So long, and thanks for all the quips

Today is a very sad day at work as my Deputy, Kirsty Taylor,  is leaving to return to the Other Place to become a college librarian.  Kirsty has been a colleague of mine off and on since 2000 (although the poor girl did have a break from me for a few years when she worked at Nuffield College, Oxford and the New Zealand parliament – don’t feel too sorry for her!) and, as a result, we work together very well, having a natural shorthand with each other as evidenced by this typical exchange – Andy: Can you do this? Kirsty: No.

Sarcasm and directness are both part of our working relationship  and as I said in my leaving speech for her earlier today it’s sometimes very useful to have people around you who will say “No”, especially when the person doing the asking is someone as pushy as me. I am genuinely grateful to her for helping me to steer our service in the right  direction over the last 4 years and I recognise and appreciate that she’s often picked up unglamorous  process and procedure while I’ve been blithely forging ahead. She’s also instituted hugely important changes that have stuck, for instance, holding weekly team meetings which now happen, without fail, every Tuesday at 10am.  That’s going to be one of her legacies.

Worth mentioning as well that she’s a grafter, quietly and without any fuss – unless it’s a SDC Platinum problem (which have been known to turn the air a vivid shade of blue) – she get’s stuff done. Even now, on her last day, she’s set her mind to sort out installation of a Bloomberg outpost at the Economics library. You spend a helluva lot of your life at work so I’m also grateful that she’s been so damn easy to get along with. It’s going to be very weird that she won’t be here next week but I’m very pleased for her that she has a new challenge ahead of her in a new environment. I think we’re both agreed that change is good and it’s high time she was making all the decisions.

Kirsty recently relented a little in respect of a debate that has raged between us ever since we first met. I consider myself to be a Northerner having been brought up from 3 to 16 in Newcastle and Northumberland and having a Geordie mother, but Kirsty – a Geordie born and bred – has never accepted my claim (typically greeting my assertion with scorn). Recently she admitted for the first time that at least ‘I behave like a Northerner’. I think I’ll take that (it’s all I’m gonna get).

One final memory is of a party thrown by Kirsty at which, needless to say, the drink flowed well, so well in fact that afterwards, in the early hours of the morning, the wife and I were briefly apprehended by the police while playing shoot-em-ups in the street. Perhaps the fact that we were dressed as Lara Croft and Superman respectively persuaded the officers to let us go after just a few words of caution?

Until the next time our paths cross…

‘Save our libraries’ day – Cambridge

If ever there was a day for a librarian to stand up and be counted it’s today – Saturday 5th February 2011 – as up and down the country protests and read-ins aim to save our threatened public libraries. I duly headed into the city centre with my wife and son in tow to partake in the Cambridge ‘flashmob’ protest organised by everyone’s favourite @LibGoddess.

Arriving in good time for the 11am start we duly visited the Central library (due to suffer a 30% budget cut) first and borrowed a heap of books before joining the troops gathering at Costa Coffee near John Lewis. There we were handed some rather smart leaflets created by @Girlinthe with text explaining the threat to 13 out of 25 Cambridgeshire libraries and Phil Bradley’s wartime posters on the front. Placards had also been prepared by @Annie_Bob and I was very pleased to snaffle a large John Kirriemuir ‘Use Libraries – Learn Stuff’ one before  we dispersed to the entrances of the Grand Arcade (we weren’t allowed to protest inside).

Now I’m not a seasoned protester by any stretch of the imagination, but the reasons for saving libraries seem like such a no-brainer to me that I had little or no concern about standing up for them in public. What I wasn’t prepared for was the immediate show of support from shoppers who wanted to know the detail of the threats and what they could do. Our response was quite simply: use your local library and write to your MP - and many said they would.  A large number of people just gave thumbs up signs, while others shouted “here, here!” and “keep up the good work” as they walked past. It was clear that whatever the media or the government wants us to believe, the public (in Cambridge at any rate) don’t want to lose their libraries and completely value and recognise their function to educate, inform and inspire.

The protest also involved some ‘read-alouds’. We were treated to readings of an A S Byatt fairytale called The Eldest Princess and my son’s favourite book: Room on the Broom. At the other entrances there were readings from Ulysses, The Hobbit and Mr Snow. Eclectic huh?!

Before I close, a shout-out to my fellow protesters at the ‘John Lewis entrance’: my wife Marisa (above left – not the passing pensioner!) and son John, @lemurph (Helen Murphy), @pussy_galore_ (Emma Jones), @AidanBaker, @felicityms (Felicity Macdonald-Smith), Jillian Wilkinson and David. We did good today.

See also:
The full set of my photos on Flickr.
More photos on Flickr and a  very short video clip of one of the ‘read-alouds’ courtesy of @Laura_B_James.

And find out more about saving our public libraries at Voices for the Library.

Personalised library services?

On the 22nd March at Homerton College, myself and Libby Tilley, librarian at the English Faculty here in Cambridge, will be running a one-day symposium on personalised library services in HE. The event has arisen from an article that we wrote together back in September 2009, originated by Libby, entitled ‘Boutique libraries at your service’ which was published in Library & Information Update in July 2010, and the subsequent commissioning of a book on the same subject by Ashgate.

The article (which is accessible in full via the above link by kind permission of Update) examines the potential application of the boutique hotel model to libraries due to their focus on personalised service. It also stands as a defence of subject librarians embedded in their departments who have developed local specialist services to their unique user groups, an approach which is at odds with, and threatened by, the more anonymous centralised approach. Ultimately it proposes a new ’boutique library model’ which comprises: subject librarians taking a boutique (or personalised) approach; centrally managed activities which support local services; and collaborative activities to further enhance service excellence.  Interestingly, our spirited defence of the local boutique approach increasingly chimes with the current reversion to - and celebration of - the embedded faculty librarian in US academic libraries.

Although the article was received favourably, albeit by a smaller audience than we had hoped (due to its publication in the digital version of Update), several librarians responded to us by saying: ‘Yes great article, but surely it just articulates what we do already?’ While there may be some truth in this, our feeling was that the value of this approach could be better enhanced and  recognised by exploring its intrinisic value (and the reason for its evolution) in a paper and by formulating a model. We hoped, and still hope, that the model can be applied across the Higher Education sector and, if necessary, used to defend the development of local specialist services where and when they are under threat.

I’m also of the opinion that although we think we personalise our services, that in reality we don’t work that approach hard enough. Do you know what all your PhDs are researching? Do you become actively involved in the research process? Do you give out induction materials to named students?  Are your service guides relevant to one student group or as many as possible? Do you regularly meet with all your users face to face? Do you greet everyone who comes into your library? etc. I know that I couldn’t honestly say yes to any of those. Are we missing a trick or tricks? I’m sure we are and that we could be sharing our personalised success stories.

Anyway, this blog post was by way of an introduction to our forthcoming symposium. If you are interested in exploring personalised library services further and examining the application of our wider boutique model then we’d love to see you here in Cambridge on 22 March. As I write there are around 20 places left.

When to keep my big mouth shut…

For the last few months I’ve been following with interest the 23 Things Web 2.0 programme conducted within Oxford University Libraries which was open to all library staff there. By all accounts it has been very successful indeed with a take-up that surprised the project team and  many resulting benefits for participants, organisers, and their libraries, alike. As I learned more about the programme structure and delivery, crucially that it is largely self-directed – requiring limited set-up, I began to seriously think ‘What have we got to lose?’ by trying the same here in Cambridge. After a suprisingly little amount of tweeting and emailing ‘Cam23′ was born, or more properly ‘the Cambridge 23 Things programme’ which is due to start next month and run through to August.

We are still very early doors with this, the project team (an excellent group of people IMO) has only just been formed and the Cam 23 blog is brand new today, but already this feels like a very promising endeavour which will bring  library staff across Cambridge together as we explore the value and application of Web 2.0 and social media tools.

This may just be one of those occasions where – for a change – it was right NOT to keep my big mouth shut!

Andy

The Holy Grail

The Cambridge Libraries Conference was held earlier today. My modest contribution was to the poster display. Our poster related to the phenomenal amount of teaching myself and my Deputy carried out in Michaelmas Term and our approach to curriculum integration in general. While the text is all mine, the poster was designed by our talented part-time library assistant, Dan Taylor, who also works as a graphic designer. Useful eh!

I’ll shut up now and let the poster do the rest of the talking… (you may have to squint a bit)

Inspector Morse and faculty/librarian relationships

Last week I attended CILIP’s Umbrella conference in Hatfield. It was a bit of a flying visit, with my primary purpose being to present a talk on faculty engagement, specifically with respect to information literacy and librarians teaching. I’m always looking for a hook to hang my presentations on and this time I chose the TV series Inspector Morse, because like Morse and Lewis  I’ve spent the majority of my working life dealing with the foibles and idiosyncracies of academics at Oxford University.

My rather tongue-in-cheek presentation asked whether Oxford academics were really as awkward, pompous, sex-mad, disturbed and murderous as Morse would have us believe. I also mused that some faculty I have worked with would probably have rather cooperated with a murder enquiry than with the idea of librarians teaching alongside them in the classroom! I also stopped off along the way to see how I’d developed as a teacher and how with confidence and increased freedom, arising from the trust and support I had gained from relationships with faculty, I had been able to provide ‘point of need’ teaching  to which students have truly responded.

I was lucky enough to be joined by two other preseners Carol Webb and Chris Powis for this ‘Information Skills for Life’ hour and despite the relative absence of communication between us before the event, I felt that our respective presentations gelled nicely. The main reason for this was that we all agreed on the importance of emotional engagement and the building and developing of relationships with faculty/teaching staff. One of my slides was headed ‘Relationship’ in a large point size and was there to prompt me to hold forth about the importance of putting all the theory that has been expounded about faculty/librarian collaboration to one side and just getting out there and building relationships with faculty, by: having coffee with them; passing the time of day; and essentially treating them as fellow human beings! Chris took this one stage further by getting the audience to consider in small groups how we see faculty, and how we think they see librarians, and ultimately drawing out the fact that we hold on to a mass of prejudices and preconceptions that are very effective barriers to the development of relationships. He also commented that if he had used slides – the clever sod dispensed with a presentation and got the audience to do all the work (only joking Chris!), then he would have put the word relationship in a bigger point size than even I had done.

Part of my presentation dealt with encountering a situation where you might be starting from scratch at your workplace on the faculty relationship/teaching integration front, as I had done here in Cambridge, back in Autumn 2007. At Oxford, I’d had the cushion of having known the same faculty for years, first at Templeton College and then Said Business School, at Cambridge they didn’t know me from Adam.  My main approach at Cambridge  (see slide above) was as follows:  1. To make it clear from the outset  (as early as interview) that I was seeking to teach and train not simply to curate and protect; 2. To shamelessly declare my teaching credentials by referring to the fact that I had received a teaching award from Oxford University for my lecture/workshop series on effective literature searching; 3. To engage with faculty by embarking on a faculty consultation exercise – partly to find out what their information needs were, but also to make my agenda, abilities and interests known; 4. To ensure that via meetings, email and other forms of communication that I was always ‘on message’ about the potential for the library service’s teaching role and its value and relevance; 5. Identifying latent teaching opportunities e.g. the plagiarism problems at Cambridge which strengthened importance of our provision of plagiarism avoidance lectures; 6. And finally, of course, actually proving myself to some of them as a teacher by making that initial teaching conribution so that faculty are reassured that this was something that I could do and be trusted with. The result of the above approach was that after only 18 months I was teaching on all programmes.

Returning to the question of prejudices, and indeed stereotypes, I took each of the typical characteristics of the faculty as portrayed in Morse in turn and commented on how this tied in with my own experiences. The message being that, of course, reality is far more palatable, surprising and interesting than fiction. There were a few imponderables, such as whether Oxford faculty were sex-mad. I revealed that I have only been propostioned once (a fact of which Chris was profoundly jealous!) but didn’t really like to say whether this qualified  the faculty member in question as ‘sex-mad’. However, I did conclude that as I had  not stumbled across any dead bodies during my time at Oxford we could probably cross murderous off the list of attributes!

Andy