Up, Close and Personal

Andy Priestner, co-organiser with me for the symposium on Personalised services in HE makes a very good comment when challenging us in his recent blog post to think about just how personalised is 'personalised'.

Having spent some time at work these last two weeks talking about how we can improve our customer service - and talking incessantly at home about it - my husband quietly presented me with an article called 'Shopping with a smile? I'm not buying it'. Strapline comment - 'What works for Mary Portas does not necessarily work in a Poundshop in Preston.'

Hmmm - up, close and personal doesn't always work. So how do we work out what is helpful and beneficial and what isn't? In a week where I have been receiving detailed evaluation emails on the impact of our skills programme in the Library, I am realising that, from the students perspectives, there is merit in personalising our teaching, but that some generic teaching is useful if part of a package where both styles feature. It's getting the balance right that's important. In an HE environment where students clearly feel that they have a lot of choice about what they go to, the package has to appeal to them!

What interests me in the whole personalisation thing is the subliminal messages that we give that seem to have the most impact. I just received an email from a student who was clearly impressed that a member of staff had painted a picture for the library in order to brighten a particularly dull spot. This level of commitment by the staff to improving the environment in a very quiet unobtrusive way demonstrates the sort of subliminal 'personalisation' that I am sure exists in many libraries around the world.

I'm not saying that a welcome smile and good eye contact for our users at the issue desk isn't important, but perhaps we underestimate that what we instinctively do already is providing a personlised service?

Conferenced out....

Too much information (is that possible?)

Cleared the desk on Tuesday and cleared the brain, but the libraries@cambridge conference filled it up again.

Echo chamber - thought the idea very relevant but was fascinated by all the echo chamber activity around me as I listened. Ned made that point really when pointing out the conference was full of librarians but to make matters worse - Cambridge librarians!

Thinking about the echo chamber I wonder about taking it a step further. Perhaps we should wake up to the fact that there are smaller echo chambers that are embedded within the wider institutional library environment or the big echo chamber of which all librarians are a part. Perhaps the 'wheels within wheels' picture says something of what I mean.

I'm not entirely sure that we always realise that they are there but a bit of meerkat action soon detects possibilities!

For example take the 'Thing' that I had to give up using - my head just wanted to explode from all the information contained there! My brain can divide itself up into approximately 6 compartments at any one time, and the 'Thing' doubles that number in one screens-worth of information! You take my point?

But I digress......

I can see the point of breaking out of my own mini echo chamber into the big wide world, but I wonder if there are just as many issues and perhaps damage caused by the lack of movement between our little microcosms, our mini echo chambers. Do we have a responsibility to engage with others in different parts of the same library environment as well as with the big wide world ? Whose responsibility is it? Your echo chamber - or mine?

Story time

Recently read David J Brier and Vicky Kaye Lebbin (2004) 'Teaching information literacy using the short story', Reference Services Review, 32/4 pp 383-387.

I like the idea of stories helping us to retain information. I know that in this instance the article is referring to the imagined story or tale, but the point still fits well with one of my many theories of teaching - that a true 'story' or - yes if you want a more technical term - a case study - is better at making the point, and importantly allowing that point to have been retained to become effectively learnt, than I ever could with bullet points on a powerpoint (or just my voice droning on).

Personally I like a visual clue as well as the story. So well-illustrated children's story books were made for me.

Cue the start to an article that might make it beyond my computer:

Communities in the past were built on narrative, or stories. Children were taught about life, about skills, about who they were and how to behave through stories. Narrative engaged the mind, and fuelled the imagination. A story that one person tells one audience, and a different person to the same audience, might be presented differently but can still have the same impact and the same truths contained. Community Learning is all about using different people to tell the same story, to teach the same principles but from different viewpoints...........

More on space

Prompted by the discussion lunch today at MML (and a need to get a presentation on the go...) I went back to my survey results from a number of academics who have recently used our new IT training suite in the Library.


Key comment:

It seems important that the room, and what goes on in it, is part of the well-established learning environment that is the faculty library. By placing electronic resources alongside material texts, the former gain a kind of visibility and status. The proximity between electronic and print resources is not only very convenient for students and class leaders - it reflects a fact of 21c. research.

If I have academics promoting our space like this - then I'm happy.

Transformative? or merely informative?

An excellent topic for the journal discussion lunch tomorrow - Is the physical library redundant in the 21st Century?

From a related blog posting I enjoyed the following

"It is not the quantity of information available nor the ease at which it can be got that libraries should focus on, but rather the quality of the educational experience offered"

On a day when I debated the pitfalls of having too much to do and think about (and just how debilitating that was!) with a colleague in the queue at Marks and Spencers at lunchtime I wonder whether 'quality' is what we as librarians all too often fail at. We talk about, plan for, and in general aim to improve our stats - whether they are circulation or footfall or website/VLE/facebook/ebook hits. The SCONUL HE annual return encourages exactly this. But are we TRANSFORMING lives? Perhaps this sounds a bit over the top? Martin Lewis is keen to point out that numbers using the Sheffield Information Commons are increasing. I've been heard to say - oh great, footfall, book borrowing etc is up. But - I don't think that this is quite the point! The point is that the service we offer should be transformative, it should be all about impact. If the physical space of the library IS important then we should be seeing comments from students that say exactly that; we should be able to correlate degree results with use of the services - and so on. Perhaps....

I am in complete agreement with Mary Beard - on the need for time to slow down, to allow the thought processes to operate in another space with the resulting serendipitous spark of illumination on a particular matter. I shan't advocate that libraries work for me in the way they do for Mary, but I can vouch for the bike ride, the walk into town and back at lunchtime, the downtime effect of shelving a trolley load of books. Anything really that removes me from my desk and my normal place of work and gets me out into fresh air or just doing something that allows my brain to quietly jog along in the background. These are frequently my own eureka moments - and the only problem that I have is the inability to recall what they were when I get back to the desk! I'm still working on a solution......

Looking forward to the discussion.

Teaching Librarian

Having completed 4 hours of teaching to groups of varying sizes on Friday, of which only two of the sessions were repeat sessions, I thought a little reflection would not go amiss. This last week I have personally taught 3 grad sessions, given a lecture, and taught a guesstimate of 4 or 5 fresher sessions. Three other members of staff have, between them, done another 10-15 hours of teaching time, let alone the 30 odd induction tours of the Faculty Library in the previous week. This next week I am contemplating a mere 3 hours of teaching with 5 in the following week.

This year we have had fresher students going to their DoSs 'clamouring' for practical sessions. It could be that they were intrigued by the new IT Training suite with the computers that emerge out of the woodwork (so to speak) and then quietly disappear at the end of a session. It could be that our Induction Tours were so good that they were desperate to come back for more! We've had Part II's asking at the desk for more 'Quickstart for dissertation' sessions. I've had somewhere in the region of 40 grads signing up for Endnote courses. We've also had three academics booking our IT training suite for training their MPhil courses - no teaching for us but good ol' library promotion going on! It's fun. It's tiring. It's fascinating.

I'm looking forward to the evaluation results to see what we can change and tweak and do better next time. I'm looking forward to the Teaching for Librarians session in January run by Chris Powis so that we can think of different ways of communicating information to our users. I'm looking forward to our patrons becoming used to the fact that we are always offering options for helping them make better use of the resources and services that we have on offer.

If we can create a climate where students in Cambridge actively ask for and want to attend training from library staff.................then I will be a happy person.

oops - nearly forgot the wordle

.....................and we're done