LILAC day one: introduction and first keynote

This was my second time attending LILAC. When I went to Limerick in 2010, it was less than six months after I had reentered academic librarianship, after a 2 year stint as Librarian of CILT, the National Centre for Languages. I therefore felt a bit out of the loop and didn't really know anyone there. It's such a friendly conference though that I soon got chatting to people. I was so inspired that after attending I successfully applied for the role of marketing officer for the CILIP CSG Information Literacy Group (who organise LILAC). Unfortunately, last year's LILAC clashed with a trip to Barcelona. I was therefore really keen to attend this year and was over the moon when my manager gave me and my colleague Ida the go ahead.

The setting for LILAC 2012: the Saltire Centre, Glasgow Caledonian University

LILAC has become such a prestigious event both at home and abroad that it is able to attract impressive keynote speakers. To begin the conference was Megan Oakleaf, the "Meryl Streep of the library world" (due to the number of awards she has won). You can visit Megan's website at www.meganoakleaf.info

Megan Oakleaf

Source: lilacconference.com via CILIP CSG on Pinterest

The title of Megan's presentation was Playing the ACE: assessing, communicating and expanding the institutional impact of IL. Megan said she came up with this concept whilst in Las Vegas. Megan talked about the ACRL 2010 report on the value of academic libraries www.acrl.org/value As she put it, it's about moving from thinking about the stuff to considering what people do with the stuff. In other words, its impact and the return on investment. We should be asking ourselves "How do we impact our institutional mission?" and we need to be collecting data and evidence to prove this. Some ideas:

• Assessing IL - define and assess Learning Outcomes in an institutional or employability context.
• Develop systems to collect data on individual library user behaviour
• Who is using presentation/study rooms? Connect to other data.
• Record and increase library impact on student enrollment.

Libraries have been show to be the 2nd most impactful facilities for student admission decisions. Why is this? We need to know!

Useful related research can be found in this post by Megan http://www.acrl.ala.org/value/?p=144 Other research at Wisconsin showed that after the 1st year, library instruction impacts Grade Point Average at graduation. However, another recent study at Minnesota highlights that data doesn't always say what you want it to, as student performance decreased after library instruction.

In order to demonstrate and develop library impact on student learning, Megan has devised an instruction impact map, first introduced in Library Quarterly, 2011, 81 (1), which you can view at http://meganoakleaf.info/libraryimpactmap.pdf 

Some questions / points to consider:

• Do students transfer skills to other contexts?
• Student experience. For them it's all the same - library, finance, etc. Making connections and focusing on building relationships is therefore important so they know what we do.
• Retention - do we help students stay?
• One way to help employability is to promote obtaining company profiles for interviews from our databases.
• Tell your library's value story by highlighting things that relate to student learning, retention, etc.
• Make sure what you're doing matters. Determine what is less important. 
• Assessment - need to see sample of student work. Should be central to pedagogy.  See Megan's article “Writing Information Literacy Assessment Plans: A Guide to Best Practice.” Communications in Information Literacy 3, no. 2 (2010): 80-90. Also see www.railsontrack.info
• A book recommended by Megan was Understanding by design by Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe. 
• No use just demonstrating how to ride a bike, students need to have a go themselves to learn effectively.

Library training rooms

On 28^th March 2012, I posted a message to LIS-INFOLITERACY to ask for information on library training areas. I received 26 replies. Below is a summary of the responses.

Average number of library training rooms: 1 - 2

Average capacity: 24

Percentage of rooms with:

• flexible furniture: 11%

• fixed PCs: 77%

• laptops: 9%

• smartboard / interactive whiteboard: 34%

• projector: 55%

Wishlist items included smartboards, more space, better ventilation, movable furniture and a camera to record sessions.

Some pictures can be viewed at:

http://libweb.surrey.ac.uk/library/cjg/floor1.htm (click on "IT Room 1" and "IT Room 2")

http://www.brookes.ac.uk/library/media/tour9.html 

 

Open Access event at the British Academy

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
• Steve Hitchcock's ongoing bibliography: The effect of open access and downloads ('hits') on citation impact: a bibliography of studies