My first strike

On Wednesday, I experienced my first strike. Unison had balloted us a few weeks ago and the majority had voted for strike action. I was a bit unsure about striking but decided to support the action. I went down to the picket line in the afternoon and handed out leaflets. It was a very positive experience - I met new colleagues and we had mostly supportive comments from staff, students and passers-by. We even managed to catch Boris!

Raising the profile of Academic Liaison Librarians

A while ago, I asked other librarians how they raise their profile within their institutions. 21 replies were received from two lists, lis-link and lis-infoliteracy. Below is a summary of the various activities and ideas that were mentioned in those replies.

Many thanks to everyone who contributed to this.

1. Face to face
a. Attending school’s coffee break
b. Attending key academic meetings
c. Series of roadshows within the Faculties
d. Events for academics, one in the summer with strawberries and cream and the other in winter with mince pies for Christmas. As well as the networking aspect we did short demos of ebooks, distance learning support etc. Quite informal, attendance was good and it was definitely worth while. We sent out printed invitations to academics with a RSVP on so we knew how many to cater for and seemed a better idea than an email being lost in their inbox.
e. Attending the new academic staff induction day. There is short talk on
the library and then over lunch we have a stand with information and
rove the room talking to new members of staff.
f. Sometimes just developing a good relationship with one or two people in
a particular department can help raise your profile as everyone else
then gets to see what a good job you're doing.
g. Something as simple as taking a new member of staff out for a coffee can be a good way in.
h. 1-2-1 meetings with staff

2. Written
a. A newsletter to all members of the university at beginning of academic year
b. Contributions to wider internal staff newsletter
c. Subject guides for each department
d. Library snippet planned for university's PG newsletter, due to come out fortnightly
e. News on the library home page
f. Subject pages
g. Area of website for other staff
h. Liaison librarian web pages
i. Liaison librarians details linked through our areas in the VLE

3. Web 2.0
a. Yammer https://www.yammer.com/
b. Library blog
c. Library on facebook and twitter
d. Blogs based on faculties, which feed into a twitter account

4. User training
a. Making contact with the person who runs the PG training programme, we now run courses there.
b. Series of sessions with our staff development department, aimed at academics, to promote what we do
c. Talking to individual lecturers/department - teaching sessions for their courses.
d. Library lunch and bring your own lunch sessions
e. Drop-in sessions in a café
f. Receive new staff and postgrad lists and contact new staff and postgrads with an email to say hello and offer an introductory session to show them various library resources
g. Action research project with one subject area, to see if I can evaluate whether one-to-one interactions with academics are more beneficial than the standard group sessions we have run in the past in regard to them understanding what I do and how I can work with them.
h. Informal drop-in session for staff just before the start of each academic year - when staff are back but haven't started teaching/inductions. We invite all the academic and admin staff (by email*and* flyers in their pigeonholes *and* posters around the Faculty!) and on the day the Subject Librarians act as hosts, dole out the drinks, network, and talk staff through using the resources.


5. Working together
a. Joint project bids with academic staff
b. Presenting papers at institution’s conference
c. Become as fully engaged as possible with the work and achieve seats on committees within the teaching school served. Out of that can come opportunities for wider engagement and profile with the rest of the university.
d. Take part in course planning and (re)validation
e. Library reps who are members of academic staff in the departments
f. Sitting on faculty quality enhancement committee
g. Take part in subject team meetings
h. We work on cross service groups e.g. with our Learning technologists or
IT trainers. One of the main things we do is promote the Teaching
Day which serves to showcase and develop good teaching practice
throughout the school

6. Other
a. Taking postgraduate certificate of academic practice (to get HEA accreditation and to get to talk to more academics!)
b. Research into the promotion of librarians as partners in Higher Education, using my own relationship with the faculty I support as the basis.
c. Publicity board with our pictures and names of departments - this is on
display in the Library but we also take it to events