Day 5 of #libday6

I arrived at 8.45, having caught up on a few bits on the train.

At 9.30am Maryse and Malcolm from JISC RSC Eastern met with myself and the IT manager. They demonstrated a variety of their resources and discussed how to promote them to staff. They stayed for just over 2 and a half hours.

I then had 30 minutes to answer emails, deal with anything immediate and grab some lunch before heading over to my second meeting of the day. I had my first Freedom of Information related query so dealt with it immediately. I grabbed a sandwich to eat in the taxi.

I spent the afternoon at a local college with my counter-part. He had previously visited our LRC so it was my turn for a return visit. They are planning on starting to run Independent Learning Sessions as we do and are soon starting a trial. I spent quite a bit of my visit discussing how we run them, I am keen to be as supportive and helpful as I can so they can learn from what we have done. I really enjoy visiting other libraries and talking with other librarians.

Partnerships for HE in FE: the library perspective

UWE Bristol

26 November 2010

It has taken me so long to post this that I'm also going to comment on how I've acted upon the tips I got from the day.

The first Keynote Speaker Mark Stone (Associate Dean for Teaching and Learning, University of Plymouth Colleges) gave an external perspective. He asked, ‘are you a service or a cost centre?’ Libraries can be seen as a significant cost so we must be very clear about what we are offering. He advised looking at advocacy in terms of documentation and the ‘pub conversation’ set of snappy answers as to what we offer. Libraries can be seen as part of wider collection of services with IT etc - but that IT are often noisier and have better user stats. In order to fight those that we are competing with for budgets we must look at producing quality metrics, KPIs and stats to show our value.
I've produced an LRC newsletter for staff showing how the LRC's mission and purpose is unique to other departments (coloured boxes through the newsletter saying 'The LRC is...' and stating a purpose of the LRC) and solid stats (such as number of Independent Learning Sessions conducted) that show the value of the LRC.

He went on to advise that we think about how staff are teaching different levels in different ways and changing their hats, and that we look at how we manage what we offer and manage expectations. Mark also suggested that those who are working on the CPD curriculum aren’t speaking to libraries. He asked the very pertinent question: what will our library provision to HE students would look like post-£9k fees? Students will be expecting to have no extra costs on top of that in terms of books, printing, field trips.
I've been in two meetings with HE staff and am working with them to build up collections and services to support their needs.

Mark also notes that staff digital literacy is often poor, and that we need to work on this at an institutional level – not just as something for students.

Mark said that we must stick our foot in the door and not be passive – we must:
• Interfere
• Deliver value
• Seek initiatives
• Ask
• Offer
• Request information and ask awkward questions
• Lead
• Not seek permission – but assume that we are in the lead.
I’m pleased to say that I've been doing a lot of this already. We must get in there early on programme design meetings – he has seen good work on helping to design assessments also. A librarian from the University of Greenwich spoke about having a service level agreement with their partner colleges which includes that they must be on such committees – one of their partner colleges spoke up at this point as to how empowered they felt by this.

Roz Howard from Salford Uni spoke about their project on preparing students for the transition from FE to HE. She spoke about a compact agreement bridging the gap from FE to HE to help students become Independent Learners and how they have created a module for students which has been set up through ASLAN – an independent accreditation agency which counts towards UCAS points.
The module included:
• Information Literacy/Digital Skills
• Study Skills – reading and writing strategies
• Time management
• Financial management, cooking on a budget etc

This module is going to be delivered by library staff. It is being offered to Salford’s partner colleges, the students must come to Salford Uni afterwards.

The next talk was from Eleanor Johnson and Andy Henrys: West Cheshire and the University of Stafforshire: sharing good practice. They shared some interesting ideas including hosting a coffee morning to introduce teaching staff to ebrary. They run a Springboard programme which was initially post Level 3 but is now for many other students as part of developing employability. It covers: 1. Research Skills 2. Reflexive learning 3. Academic writing 4. Referencing.

In one of the breaks I had an interesting conversation with a librarian with a similar cohort to mine, we were both beginning to question whether we are doing the right thing for our Access and HE cohort. At my institute we have a fairly small cohort of Access and HE students and we work very closely with them which is great in that we get to know them, make them feel welcome (which is particularly important for those who have been out of education for some time) and it is interesting for us. I'm now wondering if we are offering too much support compared to what they will get when they go on to ARU? Are we almost doing them a disservice by being too kind and helpful?

City of Bristol’s Lee Bryant and Sue Caporn gave a fantastic talk on the research that they had done on ebook use. They used voting paddles as a way of engaging users in the talk which was so much better than just standing and reading the info out.

The last talk of the day was Collaborative Approaches between Subject Librarians and HE Tutors by Adrian Macey and Lisa Souch from Exeter College. It was very nice to see the value that academic staff take in the library – Lisa is a lecturer but came to a library conference to speak. Interesting ideas included taking new books to the staff room for a week before they are put in the LRC, attendance at HE validation meetings and attending graduation ceremony. They showed the research zone area of the library portal which was really innovative, they also had separate referencing guides for FE and HE. They also spoke of using Courselab free open source software for online tutorials which is something that I want to look into for our website redesign.

My week

I've been feeling a bit down the last few days. On Wednesday I had a job interview for a School Librarian position that I didn't get.
The interview itself was really interesting as it involved a student panel and running an activity with a group of Year 7 and 8 students. The aim of the activity was to get them talking about books, so I set a task of matching up a paragraph from inside a book with the synopsis on the back of the book, working in groups of 3. This worked well as it got them talking about why we have the back of book text, how representative it is of the book etc. However, I could see at 4 mins into the 15 mins time slot that they were almost finished. I thought on my feet and asked them to then decide on a book in their groups that they have all read and write a 'back of book' for it. We then fed back to the group and discussed whether it sold the book, whether it gave too much info, who else had read the book etc. I'm really pleased that the task went well, as a year ago I wouldn't have had the confidence to do it. I wouldn't describe myself as a natural in front of a class but with practise I'm getting better. On reflection, the interview was definitely a good experience and has given me the confidence to keep applying.

This week we've been short staffed so I'm still working on the Careers Books cataloguing. The Careers Advisor brought me a second crate this week that I wasn't expecting. I've been working on my Chartership PPDP this week as I wanted to submit a draft of it to my mentor by the middle of May.
I also had a big meeting about the Ghana links project with Senior Management and Teachers Without Borders, and I managed to attend our in-house British Sign Language course for the first time in a few months. We learnt countries this week, which I have studied before, so I had a strange moment of doing a Nazi salute in the workplace as we discussed the positive effects of political correctness on BSL!

Careers books cataloguing

I've got quite a nice project this week: cataloguing a delivery of new books for our Careers Adviser. It's nice to have the opportunity to engage with other departments and is always good to show willing and show the LRC's worth!
In doing this I've been looking at the Connexions Resource Centre Index which our Careers Department use. It is a fairly basic system made up of symbols which are stuck on the spine of the book (we have decided not to use Dewey as the collection is fairly small). The General Information section of the index includes 11 headings such as Travel and Transport, Relationships, Health and Work and Training. The Work and Training section is broken into 23 main job families which each have their own sticker. The way that they have classified jobs into each family is quite interesting. In case you're wondering, us librarians are under 'Languages, Information and Culture'.

In other cross-department collaborations, last week I was invited to see the BTEC Business Studies students market research presentations as some students had done their projects on the LRC. It was really interesting to hear their take on things and one student in particular had some useful points. As she is one of our Student Assistants she may have had inside information but I still told her teacher how impressed I was. On the plus side, the main finding was that we need more computers, which we had already ordered.

P.S. I know it's been a while since my last post. I've not been slacking, I've been stuck in Australia due to the volcanic ash. More about that later..