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!).