Conference keynote and patchwork

The thing I love about making anything using patchwork is that each project is unique; the choice of fabrics changes everything, the way it's finished can be yours alone. Of course, you can buy a kit, follow a pattern and use the fabric chosen for you, but so much of the pleasure of the craft is taken away by doing this.

Having very recently completed the top side of a quilt, and having to invent my own system for finishing it off, I was reminded of the keynote that a colleague, Andy Priestner , and I very recently gave in Denmark at the Winter meeting of the Danish Research Librarians Group. Not perhaps the most obvious of connections from all sorts of points of view!

Patchwork essentials: you need fabric, an idea of a pattern (perhaps), a means of sewing bits of fabric together
Keynote essentials: you need a speaker or two, a message, a means of presenting the message

Keynotes tend towards the same style. Perhaps about an hour, often one presenter, usually based on a poweropint presentation. Given that we had 105 minutes to fill we had to be a bit more inventive, or risk boredom. We had been asked to speak about some of the content in 'the book' so from one perspective we knew our stuff. It takes very little, actually, to get us on our favourite hobby-horse - ie 'boutique' strategies for managing our libraries! How to present it engagingly was more complex and meant that we needed to re-think what a keynote should look like. Activities were introduced, including an excellent quiz that Andy conducted, together with several opportunities for delegates to engage with neighbours when discussing a particular question or issue. We both took turns in speaking, so that the style of talking and presenting varied including using different styles of powerpoint slides. And so on....

The point being - it was fun re-inventing what a keynote could look and feel like. Just like it's fun (for me!) in creating a piece of patchwork. It all comes down to creativitiy, imagination and the sort of content that inspires you, as presenter or patchworker to want to continue to engage with it yourself.

It helps that our keynote audience were recpetive and cooperative with our endeavours and that we left Denmark having made a number of helpful connections. Just like it is when I meet another patchwork addict..........

New Year Delights!

Sometimes things are just beneath your nose and you never notice them. Other times they are obvious - because they are the perfect solution.

Here are a selection of resources and links that might just be the perfect solution to the current essay or dissertation or academic interest. Or they might be totally distracting........but worthy for all that!




1. Gorgeous apps!
(Oh and if you don't have an iPad, we now have one in the Library where you can try out any of these apps - and more)
British Library apps for smartphones and tablets:

• Treasures. This includes the the original version of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and medieval books
• Nineteenth Century books. This includes access to novels of the 18th and 19th Century eg Daniel Defoe's The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe and Fiction and Prose literature eg Frankenstein
• Royal Manuscripts. This includes illuminated medieval and Renaissance manuscripts from the BL's exhibition.
• ebook treasures. More information available here. 

TouchPress with Faber brought out the (now) well-known version of The Waste Land by T.S.Eliot but have recently produced an app for Shakespeare's Sonnets. These productions take the meaning of a 'book' to a new level including a wonderful variety of performances, commentary, notes and images.

Watch for Faber and Bloomsbury's new online resource for drama and if you want to request a trial contact Libby.

2. Fascinating news from the University Library.
Did you notice that during 2012 the UL's news diary had a number of literary items?

• Dame Margaret Drabble has deposited her literary archive at the UL
• Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy has invited ten of the best UK poets writing today to take part in an unprecedented series of residencies at the University of Cambridge
• Siegfried Sassoon's Poems for 'Mamsy'     

3. Digital Theatre Plus - no excuses for continuing to promote this resource. For login and password which you need either on or off campus email Libby and ask for it. Recently added to the list of full productions is Ibsen's A Doll's House.

Much more available other than productions - including documentaries, interviews and learning resources.




4. Time-saving devices and strategies.......always good to know about when putting your New year resolutions together! Some useful ones that we promote include:

• Zotero - for collecting references, creating bibliographies and citing works. Referencing - almost pain-free! Ask Libby or Niamh for more details. Look for the book by Jason Puckett in the catalogue and/or look at his website for more.
• Google Calendars - time management at its best, including links to when your books are due back in the Library (save yourself all those fines). Look here for instruction on setting up a feed. Just scroll down to 'Loans feeds'.

5. Coming new in 2013:
Oxford Scholarly Editions Online
Oxford Bibliographies Online: British and Irish Literature

ENJOY!

Seasonal mulling...

I love mulled wine and this is definitely the season for it. This last term has been a 'mulling' sort of term, with slightly less on my plate than the previous months and opportunities to think and strategise.  I've found that it's possible to drink quite a lot of mulled wine without ill-effect; on the other hand I think that there may have been an over-indulgence in thinking.

 

Ingredients for mulled wine: (according to BBC Good Food website)

• 1 bottle red wine (I never use my best wine - any old thing will do)
  

  You can't have mulled wine without the red wine -other ingredients may come and go but red wine is a pre-requisite. Vision is a pre-requisite for running a library, whatever the size. Unlike mulled wine any old thing simply won't do. But, just like mulled wine, the vision or strategy that you adopt may be very different to the one that your counterpart down the road adopts. Why? Because the population you serve is not the same as them. Why, for example, would you adopt the policies set up for an Engineering Library when you run an English Literature Library?
• 60g/2oz demerara sugar (a better flavour than white sugar I think)
  

  Sweetners do work a treat in mulled wine. One of the greatest sweetners in the workplace is communication. We all do it, we all fail at it, we all assume that we have used it, and we all need to think harder than ever about who, what, when, where and why in our communication efforts. Both with our colleagues and our users. 
• 1 cinnamon stick (the best ingredient ever)
  

  This really hits the spot in mulled wine. In fact anything with cinnamon in it has my vote. It just adds an indefinable something to mulled wine.  It's useful having staff with that indefinable something! It may not be something that you can define - there is just something that 'clicks'. It might be their personality or skills, or a whole host of other things. But life would be worse without them!
• grated nutmeg (mmmmm)
  

  Spices - best grated. I'm thinking 'grated nerves' at this point which perhaps isn't the most encouraging thought. Libraries at the moment can create stress and tension. We don't earn our income in the way that we would like to. We are allocated income and despite managing it as well as we can, and providing as much impact data as we can to prove our worth, we still find ourselves cut - both in resources and staffing. We dare not say that we have been spoilt in the past by the size of our workforce or the apparent never-ending financial resources. Whatever the situation, we are not enjoying the level of tension that the process of whittling down our services is creating.
• 1 orange, halved (nice big juicy orange is lovely)
  

  Fruit is good for you - you can get one of your five-a-day by drinking mulled wine! Work is good for us, but we really do need to take a closer look at what we do and why we do it. Which of our procedures are ones that we are just doing for the sake of it? Laura Woods wrote a great article in the recent Update and challenged readers to think about changing our procedures or shifting our processes to machinery ot other support workers. Lets critically evaluate what we do. It's good for us!
• 1 dried bay leaf
  

  Don't ususlly add this myself, but am willing to be persauded. Odd things do work in libraries - and sometimes the very best is the serendipitous application of 'a' to 'b' that suddenly works! I think of bay leaves as possibly a little serendipitous!
• 60ml/2fl oz sloe or damson gin (optional but very nice)
  

  One of the very hardest things to do at the moment when there is so much going on professionally (and never before has there been so many ways to tell people everything you are doing!) is to stand back and opt not to join the current bandwagons, either personally in your own CPD, or for your current workplace. We do have a tendency to argue that we must look at the next and best thing - for the sake of our users. But is it really? And how much are we really reflecting and evaluating what we look at. Perhaps there are some things that sometimes we need to say 'no' to. These might include the latest gimmick in social media, or it might be an invitation to do something, or it might even be deciding that your service does not need to blindly go down a particular alley but stay firmly middle of the road.

  
  

   

mullingpresent participle of mull (Verb)

Verb:

Think about (a fact, proposal, or request) deeply and at length: "she began to mull over the various possibilities". Warm (a beverage, esp. wine, beer, or cider) and add spices and sweetening to it     At any rate have a wonderful Christmas and New year vacation time

What can I possibly say....

...except that I'm delighted that the germ of an idea that Andy Priestner and I nattered about one sunny day has resulted (some three - or is it four? surely not!?) years later in a very attractive looking book. Andy was responsible for the jelly babies, from conference 'logo' to the book, and Ashgate did a great job of putting the jelly babies on the cover.

Thanks to all the wonderful contributors and also to those who helped in lots of little ways - all the staff at the English Faculty Library bore my sighing, my yee-haws and the regular meetings with a great deal of patience and supportive niceness!

It's an odd thing to write and edit a work like this, to hand it over to a publisher and then in effect move on, and only see the fruit of the workings some 6 months later. In one sense I feel that I have changed so much since the first article, and have the whole principle so ingrained in my way of working and thinking that I feel slightly incapable of getting excited about it. However, what I am very pleased about is the timing of the publication - just at the time that Cambridge is getting all worked up about affilitation of libraries, here is a call to look at library services from a different perspective. It is not about rejecting centralisation; it is not about insisting on devolution; it is above all about collaboration and cooperation, recognising what is beneficial about both systems and where the library user is CENTRAL to all that we do. Read it and see what you think............

Eg. Whin Sill

I like to learn by 'doing'. I refer you to stuff on experiential learning, constructivism or activist learning styles for more a professional understanding of the process. In the past I didn't understand my learning preferences as well as I do now and, in particular when I needed to revise and learn for an exam, I made use of photographic memory tools.  This was based on learning visual arrangements of words or keywords embedded in a very tight structural format with plenty of headings and sub headings etc, all designed to trigger the memory. The process was fairly lengthy but in effect I could regurgitate endless amounts of information during an exam. All well and good but not terribly inspiring!

I was/still am (underneath all that librarianish stuff) a Geographer. 

One of the characteristics of learning geographical information for exams is that you often end up with endless lists of egs of landscape features to learn (a photographic memory isn't a bad thing to have with this type of learning!). Desert eg. Sahara, Gobi, Mongolian. Volcanoes eg Etna, Mount St. Helen's. Etc. You get the point. Without boring you entirely  - but relevant for this post so do keep with me - one particular feature that I recall learning about is where molten magma seeps up towards the earth's surface from the centre of the the earth through faults and fissures, and solidifies. Where it solidifies along a horizontal fault line, and when it is exposed many 1000s of years later, you get what is called a 'sill'. Eg Whin Sill. I probably learnt this example at 14, 16, 18 and even at university.

A week or so ago I was in Northumberland determined to spend a day walking along Hadrian's Wall. (as well as 'doing' other touristy things)

Somewhat by chance I ended up following the wall along the top of - yes indeed - Whin Sill. I was rather boringly excited about this realising that I was in a landscape that I had rote learnt about. Finding that it actually existed, and there I was walking on it, was an experience; those walking with me suffered from my exuberance! The actual experience was so much better than just the photographic memory.

The visit to Whin Sill made me think about learning more generally. And how we ask our students to learn in the context of libraries!  What can we do to make the whole experience come alive for them, to the point where they leave the classroom excited (yes - why not?) and motivated? Have we ever been the participant in a session that is just like the ones we deliver ourselves and have we come away having had an 'experience' that we don't forget and where everything comes alive? Or, hand on heart, not....

The 'experience' is really important, and in so many instances it will be one that makes an impact because it hits the spot - it's personal to that students, it's timely, it's relevant, it makes a difference. However, it should also be one that is backed up with an opportunity to reflect on how the experience has impacted and supported learning, and it is this that makes a difference. Beaty (2003) summarises the potential and value of this by saying:  'the challenge for modem higher education is not simply to train the next generation of academics, it is rather to tie learning from experience inextricably to academic study and vice versa in a strong lifelong process of learning which develops the person and society'.

It strikes me that by ensuring that we consider both experience and reflection together we may be forced to re-examine what we do, how we do it, what impact it may have, and what the whole point of learning is. My rote learning of geographical features was semi-useful for an exam, but the subsequent experience will be far more memorable in the long run.



Beaty,'Supporting learning from Experience', In: H. Fry, S. Ketteridge, & S. Marshall (eds.) A Handbook for Teaching and Learning in Higher Education. London: Kogan Page

Cut to the quick

"To cut to the quick" literally means to trim (cut) a fingernail down to the nailbed, the living tissue that bleeds - the "quick" is the living flesh.

Today it was pointed out to me that Harvard is scrabbling around trying to rationalise its 73 libraries. On the one hand there was a slight sense of relief in me that it is not just the UK that is feeling the pinch in its academic libraries; on the other hand bemusement as I read about the process that they are undergoing. It was a bit of deja vu as, once again, communication skills seem in short supply, and it appears that the financial and administrative sectors of the university are of more importance in their considerations than their users or employees. I'm not overly convinced from what I have seen reported that the Harvard mangement know how to keep their employees on board.

I started wondering about what might happen in the forseeable future when Cambridge libraries have all been affiliated and denuded of experienced library staff - I am guessing in the name of sensible re-structuring and saving money for those all important e-journals. I wondered what might be the impact of this on the Quickstart for Part 1 dissertation session that Isla and I taught this afternoon.

1. I guess it couldn't possibly have been given using two members of staff (irrespective of the unique contribution each brought to the table)
2. I suppose it probably wouldn't have been worth doing as the room wasn't full and it might have been deemed a waste of time
3. A handout would have done - surely - after all they took away handouts summarising the key points (note I have been reading up about 'learning styles' and have understood that theorists and reflectors like stuff to take away with them...but on the other hand does doing away with a session like this help the activitists and pragmatists?)
4. Surely we could just pop an online tutorial up on CamTools and they could all do that?
5. The students would only have missed a vew vital things like the fact that MLA International Bibliography is very useful, that JSTOR is not the only store of online journals in the university, that managing your information, backing it up, making use of Zotero is sound advice, that Zetoc provided the life saver article for this week's essay, that they can now figure out when they have a journal title where to go to find print or online. Surely they could pick all this up somewhere else.......
6. No face-to-face interactions with us  - this will probably mean that they wouldn't want to ask us, so they would just muddle by, ask their friends, their supervisor, their DoS, their Mum, Google. That'll be ok won't it?

So - in the future what would happen to our Quickstart sessions - well, bottom line is I suspect that we couldn't possibly have run the session above. Which, to my mind is more than just a case of 'what a shame'! The impact of the Quickstart session we ran today on these students will be measured and I can guarantee that I will prove that it had a positive impact on their academic development. I cannot guarantee anything of the sort in the bright, shiny new future we face.

When all the libraries similar to ours are reduced in size, amalgamated with other libraries, manned by a pool of people who know nothing about the subject, and can no longer help the students in similar ways to our Quickstart session, then the combined impact on student learning will be terrifying. I wonder if both Cambridge and Harvard are forgetting, to their cost, the impact that library facilities (resources and services) have on their worldwide research and teaching status.

Impact - 'In God we trust - all others must bring data' (Megan Oakleaf, LILAC keynote)

Just when I have been chewing my finger nails down to the quick about how to prove how much impact our library service has, two rather startling (even impactful) things occurred.And one further related coincidence. I could say that it was all down to the excellent presentations at the recent LILAC conference , but it wasn't quite.

Impact 1. I was attracted to a blog post - and a related article on understanding what impact we have on learning which really made enormous sense to me. The gist of the article said that if we are trying to prove how impactful we are in libraries that one way of doing this is to consider the academic pinnacle of student achievement and consider whether the library, as resource and service, have had an impact on student learning goals. For me this means - forget information literacy, forget all the goals that WE make up and WE think the students need to know. Look instead at the actual learning aims and outcomes that our Faculty sets the students and find out from the students whether we have had any effect on them achieving those learning goals (that's what we're here for - right?).

Impact 2. I heard an excellent keynote at LILAC by Megan Oakleaf. (http://meganoakleaf.info/default.asp). In many ways what was said was not revolutionary but the way it was presented created a wake-up-call 'oh I get it' type of reaction in me. Essentially it chimed with the article I had just read (above). She said - quite forcibly - look at what the institutional goals are for our students and work out whether the library service is having any impact on those goals (again this to me says it is not OUR goals, or information literacy goals, but our institution's goals that matter - which is a really important distinction).

As put in her IFLA paper 2010:

 "Value is defined in terms of institutional, not library, goals. The purpose of this research is to help academic libraries demonstrate their value to the institutions in which they are embedded. Libraries need to identify institutional goals (e.g., increasing student retention and graduation rates; increasing student achievement; increasing faculty research output) in order to communicate value in terms that institutional administrators will appreciate." [Full article available here  http://www.ifla.org/files/hq/papers/ifla76/72-hinchliffe-en.pdf]

Megan had two tangible ways of visualising all this - firstly a Library impact map, (http://meganoakleaf.info/libraryimpactmap.pdf) and secondly a grid which I'll be using in staff meetings for working out whether we have sufficient evidence to support our beliefs that we support institutional goals. My regular harping on institutional mission seems a valid 'harping'. By providing the institution with evidence of our impact on THEIR goals we are demonstrating our importance and usefulness.

Coincidence no. 1. and impact 3. A book on quality of student learning in HE that I was dipping into had a word in the index that I would not have noticed, apart from the fact that it was mentioned in the article referred to in the blog post above. The authors talked of a student's 'capstone' experience which in my Faculty means the dissertation. It seemed a peculiar, though rather exciting coincidence.

So what? Well, I am shocked that I have not done this before, but I have finally have in post-it notes all around my desk reminders of what it is that the Faculty expect our students to have achieved in writing a dissertation (it's not that what we want them to learn is unimportant, it's just not the best way to go about proving our worth!!). Now I have this, I can explore ways of gathering evidence to prove that the Library service contributes and has an impact (ie without us they would not progress as they are expected to do so) on student learning. Starting from this perspective means that when the service comes under threat I have clear evidence that says without us student learning (Faculty goals) will be impacted negatively.