Going Google - five gmail things

My workplace has "gone Google" today - moving staff and faculty over to use the same Google services that our students have been using for several years.

Personally, as a Google girl, I've been looking forward to the move, but some of my colleagues have been a bit nervous in anticipation, and adjusting to any new work flow, even an improved one, is change, and change can be hard. (I automatically opened Outlook about a half-dozen times this morning, before I deleted the pinned icon, because that's where my work mail has lived for years, and it's going to take a few repetitions to re-program that automatic action as I think 'email', for one thing!)

I thought it might be a good moment for a blog post, though, so I can note down what I'm doing as I 'move in', in case that's of any use to anyone else, but also because once you're in to your customised version, it can be hard to remember what the default experience is, and I may need to refer back.

Thing #1 - Conversation view. I kind of love conversation view, but I know plenty of other people who loathe it. If that's you, it's probably the first thing you notice about gmail, hence Thing #1.  There is a setting to turn it off.

You can access the settings screen via the little 'daisy' in the top right of your mailbox, with a down arrow next to it. (I think it's a stylized cog, actually, but almost everyone I've had to talk through a gmail screen over the phone recognises it as a daisy.) Click on the down arrow, and choose 'settings'. You're looking for an option about half way down the first, 'general' settings tab - there's a radio button to toggle Conversation View on or off.  

Thing #2 - Inbox layouts. Actually, while we're on that settings page, the other things I tweaked on this page were:

•  Show "Send &Archive" button in reply - toggle to yes (default is hide). Once I have got auto-labelling working fluently, this becomes the most elegant way of 'finishing' an email - especially if you run (or aspire to) Inbox Zero. 
•  Set email signature (this didn't get brought through from our old system, so needs to be re-set.) 

Thing #2 - Inbox layouts. (Settings - Inbox tab) The default setting us one giant list of everything. I prefer 'Priority Inbox' which shuffles out a) new unread email that is marked as 'Important' (the auto-filtering takes a little bit of training, but once trained does a good job), then b) things you have starred then c) everything else. There are a number of other options, too - just Important and Everything Else, if you don't use stars, for example.

Thing #3 - Labs. (Settings - Labs tab) Labs are a number of extra tools that Gmail makes available as options, while deciding whether or not to incorporate them into the main gmail experience for everyone. There are some really useful little tricks in here. I turn on:

•  Canned Responses  (which I've always thought sound great, but had no use for in my personal mail)
•  Google Calendar gadget (to get a quick view of my day's appointments on the mail mail screen) 
• Mark as Read Button  (which just saves a few mouse clicks, but does so multiple times a day)
• Quote selected text (another tiny time saver)
• Smartlabels (although I may turn this back off - it's less obviously useful here than on my personal account) 
• Undo Send (which gives you a few seconds to go 'Nooooo!' and summon the email back from the ether. Go back to 'General' once you've saved the Labs changes to set the time period for this one.)
• Unread message icon (which I hate for my personal account, but suspect I will find useful for work.) 

There's also a 'Preview Pane' option here, for those who prefer that layout for reading their email.

Thing #4  Filters.  Filters are the quickest and most reliable way I know of to get auto-labelling to work well, where there are standard rules about how you want labels applied.  In my case, I typically want, say, all emails from the handful of people who I email with regularly about our LMS (and vanishingly rarely about anything else) to be labelled as "ND LMS", so I have set filters (Settings - Filters) with rules that email from Alice, Bob, and Cindi should be labelled "ND LMS" automatically, instead of my needing to manually do that each time an email comes in. (A little bit of work now, time savings every time and email comes in in the future.)  The easy way to slowly build these up over time is - every time you get an email that you think should be the basis of a filter, you can click on the arrow next to the reply icon, select 'filter messages like this', and set that up  (it defaults to the From address info - I have filters based on subject lines, and sig file text in my mix as well). I make pretty liberal use of the 'Always mark as important' filter action as well, which feeds back in to the way I have my inbox set up.

Thing #5 - Labels.  Gmail replaces Folders with Labels. For more recent stuff, this works very smoothly, but it does expose the mess that the previous systems 'after 3 months we automatically move things to deep storage' made of my record keeping!  The bulk of it, I'm just going to have to hide under the file tree, and trust to Google's search capabilities, because it isn't worth the time to re-set, but some things I really did need to fix up.

It's worth knowing that you can bulk change all the emails with a particular label by clicking once on the edge of the label name, and selecting edit. You can't directly merge labels  (so I can't change "Managed Folders ND LMS" into just "ND LMS"), but there is a work around. It is kind of fiddly and involved which is why I am only doing it for a minority of folders where I know I will regularly search by label, and need archive things to show up without having to remember to include both "ND LMS" and  "Managed Folders ND LMS" in my search criteria.  These instructions are pretty clear, although instead of their step 5, I'd insert a step 3.5 which would read  "If you have more messages under the label than can be displayed in a single screen, you will see the message "All 20 conversations on this page are selected. Select all conversations in [name of label]" - click on "Select all conversations" to do exactly that."  That saves the whole 'rinse and repeat' part of their instructions and will save you hours if you have a few hundred emails to re-label.  

The best laid plans ...

Just got back from a CILIP in London event on the topic "The best laid plans ...", which was essentially about not just dealing with change, but thriving on it, which is definitely relevant to me at the moment.

Ray Philips, from The King's Fund, was the speaker, telling stories about his experience leading their library through a whole raft of changes - a physical move, changing LMS, changes in management, which all sounds really familiar, now I think about it. (Two summers ago my big project was the move to a new LMS - Koha. Last summer it was the move into the new library space, and right now there's organizational re-structuring going on, and some significant staff turn over.)

It has been a remarkably affirming evening, in fact, talking with colleagues and listing to Ray, and remembering that - hang on - I am an agent of change! That's why, even though my job title hasn't changed in many years, my actual job is almost unrecognisable from when I started. The core of what I do - supporting teaching and learning - is constant, but the manifestation has changed an incredible amount. My goal is "better", through evolution, iteration, and inspiration, and change is pretty integral to all of those.

OK, so the LMS switch was change I sought, and the library move was change I was actively involved in, turning a potential negative into a positive outcome (a smaller library, but a better learning environment, plus space for more resources), whereas the current situation is more of the waiting for decisions from on high variety of change, but that doesn't automatically make it bad - and at the very least it will be different.

Change is not always positive, and even positive change can be exhausting and hard, but there are silver linings to be mined, and while there's life - and change is life - there's hope. (There, I've used my cliché allowance for the month!)

This evening's event did give me reason to pause and think about the small-scale change I'm involved in at the moment. One of our lecturers has revised his approach to his film class, and I'm supporting that by setting up a dedicated short loan dvd collection, which I've spent most of the last two days getting set up. Over the last couple of weeks I've taken several groups of students off on reflective photo walks, changing what we did and where we went each time. In the past month, I've changed how I presented at orientation, and the kind of orientation events I offered to both current cohorts of students, pulling on new ideas, and responding to the new realities and changes in the wider arrangements for those groups, and also had my LMS swap from an external hosting service to in-house support. So, in other words, change is everywhere, and in everything, and that's a good thing, because change is a pre-requisite for improvement.

I didn't come away from this evening's meeting with as many concrete new things to try out as I have from some of the other LIS things I've been to recently, but I have come away feeling energised and having had some of my core perspectives affirmed, so thank you, Ray and Team CILIP in London!

The only constant is change: let's try to make it change for the better.

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

A snapshot of my reading list

It's the last week of the current semester, so the past ten days have been super-busy, and the next few days will be similarly full-on, but today has been the eye of the storm, and so quiet I actually got to take my full lunch hour, and start to get caught up on my LIS blog reading!

Here's a quick snapshot of the posts and articles which most caught my eye today:

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Defining “Authentic Librarianship” | Peer to Peer Review | Rick Anderson  
"to me, authentic librarianship is motivated primarily by concern for those we serve as librarians, rather than by concern for our own agendas or preferences." 

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Library Instruction Outlines | Portland State University (pdf)

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My Five Blocks of Library Outreach: conceptualizing the engagement impulse | Brian Mathews
"That’s when you know you are on to something—when it becomes less about the library pushing it’s own ideas, but instead, evolves into collaborating with that user community for the benefit of all."

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‘I Need Some Help Over Here!’ | Brian Mathews 
"Shouldn’t our conversations always be about improving the user/student/instructor/researcher experience? Their success is our success, yes?" 

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A study of the information search behaviour of the millennial generation | Arthur Taylor
"The longitudinal study detailed in this paper evaluated the search behaviour of millennial generation students conducting information searches in a naturalistic environment... Research has provided little insight into how information behaviour differs on the Internet, specifically with the millennial generation, and whether or not previously identified models are appropriate. Results could provide the basis for improved information search process models which better reflect current technology and the generation of information seekers raised with this technology."
(there's something about the tone of this report that bothers me slightly, if I'm honest, but actual research on US undergraduate business students is not to be sneezed at. Although - data collected in 2007, report in 2012? Think of the impact of ipads, e-readers and the like, none of which were around when this data was collected.)

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How Do We Want Students to Feel About the Library? | Brian Mathews
"If we think about these life-defining chaotic moments then the first semester of college has to be one of those key times. Leaving home, moving away, losing friends, independence, academic stress, pressure to succeed, opportunities for fun and romance. It’s a swirl of commotion. And it’s a perfect time for establishing a relationship with the library."
(switch out "first semester of college" for "arriving in a foreign city" and it's like he just reached inside my head and articulated something that's been brewing away in there for a while, about our program, and about the library.)

***

Yes, that's quite a high concentration of Brian Mathews, but I seem to like the way he thinks!

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.

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.

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!

three quick things

The busy hasn't got any less busy, and the list of things I want to post about grows ever longer, so - squeezing in a couple of quick snippets:

Thing #1 - Apparently, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office Library uses - or maybe used - Library of Congress shelfmarks. I've been having a second-hand splurge recently on books for a course on the history of the British Empire, and have ended up with two of their weeded books, both from different sellers. Somehow it seems particularly apt to be studying the rise and fall of the empire from books with that provenance.

Thing #2 - this article on student opinions about libraries and librarians caught my eye today, not least because I spent last week combing through and considering feedback given by last semester's students. When even my colleagues say things like 'you're more than just a librarian' when I do things that are eminently the realm of a librarian, you have to conclude that the image issue our profession has is far from fixed! It seems strange to me that being student-focussed, friendly, welcoming, helpful, and pro-active is somehow seen as something other than 'librarian normal'. It's fantastic to be appreciated, but still. Is that really a noticeable deviation from their experienced norm? Especially when every single person I've ever talked to in the campus library has been both lovely and helpful!

Thing #2.5 - I am working through a faculty member's extended bibliography at the moment, to produce an annotated version for next semester's students (all the better to guide them to resources in both our own collection and those held by external libraries), Chasing down the article references does remind me that, however magnificent it is to have such a wealth of journal materials available electronically, it's still a long way from obvious and simple for students to know how to access them all.

Thing 2.5b - Senate House Library's new Encore search is noticeably impressive and has yet to put a foot wrong for me. (I've been giving it a good work out whilst working on that bibliography)

Thing #3 - I'm off to the British Library's Out of This World : Late at the Library tomorrow night, and really looking forward to it. I've been wanting to get to the exhibition, and this was the perfect opportunity.

a moment of gratitude

I have a whole list of things I want to come back and post about - it's been an intense few weeks - but today I played host to a colleague from another academic library considering Koha, to give them an on-the-ground tour of the system, and a review of our conversion process. I hope it was useful for them - it was certainly good for me to have a reason to sit down and review.

I suspect I may have come over a little evangelical, because there are so many things about Koha that I've come to depend on. I really don't think I could have handled my workload in recent weeks without the time savings that Koha gives me - more efficient work-flows, and more automated almost-everything than our old DIY system.

So here's today's 'thank you' list:

• - Z39.50 copy cataloguing (with heartfelt thanks to the Library of Congress, and my colleague on campus who helps me with tricky titles)
• - Adding multiple copies of a title with a couple of clicks (multiple copies in a fraction of the time, which is invaluable for our textbook loan stock)
• - 'Edit as new' record duplication, both for the 'the only difference between these editions is the year of publication' updates, and for juggling textbook records for mass decommissioning in combination with the 'Attach copy' function.
• - I know I've mentioned this before, but - lists. Really - being able to put together reading lists so simply has been a huge, huge boon.
• - Customisable reports (and the assistance of our support company!) - all the better for getting the exact answers I need without a lot of pen-and-paper number crunching.
• - an OPAC that actually works reliably, for me and for the students and faculty.
• - Circulation stats that could confirm in a couple of mouse clicks that there really were a lot more books returned on Friday than a usual last-Friday-of-the-semester, and that no, it wasn't just a subjective feeling.

Of course, there are down sides to having your LMS entirely online - one of the reasons last Friday was so busy was that our building had no net connection for much of the previous day, thanks to a clutzy JCB driver cutting a cable!

5 things

It's been a ferociously busy couple of weeks since the students got back from break, as the deadlines began to mass - for me as well as for them.

5 things I am grateful for:

1. - interesting questions. There's no better kind of busy than getting research requests that give me cause to think and learn and explore something from a different angle as I go. My to-read list has been getting longer all month.
2. - Koha's list feature, which makes putting together a convenient shelf list of material in the LUP library for someone a snap, and allows me to re-use them where that's appropriate.
3. - organisations that catalogue to content-page level, plus those that provide index page previews; all the better for ruling a potential book in or out.
4. - e-prints, institutional research repositories, open data and open research.
5. - the London Library team, who I've been visiting daily - occasionally twice-daily - and the ILL team on campus who have helped several students out of tight corners at short notice

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

Tiny tweaks

Little things - I happened to be walking past the PCs in the library just as a student was logging in several times yesterday. The home page is the OPAC, but an overwhelming majority of them logged the machine in, and immediately went to the address bar to type in the URL for their university webmail.

The OPAC already had a link to InsideND which is supposed to be everyone's initial point of contact, and which links through to webmail, but I generally believe in following the actual use path rather than the theoretical use-path, and that small random sample was pretty conclusive!

I've just added a link to student webmail to the OPAC navigation bar - I don't know how many students will notice, at this point in the semester, but at least it's there now, in addition to the InsideND link.

Day in the life ...

It's Round #6 of the 'Day in the life of librarians' project, and I am still a solo librarian in a small academic library. In many ways, today is a much more 'usual' day for me - students are here, classes in sessions, and Koha, the new LMS I mentioned in my last 'Days post, has been up and running for a full semester.

• - first thing: library set up - check on self-check (still logged in!), lights, newspapers, quick shelf tidy of the decimated London Focus and Travel collections.
• - clear the returns drop box.
• - check email on three accounts - lots of it as this weekend was the deadline for students to send me information about condition records! Skim for urgent messages, forward on those that need to be passed on to my colleagues, answer the most urgent couple.
• - Friday was the last day for students to change their class selections, so I've done a certain amount of swapping textbooks to match, and generally trying to make sure they have any resources they need to 'catch up' missed first classes.
• - process a couple of book requests for a lecturer - and take delivery of a kind donation from the same.
• - work through the emails about textbook condition notes, updating the notes in the system (this is so much easier to do in the new LMS!)
• - after speaking to a couple of students who'd missed the deadline, email all the students offering an extension. I would much rather be processing corrections now than bills later!
• - field questions about where to find specific books, where to find the local Post Office, hand out a few membership cards to our local public library, and walk several students through using our self-check station for the first time. It's radically less high-tech than the self-check stations they're used to on campus, but it does the job!
• - update online calendar, and take care of a list-serve mystery for a colleague.
• - work through the first half of a bibliography for one of our faculty members, annotating it to show where to find the resources, either here in our library or through one of our partner libraries.
• - brief meeting with one of our students who is pursuing an independent research project, followed by an email with info and links about gaining access to the archive resources they hope to use.

• - lunch hour - which involves doing a circuit to the London Library, to pick up an ILL book for a student, then to the supermarket to pick up supplies for tomorrow's Library Tea (and my lunch) before heading back to the office.
• - arrive back just in time to catch the break between class sessions, so am here to take several more rapid-fire questions, library related and not, deal with more textbook exchanging, and hand out a few more public library cards - all good.
• - wrap up the ILL administration, and notify the student that their book is available.
  
• - the next class session starts, quiet descends, and I get to eat my lunch (at my desk)
• - go back to that bibliography
• - divert for a few minutes to help someone who's come in to reception trying to find another US university's London program. Always nice to be able to help!
• - bibliography, continues, generating some book orders to balance the places where our partner libraries can't supply. Finished and sent off to lecturer
• - blog admin - posting today's entry (written by one of my colleagues, but needing illustration etc) and writing and setting up tomorrows. In an ideal world this is a job I'd do as a batch once a week, but - none of us live in an ideal world!
• - check email again, reply to a couple of students, and a mail from my boss, with an unexpected and positive proposal that inspires some brainstorming.
• - take care of the mail that's arrived over the weekend - a handful of new arrivals for the library.
• - add six new books to the catalogue, so they can go out onto the shelves. (Original cataloguing now takes longer, because the records are more detailed, but copy cataloguing in the new LMS is so much faster than in our old one the average comes out well ahead - I appreciate this fact often!)

• - welcome the return M, who's coming in to shelve.
• - take a second to check the circulation stats to confirm that yes! Items were checked out on Saturday, so the ongoing problem we've been having with the self check station timing out seems to be fixed. Email LMS support team to share the good news, and thank them for finding the fix!
• - transfer a report over to my e-reader, so I can read it on the way home ahead of a meeting tomorrow.
• - update my rolling to-do list, and prep tomorrow's 'must dos', so I can get a clean start in the morning.

Ideas and prizes

(Two ideas came together to form a third, so I'm going to try something, and if it's a giant flop I will pick myself up and carry on, because the only way to find out is to try ... Right - pep talk over.)

Idea one - a friend of mine mentioned these London treasure hunt / mystery maps, which look like a lot of fun, and something my students might be interested in.

Idea two - My friend and I were talking about London resolutions - mine is to do at least five London things/places over the next five months that I've never done before (I already have two things arranged, but that's for another post.)

Some of the ideas we came up with as we were talking were:

• - photo-a-day (which I did for two years, and might yet go back to, because it's a brilliant way of getting in the habit of both carrying a camera and really looking at what's around you.)
• - blogging at least (1/2/3) times a week (Tired of London's daily posting being quite the ambitious undertaking!)
• - writing a weekly long letter about your experiences
• - keeping a daily or near-daily diary
  
• - weekly video or audio recording (daily, if you had the kit and commitment?)

• visit each end of every tube line
• do something in each of London's 31 boroughs (+ the City)
• join a choir / team / class and make it to x% of rehearsals/services/games/etc
• compile a list of 100 things you thought were notably different or notably the same as your expectations
  
• shop at 10 different markets and talk with 2 different stall holders at each one
  
• work towards a 'big goal' event, like signing up for a distance race, or to perform at the Union Chapel with the Exmoor Singers
• the 'collect them all, live' sampler: go to at least one opera, classical music, non-classical music, ballet, and theatre performance outside of class trips.
• tour all the Parliament/Assembly buildings you get close to - (Houses of Parliament, Scottish Parliament, Welsh Assembly, Greater London Council, local councils - maybe a trip to Brussels?)

Idea three - what if I asked you - any of my students who read this - to comment with your suggestions for challenges and resolutions, and awarded a prize of the treasure-hunt-of your choice to the neatest suggestion I receive by the end of the month?

So let's try that. Comment here, or drop me an email if you'd rather keep your resolution private, and be in with a chance of winning a London treasure hunt.

NB - please feel free to comment, but the contest is only open to LUP students - sorry, wider internets.

* Photo by dr_john2005, used under Creative Commons, with thanks.

Experiments with textbooks

Today was something of an experiment, with a whole new way of handling Textbook Loan distribution, made possible by some changes to how registration is done. Instead of spending a whole day over the weekend checking out textbooks, we front-loaded the work, so by the time I headed off to the cinema last night the library was stacked with crates and boxes, full of 129 personalised bags of books (and loan phones) ready for each student to collect today.



As expected, the actual moment of handing over the bags was a little chaotic, but with some help from my colleagues we had the queue moving at a fair pace. I don't think anyone had to wait too long, and the only reason it took us 45 minutes to distribute several hundred books was because some groups of students had prior appointments to keep! (We'd set that up intentionally to break up the flow of people, and minimise waiting times.)

On the whole, I think the students got the 'work flow' - taking care of loaned books, phones, travel passes, and then optional purchased books: lots of business got taken care of, and it's a whole day of the orientation weekend freed up for the students - and me - to spend doing something more fun in London.

It also created plenty of opportunities to students to ask questions and start conversations informally with the whole team here, for them to be able to sit down and figure out the new phones, get connected to the wifi, and to coordinate with each other about what they were doing next - heading home, going out to dinner, and so on. A much gentler end to the first day than being in a lecture theatre and just being told 'OK - that's it - we're done'.

Obviously, it will take a few days for any problems to show themselves. So far, it's just that I managed to give one student one book for a class they're not taking, which was just a case of my eye slipping a line on a spreadsheet during the set-up. Fortunately the student was most forgiving, and at least it was an extra book, not a missing one.

I don't want to get too ahead of myself, especially without more feedback from students, but personally, I think I'd call the experiment at least a conditional success. (Any students reading this - feedback always welcome!)

Things I'd do differently if there's a next time:

• - something to confirm the original emails were received, be that a second email, notification in a prep session, or something else - a couple of people hadn't received that, which was less than ideal. Nothing that can't be solved, but something to improve on.
• - print out and include in the bags each students' complete textbook info (not just the loan list) for ease of reference for the student.
• - also, print a copy of my textbook masterlist, so I can answer queries on the fly without relying so much on memory.
  
• - include a demo phone pack in the demo book bag for the presentation (was in the plan, but the incoming flight's travel delays meant that didn't quite come together)
  
• - point out in the presentation a) the log-in info on the sheets and b) the student copy of the agreement. (also in the plan, but skipped in the attempt to shorten everything on the fly to mitigate the delayed start to the sessions. I can cover it in my sessions tomorrow, but the before-collection session would be better, I think.)
  

silver lining II

I've been working from home today (my house is currently being somewhat less waterproof than is generally considered desirable) which seems to have had the unexpected side effect of making me more visible/useful to my students.

I sent out an email this morning, to let people know that I'd be out of the office, which actually generated a good number of student research enquiries - far more than I'd usually get on a Friday in the library, which tends to be quite quiet at this point in the semester.

When I'm visible in the London Centre, I'm only visible to other people in the same space - online - no boundaries. I suspect at least one or two of the enquiries I answered today came from students who are travelling this weekend, and history would suggest they wouldn't have thought to email me without the prompt.

The vast majority of the resources I was locating for people were online-access, and many of the books were via ILL, which means they wouldn't be available until next week even if I'd been working out of the office, so I think that was a net win (plus, my house isn't fixed, but we're a stp closer, at least!)

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

Two unrelated things:

Thing #1 - our building's been 'under wraps' for a couple of months now, as they were cleaning its historic stone outsides. The LUP Library has two walls made almost entirely from windows, so having them swathed in scaffolding and white waterproof sheeting has made quite an impact on it's appearance.

They're finally unwrapping us, which is a slow process - we're into week two of the careful dismantling at the moment. There are two desks through in the stock room with a view out across the street - set in the two lit 1st floor windows of this photo, in fact. I don't think anyone used them during the whole summer program, or for the first few weeks of semester, but I can't help but notice that at least one of them's been in use most of the last week, since the wrapping came off. What a difference a view makes! Makes me wonder if there might be any way of re-arranging our furniture to make more use of the windows in the main room ...

Thing #2 My App Inventor invitation came through, which was a moment of geek-joy :D

It took me a little while to get set up, compared to my partner's plug 'n play experience, but once I'd finally downloaded the relevant drivers for my handset it really is as simple as it's made out to be.

I've only had time to work through two of the tutorials, but thus far everything makes sense. I'm thinking about some actually-useful-to-me tools I'd like to make - I just love the idea of being able to roll my own.

* Android photo by Svet, used under Creative Commons, with thanks.

it's alive!

The new semester has arrived; classes start Tuesday, and yesterday was the first serious load-test for the new library management system - textbook check out - 748 books to 130 students, and I think things went pretty smoothly. There were a couple of moments where my assistant was scanning barcodes faster than the system could process them, but the whole system was much more robust than it's predecessor, we didn't run into any data-conversion problems, and the whole process was faster.

I had scheduled longer slots for each batch of students, knowing that because we had books for the new core course, we'd be checking out about 260 more items than last semester, and seeing closer to 100% of the students (plus, I had to re-introduce some paperwork), but I think we could have got away with 30 minute blocks instead of 45 after all. Not a bad problem to have, really - having short breaks between groups meant that there was no chance for long lines to build up, and that I and my assistant got moments of downtime to grab a snack or a drink, which made the whole thing less exhausting than it can be.

I've just checked, and the overnight tweak that was to make sure all the due-dates for the textbooks match up with the end of semester has worked, so I think we're off to a reasonably solid start to the semester, at least as far as the LMS is concerned. Hurray!

There are still some loose ends to tie up, and feedback from students may lead us to undiscovered problems, but having the library records converted and accurate, the OPAC set up, the stock check done and processed, and the staff interface ready and working in time for the start of semester is a pretty good goal to hit!

Switching LMS was never going to be a small job, and we started about 6 weeks later than planned, so the last couple of weeks have been really intensive, and I'm really glad that it's a bank holiday tomorrow, to rest and recover so I can dive into the first week of classes with recharged batteries. (I know it's carnival weekend, but I must admit that the closest I'm going to get to the festivities is a cup of Notting Hill tea from YumChaa)

* Textbook photo by Marquette La, used under Creative Commons, with thanks.