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.