Coming around again

If you’d asked the 23-year-old me what I did for a job, I would have told you without hesitation that I was an Information Professional. At that time I was in my first professional post and my job title of Information Officer helped back up my assurance that I was in the cut and thrust of the information world rather than the book-centric library world which I considered to be very dreary indeed. The Information Superhighway was still being talked about without a snigger and I was getting my first sense that this internet thing was going to be pretty darn big actually and despite my boss’s reservations I felt sure it would have direct application to our work at some point in the near future. Heck, I might even end up using it to answer some user enquiries!

Spin forward to 2002 and the 30-year-old me has long since got bored of explaining what an Information Professional is and despite my job title, Senior Information Officer, I’m much more comfortable with being called a librarian and I tell students this when I’m teaching them. In fact I’m at a point in my career when I think its high time the words library and librarian were reclaimed and for the world to be shown how much more there is to what we do. We librarians were the original search engines after all.

And here I am in 2010 and, with some 15 years of professional life behind me, I’m suffering the slings and arrows of outraged business school members who can’t understand why their beloved Library has just been renamed the Business Information Centre. I’m told how sad it is, and by some, how much they love books. I tell them I love books too but sorry that’s gloriously irrelevant. Our name has changed because, whatever way you look at it, the word library still comes with heaps of baggage. Within the echo chamber  (pictured) it may feel achingly cool to be a librarian, hip even, but out there in the big bad world (in KMPG reports and on Newsnight) they STILL think we ‘stamp, shelve and shush’.  My Library may be more on the business school radar than it was, but there are still not enough of our members connecting what we do with electronic information and our activities beyond the confines of our physical space (and this despite the numerous reports, papers and cases I write). You want to teach the inductions in the classroom? You want to teach ‘full stop’? Why are you interested in marketing when you’re a librarian? Why do you talk about information and data so much?

Fast forward to 2017. Can’t believe that I abandoned the word Library! What was I thinking? Libraries and librarians can be all encompassing terms. I’m convinced anew that I should be embracing them again.

And… repeat every 7 to 8 years until I get bored, retire to write full-time, and/or die.

“I know nothing stays the same,
But if you’re willing to play the game,
It’s coming around again”

That Carly Simon knew a thing or two.

Library space: a room without books (or at least less obviously with books)

“A room without books is like a body without a soul” so said Cicero (below), although I’m pretty confident that he would have  excluded business books from his analogy had they been around in the 1st Century BC.  

Despite my unapologetic focus on our electronic resources here within Library Services at Cambridge Judge Business School, I have spent quite a bit of time recently considering the future of our printed collections and the space within our physical Library. I’ve always called it the ‘physical Library’ due to my conviction that its only part of what defines our service, and I’ve always disliked it as a space. This is largely because, to the uninitiated, the layout and look of the space here suggests a traditional set-up with a strong emphasis on printed books and journals, that wouldn’t look out of place in a college (or even a school) rather than a modern specialist business school library. The book shelves in particular are very prominent and take up two-thirds of the available ground floor space.

Despite this, printed materials currently account for only 15% of total resource spend, compared to a whopping 80% on e-resources. Although in the time I’ve been here (2.5 years now) it has been possible to alter the activities of the Library team in line with this significant division of expenditure, the physical space cannot be changed so easily and the impression it gives is now detracting, or at the very least distracting, users from our core activities and service objectives.

Morrell Boone’s description of a Library as ”no longer simply a monastery full of books and journals for scholars but marketplaces competing for clients by offering different arrays of services” (Boone, M., (2003) Monastery to marketplace, Library Hi-tech) encapsulates perfectly the global paradigm shift in library space over the last decade and is closer to the reality of the service I want to manage, however, our current physical Library neither suggests nor allows it. The challenge before me (in which I’m sure I’m not alone)  is how to change the interior of my physical library according to: our current activities; the needs of our users;and the competition and threats we face: while at the same time, altering the overall emphasis from preservation, classification and storage, to access, communication and delivery.

I definitely would not advocate doing away with the physical Library altogether, despite the fact that our number of remote enquiries well exceeds those taken in person, because I still regard physical contact with our users as important. Any opportunity we have to point a user in the direction of our premium resources and give them some much-needed information skills instruction needs to be grasped firmly, especially as  this physical contact usually proves what wonderfully helpful and insightful beings us librarians are and invariably prompts the subject to come back to experience more of the same.

Although I am certain that the physical Library here is a poor advert for our service, and despite my penchant for banging on about how we can’t expect students to come to us anymore (the Mohammed and mountains bit), during  this academic year our footfall has increased by some 35%, proving conversely that this year’s intake do! This is a neat and unassailable argument for keeping the physical space but a less convincing one for spending money on its re-organisation. Hence the need for a recent survey of all our users to gather their opinions on the physical Library…

The survey went out in tandem with a discussion paper in which I detailed the current problems with the physical space as I saw them and asked questions such as whether we should: introduce social (groupwork) space, move the book collection to a compact rolling stack, try to fit in more study desks etc. I also sought data on the way they currently use the space.

Usage:
The survey rather unsurprisingly revealed that: staff assistance at the desk; study space; and use of our terminals for premium and general web resources were the most common activities, while use of the printed book and journals collections was relatively low (supporting my argument that these collections do not currently earn their space).

Future:
As for future use, the majority respondents wanted more study space and for it to be more comfortable (and to come in a wider variety of shapes and sizes); and did not object to the idea of re-housing the book collection. However, respondents were dead against the prospect of social space. Having been requested to slide a scale between 0 (‘absolutely silent’) and 6 (‘group work permitted’), an average score of 1.4 was recorded, which equates to ‘very quiet’ or ‘near silent’.

So where does that leave the service, well I’m replete with user views on the space and handily they are largely in agreement with my own, so now it’s just time for that little matter of securing agreement for the refurbishment money. The day I’ll be happy to take a new user on a tour of the physical Library may still be some time off.

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