Inductions: my oh my!

What a week. Busy, manic, busy and exhausting.

The week began by delivering a one hour lecture to the new first year students. They have started a two week academic skills module where I meet them three times. The lecture was about what is information, why do we use it and where can we find health and social care information? We talked about books, journals (because often they have not heard of them before) and databases. It was a full-house in the lecture theatre and miraculously everything went to plan - including the IT. We played a game to introduce Boolean and they were quite happy to shout out when I asked them questions. I had to deliver the lecture twice to cover all the students on the course so I was worn out by the end. I don't know what I did to deserve it but I spent the rest of the afternoon at a Quality meeting!

I ran seven orientation sessions (each lasting 1 hour) over 1.5 days. Good attendance and some of the tutors joined in with their students. Most of them engaged in full with the talk/tour and task but inevitably there were some who preferred to do as little as possible - I usually find they are the ones who get to the third year and still haven't used a database. Still you can't take a horse to water...

Mid-week I managed to deal with all the emails I had red-flagged and photocopy everything I needed for the rest of the week. It's difficult to keep up with the induction timetable yet alone do 'normal' work in addition. I also got lots of requests from students to meet for search tutorials - I've had to tell them all I'm fully booked for the next 3 weeks. I always send them guides and hints and tips to keep them going in the meantime but it feels bad to keep them waiting. Most of them understand that my time is currently consumed by meeting the new students but some get a little cranky.

The end of the week saw me deliver two more lectures for the third year dissertation students. They were furiously scribbling down everything I said about truncation and wildcard searches so I think I hit the nail on the head with content. I demonstrated reference management software and got a round of applause. We had the usual banter about why I didn't show it to them in the first year but they were keen to try it out for themselves. Just before I left for the weekend one of the students sent me a lovely email. He said that he had previously cross-searched lots of databases but had tried my suggestion of using one at a time and making full use of their limit/refining functions. Apparently it has changed his searching habits and he was surprised and relived to find he got lots of relevant, quality articles in his results list. Hearing things like this is greatly rewarding and is validation for all the time spent creating the presentation. I've saved the email in my special 'Comments' folder as such emails come in handy for appraisal/end of year review time.

It was a very tiring but rewarding week. From looking at the timetable next week looks to be more of the same - hopefully my voice will not diminish from croak to whisper....