That 'quiet' time of year..

Lots of non-librarians ask me if I'm away on holiday for the whole month of August (I wish!) and there are lots of people, librarians included, in my own organisation that say 'now it's June and the students have gone it will be peaceful'. Hmmn now the thing is the students I look after are here until the end of July and back in the first week of September. I can't remember the last time it was 'quiet'. I might get some respite from student tutorials and meetings in August but I'll be busy preparing for the new students arriving in September and answering emails from students keen to start their dissertation.

I thought I'd start making a list of all the summer jobs I need to do between now and the 1st September. I do this every year to keep me on track with all my tasks as there are some that I know won't get a look in during term-time. I think of my 'Summer Jobs 2013' list as a living document. I add things, add more things, add deadlines/names/notes, change deadlines and delete things once I've completed them. By the end of August I expect to see one or two things left on the list (previous experience tells me that there will always be things added at the last minute plus a few boring tasks will hang on in there in the hope that they will be achieved - this year I expect this will be the action to tidy my email folders).

So at this moment in time my list looks like this...

Yes, a simple word document. I don't want it in Evernote, GoogleDocs etc because I don't want to be reminded of it when I'm at home.

I'm a list person and so my Summer Jobs list will spawn lists for almost each action on it - but over the years this tactic has worked for me so I'll be sticking to it for the foreseeable future. So in 12 weeks time I'll let you know what's left on this list!

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.

Things I've been up to this month...

It felt like a quiet month but when I make a list of everything I've done it turns out I was busy. Definitely lots of bits and pieces this month but the meaty workshops get going again in March so this 'quiet' period will be short-lived.

Webliographies - I've been working with a colleague to try and introduce the idea of 'webliographies' (I'm not convinced we should be using this term) to the Faculty that we support. There is much discussion about how students never go beyond the reading list compiled by their tutor and we've been looking at webliographies as tool to change this.

In conjunction with their tutor our hope is that student groups will be set the task of searching for and locating sources (both online and printed) that are not on their tutor-compiled reading list. They then have to add these references to a group wiki. Our aim is to cover searching, using wikis, working collaboratively and referencing. The hope is, and this is dependent on timetabling, that they will be set the task and that I can be available as support either in the library or via email if they get stuck.

We are at the stage of searching for guinea pigs so we are going to present this idea to the academic staff at the next Faculty Staff Development day. I'll post more on this in the future.

Tutorials - lots of staff and student tutorials this month and all sorts of topics covered. For example, men and their perceptions of dance movement therapy; service user involvement; immunisation; ultrasound and pressure ulcers. Although I do not carry out searches for people (it's their degree not mine) I always run a pilot search to make sure I'm giving the right advice about keywords etc so I have a good rummage around the subject headings. I try to avoid the images that pop up in searches - pictures associated with wound care make me nauseous!

In-house task groups - there are a couple of projects going on at work this term and I'm on two working groups. Firstly we are looking at moving a large amount of stock around the building - this is proving tricky to say the least. We solve one problem and then create another. Secondly there is a group looking at new communication technologies. My library is not big on web 2.0 tools but we are investigating whether to use them for communication purposes and how best to use them.

Workshops - I've run a couple of lively workshops this month and the evaluations were good. I've also done lots of preparation work for workshops scheduled in March. I've been busy looking at search examples for "systemic anti-cancer therapy", "reflective practice in nursing" and whistle blowing.

Mentoring - one of my mentees is ready to submit their portfolio to CILIP. As a mentor I sometimes feel like a mother hen - I'm really pleased for them although it will be sad to see them go. I've been really impressed by this candidate - they've put in lots of hard work and even went abroad to gain some experience.

Displays - It was my turn to put something together for a library display that promoted an area of our stock. As we had topped up on study skills books last term I thought that would be an appropriate choice. The display promoted printed books, e-books, items available from the University bookshop and study skills workshops run by the Uni's Student Support Unit. There was also a QR code to direct people to the catalogue but I forgot to track statistics for it's use (I know, I know - total lemon) - still I won't forget to do it next time.

Things I've been up to this month...

Workshops:

Finally the demand for workshops has lessened for the first time this term. However I did run a couple of drop-in sessions for 3rd year dissertation students. I've tweaked the content of these one-to-one meetings since attending a course at CILIP last year. I've now got a set of questions that I run through with the students when they turn up. I quiz them on what their topic is really about, what searching they've done so far, what databases they have used, why they haven't searched using some other tools and why they chose to search like that etc. This has helped to engage them a little more and helped them to realise that I'm not going to do the search for them. Verbal feedback has been positive and the numbers dropping by remains good - it seems that I can promote these sessions on the VLE but then word-of-mouth takes over in terms of advertising.

Many meetings this month:

Disabled services group, programme management committees, team meetings, Quality committee and Faculty Board. Some of these meetings are tedious but you always gain a small nugget of exceedingly useful information so it's worth sitting through everything. The most informative meeting was our team meeting about blended learning where we looked at what it is and how we might engage more with it in the Library. We shared some of the audio PowerPoints/screencasts that we have developed for our subjects.

Meeting people:

I've met a couple of new members of library staff and told them about the work that I do on daily basis.
I've had two student tutorials - one for a dissertation and one for a PhD student. It never ceases to amaze me how little some PhD students know about searching - not the one I met this week as they were very clued up and just needed a few pointers - it just goes to show that you should never assume that someone studying a 'higher' degree knows how to search.
I've been involved in a focus group for the Investors in People quality mark that the Uni is applying for. A diplomatic but frank discussion of management styles etc was had.

Appraisal:

I like appraisals. I find it makes me reflect on what on earth I have been doing all year and it gives me a chance to get some training plans/events in to the diary. I struggled with the question about 'where do you see your career going in the next 5 years' because I'm actually quite happy where I am. I've asked to gain some sort of credit/certificate for all the teaching that I do as this is something that's missing from my portfolio.

Extra-curricular:

I've managed to rack up 4 Christmas parties at work so all in all a successful and sociable month.