Library Day in the Life 8 February 2012

I have been meaning to do the Library Day in the Life wiki for several days. I just fall outside the Feb 5 deadline...but... It always amazes me that colleagues have (or make) the time! Several of my days lately have been ideal for this so I have emerged out of my blogging silence to give you this.

Wednesday 8^th February 2012

Today I must get to work on time – even early – have to deliver a session for new Master’s level students - in a hostile environment. So it’s goodbye to the free leisurely bus journey and hello to a quick drive with £7 parking ticket next to the University. It’s so cold, but the new Student Centre is warm and inviting. I pass by the cafe and notice it’s open and there’s a friend eating FEB (full English breakfast). What torture! I am slimming at the moment. .. Up in my office we are all set to go to the nearby Business suite which we are having to use.

It is 9.00 and the student group are beginning to arrive. I do some introductions as three colleagues wrestle with uncooperative equipment. We have lift off ; with full functioning Powerpoint and YouTube clips. These are new international students and I have up to 90 minutes with them. I refused to do the suggested “Introduction to the Library” and “ plagiarism” and instead am going to tackle Social Media and Google. Having just been writing about Information Literacy, Library 2.0 and Transliteracy it’s time to do something different! Taking an openly Transliterate approach for the first time was fun. Comparing Amazon with Google Books and the Library catalogue ; setting the number of books in the world, against the number Google have digitised and the number we have in our library and so on ; encouraging them to consider accessing material online, save results, make notes and use and save them across platforms (mobile, laptop, PC). We have a truly international bunch of about 50 and I go round individually finding out country of origin. When I talk about the power of Facebook and Twitter it is really humbling to hear how students from Libya have used these social media. Also a student from Cairo. The first session went well, but no time for tea. Straight into repeat session at 11.00 and out part way through at 12.00 to prepare for returning international students in the largest lecture theatre on the University site.

I collect some guides. We are going to do a special one hour session on skills they may have (or not learned) so far in the course. We expected 180 of them : I expected only half would turn up. Peering through the door it was full : back I race for more guides. The theatre is bursting with students : my colleague runs through a list of skills and then turns to me to see what I have done. In a flash I become “Francis Maxwell-Smith” and boast about all the things I have not done and how I will still get a degree. They love my posh Oxford accent! Anyway the role play goes well and we get the message across that there is help available and that they should start to take heed.

It’s 1.30 and I must get back to the third iteration (why do we all use that trendy word nowadays?) of the Social Media and Google session that began at 1.00. I help to round this off. Great to meet all these international students and demonstrate the world they live in by using YouTube “Social Media Revolution 2012” and “Next is Now!”

It is 3.00 p.m. but when was lunch? Fortunately not all days are like this!

Day in the Life Project Round 7 26 July 2011

I am still an Academic Liaison Librarian here at University of Bedfordshire in Luton, UK.

I usually mutter about how does anyone have the time! I have done it though before and this week I thought I will go with it! Let's do today!

At the moment I am locked in combat with writing a few chapters of a book about Information Literacy. I woke up about 5.00 a.m. and was trying to make some sense of what the hell IL is all about....how sad is that!

Yesterday I spent most of the day chained to my laptop (see pic) except for the time when I went and moved a few bushes round in the garden! Guess which gave me the most satisfaction...(see pic).

I came to work by bus and had to read an important book for my research : sentences like "the focus of information literacy has largely been centred on instrumental or cognitive views of learning, which have historically been framed within a Cartesian approach to learning" and then there are epistomological concerns and I want to scream!

At work I find I have 85 e-mails again and it takes me til 11.20 to sort through them all!
Everyone is very quiet : perhaps they think I am grumpy because of all those e-mails.
Two more articles arrived from British Library electronically in my e-mail. What a huge improvement this service is but I have to read them now! "Millennial students' mental modes of search : implications for academic librarians and database developers" and "Towards Library 2.0 : the adoption of Web 2.0 technologies in public libraries". I'll save them for the bus on the way home...hope I dont sleep through my stop....
Found out about the Library 2.0 online megaconference planned for November. Must follow this up.

What does the rest of the week hold? Oh no I find I have a whole day on Friday teaching RefWorks. That's the first of the sessions we offer to M level students. Suppose they all come at once..... I dont go in for booking in advance : it went OK last time : "I always hope for the best" : reckon that should go on my tombstone.

I spy a book on my desk - that's unusual - it's a PhD thesis for cataloguing - how I admire anyone who has the staying power to go through all that. Think of the referencing...even with RefWorks.Can't face cataloguing it : there's a new version of Dewey around and that might complicate things.Talking of that reminds me of shelving books years ago with those huge long numbers after the decimal point - always wanted to get the Dewey revising committee to do a few days shelving...

Go to a leaving party for our University Head of Student Welfare : very moving as he has been here 18 years and will be much missed.Lovely jokes too but such a noisy room.

Preparing for session for 5 international students on a Writing course tomorrow. Only 5 : 3 Russians, 1 Finn and 1 Roumanian. It will be about social media : what a nice change from banging on about databases. Reckon I might learn as much from them and the way they are operating as they will from me.I'll do Facebook, Twitter, Delicious, Dropbox, Blogger, Netvibes, Evernote according to their interests.

Half an hour on the phone talking to my ex-colleagues at London South Bank University who have been through a management restructure and are being made redundant. I had that 4 years ago. I know how they feel. To say that they will feel very different about it in a month or two is no comfort.These restuctures are going to be conmmon in this economic environment.

Just found out about two great little videos from LSU Health Sciences Center New Orleans from our E Services Librarian.They will really help our sessions on Friday. I hope that others are using our Just a Minute videos on other topics available here.

It's no good : time to go back to reading about Information Literacy. Let's see "........current information literacy frameworks based on these concepts are 'incompatible with emergent concepts of knowledge and epistemology for digital and online environments". Aaaaaargh! Time for tea.
The answer lies in the Naxos Library (only £13 a year I think I pay) so I can listen to all the stuff in their library. Just the thing when I am ordering or in this case reading tricky stuff.
Am trying Honegger's score for "Les Miserables."I like Honegger but this isnt the happiest music he has written!
Time to go home : read on the bus and then piano playing and maybe a bit of writing late on tonight but no mention sof epistomology or praxis or whatever it was!

Social media survey

There is a survey about use of social media, from the International Federation of Library associations and Institutions.
"In an effort to learn more about how librarians, library workers, library students, and library associations use social media, the Free Access to Information and Freedom of Expression committee of the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA) has developed a short survey on these topics. Our hope is that the results will allow us to communicate better with those in the worldwide library community - using the most effective tools at our disposal. We're also very interested in those who DON'T use certain social media, and why they don't."
"If you have not yet done so, please take a few moments to complete the survey (deadline: Wednesday, 1 June 2011) and share it widely with your colleagues and members!" Also you can "Be a fan of FAIFE on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/faife"
In English: http://www.surveymonkey.com/IFLAsocialmedia
En Español: http://www.surveymonkey.com/IFLAredessocial-espanol
En Françes: http://www.surveymonkey.com/IFLAreseauxsociaux-frances

It's all about social media, stupid!

This is the title of a session I gave at this year's Online Inormation Conference at Olympia, London on 1 December 2010.It is a rather different topic to my usual concerns, being an overview of the problem of trying to define how libraries can get value out of social media.

It's all about social media, stupid!

View more presentations from Peter Godwin.

Library Day in the Life

This post is part of the 5th version of this little project "Library Day in the Life" wiki so that we can share what we do!
I used to think : how has anyone the time to do this? Who cares anyway? In fact it can be an interesting little time capsule for others and ourselves!

Here goes :
This morning began early : at 5.30 I began to think "how can I best contribute to the brainstorm sharing on use of presentation software that we are going to have at work at 10.00 today?" Maybe I should use my iPad for the first time to show how some of these little projects I have been trying have turned out? How well will it work in the wireless environment there?
Let's forget yesterday's 3 hours bafflement with Camtasia Studio followed by trying to play the feet and left hand at the same time on the church organ in the evening...

6.00 and time to get up. No time for exercises or piano playing today - it's straight into trying to get a Photo Story movie working on PBWorks on my iPhone.
Plenty of time to make the tea and still no image. Could do a full English and eat it before this would work...
Time to get the bus to work. Still so keen ..no time today for Paul Wellman's 'Glory God and Gold' about the Spanish excesses in 16th century New Mexico! Reading latest updates on TweetDeck, favouriting the best for later scrutiny.. then deep little sleep..where am I? Is this the ride home...oh no it's the journey in!!!

8.30 Hiding the iPad on the desk - don't want to let on about it yet. Hear that there's a video conferencing and "Oh no there's no meeting - the presentation software sharing is next week!"
What a relief so can forget the agonising over the merits of Jing, Photo Story, Camtasia, Movie Maker, Audacity etc. and how it all fits together.
Let's relax and try out a little video I made on Jing in one of our blogs : loads beautifully - so easy. Let's try it on my iPhone ...aargh it's invisible.
Tomorrow is my day off : Friday is the Mashup event in Huddersfield. We have to make our own badges - have to do something for this....
Let's return to yesterday's battle with Camtasia - that slide just didn't line up with my dulcet tones - 30 more minutes or dragging, cursing, poring over help pages - time for tea.

Let's put some photos on flickr - find out about possibility of storing a short video there. Will thisd help with the badge if I can get a QR code on the badge?

11.30-12.30 moving and shelving books as part of the rebuilding exercise overthe summer.
12.30 Lunch i9n the Business School building - more building work going on. Glad to see that the wall that was being constructed yesterday in front of the main door is only partial, creating a new slim-line ingress! Lamb Rogan Josh with rice - excellent.
1.00 My first Photo Story movie placed in flickr, and works with a QR code created in BeeTagg and read via I-nigma! It was a spoof "Art Show" made up of some photos I took last year, introduced by a certain John Farquhar-Robotham.



2.00 Create new little movie in Photo Story about University of Bedfordshire using photos taken today on iPhone, put on flickr create barcode and badge for Friday! Feel like a lie down.
3.50 Phone rings and have to meet earnest new researchers and give short tour of the library (hard hats not necessary).
4.20 Return to writing this. Decide not to mention the iPad - looking forward to playing with it tomorrow planning Scottish trip, Last-fm etc.

Library of the Future in Plain English

Here is great trigger video to help discussions about the changing library : from University of Technology, Sydney. It's complete with the usual Plain English "boos" when there's some out of date technique mentioned...

A Day in the Life

On 25 January there was a round of "A Day in the Life Project 2010" where librarians share what they do in a day. In the past I have wondered how anyone had the time to document this, let alone whether it would interest anyone!

Now that the term has sort of calmed down I thought I would do it today!

I am a Business Librarian at the University of Bedfordshire in Luton, UK ("where the airport is...!"

This morning began well with the bus on time ; no professional articles to have to read on the journey (I always keep some by just in case I need a relaxing snooze on the way) ; and I could read about the 1920s and how Hugh Walpole went to the whole Bayreuth Wagner Festival for 3 shillings.

I have been teaching (sorry - facilitating student learning) almost solidly for the past 2 weeks so there's been a lot of e-mails, blogs etc to catch upon this week. This will be the day I will do it. Just 10 items in my delicious store marked "follow-up". This led me to register for Hootsuite. This might help me to schedule my tweeting and Facebooking. Then I was trying out mypictr, a tool for chopping pictures down to size. Next came changing my privacy settings on Facebook. As this seemed a good idea and it didnt take long I blogged about this on our Staff blog too. Don't usually spend much time on Facebook and I cant stand those games where you say where you have been and films you hanent seen and so on.

Answering student e-mails followed and ordering a book. Coffee time. Mainly spent talking about the Royal family and remembering how the Queen had kept Margaret Thatcher standing for 40 minutes when she was annoyed about the Grenada situation.

Back at the desk another book request had arrived. My colleagues know that book ordering is not my favourite occupation. Intransigent ordering systems can cause Father Jack impersonations (of Father Ted TV fame). Time to catch up with my blogging. This means looking at my Favoutites on Twitter which I have mainly captured from Tweetdeck on my iPhone while waiting for the bus etc. It's a marvellous facility (Tweetdeck, not the bus). The best of these go into delicious (I am godwinpeter on delicious) and I blog about a few of them. Will all this be done by lunch for I expect to help with a voluntary researching training session at 2.00. Will this be a mixture of first second and Masters' students, like the sessions I helped with yesterday?

Arranged to do a Desktop session for new Business School lecturer on Thursday. Next week will mean 7 sessions for new Business Masters students next week which I do as part of their Communications in Business unit. I shall give a short intro, using the Cephalonian method, then help them to learn how to evaluate material, using the CRAP test. They then do an assignment where they write an essay based on some sources (some good, some less good) which they also have to reference.

It's lunch time and the teaching for today has been cancelled - room double booked. I can catch up with the blogs. As I munch the Marks and Spencer sandwiches I glance through blogs by Elyssa Kroski, Meredith Farkas (how does she write such long posts - I do admire her frankness so much -bet she can touch type - wish I'd learnt..) Then I read that the ACRL Instruction Section (IS) Ilene F. Rockman Publication of the Year Award has gone to an article entitled "Information Literacy and Reflective Pedagogical Praxis."As it says this "expands upon dialogues within Composition and Rhetoric to examine information literacy pedagogy.” Gosh, that sounds heavy I say to myself (or words to that effect) -wonder what praxis is??
Should have looked it up on Kngine, new search engine I've come across : Phil Bradlkey doesnt rate it so I put it on the backburner. (like the praxis article).

Keep glancing at my internal e-mails : hoped to take Thursday off to sort out choir music for Easter, but have 2 appointments now. Only using 9% of my e-mail space - following a purge last week where I pressed the wrong button and erased loads. Remarkable how little we really need from the past - it's just a comfort blanket most of the time.

Keep finding stuff to pass on to other staff - like the LibX extension for Firefox, EBSCO Mobile version, the Library Minute series from Arizona State (how dare they get the same idea as our own Just a Minute Library videos!)
The 39 Social Media Tools I'll use today -really good article : great! I am using a few of them but there so many more ideas to follow up.

I'm sure there are other things I've missed (I learnt many years ago that it is not possible to document all our thoughts/actions).
Wonder how weird this will sound in 20 years time! Twenty years ago I still had a typist and we used paper to communicate. Forty years ago when I was at University there was no public photocopying!We used to make notes....wow

Pics are of me in expansive mood ; our Social Learning Centre ; our LRC in the summer ; a pod in our Social Learning Centre where we sometimes teach groups.