The Librarian Identity

Open Access event at the British Academy

2012-01-17T14:42:00.000Z

Open access is a hot topic in universities at present. Only last week, SCONUL published an impact briefing on this. At Westminster, I have been considering this issue with some colleagues. We are looking to raise awareness of the benefits of open access publishing to academics, partly to increase access to articles they write through our institutional repository, WestminsterResearch.

With this in mind, I attended a very interesting and thought-provoking debate on open access at the British Academy last Thursday. The impressive panel included Deborah Shorley (Director of Library Services at Imperial College), William St Clair (Co-founder and Chairman Board of Directors of Open Book Publishers and Senior Research Fellow at Trinity College Cambridge) and Alice Prochaska (Principal of Somerville College Oxford and former University Librarian at Yale). They covered a wide range of issues, including:

The rising and therefore increasingly prohibitive cost of monographs and journals. This is a vicious circle, as when more people stop buying these, the more expensive they become.
University libraries have to devote the majority of their budgets to journals, meaning less is available for books. This is getting worse every year.
In less developed/developing countries, OA provides access to far more research than has previously been available.
If the public is funding research, there are obvious issues around that research then only being available to a select few.
Open access does not mean free - someone is paying for this, whether that be authors, institutions, or other sources. With OA, it is the point of the process when payment occurs
The issue of quality - if open access journals ask authors for money to publish, the danger is that articles will be accepted more readily.
Digitisation of special collections often leads to an increased public interest in the original collections, meaning more enquiries and visits. In fact, this trend has made some to think twice about digitising!
For Open Access articles, greater visibility means more people read and cite these papers, increasing authors' profiles and the impact of their research.
Some disciplines, for example physics and particularly astronomy, are very good at making their research available to everyone. Others are not so generous. One attendee raised the valid point that it's sometimes not possible to make data open access.

It's a shame the event wasn't streamed online, as there were lots of other excellent points mentioned which I don't have time to summarise here. Hopefully this has given you a flavour of the discussion though.

Finally, in the spirit of sharing, here are the open access sources that William St Clair highlighted on a handout:

UNESCO OA portal (mainly science)
OAPEN (OA publishing in European networks)
Creative Commons
British Academy joint guidelines on copyright and academic research - guidelines for researchers and publishers in the humanities and social sciences
SPARC Europe
The Re:Enlightenment Project
Open Book Publishers
Open Humanities Press
The Political Economy of Reading

And here are some further suggestions:

DOAJ (Directory of Open Access Journals)
SHERPA
SteveHitchcock's ongoing bibliography: Theeffect of open access and downloads ('hits') on citation impact: a bibliographyof studies

Empowering the Digital Natives

2011-10-24T17:16:00.000+01:00

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:

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

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

Eleven months later...

2011-08-11T15:11:00.000+01:00

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

2011-07-25T19:21:00.001+01:00

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

2011-07-25T18:58:00.001+01:00

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

2011-07-21T13:02:00.001+01:00

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!

2011-06-22T10:32:00.000+01:00

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

2011-06-07T17:02:00.001+01:00

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

2011-05-27T13:36:00.000+01:00

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

2011-05-24T14:45:00.000+01:00

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!

2011-05-20T13:10:00.001+01:00

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!

2011-05-19T21:27:00.002+01:00

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

2011-05-18T18:24:00.001+01:00

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

2011-05-17T21:34:00.000+01:00

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

2011-05-16T18:14:00.000+01:00

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)

2011-05-14T12:28:00.001+01:00

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!

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

2011-05-12T16:32:00.000+01:00

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

2011-05-11T15:34:00.002+01:00

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

2011-05-10T17:09:00.001+01:00

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!

2011-05-09T20:05:00.000+01:00

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

2011-05-08T20:03:00.001+01:00

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!

2011-04-26T15:27:00.000+01:00

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

2011-04-12T13:15:00.002+01:00

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.

Spreading the word

2011-03-24T15:23:00.001Z

Glazed tile image from Ishtar Gate of Babylon, Museum of the Ancient Orient, Istanbul.
Copyright Emma Woods 2011.

I am writing this post at work. However, I'm not in the library, I'm in the Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) school office. Last month, my colleague and I started visiting the school office for two hours every Thursday afternoon. We do an hour each, talking to academics, answering their queries and updating them with relevant library news. The school office is the perfect place for this to take place as it's where the hot drinks machine is, so as academics come in to get their coffee in between lectures we can take the opportunity to start a dialogue. This week it's very quiet due to UCU industrial action, which is why I'm writing this post instead.

Even though it's still early days, I feel our regular presence here has already increased interest in the library. I'm hoping that this will continue and will strengthen our relationship with the department, leading to more requests for information skills sessions and better promotion of library resources to students. Some computing reading lists are alarmingly short and this means students don't see the need to come into the library or use the online resources until very late on in their studies. I hope to start encouraging academic staff to explore what we have of relevance to their modules and to update and extend their recommended reading.

I'll write another post in a few months to further reflect on how our visiting librarian scheme is going. In the meantime, I'd be very interested to hear from other librarians engaged in similar activities. Please comment below.

Latest Thing: Technorati

2011-03-07T12:46:00.003Z

Our latest 23 Things assignment is Technorati, an internet search engine for blogs. I'd looked at the site before but never really bothered exploring properly, so I'm happy that the 23 Things programme is allowing me the time to do this.

Inspired by all the World Book Night excitement over the weekend, the first thing I did was look at some of the top blogs for books. I was pleased to see that the top blog Novelr's most recent post was about my favourite author Margaret Atwood.

I then had a quick look at the Top 100 Link but couldn't see much that interested me so I quickly moved on to searching within the blogs. Continuing on last week's theme, I searched for Matt Damon. Yesterday afternoon, I went to see Inside Job, narrated by Matt, at the Ritzy in Brixton (my favourite London cinema). It's an excellent insight into the global financial crisis and shows that some of the people who caused the meltdown are still working for the US government. I commented to my friend that I thought Matt Damon was disappointed by Obama's performance so far and so it's quite appropriate that the first result in my Technorati search was Matt Damon Tells Piers Morgan He’s Disappointed By Barack Obama.

The next task was to sign up to Technorati and submit this blog. The signing up bit was simple enough but they needed me to include my claim code in a post before my blog could be verified. The original post included this but I've since removed it.

I finally received the claim complete notice two weeks after submitting it. This means any new posts I write will appear on Technorati.

23 Things: search engines and bookmarks

2011-02-17T20:20:00.002Z

It's two in one this time, as I've had to catch up with the programme.

Thing 9 was creating our own search engine using Rollyo. You'll notice that I've added my Rollyo search engine to the right. From here, you can search this blog, a selection of websites on Ancient Egypt, or the web. Feel free to try it out!

Thing 10 is tagging and folksonomies, specifically looking at delicious. I've used delicious in the past but didn't really take to it. In the spirit of 23 Things, I've had another look at my account. I saved some bookmarks this time last year, when looking at other University library blogs for inspiration when starting our subject blogs at Westminster. However, most of the bookmarked blogs hadn't been updated for ages, so I've deleted them. I saved some new bookmarks on Egyptology and (my other obsession) Matt Damon. You can see all my bookmarks at on my delicious page If you haven't seen the youtube clip of Matt slating Sarah Palin, I strongly suggest you do. Just one reason why he's such an amazing guy!

Adding Alt tags to pictures in Blogger

2011-02-15T17:06:00.000Z

As part of a team event yesterday for the Academic Liaison Librarians and IT trainers, I ran a session on blogs with some other colleagues. At the end of the session, we presented some awards for our subject blogs, which we started about a year ago. The first award was for accessibility. I used a helpful post from the American Foundation for the Blind to guide people as to what to look for. One of the criteria was alt tags and I'm afraid I wrongly misled people that these couldn't be used with Blogger - sorry!

The image above was one copied from my Flickr account and therefore already contained an alt tag from the title I'd given it. However, you can easily add or change an alt tag using the Edit HTML tab. You need to add alt="your alt tag name" into the image code. For example, for the picture above, the code is alt="Abu Simbel". Try inserting just before the border/class/height code. Hope this works!

On an unrelated point, I chose the image above not because of recent events in Egypt but because we were learning about Ramesses II in my Egyptology class last night. Abu Simbel is undoubtedly the most impressive of his temples. I am adding a cruise on Lake Nasser to my list of dream trips so I can visit again!

Thing #8: Being my own librarian

2011-02-01T16:20:00.001Z

In the eighteen months when I lived in my own flat and had space for two bookcases, I went into librarian overdrive and ordered my books not just in alphabetical order but also by type (fiction, travel, etc). Now I have barely space for one bookcase and most of my books are stored in boxes under the bed, so there is no order whatsoever! Maybe this is a good sign, as it shows I have better things to do with my time.

Anyway, for thing number 8 of Westminster's 23 Things Programme, we have been asked to create a personal library of our books using LibraryThing. As you may have noticed from my LibraryThing gadget on this blog, I have already done this. I mainly use it to record how many books I'm reading, as well as what type. As you can see, I've been reading far too many vampire romance novels recently! Due to my lack of book space, I tend to borrow books from my local library (Balham) or from friends, rather than buy them. Handily, LibraryThing allows you to tag books as read but unowned.

In the spirit of doing something new as part of 23 Things, I've finally got round to rating the books I've read. I still can't be bothered to write reviews of them though!

Finding my voice (the librarian's speech)

2011-01-27T18:55:00.000Z

I sometimes wonder if my librarian destiny wasn't largely due to the fact that I am softly spoken. When I gave presentations at school and university, I was always told to 'speak up a bit', with calls of 'we can't hear you at the back'. These early experiences of presenting haunt me to this day. When I chose the librarian career path, it was with a very naive view that speaking in front of groups of people wouldn't be a large part of my work, in fact probably wouldn't feature at all. I soon learnt how wrong I was!

My first major presentation was just after I qualified. I was asked by ARLIS to talk at their students and trainees day about my career so far. Just a simple 20 minute talk. Rather than freaking out, I asked my line manager if I could attend a presentation course at CILIP. This is still the most rewarding training I have ever received. In fact, I felt quite emotional by the end of the day, as I had broken down some barriers. My 20 minute ARLIS presentation went okay. My nerves were still there but I got a real buzz from the experience.

Since then, I've done many student inductions, and presented with colleagues at the University's annual Learning and Teaching Symposium. However, I still feel conscious about my quiet voice. Nowadays, the pressure feels somehow greater because of my chosen career. The voice in my head is saying 'this is what people expect of librarians - prove them wrong!'.

When I saw an internal course (run by Steve Creffield: http://www.evolve-now.co.uk/) advertised on voice projection, I was keen to sign up. It took place this afternoon (postponed from December). It was a very interactive course, involving some humming and oohing. We were encouraged to block our inner critical voice and relax. By repeating an introduction to a presentation (e.g. Good afternoon, my name is Emma. Today, I'm going to show you how to use library resources) with a fellow attendee, we practised different techniques e.g. vocal range, gestures, pauses, visualisation. Putting this all together at the end, we presented our lines to the whole group, who then gave feedback. Some attendees sat at the back of the room. After my first go, those at the back said they could hear me despite my soft voice but any background noise could easily drown me out. So I took a deep breath and really pushed the words out, which worked well. However, I doubt whether I could sustain that throughout a presentation, although I will give it a go next time the opportunity arises.

One good tip from the course which I'd like to share with readers is to visit http://www.ted.com/ and pick a presentation that inspires you. Watch it once, then a second time with the volume muted. Watch the presenter's body language, pick up on what they do well and try to incorporate some of those gestures into your next presentation.

Happy presenting!

Becoming a critical but constructive friend

2011-01-21T11:34:00.000Z

In 2010, I successfully applied for the post of Marketing Officer for the CILIP CSG Information Literacy Group (ILG). When I attended my first meeting in September, I was asked to become a reviewer for the Journal of Information Literacy (JIL). This sounded like an interesting opportunity but what did I know about reviewing journal articles? Very little! Thankfully, the ILG came to my rescue by running a workshop for journal reviewers at the University of Birmingham. Susie Andretta, the JIL's editor, was present to facilitate the day.

After introductions and setting some objectives, we had a look at some titles and abstracts, both of which are essential for grabbing the potential reader's attention. They are also a good first indication of whether or not an article is going to be appropriate for the journal in question. This is a good thing to bear in mind when writing for a journal.

The afternoon session was spent reviewing two sample articles. It's amazing what lively discussion can be generated by such an activity (although in a room full of librarians, perhaps it's not so surprising). The main temptation I need to avoid is correcting the language. However, this is the copy editor's role. As a reviewer, I am there to check that the content is appropriate for the JIL. One of the key questions is: would JIL readers find this interesting? Even if an article doesn't engage me, it may still be of interest to other readers.

One of my main concerns is that I might upset the author(s), especially knowing how much time people spend on writing an article for publication. However, no matter how long somebody's been writing for, or how many articles they've had published, they should still appreciate constructive feedback. The title of the workshop, "how to be a critical but constructive friend", sums this up nicely. You are not helping the author by being nice and saying it's all great, when there is always room for improvement.

This was the first ILG workshop I'd attended (I went to LILAC, also run by the ILG, last year). It was free, I learnt lots of useful things and an excellent lunch was provided - what more could you ask for? I'm now waiting with anticipation, rather than fear, for the next article I'm asked to review!

After the workshop, Susie Andretta emailed us with some useful vidoes:

Video on plagiarism

http://www.youtube.com/user/SusieAndretta#p/f/17/Mwbw9KF-ACY

Video on digital native:
http://www.youtube.com/user/SusieAndretta#p/f/22/7_zzPBbXjWs

Video on how to get your paper published:
http://creatingknowledge.blip.tv/file/4133552/

Thing #7 of Westminster's 23 Things - tag clouds

2011-01-17T16:04:00.001Z

Thing number 7 is tag clouds, specifically concentrating on Wordle The example to the right shows some of the words I associate with the 23 Things Programme.

My colleagues and I sometimes use Wordle to jazz up our drop in session leaflets. I've also used it in PowerPoint presentations, as something to talk around.

I've found it especially helpful for highlighting the most common words used in a piece of text. For example, putting in my blog URL generates this cloud:

This is the first time I've attempted to put the cloud into my blog and I'm rather disappointed with how small it is! However, if I try to enlarge the image, it makes the text blurry. Is there a way round this?

I then tried the same with Tagxedo, which I first heard about through the Festive 24 Things blog
I had to switch browsers for this, as it wouldn't work properly in Internet Explorer. Firefox came to the rescue though. Tagxedo also creates word clouds but can make them into different shapes, such as the cat below:

Thing #6 cont...

2010-12-14T10:17:00.001Z

As I enjoyed this latest 'thing' so much, I've been playing around with Big Huge Labs a bit more and, inspired by my colleague Ellie, have created this map of where I've visited in the world.

http://bighugelabs.com/map.php

Clearly, I have a lot more exploring to do!

Thing #6 - image generators

2010-12-13T15:03:00.002Z

Image generation is the latest task for Westminster's 23 Things programme. I've had great fun with this, really enjoyed creating festive images on the three sites.

Letterjames can be used to manipulate text into an image. Here's my example, using an image of Cologne Christmas Markets:

Big Huge Labs can be used to create lots of different products from blog headers and profile widgets to magazine covers and pop art posters using your images. The child in me came out when I saw a letter to Santa as an option :)

Cooltext.com can be used to create logos or button designs. So, sticking to the theme:

I could see how these sites could be useful for marketing purposes, as they provide a quick and simple way to generate interesting images. If I was to pick a favourite, I would probably go for Big Huge Labs, as it has the most potential for fun and creativity.

USTLG meeting - the role of libraries in the research process

2010-12-03T17:16:00.002Z

Keble College, Oxford.
Photo by Robert Hextall

On a cold November morning, I made the trip to Oxford to attend this USTLG meeting. The topic, supporting researchers, was very timely as I have recently delivered my first two library sessions for researchers at Westminster. These forms a compulsory part of their initial PhD. They has previously been delivered by just a few of my colleagues, but this year we all had the opportunity to get involved, which meant we could tailor the second session to individual schools. Although the feedback we received was generally very positive, I felt slightly out of my depth at times, and unsure about whether what we were telling them was really the most useful for their needs. Therefore, when I saw the USTLG meeting advertised, I was very keen to attend!

Slides from the meeting are available on the USTLG website. I've put some of my thoughts from the day below.

The first talk was from an academic, Prof. Richard Darton, which provided some useful insights, although not in the way I'd expected. He gave his perspective on how the librarian has evolved since the start of his academic career, from curator to supplier to web manager. He seemed to concentrate a bit too much on the physical collection managing aspect, rather than the other work we do e.g. training people how to locate and use information effectively.

Kimberley Hackett gave an overview and update on the Research Excellence Framework (REF).

Research metrics is quite a complex topic to talk about in 30 minutes but Anne Costigan explained it very well and made many of us realise that it's something we need to have good knowledge of when talking to researchers. This is certainly an FAQ and as information professionals we should be able to discuss this with confidence. Along with the well-known ISI metrics, useful tools mentioned were Researcher ID (to avoid disambiguation), Scopus, Scimago, CiteRank and MESUR.

Yvonne Nobis gave an interesting talk about finding the known unknowns and the unknown knowns. She was planning to show us the http://www.lib.cam.ac.uk/scienceportal/ portal but unfortunately there was no internet available. I've had a look at it since though and like the look of it.

After lunch, we heard the bibliometrics training that Cardiff Uni offers from Kate Bradbury. They have staff sessions on the training calendar, have arranged a lunchtime seminar programme, and even managed to secure a slot at the Computer Science away day. Kate advised that the best attendance comes from sessions arranged with the school.

Alexa Dugan from Wiley (who had kindly sponsored the excellent lunch!) spoke to us about Interdisciplinary Reviews (WIRES). The idea for these stemmed from an American academic who felt that articles in reference publications don't give the writers any real credit. Interdisciplinary Reviews aims to address this by being a sort of cross between a journal article and a reference work article, with the content being the key factor. Several titles are available already and more are due to be published next year. Access is free for two years, then you can subscribe.

The final session of the day, given by Katy Sidwell, was very interactive and practical, which went down very well. It focused on us becoming a part of the research process and made us consider where we currently catch researchers in this cycle and where we could do better. The new researcher development framework was mentioned and it was suggested that we should map library support to this.

The day ended with a tour of the Radcliffe Science Library, which had some beautiful interior architecture.

Thing #5 - Creative Commons

2010-11-22T16:54:00.002Z

After a bit of a break whilst first semester busyness took over, 23 Things is back! Thing 6 is to add a Creative Commons license to our blogs, so you will now find details of this at the bottom of the page. I wasn't sure which to go for but in the end I went for the more restrictive one. I may reconsider this at some later point in time. Generally, I think the Creative Commons is very useful.

Westminster 23 Things - thing #4 using photos, images and Flickr

2010-10-15T12:39:00.003+01:00

This week's task is to create a Flickr account. I've used Flickr to find images but never to share my own (I tend to use Facebook for sharing photos with friends and family). I already had a yahoo ID so it was very quick and simple to set up my account.

I've uploaded a few photos of my Nile Cruise holiday earlier this year. See them at http://www.flickr.com/photos/woodsemma For now, I've decided not to share them through a creative commons license.

I was inspired by a post on Twitter to join the Guardian's Green shoots Flickr group http://www.flickr.com/groups/guardiangreenshoots/ This provides me with a great excuse to go photo taking around Wandsworth Common tomorrow instead of writing an essay about Egypt and Nubia :)

Westminster 23 Things - #3 RSS feeds

2010-09-30T16:08:00.001+01:00

The third 'thing' in the 23 Things programme is RSS feeds. I'd already subscribed to some using Google Reader but this was an opportunity to review my selection, deleting and adding subscriptions as necessary. As part of this, I've subscribed to all the feeds from others at Westminster who are participating in 23 Things.

The task is to write a reflective blog post telling about an item of interest from your reader. The one I've chosen comes from Sheila Webber's Information Literacy weblog and concerns a survey about Informs and the Virtual Training Suite. As you may be aware, they will not be funded for much longer, and the survey explores options on alternative ways they could continue e.g. through subscription. I think the Virtual Training Suite is an excellent resource and it will be shame if it isn't updated or developed after next year.

You can see the blog post at http://information-literacy.blogspot.com/2010/09/informs-survey.html

You can complete the survey at http://www.snapsurveys.com/swh/surveylogin.asp?k=128524501923 (ends 6th Oct)

23 Things

2010-08-31T13:58:00.003+01:00

Westminster has recently launched 23 things, a way to get staff up to speed with web 2.0 (thing #2 is blogs, hence this post!).

The blog documenting the scheme is at http://academicliaison.wordpress.com/

Thing #1 was widgets.

Library (Wednes)Day in the Life

2010-07-29T10:29:00.002+01:00

Attended my summer task & finish group on promotional materials in the morning. It was held at one of our other sites and it was nice walking over there in the sunshine! After a discussion on the four things we are tasked with finishing by the end of August, I offered to take the lead on a calendar of promotional activity, the idea being that we target key messages at appropriate times through the academic year.

I updated both of my subject blogs with details of new ebooks we've added in the last few days. Hope somebody reads them!

Library (Tues)Day in the Life

2010-07-28T09:24:00.007+01:00

I spent most of the day with e-reading renewals and withdrawing items from behind the counter - not the most exciting tasks but necessary ones! Not sure why some of the things behind the counter hadn't been thrown away years ago - many old VHS tapes and items that hadn't been issued this millennium. Guess they were kept because we've had the space but this is soon to disappear when we get our new library counter next month. The new counter will give us minimal storage space, giving over more of the library entrance space to users, which can only be a good thing.

After work, I went to a meeting with my chartership mentee. This is the first time I've mentored and I really enjoy it. My mentee is from a different sector to me and it's interesting to hear about her work and the challenges that arise. We're approaching the final stages of the process now and she's hoping to submit towards the end of this year. If you're chartered, I'd definitely recommend training to be a CILIP mentor.

Library (Mon)Day in the Life

2010-07-26T16:30:00.006+01:00

Thanks to Twitter, this morning I found out about Library Day in the Life. Somehow I have managed to miss the first four rounds of this - must have been when I was living in a cave! (quite at apt description of my time working at CILT, the National Centre for Languages). Anyway, now I've finally cottoned on to it, I am going to tweet and blog away for the next five days. This will hopefully act as a good development opportunity, as well as providing some insight to anyone thinking about entering into the library world.

I started the week off with a 'love your libraries' tour. This is an initiative taking place at Westminster and involves going round the four site libraries (Regent, Marylebone, Harrow and Cavendish), critically assessing the space and considering how it can be improved. Today it was Cavendish's turn. This requires quite a bit of imagination as it's currently having a extra floor built. We therefore had to don a hard hat and fluorescent jacket (height of librarian fashion!) and head into the building site. It was quite nice to see what has been achieved from all the drilling and hammering that we've had to deal with throughout this year!

I then checked some postgraduate reading lists to see what needs ordering when the new budget for 2010/11 becomes available next month. I also sorted out some e-reading renewals and researched possible organisations a lecturer can donate his maths/engineering books to. Found Education Aid and the London Mathematical Society. Hope one of them can help him!

My first strike

2010-06-11T15:03:00.009+01:00

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

2010-06-04T14:26:00.001+01:00

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

Librarians as Teachers: the New Professionals?

2010-05-28T12:14:00.000+01:00

May has been full of inspirational events, the latest of which was held at the University of Warwick Library on Wednesday 26th.

Having first heard about the Librarians as Teachers event at LILAC back in March, I was very keen to attend. Events kind of overtook me though and in the end I was very fortunate to get a place, as when I originally tried to book it was full. On Monday morning, however, I received a very welcome email from Jess Humphreys (CDG West Midlands) asking me if I was still interested in attending. I jumped at the chance and on Tuesday evening got the train then a bus to my parents' house in Kenilworth. My parents were away on holiday but the cat was delighted to see me, so that was an added bonus to my rather impromtu trip!

It's been two and a half years since I moved to London and in that time I have grown used to cramming myself onto a train and it taking nearly an hour to get to work. Therefore, the ten minute bus journey from my parents to the University of Warwick felt a bit surreal - I even got a seat!

I know the University well and as a student often used the library during the holidays. It's about five years since I was last there and was very impressed by its transformation during that time. The event itself was held in the Teaching Grid, an extension to the Learning Grid.

The day began with Anthony Brewerton giving us a quick tour of the Teaching Grid, an "experimental teaching space". He talked about the library's values - information, support, community, the idea of space being a catalyst for change, librarians being equals to academics, the "ladder of loyalty" and the idea of the librarian in the lobby. He also showed us a video of advice about the library from students which is a great idea. Would love to get Westminster students to do something similar. Particularly interesting to hear their perspective on the library and the staff e.g. 'tutors in the library'.

Debbi Boden began her talk 'Evolution: do we buy into it?' with two highly amusing YouTube clips - Haunted Love and the Librarian Song - to demonstrate how librarians' image is still an issue. Librarians need teaching theory - they need to know the language to be credible with academics. Debbi requires her ALLs to take the PGCert. In a time when we have to develop new services with less money and staff, we can:

work with academics - library champions
learn to say 'no' (e.g. to last minute requests)
critical evaluation rather than database training
work more with web 2.0 tools
take advantage of the financial situation - how can we help our academics in a time of recession?

There is no room for complacency!

Also of note is that in the Researchers framework, IL is key component. Link to lifelong learning.

Debbi said librarians in HE should become fellows of the HEA. This topic was taken up by the third speaker, Jo Webb. The HEA promotes learning and teaching and provides support and recognition. They have recently changed policy so it is now harder for librarians to become fellows. The associate option is open to us though. Jo recommended looking at the professional standards to see what we should base teaching practice on and how we can engage students.

The PGCert was the pre-lunch talk by Sally Patalong. Sally admitted that the idea of teaching had for many years not held any appeal. However, taking the PGCert totally changed her attitude and has increased her confidence. It has lead to exciting new opportunities, such as becoming a teaching fellow in the library. She has worked with education developers and learning technologists, as well as in the academic writing centre. She recommends peer observation as an excellent way to improve your teaching practices, along with watching other people teach (not just librarians, lecturers too!) and getting feedback from students (post-its). Remember to keep evidence of what you're doing!

The lunch break gave me the opportunity to catch up with someone I did my MA Librarianship with, which was nice. I also met someone who's following me on Twitter.

The post-lunch slot was taken by Dr Geoff Walton and he kept us awake with some thinking exercises. For example, what are the essential ingredients for teaching? A lot of teaching is about risk taking. Do you agree or disagree that teaching IL without assessing is pointless? I stood towards the disagree side as sometimes it is simply not possible to include assessment but that doesn't mean what you teach is not having a positive effect on the learner.

Emma King gave a very interactive discussion on teaching spaces and learning design. In groups, we looked at two of the spaces within the teaching grid and comment on their potential use and engagement opportunities. Adapting strategies to spaces can be daunting.

A panel discussion rounded off the day. Matters raised included the issue that PGCerts are not specifically aimed at librarians, and the fact that there is a lack of teaching practice on CILIP accredited ILS courses.

All in all, a brilliant event, with excellent organisation and innovative use of space.

Some retrospective blogging required!

2010-05-27T16:25:00.000+01:00

Afetr attending many brilliant conferences and events recently, I've finally realised that I need a blog to keep track of it all, so here it is!