Genuinely the coolest lanyard I've seen at a conference: it had the programme, wireless internet log-in, campus map, a QR code for the updated programme on the event wiki and a barcode giving access to the university library.

On Tuesday last week I went to my third (and the eighth overall) Mashed Library event at the University of Lincoln. It probably goes without re-saying that I love these events: both as an opportunity to expand my knowledge of what can be done with technologies in libraries and as a chance to network and swap ideas with like-minded information professionals.

Pancakes and Mash (named as it fell on Shrove Tuesday) kicked off with an opening keynote from Gary Green from Voices for the Library, talking about the role of social media and data in his team’s project to save public libraries in the UK. I won’t go into much detail here, but please do go and check out the website and at least read their guide to 10 things you need to know about library closures / campaigns.

This Mashed Library I wasn’t aiming to extend my techie skills, but instead focused on learning more about the kinds of events and projects others were using tech to support. Exposing your data with Nick Jackson and Alex Bilbie from Project Jerome was a great introduction to the kinds of challenges libraries face in using data. Key learning points from this session for me:

• Cultural change is required to truly seize open data in libraries: asking what companies will allow you to do with data when taking on new software and services
• Licensing of data is immensely complex, but it is worth trying to negotiate changes or exceptions to terms and conditions
• It’s easy to substitute data you’re not allowed to use (e.g. bought-in catalogue records) for data you can use (e.g. by matching data by ISBNs)
• It’s not unusual to find obtaining rights to use data which belongs to your own institution as complicated as using external data.

After lunch, I then went to see Alison McNab talking about De Montfort University Library’s Mash at Lunchtime events – see their blog at http://librarymashups.our.dmu.ac.uk/. Essentially this is a platform DMU is using to share knowledge about technology in libraries internally (within library and across the institution) and represents an interesting model for developing a technologically aware community. This was followed by an interesting chat led by Stephanie Taylor about the ways in which librarians and geeks can work together: although it soon grew clear that library-geeks talking to computer-geeks was a better analogy, as most of the communication challenges were two way!

Shot of the University of Lincoln Great Central Warehouse Library interior.

To finish, a few of us went to have a look around the interior of the Great Central Warehouse Library of the University of Lincoln. Rather appropriately for a Mashed Library event the architecture is a beautiful combination of old and new, with modern glass panels in amongst the old brickwork, and there’s some ambitious use of new technologies like information screens to convey library information and get feedback. Also on the techie side, I have to say that this conference was the best I’ve ever attended for wireless internet access and availability of power points for charging laptops: good work Lincoln and the organisers!

This event was great fun and has yet again extended my knowledge of what libraries can do with data and information. However, one thing that was discussed both at the (un)conference and on the associated Twitter feed, was that many of those attending weren’t funded by work (in my case a combination of different reasons meant I didn’t feel it was appropriate to ask). I encountered mixed feelings about this: the Mashed Library events in general always seem affordable for those living locally, which is great, but it’s also a shame that for most of us this kind of developmental work just isn’t central to our job descriptions. In tough economic times, however, perhaps that’s inevitable.

My reflections on Science Online London, an event looking at use of the web in science, can be found at http://uollibraryblog.wordpress.com/2010/09/05/science-online/ but I’ve also copied it in full below.

Science Online conference bag

Yesterday I visited Science Online London (the second day). It’s subtitle is ‘How is the web changing science?’ but it’s a general mishmash of people from various walks who share an enthusiasm for science and the web, talking about what they’re doing, and how they can share this enthusiasm.

For me, the breakout sessions were the most interesting portions, so I’ll summarise those briefly with some reflections on what I learnt from them.

Tracking researcher identity: pragmatics and ethics

The first session I attended was looking at an author ID system, ORCID. Such systems try to avoid confusion between academic authors with similar namesby assigning them a unique ID. I’m already signed up to Thomson Reuter’s ResearcherID system, to give an example. This is a more top down alternative to the bottom up approach where databases use algorithms to try to differentiate between different authors. I understand these algorithms are usually successful, but perhaps because of my limited academic output, I’ve found myself lumped in with other “K Fraser”s on more than one occasion.

ORCID aims to overcome some of the reluctance researchers have to sign up to proprietary author ID systems, and offer a central, open and transparent registry instead. The session came alive in the discussion of what such a system could do – such as create a far more nuanced record of who had contributed what to a paper than the traditional author order could capture – and the ethics behind it – should a researcher’s ID keep track of rebuttals of their work? There are a lot of positives to such a system from a librarian’s perspective (easier author search, simplified tracking down of academics’ papers for the institutional repository) so it was great to have a balanced discussion from a range of stakeholders.

What scientists want (and how to give it to them)

The second breakout session I attended was part of the ‘unconference’ (essentially some sessions which were crowdsourced from attendees the previous day). This session focused on ‘users’ (which turned out to be scientists). The most interesting bits for me were a discussion of what scientists wanted from technology (they want better publication and information gathering tools: librarians take note) and one slightly awkward but fascinating section in which a marketing specialist tried to get the scientists to identify the best way to market to them.

Obviously I had my ears open for the marketing questions, as sometimes it’s hard for the library to ‘sell’ services to academics. The main message was that scientists will come and look for information as and when they need it, and so when they do come looking, you’d better be i) easy to find and ii) prepared with a pitch and some examples of how great your services are. I’m currently mulling over ways to achieve these two things as a librarian: suggestions welcome!

The “broken publishing system”: whose responsibility is it?

The last session I attended was ostensibly a discussion of open access publishing, but centred mostly on impact factors, a way of recording how widely read journal are, at the title level. Discussions with Nancy, our library bibliometrician have already highlighted to me that judging a paper by which journal it’s in is a flawed idea, but I was surprised to hear that no one in the room – publishers included – thought they were useful or valid. Somehow impact factors have been seized as a key evaluation metric, and everyone is only interested in them to the extent that others are using them to evaluate their output!

All were agreed that something should be done to avoid this focus on impact factors, but disagreement centred on whether small acts of protest at this system (opting out, voting with your feet) or a coordinated protest (demanding an overhaul of the system at the highest levels) were needed. Again, suggestions for action welcome!

Conclusions

Overall, this was an interesting conference to attend, and I felt I learnt a lot about how scientists view the services on offer to them. Oddly, however, I think maybe I’d be more comfortable presenting at it if I attended again: a lot of the sessions were based on the assumption that the audience was composed of scientists, and I felt like more like an observer than a participant in the discussion sometimes. However, participant observation is a time-honoured way of getting to know a culture better, and I’m sure I’ll use my observations to help inform the library’s development of services over the next year: maybe with something new to contribute to the discussion of scientists online at the end.

In May I visited the London headquarters of the Royal Chemistry Society in Burlington House to attend an event entitled ‘Chemical Information for the Chemist and Non-Chemist’. As I’m new to the world of Chemical Information (albeit armed with my knowledge of information resources and an A level in Chemistry) I’d been looking out for a session to expand my knowledge and this seemed perfect. For those interested, the slides are available on the CICAG (Chemical Information and Computer Applications Group) website – just click on ‘previous meetings’, but here I wanted to talk a little bit about what I learnt about chemical information in general at the event.

Since I started getting up to speed with Chemical Information resources I’ve been fascinated by the unique search mechanism of molecular structure. The majority of chemistry-focused databases cross-reference the literature with  molecular structures.. This means you can draw a molecule, and then search for articles referring to it. As David Walsh (whose presentation has informed much of my thoughts in this particular post) noted at the event, the naming of chemicals changes constantly according to fashion, the property of the chemical that a particular scientists wants to emphasise, and according to commercial concerns (for example, using trade names, or local laboratory numbers). Drawing the chemical allows you to by-pass a large number of these problems.

Molecular structure of phenylethylamine, used under Creative Commons licence, courtesy of http://www.flickr.com/photos/ideonexus/

This seems like  the perfect search tool! Surely a mechanism allowing such exact searching means that the core information professional’s toolkit – define your keywords, perform the search, alter keywords, perform your search, iterate until satisfied or exhausted – seems almost redundant? Well, unfortunately for simplicity, but luckily for making information professionals feel useful, this isn’t the case. A lot of the time there’s reason to search for something that’s either more or less specific than a molecular structure.

For example, when patents are registered for chemicals they usually use something known as the Markush structure – a molecular diagram which records certain key aspects of a compound, but allows for certain points on that structure to be substituted by a variety of different sub-structures. This indicates that a lot of the time one exact molecular structure can be too specific. On the other hand, sometimes a molecular diagram is not specific enough. For example, the stereochemistry studies at the arrangement of atoms within a compound. When compounds with the same molecular structure are arranged differently, this can give two apparently identical compounds different chemical and physical properties.

These different degrees of specificity have interesting implications for the type of keyword generation that needs to happen in searching for chemical information. In a lot of subject areas I’d advise looking to see what’s available in the literature before deciding how specific to be in search terms: in a little studied area you tend to go quite wide and gather in a lot of related literature; in a widely studied area you can afford to be quite specific. However, in chemical information you can define up-front whether you’re interested  in a wide group of compounds or just a very specific isomer and use this to inform your search. The downside being that the beautifully simple molecular structure search isn’t always the one you want.

Over the summer I’ll be thinking more about how the different kinds of information used in Chemistry affect the way it can be taught, and learning more about the different kinds of notation that are used. I’d highly recommend looking at David Walsh’s slides, entitled ‘What Makes Chemical Information Different?’ from the event to get a good overview of many of the different types of notation used. However, I think cramming all of these into a one hour session might make students cry!

Photograph of Liver and Mash, used under Creative Commons licence, courtesy of http://www.flickr.com/photos/rbainfo

I went to my first Mashed Library event, Mash Oop North, in Huddersfield in July 2009, had a fantastic time, and was pleased to go back to Liver and Mash in Liverpool in May this year. The Mashed Library events unfold in a relatively informal unconference format, with lots of discussion of ideas and ways of quickly and easily implementing mash-ups in library and information services.

This post won’t be so much a reflection on the event as a collection of tools and ideas which I found inspiring, and hope to come back to over time. Hopefully there’ll be something to inspire others too.

Liver and Mash started with an OCLC Mashathon, a workshop that OCLC have run around the world looking at how OCLC services can be used in mash-ups to create new uses for data. Karen Coombs from OCLC has blogged a little about the Mashathon here. OCLC offer a wide range of services and resources, here are a couple which caught my eye:

• The Worldcat Basic API is available free for up to 1,000 queries a day (assuming non-commercial use) and can return a list of books held in OCLC’s comprehensive Worldcat Catalogue from a query. The list is returned in RSS or Atom format, and can be formatted by a number of standard citation guidelines. I’d be wary of using it long-term on an academic library site with the query limit, but there are further options available to those subscribing to OCLC services.

• The OCLC Web Service Application Gallery contains a list of applications developed by attendees of Mashathon events and the OCLC Developer Network. This is a good place to see what can be done with OCLC’s data on books, serials etc. and to generate some ideas. A simple, worked through example of how to set up a Worldcat citation-formatting application using Yahoo! Pipes demonstrates that such applications can be produced relatively simply, even by non-programmers.

Unfortunately, we were lacking a reliable wireless signal on the day, so weren’t able to develop much on site. The second day, however, moved on to a wider variety of applications, so I was able to take notes and experiment later. Again, here’s a selected few:

• Tony Hirst from the Open University spoke about gathering data on use of library websites (e.g. via Google Analytics), and segmenting users into groups by types of behaviour. Gathering behavioural data definitely sounds like something I’ll need to think about in our forthcoming redesign of the library website as part of the team moving the site to the University’s new content management system, Plone.

• Julian Cheal from the University of Bath, demonstrated some ways of using RFID. I’ve long had a bee in my bonnet about the limited uses (issue and return) we have for RFID in libraries considering we’re one of the biggest users of the technology, and it was interesting to see demonstrations of library cards generating prompts and information as users entered the library or carried out library-related activities.

• Lastly, John McKerrell talked about using maps in mash-ups. Maps are something I’ve seen used quite a lot on library websites, but only occasionally do these services go far beyond embedding Google Maps. Services which particularly stood out were Mapstraction - which allows web developers to switch quickly and easily between different map services, Get Lat Lon – which is a quick and easy way of finding latitude and longitude values for a given location, and OpenStreetMap – a free, collaboratively-edited map.

While I’ve not jumped in and used any of these services straight away, both the Mashed Library events I’ve been to have really opened my eyes to the wide variety of options available to me for using and integrating data on the web. You may see a few of these services turning up on the library website as we get further down the line with the Plone rollout! To finish the post, here’s a video of Liver and Mash, which I think catches the atmosphere and creativity of the event pretty well: YouTube video of Mashed Library Liverpool.

Word Cloud of tweets during LILAC 2010 courtesy of http://www.flickr.com/photos/davepattern/

Just before Easter I attended the Librarians’ Information Literacy Annual Conference, held this year in Limerick, Ireland. It was my first chance to step back and think about my new role as an Information Librarian at the university, so great timing for me.

I attended a range of different talks on areas relevant to my own personal development (on librarians’ roles as teachers, and case studies of online tool use), but in this post I’m focusing on talks which I felt had institutional significance in terms of what we’re doing with information literacy, how we’re doing it, and what else we can do.

What are we doing?
The amount and kind of information literacy teaching inevitably varies within as well as between institutions: different courses and different disciplines have different needs. However, when responsibilities for information literacy are split between different departments and services across a university there are obvious benefits from tracking who does what: to make sure students acquire key skills, and to identify opportunities for collaboration. I believe librarians, as specialists in the area, have the responsibility to make sure these skills are developed, even if we are not always responsible for delivering them ourselves.

Gillian Fielding’s presentation on The Information Literacy Audit at the University of Salford described an institutional audit as one way of doing this. The team at Salford took a checklist of key information skills to programme leaders across the university to determine what training was provided, how it was provided, at which level (pre-entry, induction, year 1, 2, or 3, or at Masters or PhD) and by which department / service. Despite difficulties with timing of the audit 70% of undergraduate course leaders participated, and it seemed like a really good way of opening up dialogues between central services and departments about what needs covering and how it can be offered. It certainly sounded like information I’d find useful, although they did have large number of subject specialists to carry out the audit compared to us!

How are we doing it?
One of the big themes of the conference for me was about how the library collaborates with others in the university. In fact, the workshop I was at the conference to lead (focusing on central services’ roles in supporting research student communities of practice) was looking explicitly at the library’s role in the wider university community. Sophie Bury from York University in Canada covered a similar theme in her presentation on academics’ views of information literacy.

The academics she surveyed pretty universally agreed that information literacy skills (as defined by the ACRL standards) were important. Furthermore, the majority thought librarians and academics should be working together to deliver sessions, a finding that she noted was echoed in some previous studies, with others suggesting that librarians should be handling this area. However, she also found a fairly even split between academics believing that sesssions should take place outside or within class time. This is an ongoing issue: sessions which take places outside of class time are not as well attended, but it’s easy to understand why academics are reluctant to jettison discipline-specific content for more general skills. How we fit information literacy into the student experience AND the student timetable is something I’ll be thinking about more over the summer as I look at my teaching for next year.

What else can we do?
Finally, as well as more ‘traditional’ information literacy, the conference also got me thinking about ways in which information literacy teaching can impact on a broader range of skills (see also Selina’s previous post about Critical Appraisal). Stephanie Rosenblatt from California State University gave a talk entitled They can find it, but they don’t know what to do with it looking at students’ use of academic literature and found that students were already competent enough at finding scholarly literature (the main focus of her teaching) but that they didn’t know how to use the academic materials. Should librarians be developing a more rounded approach to teaching information literacy? Aoife Geraghty and her colleagues from the Writing Centre at the University of Limerick discussed a way in which centralised student services could work together to support such activities.

Lastly, Andy Jackson from the University of Dundee ran a workshop on generic graduate attributes, challenging us to develop attributes such as ‘cultural and social and ethics’ into teaching Endnote and Refworks use. This was immense fun (once we’d worked out that attribution and intellectual property could be seen as cultural and social ethical issues!) and made me think about all the different angles and educational opportunities that even the most basic software training workshops offer.

Where Now?
The conference ended with a Keynote from Dr Ralph Catts talking about developing our research methods and evaluation (in time for the conference next year!). The appeal for librarians to involve educational researchers in their planning and evaluation was a little misplaced for me (I have a background in educational research, and was rankled by the implication that librarians universally lacked the ability to evaluate, rather than the resources to do so). However, I think his message about the importance of evidence in instigating, developing and evaluating our practices was sound. I definitely hope to use the research I learnt about at LILAC in the next few months, and I hope to do more reflection and evaluation as I settle in to the post.

LILAC Programme and Workshop Worksheet

Following on from my previous post on LILAC – LILAC: Part One – Workshop Presentation I wanted to reflect on sessions I’d been to discussing teaching. Over the summer one of my priorities is to think about the teaching I’ll be doing in my new job. LILAC started to help me with this, and there were a few sessions I wanted to pick out to share.

In her talk on librarians as teachers Claire McGuinness found librarians often seemed insecure in their teacher identities and covered some reasons why it’s been argued librarians are not ‘true’ teachers (e.g. not doing the same type of teaching as academics).

Claire’s discussion of teacher identify resonated with a talk I’d attended at the SRHE Conference in 2009 on The challenges for new academics in adopting student-centred approaches to learning by Ian Sadler. Ian found that unfamiliarity with material meant new academics were often nervous about experimenting with pedagogy. Perhaps the insecurity of librarians can be attributed to us being seen as ‘new academics’ as a profession, and I wonder if this has impact on the kinds of teaching we attempt.

Another aspect of teacher librarian development is training, and a session with Amanda Click and Claire Walker about on-the-job training was also helpful. They discovered that line managers of new instructional librarians are twice more likely to think they’re providing training than the instructional librarians themselves! There’s an interesting point there about making sure new teachers feel like they’re supported, and signalling when it’s appropriate for them to reflect and regroup.

A lot of the things Amanda and Claire found new teacher librarians had tried were similar to the teaching development section of my chartership plan, and it’s good to know that new teachers found reading and membership of professional groups beneficial. It was also great to hear the enthusiasm in the room for peer observation and review as a method for developing teaching skills during questions, and something I’ll definitely be exploring.

Finally, I already mentioned Andy Jackson‘s workshop on generic graduate attributes in my institutional blog post but also wanted to mention how empowering it was to realise how we can put information literacy teaching into a wider context, such as social and ethical responsibility. While still at De Montfort I sat in on a session discussing plagiarism run by a colleague, and was really interested to see students’ grasp of the issues behind such authorship and intellectual property. I really believe that getting students to relate their learning to what they know already is important in getting students to understand, remember, and apply information literacy skills. I guess therefore it’s vital to embed what we teach in a wider setting of ethics, citizenship and life skills.

What have I learnt? Being a better teacher is partly about practice and confidence. But attending LILAC has helped consolidate some ideas that have been swimming round in my head about the importance of pedagogy and contextualisation in making student skills useful and transferable. How can I make the ideas I cover in my sessions relevant to students, and is it even possible to make sure these ideas stick with students in future study, employment and lifelong learning? My next step is to actually try and answer these questions while designing my teaching: sounds like a process to document in my chartership portfolio!

After two years of attendance I can’t recommend LILAC enough. It seems to be a really great conference, the sessions are peer reviewed, and I always seem to come away with a new perspective on my professional development. I hope I’ll be able to go next year!

View of the Clarion Hotel, Limerick, my accommodation, from bridge by the Conference Venue

It goes to show that funding student places at a conference pays off! Last year I visited LILAC 2009 in Cardiff on a sponsored student place and this year I was back again presenting a workshop!

The workshop was called Building research student communities: is there a role for library and information services (slides can be found via the link). The workshop was based on activities at De Montfort University and the theory of  Communities of Practice, and was written with my colleagues Melanie Petch, Lecturer in English Language from the Centre for Learning and Study Support and  Jo Webb, Head of Academic Services.

The workshop seemed to go well, although the timing slipped a little so there wasn’t time for as much interactivity as I’d have liked. Still, it was fantastic to feel like I was moving towards the centre of our very own librarian Community of Practice and I really enjoyed being an active participant in the conference.

I’ve already written a little about the event in relation to my new job on our library blog in a post called Information Literacy within our Institution: Thoughts from LILAC. However, as I mention there, I felt LILAC was strong in both supporting reflection on work, and reflection on personal professional development, so wanted to take a chance to reflect on some sessions that had covered the latter, which I’ve done in my second post: LILAC 2010: Part two – Reflections on Teaching.

Photograph of Chinese New Year fireworks at University Park, University of Nottingham, 2010.

Since I last posted a lot of things have changed. I’ve started my new job and finished my old one, in that order, as I was asked to carry on working part-time in my old maternity leave cover post while I started my new (permanent) part-time post. I’ve submitted my personal development plan for chartership, moved from subject support for Business to Science, and had to adjust to a whole new institution.

I’ve also just (before Easter) returned from LILAC (Librarians’ Information Literacy Annual Conference) 2010 where I ended up presenting a workshop solo, due to last minute changes of plan. I’m not surprised I haven’t updated for a while, although as my chartership plan involved updating this blog (and as blogging LILAC seems to be becoming an annual activity for me!), I’ve been feeling bad about it. I’ve also been involved in meetings and work on the renamed Big Conversation and spent yesterday evaluating consultants’ bids: more on that soon.

The good news is that I have a backlog of blogs waiting to be written on my new job, LILAC, and various bits and pieces. I’ve also migrated my blog to WordPress, as Blogger was suspending support for FTP and I’m still not convinced enough by the cloud to stop hedging my bets. Plus, I’ve got all this webspace, may as well use it! The particularly observant may notice a few small changes in the layout, and I’ll continue to fiddle with it for a while until I’m completely happy, but both blog themes were based on the styles from my main site, so things mostly look the same (except perhaps in Chrome, where the background seems to be broken – working on it).

Anyway, this really constitutes a) a shout out to say I’m still here, b) a brief update of what I’m doing and c) a way to remind me to make the updates that aren’t here yet!

The other news is that the conference report myself and the other sponsored students at LILAC put together has been published in the Journal of Information Literacy. The report centres around the key themes of the conference, and you can see my handiwork under the ‘Supporting Research’ theme, one of my favourite topics. The report also features a photo of me in party frock. I’m obviously having a photogenic month!