Tales of a Librarian

Well folks, I’m back again. I thought I’d just write a little more to update you on the progress that I have made over the past couple of years in my post and compiling my chartership submission has really given me cause to think about all that I have learned and what I still have to learn!

Looking back over the posts that I have made over the years since joining my present employment, I can definitely say that I have become a lot more confident in pretty much all of the areas of my work that I do on a regular basis. For example, there was a post on search skills, and how I felt that I had a long way to go before I was able to undertake complex searches for people. I now feel that I am more able to do these, and do not need to rely on the advice of my colleagues and/or manager to undertake the vast majority of searches, even those that often involve fairly complex search terms/concepts. Of course, there are still going to be a few times when advice is needed, as users have a habit of always surprising us in this regard! But it’s good to be kept on your toes, and learning new places to search and finding the information for users is very rewarding, particularly if it is hard to locate somewhere. I think that is one of the main benefits of the service for users.

Even searching the planning appeals, which often involve very specific terms or legislation, has become a lot easier, and I’m far more confident in doing this than I was even a year ago. I think my subject knowledge in all of the areas that we cover has improved greatly, through the process of reading/scanning the journals and websites, and through abstracting documents. It’s amazing the amount of information that you can pick up. Obviously we’ll never be specialists in all areas, but you get the general feel for what is happening in each area, pick up trends and buzz words that are in use, and get to know and understand the various terms and concepts relating to each subject.

Becoming involved with the journals collection has been great for me, it is very motivational to have my own responsibility for their management and to make the improvements that are sorely needed to ensure that the process is as efficient as possible. One complaint that could be made is that the process is very ‘bitty’, there are always things cropping up, such as overdues or unpaid subscriptions through our subscription agent, but identifying new journals to add to stock, and liaising with suppliers and publishers is very interesting. It definitely keeps me on my toes! I also enjoy working with the two ladies who deal with the check-ins and trying to ensure that everything is up to date and running as smoothly as possible. There are a few changes I would like to make, such as rejigging the database in which our subscription details are kept, as I feel this is quite outdated and would benefit from having more information on it, such as the format of journals. A lot of journals are now both print and electronic, and there are also an increasing number of electronic subscriptions. Being able to record this in the database along with the rest of the information would be a great help, and adding username and password details would be fantastic. I will have to look into this as I’m not sure at present whether the database can be changed to incorporate this. I’m also in the process of updating our e-journals access information, which is currently held in a seperate spreadsheet, no doubt left over from when there was only a small collection of ejournals to manage. Given the increasing number of journals available online, I think it would be sensible to have all of this information in the one place, as it would increase accessibility and make it easier to keep up to date.

As I am now fairly confident in the basic duties of my work as an Information Officer (abstracting, literature searching, stock selection etc) I feel that the area that I am developing most at the moment is in project work, which we are commissioned to carry out by various agencies, both on short-term and long-term projects. Generally, these involve identifying suitable material for inclusion on electronic databases/libraries, abstracting said material according to the various house standards employed by the contracting organisation, and publishing the material to the web. As well as improving my skills in a variety of abstracting formats, I have also been given experience in managing projects, through my role as deputy for two current projects that we are doing for government agencies. I will slowly learn how it is done and will hopefully be able to take on more responsibility as my skills develop.

In terms of my own CPD, I have a couple of courses lined up (which I mentioned briefly in my previous blog). The first is ‘Copyright for Information Professionals‘, run by CILIPS. After discussion with my mentor we agreed that this course would be useful not only for letting me understand the wider copyright context as it relates to libraries, but will also be of use with my work as journals manager. Our situation as a private subscription-based library with remote users means that our copyright situation is complex, and involves a couple of different licenses with the CLA. Any extra information I can gather on this front will be put to good use!

The second course that I have applied for is the ‘Introduction to first line management‘ course, also run by CILIPS. After looking at my PPDP and my development over the past couple of years, it became clear to me that I had not had much experience in directly managing others, so this course will be a good introduction to the basic principles involved in this.

I am also going to attend a ‘roadshow’ run by Dawsons (a bookseller, from who we buy pretty much all our hard copy books), where they will be demonstrating their new e-book platform, dawsonera. As you might be able to tell from previous blog posts, I am very interested in the development of electronic sources of information and their usage, so I am looking forward to see how it works and whether it will be of relevance to our service. We will need to ask a variety of questions relating to the copyright situation of the ebooks available, whether users will need separate usernames and passwords, whether we could incorporate it into our online database in anyway, and the amount and subject matter of the books that would be available online. Our service has seen a notable decline in the number of hard copy books that are sent out on loan, with users tending to prefer information that can be downloaded directly from our online database. If we could provide a number of books in electronic format, this may help to increase the number of ‘loans’ that we receive for these titles. It will all of course, depend on whether it can be integrated with the service as it currently is without too much inconvenience for users. For example, asking them to use a seperate site and username and password would probably be too complicated. Also, the search facility would not be integrated across the two platforms, unless there was some way to amalgamate them. There are also a variety of copyright issues to consider, given that our users would not be accessing the material from our building, but from their own, giving rise to the need for access from multiple locations, which may not be allowed by the terms and conditions.

I guess you can but ask though! I will be able to chat with a representative about our needs and feed this back to the rest of the staff for consideration. I’m quite excited about it!

And finally, I stumbled across this online through the CILIP mailing lists, the Hollywood Librarian! It looks fantastic, and I would really like to see it. I mentioned it to a couple of colleagues, and one of them who is involved with the Career Development Group is looking into arranging a viewing of it at some point in the near future. I hope they manage, as it looks like a really great film!

I found this link hiding within the realms of my unpublished blog posts from many a moon ago and couldn’t resist posting it… both for amusement value and also because the pictures are… well, they are stunning! Go on, take a look… Red Hot Library Smut.

Howdy! Why, it has been a while, hasn’t it? I’m afraid the daily grind of work and life in general has caused me to let this blog slide over recent months, however, I thought it would be worth posting to say that I am now back on track with my chartership with renewed vigour!

Indeed, there is in fact a light on the horizon, shining away and beckoning me towards the finish line. I have been rather distracted along the way, a little detour which probably could have been avoided, but now that I am back on track and will hopefully submit before the end of March 2008, I feel a lot less stressed about it and also really motivated. It’s like the final burst of energy to get to the end of the race!

When I first started out on my chartership, I was determined to get it within a year. I had my PPDP all sorted out and kept detailed notes of everything I was getting up to. I actively sought out training courses which were either relevant to my work or which filled training needs that I had identified. After so long in the job though, various time pressures piled themselves on and the chartership was unfortunately pushed to the back of the pile for a while. I suppose this happens with a lot of people, the demands put upon them to get the actual job done has to come first, but it is so important to not forget about your CPD, as I have realised, and I regret letting this happen over the past year.

I feel that attending training courses, thinking about your development, and knowing how you want to improve gives you something to focus on, something to work towards, that gives you direction when you may feel like you are just trundling (is that even a word?) from one week to the next doing pretty much the same thing. So I feel really motivated at the moment, have taken on extra responsibilities at work, and sorted out a few training courses for myself in the not to distant future.

And more to the point, I have started to draw together my portfolio for submission. It’s amazing how many pieces of evidence you gather over the process of just doing your job! I guess that’s the point of the chartership really, actual work experience, but combining this with reflection about how you have progressed, the performance of the organisation, and of yourself, and how you intend to develop in the future.

The process of chartership can be daunting, but for anyone in a library/information related job, the pieces of evidence seem to come together fairly easily, even though it may seem like an impossible task at the moment.

So hopefully I will have mine together soon, there are a few really good examples on the CILIP website which have given me guidance about how to structure it etc so I’m feeling more confident about that now as well. Just need to get all the extra documentation, finalise what is to be included and finish writing up my evaluative statement and then create a contents page! Sounds simple when you say it like that, but it can be quite fiddly and will no doubt take a fair bit of time.

But you heard it here first, my deadline is set and I intend to stick to it - the end of March people. It will be submitted. Or I’ll buy you all a drink. Maybe.

Can’t resist a quick post on this… on the BBC news website today there is a story of a bunch of VERY dedicated librarians fighting to keep their library open, by taking their clothes off!!! Made me smile… just hope my employer don’t get any funny ideas if they get into financial hardship!

Hi there, thought I would write a little bit about a couple of days that I have had out of the office recently, which were both very enjoyable. The first was a couple of weeks ago now, a practical project management course, which was presented by JISC Infonet on behalf of CILIPS.

I found the course to be a very good introduction to the main principles of project management, and whilst I don’t feel as if I learned everything there is to know (a pretty impossible task in one day at any rate!), I do feel slightly more confident in my ability to plan ahead for projects, if I were ever asked to undertake one. I feel as if i could even use some of those principles learned on a smaller scale within my everyday work. A couple of other people from my work were also there at the training course, however, they both have quite a lot more experience than me in managing projects. I think that they both found it to be of use to them too.

The course itself had quite an educational focus, but was transferable to other areas, although some of the principles might be different, e.g. when we undertake projects it is often on behalf of others (paying customers) and so we don’t generally need to justify the project to management in the same way that someone in an academic or public library might need to.

They also provided quite a lot of material for us to take home, and directed us to a range of materials which are available for free on their website, all of which would be of great use to anyone undertaking a project of pretty much any size. There are also other infokits (as they call them) related to other aspects of management, such as change management, which I might also have a look at, as management is one area of my chartership where I feel that I might perhaps be lacking in experience slightly, due to the nature and organisational structure of my current employment.

The second day out that I have recently had is to the CILIPS Branch Group Day, which is normally held in Peebles, but was this year held in Dundee. I think this was to make access for people who live in the north of Scotland easier access to the event. I met in with a few people that I already know there, and also was introduced to other people. Funnily enough, I bumped into my previous dissertation supervisor and co-author of my recent article (mentioned below) on the train on the way there. It was nice to get out of the office and to network with other people who have sometimes vastly different roles to my own. I was chatting for a while to a woman who works in a health library, and it seems to be completely different to my own experience, and is something that I would be quite interested in experiencing, perhaps only as a work shadowing day though, rather than as a future career path!

I sat through a number of interesting talks provided by the different branches of CILIP. I was quite conscious to pick talks which were quite different from one another, so as to get an insight of library related issues in areas that I am not so familiar with. The first talk was on digitisation of local and national heritage materials, and the main issues surrounding this. I felt that much of what was said had already been covered in my ILS degree, as we did a digital libraries course, but it was still interesting to hear about it from a different perspective. A number of interesting sites with digitised materials were also discussed, such as the NLS, and examples of good practice shown.

The second talk that I attended was on Google and whether libraries and librarians will be able to evolve in order to keep up with technology and changing user demands as a result of this. There was a lot of emphasis on the library becoming less important as a place, and less visable in the provision of resources and services. How libraries and librarians could improve their libraries so as to stay relevant to people, particularly young people in higher education was a main focus of this talk.

The third talk was about the establishment of student centred learning at Napier University, such as the use of blended learning through a VLE and the importance of providing support for the users of such services.

Hi there folks, sorry it has been a while since my last post but I have been away on annual leave and things been getting quite busy on the work front too.

Since I last wrote I have done quite a lot towards my chartership, well, at least in terms of working out what i have done so far and what i have still got to do. It really helps to take a couple of moments to sit back and look at what i have achieved so far and what I still am working towards. I think i am on the right track, although, there is probably not enough material to make a full submission yet. At any rate, my full 12 months isn’t up for another month or so, so I won’t be able to submit anything before that point anyway.

I have a new mentor now (can’t remember whether i mentioned this before), as my previous mentor has retired. My new mentor seems keen to encourage the others within my work to complete their chartership too, and we have been having regular meetings about our progress. The others in the office are at a much further stage than I am with the chartership process, but are chartering under 2002 regulations, which is causing some confusion for me (due to all the differences between the two methods of chartering). I’m not sure which one seems more complicated. I think that they both have their strong points, for example, whereas the 2002 regulations are very structured, this is also good in a way because it helps to identify any gaps in learning. The 2005 regulations are less structured, but I sometimes struggle to know where I am lacking in coverage for my application. I have emailed my mentor the list of things that I could include so far so hopefully she will have some useful suggestions or comments at our next meeting.

I do feel as if I am getting along alright with the chartership, what would be ideal would be to have a set amount of time per week where I can sit and just concentrate on it and do a little work towards it, but it seems to be quite difficult at the moment in work to guarantee such time. I have also been trying rather unsuccessfully to arrange a visit (or visits) to other libraries so that I can see what happens in areas outwith my sector. So far though, nothing has really happened with regards to this, so perhaps this would be another thing worth discussing at my next chartership meeting.

One thing that I definitely can include in my chartership, however, is my recently published article: ‘A snapshot of information use patterns of academics in British universities’. How exciting!! I’m really pleased. My name in lights. I have also been informed that it is an ISI ranked journal, which means that it is a really good journal to be published in!! Yay! Here’s to many more…

Hi. A really useful article from Freepint on writing content for the web. Looks like I don’t need that training course after all!

This is a really insightful and useful article about preparing content for the web. It’s not something that I am responsible for in my day to day work, and it probably doesn’t apply to blogs in the same way as web pages, but it is really interesting to hear how content needs to be presented entirely differently than one would write an essay, etc.

It contains really useful and practical tips, so if you are interested, it is well worth a read.

Along similar lines is the plan english campaign - a campaign to eliminate jargon and establish a culture of writing public information in plain, easy to understand english. This is a far cry from what we were taught in University, and indeed what I am used to. I know that people within my work have attended plain english courses as a requirement for taking part in projects with clients, so as a movement it really seems to be gaining momentum.

A warning to all librarians on the perils of sticky labels… see post from ‘This is Broken‘ blog, via Librarian.net. Made me laugh…

Hey folks, it seems like a long time since I actually wrote anything for this blog (probably because it has been a long time since I wrote anything for this blog). So i thought i should fill you in about what i have been getting up to library-wise over the past month (or two)…

Well, I have recently taken over responsibility for the journals administration within my organisation, which i am really enjoying. I’ve made up a couple of spreadsheets to keep track of things, and have had the annual renewal form in from the subscription agent that we use to supply many of our journals, so i have had lots to keep me amused. The person who previously did the journals has now left the organisation, and the journals supervisor is on maternity leave, so its really just down to me and the two lovely women who deal with the check-ins, invoices etc.

We have been thinking a lot about cancelling journals in order to save both money and time. In our organisation, people will probably be shocked to hear that there is no real budget for books/journals which is set for the year, but even so it has become important for us to consider journals which are not representing value for money and are wasting the time of the Information Officers, and not really benefiting our members.

This has really been my first experience of weeding out stock, and making judgements about which items to continue stocking and which to cancel. We are currently seeking everyone’s opinions on this, based upon data which the deputy manager has compiled from the database. We are looking at journals which cost a lot of money, those which we have not abstracted much from, those which no one has really requested, those which have not contributed to the weekly bulletin that we produce, as well as those which are increasing in price this year.

A few recommendations have been made already, but it remains to be seen what will stay and what will go. It is remarkably difficult sometimes to decide what is most important, when all the journals have such different articles, quality, number of issues, costs, subject matters etc.

It would probably be really useful to draw up some kind of ’score sheet’ to assess journals by, which could then be used as a basis for cancellations. I guess people looking at the data produced by our manager are doing something similar mentally though, as I know I was.

I wonder how other libraries etc. decide upon what stays and what goes within their organisation? It would be quite interesting to find out, as this is something which I have very little experience of, as like I said, we don’t really have a budget, and are currently not too affected by space contraints which might merit such weeding of stock.

I attended the AGM of the Library and Information History Group (LIHG) yesterday afternoon through in Edinburgh, which was very insightful indeed.

It was held in the Signet Library, just off of the Royal Mile, in West Parliament Square, an area of the city so steeped with history that it seemed to be the ideal location for a group that are interested in the history of libraries and of the library profession.

My interest in attending this event was primarly to attend the talk and tour of the library, which is a very important law library within Scottish Legal History. The talk that we were given detailed the development of four of the legal libraries within the area, from the 1600s, which i have to admit left me feeling a little bit dizzy with numbers, and also very appreciative of modern fire prevention and fighting techniques, as the frequency of fires which these libraries seem to experience in the early days of their history was quite astonishing!

The library itself was a Georgian masterpiece of a building, with sweeping staircases, enormous pillars and walkways, and stained glass windows. How very different to the modern constructions of libraries today! The library itself was an exercise in preservation, nevermind the books that it held. Much of the original furniture remained, and rugs which would cost upward of £0.25 million to replace today. How extraordinary!

The library contained both legal and non-legal texts, most of which were kept in shelving behind glass or metal screening. I do not think that i saw a single person using it in the time i was there! Their situation regarding cataloguing is that only three quarters of the books in the lower library (law related) are electronically catalogued and available in an online opac, the rest are included in a card catalogue (held within the most magnificent mahogany cabinet!). The upstairs library has not been catalogued for the online opac due to funding restraints. Indeed, until only a few years ago they kept a hard copy loans record!

The building is really very impressive, but i have to admit that i was a bit confused by all the technical legal type information, i.e. the different users of the library and courts and such. There was not a great turnout for the event, most people there were already members of the group and of the committee, but they were very welcoming of me, the little outsider who knew very little, if anything, of library history.

Most of the people there really seemed to be very interested in library history as a research subject, and seemed in that sense to be as much historians as they were librarians. They seemed to realise that there was a real problem for their group in getting people interested in the history of libraries and that most librarians and library staff had very little knowledge about the history of the libraries in which they worked and of library history in general.

I think that the experience gave me a real insight into a view of librarianship which i had not really considered prior to attending. Understanding how the profession has developed and how it has been regarded by the public over the many years is of interest to myself, but i do not think that i would join the group as yet - if anything, i do not feel as if i know enough about the history of libraries to merit joining.

I will certainly in the future think more about the profession from this angle, and perhaps next time I visit a library building will think not just about what it currently offers and what it will offer in the future, but also about what it has offered in the past and how it has shaped and influenced the lives of the people who have used it and has grown and changed with the community in which it is placed.

UPDATE: I forgot to also mention one of the most unusual things that i discovered on the day - that the speaker who gave us the talk and tour of the building had been only the second qualified librarian to work in the library since it first opened (hundreds of years ago!)… what does that say for the recognition of the profession!?? Also, she was the first woman to work as a librarian within the library too….. (16th June 2006)

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