Excited and engaged of Cambridge

As per my own instructions on the Cam23 blog this is my Thing 3 post about my previous experience of Web 2.0 and social media. Over the past 18 months my engagement with all this stuff has increased tenfold, with the main turning points being setting up my Twitter account in Feb 09 and this blog in May 09. Finding my way with both led me in turn to initiate the creation of a Library Twitter account and a Library Facebook page for service promotion and communication purposes. More recently we have  organised what we regard to be the best free web resources in business and management through a Del.ici.ous account, while this summer, we’ll be replacing our newsletter with a Library Service blog. I have many many reasons for using this new media, but  foremost among them is my belief that as librarians we now need to use every route available to us to as the competition we face for the attention of our users is greater than ever.

Although I emphasised the importance of the practical application of these tools at last week’s launch event, what I neglected to say, and perhaps should have done, because in my opinion its just as important, is that using these tools – particularly my personal Twitter account and this blog has led to more professional networking and more reading and processing of thought-provoking and relevant articles and blog posts than ever before. In short, they’ve made me more engaged and, it may sound corny, more excited about my chosen career, which after 15 years as a business librarian is no mean feat.

Although much of my use of these tools is categorically not about directly communicating with users (e.g. this blog and my personal Twitter) I firmly believe that my library users ultimately benefit from the fact that I’m engaged in this professional activity, as otherwise I would have considerably less idea of what new tools and resources were out there and what developments and issues I need to take into account to provide the best service I can.

Having said all that there’s still a great deal out there that I’ve never used or have maybe never seen the point of and that’s why I’m Cam23-ing.

Andy

That same old induction problem…

Its that time of year again and that same old question of how much or how little to say in student inductions. This year here at Judge Business School with our new MBA class we’ve decided to try something completely different to the usual 45 minute lecture theatre presentation come lecture, followed by library tour. Not only are we increasing the length of the session to 2 hours (plus an essential 15-minute break in the middle) so we can demonstrate our key databases but we’re also making as much as we can hands-on.

I remain to be convinced that is the best approach given that its their first week and many of them will be quite understandably distracted by other things, but this does respond directly to comments from last year’s MBAs that they wanted more than just a snapshot of the databases at the top of the year and I’m never going to turn down allocated teaching time.

Another important change is the decision to bill the first session as ‘Business Databases’ rather than ‘Library Induction’ in order to see if the level of enthusiasm and engagement is affected in any way.

Glazed and/or pleading faces will seal the fate of this new initiative!

Andy

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