EBSLG 2011, HEC Paris: Innovation in Libraries (Part 2)

Day 2 (continued)
Lunch on the second day provided an opportunity to meet Anna Drabble of Emerald (@anna150 on twitter), Head of Digital and Product Development at Emerald Group Publishing, who was the only other person tweeting at #ebslg11 (although there were plenty of lurkers). As well as our shared interest in the impact of social media we discussed the specific matter of live-tweeting at conferences. I find that it helps me to process the events I attend and, of course, it gives access to the event for those unable to attend. I wrote about this issue at some length after last year’s BLA conference and upon reading that post again, apart from being amused to see I was still resisting an iPhone back then (I couldn’t live without now), it made me realise how much more accepted device-use is at conferences, just one year later. I distinctly remember dark looks at last year’s EBSLG when I got my laptop out, but this year, loads of delegates were on iPhones, iPads, laptops, even if only two of us were tweeting.

However, we’re not all the way there yet… one sponsor made the mistake of demanding we switch our phones and laptops off at #ebslg11 - ironically during the mobile tech roundtable! – presumably on the basis that we weren’t concentrating. I refused on the basis that I was tweeting (others could have refused on the basis that they were taking notes) and realising his mistake, he quickly, and unconvincingly, pretended it had been a joke. Today’s speakers need to realise that devices are now part-and-parcel of their teaching experience. If it makes some of them try harder to grab our undivided attention then that can’t be a bad thing! Although doing so by making a whole conference hall do aerobics and air-kisses is probably not for every speaker – apologies Cambridge librarians, but I just couldn’t resist it.

Thorsten Meyer of the German National Library of Economics (ZBW) was the first speaker after lunch (and now the new president of EBSLG – congratulations!) on the topic of Open Innovation, the process by which customers are actively integrated into the innovation process via Web 2.0. At ZBW open innovation has been employed by ZBW labs and for an ideas competition: The EconBiz challenge. Essentially, ZBW is sourcing input form the outside world in order to improve and develop new and existing products. One soundbite from this session that I particularly liked (tweeted by @anna150): It is important to have good ideas – but an idea is not yet an innovation…

Veronique Mesguich, Library Director of the Leonardo Da Vinci University spoke next. There were plenty of ‘take-aways’ from her session. Firstly, the simple statement (that I think I’ve been saying since circa 2001): ‘We are in the age of access not property’. Secondly, the observation that librarians are more like teachers and teachers more like librarians (because the latter are searching for, and retrieving, more data from the web with which to present). Finally, the fact that librarians now have many new territories and, because of this, collaboration with those already in these territories is key. She talked specifically about ‘soft empowerment’ as her preferred approach to this collaboration.

I personally find that because ‘the game has changed’ and librarians now must actively embrace technology and marketing that I am perceived as encroaching on other departmental territories more and more and it is a challenge to square that with all parties. I agreed with Veronique and, later, Dominic of MBS, that communication, listening and building relationships is key. Unfortunately there is sometimes little difference between positioning and empire-building in the eye of the beholder. I guess I just have to try harder to be understood and to make it clear that what we’re about offers the opportunity for collaboration and a fuller overall service to our users and does not constitute a threat. After all, we’re all cogs which go to make up a larger organisational mechanism.

The remainder of the afternoon was given over to the Bazaar of Ideas which this year saw the following projects/topics explored: implementation of an open-source LAS system at INSEAD (Pascale Pajona) – very neat it is too; a database of research publications at University of Paris Dauphine (Andre Lohisse); library book events and social reading at HEC Paris (Sylvie Marion); Manchester Business School’s excellent Business Research Plus blog service (Dominic Broadhurst); more on the EconBiz challenge at ZBW (see above); development of the Cranfield Research Information System (CRIS) (Mary Betts-Gray); use of Twitter at EADA library (Carolina Sanmartin); and finally, my own presentation on our adoption of a WordPress blog as the new front-end of our service here at Judge.

Thanks to my switched-on team the demo involved some instant chat (a component of the new site) in French for the benefit of the continental audience. As each of us taking part in the Bazaar had to present 4 times with the audience circulating, I found it interesting to see how I could improve on my content and flow as I progressed, with the third session probably  the best and the first outing definitely the weakest. Practice absolutely does make perfect. The prezi presentation I used is available by clicking on the image below.

The Hall of Mirrors, Palace of Versailles

The day was rounded off in style with a virtually private tour of the Palace of Versailles which is usually heaving with visitors. The Hall of Mirrors was my  particular highlight due to its historical significance as the venue of the signing of the Treaty of Versailles, although it was also great to see the door through which Marie Antoinette fled when the French populace stormed the palace at the outset of the Revolution in 1789.

Versailles was followed by a return to the HEC Campus in Jouy-en-Josas and the gala dinner at the CRC castle at which the company and  food was superb and the wine flowed freely.

Next time in my final #ebslg11 post (Part 3 of 3): Google Books; the impact of mobile technologies and social media, and a visit to Maxim’s.

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

10 challenges for the library profession

Over the next week or so I’ll be posting summaries and reviews of the many excellent sessions presented at the recent EBSLG conference at Ashridge Management College (5-8 May 2009), The first session was led by Tony Sheehan, Ashridge’s Learning Services Director.

Tony identified 10 challenges that currently face the library profession and which were also intended to answer the increasingly asked question: “Do we need libraries at all?”

Tony’s 10 Challenges:
1. Business
Librarians should be integrating with all parts of their organisation and avoid their library becoming a silo. Collaboration and connectivity are therefore key.
2. Workload
Information has grown exponentially but our capacity to absorb it has not. There is an ever widening zone of ignorance.
3. Search
Librarians are now answering more complex research questions than ever. This shift is important and will help us to erode the zone of ignorance (see above). 
4. Attention
We are now driven  by info-lust and distracted by content and therefore hyperlinking off in our own minds all the time. Mistakes arise from our ‘emotional tagging’ of information and recognising misleading patterns. After Bazerman and Chugh, we need to bring the right information into our conscious awareness at the right time.
5. Complexity
Librarians are now facing brand new problems and the answers are frequently to be found in different disciplines.
6. Connections
The Internet now offers us connections. Shirky: “Each URL is a latent community” – the trigger for richand engaging conversations – the launch point for creativity”. Technology is providing us with connections that should be fully utilised. e.g. the lizard spit that may provide the answers to diabetes.
7. Communities
Networks of knowledge (such as EBSLG) are now more important than ever for librarians. See book: The Wisdom of Crowds and e.g. of checking out TripAdvisor before choosing a hotel.
8. Technology
What we all now experience at home, technology-wise, is setting the standard for our experience at work. We can do almost everything electronically now. e.g. of use of World of Warcraft by CISCO for job selection process!
9. Personalisation
Eagleton refers to the human situation of ”hasty, random choices with little thought and evaluation”, which we’ve arrived at through Google and the search engine revolution. Critical information skills have been lost and librarians have to ensure that they are still on the agenda by providing the best of both worlds (Google and information portals/services).
10. Reflection
We should be spending more time reflecting, thinking and learning and less time doing. Space is important. We need this in order to keep up with the latest trends.
Conclusion:
Libraries and librarians can still be valuable if they can keep up-to-date and respond to organisational, individual and environmental needs. The problem is that many library services are currently invisible.

Although there was nothing particularly groundbreaking about Tony’s presentation, I found it to be both affirming and relevant.
His call for librarians to spend more time relecting and learning in order to keep up-to-date was actually the final catalyst for me to start blogging. As for the invisbility factor – promoting my own library service to make it as visible as possible is easily my number one priority on a day-to-day basis.

Andy