Day 1 of ‘Library Day in the Life’ (8) on which I did lots of stuff…

So this is the first time that the Library Day in the Life project has come around when I’ve thought that blogging my work week might actually be a viable proposition (at the start of the week anyway!). I’ve always liked the idea of it and enjoyed reading other’s posts so here goes…

And I’m already getting an inevitable pop culture reference in, as the project makes me think of Howard Jones’s ‘Life In One Day’. Not his best effort. BTW for those that know him, don’t you think he looks like Owen Massey McKnight?

Opening up…
Mondays have taken on a new complexion for me recently as I’m now down on the rota to open up the Information Centre. You might question why I’m part of this rota given I’m in charge and have 4.5 FTE staff reporting to me? Well, I think its important for me to muck in where its not too costly – in terms of what I’m paid – to do so, besides it keeps my eye in with processes and problems at the desk. Today opening up was a pain as there’d been a power cut or somesuch at the weekend so nothing was working – Bloomberg terminals, our promotional plasma screens, public terminals.

Email fascism…
Next up a quick squish through my emails. I’m a bit OCD with my emails. They are all meticulously filed and I feel as though I’ve failed if there’s more than 5-10 emails in my inbox at any one time! By the end of the week I have to be faced with a glowing white blank screen or the world ends. Doesn’t it?

A selection of the type of emails waiting for me today:

• a request for info about the availability of a market research report
• a member of staff won’t be in due to a poorly child
• more MBAs want to link with me on LinkedIn
• a non-Judge student wants to know how to research the  activities of a 19th Century businessman (this came to me but was re-directed to the staff member ‘on enquiries’ today)
• my Deputy, Kirsty, wants me to come up with a truth or a lie (a la Would I Lie To You) for the icebreaker activity for some training we’re running on Wednesday
• someone wants to know how to access a Corporate Governance database called RiskMetrics
• people have been looking at my profile on Academia.edu
• the usual library automated system notices

While still pending from last week were emails about:

• sorting proxy server authentication for our databases with the IT dept (I have a budget of £300k pa for databases)
• getting a price on the DealScan mergers and acquisitions database
• writing my report for the Operations User Group on Friday
• prepping a presentation on our ebooks collection development policy for Cambridge librarians

Followed by a quick scan of Twitter via HootSuite, and the idea to participate in #libday8 is planted, partly, if I’m honest because 8 is my lucky number.

Meeting with Meg…
Meg, my part-time Projects Officer, has been away for a week so this is more of a two-way briefing session to share what has happened and also what she will be doing this week. Most significantly the news that Kirsty will be leaving us in April to take up the job as Hertford College librarian back in Oxford (where we both used to work). Its a good move for her, but I’ll be very sorry to see her go. We also needed to discuss a few slight changes of responsibility and action over our service front-end: a WordPress.org blog and a social media session we are preparing together entitled ‘Twitter for Research’. We also covered her upcoming projects which chiefly relate to enhanced support of faculty and researchers through further promotion of what we can offer them. We are about to launch: Bi-weekly ‘Research Alerts’; a document called ‘Research Toolkit’ detailing our services; and, for all user groups, a guide to ‘Apps for business and pleasure’ (but as Meg felt the need to clarify NOT ‘sexy’ apps). 

Course preparation…
There followed a bit of time to look over the prezi that acts as the framework for a morning of ‘Personalised Customer Service’ training for my team and Libby Tilley’s team from the English Faculty library – the aforementioned Wednesday training. I need to kick the event off and then Kirsty and I are taking it in turns to present and facilitate. Should be a lot of fun as we’ve picked some funny and interesting YouTube videos to show to pep it up and there’s going to be lots of group discussion.

12:00
Ridiculous! Lunchtime for me already as I’m going to the Cambridge Chop House with two other business school managers. I do try to take a lunch break but don’t find it very easy, today I have no choice which is probably a good thing. But 12:00 that’s not lunchtime! 13:00 is lunchtime, everyone knows that. I did find the time during lunch to send some sarcastic tweets to Kirsty about her traitorous departure to The Other Place. The food was an ok Fisherman’s Pie, Marisa’s (my wife) would have been nicer as it would have had prawns and a crustier cheese topping.

A bonus hour
First thing in the afternoon I was meant to be meeting with a member of my team about revising our annual student online survey ahead of its launch next Monday, but she’s the one at home with a poorly child. So this is that wonderful bonus of an hour’s time that I hadn’t banked on. I check my Nozbe (highly recommend it) tasks app on my iPhone and see I need to let Meg know how we’re going to divvy up the Twitter session. I’m about to collate the content I have so far with a view to emailing her some suggestions as to her angle, when I get an email from Emma Coonan. Otherwise known as everyone’s favourite Librarian Goddess, Emma was inviting me to join the Dropbox folder for her new book, with Jane Secker, on ‘Rethinking Information Literacy: a practical framework for teaching’ for Facet, following their ANCIL research, for which I’ve agreed to write a chapter on presenting and communicating knowledge. Reading through the guidelines and what’s expected of me, made me realise I have lots of questions for her and that the Twitter session might be a great way of exploring some of the avenues outlined. I ask to meet her for a coffee. To find out more about ANCIL check out this video:

FT Rankings
I receive an email alert about the global business school rankings from the FT which are a big deal if you are a business librarian like what I am. The ranking affects all sorts of stuff, but most notably attendance on our MBA course, which brings a huge amount of money into the School. In a simplified nutshell if the rankings are down, then numbers of good applicants might drop, and the number of MBAs that year will drop and ultimately I might lose some of my budget.  I am relieved to see that Judge has retained its position at 26 in the list. I communicate this fact to my team and await the official email from the Director giving his take on this ‘steady state’ result.

Foiled escape plans
Another email catch-up slot and I’m mildly irritated to note that two of them are from people chasing me to chase someone else who I have already chased – patience people! I decide to go elsehwere in the business school in order to not be tempted to read my email so I can work on the Twitter session when the phone goes. Five minutes later I’ve said ‘Yes’ to hosting a database event at Judge for the market research database company Euromonitor and set about booking a room and sending possible menus by email. I attempt to leave again and promptly receive a phonecall from Rowland Thomas the Economics dept librarian regarding  the possibility of organising a Bloomberg terminal over at his Library using one of our licences. I add ‘Contact Bloomberg’ to my ‘to do’ list and then succeed in escaping my office.

Twitter for Research planning
This is much quicker than I imagined due to the research I’d already undertaken last week. I plan for the session to be part-discussion, part-presentation but to offer an overall approach that makes it clear that we don’t have all the answers and that using the platform is very much a personal choice. As well as a prezi presentation, there will be interactive post-it note exercises, discussion in twos, videos of Stephen Fry and a PhD student talking about social media, demos of crowdsourcing and of using Twitter from within HootSuite.

Wrapping up
I round the day off with a  chat with Kirsty about various staffing matters and her recent resignation and return to Oxford. We’ve worked together on-and-off since 2000 so its going to be strange saying goodbye again – although I have now done that several times over the years! My evil email inbox has once again filled up: 5 junk, 5 fyi, and 10 to act on, including a hugely useful reply from Emma about the direction to take for the IL book.

I’m on leave tomorrow as I’m meeting an actress for lunch to talk book projects so, like Worzel Gummidge, I’ll have my other head on.

Altogether now… “Put a ‘Wur’ after double-u and a ‘wur’ after oh…”

Brand new brand

Drum roll…. This is one of three new brand images for Information & Library Services here at Judge. When I first discussed possible options with our designers I knew I wanted images that communicated that our service is principally about the provision of electronic business information and data, after all 82% of our budget goes on databases and we spend the vast majority of our time guiding users to them and/or fulfilling data requests with them. I was also keen that our new images incorporated our new name and some eye-catching colours. So how did the designers do?

Pretty well I think, especially as I think it communicates a bit more than what I initially asked for, elements that could feasibly be described as representing the speed of our response to user enquiries and the rapidly changing nature of the business world. Plus they have impact and feel dynamic.

This is one of three designs which we’re currently frantically adding to PPTs, Word docs, video tutorials, posters and more before term. The alternative designs use different colours but are otherwise very similar. One of the designs has already been affectionally named ‘the sea-monster’ so that one might get used a bit less than the other two!

As well as making us look more professional and consistent across all of our promotional materials,  these designs should save us some positioning time and arduous explanation as to why we’re not a regular library in our hands-on inductions.

Completely in character for me to have sorted style before content but there you go…

So what do you think? Do you like it?

What a difference 24 hours makes…

OK, so I’m a complete convert, after our misfire library induction yesterday I was feeling much less keen on the hands-on and longer session approach, but today its  a completely different story. I guess that the main change today was that  the PCs were already set-up in our portal so there was no way that the students could go wrong to start with. Also, the inclusion of the sentence ‘out of courtesy to presenters please don’t update your Facebook profile or read your email’ completely did the trick and we had an attentive audience, even in the 2pm after lunch sleep-slot! In both of today’s sessions the students listened, interacted, understood and were generally fab human beings. I could have hugged some of them for asking what, if I didn’t know any better, seemed like perfect planted questions! One more session to the fourth and final MBA stream tomorrow and I feel like I’ve finally cracked MBA induction. Only taken me 15 years.

The best thing about it is of course that  those who attended today’s sessions are as equipped as they can be information-wise at this point in the course, and as a result dbase usage, enquiries and footfall should theoretically increase. I’m a happy chappie – can you tell?! I would be happier but I now have a whole day’s worth of emails ahead of me before I go home.

Andy

That same old induction problem (after the fact)

OK, so those of you who read my post earlier today, here’s how the new hands-on and longer session style went down.

Negatives

• There were inevitable technical problems at the start of the session – students not having sourced or brought with them the passwords required to access our portal. Also some browser issues.
• My lovely powerpoint session froze for no good reason right at the start.
• The Lab we were presenting in had just been refurbished and it took us a while to work out where the dimmers were and how to up the mic volume.
• Some of the databases behaved slower than usual - THEY KNEW!
• We didn’t have hands-on for all databases due to group password and simultaneous user ssues .
• A lot of the students inevitably strayed into Facebook, email and other sites during the session.
• The students were obviously tired from having being talked at alot already today.
• Overall, it didn’t feel as professional and seamless as I’d have liked.

Positives

• We took the students straight into our portal – none of that ‘you can go in yourselves after the session’ malarkey.
• We gave them much more info than usual about our main databases.
• They asked a lot of relevant questions.
• They all came back after the coffee break!
• We felt they understood our main messages about the library service focusing on databases, business information and training and teaching rather than traditional aspects.
• The lab was a comfortable location for the audience and if they got bored they could get on with their own thing (!)
• Most of them chose to join the optional tour after the session.
• It was definitely an interactive experience.
• The debrief conversations brought us closer to the IT team!

So all in all, not too bad.  Hands-on is definitely more exhausting for the presenter, but its ticking lots of learning boxes that a straight lecture just doesn’t. I’ve got some clear ideas about how it can be improved for the next 3 streams who have the same sessions with us (most importantly logging on to the portal in advance) and we won’t be beset by new room issues next time around, so the only way is up!

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

Open All Hours

In February of this year, Judge Business School Library service went over to 24/7 opening, with members having access outside of staffed hours via swipecard. We decided to try this out for a number of reasons:

• To finally succumb to demand. This had been requested by students for many years via  the staff-student committee and the annual library survey. In fact, in the 2008 survey it was the most requested improvement, cited by 29%  of respondents.
• Because as a business school that considers itself to be world-class, arguably we could no longer justify the limited opening hours  of 9am to 7pm.
• In order to provide a more flexible and customer-focused service to our users.

The main argments against the move to 24/7 were as follows:

• the security of the staff area (specifically the lack of lockable cupboards and shelving at the open Library Desk)
• the fact that we only had a self-issue terminal so users couldn’t return books after hours
• the fear that materials would be removed from the Library without being loaned
• and finally, the possibility of more food and drink debris and the related need for more cleaners

Thankfully the first two points could be easily remedied with a bit of cash injection for furniture modification and a self-return module for our existing 3M terminal, while the second two were always going to be more ‘suck it and see’.

As far as I was concerned, and as I repeated at length to nay-sayers, if a few books did go missing, then in the grand scheme of things that wasn’t too important. What was much more significant was that the overall service would be vastly improved and expectations (particularly of our North American students) would be met. I also wasn’t too interested in exactly how many people would use the library after staffed hours, as the willingness to go 24/7 and the message that would sent about our service was far more important than the reality of use.

So 4 months down the line how has it gone? Well I’m pleased to say that very few books have gone missing, the Library is no dirtier than before and usage has been higher than I imagined, especially between 7 and 9pm and during the pre-lecture 7am-9am slot. As for the praise we’ve received, well, quite frankly its been embarrassingly good. In the annual Library survey, students variously described the new 24/7 opening as fantastic, excellent and even ‘heaven-sent’. To say that 24/7 has proved popular is something of an understatement.

All that and not one mention of Arkwright, Granville and Nurse Gladys Emmanuel. So to put that right:
     Granville: I’ve got the blood of poets and lovers in my veins.
     Arkwright: [as Granville leaves] Yes. And at least one electrician.

Andy

Enquire within?

Various experiences during my career (mainly negative ones it has to be said) have led me to take stats on almost every aspect of the library service I currently run. One such statistic that is an abolsoute bind to keep, but which is nevertheless hugely significant, is a tally of enquiries received by myself and my team. As of this academic year, beginning September 2008, we have all diligently kept records of each enquiry and specified whether it was received in person, by email or by phone.

Personally I have not found these stats surprising, but it is entirely possible that other stakeholders within the business school might. This is because they clearly point to the fact that library staff at Judge field only 40% of enquiries in person and that the remainder are received via email or phone. Apart from anything else this data supports my efforts over the past 18 months  to shift the emphasis from a rather blinkered focus on physical users of the library (our more obvious clientele, simply because they’re right in front of us) to a more balanced service that equally supports those users who do not regularly, or in some cases never, visit the physical library and choose to communicate with us remotely instead.

What is more, the ‘in person’ stats include 9% that are received within the School but outside the Library itself – in the Common Room, corridors or staff offices. I am passionate about bringing the library to its users and this stat reflects this activity.

What does this mean for the library service going forward? Well it doesn’t mean I’m after getting rid of the physical library (as some of my colleagues in the business school who regularly make jokey references to Farenheit 451 might suspect, because they know I’m essentially an e-librarian), especially as gate totals are actually on the rise, but rather increased recognition that usage is changing and that we cannot and should not be defined by our physical confines any longer.

The validity of this new wider definition of the library service will be neatly and practically demonstrated by our forthcoming support for Judge’s new Executive MBA programme, which we will primarily be supporting remotely, a fact that has led me to plan a summer training day for my team to ensure the provision of truly excellent and professional remote support to these new library users.

It will be fascinating to see this time next year how much further the ‘in person’ enquiries stat has fallen, as fall it will.

Andy

Not just reacting (or why I’m finally blogging)

OK so I’ve finally taken the plunge and begun a blog. Why? Well, for two simple reasons that I could no longer ignore…

For one thing I’ve become a Twitter-addict and wanted to examine some of the fascinating debates that have arisen from that activity in more detail than the 140 characters will allow. For another I wanted to start exploring the many issues that are currently affecting academic business librarianship through a blog format, as my awareness of  the instant – and global - publishing of my words SHOULD ensure that I don’t simply react (a natural tendency of mine) but truly absorb and process before taking action.

So if you’re interested in reading about the challenges faced by a hard-working and enthusiastic Head Librarian at a UK business school (Judge Business School, University of Cambridge) this blog may be for you…

Andy