Empowering the Digital Natives

I had a very interesting day out in York last Thursday, attending the JISC RSC Yorkshire and Humber Learning Resources Conference: Empowering the Digital Natives.The venue was the National Railway Museum in York, an amazing venue!

The event kicked off with a presentation by Andrew Walsh (University of Huddersfield). He began by asking us to make sure our mobiles were switched ON and said he was happy for people to be tweeting, blogging, facebooking, etc, while he spoke. This was appropriate given the topic of his talk - phones, slates, netbooks and desktop computers: information use across devices. Of course, many libraries have embraced mobile technologies but how many are thinking about their actual impact on our academic community? Andrew emphasised the importance of context when people are searching for information on their mobile phones, as well as the fact that people will choose the easiest tool (an app) rather than the most appropriate. People are therefore using a narrower range of tools than if they were searching on a different device, such as a laptop. Time spent searching is also much less because people want the information then and there. Sites like Twitter bring the information to you, so searching becomes passive. This can mean that we get overwhelmed by the amount of information we are being fed. 

After Andrew's talk, we had a choice of three workshops. I attended one about digital identity, provided by Scott Hibberson and Kevin Campbell-Wright. It was a very entertaining session as they'd devised a scenario of how social media can have good and bad consequences, even if you're not actually on any of the sites. Several participants took on the roles and played out the scenario, which began with a leaving party where a couple of the characters got a bit carried away and then followed the repercussions following this. It made you consider the importance of managing your digital identity.


In the next workshop, making it mobile, we got to have a play on different devices, such as the iPad and Samsung Galaxy tab. We also considered the various uses for these in our workplaces. One app I especially liked was called String, for augmented reality. Basically, you scan a picture and an animation appears. My favourite was the dragon!


After an excellent lunch, we were treated to the first presentation about a new curriculum for information literacy (ANCIL) developed over just 10 weeks by Jane Secker and Emma Coonan. 

A New Curriculum for Information Literacy: JISC-RSC, York, Oct 2011

View more presentations from Emma Coonan

 We were asked to consider how we would implement the curriculum at our own institution by answering  the following questions:  

1. Who are the stakeholders / who would you work with in your organisation?
2. Who would be on your side / your champions? Individuals or teams?
3. Who might get in your way or need further convincing?
4. What other challenges might you face?
5. What would you need to suppoort you when implementing the curriculum? E.g. resources?
6. Who are the top three people to get on your side in your organisation?

ANCIL materials are licensed under creative commons (BY-NC-SA) and Jane & Emma are keen to receive feedback on how people are using them.

The last workshop I attended was on digital inclusion, by Lisa Featherstone from JISC TechDis. She introduced us to the anatomy of the digital literate graduate and the digital literacy in HE website. She also gave us lots of handy tips on how to make documents more accessible.

 I heard about lots of useful tools throughout the day, including:

• instapaper
• dropbox
• evernote

All in all, a great day! You can see some pictures from the event on Flickr.

Eleven months later...

Well, it's eleven months since the University of Westminster's 23 Things programme started and on Thing 16 we are drawing things to a close. In this final 23 Things post, I'd like to take some time to reflect on the new tools I have had the opportunity to explore since last August, and revisit some of my favourites, and say which of the technologies I will not be using again.

My favourites
My surprise favourite discovered through the programme, and one I've used quite a bit in my subject blogs, is Letter James.

23 Things also inspired me to finally set up a Flickr account, which came in very handy for posting photos of my visit to Lund.

Not so keen on...
I found the podcast exercise slightly frustrating, same goes for Google sites.

To sum up, I think I would have enjoyed 23 Things more if it hadn't taken so long to complete. I lost enthusiasm for it due to having to wait so long between things and I watched in envy as the University of Warwick got though their programme in just a couple of months!

Thing number 15: social media

Thing number 15 is easy peasy, as I'm already using all the social media mentioned.

Facebook is what I use for personal, non-work socialising - so all my friends and family. I've been on Facebook for over four years now and it's scary how my life since joining is all recorded there - holidays, birthdays, friends' weddings, etc.

I've been on LinkedIn for 18 months or so and this is more for professional life, although some of my 'connections' are really good friends. I created a Group account for the Information Literacy Group, which is handy for letting members know about events and other IL-related news.

It took a while but I am now a Twitter convert. This kind of crosses the divide between personal and work life. I didn't want to have two accounts so I follow librarians and my favourite celebs using the same one.

Thing number 14: create a podcast

For Thing 14, we were asked to make a podcast using Audacity. This thing has been a while coming as I encountered several obstacles along the way. I have created the audio file but am having problems posting it so you'll just have to believe me. It makes me cringe anyway so probably best it's not out there for the world to listen to!

Much Ado About Blogging

Tuesday 19 July was a very busy day!

Morning: University of Westminster's Annual Learning and Teaching Symposium
The Marylebone Road librarians presented a poster on a QR code project we've been developing.

Afternoon: CPD25 event, presenting with my colleague Ellie Murphy on our library blogs
Proof of the opportunities that can arise through Twitter! A couple of months ago (during my post-Sweden come down), I saw a tweet from Ian Clark asking if anyone was writing a blog for their library. I replied 'yes' and he asked if I would like to speak about it at an upcoming cpd25 event. It sounded like a good opportunity so I agreed. I invited one of my colleagues, Ellie Murphy, to speak with me.

The event took place at the London Mathematical Society, in Russell Square. Here's what Ellie and I presented.

Blogging at the University of Westminster

View more presentations from University of Westminster Technology Enhanced Learning

The other speakers at the event were Dave Puplett and Tim Fletcher. Dave's presentation was about how the LSE is using various social technologies (including Facebook and Twitter) to connect to their users and to find out what users are saying about the service. He included some brilliant images of Henry hoovers!

Fill the vacuum on Prezi

Tim presented on using Twitter to communicate with Birkbeck library users. There seems to be a good camaraderie between London libraries on Twitter and I can't help thinking Westminster is missing out here. A positive sign that this is an area for consideration at Westminster was the presence of a marketing colleague at this event.

It was great to have the opportunity to speak at this event so many thanks to Ian Clark for posting that message on Twitter. To read his take on the afternoon, visit his blog. I'd also like to thank Caroline Fletcher and the rest of the cpd25 team for organising the event.

Evening: Much Ado About Nothing, starring former Doctor, David Tennant, and the very witty Catherine Tate
My friend and I booked this ages ago and we had great seats. In fact, Russell T Davies was sat just a few rows in front of us! Much Ado is one of my favourite Shakespeare plays (partly due to the Kenneth Brannagh film, which happily coincided with me studying the play for GCSE).

First time for everything!

I am having a week of firsts - first zumba class, first time attending the South London Choir (due to Glee withdrawal), and my first TeachMeet (which I'd helped organise, so think that may be the first professional event I've been involved with at that level).

My involvement in the London Librarian TeachMeet started with a message from Lynne Meehan on the Librarians as Teachers Network forum. I'd read with envy about all the TeachMeets that were happening around the country so was keen to help organise one in London town. While Lynne sorted out a website and Twitter account, I offered to find a suitable room at the University of Westminster. I had the perfect room in mind and was delighted to be told we could use it on the date Lynne and I had chosen (20 June). As TeachMeets are free events, I began thinking how we were going to cater for the 40 - 50 attendees, so I applied for sponsorship from the Information Literacy Group. Luckily, they approved my application. Lynne and I also encouraged attendees to make some cakes, as we'd noticed this was a popular feature of other TeachMeets.

A few weeks before the TM, Lynne and I met for the first time, along with my colleague Sara Goddard (who already knew Lynne). We discussed logistics for the event. Sara offered to hold up cards to show speakers how much time they had left.

So, over three months after Lynne posted her message, the day for the London TeachMeet finally arrived. After some refreshments and a welcome from my manager, Fiona O'Brien, the series of short presentations began. Hannah Wood (who has nearly the same name as my niece!) talked about the effectiveness of storytelling in teaching. This doesn't mean reciting Little Red Riding Hood but using real life examples from past sessions in future ones. Students like hearing what their peers have said and done, it makes them more engaged with what you are teaching. So, next time you're delivering a training session and a student does an interesting search or says something insightful about a resource, jot it down!

Next, Daphne Chalk-Birdsall introduced us to the Archigram Archival Project database. I am embarrassed to admit that this was the first I'd heard about this, even though it's run by an architectural research group at the University of Westminster! It looks like an excellent resource for architecture librarians.

Alice Cann then posed the hardest question of the day - when you only have one session with students, should you try to show them everything, or just a few select resources? By showing them everything, you risk confusion or scaring them off by the sheer volume of resources available. By showing them just a few resources, you risk them only using those and never exploring beyond, when a resource you missed could be the one they really need at some point. I tend to compromise by showing them the main ones and providing a handout listing other possibilities. As Alice pointed out, a better solution would be to have more than one session with students, but this is not always possible.

Sian Aynsley gave us a tour of the CLIST website, a resource for clinical librarians. Things then sped up somewhat, with the timings of talks reduced from five to two minutes. Appropriately, Deborah Lee began by talking about using the quick quiz for staff training at the Courtauld - closed questions and a few trick ones at the end to check trainees have been paying attention. Stephen Johnson then gave the last talk before the tea and cake break, which was about the importance of education to improve information assurance in central government.

The second half of presentations kicked off with Zoe Thomas and Angela Young talking about a form for trainers to use to reflect on what has worked well or not so well in sessions. This is something we should be doing all the time but often it gets forgotten, particularly at busy times. Also, if you've had a session that didn't go so well, the temptation is to forget about it. However, bad experiences are often the ones you can learn the most from, which is why this form is such a good idea.

Paula Funnell and Roddy Lander spoke about changing from more formal information skills sessions to drop-ins. These have proved popular with students and staff. We run drop-ins at Westminster but interest varies. Some days, I just sit in the training room by myself for an hour, which can be frustrating. We then heard from Rowena Macrae-Gibson about City's Upgrade website. Having missed this year's LILAC, it was nice to have an opportunity to hear about this resource.

Chocolate: a near guarantee to grab most people's attention, which is why at Imperial they use it to lure students into enjoying (rather than enduring) their library induction. Ruth Harrison told us about Imperial's treasure hunt induction, with chocolates on offer for all participants, and a whole box for winners. Fabulous idea but I wonder about those who don't eat chocolate for whatever reason. Is an alternative incentive on offer? I ran a treasure hunt when encouraging staff at CILT, the National Centre for Languages (my last workplace which now sadly doesn't exist) to use the library. It was great to see the enthusiasm generated by the competition to win a box of chocolates. Once, I organised an easter egg hunt around the library - staff had to look up a particular book on the catalogue and by finding it on the shelf they would also find a mini creme egg (or similar). We kept finding the eggs on the shelves for ages afterwards. I had to smile when I returned to sort out the remaining books in the library and came across an egg - must have been hidden for over two years!

Back to the nano-presentations, Edith Speller (from Trininty Laban) told us why we should do more exercises (quizzes, treasure hunts, etc.). The final talk was by Hannah Bennett who asked students "what kind of LRC user are you?", an idea inspired by Facebook to find out how much they already know about the library.

All in all, a very inspiring afternoon. Before writing this post, I was worried I hadn't taken anything in, as I was so caught up in making sure everything ran smoothly. However, judging by how much I've written, I appear to have taken in quite a lot!

Tagxedo cloud of my Erasmus posts

I just created this for a presentation I'm giving to colleagues next week. The reindeer shape was the closest reference to Sweden available. I really like it!

The Last Librarian

It is with some sadness that I write this post. My former employer CILT, the National Centre for Languages, went into administration in April. Many of CILT's activities have been transferred to CfBT in Reading. However, they did not buy the library and I have therefore been very concerned about what would become of this very important national collection, that has been developed over more than 40 years. I was the last librarian at CILT as they were already in trouble when I left and were only replacing "mission critical" posts.

I was pleased to hear that the CILT Resources Library has been bought by the Association of Language Learning and the University of Cambridge Language Centre. They have taken the research collection and are asking for donations to help secure its long term future.

Before work today (very early start!), I went to CILT's former premises on Westminster Bridge Road to help sort out what remains of the library collection, mainly the teaching materials, which will now go to CfBT. I was pleased to be able to help out the library in this small way, as I formed a great attachment to the collection during my time working for CILT. In fact, I felt quite guilty leaving it. Some of my former colleagues have done an excellent job in caring for the collection since my departure. They also made sure senior management did not forget about the library.

CILT was a great place to work because of the library and the majority of my colleagues, many of whom I am still good friends with now. However, because it was such a small organisation relying mainly on government money, it was a very stressful place to work. It totally consumed my life and affected my wellbeing in a way I hope no other job ever does.

Many public libraries are also facing closure due to spending cuts. Visit voices for the library to find out what you can do to help save libraries.

13 going on 31

Thing 13 is here and it's Google sites. I've played around with this a bit before. We have a site for the ECS (Electronics and Computer Science) librarians. Also, this is where our Academic Liaison Librarian profile pages are kept.

However, in the 23 Things spirit, I have created a brand new site about my visit to Lund.

I do find Google sites slightly frustrating at times but it has lots of useful features, such as being able to add Google apps to pages.

Goodbye Lund!

As a final day treat, I requested to visit the archives of Lund University Library, in particular the Papyrus Collection, due to my interest in egyptology. Eva Nylander was my guide for today and she showed me some amazing manuscripts, including Necrologium Lundense, the oldest handwritten manuscript in Scandinavia that still exists.



Necrologium Lundense


The Papyrus collection consists of about 800 fragments, ranging from around 300 BC to 300 AD. A digital collection is available.

I also saw a very famous book about a dream, which is a bit of a mystery because nobody knows who wrote it!

To finish, I was shown some manuscripts relating to the UK contained within the De la Gardie archive. This includes a letter of proposal from King Erik of Sweden to Queen Elizabeth I.

My netbook's about to run out of battery and I have a slow internet connection here but will add some more photos from the archive next week.

Get thee to a library!

I returned to Campus Helsingborg this morning. I had a very interesting discussion with a librarian there who is taking a teaching course that is mandatory for librarians, researchers, etc.at Lund University. She is finding it very useful and inspiring and is trying out some of the ideas in training sessions. I am hoping to start a similar course at Westminster in the near future. We talked about what information literacy training we provide (she also has responsibility for tourism within the department of service management) and the challenges that can arise. The library training she delivers to new students is encompassed within an academic toolkit, which includes academic writing and critical analysis.

At lunchtime, another of the librarians took me to Helsingborg public library. It's a nice library space, with a cafe in the centre. Academic and public libraries seem to work together to a far greater extent than at home. The staff at CH have even done a short exchange with staff at the public library. There are also study spaces which Lund University students often use.

In the afternoon, I went with another librarian on a ferry to Helsingør in Denmark, where Shakespeare set Hamlet. I must be drawn to places with a Shakespeare connection - I grew up near Stratford and spent my Erasmus student year in Verona. I even wrote my masters dissertation on Shakespeare collections in the UK.

However "Hamlet's castle" (Kronborg castle) was not the reason for my visit to this town. I was here thanks to a visit, arranged by the SFIS Syd and Svensk biblioteksförening Regionförening Skåne, to Helsingør's new public library. It was a fascinating place and, fortunately, I had a translator so I could find out about it.
 
I've been in some impressive public libraries, but this was truly the stuff of librarians' dreams. With so many cuts in public libraries and the arts at home, it's lovely to see somewhere that's investing in its libraries and culture. They have Macs everywhere, rooms where people can play video games, a "secret" room for children's storytime, and much more. Seriously, if Carlsberg built libraries... Unfortunately, I didn't get a good exterior shot but if you go to this website and spot the building that looks like sails - that's it!

Here are some fun interior shots:



Children's library (secret room is the black round one)



We had a delicious dinner on the ferry and in the course of eating we made the crossing a further three times. It was a great opportunity to chat to librarians from other libraries/sectors, so I got a broader impression of the Swedish library scene than just Lund University. I was made to feel very welcome and it shows that, no matter where you are, librarians are always very friendly!

Sadly, tomorrow's my last day in Lund. I am back at the University Library to see the archives, particularly their papyrus collection. Then I'm going to Copenhagen for the weekend so might not have time to blog. I'd like to say a big thank you (tack så mycket) to all the librarians and other library staff I've met during my visit, and also to everyone who's been following me on here. Hope you've learnt something and maybe even been inspired to apply for the Erasmus staff mobility programme yourself!

The Tourist Librarian

I caught the train to Helsingborg this morning, which should be about a half hour journey unless you get on the slow train (guess what I did). Lund University established a campus in this town ten years ago. It serves several subjects, including tourism and computer science (both of which I support at Westminster). This is why I was particularly keen to visit this library.

Campus Helsingborg

Whereas the Faculty of Social Sciences (where I was yesterday) is located in Lund's former hospital, Campus Helsingborg's building used to be a rubber factory.

Like yesterday, I met Academic Liaison Librarians (Kontaktbibliotekarie) for the various departments based at CH. One of them had visited Cardiff University through Erasmus to find out more about the Cephalonian method. This is interesting because we have discussed using this at Westminster.

Colleagues working at Westminster's Harrow site would probably understand how the ALLs at Helsingborg feel in being away from the main university site. One of the ways the library staff at Lund communicate with one another is via a blog. This blog was first set up when Lund did 23 Things a few years ago. However, they decided 23 was too many so cut it down. I think this a wise decision in light of the fact that we started 23 Things 9 months ago and are only on Thing 13!

One of the librarians,Anna Alwerud, took me for lunch at IKEA's world office, just across from CH. This used to be a sugar factory.

They had IKEA's commandments on the wall and Anna commented these are very appropriate for libraries - do you agree and, if so, which ones?

After lunch, Anna and I were on the information desk. I went to browse the tourism books and felt at home when I saw familiar titles written by academics at Westminster.

I'm at Helsingborg again tomorrow and am taking an exciting trip across the water to a place made famous by Shakespeare - can you guess the play?

The Social Library Network

This week I am out and about in the Lund University Libraries network. Today I met the Academic Liaison Librarians working at the Social Sciences Faculty Library (this consists of the Library of Social & Behavioural Sciences and the Political Sciences Library - these libraries are currently in separate buildings).



Library of Social & Behavioural Sciences

I had a very interesting discussion with the ALLs about what they offer here compared to the University of Westminster. Our discussion focussed particularly on services to international students, as many of the students in this Faculty come from outside of Sweden. Lund has been a popular choice for international students because, up until this year, it has been free to study in Sweden. At Westminster, I support tourism and events management, and these courses attract many overseas students. Through my contact with these students, I have started to consider the services we offer them, as they sometimes find it hard to understand British university libraries.

One of the librarians recommended an article to read in preparation for the meeting. I found it very helpful!

Hughes, Hilary E. (2010) International students' experiences of university libraries and librarians. Australian Academic and Research Libraries, 41(2), pp. 77-89

At Lund, they do offer separate information skills sessions for international students in most subjects (apart from those with mostly Swedish students). However, this is a question of language more than anything else, as they have to offer sessions in both Swedish and English.

They were very interested in the way my library service is organised, especially the fact that the ALLs don't do any frontline work anymore. The information desk at the Social Sciences Library in Lund is considered to be very important in making the librarians visible to students. One librarian commented that this service is especially important for international students. 

After lunch, I found out about a new optional course being offered to new researchers from this October: Information Management and Publication Process for Social Scientists. This is a five day course in total, spread out over several weeks. It looks very interesting.

I also heard about Lund's Global Research Gateway, developed by the Social Sciences Library, to be used as a pedagogical tool. It also has a wiki element where Lund users can comment on the site. This has led to interesting discussions, for example that information sources are too biased towards the English language(relates back to international students discussion).

Lund University Libraries are starting to introduce Dewey to replace their existing Swedish classification system. This is to make resources more visible on a international level and to save time when classifying.

After work, drinks had been arranged by the librarians from the Libraries Head Office (where I was last week). We went to a British pub called the Bishop's Arms. They very kindly gave me a traditional cake from this region Skåne called spettekaka, as well as a tea towel with some traditonal Swedish food recipes on it. I am doing quite well on the gift front as the librarian from the University Library gave me a Swedish cookery book. I will have to host a Swedish party when I get back to London!

spettekaka

Runer has it

I spent today at Lund's University Library (not to be confused with Lund University Libraries network), in Swedish this is Universitetsbiblioteket, or UB for short. The UB has a long history. It was founded the same year that the University was established, in 1666. The reason for establishing a University in Lund was to mark the area (Skåne) as Swedish, as until 1658 it had been part of Denmark. Lund is Sweden's second oldest University, after Uppsala. The University originally used the cathedral library, in a building that still stands today. It then moved to another building which also housed pigs and grain! There is still a library (of philosophy) in this building.



Universitetsbiblioteket

 About 100 years ago, a new building was constructed for the UB. This has been extended several times to accommodate the ever expanding collection. The UB is a legal deposit library, like the British Library. This means it collects everything published in Sweden - not just books, but newspapers, magazines, leaflets (e.g. IKEA product information), posters (including billboard), literally everything! I was lucky enough to be shown around by one of the librarians who work at the UB - the sheer volume of material is overwhelming! They have several off-site storage units to house it all.

As well as being a legal deposit collection responsible for perserving Sweden's cultural heritage, Lund University also serves the function of lending this collection. This differs to the situation in the UK, as the British Library handles this. However, Sweden's equivalent of the BL, the Royal Library, only serves as a legal deposit library and does not lend its collection.

Together with the Royal Library, staff at UB catalogue the legal deposit materials. These are available to view on Sweden's national research libraries catalogue, Libris (UK's closest equivalent would be COPAC). Libris has the added fuctionality of being able to select specific libraries to search, meaning that it can be used as an institution's main catalogue.

Universities in Sweden have three main tasks - education, research and the public. This means that anyone over 18 can apply for a library card and the university cannot charge for this.

The UB used to provide quite a lot of user education but now that role is largely carried out by the faculty libraries. I'll be visiting one of these libraries tomorrow to find out more about what they do in this regard.

They have about 550 study places available in the UB, including group spaces/rooms, silent study areas, and a room for researchers. Many years ago, only researchers and gentlemen (without their staff) were allowed in the Library! As with many libraries, there is demand for more study space.

Another insightful day at Lund. I'll leave you with a couple of images of Sweden's largest rune stone, housed in the entrance of the UB.

Breakfast at Library HQ (Friday)

Blogger was down for most of yesterday, which is why this has been published a day late.

On the way to work today ,I encountered another bunny. Much smaller than the last one and looked more of a pet than a wild one. A far nicer sight than I see on my London commute!



So, now for the moment I'd been waiting for all week - breakfast (or frukost). This week there was a Greek theme.

yum!

yum!

yum!

However, this was a working breakfast and I was in a very interesting meeting this morning, discussing a study currently being undertaken by three of the faculty librarians (medicine, economics and law) together with Lena Landgren from the head office. This initial study, which started in February and finishes next month, is looking at the impact of library teaching. They are using Sharon Markless' impact measures. Sharon gave a workshop to library staff at Lund last year. They have held focus groups with students, teachers and librarians from the faculties. Results from these groups have been colour coded according to the measure they meet. The project group is going to analyse the results and write an internal report over the coming weeks. They also aim to publish the results in a journal at some point in the future. 

Another key topic related to this is librarians as teachers and I had a very interesting discussion with Lena about this. At Lund, they have pedagogical cafe meetings, which are an informal way to discuss teaching practice. Some librarians have also chosen to participate in a 'critical friend' exercise, where you observe another librarian while they're teaching and have criteria to assess them against. I told Lena about the Librarians as Teachers day held at the University of Warwick last May, the Librarians as Teachers network and the popularity of TeachMeets for librarians around the country (including the forthcoming London one being held at the University of Westminster). Our TMs work in a similar way to Lund's pedagogical cafe concept except they involve information professionals from a range of institutions.

I should mention that Lena Landgren and Åsa Forsberg are presenting a paper "Student centred learning: a threshold concept for teaching librarians?" at EBLIP6 (Evidence Based Librarianship in Practice), which is being held at Salford next month.

Exit through the library gift shop

When I lived in Italy, although my speaking skills were never that great, my understanding was fine, so I could easily follow conversations (as long as they weren't speaking dialect). This is not the case with Swedish! However, there are words which I can pick up on to get the gist of what's being said and then I contribute something in English. At the 3pm coffee break today, I picked up on the words "graffiti" and "Banksy" so mentioned that a Banksy had recently appeared by where I work in London (see Westminster news). A clear sheet was put in front of this work last week to protect it.

Today, I was working with the Lund University Libraries marketing and communications team. Marketing is one of my main professional interests. Unfortunately, I don't get to do much of this at Westminster, but I am the Marketing Officer for the Information Literacy Group. This has recently involved ordering lots of lovely promotional materials for the ILG and Journal of Information Literacy.

I brought some examples of materials produced for my department (Information Systems and Library Services) at Westminster to show the team at Lund. Ours and theirs are quite similar - pens, sweets, bags, etc. All those things students like! We also face similar rules over using approved university images, colours, logos, etc.



Lund University Libraries roll up (produced for IFLA last year)

They have a library marketing working group at Lund. We used to have one of these at Westminster but it seems to have fallen by the wayside. We did have some task & finish groups last summer though which resulted in a nice leaflet promoting the work of the Academic Liaison team (librarians and IT trainers) to academic staff, as well as our own web pages which we have full editing rights over as they're in Google.

I spent the afternoon looking at Lund's internet and intranet pages. It's very complicated because they have lots of different systems and 30 libraries. They're soon to have a revamp of the website so look forward to seeing that. Their intranets are localised to particular departments, so library head office staff can put photos, relevant news, etc. on there, as well as putting their name down to organise the famous Friday morning breakfast :)

Some of Lund's libraries have Facebook and Twitter accounts. This one's also making excellent use of LibGuides. They also allow students to 'book a librarian'. Some of my colleagues at Westminster are using youcanbook.me, which offers a similar service.

Very excited about tomorrow morning's library breakfast - apparently it's huge!

Emma in Wonderlund / Discovering DOAJ

I saw a very big rabbit on the way to work today - maybe it's so big after munching on these huge leaves:

Non-librarians may find this post a bit dry, so you might prefer to watch this video about Lund instead :)


This month, the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) celebrates its 8th birthday (many happy returns!). It has grown a lot since it started in 2003 and now includes over 6000 titles. It is administered from Lund University Libraries Head Office and today I got the opportunity to work with some of the librarians who manage it. Given that it's a very small team, and even they are not working on it full time, it makes DOAJ appear even more impressive.

I have to admit that my own experience of DOAJ is somewhat limited to showing it to new researchers as an example of scholarly communication. I therefore found it very interesting to find out how journals are selected for inclusion in the database. There are strict criteria which the journals must meet. Anyone can suggest a journal (if you know of a good open access journal that's not included, simply complete this form). However, don't expect your suggestion to appear on DOAJ in the near future - DOAJ staff need to contact the journal editor to ask some questions about the title to see if it meets the criteria. A catalogue entry then has to be created and a link to the journal provided (DOAJ does not host the journals, it just links to them). With around 150 suggestions received every month, the backlog is huge! On top of that, staff have to check that current titles (all 6000+ of them!) continue to meet the criteria. Fortunately, they can get students in to do some of this work.

As far as the article level information goes, it is up to the journal editorial board to update this, which is why only about 42% of the journals on DOAJ are currently searchable at article level. When you think about it though, this is quite a high percentage and shows the importance of DOAJ to journal editors. DOAJ also provides the opportunity to archive journals in the e-depot of the National Library in the Hauge (only available for journals with PDF articles). Journals using this service have an 'archived' icon on their DOAJ record. The other icon that appears is the SPARC Europe Seal of Approval for open access journals, which means that the journal has the Creative Commons License BY and provides the article level metadata.

You may notice that DOAJ has recently undergone a facelift. This is just one of the ways the team is developing this very important service. Future developments include having DOAJ in languages other than English, specifically French, Turkish, Greek and Chinese.

I spent quite a lot of the day helping the team by going through a spreadsheet of the latest journals that are using Open Journals Systems (OJS) and comparing with journals already on DOAJ and in the admin system. I colour coded the titles according to their current status.

Finally, I'd like to point you to the interesting statistics by country page and ask you to consider supporting DOAJ. For a small cost, HE institutions can contribute to this key resource for the research community, and they get a mention on DOAJ's website.

After work I treated myself to a very nice ice cream and a walk around Lund University's beautiful botanical gardens (left memory card in my laptop though so no photos I'm afraid).

The good life

My day begins with an excellent breakfast, including delicious homemade jam and boiled apples from the garden at my b&b. I then set off to Lund University Libraries Head Office.

My new commute

 I like the way they treat their staff here - free fresh fruit is provided, along with fresh filter coffee (imagine the money I'd save on Costa!). I think the fresh fruit is a great idea - we need those vitamins to fight off all the student germs :) They have regular coffee breaks at 10am and 3pm, which gives colleagues the oppotunity to talk to one another in an informal setting. At the 3pm break, a metadata meeting had just finished, so I got to sample some Swedish cake that was left over from this - very yummy! They also have breakfast together every Friday morning (I will report back on this).



Staff room at Library Head Office



So, what have I been up to today apart from eating and drinking? Well, this morning I gave my hostess Åsa some University of Westminster Library materials. She had given me some Lund leaflets yesterday, all in English. I asked her if they produced everything in both Swedish and English and was told they have just developed a new language policy which says that things should be produced in both languages. English is important due to the high number of international students at Lund.

We also disussed support to researchers, which is a hot topic here as it is back in the UK (see my post from last year's USTLG meeting). At Lund, they offer quite an intensive induction programme to new researchers. Leading on from this, we started talking about reference management tools. They mainly use EndNote at Lund but are considering introducing Refworks as well. I told Åsa about my own experience of RefWorks, which we train Westminster students to use. We then discussed other more social media tools, such as Mendeley.

Lund is currently considering acquiring a new Library Management System. Åsa showed me their current system. I'd already shown her Primo yesterday. They're also about to introduce Dewey classification.

We talked about VLEs. At Westminster, all departments use BlackBoard. At Lund, they have many different platforms for this purpose!

Åsa has done work on OERs (Open Educational Resources). Lund uses LibGuides, which we don't have at Westminster. It is very interactive and means you can share and use resources from many other institutions.

I met quite a few other people who work at the libraries head office, some of whom I'll be working with later this week. After lunch, we visited a couple more libraries, one of which has the computing books in it so I felt at home there :)

Lund University Technology campus

In the afternoon, we talked about support for visually impaired students. Sweden's Library of Talking Books and Braille (TPB) works in conjunction with public and academic libraries to provide talking books to those who need them. All key course texts are included. Lund University is even able to add their own material. Registered students are able to download the talking books they require. Lund uses Dolphin screen reader software.

We finished off with a discussion of Lund's teacher training for librarians, moving from knowledge transfer to a more student centred approach, where they are able to interact and discover for themselves. I will be learning more about the impact of this on Friday (after the nice breakfast!).

Off to work I go!

Religious studies library

My normal commute to work involves cramming myself into a very small space for about 30 minutes. Today, my commute was a pleasant 20 minute walk in the sunshine.

On arriving at Lund University Libraries Head Office, I was met by Åsa Forsberg.  Åsa told me about Lund University and how the libraries function. Here are a few things I learnt:

• Lund University has 47,000 students (this makes Westminster's 22,000 look quite small!)
• It is a legal deposit library
• There are 30 libraries in its network (a few of which I visited today, including the interestingly designed religious studies one, as pictured above). The law library had chandeliers!
• The faculties fund their libraries, including the staff
• They have a library council and various cross-site working groups

I will be finding out more about the various projects at Lund, including DOAJ (Directory of Open Access Journals), over the next fortnight.

A Librarian Abroad: day one

After an early start at Gatwick Airport, a flight to Copenhagen and a beautiful train journey across the Øresund Bridge to Sweden, I arrived in Lund, my home for the next two weeks.

Mostly good impressions of Lund so far, although I was a bit surprised to be directly asked for money twice. The first time I had my guard down cos the guy didn't look dodgy but the second one looked quite trampy and got waaaaaay too close! And to think when someone was asking for money on my local train on Friday, I naively thought I'd be escaping all that when I came to Sweden.

Aside from the begging, Lund is a beautiful city. According to the Lonely Planet it's "Sweden's answer to Cambridge" and this is certainly true when it comes to the number of bikes around.



Of course the Cambridge comparison is also due to Lund's University, which is the reason for my visit here. I applied for Erasmus funding for this trip last November and was delighted to be selected, so it's very exciting to finally be here. This is the second time Erasmus have funded me to experience another European university. As part of my first degree, I studied at the University of Verona for a year. Scary to think that was ten years ago! I think this is going to be quite a different experience :)

I am looking forward to meeting the staff of Lund University Libraries over the next couple of weeks, finding out how they do things over here and telling them about what we do at the University of Westminster.

I'll be blogging and tweeting while I'm here so if you're interested in finding out what a librarian abroad gets up to, watch this space!

To Google and beyond!

The latest of Westminster's 23 Things is online applications, specifically Google apps. As I've been using Google docs for some time, I don't feel I need to do the task set. Instead, I will take this opportunity for some general Google musings.

Once upon a time, Google was merely a search engine. Nowadays, it is much more than this. I have an igoogle homepage on my laptop, I switched from yahoo mail to gmail in 2009, my rss feeds are managed in Google Reader, when I need a picture of something I use Google images, and when I need to translate something I use Google Translate. My android phone uses Google and came with a load of pre-installed apps, including maps, talk and voice search. Then there's Google Scholar and Google Books. Even this blog is a Google product.

At Westminster, our students get Google accounts for their main university email. Staff get both outlook and gmail. We regularly use Google docs to collaborate on tasks. I have found this to be a helpful tool, although it's not always flawless. Last year, we decided to have individual pages for the Academic Liaison Librarian team and Google sites provided the best platform for us to create these pages, as we could have ownership of them and edit as required, rather than relying on someone else.

To finish, here's a timely video from yet another Google-owned product, You Tube.

Information Literacy musings

Ever since my days at Sheffield, Information Literacy (IL) has been one of my main professional interests. I was fortunate enough to be first taught about this concept by the IL guru herself Sheila Webber, who writes an excellent blog on the subject. This blog is regularly updated - when I just checked my RSS feed the latest post includes a link to a very useful article for one of my liaison subject areas: "Assessing Information-Seeking Behavior of Computer Science and Engineering Faculty" by Valerie Tucci, Issues in Science and Technology Librarianship, (64).


This provides a great example for the topic of a seminar I attended yesterday evening, Social media: re-conceptualising information literacy. This seminar was led by Professor Helen Partridge, a librarian-turned-academic from Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane. She is currently halfway through a six month sabbatical at the Oxford Internet Institute and her research is looking at people's information practices within social media. Slides can be found on slideshare. As her research is just at the beginning stages, the seminar involved Helen asking questions and the group sharing their thoughts and, quite often, posing more questions. Helen said that she sees social media and mobile technologies as going hand in hand and that she has always thought of information literacy has being a social concept. Some of the questions/issues raised included:

• Is social media sociable?
• Differences between the various literacies: information, media, digital, trans, meta, etc.
• IL more significant than ever before
• How we conceive information
• Process - how we would like users to behave vs how they want to behave
• Role of IL educators - changing relationship with users now they are content creators

All in all, it was a very thought-provoking evening and I look forward to hearing more about where Helen's research leads.


The seminar was my second IL event in the space of a week, as last Thursday I participated in my first ever webinar, IL and the Oprah effect, hosted by Peter Ciuffetti from Credo Reference. It was quite exciting to participate in something with librarians from all over the world. I was impressed with the interactivity involved, including quick polls. Peter's presentation looked at how we could get marketing IL inspiration from phenomena such as the Oprah effect on sales of products featured on her show and the Harry Potter effect on increasing fiction literacy levels of young people. The main issue is that measuring  IL is more tricky and we have to rely more on anecdotal evidence. A couple of ideas/thoughts I took away from the webinar were:

• Which web pages are students looking at? i.e. where is it best to advertise IL sessions? Homepage? Portal login? Library pages? What are the restrictions to using these pages?
• Using Google ad words can be a cost effective way to create an impression on students. You can set it up so when certain keywords are searched, your ad appears. The more specific the better. You add a certain amount of credit to the account but money is deducted only when someone clicks on the link. However, getting the searcher to click is not the intention, merely just being on the page places your service into the searchers mind. Cheap way of promoting.
• Who do students listen to? Their peers! By getting students on board and encouraging them to promote IL training, the battle's almost won. A peer mentor scheme has been tried at Brigham Young University.

Slides from this webinar will shortly be available from the Libraries Thriving website.


Next week is a big week in the UK's IL calendar because the Librarians Information Literacy Annual Conference (LILAC) is taking place at the British Library. I attended LILAC last year and was so inspired that I applied to be marketing officer for the group that runs it (the Information Literacy Group). LILAC has therefore been in my mind for some months now as I've been busy getting promotional materials ready in time. Unfortunately, I'm not able to attend this year as on Thursday I'm heading off to Barcelona for a week. Some of my colleagues will be going to LILAC though so I look forward to hearing about it when I get back.