Things I have been up to this month....

Another busy month full of bits and bobs:

1.  I had a meeting with my Chartership mentee who is progressing extremely well. I enjoy mentoring as it keeps me on my toes with regards to thinking about issues beyond my workplace and it gives me a way to give something back to the profession.

2. I helped to staff an e-books promotion stand at work. We were hoping to catch people who had not yet discovered our e-books or those who were a little hesitant about using e-formats. We had a steady trickle of people drop by the stand and it was pleasing to see that most of the students had at least tried an e-book once and there were many keen to discover more about our collection.

3. Inducting new students to the Library - the courses I look after have two intakes per academic year. I'll have 2 cohorts of BSc, Foundation Degree, CPD and Master students every academic year. This means that induction happens all year round and just when you think things are calming down, in comes another group.
It's all good fun though and means that I get to try out induction activities and not have to wait a whole year to tweak it or try something else.

4. Learning not to assume - I had a request from a member of academic staff who wanted advice on "advanced search strategies". We made a time to meet, talked about the topic they were intending to search for and what resources they had used so far. Now when someone said 'advanced search strategies' I assumed (quite wrongly as it turns out) that they wanted truncation, snowballing, search filters and subject headings galore... How wrong I was. It became obvious that advanced searching was simply using the Boolean operator - AND. On reflection this was what they perceived to be advanced searching (and for them it was) but it wasn't what I thought it should be. Still their expectations were met even if it meant I couldn't flex my searching muscles as much as I wanted to.

5. Running tours for prospective students on Visit Day. This is an important and yet infrequent part of my role. Several times a year the University holds Open Days (for those thinking of applying to the institution) and Visit Days (they've applied but aren't sure whether the institution is their 1st or 2nd choice). Library tours are on offer at these events and the take up is good. The tours are devised to promote the library and therefore the institution. We run short tours of key parts of the library and mention lots of statistics about the number of computers, books and journals we have. These tours cater for prospective students and their parents. It is my observation that the parents get more out of it than the students do - why? Well there are still a lot of parents out there who didn't go to University (this Sept will see us cater for those born in 1994) and they enjoy seeing inside institutions that were once, for whatever reason, seen as not for them. Their child might also be the first in the family to attend University so they'll be interested to see where they are going and what they'll be doing when away from home. So it's often the parents who ask all the questions.

6. Professional development activities - I've arranged a visit to the College of Occupational Therapists to see the library and find out about their services. Many of the students I look after can apply for membership of the organisation and I wanted to ensure I knew enough about them to promote their collections to our students especially those doing their dissertation. I'm also waiting to book a place at my first ever TeachMeet - I'm too chicken to present but maybe next time. I'll blog about these events later in the Summer.

8. Annual leave - yep - there won't be any posts for a while as I'm on leave and after that I will be busy with inductions. So Happy Easter and I'll be back in May.