Whales, games, conferences and teaching

Apologies that my blogging has been a little like the sporadic surfacing of a Cuvier's Beaked Whale lately! I have a lot I want to reflect on and, as I've said previously, the times when I feel least like I have time to reflect are precisely the most important times for me to do it. (I wonder why I use breathing metaphors so much when thinking about reflecting...) So I'm sticking my head above water to give a quick update to reflect a bit on what has been going on since I started my new job in November.

• Attended a course on game design for libraries put on by the CILIP School Libraries Group. I was pleasantly surprised to find that this was being taught by some HE librarians and they were talking about the HE sector for the most part, so the content was very well suited to me, but it was also fantastic meeting and talking to lots of librarians from school libraries. We don't often get to meet school librarians in HE but I was struck by how different the support for information literacy is in the different schools. It reinforced the idea that we can't assume what undergraduates arrive knowing because just within London there is very different exposure to critical reading and information literacy depending on the school.
• Attended various talks by the fabulous Office of Scholarly Communications. These guys just seem to get it. They just formed last year and already they're tackling a lot of big issues facing researchers such as open access, open data, and managing one's online profile. This overlaps with some of the work librarians are doing but rather than fighting for supremacy, the OSC have made sure to leverage the might of librarians in Cambridge, providing training and ensuring that we have a lot of buy-in with what they're doing. I think it's absolutely brilliant - rather than having to navigate the vast and confusing information "out there" online, we have a local resource I can point people to and in turn they're making sure librarians are better prepared to answer some of the questions we get from academics. Big shout out to these guys! Check out their blog as well - it's well worth a look.
• Attended the Libraries@Cambridge conference. I was also one of the live bloggers for this event. You can read my hastily typed post on the first Keynote Address here! It was my first time at this event and I was very impressed. I like going to external events like the CILIP SLG course because of the chance to meet with people from diverse backgrounds but it was clear from the conference that there is huge diversity within library roles just in Cambridge.

I've been learning quite a lot in my new role, helped along by my brilliant co-workers. From my perspective it's a relatively small team, but there's a lot of interlocking expertise. Some of us overlap in places but we also complement each other's expertise very well.

The big thing on my mind at the moment, however, is teaching. For a very, very long time I've known that I wanted be involved in education in some way, just not in front of a classroom day in and day out. (I have respect bordering on awe for those who can summon the energy to do so and do it well!) This meandered from thinking about tutoring for a non-profit to interpreting heritage sites for visitors to doing museum outreach and education and lately being focused on information literacy education through libraries. I've taught roller skating with the local roller derby league and absolutely loved it - the feeling of helping someone "get it", of breaking things down to help them, giving pointers and knowing when to step back and let them practice on their own.

So I was fairly nervous but also excited when I found out I was to begin teaching last week! I've taught a couple of sessions so far and I think they went pretty well. Areas I want to work on are deepening my knowledge of the areas I'm talking about so I can speak with a bit more understanding and developing a storehouse of pertinent examples for each point. What I think I'm good at: being engaging/holding people's attention, appearing relaxed even when I'm feeling nervous or flustered and developing sessions that take into account different learning styles. I think it's a little early to start making much deeper statements about teaching. I can certainly see how it is an incredibly dynamic process learning to teach!

There is a lot more going on at the moment that I would love to get into, such as the UX study for which I'm currently applying for ethics approval, and my new-found evangelism for Open Access, especially at moments when I'm dealing with tricky Inter Library Loans requests, but I will save those for another time!

ARLG: Communicating with our users.

Yesterday marked my first CILIP event as I attended the course "Communicating with our Users" as a delegate. The speakers were Angela Cutts and Emma-Jane Batchelor (Faculty of Education), Cambridge, Jane Helgesen (UEA), and Libby Tilley filling in for a poorly Georgina Cronin (from the English Faculty Library and the Cambridge Judge Business School libraries respectively), while the delegates represented a range of libraries from places like Norwich, Cambridge, Nottingham, Hertfordshire and Hull.

As a thoughtful and caring group of librarians, the delegates had little trouble answering the prompt, "Why communicate?" Reasons cited included understanding our users, building relationships, breaking down barriers and being able to better tailor our services. Of course there are ways in which communication benefits us in terms of marketing library services, busting myths about who we are and what we do and even simply informing people that we exist. But communication is very much a two-way street with benefits for everyone if it is done effectively.

Done poorly, communication is effort down the drain. Photo by Lucy Welch.

A quick exercise listing ways in which libraries can engage in real-time vs. any-time communication revealed the vast number of ways we try to communicate with users, but equally (if not more) significant are the ways in which we unconsciously communicate. We were asked to put ourselves in our users' shoes and imagine what is communicated to our users unconsciously when they step inside our libraries. Those libraries with grand atriums devoid of books and comforts might look imposing, institutional, or more like a hotel than a library. My library is much smaller but on walking in there are no clear directional signs and staff are practically hidden behind a ridiculously tall desk that my shorter colleagues struggle to even see over the top of. I have always felt that this physical barrier forms part of a larger psychological barrier between us and our students that keeps us from communicating.

The issue of formality vs. informality was discussed quite a bit and forms another unconscious method of communication. Whether you address users in emails with "Hi, ______" or "Dear _______", whether you wear jeans and trainers to work or have a business-like dress code or wear sparkly lanyards, whether your Tweets sound funny and human or like they were generated by a computer, these things can set the tone for communication and are very dependent on the user base at your library. Emma and Angela work with many professional teachers and as such they feel more formal communication is needed, whereas Libby is on first name, "Hi, ______" terms with her predominantly undergraduate student base. And while Emma and Angela have developed the implict dress code of "dress like a teacher", Andy Priestner and his staff at the CJBS library "embrace the informal" and dress in the same sort of jeans, trainers and other comfortable clothes that their users wear. It may seem of little significance but clothing, tone and other subtle ways in which we portray ourselves communicate huge amounts. It's not only what we say but how we say it that either breaks down or puts up barriers.

The only time I wear jeans to work is on Saturdays.

This gave me a lot of food for thought. In my four years in my current job I have only ever worn jeans to work on Saturdays (as in the photo above). I'm not overly formal, given that the orange converse, my Doc Martens with a hole in the toe and my brogues, which are in an advanced state of decay, have all made regular appearances at work. But I had always wanted to be recognizable as a professional, both because I look close enough in age to the students to often be mistaken for a student rather than a professional librarian and because I felt that if I dressed formally it would help communicate to students that librarians had more to offer than just stamping books. Also, it would not feel entirely right to supervise visiting readers at the Wren Desk wearing shorts and a t-shirt while many of them wear shirts and ties for the occasion. However, I will have to give serious thought to the discussions we had yesterday and the article I posted above. As Andy said, "Clothes don’t make you professional." Would it help break down the barriers between staff and students if I wore jeans to work during the week? Do the trousers, shirts and blazers instill a sense of confidence in students that I am a responsible adult who is capable of helping them? I don't know. As all of the speakers said, communication should be tailored to the user group based on understanding and in those terms I'm only just getting to know who our users are.

The main thing is to be strategic about communication. We brainstormed words that apply to communication for each letter of the SMART objectives acronym and it turns out that librarians are rather good at coming up with synonyms:

@ARLGEastern Your SMART objectives for library communication. Thanks for all your ideas #arlgcomms pic.twitter.com/5GGITcrXkw

— Angela Cutts (@AngelEdLib) May 8, 2015

Putting thought into all of these aspects and tailoring them to your users will maximize the impact of communication meaning that your time is being well spent. Angela and Emma went on to look at specific examples of how they used multiple channels to communicate on a single aspect of the service. Their fun, engaging efforts were carefully timed, tailored to their users and were very eye-catching, but they always had a purpose behind them. Their "Will you be my borrower?" display for Valentine's Day, for example, generated crowd-sourced book recommendations. While they had fun making art-and-crafty DIY displays, the thought behind their outreach was methodical and I was impressed and inspired by how interconnected their displays, social media output and in-house events were. There was always a reason or a catch behind all the fun. It was always communicating something about the library's services but doing the double duty of helping users see the library staff as approachable and human.

I won't go into the excellent and exemplary case study presented by Jane Helgesen about communication with users during a project to redesign a space in the library. Suffice it to say that it provided me with many ideas about how we might approach a major redesign of the library if it ever comes to that. The main point I want to bring up from her talk was the importance of staff buy-in for effective communication. Faced with the difficult task of getting students excited about the library re-development (rather than irritated by the disruption to their studies), Jane ensured that everyone on the library's staff were well informed so they could give consistent, on-message information to students. Staff needed to be "clear and confident about what was going on," and their enthusiasm for the project could then spread to the library users. This was achieved through regular meetings, emails, and a shared folder that was regularly updated to keep staff in the loop and feeling empowered. It was a great example of how good communication is a holistic way of approaching libraries, not just a marketing tool to be exploited.

Communication is about understanding, give and take and being serious about not taking yourself too seriously.

You can get some different perspectives on what was discussed from the excellent live Tweeters by reading through #arlgcomms on Twitter. It was a great day, topped off with a tour of the Dawson Books warehouse, where Lucy and I, bedecked in hi-viz vests, came over all geeky about conveyor belts, industrial scale book shelves and a very satisfying machine that folds cardboard boxes. Thanks to the ARLG and the organizers of this event for a really nice day!

Lucy and I take a hi-viz selfie in the Dawson Books warehouse.