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/.

Screenshot of part of the Prezi

My last post ended in somewhat of a challenge to myself: to use my love of playing with new technologies to experiment a little with the format of my teaching. I’ve therefore been trying out Prezi, the “zooming presentation tool”, as a way of presenting a teaching session I’ve been working on.

It’s still very much a work in progress, which is why I’ve gone with a screenshot rather than a link to the Prezi itself! However, I’m quite happy with how it’s going.

Because Prezi is a big canvas you can move around, zooming in and out, it acts as a mindmap of the stuff I want to cover in my session, and has encouraged me to think about how different aspects of the teaching link together, and how to make a narrative out of them. This has helped me develop the session, and hopefully should make it more coherent.

Another benefit is that I can use this mindmap as an archive of the presentation and the resources I cover, allowing students to retrace my actions, and acting as a tangible reminder of how I interpreted the resources. As well, of course, as mundanely linking to the resources I covered!

However, now I’ve arranged the Prezi as I want I’m starting to think that I could take the information back into a Powerpoint presentation, using other cues to indicate when a concept is a key idea, and when its more of an aside – which I’m currently using zoom to indicate. The zooming mechanism has acted as a useful tool for making me distinguish between key points, the meat of the presentation, and hints and tips, but it isn’t the only way I could present these different types of information now I have identified them.

I suspect the proof of the pudding will be in the eating, and I won’t really decide what I think of Prezi until after I’ve used it in a session! Furthermore, the educational technologist in me knows that even if it is a success, it may just be the novelty of the tool catching students’ attention and not its inherent usefulness as a way of displaying information and ideas. However, the new teacher in me isn’t above using a little bit of novelty in an attempt to help students learn! That said, I will post the Prezi here after I’ve used it in my teaching, and see what conclusions I can draw on its effectiveness.

Screenshot of the blogs where I contribute

I currently contribute to two public blogs: the University of Leicester library blog, where I work, and this one. This one has been rather neglected since I started blogging all my professional development events over at uollibrary, with the exception of my recent contribution to the Library Day in the Life project. As events are one of the major points of focus of this blog I’ve not been driven to post here so much.

However, in my chartership plan I’ve indicated that blogging is one way I’d reflect upon my development. Why hadn’t this blog become a place of reflection? I’ve realised that I’d grown out of touch with blogs. I’ve been using Twitter quite heavily for some time, and I’d stopped using my feed reader and was relying on Twitter to point me towards blog posts of interest. About once every two months I’d visit my Protopage site and feel guilty that I hadn’t read anything. I’d try to catch up, but always felt I’d missed the conversation.

So I’ve made an effort to rejoin the conversation, by changing the way I read blogs. When blogs first came to my attention I preferred using a page-based feed reader, but then I was looking at blogs for entertainment, not professional development, and didn’t want to keep track of what I had and hadn’t read. But for my professional development it’s nice to be prompted to keep up-to-date, and encouraged to discuss and reflect. So I’ve switched to Google Reader, which keeps track of how many posts I have and haven’t read, and encourages me to keep up-to-date.

And lo and behold, three days later, here I am writing a blog on the process. Because it turns out that having read others reflecting on what they do prompts me to think about what I do. And reading others thoughts day-to-day prompts that far more than trawling through a backlog. Plus (for bonus points) Google Reader is really easy to access from my Android phone on the train, meaning it’s easier to keep up-to-date too!

From a wider perspective, I think it’s really interesting how changing the tool I use to do something really changes how I see it. I’m going to see if I can apply this elsewhere. Next step: changing the format of my presentations for teaching… and I promise to blog on how that goes too!

The view of my desk at work

As I was only in for two days this week a major goal for today was clearing my inbox as far as possible! I tend to have folder for projects so this isn’t too alarming a task, but I had a few queries to follow up and things to get done before I went.

Firstly, I followed up on the map query from yesterday by establishing contact with the map library. They were very helpful. Unfortunately, copyright restrictions meant the maps couldn’t be copied without permission from the publisher, but they did fax me through the details of the series of maps I needed. Once I had the publisher’s name I was able to source quite a few alternative points of access: one local stockist of a CD with the maps on, and also online versions of the maps (which were useable with help from Google Translate!)

My original plan was to be in work on Monday and Wednesday this week, so I didn’t think I would be in today, and only belatedly remembered I’d said I was unable to help with some teaching on Tuesday morning. The teaching was unique to this time of year: helping tutors who were going to be supporting international students in researching essays for our summertime international induction courses. I was able to pop in to the session and help support one of our biological science librarians in demonstrating some general science resources which might be relevant for students to search.

I made my way through the majority of the emails I had – mostly small things – as the day progressed. This included providing some text for a distance learning handbook for Geography with details of library services. I was able to borrow a large part of the text from another of our librarians who has a much larger portfolio of distance learning students in the departments she supports. However, I needed to check a lot of the details of services provided, including where a graduate certificate fitted in our various borrowing and service categories!

Lastly, I was down to two messages in the inbox, and had to finish sending off the details of our subscriptions to individual academic journal titles to one of the departments I support. I’ve been trying to find time within a staff meeting to discuss these within departments, but as this department doesn’t have a staff meeting scheduled until after our deadline for decisions, we decided to email the list of current subscriptions round, like previous years. As I send the email, I’m thinking there must be a better method than inviting email comments, perhaps some kind of online questionnaire? I make a note to investigate this further with the other departments when I came back from my break, and then my library day in the life week for Summer 2010 is over!

Victoria Park, which sits behind the University.

This is my second set of posts as part of the Library Day in the Life project, although it’s the fifth round of the project as a whole, which aims to record typical (and atypical) days of library workers around the world. You can find all of my posts within this project under the librarydayinthelife tag. For those new to this blog, I am an academic librarian, providing scientific subject support at a UK university.

I was only in the library on Monday and Tuesday this week. My current post is usually part-time, working Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Friday mornings, but this week I swapped Wednesday for Monday and ended up taking Friday morning off to give myself a short break. This crammed a lot of activities into two days!

My first activity on Monday was attending the Web 2.0 forum – a group of librarians, researchers, student support, educational technologists etc. who meet up to discuss web 2.0 and its use in the university. I’ve never been before as I’m rarely in work on Monday mornings, so it was an interesting experience, although attendance was low because of the summer break. There was lots of discussion of e-books – both in terms of e-book readers and support for e-books provided by the library – and also mobile web access to university resources. Lots to be thinking about!

When I got back to the office I finished checking my email and started addressing a query from a member of academic staff about obtaining some topographical maps of Iceland: they were out-of-print, but he’d heard they might be obtained from the British Library. A quick visit to our Document Supply department across the office established we weren’t quite sure of the details, so I ended up contacting British Library customer service, who told me it might be possible to obtain something through the imaging service rather than the document supply service, but that it was best to contact the Map Library directly for details.

A member of staff from our Student Development team contacted me via Twitter to ask if I’d be interested in joining the new dissertation wiki she’d set up. I’ve got a user account on at least five different wiki sites, so I spent a few minutes researching my own account details for the right one, and then sent a request to join.

This was followed  by a meeting of the team redesigning the library website. Next academic year the library is in line to move its website onto the University’s new content management system: this project is looking at making some changes to the website for the upcoming academic year, and then will move on to the redesign as a whole in collaboration with the web team. I had to quickly finalise my choices of interesting library site designs to take to the meeting.

In the meeting we had a productive conversation about the strengths and weaknesses of the sites we’d brought, and ended up with a task to put together some suggested layouts for our new pages for next year. In addition, I need to learn a bit more about Google Analytics, which the library systems team have set up on the current webpages, to help interpret our usage statistics.

Tomorrow: the map query, part 2!

The Information Librarian Office at Leicester

In my last Library Routes post I was working as an Assistant Librarian at De Montfort University, supporting Business, but as this was a temporary post, I have since moved onto a new job as Information Librarian at the University of Leicester.

The academic subject support aspect of my job which I love has continued, although the context and subject have changed considerably. I’m supporting half of the College of Science and Engineering in my current role: specifically Chemistry, Geography, Geology and Physics and Astronomy.

I’ve never followed a simple academic path in my studies (my A levels were in Chemistry, French and English) which has stopped me from being too stumped by this move from the social sciences. I did my undergraduate degree in Psychology, which is part-science, part-social science and a little bit of an art, so it’s been a great preparation for moving between different subject support areas, although I’ve still got lots to learn about science support.

In moving from one job to another that’s quite a small change in role for me, compared to others in my past. That’s not to say it’s samey, and I’m still doing lots of additional activities: I’ve just finished working on the Defining Our Professional Future Project Board for CILIP and I’ve still got lots of professional (Chartership) and academic (paper writing) activities on the go. It’s nice to be in a permanent post for a change, and I’m looking forward to charting my route within this institution, rather than between different ones for a while!

Although I’m sitting on the project board, I’m a CILIP member myself, and one who’s not 100% sold on every service it offers. I therefore wanted to take a moment out to be part of the Conversation too, remove my ‘Project Board Member’ hat and have a bit of a chat about the three questions the Conversation is currently mulling over:

• What will the knowledge and information sector look like in 2020?
• Where will a professional association fit into this sector?
• How will you engage with this professional association?

The Knowledge and Information Sector in 2020

Technology is one that will come up again and again (and not just in the information sector). I’ll cover it briefly. I’m not going to guess which technologies will be relevant to information professionals in 2020. Technologies change all the time: if you think that learning to use Twitter now is going to help you in 2020 you’re sadly mistaken. However, I am certain that the information professionals in 2020 will need to be early adopters of technology, experimenters, and no longer those behind the curve in hearing about and adopting new forms of tech. Or else we’ll have gone the way of the dinosaur. End.

An issue that’s more personal to the sector is its fragmentation. I believe in 2020 the sector will be just as fragmented as it is now. It’s inevitable that information management will take place in a range of different institutions: that there will be public and private organisations (and individuals) with different needs. And its also inevitable that whether I work in a university, or a law firm, or a public library, or the health sector, or a school, or for Count Waldstein, I’ll have more shared experiences with those in similiar posts. However, I hope that in 2020 information professionals will have grown better and looking beyond these everyday sectoral  concerns to wider shared issues (information literacy, information management, information systems design).

The role of a professional organisation in the Information Sector

The role of a professional organisation is surely about bridging the gap between those sectors. About developing a shared identity for information professionals. And to do this it needs to definine its boundaries. Who is an information professional, and who isn’t? What kind of work does an information professional do? It’s comparatively easy to tell if you’re a librarian or not, which I think is why CILIP ends up full of librarians talking about librarianship.

You may have noticed that the subtitle above doesn’t say ‘the Knowledge and Information sector’ Why not? In have an MSc in Occupational Psychology, and studied knowledge management. I’ve therefore got some expertise behind this claim: knowledge and information management are the opposite of each other. Information management is all about arranging information in structures so it’s easy to find, and making it easy to convert data to knowledge. Knowledge management is all about capturing disorganised ‘soft’ human knowledge and desperately trying to convert it to data. While these two processes are related, and professionals in both sectors can learn a lot from each other, I don’t think an organisation like CILIP can simply lay claim to the Knowledge sector without a merger with a specialised Knowledge Management group. We can’t claim to be experts in everything, and our identity is strongest when we admit what we are not.

Lastly, once it’s established what an information professional is, the professional association must be clear about what a good information professional is (those undertaking continuing professional development, for example), and build its membership from these good information professionals. What’s the point in joining a professional organisation when there’s equally competent equally active professionals outside it, and those who merely passed a course inside it? It must actively improve the quality of professionals within its boundaries, for example by masterminding the cross-sector initiatives referred to above. And if it can’t offer this, why call it a professional organisation? Why not have training courses and networking sessions funded by one-off payments? Why have membership at all?

How I’ll engage with this professional association

This time I think I’ve really answered this question before I got to it. How I engage with a professional association depends on what I get back from engaging. I’d love to be able to be a member of a society where being a member is a guaranteed of quality to employers, where collectively we are improving the information sector. However, if that isn’t going to happen, I’ll just have to demonstrate my professionalism through my activities, and do my best to keep an eye on what happens in other across different sectors. I can do it on my own: I’ll join committees, and attend courses, and read the literature of a professional association if it can help me do it better.

So, your move first, professional association. How do you plan to engage with me? What do you think might make me a better information professional? If your answer is convincing enough, I’m on board.

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!