie Birkwood about LibTeachMeet at LILAC thing), so they're now up to Thing 10 - catch up time!

Thing 2: Cloudworks
From the 13 Things site: "Cloudworks is a website for teachers in HE to to find and discuss ideas for learning and teaching, and share their own ideas too."

I had a quick look around first and found a few sections relating to information literacy (which I've been working with recently), but lots of "clouds" with no responses. Not the most inspiring start, so I decided to follow the recommended steps.

The Learning Design Toolbox is a "cloudscape" which seems to include a lot of useful suggestions for activities - regardless of subject. This could certainly be useful in terms of finding quick ideas to adapt for your lessons. There are also some Tips and hints for effective use of Cloudworks which includes suggestions such as using Clouds for conference discussions, for sharing resources and ideas, for networking and for keeping up to date.

Will I use it? I don't think so, except for browsing through that handy toolbox from time to time. Do I think Cambridge should have a similar one? I'm not convinced it would be used enough, but maybe? CamTools can be used in this way, but isn't, but then that could have something to do with the clunky way it currently works, or because it's hard to browse for a group that you aren't automatically signed up for and don't know is there. I wouldn't rule it out, but I'm not overly excited by this one I'm afraid.

13 Things for Curriculum Design

2011-03-26T13:44:00.004Z

I participated in the 23 Things course for librarians in Cambridge last summer, learned so much and got to know more of the community of librarians here, so when I spotted Emma's tweet about this 13 Things course last week I was curious to see what would happen with this programme.

To answer the questions - before becoming a librarian I qualified as a secondary school teacher in Ireland. I have experience of teaching music and German privately and in classes of up to 30 students. The curricula for Junior and Leaving Cert state exams were set by the State Examinations Commission, but the Transition Year programme (for 15-16 year olds) was less formally structured so I designed the programmes I taught for that.

Librarians have a very important role in teaching and training within the university context. We teach the students about managing their information, referencing, finding and using resources (both in print and online) and critical appraisal of these resources. We don't currently have a structured curriculum for information literacy in Cambridge, but this is something that some other universities offer already and I believe there's an Arcadia project starting soon to design one here too. I'm planning to watch what's happening in the 13 Things programme to see what tools are suggested but more importantly to get an insight into what others are doing in curriculum design in the university.

#lisbkchat: Librarianship book discussions online

2011-03-20T19:06:00.000Z

I "listened" with half an ear to the #catbkchat Celine took part in last week on Twitter. Although I haven't read the book so wasn't really following, I think it's a great idea and was wondering if any librarians/info pros out there would be interested in doing a more general #lisbkchat? The idea would be that we pick a book to read, pick a day to discuss it and basically have an online librarianship book club. My personal vote would be to start with something related to information literacy since I'll be eating, sleeping and breathing that stuff over the next few months for my dissertation anyway. Anyone up for it? And if so, any suggested book titles to start with?

LibTeachMeets on the CILIP Update Blog

2011-03-17T20:04:00.002Z

This post was originally written for the CILIP Update blog. This version has been edited for clarity and to include information about other LibTeachMeets I've heard about since then. Thanks again to Matthew Mezey for accepting the original and for giving the go-ahead to republish it here.

Last summer while browsing through 23 Things blogs I came across a post by Isla Kuhn talking about a certain format that school teachers use to share teaching advice and experience in an informal setting. Isla wondered aloud whether this 'TeachMeet' idea would work for librarians too, and got immediate enthusiastic responses from several Cambridge librarians. We held our first LibTeachMeet back in September, are now planning our second one, and other similar events have been popping up around the UK.

What are they?
TeachMeets are relatively small, informal events - we've had 50-60 attending ours. Attendees sign up using a wiki or bookings form to give 2 Minute Nanopresentations, 5 Minute Micropresentations or to attend as an Enthusiastic Lurker. Talks are two or five minutes long and the order is usually randomly selected on the night. These talks may be complemented by networking activities - the recent Huddersfield TeachMeet included a speed networking session. The bite-sized talks mean that librarians can get lots of ideas in a short space of time, and the informal approach makes it a less daunting format for new presenters.

Upcoming LibTeachMeets

Tuesday 29^th March, Cambridge #camlibtm / @camlibtm
Wednesday 4^th May, Newcastle #toonlibtm / @hblanchett
Thursday 26th May, Liverpool #livlibtm / @LibraryEmma
Tuesday 14th June, Leicester #imeetdmu

Huddersfield Librarian TeachMeet (#hudteachmeet) took place last month and there are plans to organise TeachMeets in London (@_moo_), Oxford (@gallagherliz), Bournemouth (@CarolineCooke) and Bristol (@tomroper/@wigglesweets).

What's involved in planning a TeachMeet?
TeachMeet planning can be as formal or informal as you choose. For our first one we took a very casual approach and we were booking up before even announcing a venue! Second time around we've been much more organised. We announced date and venue details well in advance through mailing lists, blogs and Twitter and were booked out within hours of opening bookings. For more advice on organising your own TeachMeet please visit our blog or contact us directly, info@camlibtm.info.

How to find out more:

Our website, http://www.camlibtm.info, for information about the Cambridge events, as well as our LibTeachMeet YouTube videos
On Twitter: #LibTeachM to find your local LibTeachMeet or #camlibtm / @camlibtm for Cambridge events
Katie Birkwood and I will be speaking about TeachMeet at the upcoming LILAC conference (Monday 18^th April, 3pm)
Email the Cambridge TeachMeet team at info@camlibtm.info

edited to add Bristol 19/3/11

Library Day in the Life - Thursday

2011-01-28T08:52:00.001Z

This post is part of the Library Day in the Life project, in which librarians share what they really do. For anyone new to this blog, I'm Assistant Librarian in a faculty library at the University of Cambridge.

Things have settled down a bit here now that we're a full week back into term. We're still busy, which is great, but I also actually sat at my desk yesterday! In between the usual issue desk stints, I finished that reference I've been talking about, gave it to the colleague for her funding application, ordered some books (although the system kept crashing), wrote a blog post for the library blog about the Ask Shakespeare event, checked copyright for a book chapter to be added to the Camtools (our VLE), attended a meeting to plan a Food for Thought event which will take place next June, chatted with colleagues about their jobs so I have a better idea of how things fit together, did a bit of shelving, looked at websites with a colleague (in preparation for redesigning ours!) and prepared for and attended a review meeting with my librarian.

Busy day!

Library Day in the Life - Wednesday

2011-01-27T13:52:00.004Z

This post is part of the Library Day in the Life project, in which librarians share what they really do. For anyone new to this blog, I'm Assistant Librarian in a faculty library at the University of Cambridge.

Yesterday was fairly unusual, in that I wasn't in the library much at all. I am doing an ILM accredited course in Front Line Management, which means that I'm out of the office one day a week for five weeks. The really interesting thing about the course was the mix of people there - administrators, researchers, librarians and a chef! No academics, unfortunately, although apparently they do get some sometimes. Yesterday's course was all about leadership and team-building, things that I've done before but which are always worth thinking about again. This course is particularly good because it's so practical. They do the theory, but always bring it right back to how it relates to us and to reflecting on what we might need to do differently as a result.

I did pop into the library on my way to and from the course though, during which time I discovered a colleague from the Pendlebury Library/University Library will be presenting at a conference in Dublin (at which I'm doing a poster session), sent emails organising a meeting to plan a CPD programme for library staff nationally (modest I know - more on that in due course) and got some tips from my librarian on writing references so that I can do proper credit to a colleague in another Cambridge library.

Library Day in the Life - Tuesday!

2011-01-26T08:44:00.001Z

This post is part of the Library Day in the Life project, in which librarians share what they really do. For anyone new to this blog, I'm Assistant Librarian in a faculty library at the University of Cambridge.

Did we really have this many students last year? My poor desk hardly saw me yesterday and tea is the best invention ever. Maybe it's because the first batch of books borrowed in the new term were due back yesterday, but I'm sure every student in our faculty was in the library yesterday!

In between receiving books, putting them in order for future shelving and a lot more stamping than normal, I checked the copyright status of book chapters to be added to the VLE, helped students with resetting their PWF (computer room) passwords, showed others how to do online renewals and re-registered a faculty member whose membership had expired.

A pleasant surprise then - a colleague from one of the college libraries and a fellow member of the TeachMeet popped in after a meeting nearby. I gave her a tour of our library, then we said we'd go for lunch at the UL (the main university library). Half an hour later, the hordes of students stopped arriving (are you sure we had this many students last term?) so off we went to the UL Tea Room, where we bumped into another TeachMeet colleague. Lots of talking about the incredible response to our second event and the need for celebratory cake, then back to the faculty again for the afternoon.

The original plan for yesterday afternoon was to go to see the venue for the Personalised Library Services symposium, and to build in visits to a college library and the Education Faculty Library while I was out that neck of the woods. Best laid plans, however... The reconnaissance trip was cancelled, so I cancelled the other two visits. Disappointing, but I'll get there soon!

Instead, the afternoon started with meeting the new rep for a publisher we use for Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic books, continued with some discussion of how to present the relating reading for the boutique library model that forms the basis of the symposium we're organising, a surprise request for a reference from a colleague in another Cambridge library and 20 minutes of shelving!

Library Day in the Life - Monday!

2011-01-25T08:54:00.000Z

This post is part of the Library Day in the Life project, in which librarians share what they really do. For anyone new to this blog, I'm Assistant Librarian in a faculty library at the University of Cambridge. I'll aim to post each day this week - this one's a little late going up I know!

My day was split between working on the issue desk, at my own desk and at our first floor enquiry desk. I've been working on several interesting projects on the go at the moment, in between dealing with borrower queries, registering new members and generally supervising what was happening in the issue desk area.

At 8.40 I met with our librarian to go through what we were doing this week and ensure that any staffing implications were sorted out. I also followed up on emails and various issues that arose over the weekend (printer problems, online fine payment queries, staff training needs...)

While on the issue desk, I did some literature searching for a symposium I'm helping out with, Personalised Library Services in HE. The symposium is based around the boutique library model, as outlined by Libby Tilley and Andy Priestner in CILIP Update last July, and will form the basis of a future book. I've set up a Zotero group to start pulling a bibliography together, so feel free to read the article and flag up any other articles that you think fit this model.

Tea break: time to send out notifications about our second Cambridge (lib)TeachMeet. As Katie and Celine have already mentioned, the response has bowled us over - we were booked up within a day! More evidence of the value of this kind of event, which we'll need to include in the paper we're giving at LILAC in April.

Other things I did yesterday - dealt with some HR stuff new staff members, arranged two library visits for when I'm out the far side of Cambridge later today, ordered books to meet reading list requirements and finished off with a bit of shelving.

25 Research Things

2010-12-09T08:33:00.001Z

A while back I noticed that a 25 Things programme has been developed in Huddersfield, this time geared towards researchers rather than librarians. What a great idea for user ed! Unfortunately there only seems to be a small number participating in it.

I suspect the programme works better with library staff for two main reasons: there is a sense of community and support between librarians across the university and we're in CPD mode rather than major research project mode. It's very interesting to see what researchers make of the things that we consider for work purposes - I'll follow it closely and see how it goes!

A tangent from a brown bag discussion

2010-12-05T22:45:00.004Z

Last Wednesday I attended another brown bag lunch in Cambridge, inspired by the British Library debate on whether the physical library is redundant. Katie has already posted an excellent summary of our discussion so I won't repeat any of that, although I did find the point that only three of the 150 most used books in the Economics library are even available electronically very interesting. A few related items popped into my RSS reader just after the discussion:

Ed Chamberlain reported on the FutureBook conference, including stats that show that even most publishers don't believe that ebooks will make up the majority of sales in the market in the near future
Libby Tilley shared a comment from one of our academics on the value of holding classes in the IT Suite within our library, rather than elsewhere in the faculty
Louisa Brown's research on the use of ebooks in the Education Faculty Library here in Cambridge showed that their students still prefer the printed book - they use ebooks when "forced" to because they are unable to make it to the physical library
Disturbingly, an academic opened a University Science and Technology Librarians Group conference in Oxford by claiming that library funding should go straight to researchers (so each researcher would have to purchase the articles they need, no sharing of resources and good luck to the poor unfunded undergrads?!?)

Instead of repeating what others have said (no, I don't think the physical library is redundant, and besides, there's more to a library than a building with books in it!), I'd like to follow one of the tangents that cropped up during the discussion.

A parallel was drawn between the fate of record companies because of easy availability of music online and the difficulties of digital rights management, and that of publishers who are trying to work out how best to monitor the use of their ebooks and ejournals. Although this is undoubtably a headache for the publishers, is it really as much of a problem for the researchers? How many of them make anything from academic publishing in the first place? Perhaps they could follow the example of musicians, who have been able to take more control of the distribution and promotion of their own music by releasing only part of a track, or an individual track from an album. It is already clear that articles that are freely available online are more likely to be cited. I know of one person that posts draft or pre-publication versions of his own articles to a blog (when possible) in a conscious attempt to raise the profile of their work, as well as submitting work to his institutional repository and to open access journals. The main difficulty is having some sort of quality control, but there are various ways to do that and besides, isn't that why critical appraisal is so essential?

Thinking about all of this brought me back to a post by Anne Collins on the Librarian of the Future. In it she suggested that in addition to the teaching, marketing and management roles, we could support our researchers by providing "copyright advice, help with getting published, help with citations, help with indexing terminology, open access advice". This kind of added support chimes strongly with the tailored boutique library service idea that is gaining momentum at the moment thanks to Libby and Andy.* The Contemporary Music Centre provides some similar services to their composers, but I was wondering if anyone knows of other libraries that provide this kind of support already? Or are there other services that academic libraries are providing that might not be considered standard?

* Someone needs to put up a post about the boutique library idea so I have something to link to! Or maybe you could point me towards an existing one...

Costs vs. Benefits: Texting students

2010-12-01T08:41:00.002Z

Last week, representatives of a number of different libraries got together to discuss the JANET text messaging service - how we've found it, problems we've encountered, resolutions to the problem etc. Thanks again to everyone who came along or followed remotely, and especially to Sarah for reporting live via the chat functionality in the Cambridge_Librarians Camtools site and to Emma, who has pulled together the information about what the different libraries do and added it to the Cambridge_Librarians wiki.

For anyone who can't access this, the main uses to which libraries here have put the service are:

Notifying students that books they have requested are now available
Reminding students to return overdue books
Organising emergency invigilation if evening staff can't come in at short notice (I'm stealing that one Hélène!)
Alerting all library users to unexpected closures - especially useful for library members from other faculties!
Letting people know that we've found their lost property (if an owner is identifiable)
Helping faculty out by sending messages to students.

Advantages

In the Education Faculty Library, they have found that very overdue books are being returned more quickly when a text has been sent.
Books on the "hold" shelf tend to be borrowed or returned to circulation more quickly (students will often text to say they don't need the book any more.)
The message reaches the students far more quickly than an email would, especially in subject areas where students tend to check their email less frequently.
The students are less likely to ignore a text than yet another message in their already crowded email inboxes.

Problems to be aware of:

Now that several libraries are using the service, we need to identify ourselves in the message! (Students may be members of multiple libraries and may not know which one is contacting them.)
The default is set to send messages from JANETtxt rather than from the phone number we were given (which means that the student can't reply to the message, defeating the point of having the two-way service).

Tips:

Identify yourself!
Set up templates to reduce staff time
Keep an eye on the character count to avoid the message running into two texts
Check what your group limits are - we use the group function to set up year groups, but there is a default limit to the number of people you can have in a group (contact PageOne to change this if needed)
Import patron name and email address from a spreadsheet, so that when the first years arrive in October you just need to add their phone numbers
Add the patron barcode number to the name field so you know you're sending the message to the correct person (thanks Simon!)

We were joined at the meeting by a number of people who have not yet used the service but are considering it. I think the most interesting discussion arose from the question "Why pay for text when you can email?" I think we came to the conclusion that it depends very much on your library - some faculties use Camtools very heavily which means that student inboxes are full of (often irrelevant) update messages, which in turn means that the students just don't check or see the messages they actually need. Others find that sending an email immediately rather than waiting for the automated message through Voyager works just as quickly as sending a text.

We've only been using the service for one term, and my experience has been that we often catch people while they're still in the library, saving them an extra trip to collect their book/lost property/whatever it is we want to let them know about!

So why pay? A lot of the things we do cost either in time or other resources without necessarily having any resulting income. As with everything else, we need to consider the cost in relation to how much it helps our students and what value it brings (e.g. in returning books more quickly to the shelves / providing the personal touch that we aim for in this library). I think it would be interesting to find out from students in our next survey whether they like the text service and whether they would prefer to receive emails as they have in the past.

Future-proofing libraries

2010-11-03T16:03:00.001Z

Today I attended my first ever 'brown bag lunch'. Once a month, librarians from around Cambridge get together to discuss recently published articles. This time, it was hosted by Lyn Bailey at Classics, and the articles related to future-proofing libraries.

Bell, Stephen J. "Fit libraries are future-proof: A dozen ideas for whipping your library into shape." American Libraries Magazine, 21 September 2010. http://tinyurl.com/3yvbb5b
Miller, R. "Future-proof your library." Library Journal (2008), 133(13), 30-31.

Thoughts beforehand: reading Bell's article, I was reminded of the article by Andy Priestner and Libby Tilley in the July edition of CILIP's Update magazine. In it, they emphasise the importance of tailoring your service to meet the needs of the library users, arguing that the faculty library network in Cambridge allows for closer relationships with staff and students within the subject and greater independence and flexibility, which means the librarian is better positioned to meet the needs of these library users.

We did wander from the main focus from time to time, but only to interesting and thought-provoking topics:

The balance - and sometimes conflict - between professional core values and the expectations of the institutions we're affiliated with
Building a ladder of loyalty - developing our borrowers from casual browsers to committed patrons and on to become our advocates (and defence!) in times of cutbacks
Ranganathan made an appearance - with some debate on whether in fact every book did have its reader
On to collection management, particularly weeding and how the act of removing of a book from the shelf and showing it to academics can in fact cause the book to be borrowed, thus removing it from the 'to be weeded' list...
...and back to the whole expectations debate, the librarian's perceptions how the library should work versus the perceptions of staff, students and other faculty members.

I'll look forward to the next one, at which (I believe) we'll get to hear some more from school librarian Jenny Horler. Jenny spoke at our recent TeachMeet about how she tries to build a link for her 6th form students so that they're properly prepared for third level. Her talk then was only two minutes long, so it will be great to have some discussion on it and find out more about how she does it.

Meanwhile, I'd love to hear what other people think about the articles - whether or not you made it to the discussion!

TeachMeet II: The planning begins

2010-10-25T21:46:00.000+01:00

I've just spent a lovely evening with Celine, Chris, Katie and Isla, wrapping up the last bits and pieces from our (lib)TeachMeet and preparing the next one.

We've sent out a questionnaire about the last one to see how people feel about it after having time to reflect and hopefully put some of the tools and tips into practice. We also talked about how to share what we've found so far (more on that in due course...)

So for now, a few questions to help us plan the next one, for anyone who attended the last one or thinks they might like to attend future ones:

How long do you think it should be? Two hours in the early evening (as we did last time), a full afternoon or other?
What day of the week suits you best? Is it easy enough to get away from work during the week or would it be better to hold it at the weekend?
Can you recommend a venue for future events? We're thinking 50-100 attendees and interested in different types of room / space, so all suggestions welcome.
Would you be interested in joining the CamLibTM team?

All suggestions, opinions and enquiries welcome!

Library visits

2010-10-07T19:52:00.002+01:00

Today I got a glimpse of how they do things in corporate libraries... well, in one of them anyway.

I met Jill of all trades for lunch and we compared experiences. Because the organisation she works for is scattered around the world, the main emphasis is on providing services for remote users through document delivery services and an electronic library. This also means that the team of librarians/information specialists are based in different countries, so team meetings require video conferencing.

They do have a print collection as well, cleverly designed so that it flows into their canteen area as well. I really liked this because it means that the library is easily accessible to the members of staff that do actually work in that location.

I found our conversation today really interesting, so thanks again @libclare!

TeachMeet and the LAT Network

2010-09-28T20:45:00.005+01:00

Well the night came at last, the first Cambridge (lib)TeachMeet has been and gone and quite well I think - I hope the attendees agree! There was a great mix of content, from the Cephalonian Method and resource blogs to Prezi presentations and Flashmeeting software.

I spoke for two minutes to introduce the LAT Network, a new site for librarians who teach. This network was established by Johanna Anderson following an enthusiastic response to her blog post on the subject. She's now looking for ideas for its future development in terms of content (resources? blog posts? advice?) and for volunteers to help with looking after the site itself. If anyone's interested post a comment below or visit the forum section of the site.

We're pulling presentations and posts about the TeachMeet together on the wiki, through a Delicious feed and on Twitter so visit any of these sites to find out more. We're also planning a bigger and better event early next year so watch this space!

The Librarianship Qualification

2010-09-06T12:23:00.003+01:00

This is a difficult one (following from discussions here, here and here). As mentioned before, my first full-time library job was as Music Information Officer at a specialist music library, doing all of the things a 'proper' librarian would have been doing - if there had been one there - and I think I did a good job at it too. They did recognise the value of the qualification, encouraged me to go for it and have appointed people that were already qualified to the position since then, but in a lot of ways the fact that I had a strong music background was more important to the post than the librarianship qualification would have been. I remember feeling frustrated that I was doing so much in that post but couldn't get the job I was already doing elsewhere without getting this 'piece of paper'. Luckily, I love learning so was more than happy to do a Masters. I looked into the options and went with Aberystwyth - a distance learning programme that even had an optional module on music librarianship.

I'm now about to head to my last study school in preparation for the dissertation and I've come around to the value of the qualification as more than just a way to open doors. Our course included the theory, but a lot of the assignments encouraged practical application - business plans for new services, reports for collection management, analyses of information retrieval systems, a journal article for actual potential publication, an entire module on Studies in Management - and we did have the option to specialise in areas such as music, archives, health, schools and knowledge management. We didn't spend lots of time actually cataloguing or classifying, but then, that's the kind of thing that's best learned on the job. I think the balance between the practical and the theory was perfect, although I would love to be able to take more of the other optional modules. (Please let us do them as CPD when we're finished the Masters!)

Do I think a Masters is essential to be a good librarian? No. I know I did a good job without it, and in fact a postgraduate diploma is the norm in Ireland, not the full Masters.

Do I think I would do things differently if I was back at CMC now, with what I've learned from the Masters? Absolutely. I have a much better understanding of approaches to collection management. I have thought through the issues involved in deciding between electronic and print. I've done some research on what's done differently in other Music Information Centres. I've realised the importance of evidence-based learning and feeding my experiences back into the literature.

So, do I think you should have to have a postgraduate qualification in librarianship? It was valuable, it did prepare me for working in all sorts of libraries, it taught me to think beyond the here and now and look for better ways of doing things. I don't think someone with years of experience should be overlooked because they don't hold that piece of paper already - their practical experience might be worth more than the qualification. Isn't that why CILIP allows Associate members that are working in what is essentially a librarian role to apply for chartership, even without the qualification, provided they can prove that they are working at that level already?
I think the real point is that any applicant for a job as Librarian should be able to prove that they have the skills and knowledge required for the position. The piece of paper is a useful short-cut, but it's not enough. Experience is needed as well, and more than a certain amount of experience should be enough to be called for interview, even without the qualification. If someone can stand up against other candidates that have a Masters, then they should get the job. I think the best-placed applicants will always be the ones with qualification and the experience, and even sometimes additional qualifications that are relevant to the job, such as a background in the subject area. If there's a glut of people with a Masters, it's always going to be more difficult for the people without it to prove that they can do just as well, but if they can prove it, they should have that chance. I'm grateful to the English Faculty Library for taking me on even though I'm still working on it!

Just my thoughts...

Library Routes and Roots

2010-09-05T18:47:00.007+01:00

I've been aware of the Library Routes project since its inception but have put off participating until now. First I had no blog, then I was only working a few hours a week so it didn't seem to be the best time to do it. Now, with the #aberils dissertation school next week and a new job around the corner, it seems like a good time to add myself to the wiki.

My background is in music (NUI Maynooth) and education (Trinity College, Dublin). Fortunately / unfortunately there weren't many full-time jobs for music teachers at the time, so I found myself teaching part-time and working part-time as a library assistant at the Contemporary Music Centre (CMC). This first library job involved lots of photocopying and binding of musical scores, with a few general library duties thrown in.

A year later there were still very few music teaching jobs coming up, so when the position of Music Information Officer opened up at CMC I applied and I got the job! This was a fantastic place to start with libraries, because there were two of us working full-time in the library and I got to do a bit of everything - acquisitions, cataloguing, creating content for the web / other publications and lots of user support. I attended one of the IAML study weekends, realised that I actually preferred library work to teaching and applied for the MSc Information and Library Studies at Aberystwyth.

My next position was as Senior Library Assistant on the Changing Libraries team at An Chomhairle Leabharlanna (The Library Council). This position gave me more line management and training experience and I was involved in projects such as the redesign of the Ask About Ireland website and a book digitisation project, among others. I took a career break from this position earlier this year and moved to the UK.

Ask About Ireland website

Since March, I've been working a few hours a week as a library invigilator at the medical library in Cambridge and working on my librarianship qualification. I've been making the most of the time available and opportunities that came up, attending CILIP events, doing the 23 Things programmes and helping to organise the first (lib)TeachMeet (limited places still available, sign up here!)

I'm now at a bit of a turning point in my career. Next week I'm off to Aberystwyth for my third and final study school, and the week after that I'll be starting as Assistant Librarian at the English Faculty Library, Cambridge. I'm very excited about this job - I have an interest in the educational role of librarians and think a faculty library is probably the best place to be for this side of things. I've met most of the team and am really looking forward to working with them, and from what I've read and heard, this library always has lots going on.

I have to say, I feel really lucky to have had the broader early experiences from CMC and the Library Council while I was studying. By working while studying, I've managed to avoid the Experience Catch-22 that Bronagh talked about at the New Professionals Conference, and I've been able to draw on this work experience in completing assignments throughout my course. It's been a long slog, but I don't regret taking the distance learning route to qualification. Roll on the dissertation, chartership and future opportunities!

Too many email accounts? Gmail and Priority Inbox

2010-09-04T09:39:00.007+01:00

I know I'm not alone in having this problem. I have my personal email account, my university account for Aberystwyth, two accounts for Cambridge (although I'm guessing the medschl one will disappear at some point) and a professional account (npagelibrarian at gmail) that I set up to use for my social media card rather than giving my personal account out to just anybody. The solution?

Gmail has, for as long as I can remember, allowed you to send and receive messages for another email account. This has been particularly useful for my Aber account which is the account used for general communications by the department and, most importantly, to which my results and feedback are sent. It's not worth checking most weeks, but having it come to my normal Gmail account makes things much easier.

To set this up, go to 'Settings', then 'Accounts and Import'. Click 'Send mail from another account, and follow the instructions as they come up. A verification code is sent to the email address you are adding, to confirm that you are supposed to be able to access that account (a sensible security measure). You will probably want to select 'Reply from the same address the message was sent to' to prevent any confusion. You can then, if you wish, set up a filter so that everything that comes to that account is labelled as it comes in.

So what's new about it?

Gmail's new Priority Inbox

Gmail has introduced Priority Inbox. This allows you to sort your inbox into up to four different sections. The default is to have three sections: Important and unread, Starred, and Everything else. I have removed Starred, because I don't use this feature, and instead added a section for anything labelled 'EFL' (emails relating to the job I'm starting soon) and a section for other, less important unread items (such as the LinkedIn update shown above). I can still access the traditional inbox too, if I prefer. Gmail needs to 'learn' which emails you consider important, but they catch on pretty quickly.

To change how this is set up, go to 'Settings', then 'Priority Inbox'. To change what appears in the different sections, click 'Options', and if you want to highlight all from a particular label, click 'More options' within that menu.

This approach suits me really well because I keep things in my inbox until I no longer need to refer to them and then label and archive them when I'm finished. You could, hypothetically, set up your work account to come into Gmail and then use labels to separate these emails from ones to your personal account. Of course, many people prefer not to mix work and personal emails at all, while some workplaces may have a problem with regularly accessing email through another service for data protection reasons. There's the whole issue of selling your soul to Google too, but you've got to admit they've added some nice functionality here.

Customer Journey Mapping

2010-09-03T23:29:00.001+01:00

Flicking through CILIP's Gazette this evening (while, of course, reminscing about my Friday nights), I had one of those "of course!" moments. In it Erika Gavillet outlines the idea of Customer Journey Mapping. The idea is that you ask users (or staff acting as users) to go through the process of doing something, for example using a new service or finding a book, perhaps using a comments sheet for feedback, and revising the format/signage/facilities accordingly.

It's not rocket science and there's nothing new about it really, in fact, we've done a bit of it recently as part of the Follow that... programme at the medical library. It's just one of those blindingly obvious things that we sometimes need people to spell out for us. It's a simple form of evaluation that we have used before, but I will certainly use more consciously in the future.

What are hashtags?

2010-08-27T16:11:00.000+01:00

I was going to tweet this, but realised that people who follow tweets probably already know what a hashtag is. So for any #cam23ers or others reading this blog that looked at Twitter but couldn't figure out what the #s were all about, Phil Bradley has posted a great explanation of what hashtags are and what they're used for over on his blog.

Communication in Cambridge University libraries

2010-08-26T10:51:00.000+01:00

In case anyone's missed this, there's a discussion starting at 11am in Selwyn college and Lyn Bailey has kindly volunteered to report live using the chat functionality in the Cambridge_Librarians CamTools site. Looking forward to it!

E-books

2010-08-20T20:15:00.006+01:00

My first experience of using an e-book was as part of my librarianship studies at Aberystwyth. As a distant learner, based (at the time) in a different country, in a small specialist library and with very limited access to university collections, it was great to be able to access at least one of my books easily whenever I liked. At the Library Council, we digitised more than 300 books ranging from art and music to education, industry and trade, and this digital collection can now be freely accessed on the Ask About Ireland website.

For this Thing, I started by using the Cambridge e-books CrossSearch option to find ebooks with the word 'surgery' in their titles. This was a useful task because although I knew that there were ebooks available here I had never tried accessing them from this angle. I think the other route suggested, via the main library catalogue, is the one that will be used more by students because it's really the content they need and the format would be secondary to that.

I hadn't looked at MyiLibrary before, but (at a quick glance) like the way the search and browse options work. I was already familiar with Project Gutenberg and also Archive.org - a very 'busy' site, but I like the range of options it provides for viewing the books.

Notes on using Zotero

2010-08-15T15:55:00.003+01:00

I'm now using Zotero to write an article and a few interesting points have arisen.

Errors
The JAVA uno error came up again when I tried to insert my first reference. I fixed this as before and citations have been working properly ever since.

Set-up
You have to have Firefox open while inserting citations. This makes perfect sense since the citations are stored in the browser.

Styles
If you're unfortunate enough to have to cite using one of the many different Harvard styles, it's very difficult to see which one you should be using. For example, for my masters I need to use Harvard APA and for the article I'm writing I need to use Sage Harvard. These styles are not clearly listed in either the pre-installed list or the Zotero Style Repository. This means librarians may need to track down the correct house style or edit styles to get it right, ensure that their students know which one to install and use and that, for example, Harvard APA means the American Psychological Association style as opposed to the styles that actually have Harvard in their name.

Bookmarks and Reference Marks
Because I was working with OpenOffice, the default was to save references as ReferenceMarks. It seems that this format works only with OpenOffice - a bit pointless since most people I'm likely to send it to would be working with MS Word. In order to minimise the chances of the references disappearing, I had to save as .doc and select the Bookmarks option instead.

Other potential issues
I suspect that there could be a problem with the browser taking longer and longer to load if there are a lot of citations stored on it, but this problem has not yet arisen for me.

Once I sorted out these problems, I found it very easy to insert references and create a bibliography - it really is worth the effort.

Lost in translation

2010-08-13T19:47:00.013+01:00

Inspired by Vanessa's wonderful Greek Wordle, I decided to run my blog through Google Translate. (Apologies to the non-Irish speakers out there!)

The result was hilarious, including attempts at direct translation

"so here you go" = "agus mar sin théann tú anseo" = "and so you go here"

...and some incomprehensible attempts at sentences:

"Off I went to see if I could find a clear and simple explanation of how to do this using free software and do you think I could find any?"
=
"Off Chuaigh mé a fheiceáil má raibh mé in ann a fháil míniú soiléir agus simplí ar conas é seo a dhéanamh ag baint úsáide as bogearraí saor in aisce agus is dóigh leat raibh mé in ann teacht ar bith?

=
WHAT???**

Some surprisingly nice-sounding phrases too though, it has to be said:

"As my faithful readers know" = "Mar is eol do mo léitheoirí dílse")

This reminded me of a wonderful email my husband received last month to his old (Irish) university account:

Tá Bunachar Sonraí Cothabháil Ríomhaire atá ar siúl faoi láthair ar ár Ríomhphost gréasáin Message Center. Ár Teachtaireacht Center is gá a ath-shocrú mar gheall ar an méid ard de phoist a fhaighimid spam laethúil. Beidh Cothabháil a leagan síos agus cabhrú linn cosc a chur ar an aincheist seo go laethúil. Hanover nua ríomhphost Gréasáin Software a sholáthar pop - uaire le bloc de roinnt focal teoranta ó thaobh spam,.

*Chun revalidate do bhosca ríomhphoist do thoil:
Cliceáil anseo: [LINK DELETED]

Is é an Bogearraí Hanover Ríomhphost Gréasáin go tapa agus cur i bhfeidhm meáchan éadrom go tapa agus go héasca le rochtain do r-phost. Má theipeann ar revalidate do bhosca ríomhphoist a bheidh do r-phost a fhágáil i-ghníomhach ó ár mbunachar sonraí.

Go raibh maith agat

Riarthóir Córas

Now it was far too much work to figure out what this was meant to be about so I stuck it through Google Translate and got the following:

Computer Database Maintenance is currently underway in our Webmail Message Center. Our Communication Center is required re-arrangement because of the high volume of spam mail we receive daily. Maintenance will be laid down and help prevent on this dilemma daily. Hanover new Web mail Provide Software pop - off several blocks of limited word spam terms.

To revalidate your email box please:
Click here: [LINK DELETED]

The Hanover Email Software Web quickly into light weight application to quickly and easily access your email. Failure to revalidate your mailbox to be your e-mail left in-active from our database.

Thanks
System Administrator

A remarkably comprehensible translation, don't you think? Some spammer out there has gone to a huge amount of effort to translate their messages for the benefit of their Irish targets. I wonder if I keep translating into Irish and back again would it end up saying what it was originally supposed to say?

I've removed the links because, while I don't know where they led, I don't want to be responsible for forwarding them to others. Just in case.

*P.S. I particularly love the sentences where English words were left in alongside the Irish translation attempt:

Chun revalidate do bhosca ríomhphoist do thoil...

**P.P.S. Oh, ok, so the translation isn't all that bad, considering it was done by a computer!

23 Things Wordle

2010-08-12T23:15:00.003+01:00

Looking at other completion posts, I've just realised that I never did my Wordle, so here you go:

Zotero Success!

2010-08-12T21:20:00.003+01:00

As some of you know, I've been having trouble with Zotero recently. I added it to my browser, no problem, and synced to my online account, but was getting two error messages every time I opened OpenOffice no matter what document format I opened and with new and existing documents (Error loading BASIC of document...). Closing the error messages allowed me to work with documents as normal, but I couldn't use the citation software with it.

I searched the Zotero support section and couldn't find any useful answers. Taking a second look at the Word Processor Plugin Installation page, I noticed some advice for when the Zotero options weren't displaying at all. This wasn't my problem, but I tried their suggestion for that issue and it worked.

In Firefox, go to Tools→Add-ons→Extensions→Zotero OpenOffice Integration→Preferences and click “Reinstall OpenOffice components”.

Now I had a new error message though:

Zotero OpenOffice Integration could notcommunicate with OpenOffice.org because the Java UNO runtimedirectory specified in the Zotero OpenOffice Integration preferencesdoes not contain a “ridl.jar” file.

I couldn't find a solution on the suggested troubleshooting page, so back I went to the Zotero forum to see if there was an answer for me. I had better luck this time, using the advice from the last post on this page. I installed the package openoffice.org-java-common using synaptic package manager. Then I went back into Tools→Add-ons→Extensions→Zotero OpenOffice Integration→Preferences and clicked 'Detect OpenOffice.org paths'.

This fully solved my problem. I've now been playing with Zotero citations within OpenOffice and I love it! I will once again try to use this the whole way through the article I'm working on and see how it goes.

A coordinated and strategic approach to LIS Research

2010-08-12T09:56:00.000+01:00

As my faithful readers know, I am about to start the dissertation part of my MSc at Aberystwyth. I was very interested to hear about the LIS Research Coalition, and particularly like the sound of this "coordinated and strategic" approach that they're facilitating. I would have loved to go to their recent conference, but unfortunately the student opportunities seemed targetted at PhD students only - fair enough, but that ruled me out. I'm following the Twitter feed and I think it's great that they pull together information about funding and research results.

Here's my question: I'd like to contribute usefully to LIS Research, so went looking to see if they have come up with research priorities. I don't see any on the site - are there any? I think what they're doing is really valuable, I'm just not sure how I can fit my research into this strategic approach. What am I missing? Any help would be wonderful!

Curvy text using Gimp Image Editor

2010-08-11T13:14:00.006+01:00

I was recently asked how to put curved text on a logo. Off I went to see if I could find a clear and simple explanation of how to do this using free software and do you think I could find any? Lots of complicated explanations or ones that expect that you already know about paths, lots that left bits out so you were left scratching your head and wondering why it didn't work for you, but nothing clear, simple and taking you the whole way through. So here we go, especially for The Lizard Lounge, curvy text using Gimp - and so I don't have to figure it out a ~~second~~ third time! I'll assume you've downloaded the software and go from there.

Step 1: Draw a path
Select the Path tool (left). Click on two different spots to make a line.

Step 2: Shape the path
Click and drag the line to create a curve. You can change the degree of the curve by clicking and dragging the little squares that now appear.

Step 3: Write the text
Select the text tool (left). Write the required text and click 'Text along Path'. You can clear the text box once the text has appeared on the curved line.

Step 4: Select the text path
At the top of the image window, select Dialogs, then Paths. Right-click on the text path and click 'Path to Selection'.

Step 5: Create a new layer
In the image window, select Layers, then New Layer. Select the Bucket fill tool (left) and click on the image window. Your text should now look something like this:

Step 6: Rearrange the layers
Open the Layers dialog box (Dialogs>Layers) and drag the layers into the correct order. Alternatively, you could right click on the image, select Layer, then Stack, and rearrange using the options there.

Step 7: Flatten image
Before saving the image as a .jpg or .png, you need to 'flatten' it. In the image window, select Image, then Flatten Image.

Step 8: Save the file
So far we've been working in Gimp's own image format, .xcf. At this stage you'll probably want to save it in a different format for web or print use.

The finished product!

Don't ask me why it's so complicated, it's one of my pet hates of image editing, but I hope that works!

This is the end...

2010-08-09T23:24:00.004+01:00

... of the main 23 Things Programme, although we're still working through the medical one. There were times when I thought I was crazy to be trying to do both, thinking we'd never get to the end, but now it seems to have flown by.

Looking back at the half-way mark, I still agree with what I said then. The most valuable part of the programme actually had nothing to do with the tools - it was the community spirit that came out if it, and now also opportunities such as my involvement in the first Cambridge Librarian TeachMeet, (27th September, St John's College). I think it's been valuable personally for raising my profile and helping me to dive into the Cambridge library world.

In terms of things, I'll build on my previous list:
Tools that I am likely to keep using:

This blog: I've never kept a blog before, but am finding it a very useful tool for reflecting on events attended and have now set up a private blog for tracking my thoughts on articles for my masters as well.
RSS feeds: I was already a convert for this one and love scanning headlines for interesting articles/posts rather than visiting the websites themselves.
Doodle: We've used this already to plan a discussion on Defining our professional future and are now using it to discuss organising a TeachMeet in Cambridge.
Google Calendar: Another one that I use personally, but I can see that it could be very useful in a library context.
Twitter: A new convert, I'm finding this really useful for keeping up with what's happening and especially for networking.
Flickr: with a very big pinch of salt
Delicious: Although when will I ever have time to go through my "to read" pile?
Youtube and podcasting: I'll have to think some more about how to approach this in real life though.
Social networking sites: Facebook (in library context, but not as a librarian, if you get what I mean), but also LinkedIn, LISNPN and the LAT Network for my professional development and making more contacts.
Zotero: we're still having a bit of a tiff, but I'll get around to sorting that problem any day now.
Google Docs: Very useful for sharing raw thoughts with others - not so much for the formatted finished products though.
Wikis: Already useful for #camlibtm but I'm sure they will prove useful for other projects in future too.

Things I am less likely to continue to use

iGoogle: I prefer to track RSS feeds using Google Reader and am happy to use tabs to open other pages I need.
Slideshare: I would put a presentation up there for the benefit of others, but it doesn't suit my style for catching up on events I haven't been able to attend. Please keep blogging, everyone!
LibraryThing: Sorry Tim! Although maybe this will be useful for specific promotional purposes, we'll see.

And so I'm done - luckily we have the TeachMeet to look forward to in September, catering to all who are suffering withdrawal symptoms!

Wikis Mark II

2010-08-09T23:02:00.006+01:00

This will be another short one because I've already covered it in CamMed23. since that post I've been using wikis as part of planning the (lib)TeachMeet (have you signed up yet?) and at the medical library for putting together the answers for a quiz. I still think the most obvious use for wikis in a library context is internally for staff manuals and shared information.

And again, if you haven't visited it yet check out the #camlibtm wiki!

Podcasting

2010-08-09T22:46:00.007+01:00

I used to listen to podcasts on a daily basis on my way to and from work - until I mislaid my ipod (it's got to be in that house somewhere!) It was great for following programmes that were on at awkward times, such as the arts and Irish language programmes on "mainstream" channels. As mentioned previously, my first library job was at the Contemporary Music Centre which was one of the first arts organisations in Ireland to use podcasts to promote what they did. I've mentioned podcasting and Youtube at CMC already as part of the medical library programme. I think podcasts are most useful if they provide regular features from the library, such as a series of talks, rather than as library tours. I am open to that idea though, has anyone used them and found that they've worked for this purpose?

Google Docs and Waves

2010-08-06T19:44:00.010+01:00

Here's one I've done earlier for the medical library's 23 Things programme (don't you just love when they overlap?) We've also been using Google Docs in planning (lib)TeachMeet, as Katie and Celine have already mentioned. I find it handy for keeping a back-up of work-in-progress documents such as essays or for sharing content with others, but the formatting problems mean that I wouldn't bother working with it all the time.

Since I'm here, I might as well mention the demise of Google Wave. I did post a comment about this on Ange Fitzpatrick's post but it's not appearing yet. There, I agreed with those who say Wave's problem was the lack of purpose - it was fun to play with but it never made sense as a standalone product.

There is definitely scope for its functionality to be incorporated into Google Docs and also into GMail though, and I think this would make collaborative working online much easier for all of us.

[This image of a kayaker catching a wave comes courtesy of Tommy P World. Another blast from the past, not that I was ever the best paddler in the world...]

Marketing with social media

2010-08-06T19:19:00.011+01:00

I'm going to keep this short since others have discussed it so well already. I think a social media strategy needs to be included in the marketing strategy of every library - in fact, I think it would help if every library had a coherent marketing strategy in the first place! It can't replace traditional marketing and advertising approaches, but it certainly can enhance them.

Image courtesy of phonogalerie.com

So, which social media tools I would use? It all depends on your users, which makes it difficult for me to answer right now - I'm not currently working in a library full-time and only know the few library users that come in on a Friday night.

Of the tools covered so far in #cam23, I think a library blog is possibly the most valuable, but Twitter, Facebook and Flickr could all play an important role in marketing the library.

Other Things (Netvibes, Google Calendar, Doodle, Delicious, Zotero, LibraryThing, Slideshare) would, I think, be more useful to us in delivering services than in marketing them, although it does all add up so it's important to consider how these are presented too.

I think this is a question I'll have to come back to when I'm in a better position to talk about marketing a specific library. In the meantime, (this bit's for thewikiman) you may find more to think about in my previous post about the use of social media at the Contemporary Music Centre or in this post on UKOLN about a user survey at the English Faculty Library.

(Hmmm, so much for keeping it short then...)

Inspiration at dawn

2010-07-31T05:36:00.001+01:00

There's nothing like waking up early to get the creativity flowing! Not only did I (finally) come up with something to present at the Cambridge (lib)Teachmeet on Monday 27th September, this morning I thought of a teaching approach to use for it.

I'm going to present the new network for Librarians as Teacher (thanks Jo!) using a simple training approach used a few years ago during team-building sessions for Rangers and young Guide leaders (aged 16-26) in preparation for sailing Asgard II from Inverness to Dublin.

Curious? Come along to the wiki to sign up to speak or lurk. I'll also be looking for feedback on what you'd like to see on the LAT Network site, so don't forget to bring your thinking caps!

Zotero

2010-07-28T12:08:00.004+01:00

One more assignment submitted and I'm well on my way to the MSc, all without using referencing software at all. Never underestimate the power of word processing software! And yet, so often along the way I've thought "there was an article for one of the other modules that might be useful for this one... didn't need it for that essay so have no citation to check... which one was it again?" followed by more trawling through folders for that elusive article. I had a glance at Mendeley a few months ago but was mid-assignment at the time, I tried out EndNote when doing a different course (music? education? can't remember when it was!) and didn't find it to be worth the effort, I then resorted to creating my own Access database to manage references - I completely empathise with Miss Crail latest rant. I am now about to start another assignment so this is the perfect time to explore Zotero - properly!

Big plusses with this one - it's browser based so all I have to do is click an icon to save references. It was really easy to install and works with OpenOffice (a deal-breaker for me). I love that it opens up just below your browser window so you can see it all properly, including the different folders you've set up to manage different pieces of research. I suspect this would be even better on a "proper" computer rather than my little 9" laptop.

So far, so good! And with that, I'm off to do some searching for an article on information retrieval. I'll report back after the practical experience of using Zotero for an entire project.

TeachMeet for Cambridge Librarians

2010-07-28T10:01:00.003+01:00

Following on from the post over on thingblogging, we've allocated a hashtag (#camlibtm) and delicious tag (camlibtm) and have a wiki page on the way for a TeachMeet for librarians. What we need next is a venue - any suggestions?

It's happening on Monday 27th September in Cambridge and we're planning to focus this first one on tools and techniques we use for user education in our libraries - whether they worked for us or not!

We're going to be calling for people to present short (2 or 7 minute) items, using whatever format they like - presentation, poster, off the cuff, demonstration, anything at all! The idea is that it's all very informal, a bit of fun and chance for us to learn from what other librarians are doing. We think everyone will have some piece of experience to share, so get thinking and watch this space!

Related posts:

Social Networks for Librarians

2010-07-23T20:43:00.004+01:00

Facebook and LinkedIn - I have profiles on both of these sites but I can't say I've found either of them particularly useful professionally.

Facebook is good for keeping in touch with family and friends and occasionally I'll share an event, rsvp, 'Like' a page, or add myself as a friend of a library/group/university but I can't imagine using my personal profile here for work or study purposes. I do think it's worth having a library presence here because some people do like to use it as their starting point for study as well as leisure, provided it's kept up to date and represents the sociable face of the library. Here's one of the frustrating things about it though - is it possible to see the pages you've 'Liked'? How useful is it if the user can't find your page again easily? Am I missing something obvious here?

LinkedIn is more useful professionally, but I think it really depends on the sector. If you are looking for a job work in business or computing and live near London it's useful to be there because recruitment agencies will find you. It may be useful for corporate information workers too, but I'm not convinced it will ever work for me in this way. I have joined some library-related groups such as CILIP, LIBER, New Academic Librarians, YEP! and Irish Public Libraries and sometimes an interesting discussion crops up on one or other of these, but nothing worth writing home about.

Two new networks aimed at UK librarians have been set up, both of which I think will be more useful to me professionally than LinkedIn or Facebook. The LIS New Professionals Network was set up to support, well, new professionals in the library and information sector (what gave it away?). There are already some interesting discussions, useful resources and a blog to follow on this site.

The second network (as mentioned previously) is the Librarians as Teachers Network, set up literally this week by Johanna Anderson to support librarians in their teaching role. This site is very much in development, so come along and help us to decide what should be on it!

Edited to add: I've just heard of academia.edu via Magister et Mater's blog and am off to explore. It seems to be closely linked to Facebook though...

Maps and Mapping

2010-07-23T19:39:00.005+01:00

Of the online map tools mentioned on the Medical Library's 23 Things programme, I'm most familiar with Google Maps. I regularly print out a map and directions to bring with me when going somewhere new.

Distances from my house to the medical library:

GoogleMaps: 14.8 miles
Bing: 14.6 miles
Streetmap.co.uk - if this allows you to get directions and distances I didn't stay long enough to find them. The moving ads in the background are very distracting!
Mapquest: 14.5 miles
Navteq: 14.41 miles - more annoying ads, but not as bad as the Streetmap ones

So I'm surprisingly not the furthest away from work here.

The image here is of some random houses, not mine, but I got it from Google Street View. It's actually quite shocking how clear they images are, especially since I'm living in a relatively small town, but at least it's not showing live information. Imagine how much fun burglars would have with it if it was!

I've glanced at OpenStreetMap before but not used it much. I think the main advantage here is that walking routes and shortcuts are marked in on the map as well. I had never heard of OpenCycleMap before but this could be very useful if I wanted to check out possible cycling routes.

Instead of using the suggested optional task, I thought I'd show you something we worked on in the Library Council (I hope you don't mind Isla!) Scans and data from Griffith's 19th century valuation of tenements was being added to the AskAboutIreland website, so we arranged to have the Ordnance Survey maps of the time, including plot markings, digitised to accompany this information.

We then had the 19th century maps overlaid onto Google Maps, and it is now possible to slide between the old maps and the new.

You can also zoom in and out to see the area in more detail. Don't take my word for it though, it's much more fun to play with it yourselves! (You'll need to do a search by family name or placename first though.)

For all the teaching librarians out there...

2010-07-23T09:30:00.000+01:00

I'm very excited about the new network that Johanna Anderson has established for teaching librarians. It was established really as a support for librarians that are working on the PG Cert education courses but I think it will be a useful resource for librarians at all stages, with or without the qualification.

Escaping the echo chamber

2010-07-23T09:11:00.002+01:00

There was a very interesting talk in Leeds yesterday on the issue of the library echo chamber. Ned Potter and Laura Woods talked about the problems we have with people's perceptions of us and what we do, and with most of the rebuttals coming in the form of blog posts and tweets that are only read by other librarians and do nothing to change the wider picture. They did also point out some examples of people that have managed to break out of the echo chamber, including fellow Aber student Ian Clark and his recent Guardian article.

Escaping the echo-chamber on Prezi

I really liked the presentation itself. I've seen Prezi used very well once before, but this one was excellent. I wish I could have been have been there, but Leeds is a bit of a trek from Cambridge.

The most interesting thing for me (apart from the importance of the issue itself) was how easily I could follow the presentation remotely. Ned and Laura both blogged in the morning about the event and linking to the presentation. They used future tweets so that they could send out their talk in real time for those of us that couldn't make it (including a bit of the back-and-forth nature of the presentation) and called for our participation in feeding ideas back to the room. Now, admittedly there was a bit of a time zone mix-up that meant I got to read the presentation an hour before it actually happened, but in a way I think that's a good thing. Often there isn't enough time for remote followers to get their input into the discussion - having a bit of a head start meant that we had more opportunity to join in. The tweets have been archived using TwapperKeeper.

I think we all have a lot to learn from the way this presentation was organised. I'm definitely going to try their approach in future - although I believe Prezi is supposed to be very difficult to do well. No different from Powerpoint then. Oh, and I mustn't forget to tell the world what we actually do and try to become another echo chamber escapee!

LibraryThing

2010-07-19T23:09:00.004+01:00

Another one of those sites that I thought sounded great, signed up for, and then forgot all about. I think the whole idea behind LibraryThing is great, and surely every book club should be on it.

I have never looked at it from the point of view of libraries themselves. I can see how valuable it would be for cataloguing a small library collection, but I wonder how easy it is to export the records - anybody know? You wouldn't want to spend all that time cataloguing your holdings only for LibraryThing to change/merge/fold altogether!

Wenzeler's article was very interesting and I really like the idea of enhancing existing library catalogues with user-generated content from LibraryThing. I believe AquaBrowser, when it comes to Cambridge, will create a shinier, happier user experience anyway though, so do we need LibraryThing?

Slideshare and Delicious

2010-07-16T20:48:00.008+01:00

I was so organised until about a week ago, keeping up with both 23 Things programmes - how did I end up with four Things to do for Cam23? Catch-up time!

I alluded to Slideshare already in my reflective post. I'm not a visual person at all, I'm not likely to click through presentations or videos in blogposts and would much prefer to read a summary. I do know that that's just because I'm a strange, strange person and obviously try to cater to other more normal people in my own posts. I do see the benefits of Slideshare for providing access to delegates after a course or conference and for sharing your ideas more widely. I would put presentations up there, but I'm not likely to spend hours looking through presentations I haven't seen first-hand.

Here is one of the presentations from the New Professionals Conference I attended a couple of weeks ago:

Proving the value of peer networks

The nice thing about this one is that you can get it even if you weren't there on the day. Bethan put the whole presentation together using quotes she received from her peer network. I was going to provide bonus points for anyone who correctly identified the quote from me, but it doesn't seem to be on this version. Maybe it was just one she read out, or maybe I was just imagining that feeling of fame and glory. Hmmm....

Here's the prize-winning work of another of the presenters:

Would you work for free? Unpaid work in the information profession and how to make it count

View more webinars from Bronagh McCrudden.

Delicious - here I'll cheat a bit and refer you to my previous post for 23 Medical Things instead.

Youtube and music libraries

2010-07-14T22:30:00.016+01:00

I've been thinking a lot about my first library job recently. I worked at the Contemporary Music Centre for four years, first as a library assistant and then as Music Information Officer, and have followed their news feeds ever since. I was very sorry to hear that their Director, Eve O'Kelly is stepping down, but I ~~am sure~~ know she will be very successful in her 'freelance career in cultural management and research'. Evonne Ferguson has been appointed Director and I would like to wish her all the best in this position.

What does all of this have to do with YouTube, I hear you ask? Well, one of the most interesting things about CMC, for me, is how forward-thinking they are and how well they use social media to promote themselves and the music of Irish composers. They have an active presence on Twitter, YouTube, Vimeo, Facebook, MySpace and flickr, and provide RSS feeds of news, features and opportunities. They were one of the first arts organisations in Ireland to create monthly podcasts [feel free to correct me if I'm getting any of this wrong, Jonathan!] I strongly recommend checking them out if you're looking for good ideas.

Here is their latest feature, based on their recent conference The Future of Music in the Digital World.

Follow that........ reader!

2010-07-13T21:13:00.002+01:00

I had had a slight problem doing this one because I wasn't working last week. Luckily, I have had experience of some of these tasks before. My very first library position was as a music library assistant at the Contemporary Music Centre in Dublin. In this position I photocopied and bound scores of music by Irish composer for use in the library and for sale. Photocopying and binding are therefore second nature to me.

Wireless access in the library, as mentioned before, is something I avail of nearly every Friday. I have also had the pleasure of helping Medical Library users to add printing credit to their library accounts and to scan documents. The scanner was easy to use, but I think it's a pity that there's no option to scan the image as a pdf. I would recommend installing Irfanview or similar software on the computers to address this problem.

For extra credit (as Ange Fitzpatrick is fond of calling it), the Medical Library does have the following books, recently requested by a user:

Imaging picture tests for the MRCPCH / A.P. Winrow. WN 18.51.1
250 questions for the MRCPCH part 2 / J.L. Robertson, A.P. Hughes. WS 18.115.1
Get through MRCPCH part I : BOFs and EMQs / Nagi Giumma Barakat. WS 18.117
Data questions for the MRCPCH Part 2 / J.L. Robertson, A.P. Hughes. WS 18.76
MRCPCH part 2 paediatric : practice exams / P. Gringras, D.K. Pal, M. Greenberg. WS 18.92
Paediatric grey cases for the MRCPCH / Alan C. Fenton ... [et al.]. WS 18.86
MRCPCH part 2 : questions and answers for the new format exam / Kate H. Creese, Colin V.E. Powell and Patrick H.T. Cartlidge. WS 18.125.1

We do not appear to have the following:

Towards MRCPCH Part II theory examination / Tapabrata Chatterjee M.D. (Author), Suraj Gupte M.D. (Editor)
Questions for the MRCPCH Part 2 Written Examination / Nick barnes & Julian Forton
MRCPCH Part 2 Practice Exams / Giles Kendall & Ian Pollock

Pause for thought

2010-07-09T23:09:00.011+01:00

Well, I have been working my way through the 23 Things Programmes at the Medical Library and the University Library and have so far been able to (pretty much) keep up the pace. Some of the Things were already familiar to me, but most were new or had more to them than I had realised. These programmes have been great for thinking about the various tools and how they might be applied in a library context. There are, of course, far more tools to be explored than can be covered in 23 Things, but it's good to get a structured start on them.

[Image found on flickr, with thanks to visualage]

The VARK questionnaire showed that I'm not a particularly visual person but pretty much any other approach suits me and I have a "mild read/write preference". This doesn't surprise me at all - I have to consciously think about including images in my blog posts and I confess that I skipped some of the embedded videos and presentations (oops...) I much prefer if people would write out the key points of the presentation instead! The programme has used a combination of text, images, presentations, videos and opportunities to meet in person, so I think it has catered to most learning styles.

Tools that I am likely to keep using:

This blog: I've never kept a blog before, but am finding it a very useful tool for reflecting on events attended and have now set up a private blog for tracking my thoughts on articles for my masters as well.
RSS feeds: I was already a convert for this one and love scanning headlines for interesting articles/posts rather than visiting the websites themselves.
Doodle: We've used this already to plan a discussion on Defining our professional future and are now using it to discuss organising a TeachMeet in Cambridge.
Google Calendar: Another one that I use personally, but I can see that it could be very useful in a library context.
Twitter: A new convert, I'm finding this really useful for keeping up with what's happening and especially for networking.
Flickr: with a very big pinch of salt
Delicious: Although when will I ever have time to go through my "to read" pile?

Things I am less likely to continue to use

iGoogle: I prefer to track RSS feeds using Google Reader and am happy to use tabs to open other pages I need.
Slideshare: I would put a presentation up there for the benefit of others, but it doesn't suit my style for catching up on events I haven't been able to attend. Please keep blogging, everyone!

Do I feel more competent and confident? Perhaps not in terms of the skills themselves, because I was already using quite a lot of the tools and am comfortable with picking up new ones. I am certainly more confident about putting myself out there by blogging and tweeting and am already experiencing the benefits of that. Every day I discover a new resource, make a new contact or explore something I have been meaning to look at for a long time. I think the programme has also helped me to establish myself a bit more in the UK library world - very useful since I moved so recently!

I think that perhaps the most important part of the programme for me is the sense of community I've been getting. I have only been working in Cambridge since March, and only one evening each week (with the occasional extra session) so it was hard to understand how I fit into the system in Cambridge. Through 23 Things I have had an opportunity to get to know more of the staff in the other libraries. Through some of their blogs I have been able to get a hint of personalities, of interests beyond librarianship and of how things work in the other libraries. I'm looking forward to the rest of the Things, but I'm looking forward to all the "extracurricular" posts even more.

What sites do you search?

2010-07-06T23:08:00.002+01:00

I often need to use a search engine on a different site, to check the library catalogue or to find more information about that news I just heard. If there are any searches that you find you use regularly, read on!

This is a problem that has already been considered in Cambridge, and they have addressed it in two ways. You can add a search toolbar to your browser window:

The image above has been borrowed from the toolbar instructions on the Cambridge website. Unfortunately since I'm working on a 9" laptop it doesn't work so well for me. They've thought of that too and given us an option to add a Newton search to that handy search box in our browsers:

It's actually possible to add most other searches engines to the browser as long as they use a single search box. I've added the Essex public library catalogue search to mine using Mycroft (click on the image to see it more closely).

First, do a search in the catalogue / search engine you want to use. Make sure to use a search term you'll be able to find in the url.

Copy the resulting url and paste it into the Search URL field.
(Pick something you'll be able to recognise in the url.)

Find the search term you used and replace it with {searchTerm}

Fill in whatever other fields you want to and then click 'Generate Plugin'.

Copy the code that appears in the box, paste it into Notepad or other text editor, and save it as an .xml file.

Upload this file to the internet. The file for my Essex library search is at http://niamhandandrew.com/elan.xml.

Then use this code (edited to use your file link instead):

and paste it into header of your website. If you're not sure how to do this, I'll refer you to Step 3 from this previous post.

Some sites have it included in the headers of their own code, allowing people to add their search by visiting any page of their website. It would be really great if the one for the Cambridge catalogue could be added this way. Here's how it looks in Facebook:

Added advantage: certain people have no more excuses for buying books on Amazon rather than checking the library catalogue [I'm looking at you, Andrew!]

Proving your worth in challenging times

2010-07-06T13:33:00.010+01:00

Another great event from the Career Development Group, this time aimed at "new professionals" and taking place in Sheffield. I got talking to lots of interesting people, some who went straight from college into library school, some who came from different careers and moved into librarianship, some (like me) who found themselves working in a library and realised that this was the job for them, and one (incredibly brave) person who dropped everything and moved to restart their library career in a different country.

Some points that stood out for me from the day:

Blurring boundaries between professions: we need to gain some of the competencies of other professions we work with (for example, teaching competencies if working in academic libraries) in order to work more effectively with them - Sheila Corrall
Make sense (of the sector), provide evidence (of what you can do), be visible, and maintain enthusiasm - Eleni Zazini
Consider using voluntary work to fill gaps in your CV and escape the "Experience Catch-22" - Bronagh McCrudden
If we don't keep up with changes in our field we can't claim expertise - Laura Woods
Building peer networks is definitely worth the effort - Bethan Ruddock (Presentation on slideshare and thanks for quoting me, I'm famous now!)
Build your elevator pitch - Lucy Marris and Andrew Cox (personally I can't see myself using it in conversation but it's definitely worth having firmly in your mind at least)
Professional generosity: sharing experience when networking makes it all worthwhile (Biddy Fisher)

I really value the fact that most of the events I attend have a good mix of people at all stages of their library careers, but this one was marked by a particular enthusiasm and excitement that comes from being with others new to the area, full of ideas, energy and potential. I knew exactly what Biddy Fisher meant when she said that the future leaders were in that room - there were some that certainly stood out as ones to watch!

Things I want to look into following this conference:
LIS New Professionals Network: Aims to be a one-stop shop for new information professionals, with news, course information and jobs. Other membership groups will feed into this as well as CILIP.

VIA Survey of character strenths: Identify your strengths and then play to them (requires registration)

Professional doctorates starting from 2011 in Sheffield: 4 years part-time, very structured and specifically aimed at practitioners. (Better finish this masters first though...)

Other posts about the day

thewikiman
Bethan's information professional blog
The Shiny Forager
Just another dent in the damage
Organising Chaos (reflections on presenting)
Organising Chaos (perspective on the conference)
Palely Loitering
The Graduate Librarian
Random musings of a librarian, almost

...and some photos...

sarahjison

...and much more will, I'm sure, be added on #npc2010

Flickr

2010-06-26T11:54:00.008+01:00

Flickr is one of those sites I knew about but never really used. I can see its usefulness for sharing your own photos and for sourcing creative commons images, but as with everywhere on the web you can never be 100% certain that the people that posted the images were entitled to. For example, I know that Trinity College are very careful about images of the Book of Kells, charge per use and would never allow them to be posted to the internet under a creative commons license, and yet here it is. I have huge problems with the idea of restricting access to images of documents that are hundreds of years old, and I believe if the user was based in the US he would be allowed to reuse it although Irish people (to whom the book really belongs!) are not. The joys of copyright and the internet! Of course, if someone claims rights of an image on this site I'll just take it down.

One of the interesting things about Flickr is the fact that people use different images to create new ones. The image above, for example, which I used in this post, was created by sammydavisdog using three other images. Very artistic, I think, and a nice way to add a personal touch rather than just reusing generic images.

Going mobile

2010-06-25T21:18:00.011+01:00

I love free wifi and can't wait for the day when it will be available everywhere I go. I get quite upset with service providers that expect me to pay for access, for example in hotels or at train stations. Every Friday I head in early to do some study before working in the medical library, I connect to libair and happily access all the journals I need. [Libair can be a bit annoying though, knocking me off-line even though I've left the 'log out' browser window open. I don't know if that's the same for everyone or just because I'm working in Ubuntu.]

I have been known to whip out the laptop while in the hospital canteen so I can check my emails then rather eating into my study time. I have used wifi connections at a conference to tweet the event and when travelling to make sure that I really am going to the right place and there really is a train/plane/bus/meeting at the time I think it's at (anyone else get paranoid like this sometimes?) Even at home I access the internet through a router rather than hooking up the old way.

I used the wifi on my Irish mobile, but to be honest I haven't tried on my UK phone and haven't missed it. Besides, I was always afraid I'd discover I had connected through the far more expensive 3G connection instead of a free service. I'm not surprised that the M-Libraries report found that people prefer to use their phone for text and voice services rather than web services (so far!), but I like the idea of being able to take out a phone to check a street map instead of having to take out my laptop.

Now I sound like I'm permanently online! I'm not, and I do think there are times when an escape from the internet is needed. If I'm away (as I will be next week) the phone gets left beside the bed each day and the internet is used only for planning excursions, if at all.

So mobile technologies in the library? I know that the JISC Cambridge Library Widgets project is looking at this area and have been following their blog for developments. On an ongoing basis, the most basic issue is obviously making sure that the system is working, or if it's down, getting it back up as soon as possible. We need to make sure that our OPAC and book renewal functionality display well on a very small screen, and if not, we need to create mobile versions of them. Other libraries have developed audio tours of the library, provided reference services via instant messaging, signed visitors up on the spot to library programmes and used them when "roving" to check the catalogue on behalf of the students (sorry, can't remember where I read about that one.) If anyone has any more examples of interesting uses of mobile technology in the library, please let me know!

In the M-Library report, Keren Mills makes the excellent point that developing these services costs money. We have to balance the value of each of these services with the costs of developing them, bearing in mind that not all of our students will want to use them anyway.

Image above taken from Flickr, with thanks to shapeshift.

Working with Wikis

2010-06-25T19:50:00.007+01:00

This is pretty new to me because I had never actually edited a wiki before starting 23 Things. I like the idea for collaborative working, and as Anne suggests it's a great option internally for staff/web manuals and other information that needs to be shared. Since I have now registered with PBWorks, I have added my blog to the UK Library Blogs wiki - maybe others would like to as well.

Wikis have also been used in educational settings, for example I know of Irish language courses that set assignments involving translating articles into Irish and adding them to Vicipéid. I'm not sure how useful it would be as a teaching resource for training students and other library users though, I think I'll need to think about that a bit more.

Some thoughts from Cambridge

2010-06-23T11:49:00.005+01:00

Thanks very much to all who came to CB2 yesterday to discuss the future of libraries and feed into the CILIP discussion. We had strong representation from academic and medical libraries and it was great to get some perspective from corporate and school librarians as well. Since other posts have already given a really good overview of what was discussed, I think I'll stick to my own thoughts from the evening.

The future of libraries and information professionals

I thought the Futures Thinking report was very interesting and relevant outside of academic libraries as well. I think we're moving towards an even greater emphasis on providing one-to-one support and training to users. Online services will be ever more important, but I agree with Libby Tilley's suggestion that the face-to-face contact will remain essential. I think that people will engage more with the service through online channels if they know who they're talking to.

I think that there will be a greater emphasis on the teaching role of the librarian, hopefully working more closely with teachers/lecturers to embed information literacy training into the curriculum. This is already happening but not across the board. I like Anne's suggestion that it should be part of the librarianship qualification, although perhaps as an option rather than a core requirement.

The greater emphasis on electronic resources will continue but will not replace printed books. Even with a reduction in the number of printed books in the library, physical spaces will still be required for private study, group work and informal learning.

I thought the idea that researchers need more practical advice on copyright, referencing and how to get published was interesting, and it struck a chord with my past experience as Music Information Officer at the Contemporary Music Centre. There, promotion and advisory services to composers were part and parcel of what we did.

I am concerned about the deprofessionalisation of the public library sector, which reinforces the idea that all librarians do is stamp books - a self-fulfilling prophecy. If we're trying to tell people that librarians can help them with their research, but there are no actual librarians in the public libraries, how is that going to look? As Anna pointed out last night, things will tick on nicely for a few years before the effects will really be seen.

Regarding suggestions of a name change for libraries and librarians, I don't think that's necessary. What we need to do is to promote ourselves more as we are, demonstrate the different things we do and counteract the stereotypes in our daily work.

CILIP - now and in the future

I have to say that as a student member I feel I have benefited hugely from CILIP to date. In the few months since I moved to the UK I have attended courses on chartership, disability awareness, Librarians as Teachers, 'Working Smarter' and 'A cut above the rest'. Looking at that list, all were organised by special interest groups. If the special interest groups can deliver these excellent training opportunities so affordably, why can't CILIP centrally do it for less than a few hundred pounds? I really like the suggestion of transmitting events electronically so that members who can't travel/get childcare/afford the cost of the events can still benefit from the content. There's only so much you can get by following on Twitter.

At £38 for the publications and training course discounts alone you can't go far wrong. Will I remain a member when I'm no longer a student? I'm not sure. I really do want to charter, but if I don't feel I get anything from CILIP after that will I be happy to pay an annual fee just to write MCLIP after my name? If the subscriptions were lower I wouldn't have to think twice about it, but at the current rates I would need to have a much better idea of where my fees are going.

I'm willing to accept that the Newsnight debacle was a once-off down to very short notice, but I agree that I wouldn't be too happy if it were to happen again. Hopefully the one-minute messages and comprehensive training for staff and sector representatives will address this in the very near future, especially since CILIP constantly talks about its advocacy role.

Do we need two publications? Could they be merged? I have to say I do like Update Digital for the multimedia that can be added, but the content needs to be available on the website at the very least as a normal pdf and ideally through an RSS feed. It's not enough to have the pdf download within the flash file - if you don't have flash you still can't access it! I also don't think it's unreasonable to expect that the professional body for library and information professionals would have a decent website that is easily navigable and works as it's supposed to (for example, I've given up trying to get through to the journals I should be able to access).

The Conversation

Great use has been made of the internet and social media in this consultation, but I feel that every branch should have organised face-to-face discussions to feed into it. I know that some in Wales, for example, are feeling neglected. I'm also unsure how well information professionals outside the more traditional library sector have been consulted, and felt that the questionnaire was only a tool for producing stats to pad out the end report, not really interested in our views. I don't want to sound like I'm being over-critical here (I know some members of the project board have felt under attack) - I just want to voice my concerns and hope that the final report will show that they are unfounded.

This has been a bit of an essay, I'm sorry! I'd love if people could continue the discussion through the comments and the other blog posts arising from this:

Office 2.0

2010-06-21T17:49:00.007+01:00

I have used Google Docs before, mostly in a personal capacity (e.g. sharing spreadsheets with family contact info) but also on various projects (e.g. tracking progress of technical projects). For this task, I decided to create a document with starting points for tomorrow's discussion.

I set the document so that it can be read without logging in, but you must log in to edit it. Almost as soon as I sent the invitation to collaborate, a colleague logged in and started editing too (thanks Anna!)

Unfortunately I can't see what my colleague is doing while she's doing it, so it's still possible for us to be editing the same section at once. Makes me wonder what ever happened with Google Wave, and when they'll integrate that real-time collaborative functionality with docs? I do find Google Docs handy, but unfortunately it doesn't handle other word formats very well. I use it as emergency back-up, but wouldn't keep rely on it for final versions of work.

I never knew about the survey options in Google Docs though, so that was new, thanks Isla! I just set up a basic question to see how it works:

I'll be exploring this option more in future, it could be very useful! I'll also take a look at that powerpoint option later on.

Who's been visiting MY blog?

2010-06-21T12:59:00.017+01:00

I'm sure I'm not the only one who gets curious about how many people actually read my blog or whether I'm just talking to myself. I'm amazed that Blogger doesn't have any stats available automatically (or does it?), so I thought a post about setting up Google Analytics might be in order.

[Creative Commons image found via Flickr, with thanks to sammydavisdog]

I have to say, I love Analytics. It's free (woohoo!) and yet it gives really in-depth information about your site - who's visiting? Where are they from? How long do they stay? How do they find their way around? What possessed them to come here in the first place? This screenshot shows the overview page - not very impressive stats, some might think, but I think it's amazing that I got a grand total of 35 hits last Friday for this very new blog.

In fact, it gives far more information than I'd ever need about this little blog, but has been really interesting for some of the more complicated websites I've worked with. I recommend checking out the Site Overlay feature as demonstrated here on the Ask About Ireland website. (Click on the image to see the larger version.)

Looking at the site as it appears to the user, you can immediately see whether people are using the links or images to navigate around the site, or whether they prefer to use that convenient search box in the top right hand corner. Hours of fun to be had following user paths through the site, and I'd imagine very useful for the library websites.

So how do we get all of this wonderful information about our incredibly popular blogs?

Step 1: Set up an Analytics account.
This part is easy, since we've all been playing with Google products already as part of 23 Things. Visit http://www.google.com/analytics, log in and click 'Sign Up'. Follow the instructions to enter your website url and do the user agreement process.

Step 2: Copy the tracking code
Copy the code from the box.

Step 3: Paste the code into your site
This is the fun part! Luckily, because our blogs are based on a template we only have to paste the code into one page.

[Don't worry if you've never used HTML, you don't actually need to know any for this. If you're worried about making mistakes you could always copy the existing html and save it in Notepad or similar text editor so you can retrieve it easily.]

From the Blogger dashboard, select the 'Design' tab.
Click on 'Edit HTML'
Look through the HTML to find where the header ends (it says /head in < and > brackets - blogger's driving me crazy not letting me put this in properly here!)
Paste the tracking code just before where it says /head in < and > brackets

You should end up with something like this in the code:

This won't change how your site looks, it'll just collect statistics to be sent to Google Analytics.

Have fun! And if you have any questions just ask and I'll try to help, but be warned, I'm no expert...

P.S. Hello to my readers in USA, Canada, Australia and South Africa (and of course my loyal followers here in the UK)!

P.P.S. If you like changing your templates, don't forget that you may need to reinsert your tracking code (as I just did, oops!)

Developing librarians as teachers

2010-06-19T11:05:00.001+01:00

Laura Bewick and Sheila Corrall have just published an article that's very similar to what I'm hoping to look at in my Masters dissertation.

The authors looked specifically at academic sector to identify the pedagogical needs of subject librarians. The article includes some useful information on how the selected librarians have gained their teaching skills and which theories and concepts have been of use to them. It was interesting to see that the librarians surveyed were mostly confident in their ability to deliver training - I wonder if this is partly because only one subject librarian was selected per academic institution? The process seems to have been sufficiently random though... Perhaps it's because a lot of experience was built up prior to becoming Subject Librarian, and that this is why they were appointed to these positions in the first place?

As I would have expected, there were some calls for optional teaching modules to be included in LIS courses, as well as a demand for short courses and on-the-job training. Sheffield have now established an MA in Information Literacy, which would be of interest to many of those who find themselves doing a large amount of teaching within their library jobs. I'd love to see Aberystwyth developing a distance learning module on the educational role of the librarian and make it available as a CPD course for practising librarians as well as optionally on their ILS courses.

A really interesting article that has also pointed me to lots of other relevant research. Here's hoping there'll still be interesting work for me to do in the area by the time I've finished my other assignments!

Bewick, L. and Corrall, S. (2010) "Developing librarians as teachers: a study of their pedagogical knowledge", Journal of Librarianship and Information Science, 42 (2), 97-110.

The people have spoken

2010-06-18T11:03:00.003+01:00

Thanks for all the interest in getting together next week to discuss #cilipfuture. The results are in from the Doodle poll and Tuesday at 6pm seems to be the most popular time. Apologies to those who weren't able to come at that time. The venue is CB2 Restaurant Café, which, I'm reliably informed, has wifi so we'll be able to tweet (thanks Isla!) and I intend to blog about it once I've thought the issues through.

According to Doodle we have 11 attendees - if anyone on the list can no longer make it or if anybody extra would like to attend, please let me know by adding yourself to the Doodle poll, by commenting on my blog or by email at nt311@medschl.cam.ac.uk. Looking forward to seeing you all then.

User-generated content

2010-06-16T11:33:00.007+01:00

What an appropriate item for Thing 8 - I've been putting off doing an article on user-generated tags for my course, working on other modules while I let that one rumble around in my mind for a while. I'm not sure yet what angle I'll take on it, but Emma's post and Tom's response are certainly helping with that. I fully agree that although user tagging can't replace an authoritative catalogue, it does facilitate browsing using everyday language and we should be looking at ways to integrate them with the catalogue.

Tag clouds can be a nice way to browse blogs especially, so I thought I'd share what the one on my blog looks like so far. It does look much more interesting now that I've added extra tags to all my #cam23 posts.

I recommend checking out Isla's tagging system and resulting #regionaltagging discussion on Twitter.

On the importance of libraries, or, why the internet is not enough

2010-06-15T20:50:00.003+01:00

I've just been reading an article by Inskip et al. on the information needs of the folk music library user and just had to share these particular quotes from their interviews:

‘you sort of go to the internet when you’re stuck I suppose to see what you can find but its because it’s so unstructured it’s much much more sensible in a way to come to an organised library as a first resort for pursuing things’.

and...

‘there’s always sort of things that [the librarian] will say or people will say that sort of point me in directions that you’d never pick up entirely on your own’

I couldn't have put it better myself!

Using Twitter - without using Twitter interface!

2010-06-14T17:17:00.004+01:00

Miss Crail has put up a fabulous post giving her reasons for hating Twitter, and even a month ago I would have agreed with her. Although it's uncluttered to look at, Twitter's interface makes it near impossible to follow discussions. Besides, there's a problem (for me) with its entire foundation - the question "What's happening?" (Hmmm, wasn't it "what are you doing?" They must have changed it to make it vaguely useful-sounding.) I'm going to cheat a bit here and just edit what I wrote in a comment on Miss Crail's blog.

That's exactly how I felt about Twitter first time round, and how I still felt until I started using JournoTwit. Now my feeds are displayed in nice, sensible columns with the hashtags I'm following separated nicely, with a column just for where I'm mentioned, and with a pretty feed cloud that I don't actually use much. I unfollow anyone who tells me too much about their mealtimes and transport arrangements, and use it mostly for following CPD-related topics. I have been converted.

I hate Twitter as it's set out on its own site - but with a decent reader it's actually very useful!

Re: Tom's comment - JournoTwit even has a handy "in reply to..." link that you can click on to see what a message was in response to. Doesn't work all the time, but it usually does - see screenshot above.

Conversation on the future of information services

2010-06-12T10:11:00.007+01:00

As we all know by now (I hope!), CILIP is currently looking at the future of our profession and what CILIP's role could / should be in this. I have been following the discussion through Twitter and the Netvibes dashboard and filled out the online survey. Some interesting angles have come up, including arguments that CILIP is public-library-centric (not something I've noticed!), discussion of the skills we now need and whether librarianship training adequately addresses our needs.

I have to say though, that this is the kind of discussion I like to have in real life, face-to-face, so that new ideas can be sparked off in a much more immediate way. I know that some of the branches and special interest groups organised events around it, but if any were near me I didn't hear about them. The conversation was touched upon at the Librarians as Teachers event in Warwick, but not at any of the other CILIP events I've attended in the past few months, and I'm feeling that I still haven't had a chance to think this through properly.

I am hereby rising to Katie Fraser's challenge and asking if other library staff in the Cambridge area (or further afield), professional/para-professional, CILIP members and non-members, would be interested in getting together to discuss some of these issues?

Update: Even though it's Saturday a few people have already shown interest. Please visit this poll to let me know when would suit you to meet up for this discussion. I'm still pretty new to the area so all venue suggestions welcome!

The Future of Music... and libraries?

2010-06-11T12:14:00.005+01:00

This morning I've been following a conference organised by the Contemporary Music Centre on The Future of Music in the Digital World. A common theme is coming through the Twitter feed that online dissemination is essential. Good news for performers who can persuade people to pay directly for content, bad news for the ones who are not yet established and have to give lots away for free in a bid to gain recognition, bad news for the middle-men, but what are the implications for the library and archive sector?

A few quick questions come to mind:

If artists release only in electronic form, will libraries be forced to subscribe to electronic packages such as those available for journals? I can see this being very complicated for specialist libraries.
Will they have to contact individual performers in an attempt to obtain good quality recordings or resort to burning lower quality content in order to have a copy at all - and what are the copyright implications of that?
How can music be adequately collected and archived if published on individual websites - will we have to rely on what's on iTunes?

I'm sure this has been addressed before so I'll do some research (once I've finished the essay I'm working on), but I'd be interested in any thoughts people have to share on this.

Google Calendar...and a serious question...

2010-06-11T11:49:00.006+01:00

Google Calendar is another one that I use all the time in a personal capacity. The option of sharing calendars is handy - I have a calendar that's shared with my extended family so I have no excuses for not knowing whose big birthday celebration is coming up and when, and back when I was a Guide leader in Ireland I shared a calendar with other leaders so we all knew what was coming up locally, in Dublin and nationally within CGI. I never thought of it as a tool that can be embedded within a website, but I see how that could be very useful.

A question that arises from all this use of Google products in a work environment: how comfortable are we with sharing organisational information with a global company? If it becomes the norm to use email, documents sharing, calendars and other tools from a particular company, should there be limits on what types of documents are shared there? Maybe it's not an issue in the university sector - what do other people think?

Doodle!

2010-06-11T11:04:00.004+01:00

I have been invited to use Doodle for meetings in a previous job (slightly pointless since it was a meeting with a colleague in the next office) and as part of a book club that's starting in Cambridge (thanks @ange_fitzpatrick), but have never created one myself before.

The process is very easy - Doodle provides:

step-by-step instructions
useful tips such as 'On average, 5 options are sufficient to successfully find a common date and time.'
time zone support to accommodate people in other countries, useful if you wanted to schedule a conference call
time-saving options such as copying the times selected for one day for you, so you don't have to keep filling in boxes
option to get Doodle to email and chase up participants (but no requirement to do that!)

I like tools like this that don't require guests to subscribe in order to participate. I also like that there's an option to create a 'hidden' poll, so that only the moderator can see who voted each way. Not completely anonymous, but it could help if people are shy about making their suggestions. You can even make your Doodle poll look more official by adding branding.

All in all, a nice little tool, although I have no need to use it at present. Thanks also to Rachel Marsh for the Doodle facts, especially pointing out the app for Facebook.

#cam23 Blogs Tool from Girl in the Moon

2010-06-06T17:17:00.003+01:00

Girl in the Moon has kindly shared a blog folder of all #cam23 participants - well worth adding to your RSS reader!

Blogging for #cam23

2010-06-06T16:56:00.012+01:00

As mentioned, this site was set up for the medical library version of 23 Things, but a few of us are doing the University Library one as well. Rather than setting up a second blog, I'm going to continue using this blog for both and have now registered it with the #cam23 site. I'm looking forward to discovering new resources and re-evaluating ones I've used before over the next few weeks as part of both programmes.

I have never had a blog before but do use Google Reader to follow other useful blogs, news feeds and journal TOCs. I'm finding the comments option great for further developing my thoughts on a subject. For example, I blogged about the Librarians as Teachers event at Warwick and within a day had a number of new interesting angles to follow on it. I have used other social tools before, such as Delicious and Twitter, but gave up on them because they didn't do what I needed them to do at the time. 23 Things at the medical library has prompted me to look at these again and I've found that they have been further developed since I last looked at them and are now much more useful.

I have been looking through some of the other blogs and it's really interesting to see what people from other libraries are thinking. I hope that more of the bloggers will add posts on other topics too, such as what they're doing in their own libraries or cpd events attended. The project will, I think, be a great way to build networks with other parts of Cambridge libraries and to learn from what other people are doing.

One suggestion - on the medical library blog, the participants list is sorted by latest post, which makes it much easier to see what people have blogged most recently without having to use a reader. Would it be possible to do this for #cam23 too?

Bookmarking and social bookmarking

2010-06-06T16:02:00.008+01:00

Week 5 of 23 Things, and we're looking at bookmarking. When working full-time with a normal/big computer screen, I used browser-based bookmarking a lot, especially the bookmarks toolbar in Firefox. This is great if you regularly need to access certain sites when using a particular purpose, for example when in work. I've added some bookmarks that I think we'll all use in the Medical Library, since I'm currently on a shared computer.

It is also possible to use a bookmarks folder in the browser, but I find I tend to forget that I have bookmarked things there. I do like that when you look at recent bookmarks you get the option to open all recently bookmarked pages in tabs.

The bookmarks toolbar approach is actually less useful for me at the moment because I'm mostly working on my lovely 9" netbook, which, while handy (fits in my handbag!), doesn't have a whole lot of screen space to spare. I find Delicious very useful for this reason. When I first discovered Delicious, it was known as del.icio.us and wasn't nearly as nice to use as it is now. I used it for a while as a personal bookmarking tool and gave up eventually because it was so awkward to change tags retrospectively if needed. Coming back to it years later, I (amazingly!) remembered the password, deleted bookmarks that are no longer relevant to what I'm doing, and started over.

The new version makes it much easier to tag bookmarks, add notes and share the bookmarks with other people. This sharing functionality is not something I've ever used in Delicious, but I can imagine that it would be very useful for people working in a research group, for example. I have never searched for tags using Delicious either - this could be good for sharing the work involved in finding useful information about a subject or for getting an overview of what people in general associate with a particular term. The toolbar buttons are very useful for tagging things quickly while browsing, without having to keep the Delicious account open at the same time. Delicious could be used by libraries to highlight relevant resources, and the bookmarks could then be pulled via RSS feeds into a particular part of the library website.

NHS MyLibrary includes a links panel that can be used to bookmark relevant sites, with the option of tagging links as well. The tagging functionality allows the user to label sites according to their relevance to particular project or area of research, facilitating the retrieval of these items at a later stage. As with the MyLibrary RSS Reader, this would be very useful for medical staff and students if they wish to keep all work-related resources together in one space.

Working Smarter 4: Marketing and Professionalism

2010-06-06T14:49:00.001+01:00

I'm only now getting around to finishing my posts on the Career Development Group conference, Working Smarter, which finished up with parallel sessions on marketing, time management, working with volunteers and professionalism.. I attended 'Marketing on a shoestring' and 'Professionalism for success'.

Andy Ryan from London Libraries facilitated the session on marketing. The more interactive approach taken in this session was great, especially since it was straight after lunch. Andy started by getting us to come up with some of the media we could use in marketing our libraries, highlighting that the internet provides lots of opportunities to promote events cheaply. I also pointed out that local newspapers are often crying out for content, so writing an article for them to edit/include can be a great way to hit your own area. Andy's example of how London Libraries promoted their Graphic Novel Network was really interesting. Three tips from her experiences:

Establish meaningful partnerships (find that niche of passionate people)
Remember to use existing contacts to continue to build those relationships
Use social networking!

Susie Kay then gave a presentation about professionalism, emphasising the importance of maintaining our employability. She suggested that professionalism is about everything you are, everything you do, at work in your private life. We should aim to have a positive effect on those around us, in every type of personal interaction, at every level. Professionalism also involves getting organised, managing your time well and making sure to keep a healthy work/life balance. It involves having standards for yourself and expecting the same standards of others around you.

Embracing professionalism is commitment to self belief, choosing excellence, making permanent improvements and knowing that you can have a positive effect. I like to think that I aim for these things already, but it is always helpful to have them highlighted. The session was very general though, and not quite what I expected. I thought that it would include some mention of librarianship as a profession. I feel that the terminology used is unfortunate, since it implies that the rest of us are somehow "unprofessional". I like to think that I am professional, even though I don't (yet) hold that piece of paper. I do see the value of having the qualification though and I'm getting ever nearer to completion. One day, in the not too distant future, I will be "a professional librarian"!

MyLibrary RSS Reader

2010-06-04T19:35:00.004+01:00

I'm back again to look at how RSS feeds are used in the NHS Athens resource, since it seems that MyAthens in the NHS section of the medical library website links to something other than NHS Athens. Thanks Isla for putting me straight and setting up an account for me to use!

I like the fact that this resource automatically gathers together information I might need based on my account information, from contact details for my "home" library, Cambridge University Medical Library, to RSS feeds from the NHS. I added some feeds for journals found through Journal TOCS, which I recently discovered thanks to Roddy McLeod.

I think the most useful part of MyLibrary is that you can set up an e-shot with the new items from your feeds and specify how frequently you receive them. I can imagine this would be particularly helpful for people who prefer to work with email rather than RSS readers, or who perhaps don't have time to check this external resource as frequently as they like.

iGoogle Revisited

2010-05-28T19:55:00.007+01:00

I am one of the ~~fools~~ ones attempting to do #cam23 alongside #cammed23. Glutton for punishment, I know, but actually I don't think it will be too bad. There seems to be a bit of overlap and I have done some of the things before. Besides, I'm hearing things about certs and vouchers, how can I resist? We'll see how far it goes.

So, a second look at iGoogle to add the new requirements. I have already set up set up an iGoogle homepage and added tabs, added 'stuff' and RSS feeds to the tabs, compared iGoogle to Netvibes and Pageflakes and looked at alternative RSS readers for the medical version of 23 Things.

Now I've added a library tab as well, including COPAC and other useful resources to it. I did a search for other library-related gadgets and found quite a few libraries with catalogue access widgets (including two for Cambridge), one that picks a children's book each day, and one that lets you track when your library books are due back. Must look into that one more closely, could be useful given the number of libraries I borrow from!

RSS feeds

2010-05-28T19:20:00.009+01:00

23 Things continues at the Medical Library and this week we're looking at RSS readers. I am a big fan of RSS feeds as an easy way to check updates from a large number of sources very quickly.

First I looked at browser-based RSS readers in IE7 and in Firefox. I can see that these might suit some users, especially if they always work with a particular computer or only have a small number of feeds, but this approach to feeds is definitely not for me.

I prefer to work with a web-based RSS reader, since I tend to work on different computers and like to be able access things remotely.

As you can see, I use Google Reader a lot! I tend to use 'list' mode so I can scan the headlines, getting an overview of what's been going on before clicking into the headlines that interest me.

I like the fact that I can sort feeds into different folders to browse related feeds all at once. It's also possible to mark things to read later or to email an item of interest to yourself or a friend if you want to take a bit longer reading things.

MyAthens was new to me, since I don't have a personal account. I logged on using the issue desk account and added a new feed to the page there. This could be very useful to medical staff and students if they wish to draw all work-related information into one place.

So how could RSS feeds be used in the medical library? The most obvious use is internally, to stay aware of what is happening in the medical field so that we can then inform our users (or know what they're talking about when they ask us!)

Another good use might be to pull recent book acquisitions and the tables of contents of journals we subscribe to into the medical library website via RSS so that staff and students can also see at a glance what is new in the library.

Now, off to delete the things I added to the issue desk...

Librarian as Teachers: the new professionals?

2010-05-26T21:48:00.003+01:00

Just arrived back from an excellent day at the University of Warwick, more convinced than ever of the importance of teaching and training skills for librarians. Antony Brewerton started off by giving us a tour of the Teaching Grid, a flexible space within the university library. The area can be divided up into different sized spaces depending on requirements of a particular training session. Staff can also use this area to try out technologies such as interactive whiteboards prior to using them in a teaching context. I liked the Ladder of Loyalty as a way of thinking about library relationships with our users. Our challenge is to bring staff members into an active partnership arrangement with the library.

Debbi Boden gave the keynote speech, discussing the evolution of the profession. We need to know what we are in order to decide where we're going, and we still have that stereotype to fight. She argued that any librarian that is teaching needs some knowledge of the background theories, and suggested that HEA Fellowship may be more valuable than CILIP chartership for some library professionals. We need to know the language of teaching if we are to work in closer partnership with academic staff. The current economic situation can be seen as an opportunity to collaborate more, develop more online services and make more use of social media within a library context. Jo Webb continued this thread with some background to options for professional recognition through the HEA framework, but highlighting concerns about a shift in policy that appears to exclude librarians from the Fellowship framework. She argued that there is no dichotomy between HEA and CILIP qualifications- we have a dual identity as librarians and teachers.

Sally Patalong presented her experiences as student and later teacher of the PG Certificate. Her recommendations are to observe other people teaching from as many different disciplines as possible, to get feedback from students and to keep evidence of everything you do to reduce likelihood of being cut! After lunch we had some more interactive sessions, looking at the essential ingredients for teaching (Geoff Walton) and how we could use different types of space for teaching and training (Emma King).

The panel discussion at the end was great for pulling together the messages from throughout the day. It also helped me clarify a possible topic for my masters dissertation – I'd really like to look further into the teaching role of the librarian and what should be included within LIS programmes to prepare new professionals for this role. I'd love to hear from anyone with suggestions on this!

Working Smarter 3: Fund-raising

2010-05-24T13:38:00.002+01:00

At the Career Development Group conference last week, Kathy Roddy discussed the 3 Rs of Fund-raising: Relationships, Research and Recipients. I found this speaker overwhelmingly enthusiastic and positive about the potential sources of funding and our ability to raise funds for our libraries. She made it sound easy!

Relationships: "Fund-raising is friend-raising." We need to be out talking to potential funders, making sure to contact them by phone or in person before filling in the forms. Asking if they fund this sort of project, and if they say they prefer to fund "y" then discuss other projects they may be interested in funding. People give to people they know, respect, know will do a good job. It's also far easier to get money from people who gave before, so maintain these relationships!

Research: Find out who the potential funders are, what the need is for this service and what your outcomes will be. If you can't prove a need or identify worthwhile outcomes, you won't get the funding you're looking for. Remember that funders don't fund institutions - they want to change the world for the better.

Recipients: Who will benefit from what you do? What are their needs? Outcomes and impact are essential and we have to prove that we meet these. Libraries change lives! We need to convince funders that our projects are a massive investment opportunity that will change things for the best, who wouldn't want to invest in that?

The British Library is very good at tapping into the different types of funding streams.

Funding streams

Statutory
Lottery – Good to start with Awards for All, it's very easy to get this funding and not limited to charities.
Trusts and foundations – their job is to give money away, our job is to make it easy for them! Look up Guide to the Major Trusts and identify the ones that might be interested.
Company sponsorship
Individuals – one-off donations, committed giving schemes, major donors. Major donors are giving more than ever before, the only sector that's growing! Legacies are the most cost-effective method of fund-raising.

Blog search with Google

2010-05-21T11:03:00.007+01:00

As I'm attending the Librarian as Teacher event next week in Warwick, I decided to use this topic for my blog search. I found this site which pulls together e-learning resources. It's disappointingly old for a top hit within UK websites - surely there must be more recent resources here? It isn't a blog itself so I'm not sure why Google brought it back. Other parts of the site appear to have been updated more recently though and I'm sure some of the resources listed will be more current. Worth bookmarking anyway!

Working Smarter 2: Training and development on a shoestring

2010-05-21T10:09:00.001+01:00

This is the second of a series of posts following the Career Development Group's national conference 2010, 'Working Smarter'. Carol Brooks gave a great presentation on finding ways to further your professional development even if there are no funds available - it's our responsibility! We should always be watching for learning opportunities and how they will benefit us.

We need to take a systematic approach, identifying skills that we need to develop and finding ways to fill these gaps. Start by doing a needs analysis, then identify what you will gain from each training opportunity. Training does not have to cost a lot - look for night classes, CILIP groups, workplace and other sources of cheap/free courses. Courses could be planned internally for staff and using staff skills and knowledge, meaning that the learning is much more specific to the needs of the organisation. Skills can be exchanged with another authority. Special interest groups looking for a venue for training courses will usually be happy to reserve places for your staff in exchange.

If planning a course, don't start from scratch – tweak to make more relevant, but don't reinvent the wheel. Consider how long the training needs to be - a shorter course may be more economical and more focussed. If trying to convince employers to allow staff to attend, highlight the risks of not having the training. Consider the various learning styles in developing the course.

There are lots of opportunities for CPD on the job, from shadowing and secondment to mentoring and coaching. Induction training is the most important opportunity for an organisation and doesn't cost much. Everything the new employee learns during induction will be specific to your organisation. Never underestimate it and never cut it short!

I liked the suggestion of mystery shopping as a tool for customer service training. Other good methods include learning hour (colleagues come together to hear about something you've been working on), learning sets (topic brought in by one person, everyone in the group contributes questions/solutions to the problem) and shadowing programmes (either at own level or more senior level).

Learning resources

businessballs.com
youtube
leadership-expert.co.uk
web2 applications – e.g. using facebook for learning sets
web-based emails
rss, discussion groups, blogs, twitter
professional press: read it, but also consider writing an article
professional networks: make friends and contacts
Forums: contribute and share ideas
committee work: attend meetings, perhaps take on a role
organise meetings, fund-raising events or training courses.

I am already very committed to my professional development and have made the most of working part-time to follow up topics of interest to me through conferences, blogs, discussion groups etc. Just a couple of weeks ago I discussed the possibility of shadowing a colleague here in the medical library to gain an insight into cataloguing in an academic environment. I have to confess that I could take a more structured approach to identifying skills gaps and filling them. My first priority at the moment has to be completeing my MSc though!

23 Things: Personalised Homepage

2010-05-19T12:50:00.010+01:00

I have an iGoogle page that I used quite frequently for a while, but stopped in favour of using a bookmarks toolbar in my browser and links on my laptop organiser. As part of 23 things I've taken a second look at iGoogle and really like some of the features they've brought in since I last used it.

The option of tabs didn't exist when I first used iGoogle, and is a nice way to divide the resources you may want to link to from a homepage. I have set up tabs for procrastination and study, in addition to the 'Home' tab, and changed the theme. I have added some gadgets, widgets and RSS feeds and rediscovered the joys of 'Frogger' in the process (although back in the days of our Vic20 I definitely knew it as 'Hoppit').

I then explored Netvibes, which I recently discovered through CILIP's Conversation page but had never used myself. I entered 'library' selected a photo from a selection of related images and clicked a button to produce a starting dashboard. Slightly disappointed that none of the images reflected the IT dimension of libraries these days - a photo of the new library of Tallaght would have been lovely, but never mind.

Netvibes ran a few searches on my behalf and pulled the information into one place for me with very little work on my part. I can easily add and remove content to make the results even more relevant to what I am looking for. I like the layout, with tabs along the top and information from various sources presented in separate blocks. I can see the value of this resource especially for educational contexts, where different tabs could represent different subject or research areas. I also like that there is no requirement to sign up fully to use this service. I also had a quick look at Pageflakes, which seems similar to Netvibes but requires subscription before setting up pages.

I think that, of the three, iGoogle is probably most suitable for personal use, especially if you use other Google services already, since you can use one log in to Gmail, iGoogle, GoogleDocs etc. Netvibes would be particularly useful for presenting information to targeted user groups, and it would therefore be worth considering using it within the library context.

Working Smarter: The hidden costs of meetings

2010-05-19T11:31:00.004+01:00

On Monday, I attended the Career Development Group's national conference, Working Smarter: making more of an impact with less, a really useful day with some very inspiring speakers. I'll highlight some of the points that stuck from each session in separate posts for ease of reading/reference. The event was kindly tweeted by @bethanar (#cdg10) and I believe the presentations will be linked from the CDG website.

Susie Kay: The hidden costs of meetings

Meetings serve a purpose, but in some organisations more time is spent in meetings than doing other work! This means that there is very little space for flexibility if something urgent comes up. If running from one meeting to another there is no time to process what was discussed, little time to follow up on required actions and not enough time to prepare for the second meeting.

Susie Kay suggested looking at electronic and other alternatives to meetings - I particularly liked the suggestion of having running discussions displayed on large whiteboards around the organisations. I know of another organisation that does it using post-its on a particular wall - simple but serves the purpose! Discussion boards on an intranet can also be used, and should be managed by a particular person - not necessarily at management level. There is, of course, the fact that staff still need to make time to read this and some will be more diligent about following the conversations than others. I think a certain amount of chasing and drawing in might still be required using this approach. Other options such as conference calls were mentioned, but these are more open to technical problems.

Messages: If someone suggests that a new recurring meeting is needed in your organisation, consider whether a meeting is really necessary, and if it is, whether it really needs to be as long or as frequent as proposed. A five-minute 'scrum' every day may be more appropriate than a weekly meeting that lasts all morning. If you do have a meeting, keep it on track! Start on time, stay focused and don't discuss anything that is not on the agenda - note those issues for later discussion. Most importantly, ensure that everyone knows at the end what the conclusions were and what they need to do as a result.

The blogging begins!

2010-05-17T20:19:00.013+01:00

For those who know me and how much I love RSS feeds for keeping on top of information, it may seem strange that I've never blogged myself. I've resisted it so far for a number of reasons - never liked the idea of having an online diary, unsure about putting myself out there electronically, certain that other people have more interesting things to say... the list goes on.

Why the change of heart? I've been to a number of CPD events recently and the 'reflective practitioner' idea has been sinking in for a while. I know I've benefited from reading posts by other new professionals who use blogs to reflect on their own experiences. Now we're doing 23Things at the medical library at Cambridge, so I thought, why not? So I've started this blog mostly as part of this programme, partly for the fun of it, and who knows, maybe I'll continue long after I've finished my 23Things.

In case anyone's interested, here are some blogs I've found interesting/useful:

Oh, and of course,