Academic Skills Session: Research Survival Guide

Our second session in the Academic Skills Programme was called 'Research Survival Guide: Mastering Your Dissertation or Project' (side-note, I think in hindsight that 'Surviving Your Dissertation' would have been a snappier title, but oh well...!)

Research Survival Guide: Mastering Your Dissertation or Project from Annie Gleeson

As with the last session, I've adapted the content into three posts on the library blog:

• Research Survival Guide Part 1: The Literature Search
• Research Survival Guide Part 2: Evaluating Resources
• Research Survival Guide Part 3: References and Bibliographies

I made a screencast of Zotero in action to show how the cite-while-you-write and bibliography export features work, now uploaded to YouTube with voiceover.

We also had a couple of handouts for this session - a Literature Search Plan worksheet to get the students thinking about the search terms they were going to use, and a Reference Template to take away and use to record their references if they favoured the pen-and-paper approach. The reference template was adapted from Meriel Royal's version, thank you Meriel for the idea!

Academic Skills Session: Navigating the Information Jungle

Liz Osman and I did two sessions earlier this month as part of the college's Academic Skills Programme. Our first session 'Navigating the Information Jungle' was aimed at first years, and was a kind of 'you've found your feet, where do you go from here?' session.

Navigating the Information Jungle from Annie Gleeson

I've adapted the content of the session into three posts on our library blog:

• Navigating the Information Jungle Part 1: Knowing What’s Out There
• Navigating the Information Jungle Part 2: Making Sense of Reading Lists
• Navigating the Information Jungle Part 3: Referencing and Plagiarism

What I've been reading in August

Well, we did it! My MA class has now submitted our dissertations, and that's the end of my year at UCL. This blog has been very quiet over the summer for obvious reasons, but I'm hoping to get back into the habit of blogging regularly once more now that I have a bit more time on my hands!  I managed to keep the monthly round up posts going though as they're fairly quick to put together, and here is what I've been reading in August (or in most cases this month, what I kept unread until the start of September!)

eBooks

Andy Woodworth, Libraries and eBook Publishers: Friend Zone Level 300


Marketing library services

Naomi Tiley, IFLA Conference: Marketing of Rare and Special Collections in a Digital Age

Stpehen Barr, How should academic libraries communicate their own value? 


Information Literacy

Daniel Russell, Internet Search: What makes it simple, difficult or impossible?

Meredith Farkas, The devil you know in first-year instruction


Games and libraries

Lisa Poisso, Real-life librarians hit the Ironforge stacks (interview with Ellen Forsyth from the WoW guild Where is the Library, which runs regular discussion groups in Ironforge library)

Games and Libraries, Edited transcripts of talks (archive of the Where is the Library discussions)


Presenting

Bobbi Newman, 20 Things to Do After You Accept that Speaking Gig

R. David Lankes, Beyond the Bullet Points: Bullet Points (advice for developing speaker skills)

  
Neutrality in events and conferences

Library Camp, The Co-operative Bank Grant Application

Lauren Smith, Library Politics and Agenda-Setting


Misc.

Brian Matthews, Think Like a Startup (I haven't had time to read all of this yet, but it's good stuff. Aaron Tay's post below pulls out some of the main points)

Aaron Tay, "We're a cut-and-paste profession"

Travis McDade, The difficulty of insider book theft

In the Ironforge Library by Tourach

What I've been reading in July

Mashcat

I found Mashcat a really interesting unconference. I won't pretend to have understood everything that was talked about, but I definitely learnt a lot! These are the slides/blog posts from my favourite sessions.

Ed Chamberlain, Text to data [slides]

Gary Green, A Travellers Map in Yahoo Pipes (Really cool visual way to search subject headings referring to places)

Owen Stephens, Boutique Catalogues (Includes demonstration of how a catalogue could be customised for musicians, creating faceted indexes for key, bpm and time-signature)


Presenting

Ned Potter, Good presentations matter


Libraries and the Internet

Lauren Smith, Internet Access and Public Libraries

Phil Bradley, Libraries charging for internet access is wrong

Voices for the Library, Free internet access should be a cornerstone of every public library

Ian Clark, Barking libraries - tiny cuts or massive scars?

CILIP, Act risks limiting internet access in libraries, schools and universities


E-books

Alison Flood, Call to 'move libraries into 21st century' sparks ebook lending review


Volunteer libraries

CILIP, Value of staff at heart of revised volunteer policy

Dalya Alberge, Authors face royalty threat from volunteer libraries

Ian Anstice, Surrey chooses volunteers over paid staff at the same cost


Online learning

Emma Cragg, Where next for 23 Things?   (I've heard a lot about coursera lately, and I'm definitely going to look into it when I finish my MA. One course at a time though...)

By Guillermo Esteves on Flickr

#libday8 - my week

This post is part of the Library Day in the Life Project. My previous Day in the Life posts can be found here.

I kind of failed at posting every day this week, so here's an end-of-the-week summary of what I've been doing with myself!

Monday and Tuesday were UCL days. Although I'm doing the same number of modules this term as I was last term, the timetabling has worked out a lot better and I only need to travel into London two days a week instead of four. This term I am taking modules in Information Sources and Retrieval, Management (both of those are compulsory) and then optional modules in Publishing Today and Cataloguing & Classification II.

Our common room, looking unusually empty on Monday morning.

MA-wise this week I've had a 3 hour lecture for each of these modules, and I've made a start on reading for my first essay this term (on legal issues for libraries). In our Management module we are doing a lot of group work, based around an imaginary library that our group has to come up with staffing structures, strategic plans etc. for. Our group is using a Google Doc to keep all of our notes together, to make it easier to put together our portfolio at the end of term. I blogged in more detail about Monday on the UCL DIS Students blog.

Wednesday and Friday are the days I usually go up to Cambridge to work at Newnham. I am job sharing with Jo, our senior library assistant, but sometimes we ovelap so we are both in on the same day, and this usually happens on Wednesdays. So we had a staff meeting on Wednesday morning, to get everyone up to speed with what's been happening in the last week, and looking forward to the week(s) ahead. After our meeting I got on with going through cataloguing errors thrown up by the bib-check programme. We have been converting a lot of short records for our rare books collection so it was a looong list this week, about 20 pages! Luckily, most of these are not actually mistakes made by the cataloguer but things like "record contains local information but it's post-1900". "Rare" to us includes some post-1900 material so this can just be ignored.

Checking the list too me up until lunch-time, and then for the rest of Wednesday and most of Friday I have been doing a lot of cataloguing, a bit of lyfguarding (covering in protective sticky back plastic), basically just moving things along and getting books ready to going out on the shelf. We do all of our own classification and processing, and download catalogue records or find another Cambridge college in our database (any that begin with A-N) who has a record we can share. The record sharing thing is fairly new and has taken a bit of getting used to, but I think it is working quite well (I say this, having absolutely no knowledge of how things are going on behind the scenes).


Friday was also the deadline for our graduate trainee applications, which I can't believe has come round again already! Didn't Polly just get here? Now it's halfway through the year already...

As the eagle-eyed amongst you will have noticed, I have Thursdays "off". I'll usually spend this doing work for my MA, but this week I was in Cambridge again, co-presenting a training session on "Blogging for Absolute Beginners". I think there were fourteen people registered for the session, ranging from graduate trainees to librarians, with five of us there to run the session (Clemens, Margaret, Emma, Charlotte and me) and talk about our own experiences with blogging, and it was quite fun! We talked about which blog platform to choose, dos and don'ts of blogging, and how to fit it into your routine. There was also time for everyone to have a go at publishing their first blog post. This was my first time presenting at a session like this, and while not everything went as smoothly as I'd like (I had a bit of a fail with my slides - I thought I had embedded the fonts but all the text on my second set of slides turned out as squares so I clearly did it wrong...), overall it went very well and we have had some good feedback. In fact, one of the participants has just sent us the link to their new blog, so that's fantastic.

So that's the end of my #libday8 week, now to celebrate National Libraries Day by going to my local branch library and setting up an online account so I can borrow e-books!

#libday8 next week

Next week is the 8th round of the Library Day in the Life project, and the third that I have taken part in. My previous posts are all tagged with Library Day in the Life.

This will be the first time I have taken part as a student, and while I hope to post some snippets here on this blog, I will also be posting on the UCL DIS Students blog, along with some of my fellow students. It should be a fairly normal week for me, I'll be at UCL on Monday and Tuesday, and then working at Newnham on Wednesday and Friday. On Thursday I'm doing something new though, I'm going to be co-presenting a training session for librarians on "Blogging for Absolute Beginners"! I'm a bit nervous as I haven't presented a training session before, but I'm my co-presenters are excellent so I'm sure it will be fine! I'll let you know how it goes, along with the rest of my week.

What I've been reading in October

Save Libraries

Peter Walker and Alison Flood, High Court Bid to Halt Library Closures Fails 

Lauren Smith, Just Another Liberal Whinger? (A brilliant response to this article by John McTernan) 

Alison Flood, Philip Pullman declares war against 'stupidity' of library closures

Voices for the Library, 22nd October 2011: Library Campaign Conference (includes full speech of Philip Pullman's speech) 

Library Camp

Paul Stainthorpe, Let them tweet cake: why Library Camp was unconferencing done right

Gaz Johnson, Camping

Saint Evelin, Library Camp: Call me Sarah if it makes things easier...

Presenting

Ned Potter, 5 Easy Ways to Create Fabulous Slides 

Ned Potter, Student Induction, Libraries, Prezi, and Interactive Maps

Digital Resources

Micah Vandegrift, The Digital Public Library of America

Dan Cohen, Digital Ephemera and the Calculus of Importance

eBooks and eReaders

Simon Barron, Why I got a Kindle

Ian Clark, Why I have not got a Kindle... (I'm considering buying something to read ebooks on - Kindle, Kobo or Android tablet - so Simon and Ian's posts came at a great time! Any other advice would be very much appreciated.)

Digital Divide

Ian Clark, Follow your dreams - but it will cost you

Mark Herring, Fool's Gold: Why the Internet is no Substitute for a Library (London: McFarland, 2007)

Jobs and Careers

#uklibchat, Summary: Thursday 22nd Sept 2011. LIS Jobs and Careers 

Simon Barron, Thoughts on Military Librarianship

Carley Deanus, My Graduate Trainee Year: On Reflection... 

Games and Gamification

 Gerard LeFond, Why Education Needs to Get It's Game On

by Cindiann on Flickr

[CPD23] Thing 17: The medium is the message - Prezi and Slideshare

It has rather amused me reading through the CPD23 feeds over the last couple of weeks and seeing the number of posts along the lines of "This is a placeholder post for Thing 17, order must be maintained! *twitch*" I have to say the thought did cross my mind to do the same! Oh librarians :)

Prezi
I've only recently started using Prezi, after we covered this in Cam23 2.0. At the moment I'm still playing with it, and making frivolous presentations such as this one of my Dublin holiday:

Dublin, September 2011 on Prezi

When I start at UCL I'm sure I will have to start giving proper presentations, so I may have the chance to use this tool then. In the meantime I made my second complete Prezi for CPD23, which condenses my instruction post on Twitter into Prezi form:

Twitter: What's it all aboot eh? on Prezi

I really like Prezi as a presentation tool, it's intuitive to use and for an audience it is nice to see something other than Powerpoint slides once in a while. When I do use it I'll make sure not to whirl about madly and make people sick!

As a project for the future, I would like to have a go at making an interactive map of our library using Prezi, something along the lines of this one by Ned Potter.  I’ll probably need to practice a bit more before I attempt that though...

Slideshare
I’ve only used Slideshare as a creator once before, when I wanted to share a presentation the graduate trainees made for the Libraries@Cambridge conference. Surprisingly, our presentation was chosen as one of Slideshare’s ‘Featured Presentations’ (I’m not sure why, it seems quite a niche topic!) and then went on to get over a thousand views in a week, which was a bit of a strange experience! Again, I think this is something that will become increasingly more useful in the future as I start making more presentations.

Apart from that, I have used Slideshare quite often to view other peoples’ presentations. After conferences or other events I will usually have another look at the presentations, which are often hosted on Slideshare.

I think if you were going for a job in design or marketing, a slide-deck CV could be a good way to show your skills off. If I was going for a job which asked for these skills in the job description, I might consider putting together a Powerpoint or even a Prezi CV. It obviously couldn't contain as much detail as a traditional CV (at least, not without filling your slides with text and making a rubbish presentation) so I don't think it could replace the paper one.

I'm glad the last weeks of the programme are going to be spread out a little bit more, as I start at UCL on Monday. However I think the last few Things are going to be some of the most useful and interesting, so bring it on!

[CPD23] Thing 15: Events

Attending

I've been fortunate enough to have been able to go to lots of events this year. I went to the CILIP New Professionals Open Day in October, which was a brilliant way to start off. It would be very easy to start off a new job (especially one that has the word "trainee" in the job title!) feeling as if I should keep my head down until I've learnt more, and not interfere with what the professionals are doing. But at NPID2010 many of the presenters were people with only a few years of experience, who had got stuck in and got involved in everything they could, which was incredibly inspiring.

Other things I've been to this year have ranged from a TeachMeet to the New Professionals Conference in Manchester a few months ago. I've made a point to blog about events as soon as possible afterwards, as otherwise I find the details and even important points slip away fairly quickly.

LibCampUK is coming up in October - I was a bit wary of this at first as the concept seemed very loose! But now it seems like almost everyone in my Twitter feed is going so I'm glad I did sign up, will be nice to meet a lot of people face-to-face finally! I would love to go to a huge conference like the IFLA conference or ALA annual, but would definitely require a helping hand from a conference bursary to be able to do that!

Speaking

I'm good at other things though...

I haven't presented at any events, and I can't see it happening any time soon! I think it's best to play to your strengths. I'm a pretty awful public speaker so while I could happily write a paper, it would probably do more harm than good to my career for me to get up and present it! At the Libraries@Cambridge conference in January the trainees put on a presentation about the Graduate Trainee scheme in Cambridge, and since there were seven of us which would be rather a lot to get up on stage and speak, we split ourselves into writers and presenters and it worked very well.

Organised 

I haven't done any organising for conference type events, but  I'd feel more confident about doing so after having been involved in organising various events for Cam23 2.0. We've had a launch party and are currently thinking about the wrap event, and we've had a couple of reflection week meet ups in between. So far most things have gone very smoothly - Doodle has been great for deciding dates and times, and having a team of organisers means that when I forget something someone else will remind me! Always important. There have been one or two hiccups along the way, but again, these are  much easier to overcome with a good team.