Back story: I am a Learning Resource Centre Assistant in a sixth form of approx 900 students in north east London, in a team of 4: my boss, myself and two part time LRC Assistants. Approx half of our students are vocational and half are doing A’ Levels. At least 50 of our students are moderately to profoundly disabled and undertake Level 1 courses and classes in life skills.
Back in October 2009 during my first few weeks in my job we had a request from a student to become a helper in the LRC. As there wasn't such a scheme in place, we sent an All Students email to see if anyone else was interested. We were contacted by several students, who left their names with staff at the Circulation Desk. At this point my manager suggested that I take the project on as it would be good management experience for me.
I emailed the students who had expressed an interest and asked them to send me a paragraph within a week about why they wanted to be student assistants. About half sent me something by the deadline. Many students don’t check their college email account, and some thought that simply by showing an interest that they could just show up whenever they fancied to work! I felt a little guilty turning people away, but I wanted to make it clear that this was a proper work experience with a proper result (a certificate after 10 hours of volunteering). I emailed the successful applicants (7 in total) a training pack that I had created which included descriptions of the tasks they would be doing and exercises. The exercises included putting shelfmarks in the correct order and reflecting on customer service issues.
The tasks I assigned for the students were: shelving, strict shelf checking in the LRC and in the Study Centres, filling printers with paper, weeding newspapers over one month old, shredding one month old signing in sheets, labelling new items, helping put up or take down displays and other tasks as they came up.
I was very aware of Data Protection in assigning tasks. Our LMS system includes tabs with borrower information such as address and date of birth as well as loan history etc so I felt it was inappropriate to have students using the circulation system, although they did shadow us doing the basics but didn't see the full borrower record. I have a tendency to err on the side of caution, much more so than the rest of my team. I felt it was prudent not to have students working behind the Circulation Desk to make a clear line between the role of an LRC assistant and a student volunteer. This is for two reasons: firstly to keep the respect of the staff and students and secondly to ensure that higher powers don’t get the impression that the library could be run partly by volunteers and that we are expendable!
Setting tasks was challenging. I wanted to ensure that the students got some relevant experience and actually did some work that was of value to us. I wanted to make sure that students were safe and felt comfortable in what they were doing. I think I erred on the side of caution too much with this, at one point a student was strict shelf checking in an unsupervised study centre that I felt was becoming a bit raucous. I stuck my head in twice to check on her and she probably thought why is this batty librarian worrying about me?! I repeatedly told the student assistants that we really appreciate their hard work and that if for any reason they felt unsafe or uncomfortable with a task to let me know. I hope that I made them feel comfortable enough to have done so if they needed to. I was also aware of the health and safety of the overall space, and ensuring that my time spent with the student assistants wasn’t detracting from the overall service. There were also individual considerations, for example one student volunteer is a really pretty girl and I noticed that boys would come in to the library when they knew she was working!
For the first two weeks the student assistant scheme took up a lot of my time as I was training each of them individually. It was a challenge for me to communicate successfully with sixth form students who have never worked in a library before. Each library I've worked in has its own local terminology (e.g. shelfmark/pressmark/classmark) but a person with experience in a library will understand broadly what is required. I learnt never to say ‘Do you understand?’ as they will say ‘Yes’, but rather to ask a question to confirm their understanding such as ‘Which book out of these two goes next on the shelf?’ I learnt how important it was to explain not only what literally had to take place (e.g. explaining the physical act of a book move) but also to explain the context and motivation behind the book move (e.g. we’ve got lots of new books around 300-330 so we’ve added a bay of shelves here and need to move the whole collection round etc). I learnt by making mistakes: at one point my lack of clarity in explaining a book move ended up costing me half an hour as I corrected the mistake. At some points in these early stages of training and supervising the students I wondered if it was worth the time: whether it would be easier just to do these tasks myself than explain them to other people to do. I also had to get over my own slight feeling of embarrassment about telling people to do things as I had little management experience.
By week five I realised that my system of writing a rota for the assistants simply wasn’t working. It was too difficult to predict what exactly would need doing. Instead I created a chart of what tasks I would like completed over the week and as each student arrived I assigned tasks and ticked them off. This way I could respond to a particular request – such as if we’d had a complaint that one study centre was particularly messy then I could prioritise it. By this stage I was also becoming aware of individual preferences and abilities and worked with that as much as possible. I juggled my lunch breaks so that I would always be available.
A problem came in around this point: one of the part time LRC Assistants started to complain about the Student Assistants. She felt that they were strict shelf checking too quickly and thus couldn’t be doing it properly but didn’t have examples of the shelves being in the wrong order. I feel unwilling to go behind each student and check the shelves: if I’m going to do that then we might as well not bother having them! I did spot checks and couldn’t find any problems. I also had a little briefing with the student assistants on their first shift back after Christmas to check they could remember how to do all the tasks and give a little refresher. My colleague also complained that she didn’t have as much to do. This was a shame and I explained to her that being released from the ‘housekeeping’ tasks allowed us more time for engaging in more challenging projects. This slight tension has remained but I feel I have reassured the staff that the students aren’t taking their jobs and frankly I don’t know what more I can do. I also advised the staff that the student assistants can help them when they are particularly busy. They are hopefully now being seen as a help not a threat! At times I had to be a little bit creative in finding tasks for the students to do, especially as they were very speedy so a pile of labelling that I would expect to take them half an hour would be done in ten minutes. This was all a learning curve for me.
Around week seven I set a schedule to recruit the next round of student assistants. Firstly I spoke to all of the current assistants to ask if they wanted to continue beyond week ten. I got a positive response from all of them, but advised them to go away and think about their work load and let me know the following week. Two came back to me saying that they weren’t going to continue but the other four will carry on which is really nice. I must be doing something right!
I recruited two more student assistants by the same method of putting up posters and sending an All Students and asking students to contact me with a paragraph detailing why they want to work in the LRC and why they think they will be good at it. I was happy to recruit a student who had expressed interest in the first round but hadn’t sent in her paragraph and a student who had worked in her previous school’s library.
Training for the second round of student assistants was much easier and didn’t take up as much of my time. I think this was due to a combination of me being more confident and experienced and the fact that one student had library experience and the other’s best friend already was a student assistant so she would have explained a lot of it already.
The student assistants from the first round are now getting more challenging tasks where possible.
Conclusion
The sum total of all of this is that the LRC has benefitted from over 60 hours of shelving, strict shelf checking etc. Our entire collection and all four of the study centre are now strict shelf checked on a weekly basis which certainly wasn’t happening before. This in theory has freed up LRC Assistants to do over 60 hours stock promotion, displays and other projects to further our role within the college. The students have benefitted from work experience which should have been engaging and will look good on their UCAS form or on job applications.
The benefits for me have been immense in terms of my communication and management skills. I hope that learning from the mistakes I’ve made with this project will make me a great manager when the time comes.
Having the students assistants programme and my management experience from it in place allowed us to take on two work experience students at the very last minute which I have already blogged on.
Next steps: find out more about how other schools/colleges do their student assistant programmes and read up on management skills.
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