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.

Day 2 #libday6

What an absolutely appalling day. I had a headache by 10am.
The ALS department moved into the rooms in the back of the LRC. There are problems with keys that I am getting sorted out - the Estates Manager here is fantastic. As predicted, having an area containing 8 PCs shut off on our busiest day of the week meant that it was more or less bedlam in here so I spent most of the day on behaviour management, finding people computers and generally trying to make sure that the place is still running approximately how it should while dealing with a whole series of complaints and people getting upset about lack of resources. Also, I'm trying to reassure the LRC staff that the ALS department moving in won't be a problem, but I can understand their concerns. We have spent 6 months establishing the LRC and just as things start to settle down we've had another big change. Of course, with all of this going on everything of a mangement persuasion that I should be doing was sidelined.
On Tuesday afternoons I supervise two Independent Learning Session - one from Fashion and one from Art. Both groups worked well as usual.
Here's hoping that tomorrow will be a better day!

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.

Learning Resource Managers meeting for East of England FE colleges

Held at ACER on 19 November 2010

We started by each Learning Resource Centre Manager giving a brief report on what is happening in their college. The common themes were:

• restructuring/redundancies/doing more with less staff
• budget freezes
• increase in delivering/supervising classes
• promoting e-books and e-resources
• library refurbishments
• safeguarding and encouraging student to wear ID cards

It was really useful and reassuring to see that my experiences are mirrored by other LRC Managers and to discuss ideas and strategies both formally as a group and in small groups during tea and lunch.

Elaine Salter from the University of Westminster gave a talk about how they have established roving. It was interesting to hear how roving combats feelings of library anxiety in students. It was also interesting to hear the process of how roving was introduced to staff and how not all staff were required to rove, as some staff are better suited to back room tasks. I'd like to see how roving works in practice. I've heard of there being two seperate teams on the floor - one roving and one behaviour managing - signified by different coloured t-shirts. Unfortunately I don't have anything like the amount of staff to achieve this.

First day of term

We've been in the newly refurbished LRC for a week now. We're still ironing out little problems but we are just about there. My new part time member of staff has joined the team now which has allowed me to sort out rotas etc. Thankfully she is lovely and has lots of experience so she's been able to hit the ground running to some extent.

Last week was admin week so I had the chance to meet lots of the teaching staff as they called in to see how the refurb went. I've also been into two team meetings to promote the LRC, discuss the Independent Learning Sessions and the inductions. Speaking to a group of teachers is a bit nerve-wracking (as they are the experts at speaking to a group!) but I'm getting more comfortable with it.

The inductions have been fully planned and discussed with my team. The first sessions will be run tomorrow morning. The Independent Learning Sessions are also starting to take shape which is pleasing. They will begin running next Monday, I'm sure it'll be trial and error but the purpose and real value of them is becoming clearer which makes it easier to get teaching staff on board and to work out how to measure it.

It has all been somewhat overwhelming but exciting. I've had a lot to do but I'm making good progress and forming good relationships with other departments which is helping. That said, things can always be worse. I came in to college last Friday thinking 'my god, I've got so much to do, how will I cope?' and by lunchtime we were informed that Ofsted are coming in three weeks. So I've now got that to anticipate and prepare for.

I've been a bit negligent with Twitter and my RSS feeds while all this has been going on. I went back on today and am so impressed to see that in a week the need for action over the crisis in misrepresentation of public libraries has gone from a discussion to a campaign. I have so much respect for those who have taken the time to put together Voices for the Library. I'd love to get involved once I'm on the other side of Ofsted.

First Professional Role and A Good Week

I have good news to share. After three job interviews over the last two months since returning from Australia, I have now accepted my first professional role as LRC manager at an FE college in Cambridgeshire! I will be starting in early August. I'm not sure how this will impact my Chartership as my proposed hand in date is now looking a bit ambitious, especially as I'll have a bit of a commute until we are able to move house.
The college I'm moving to is going through a major library refurb this summer, in order to put in a lot more computers. From September there will be classes in the library at all times which will be supervised and motivated by LRC staff. This will be great in terms of promoting Information Skills by stealth! The pay off is that they've decided to put all of their books into rolling stacks to make space for these computers. I'm a little concerned that this may marginalise the use of the books, so I'm going to have to work hard and get creative to promote them. They have a very well developed VLE and e-book collection which is part of the reason they are doing this.
I'm really going to miss my current workplace. I really like the students and couldn't be happier with my manager. She's been a real mentor to me and I'll definitely be keeping in touch. But unfortunately the downside of working in a small school is that there are less opportunities for progression which is why I'm moving on.

The job interviews I had were really fun actually. I've delivered classes, done presentations and roleplays, and been interviewed by a student council who wanted to know what piece of cutlery I'd be and who I would be in Stars in their Eyes! (A spoon and Edith Piaf, for those curious).
All of the interviews were whole day events, where you spend a lot of time with the other candidates. This was interesting. At best I was meeting other professionals (I ended swapped email addresses with someone I was meant to be competing with!), at worst I saw the lousy side of human nature (another candidate trying to psyche me out with 'gosh aren't you young to be here?' comments).

This week I delivered two Information Skills lessons to AS English Literature classes as part of their progression to A2. It was for the module War and the Individual which was ideal as I read a lot of history and war fiction. It went really well and I'm pretty pleased with myself as my new job will involve a lot more working with classes than my current role. However, it made me realise how much I'm really going to miss some of the teachers and the strong links I've made with departments.

Today is BTEC hand in day, and I've spent quite a bit of time one-on-one with students helping them finish their work. The amount of cut and pasting is worrying. I wish there was more uptake from the departments for Information Skills sessions during the year. I feel like what I'm doing today is just making sure that they don't get done for plagiarism rather than giving them skills.

In other good news, my colleague that I've been tutoring who is doing the same MSc that I did has passed her second semester. I'm really happy for her as I know she was worried, and I hope that my efforts have helped. I'm quite jealous of her at the moment because her dissertation is really interesting.

CILIP Professional Futures and Newsnight

It's rubbish being so busy because I keep drafting blog posts and not finishing them and by the time I get back to them the 'latest debate' is a bit stale! Anyway, here's a few things that have been on my mind the last few weeks...

Last week I finally completed the CILIP Defining Our Professional Future Survey. I was a bit late doing it because I've been busy out and about defining my personal professional future (more of that soon).


What will the knowledge and information sector look like in 2020?I agree with most of what has already been blogged on the subject, specifically from Joeyanne and Bethan. I agree with Bethan's thoughts on increased convergence. As information professionals we are already converged, for example the convergence between subject specific knowledge and information skills. In my sector I am seeing more job descriptions that require not only a library qualification but also a teaching qualification, and ideally a careers guidance qualification. In terms of my professional development I look both at library organisations and education organisations (such as Institute for Learning), my professional reading reflects both of these things as does where I look at job vacancies.

On the whole I don't feel too convinced with CILIP's advocacy and representation of the profession and that really was my conclusion to the Big Conversation. The Newsnight business was concerning, especially when I read on Ned Potter's blog that CILIP were unable to send someone on to Newsnight at short notice. For me a big part of The Big Conversation, my chartership and my professional future is focussed around developing teaching and presentation skills, something that is daunting but I know that I must be able to get up and speak to a group of people. Going up against Paxman is nothing compared to putting yourself in front of a classful of disinterested 17 year olds! Anyway, I've come to the debate late so I won't say anymore but I hope that lessons have been learnt from it.

My own experiences of CILIP have been very positive. I loved Umbrella and feel quite passionate about being part of a professional body. That said, my colleague who is currently at library school is very negative about joining, as are much of her cohort. Maybe CILIP is getting a bit complacent about attracting members who are joining the profession especially as job descriptions get wider and they face steeper competition from other organisations (IFL, SLA, BCS etc).

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!