Teaching skills for librarians.

Last week, the CDG East of England Group hosted an afternoon of presentations and workshops at Cambridge University Library, on the topic of Teaching Skills for Librarians.  I found it both enjoyable and really useful, so - this is going to be a long blog post! 

It may not always be obvious, but teaching is an integral part of many library roles. Every time we interact with library users or create spaces and resources that support learning and personal development, we're teaching. Many of us also teach in more formal sessions: whether it's as embedded librarian teaching colleagues how information management can transform their project, a formal class on referencing methods or information literacy skills, or basic orientation sessions for new students, we're teaching.

That said, teaching skills weren't on the curriculum when I went to library school, and I'm honestly not sure when I switched from thinking of library orientation sessions as "presentations" and student's asking about how to research their assignments as "reference interviews" to thinking about both of those sorts of interactions as teaching, but somewhere in the past mumble mumble years, that change happened. "Teaching" is often the frame I use now, and it's a skill set I'm always looking to improve.

Boxes of books

It's Climate Week this week, as well as my students' Break Week, which gives me both time to finish boxing up a batch of books for BetterWorld Books, and a moment to reflect on how that partnership has worked out over the past couple of years.

I hate the idea of things going to waste, but de-selection is as important as selection in managing any collection, so there are always going to be books going out as well as coming in.

Way-back-when, dealing with de-selected stock took up far too much of my time - I was sorting stock for it's suitability for three different charity shops, coordinating deliveries and collections to get the stock over there, stripping covers to make 'dead' books fit for paper recycling, and then there was this whole shelf of books that I was going to get around to selling to raise money to put back into the collection "someday"...

Our arrangement with BetterWorld Books put an end to all that, and over the past couple of years the stock we've sent to them, rather than to landfill, has (according to the figures they just sent me):

• Saved 40 trees 
• Saved 5 metres cubed of landfill space 
• Saved over 8,900 litres of water 
• Saved almost 8,250 Kwh of electricity 
• Saved over 1600 Kg of greenhouse gases 

Not bad, for a service that's also saving me untold amounts of time and hassle, and generating income to keep our Travel section up to date!

Honestly, I can't quite imagine how I'd have handled the heavy stock weed and simultaneous library move last summer without being able to just seal up the boxes and send them on their way.

BetterWorld Books was started by three Notre Dame students, and it's a nice thought that we're doing our part from Notre Dame's London program.

* Photo by nofi, used under Creative Commons, with thanks.

Day in the life ... #8

It's Round #8 of the 'Day in the life of librarians' project, and I am still a solo librarian in a small academic library. It's week 3 of the semester, and fairly quiet - a chance to draw breath after the hectic preparations for and start of the semester.

- First thing - pick up the post (newspapers still haven't arrived) and do a quick walk through of the library, checking that all's as it should be. It's Wednesday, so I also need to re-set the catalogue and self-check machines, after their weekly maintenance shut down.

- check to-do list, voicemail, and email. Send a few quick emails to take care of things that can be taken care of in a few lines.

- collect and return the library items that were dropped back after I left yesterday.

- hunt down a full citation for an article that a faculty member wants added to their class e-reserve, and pass the request over to my colleagues on campus.

- Open the post, and process the one book that arrived this morning - and find where I made a mistake earlier this week. Two books with the same main title, same editor, but different sub titles, and I crossed the wires. Oops. Fortunately it's an easy enough fix, and they're both reference books that won't be needed until later in the semester, so it won't have caused anyone any problems, but still - oops. Having the subtitle field added to all the reports and screen which display title is on my wishlist, and this reminds me why!

- Phone the director of one of our summer programs to check a couple of details, and then settle down to a solid batch of preparations for that program. They won't be here until May, but the turn over is tight, and the program itself jam-packed, so being prepared is absolutely key! I emailed the faculty teaching on it earlier in the week, and most of them have got back to me with their preliminary requests. Set up budget lines to track expenditure, and compile a spreadsheet of the textbooks they'll need, to price up and decide what we can provide through our Textbook Loan program, and what students will need to buy.

- Run over to The London Library, to collect a book on behalf of a student who wants to get a head start on a research project (this is our local ILL service - they are a fabulous resource to be able to pull on, and lovely people to work with.)

- Pick up the days' newspapers, which have finally arrived, and put them out in the library - just in time for the student's lunch break.

- Discover that the two self-check stations weren't powered back up after they were PAT tested earlier. Fix.

- Answer a couple of student questions - London related rather than research related, but that's good too.

- Chat to a pair of students about their travel plans for spring break, and how they might find information and decide on an itinerary.

- Continue working on an annotated bibliography for a history class, which leads to ordering a couple of books to fill some gaps where the external libraries our students have access to don't.

- lunch time. I'm reading a novel to review for Whichbook at the moment.

- Back to the bibliography - it's fairly labour intensive, but it's a worthwhile investment as it both makes it easier for the students to find their way through our patchwork of provision, and enables me to be ahead of their needs in terms of adding to our own collection.

- Walk a student through using our self-check system. One of the nice things about my new office is that it's much easier for students to come and tell me if they're unsure about something!

- Today is the first quiet day I've had this year, so I'm taking the opportunity to blitz a couple of admin-type jobs that have got a bit behind through the busy start of semester. One was re-labelling and officially moving a stack of books from the Reference section back on to the open shelves, which reflects the changes in courses on offer. I focussed on getting the necessary books *on* to the Reference shelves before the start of semester, so it's good to finally complete the other half of the job! The other was checking up on the status of older orders, and chasing the couple of titles that should have been here by now, and updating the expected dates on a couple of others. Academic publishing schedules can be somewhat flexible ;)

- Do a final walk through of the Library - I need to re-stock the printers tomorrow - and collect up and return the day's returns (few though they are)

- Set up my to-do list for the morning (key items: some testing on an updated version of Koha, our LMS, and some detailed admin checking on information about next Fall's courses.)

- Finish on time, with almost all of today's to-do list checked off. It's close enough to the start of semester that that still feels like something of a novelty.

Fun with numbers

The first day back at work seems like an excellent time to check in on the circulation stats from last semester.

We made a lot of changes last semester - the Fall group moved into new student accommodation, the building hours here at the classroom centre changed, and my library moved from the 1st floor to the 3rd, into a very different space - so it's almost impossible to attribute causation, but still interesting to look for patterns. (I'll be getting the results of our general student feedback surveys tomorrow, and the comments there may help me figure out some possible whys.)

Pure circulation numbers confirm that one of my fears about the library move did not come to pass. If the move the 3rd floor had made the new library 'out of sight, out of mind', or too much effort to visit, you would expect to see a drop in circulation figures. The stats say, that didn't happen. Last Spring was our highest ever circulation semester, both in raw numbers and in terms of items per student per teaching week, and we didn't hit those highs, but both measures were higher this past Fall than they were in Fall 2010. There's always more I can do with promotion, advertising, and making sure we have good resources available for people to borrow, but there's no collapse in circulation figures that would indicate that the move was a major problem on that front. (This matches my observations about the space in use throughout the semester, but it's nice to have some numbers to back them up!)

Mondays were, unsurprisingly, the busiest days for all sorts of transactions - loans, returns and renewals - and I wonder if the pattern of Tuesday's being the second highest loan day, but Wednesdays being the second highest returns day indicates a lot of people returning books after 6pm on Tuesdays, which then wouldn't get processed until the next day. There's a fairly solid band of loans going out over the weekends - hurray for self-check! Renewals get a spike on Sundays, which I'd guess is people getting ready for a new week of classes, and Thursdays are a popular day for dvd loans - something for the weekend, I wonder? Travel book check out is pretty even across the teaching week, but non-existent on weekends, which makes sense, as that's when the readers of travel books are doing their travel.

* Photo by Cara Photography, used under Creative Commons, with thanks.

Reflection

CILIP in London organised a pair of half-day training days a couple of weeks back, and I'm really glad to have been able to go - the afternoon session on copyright is the one that was the most obvious selling point to my boss - and did, indeed, confirm some things, clarify some other things, and lead to a flurry of action items on my to-do list, but the morning session on reflective practice was, I think, the one which has had the most impact.

It wasn't so much new news - although there was some of that - as hearing the needed thing at the right moment. At the risk of sounding like a hippie, of being re-enforced and replenished, and having the framework of the course and time outside of my everyday, to think about the question in the abstract as well as in the specific through the exercises.

I'm busy - we're all busy - and this year seems to have been a real exercise in stress-testing and load balancing, with major changes in buildings, processes, and personnel at work as well as everything that's going on in the wider world. I know, intellectually, that reflective practise and iterative improvement are powerful tools, but this session made it so concrete to me - the speakers' passion and kindness, and working the exercises - being given permission to spend five minutes to breathe and reflect and re-focus... I came back full of ideas and energy and enthusiasm, and have been making use of some of the framework questions as I've run into things since.

Also - to tie this back to CPD23, which I am still slowly, oh so slowly, working my way through - the idea of 'Communities of practice' resonates so much more strongly than that of 'networking'. Maybe it's just me, but 'networking' and 'contacts' seem cold, harsh, kind of slippery - a totally different focus than building and nurturing and growing a community, or group of overlapping communities, which in turn support and nurture us. That last - that makes sense to me.

The last CILIP in London event I went to was the networking evening they arranged for Thing #7, which was, I must admit, a total wash for me. I managed to put my foot firmly in mouth in front of two of the three speakers, and while I did give my cards to a couple of people who I got chatting with, never heard from them again. Getting together with a group of fellow professionals all interested in learning about the same topics seemed much more organic, and the personal nature of the Reflective Practise session in particular lent itself to getting to know people, so I feel a lot more confident following up with my fellow participants.

(Photo by Camille, used under Creative Commons with thanks)

Not a thing ...

Between the Facebook furore, and Avos' "upgrade" to Delicious which has essentially wiped out the carefully curated sets of useful open-web sources I'd assembled for my students, I'm not really feeling the cloud-based techno-joy this week!

(I *know* this is the risk we take when we commit our energy, our work, our words and pictures and communities to projects and products that will be bought and sold and monetised above our heads, but so often the opportunities are worth the risks, at least for a while.)

The Delicious thing could not have been more comically badly timed if they'd done it too us on purpose, though! The webstats say that the curated links master page isn't used that often, but, sure enough, Delicious manages to set all our links to private while it was busy loosing the tags, bundles and associated meta data, and I get two emails within a couple of hours from students who'd fallen into the newly created information pothole.

Those two students got a hand-picked list of resources (open web, subscription online, and physical) and hopefully the delay while I put the lists together didn't throw their plans too much. On the one hand, that's a better service: on the other, the hypothetical students who hit the dead links but *didn't* get in touch, have zilch.

Reviewing and re-thinking that curated-web sources section has been on my long range to do list for a while, waiting patiently in line behind my day-to-day job, and the One Big Thing project, and the slightly-more-urgent projects. It's just jumped up that list, somewhat. At least, reviewing the process has.

I'm not sure I want to invest the time it will take to pick an alternative and import my back-up file somewhere else until I've taken some time to review, and to think about how best my curating web resources might help my students find the information they need. Is this something I even need to do? What's the best way to do it with the tools I have now, vs the ones I had four or so years back when I started using Delicious because that was the best fit at the time?

The short term fix of just evaporating the links on our site, at least for the time being, is really tempting. If nothing else, to give myself time to reflect and review before I react.

* Photo by macieklew, used under Creative Commons, with thanks.

Small things

Small frustrations - seeing links to an interesting Google Search Education Webinar after the event.

The links all go to the Webinar page (because they were written before the event) - which dead-ends.

Would it be so hard to put the line "Presentation will be archived here" in the description, automatically, always, for every webinar, so that people don't dead-end?

I mean, I know I found that link to the archive in minutes, but I had to *assume* that there would be an archive somewhere to find it, and what do marketing people say about assume?

(Irony factor of mentally lecturing Google on making information easily findable - high. Yes, I know.)

It does prompt me - again - to keep trying to see our own online content without my background knowledge, to try and avoid leading people into similar dead ends on our, much smaller, scale.

And to find an hour to sit down and listen to the presentation.

CPD23 update and things#8 & #9

I could have predicted that I was going to fall off the CPD23 wagon during August, but I have managed to squeeze in various bits of progress, though, as well as keeping all the other balls I'm juggling up in the air.

For example, I've given Evernote (thing #9) a good solid test run over the past weeks, and it's currently fitting very neatly into my work flows. Specifically, I'm one of team of three keeping our program's Facebook page stocked with several-posts-a-day about free and interesting things going on in and around London. Being able to stockpile webpages and articles in Evernote as I find them - whether that's at home, at work, or out and about using my phone - has been a real boon.

(I already did the 'taking photos of notices to remind myself' thing, so having my photos turned into easier-to-find-again notes that I don't have to transliterate by hand is also easy win.) I've got in the habit of titling each 'note' in that notebook with the date in YYYYMMDD format, so a quick sort by title pulls the events-happening-soonest to the top, and also makes weeding old notes out very easy.

Two other organisational tools I wouldn't want to be without are spiral bound notebooks, because I've yet to find an electronic to-do list manager that works for me better than my paper process, and Google Calender (thing #8).

I can't really claim Google Calender as a CPD23 discovery, though, as it's been about three years since I gave up on paper diaries, and started layering up Google Calenders. Being able to toggle various 'layers' in and out is a fantastic tool for me, for planning my time, for scheduling both professionally and personally, and for keeping track of 'things to have in mind' but which don't warrant a firm scheduled slot on my main calendar, but which I want to be able to layer in easily when it's appropriate. To be honest, I wasn't particularly sold on keeping my calendar online until a friend of mine pointed out that you could have *multiple* calenders, and that was the killer feature for me.

We also started using Google Calenders for program calenders for use with the public and with students just over a year ago - all our students are on Google Apps for Education accounts, so making it easy for them to subscribe to our program events, and the calenders relevant to their specific classes seemed like an obvious step to take.

_________

As the new semester beds down and the teething difficulties with the new library get fixed, it's starting to look as though I might be able to draw breath, get back to blogging more regularly, and try and catch up with the program before it draws to a close. Here's hoping!

* Photo by Incurable Hippie, used under Creative Commons, with thanks.

Loads of links

This post is basically a links list - 100% of our students arrived with a laptop, tablet, or other personal computing device, which made me think about the sites I have at my fingers tips on mine.

These are my personal - I stress, personal - recommendations for the essential sites to bookmark, subscribe to, or otherwise have to hand for tackling London.


Getting Around

TfL - for the journey planner, and for the all-important disruption maps, especially when making weekend plans, when the engineering works kick into high gear.

GoogleMaps - obvious, but true. I still carry an A-Z sometimes, but now I have a smartphone...

WalkIt: London - my other go-to for walking directions, especially as the less busy and lower pollution choices often turns up good alternative routes through parks, or using the riverside.

What's On

Time Out : London - again, obvious, but for good reason! Tip: once you have searched for something - say, events in the category music, happening in the next 7 days - you'll be able to select 'Free' to limit the results, which is a great tool for turning up free activities and events.

Londonist - huge sprawling team-run blog on all things London. Subscribe for a steady flow of news, reviews, and what's-on posts.

London's not short of fantastic opportunities for free things to do, but I haven't found one single 'freebies' website that I could recommend as The One - I check in on a few, and generally do a little searching around to confirm events, particularly recurring events which may keep showing up in the listings long after the events themselves cease. http://www.freelondonevents.co.uk/ and Free London Listings are the two I use most.

I also connect directly with venues and organisations who host events I'm likely to be interested in - Twitter, Facebook and mailing lists bring me regular updates on things I might want to see and do. There are some suggestions for venues to try in the London on a Budget: Entertainment Edition post I wrote for the program blog here.

Meetup.com can be useful for tracking down people who share common interests, and if you're interested in photography, Flickr's London Meetup Group can be a good source of information. (Safety note - if you're going somewhere to meet up with people you don't know, take the usual precautions for your safety - take a friend, meet somewhere public, let people know where you're going and when you expect to be back, etc.)

News & Weather (online)


- BBC Weather for Central London
- BBC News
- The Guardian

Suggestions for essential sites I've missed welcome in the comments!

* Photo by , used under Creative Commons, with thanks.

SpringBen

Testing, testing,

The blog-silence can't entirely be put down to being super-busy - I also went on holiday for just over a week - but I have been ferociously busy, getting the new library space set up and ready to go. Yesterday was my first 12 hour day of the academic year, and the semester hasn't even begun yet! The early crunch point is my own fault, though, as I'd scheduled a library test day for today.

I might have had my doubts, as I worked late last night, that spending a whole afternoon on test-driving the new library might not be the best use of my time, but thanks to my six sixth-form-student volunteers I can say now that it was absolutely worth it. Worth it both in terms of the feedback I've gathered, and in terms of reminding me why all this matters - students. Spending time with students, even if they're not "my" students, is energising and rewarding.

The photo illustrating this post is those students very first impressions of the library space - I had them hit the post-it notes as soon as we walked into the space and sat down: "welcoming", "organised", "fresh", "open", "inviting", and my favourite "nice environment for learning". I also had them do some individual tasks, and a small group project, to test out how the library would work in use, and had them critique my library orientation talk, before and after using the library. They asked excellent questions, jumped on the roll-play tasks with enthusiasm, and came up with some really good suggestions.

It's a new space, with a different balance of advantages and problem areas, and I want to avoid "fighting the last war". Between their feedback, and what I picked up observing them, I think I know what my priorities are for the next week (signs, display, navigation), and what to watch out for during the semester. I suspect the old clash-point between silent and social study is going to continue to be an issue. The spaces are much more clearly defined, but the acoustics aren't helping, so developing a community expectation of quiet behaviour even in the non-silent spaces is still going to be an important goal. I'm hoping the other changes in the building might help, though - the proximity of study rooms for group work, and the more convenient computer classroom for social computing.

Suggestion-wise, there's a couple of things I'm definitely going to work into my orientation, and one larger idea that needs more conversation, but that I really hope comes together. My test-drivers were asking if there was any way they could come back, so obviously we've done something right!

Overall, a very productive afternoon indeed, and now I just need to send a few thank you notes to everyone involved in making it work; the test-drivers, their school, and my colleagues here.

Moving in

Once again, the list of things I want to blog about is getting longer and longer and the amount of actual blog posts tends towards zero. What can I say: it's been a busy couple of weeks with the Umbrella conference, and the building project at work moving on at speed, as well as the usual pre-semester work. I spent most of this week moving in to the new library space, and associated new office.

I'm saving photos of the library for a proper post when it's all done, but here's a sneak peek of the new LUP Librarians' office

It's quite a lot smaller than my old office, but more compact, more efficiently designed, better lit, and while I no longer have air-con, I do have an actual window. More to the point, it's in the perfect location relative to the new library. The team who did the renovations have done a really nice job: hard to believe this was a poky over-heated computer lab a few weeks ago!

It's not quite finished - the noticeboards are waiting to go up on the wall over the desk, and I'll be adding a couple of chairs for visitors - but it already feels like a good place to work. I'm really pleased with how it's come together. I hope it will feel open and welcoming to my students and faculty, too, as that's key to everything I plan to do out of the space!

Thing #3 again - cards

There was a certain amount of synchronisity with Jo's CPD23 Thing #3 post touching on business cards. I've never really had the need for them, but over the past couple of months there have been two or three occasions where they would have been really useful, and I'm off to Umbrella 2011 next week, so now's clearly the time.

Somewhere back in the mists of time I remember reading about a music fan who had made business cards out of old record sleeves (something akin to this idea, although these are not they). I remember wondering how well the idea would transfer to books at the time - if it would carry the same sort of messages, or if, given how strongly many people feel about the sanctity of the printed book, you'd just come across as an evil book murder.

One of the things I've been working on in recent weeks was a full stock weed, ahead of moving the library, and amongst the books I pulled off the shelves were a few paperbacks where the binding had simply collapsed. They were no longer of any use to anyone as books, so some stickers and guillotine-wielding later, I have these (see photos)

So - what do you think?

CPD23 things #3 and #4

Thing #3 is 'Consider your personal brand' and #4 is 'Current awareness - Twitter, RSS and Pushnote', and I'm considering them together, not as a short cut but because of the inter-relationships between the tools we use for both.

For example, I use Twitter, but not as part of my public profile. I have a locked personal account, which is a great source of incoming news and links, a really useful tool for current awareness, and is invaluable for bouncing ideas off people.

A few years ago, I also had a public Twitter account set up under a random pseudonym (an account which has long since been deleted) which I set up to learn on. Twitter was one of those things I really had to try on for a while to see how it could be useful. Setting up a test drive account, not tied to my "personal brand" in any way, gave me the freedom to experiment and learn by doing, without the worry that I'd somehow do something that would be inscribed forever on the permanent record of the internet.

I do occasionally feel a bit boxed in by the decision to keep Twitter personal rather than professional - at least in terms of what I'm posting, rather than reading - but at the moment the balance of costs and benefits still isn't pushing me to go public in full.

I have a lot of respect for the benefits of 'living in public' ala Jeff Jarvis , but I think pseudonymity and 'constructed publics' - like a locked Twitter account - give many of the advantages with a lower level of risk.

Searching for myself online showed both that the personalized search bubble issue isn't particularly affecting this search, and that I need to do a little work. The University biography page that's been anchored as the first result in my vanity searches for several years vanished in the re-vamp of the department's website at the start of the year, and it's new location, hidden inside my library's OPAC pages, doesn't have quite the same SEO juice.

This blog doesn't show up in general searches (only a couple of the people-specific search sites had made the connection), so I need to tweak the meta-data to better represent the fact that this is one of the spaces where I choose to be public-broadcast.

The name 'Miss Alice' is, I admit, firmly tied to my current post - one of my past students started calling me by the title, and it all went from there. It's one notch more formal than just 'Alice' but less so than 'Ms Tyrell', and I'm not faculty so the generic 'Prof' isn't appropriate. The name landed here, because I started the blog for a student audience, and my using it for library-related thoughts is a relatively new development.

My LinkedIn profile, which is now the first substantive thing you find when you search for "Alice Tyrell", isn't as inviting and informative as I'd like it to be. I've done a little tidying up, but not being able to re-order my 'current' positions to list my primary post above my two part time volunteer gigs without fudging the dates fairly spectacularly is ... frustrating.

I think it's relatively clear that I'm not any of the other Alice Tyrell's that show up in the search results, though - I didn't die in 1422, I'm not a thoroughbred horse, nor was I a vaudeville dancer in the 1920s.

thing #2 - blogs

The 600+ blogs listed on the CPD23's delicious list is, I admit, somewhat daunting when taken as a whole: my approach was to filter by tags and then browse through looking for names that caught my eye. Not exactly scientific, but it's better than giving in to choice paralysis, and has led me to some interesting blogs.

(Props to The Library Scull for drawing my attention to Reading's ThisIsMe project, which I'll be coming back to in Thing #3.)

Heading out to leave comments on a selection of new-to-me blogs did remind me just how much I loath captchas, though. I know why people use them, but the extra step is off-putting, and the accessibility issues are manifest. (I'm mildly dyslexic and sometimes really struggle with them; I know others find them essentially impossible.)

Also it really struck me how distancing having a comment referred for moderation can be. Again, I recognise why people choose that setting, but the past couple of hours reading did prompt me to go and check my Blogger settings.

I had moderation set only for posts over 14 days, and I've tweaked that up to 30 days. Most of the issues I've had with spam comments, both here and on the group blog I manage for work, have been on older posts, so that seems like a fair balance, especially once you add in Blogger's automatic spam comment filtering, which I've found pretty decent (only one false-positive to date).

* Man Blogging, after Gabriel Metsu, by Mike Licht, used under Creative Commons, with thanks.

CPD23 - late, but not absent.

I've been going backwards and forward on this for the past two, three weeks, but - late to the party, I know - I'm going to jump on the CPD23 (23 Things for Professional Development) bandwagon.

The timing's the issue. Both the summer schools that I'm supporting wrap up this week, so I'm end-of-semester busy and end-of-the-year tired. This is going to be a pretty intense summer, too: we start packing to move the whole library on Saturday, and launch the new library space in August. Not to mention that I've got the builders in at home, just to make sure that there's disruption on all sides.

On the other hand, maybe this is the ideal time to sign up to a project designed to keep evaluation and reflective practise front and centre? A reminder not to let the bigger picture slip out of view amongst all the busy?

So here I am - a solo librarian in a small academic library, serving 3 cohorts of undergraduate students each year, always looking for ways to improve the services that I can offer my students and my colleagues. Hi.