23 Research Things - Thing 2

It's Wednesday and that means 3 things:

1 - My legs hurt from doing squats and deadlifts at the gym this morning,
2 - I'm getting ready for my weekly cycle out to West Cambridge to be the roving librarian at the Whittle Laboratory and,
3 - It's time for another installment of 23 Research Things!

Thing 2 is about reflective blogging. Hooray! A Thing I do anyway!

Self five!
(30 Rock via https://lockerdome.com/6956494474193729/6944414779055892)

I've had personal blogs off and on since the early 2000s, back when LiveJournal was the place to over-share your feelings with strangers and obsess over which 100x100 pixel profile picture best expressed your mood. I started this blog in 2014 as I was starting think more about career development. My first post is still unpublished and is ironically titled "Social media: are we just talking to ourselves?" It was going to be a hard-hitting piece on the echo chamber effect, illustrated by quotes from Brave New World. Looking through my list, I've started and abandoned almost as many posts as I've published.

This assignment is to talk about how we feel about blogging as a tool for reflection and obviously I can see its merits. But I want to point out that it isn't always comfortable for me and I can certainly empathise with people who have serious reservations about sharing non-academic writing in such a public setting. After all, even if you are sold on the benefits of reflection in the learning process (which I am), why do those reflections need to be posted where anyone can see them? The paradoxical doubts of, "Do I really want strangers to be able to read this?" and "Probably nobody cares what I have to say anyway" can silence many potential bloggers. It's perfectly valid to write and reflect privately, and I certainly do that as well. I am a paper and pen journal writer and those notebooks will hopefully be consumed by a fire as soon as I die so that I don't have to be posthumously mortified (no pun intended) by the thought of people reading about my more navel-gazing moments.

The benefit of blogging over private journal writing is that by changing the audience to whoever it is you think might read your blog (Hi, Mom!), you are exercising a different voice. It's not the free-flowing stream of consciousness of a personal journal, nor is it the rigid structure of academic writing. You are communicating in an informal but public register, which is a crucial thing to practice as a researcher. I think of it as a format for complete thoughts, hence the unpublished blog posts sitting in my list. I was obviously thinking about a particular topic and wanted to get it written down somewhere, but I didn't have enough to say to share it. That's fine. The writing process itself is the valuable part. The public nature of this format simply holds me accountable; I feel guilty when 6 months go by with out a post, not because I think my eager readers are clamouring for it, but because I know people can see how little I've been writing and I like to challenge myself to write complete thoughts.

Reflective writing is valuable for a few reasons. First, it reinforces things you've learned. Writing about what you've recently read or attended classes in is part of the alchemical process of creating deeper understanding. Second, it allows you to clarify for yourself how you feel or think about particular topics. Third, it's just another chance to practice writing and communicating. And finally, it frees you from the burden of hanging on to whatever is on your mind.

That last one's a bit odd. Let me clarify.

You may recall from my Thing 1 post that I'm on a bit of a productivity kick at the moment. While working on some pre-planning for my first Bullet Journal last night I came across this video of David Allen, author of Getting Things Done, doing a Ted Talk on stress-free productivity.

In it, he describes how people feel that they could be more productive, if only they had more time. But too little time, he argues, is not the problem.

"You know what you’d do with two more hours? You’d have two more hours of overwhelming stickiness. Actually, for most of you, it’d be a good thing you don’t get two more hours. Because the issue is not time.

How long does it take to have a creative idea? Zero time.

How long does it take to be inspired? Zero time.

How long does it take to recognize an opportunity you could leverage and take advantage of? Zero time.

Time is not the issue for those things. There is something required for those things. What’s that? Psychic bandwidth.

You need space to think."

Creating that space to be truly present and focused, he says, requires that we get rid of all the other stuff cluttering up our thoughts by writing it down. Anything you're thinking about, from jobs you need to get done to the relationship between social media and Aldous Huxley novels, is taking up bandwidth that you need to focus on what you're doing right now. Furthermore, he says, it helps you identify the task at hand. If you're mulling over a course you just took or a conversation you just had, write about it and figure out what action you need to take. "What exactly is the work you need to do?" That is the chief value I see in reflective blogging; it's identifying the "What now?" as Georgina put it. Learning for the sake of learning is fine, but if you can figure out what you can change as a result you will get more out of it, and maybe free up some bandwidth to have some great ideas.

23 Research Things - Thing 1

Hello! I'm joining in with 23 Research Things Cambridge and will do my best to post all of the "Things" in a timely manner. Thing 1 is an introduction and a chance to reflect on what we hope to get out of our involvement. I think this also might be a good chance to introduce myself in case any new readers find this blog as a result of the programme.

The author, as viewed through a series of tubes

My name is Kirsten and I'm Assistant Research Support Librarian in an HE Engineering Department. I work with Masters and PhD students and researchers through various phases of the research process, from research ethics to accessing resources to understanding the 21st century academic publishing landscape. I do quite a bit of teaching and one-on-one work as well as developing the online support for our students and academics. While I already do a fair amount of CPD around research, I thought 23 Research Things would be a great chance to find some new ideas and be reflective about my practices.

This is rather timely as I'm looking at revamping my productivity and goal setting at the moment, moving toward an analog system that will allow me to take notes and do more reflective writing with pen and paper by trying out bullet journaling. So I'm already thinking a lot about how I manage my own information and what my personal and professional goals ought to be over the next 6-12 months. The schedule of upcoming Things looks like it will be a good blend of strategies I've thought about a lot and ones I haven't really explored personally. I'm hoping to gain a lot of perspective, both on my role in research support and as a researcher myself.

I'm also looking forward to hearing from other participants - particularly people outside the library world - in order to expand my understanding of the ways in which people do research. Look for regular updates on this blog and I hope to hear what you think as part of this programme!

Course Write-up: Gathering feedback

Hello! It's been a while since I've written up any courses I've been on, in part because I am very lucky that I work in a place where we share what we learned on courses at our weekly staff meetings so I haven't felt the need to try to reflect or assimilate in writing. But it's always beneficial to write these things down for my own sake as well as sharing them more broadly, so I thought I'd try to make more of a habit of it, at least when I feel it would be useful to do so for my own practice. I'm working on a some other work-based and professional development habits, which I hope to talk a bit more about in an upcoming post. Meanwhile, here's a write up from a course I went on this week.

Sally Stafford's recent session on gathering evaluation and feedback was one I've been looking forward to for a while. As someone who teaches a fair amount, I often rely on the course leaders to pass on feedback from their students about what I might improve, and we are still working on developing strategies for consistently getting evaluations from the training sessions we give. While I really enjoyed this course, it was a bit of a stretch to think of ways of incorporating it into my own practice as there was a heavy bent toward feedback on exhibitions and outreach events rather than training sessions. Even so, it certainly got me thinking about creative ways of framing questions and assessing learning outcomes.

The first point Sally made was that when people think about feedback, they're often only thinking about gathering opinions after the fact. However, effective projects look for feedback throughout, from the initial development phase. By doing this you can ensure that you are delivering content that people really want, in a way they want. Teaching sessions have this built in, in that the process is inherently iterative: ideally, your training gets better each time you do it based on the feedback you've had before, and there is no "final" product to get feedback on. However, it is useful to think about impact in the same way museums do. What have people taken away from my session? What was the impact on their practice? Impact is a fiendishly difficult thing to measure, but various sectors are under increasing pressure to demonstrate measurable impact to justify funding, staff and other resources. This is not to say that everything needs to be reduced to a number, say "72% of participants said this training was Very Useful". I'm always more inspired by individual comments, like, "I learned a lot, thank you!" or "I never knew librarians knew so much about this stuff!" But in large volumes that becomes more and more difficult to parse and if you are involved in a project that requires you to justify funding, you may be dealing with people who find the numbers much more compelling than a few glowing remarks when presented in a report.

GLOs and designing questions

Central to Sally's process were the Generic Learning Outcomes, a framework used by the MLA to assess learning in non-classroom contexts. While much of the discussion around the GLOs focused on the context of exhibitions or outreach to school groups, I found the framework to be a useful prompt to think about what questions one could ask to gather feedback about different facets of learning.

• Knowledge and understanding: While this is fairly straightforward, asking bluntly "How much/what did you learn?" is not necessarily going to give you brilliant feedback. Any parent who has asked their kid what they learned in school today will be familiar with the non-commital shrug followed by that slippery syllable, "Stuff". The group talked about potentially asking for one thing that stuck out, one fact for example. Since I often do follow-up sessions or series of classes, I could always ask at the beginning of a class for one thing they learned in the previous session for example.
• Skills: This is a tricky one to get verbal feedback on, but could be tested through doing an activity before and then after the session. An approach that Sally used for our session was a target, where we rated our confidence with evaluation before and after the session using sticky dots placed correspondingly on the target. I think confidence is a good operative word when asking people to self-report on their skills. 
• Attitudes and values: Another tricky one to ask about, as Lucy was tactfully explaining, as it has to do with subjects that people are sensitive about. Sally offered the example of, "Are you a bigot?" as a potentially insensitive way of gathering feedback about this aspect. :) My content is often very value-laden. I talk pretty openly about my mistrust of metrics as a good indicator of the quality of an article, about the flaws in the peer review process and advocate passionately for Open Access publishing. Rather than gathering this in the form of feedback after the fact, I usually seek to have a discussion during the session where people are invited to share their points of view.
• Enjoyment, inspiration and creativity: While I don't think I'll collect finger paintings from my students, it's worth thinking of creative ways people could respond, especially if they have felt inspired by something in a session. I refer to this facet later as the 'Ah-hah' moment and discuss it in more detail.
• Activity, behaviour and progression: Once again I do often have the opportunity to find out what people learned from a previous class and I think I could take greater advantage of that to see if behaviour has changed in response to something I've taught. I usually ask if anyone has been using a particular tool or technique and ask for feedback but perhaps I could do this in a more structured way.

Creative feedback methods

I'm obviously still mulling over how to ask for feedback and how to record it, but the session was certainly not short of ideas. Many of them would suit a UX context better as they're fairly involved, e.g. focus groups, behavioural mapping, observation, interviews etc. Some suit different audiences better than others, for instance role-playing or drawing would be great for kids but I somehow doubt I could get a room full of stressed MPhils to see the value of such tasks (as much as I believe that creative endeavours are good for stress levels). There are some ideas I'm tempted to use, however. For shorter sessions on a particular tool or skill, I'd love to adapt the target method to show the change in confidence levels. For series of sessions I'd like to build feedback into subsequent sessions and help people reflect on how their practice of academic research is developing. It's definitely gotten some gears turning in my brain regarding how I could gather feedback beyond my usual post-its at the end asking for one thing they've learned and one thing they'd improve.

Ethics and accessibility

I wanted to raise a couple of issues that didn't come up during the course. First, gathering data from people I think it's essential to speak to someone in your institution that knows about research ethics. They may say that no further approval is needed, but the moment you start gathering artifacts or quotes from people, start observing their behaviour or start intruding on their time it's important to think about the ethical considerations.

• Is participation voluntary?
• Have you informed people that they're being watched?
• Have you informed them of how you will use their data and do you have a plan to follow through with that?
• Who will have access to the feedback they give you?

Unless told otherwise, people have a reasonable expectation of anonymity when taking part in studies. It doesn't have to be a signed consent form in every instance and can be very light-touch. For example, I plan on adding a quick verbal disclaimer when I'm asking for feedback that it's anonymous and any feedback they give us will be used to make our training programs better. There is a blurry line between user experience research and feedback and I would think that it would be good to err on the side of caution and consult with someone who can give guidance on what you need to tell participants and how to keep the data in a safe and anonymous way.

Similarly, it's important to think about comfort levels. One method discussed for use with teaching sessions was task-based feedback, for example acting exercises to gather feedback during a session. It was mentioned that adults were likely to be self-conscious about this, but that it would be engaging for children. I agree but I think it's important to be aware that if this is built into the curriculum of a particular course or training session it may not be accessible for people on the autistic spectrum or other social differences. By way of making course content equally accessible to all, I would be interested in finding a way for students to opt in rather than making it a requirement, or seek other ways in which you could gather similar feedback.

Accessibility sprung to mind again when we looked at feedback methods using red, green and amber coloured pieces of card to let the instructor know how confident or engaged participants felt. Again, alternatives that are accessible to colourblind participants would be useful to prepare ahead of time. These are just a few examples - there are many ways to build accessibility into your feedback process if you take the time to consider who is being excluded by the method you have chosen.

Ah-hah moment

I think my favourite concept from the course (and my own 'Ah-hah' moment) was the idea of focusing feedback on what inspired someone, one idea they'll take away from the session or one lightbulb that lit up during the session. Even if a student in one of my sessions paid me pretty much no attention but they had an 'Ah-hah' moment regarding their own work while sitting there, I feel like at least I provided them the space to get that inspiration and I'd love to know about it.

For kids visiting an exhibition, they may not grasp your thesis but they will certainly remember the taxidermy pigeons because they're surprising. Or they might remember that, like Charles Darwin, they always keep a journal too and like drawing the animals they see. Similarly, my students may not remember everything I tell them about Data Management, but I hope they remember the story about the guy who lost 6 months of work when his laptop containing his PhD and the backup disk, both in his rucksack, were stolen in a pub. Or when looking at conference posters for design tips, maybe a student will finally figure out what methodology she'll use for her own dissertation (this literally happened in my class yesterday). I don't really mind if she took on board less of what I taught as long as she left my class excited about something to do with her work.

I think beyond tips for improving the actual content or timing of the sessions this will be the focus of generating feedback. It provides students the chance to reflect on what they're excited about, which will reinforce whatever inspiration they've had, and it gives me a window into what material students are resonating with. On a personal development level, I've just started a weekly reflection/accountability thing where I write about what went well vs. not so well, which includes noting down my own 'Ah-hah' moments. It's really helpful to try to capture what's inspiring you from the courses you're taking or the books you're reading as it makes it easier to remember and therefore implement any changes that you might think of as a result (especially if, like me, you're consuming so many great articles and podcasts that often times great ideas are driven out and forgotten, no matter how inspiring they were).

So, to try to synthesise a write up in which I concluded pretty much nothing, it was a good session and it's definitely got me thinking. These concepts might go on the back-burner for a bit but I can have a look at this post later on when I'm developing courses to see if it prompts any more 'Ah-hah' moments. 

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!

Work/Life Balance

By woodleywonderworks on Flickr

As far as first world, middle class problems go, few are as prevalent and perennial as the problem of balancing one's career with the rest of one's life. The thing is, dividing the problem into two parts - work, and then everything else outside of work - is a tremendous oversimplification. I don't know anyone's life who can be divided so cleanly. Even if you take kids out of the equation (which I have), you still have friends and family, fitness, mental/physical health, cooking, keeping your home and garden under control and maybe even altering it in fairly major ways, hobbies you love, classes you take, travel, decompression time by yourself... the list could go on and on.

Work is not so easily segregated into a single category either when you add to the day-to-day activities things like committees, special projects, long-term goals, professional development, relationships and networking etc. There are certainly times when I feel incredibly motivated to join everything, participate in everything, take on everything, and there are others when I am perfectly content to not have any challenges greater than a trolley of books to be labeled and a stack of archives to reshelve. So how does one cultivate all these disparate facets without burning out?

I used to think that achieving work/life balance involved stumbling upon the magic ratio where one's time was divided up into all the various hobbies, interests, social engagements and professional development activities and that was it. Once you'd settled on The Timetable you were good to go and the reason I hadn't achieved a balance yet was because I needed how to figure out how to divide all the hours of the day. But life doesn't work like that. Plans fall through or crop up unexpectedly, and, more importantly, I don't work like that. I used to think that balance was something I would have to impose upon myself because I'm the sort of person who dives passionately into one thing to the exclusion of others for a while, only to reemerge with a new passion a few weeks or months later.

The revelation for me has been accepting that balance is not a fixed ratio but a point that is constantly shifting beneath me in response to external circumstances and where my own energy and passion is guiding me. 

Balance means keeping some things ticking over with minimal effort/energy expended while I pursue my latest passion, but also recognising that whatever it is, no matter how passionate I am about it at the moment, it isn't the be-all-and-end-all thing I'm going to dedicate the rest of my life to. It's taken me over 30 years to recognise that pattern and understand how to make it work in my favour rather than feeling like it's a fatal flaw that will stop me from ever achieving balance.

Lately I've been working on riding the ebbs and flows of energy and making them work for me. Here's a brief run-down of the different facets that make up work/life balance for me and how I'm learning to maintain them without letting them take over:

Making - Although I'm not very artistically talented in any specific way, creative expression has always been very important to me, whether it's writing, photography, drawing, crafting, dancing, singing or curating (this includes things like putting together Pinterest boards and Spotify playlists). Sometimes I have absolute bucket-loads of creative energy and all I want to do is make stuff. This makes me seek out creative projects at work and/or at home. It's worth knowing that I can happily ride the wave of this creative energy for a while and accomplish a lot in a short space of time but that it will burn out pretty quickly, so I should be careful that I don't start so many things that I can't finish any of them before I dry up. Luckily, this sort of mood comes along pretty regularly so I can pick things up again at a later date when my creative energy is bubbling over again.

Moving - It's taken me a very long time to realise that I derive a huge amount of energy and happiness from being fit and active. As the sort of kid who loathed P.E. and organised sports, it was surprising to get to university and realise that I LOVE working out, I LOVE a physical challenge and I LOVE having a lot of movement in my life. I can turn sloth-like very easily, however, so to keep balance it's important for me to have physical activity be part of a routine. Roller Derby was great for this because even if I didn't feel like going to practice I would still go because it was an obligation. Then I'd invariably have a good time and feel better for it. Without the structure of Roller Derby, I kind of lost motivation for about 6 months, but I now have a personal trainer and I'm getting back into a regular schedule of exercise and feeling a lot better for it. It's good to know how important that discipline and routine of exercise is to my overall well-being so now I will try to keep that in mind as something that should be a part of my life at all times.

Learning - This includes reading, practicing something new, problem-solving, doing something unexpected, basically just introducing something novel into my life. Like "making", this is something that I can do at work by attending classes, developing my skills or just trying to do something in a different way. Sometimes I have a lot of energy to do this, while other times I really don't feel like I can take any more on because I'm getting overwhelmed and can't focus on anything. Once again it's about using the energy while I have it but not taking on too much because I know it won't last indefinitely.

Friends/Family - This one doesn't need too much explanation. If I don't have time to see friends and family, I start to feel super guilty and overwhelmed. Everyone needs time for relationships outside of work and this tends to need to be the most flexible aspect because it depends on when other people are available or need you to be in their lives. In my mind time with friends and family is never time wasted. It's the priority, even if it's not a constant.

For me the most difficult part of trying to strike a balance is accepting that I will not always have the same level of energy for particular activities - that it's a moving, shifting quantity and that my balancing point will differ from week to week or even moment to moment. When I have a lot of energy for a particular activity I find it very difficult to accept that it will change. At the time it feels like I can take on anything and everything and I have almost unlimited enthusiasm for a particular thing. Often it feels like a "Eureka" moment and it seems like I've finally discovered my calling in life as I practically fall in love with whatever the latest thing is. But this has happened so often in my life that I know now to be prepared for the bubble to burst, for reality to set in, and for my enthusiasm to wane as quickly as it arrived. It's not that I have no interest in it anymore, but I just have less energy and passion for it. I've never stopped being interested in astronomy, for example, but I stopped wanting to be an astronaut when I was about 15.

I don't think these things have been a waste of time simply because I didn't go on to "do" anything with them. It's nice to be able to contribute to conversations about astronomy, say, or at least know enough to ask questions of people who know it better than I do. Same with music, history, art and any of the other things I've been passionate about in my life. It's the newness, the learning, the dwelling in beginner's mind that makes it worthwhile. If I'm shaking myself out of routine and getting excited about stuff, it doesn't matter what that stuff is or whether I "do" something with it. At least I've kept things fresh and exciting. Maybe I'll never be a master of any one trade, but at least I'll have had an interesting life and taken advantage of my natural magpie-like tendencies to find my own individual work/life balance.

While you're pursuing your passions it's important to learn how to budget your finite mental energy by making as many other things automatic as possible. That keeps all the facets of your life ticking over at a base rate so that you're not abandoning your friends to do your hobbies, for example, or letting your physical exercise collapse completely when you're diving into a big project at work. The video below is a really good explanation of this idea. I highly recommend it!

So that's what I'm working on at the moment. I can feel myself shifting out of a very work-focused period into a time when I have a lot of physical energy, so I might need to consolidate my projects at work, maybe delegate a few things to my co-workers to keep the momentum going and use this opportunity to reflect on what I've done in the last month or so and what I can do better next time the career energy ramps up again. It might seem a little chaotic from the outside but I'm learning that this really works for me, so I guess I'll run with it!

Tomorrow's Library Leaders

Yesterday I went on probably my favourite Librarians in Training course yet - a day-long workshop on leadership in libraries led by Jo Alcock and Andy Priestner. Since it lasted all day a summary of the course would be absolutely massive, so instead I will reflect on what the course made me think about. It certainly provided a lot of food for thought and I left with a head full of notions which will probably take me a while to put into any sort of coherent form.

The course structure ticked all the boxes in terms of learning styles and there were plenty of activities to keep the momentum up over the whole day.

Masking tape-a-go-go pic.twitter.com/88wJ0eBOZd

— Andy Priestner (@andytraining) June 18, 2015

The activities were nice and varied, some involving large group team work and some one-on-one communication. The workshop was less about specific leadership skills, however, and more an exploration of what leadership is, what types of leaders there are and so on. I felt like it could have tied back more strongly to our own leadership styles as I left wishing I could have had some feedback on what kind of leader I am. However, we were given a good tool for finding out through peer coaching, so I might give that a go in my workplace.

The only other thing I personally would have preferred would be a few more breaks to reflect throughout the day, as there was so much to think about that it got a little overwhelming for me. But I appreciated that they needed to keep everyone's energy up and I'm probably unusual in getting a lot of energy out of reflective writing. The whole day was rather self-reflective anyway, even if it wasn't in the form of quiet writing. It felt a little bit like a day of doing those online personality quizzes that tell you which of the Power Rangers is your spirit animal (only way more insightful).

I was surprised to learn a few things about myself, like how I'm more willing to give up happy memories than traumatic but transformation ones because they taught me important things about myself, that the goals of "making stuff" and "making people happy" are a non-negotiable part of my life and that in the Authentic Leadership model there are lots of values I'm drawn to but when it came down to it I chose Aesthetics. This was described as: "A need for self-expression and an interest in the quality, look, feel and sound of things. A close attention to and concern for the appearance and impact of their work." I chose this over Altruism, which I would have said was a more core value to me. But in terms of the triggers of what I've been working on lately it makes a lot of sense. I think I work at altruism and am more conscious of trying to be a good person, but creative expression is the thing I do without thinking - the thing that is so fundamental to me that it doesn't feel like work. That's not to say I'm particularly talented at creative expression, but it does fuel me and give me a lot of energy. These were really valuable insights that I will definitely keep in mind as I continue to try to figure out what kind of leader I am.

In terms of trying to figure out what kind of leader I am, the course didn't help me arrive at any conclusions. I even began to question whether I actually wanted to be a leader. But ultimately I think questioning this kind of thing is quite healthy. This is a transcript of the reflective writing I did directly after the course:

Why is the concept of "leadership" important to me? Why do I want to be perceived as a leader? I have this odd juxtaposition of wanting to excel, to be involved, to feel accomplished, and also to shy away from attention and praise. And yet "leadership" exerts a kind of fascination for me. I'm not really sure what kind of leader I hope I would be. If I am a leader already then I might be a transformational one. The problem of burn-out and the need to be able to handle criticism better resonated very strongly with me. Certainly I think I've been involved in a cultural change at work, but who is actually following me? No one? Everyone? Is it important to know who considers me a leader or who my "team" is? I guess I do need some recognition - or at least validation - if I feel this uncomfortable thinking of myself as a leader without external acknowledgment.

It's like when I was asked in a job interview how I thought my colleagues would describe me - I didn't know and the fact that I didn't know kind of frightened me. I am really uncomfortable with the idea of other people having opinions about me. But my god am I going to have to get over that if I want to be a leader. It's all about whether or not people feel motivated by you, supported by you, or intimidated by you. You have to be okay with people having opinions about you that are beyond your knowledge or control. You have to be okay with people not liking things that you do. So it begs the question, do I even want to be a leader and if so, why?

I have to say that I do. I think I have a lot of creativity and vision, but more than that I really enjoy working with the ideas of others. I care about others and about my work. I think I have a lot of energy and ideas to contribute and I'm not afraid of putting myself out there. Beyond that, I certainly have weaknesses and traits that might be considered problematic for a traditional leader: emotional immaturity, over-sensitivity, self-doubt, etc. But I can work on those, get out of my comfort zone and be self-reflective enough to learn from my mistakes.

Thanks very much for a really engaging and thought-provoking course, Jo and Andy!

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.

UX Studies 1 - Lessons learned from the Feedback Wall (that don't have much to do with feedback)

The Feedback Wall at my library has been ongoing since mid-February and was inspired by this post on the UKAnthroLib blog. I'll admit that my secret hope when putting it together was that we would get positive feedback in among the mixture of suggestions and criticisms, the way other libraries seemed to be getting. In hindsight, I know that was a lot to ask given the relationship we currently have with our students, and our feedback so far has been entirely criticism and suggestions. While it has occasionally been a bit wounding to the ego, a lot of good has come out of the Feedback Wall and we intend to keep it going. Hopefully we'll get to the point where we do start to get positive reinforcement from students, but I certainly know now not to expect it.

Along those lines, I wanted to share a few lessons I have learned during this process that have less to do with the comments people have left and more with the process of soliciting feedback in this way and about workplace culture.

1- You can provide all the bells and whistles you want as long as you also address the most pressing needs.

I had been feeling pretty good about the Feedback Wall. In response to feedback we've received in the last three months we've brought in pens for next to the catalogue computers, sped up the acquisitions process for recommended books, purchased USB DVD drives and book rests for students to borrow, acquired ear plugs to give out to students and relaxed our drinks rules to allow students to finish hot drinks in the Issue Desk area rather than outside the library.

However, one issue keeps coming up consistently: the students want a water cooler or drinking fountain in the library. It is our most common suggestion/complaint on the feedback wall and was one of the most common comments on our user survey last year. No matter what else we were doing, this issue came up again and again and, while I sympathise very much with the student perspective, there was reluctance from higher up to do anything about it. I feel certain it will keep coming up until we do take some kind of action. It has been an excellent lesson in the fact that even if you think your institution is being reasonable (i.e. bring in your own water bottler), the users do not necessarily agree, and it is important to address those concerns.

2 - No matter how hard you work, people will still find something to critique you on. There's a balance to strike between trying to meet every single need and not bothering.

As a library assistant I work very hard to make the library a positive place for students to work. I am one of their main human points of contact with the library and as such I am very invested in making sure they have a good experience. However, I am also in the position of enforcing rules and, as the person who keeps track of the Feedback Wall, representing the views and expectations of my institution to students. This is a very difficult position to negotiate, especially when your sympathies and the policies you are enforcing do not align.

Even if you could somehow meet every need thanks to an inexhaustible budget, incredibly flexible library space and a staff entirely comprised of the sort of service-minded, bend-over-backwards librarians we wish we could be, there will always be something that someone thinks you've done wrong or could improve on. If you're in a more flawed (i.e. real) library, there are lots of somethings users will pick up on. This can become overwhelming if you let it. Or, you can take things on as you have the capacity to deal with them, one step at a time. Like I talked about in my previous post, keeping your focus on the final goal of a perfect library is unattainable and will ultimately lead you to burn out. Do what you can, when you can. If you are smart about it, you can potentially have a big impact without wearing yourself out.

3 - Learn to not take criticism of your institution personally.

Most of the feedback has been constructive or at least polite, but there have been a few that have really gotten under my skin and made me feel truly awful. The worst actually cropped up this week and was about - you guessed it - water. Not only did the student feel that we were expecting people to "drink from the sinks like dogs" but wondered how long the library was going to "ignore" the issue. This hurt, particularly because I had been trying for months to find new angles and new approaches to get management to solve this issue. Even if it was not being resolved, it was certainly not being ignored.

That was a moment when I needed to step back and put myself in the shoes of the individual who wrote the comment. From their perspective, it must have felt like we were ignoring the issue. If students see that nothing is being accomplished, they assume that means that nothing is being done. It wasn't a personal critique, just an expression of frustration at what to the students must seem like a no-brainer issue because we haven't been able to adequately justify the library's position.


I think empathy is the key to negotiating these difficult situations. If you can simultaneously empathise with both parties and truly understand their perspectives, it makes creative problem-solving and negotiation much easier. The moment you let yourself get worked up and feel personally affronted, you shut down your ability to approach the problem from different angles because now you are simply approaching it from a defensive position rather than one based on understanding.

4 - If you really believe in something, don't give up arguing for it. Keep changing your approach until you can reach a compromise.

Everyone's heard the phrase "You have to pick your battles", right? I kind of have a love/hate relationship with that phrase. It's useful in as much as it can remind you about the finite energy, finite resources or finite flexibility you have to work with, as in my previous points. But when it comes to dealing with people, this phrase makes me very frustrated. "You have to pick your battles with ________, you know?"

To my mind this just excuses the other person from having to make compromises. I'm certainly not saying I want to be adversarial over every single issue. Indeed, the most effective approaches involve seeing the issue from the other person's point of view and addressing their concerns in a creative and civil way. But I don't think that you should let "picking your battles" excuse anyone from having to engage in conversation over your difference of opinion on important issues. Nor should you let it excuse you from having a conversation that you're nervous about having. If you truly believe in something, keep trying different angles, different approaches, different solutions.

Somewhere in the depths of the UXLibs hashtag on Twitter I saw a quote from a keynote address (I'm really sorry, I don't remember which one or whose tweet it was) about approaching service design using the same rules as improvisational acting. In improv, there's the idea of "Yes, and..." This is where actors doing a scene together always build on what was said before. They never shut each other down by contradicting the inventions of their fellow actors, and they keep the scene going by expanding and elaborating on what has just been said, no matter how off-the-wall it may be. There was the idea at the UX Libs conference that this kind of environment is ideal for design because it keeps creative momentum going. Maybe some of the ideas will be impossible or undesirable in the end, but as part of the creative process it's important to run with them anyway because what sounds like a mad idea may end up being the brilliant solution you've been looking for.

If you are lucky enough to work in a "Yes, and..." environment, it's likely that you have a lot of scope to innovate. If you work in a "No, but..." environment, chances are you find it difficult to stay positive and keep coming up with new ideas. I know that I can get very emotionally exhausted by keeping my own momentum going while being told why my ideas won't work, why things won't change and so on. I'm not saying that you should ignore your own emotional well-being and plug away at things until you feel like you're going to drop, but don't let yourself get discouraged on the issues you really believe in. In that sense, you really should pick your battles - make sure you're investing emotional energy in things proportional to how important you think they are. But it's worth remembering that there are multiple approaches to every problem and it would be a shame to give up before you find one that works.

5 - Don't pay for supplies for your research out of your own pocket.

This one doesn't need much clarification. If you're doing UX research for your library, you're doing it for them. If you pay for your own supplies you'll end up feeling like an idiot later on, believe me.

Right Livelihood: Becoming a Buddhist Librarian

“Hour by hour resolve firmly to do what comes to hand with dignity, and with humanity, independence, and justice. Allow your mind freedom from all other considerations. This you can do, if you will approach each action as though it were your last, dismissing the desire to create an impression, the admiration of self, the discontent with your lot." 

- Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

Source: www.tibetanbuddhistaltar.org

I've had a hectic week at work this week what with stressed out students facing their exams, dissertations due, events in the library and lots of smaller projects needing tending. Fortunately, that has propelled me back to my meditative practice, which had tailed off a bit of late. Facing stresses I have faced before with a relatively new set of skills and attitudes has prompted me to think a lot about how my exploration of Buddhism has shaped my approach to my profession over the last year.

The title of this post, "Right Livelihood", derives from one of the core tenets of Buddhism, the Noble Eightfold Path, in which the Buddha prescribed the way to the end of suffering. "Suffering", incidentally, is the most common translation of the Pali word dukkha, but it is not as extreme as we tend to mean it. For instance, I've also seen dukkha translated as "unsatisfactoriness". It refers to that feeling most of us have that something is missing, something could be better, or that we're falling short in some way -  a pervading dissatisfaction with the way our lives are right now that drives us to work harder, to acquire more stuff or to escape from it all. The Noble Eightfold path is a way of being in the world that works to root out the desires and aversions that drive dukkha, and it has echoes in Epicureanism, Stoicism and many other philosophical and religious practices the world over.

The Noble Eightfold Path is both less of a super-human undertaking than it looks and profoundly more difficult than it seems. It is not a set of commandments for how you must be all the time lest you face some divine retribution, nor is it something to which you can simply pay lip service. Walpola Rahula, a Sri Lankan monk and author, wrote that the facets of the Eightfold Path "are to be developed more or less simultaneously, as far as possible according to the capacity of each individual. They are all linked together and each helps the cultivation of the others." [The emphasis is mine.] Right livelihood (which can also be translated as "skilful" or "wise" livelihood), like all of the facets of the Eightfold Path, is not clearly and explicitly defined. Generally speaking it is any undertaking that does good rather than harm, which is ethical according to a Buddhist framework (in general Buddhism does not condone killing, lying, slavery or dealing in intoxicants) and which supports rather than hinders the individual's spiritual practice. However, it is up to the circumstances, the capacity and the judgment of the individual what right livelihood looks like in their own lives.

The Noble Eightfold Path. Source: beliefnet.com

Even with such a broad definition, right livelihood seems to generate anxiety in a lot of modern, especially Western Buddhists. Ted Meissner of the Secular Buddhist podcast has joked that many people seem to think the only right livelihoods available to Buddhists are along the lines of yoga teacher, monk or aquaponic kale farmer. I certainly struggled with this when I first encountered right livelihood, becoming deeply uncomfortable with the feeling that I was reinforcing a system of privilege through my own complicity. Ajahn Brahm observes, however, that, "It's not what you do but how you do it that makes all the difference."

This is the point at which the entire system of the Eightfold Path begins to work together: the "how you do it" point. What Buddhism is teaching me is greater mindfulness of the present moment, detached from old scars and prejudices picked up in the past, removed from perceptions of the future. With greater attentiveness comes greater patience and compassion. This can only be accomplished through good intention and effort. It is the quality of your work that matters, even if you are washing a dish or reshelving a book. If you are doing something with your mind wandering elsewhere, how well are you actually doing that thing? Right livelihood, then, is not connected to one's job title so much as putting one's entire self into one's work, whatever that work happens to be.

The "how you do it" also includes your relationships to other people; to your co-workers and library users. Think about a time when someone in a customer service role smiled at you or went out of their way to be helpful when you were having a bad day. That one small interaction cost them nothing but it improved your day dramatically. Think of all the people you smiled at or helped in your job today. Even if they didn't see you, even if they never know what you did, did you catalogue something in a way that will help a library user find it? Did you make sure the shelves were organised so they could retrieve it quickly? You form part of a service made up of people for the benefit of people. You facilitate the creation of knowledge, the spark of discovery and the joyous, frightening, silly, satisfying experiences of library users. Did you do it well and wisely? Did you bring compassion to your library's services? In terms of my fears that I was reinforcing privilege through my work, I think that unjust systems cannot be changed by turning our backs on them. If I bring compassion to the corner of the world I inhabit, to every person I meet and to the people I will never meet who use my library's services, I think that's all anyone is called on to do in order to make the world a better place. 

The most difficult part of mindfulness for me has been cultivating better self-awareness, including an awareness of my own flaws. It can be very uncomfortable to look at your professional and personal shortcomings, but it is ultimately an incredibly useful exercise. Not only can you learn to work through them or at least to work around them, but if you can look with compassion at the parts of yourself that you dislike the most you can certainly treat others with the same degree of compassion. Acknowledging my own egocentrism and my need for recognition was the most important step toward letting it go. Obviously it's still a work in progress but the minute I stopped shying away from it I was able to shift my perspective on my work and what I wanted to get out of it. It isn't about self-abnegation so much as the recognition that "myself" is no more than a useful construct for interacting with the world that can be let go.

"The beginner's mind is the mind of compassion.When our mind is compassionate, it is boundless." - Shunryu Suzuki

Beginner's mind, or "don't-know mind" is an important approach to life in Buddhism, especially in the various Zen traditions, that is very connected to the idea of letting go of self. Zen teacher Shunryu Suzuki said, "In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities, in the expert's mind there are few." As librarians we often need to market ourselves as experts in particular skills and competences in order to more effectively integrate our services into the teaching activities at our institutions. But while it is important to showcase our professional expertise, it is equally important to cultivate in our own minds a sense of curiosity and openness. Kristen Mastel and Genevieve Innes, two librarians writing about Mindfulness for librarians, argue:

"The benefit of a beginner’s mind, if one can cultivate and achieve it, is that one will then look at the world with fresh eyes, and can rediscover the joy of learning something new, of finding just the right article or book, the deep satisfaction of having a question or curiosity answered, a curiosity sated--experiences which excited one and first drew him into the profession. In beginner’s mind, we understand what it is like to be in new situation, to feel uncertain, to feel vulnerable. In the beginner’s mind, one realizes how important it is to demonstrate patience and understanding with ourselves and others."

Beginner's mind, then, is important to cultivating compassion for our users as well as finding joy in our careers. It can be frightening for information professionals to embrace something like "don't-know mind", but I think that if we are to develop a partnership with library users rather than an expert/novice or gatekeeper/seeker relationship it is important that we learn how not to be experts, to learn how to not know. Our users are the true experts on their needs and goals and approaching them with an open mind ensures that we have the best chance of understanding them.

Source: http://www.buddhistelibrary.org

In a previous post, reflecting on where I am at professionally, I mentioned a shift in focus from self-oriented goals to service-oriented goals. I said that I was no longer focusing on where I wanted to be in my career but what I wanted the library to be like. While searching for other librarians' musings on right livelihood I came across a wonderful article by a recently qualified librarian that I think sums it up perfectly: 

We new librarians need not be enlightened Buddhists to learn something from these teachings about the connection between ego and burnout. We bring high ideals to our work, as we should, but are doomed to burnout if we tie our egos to achieving those goals. We are never going to teach all of our patrons to be critical about their information sources. We will never have the funding to provide all of the information sources our patrons need. We will never convince all of our leaders that information needs to be free. Certainly, we can make progress toward these goals, perhaps tremendous progress, but there will always be more new technologies to master, more information to organize, more information needs to meet. Perhaps we will be able to face this constant onslaught without burnout if our goal is service, not personal accomplishment. - Roberta M. Richards

This resonated with me very profoundly. I was heading for just such a burnout when I began engaging with Buddhism because my ego was tied to goals. I was clinging to what I thought I ought to be, what my library ought to be, and that neither of us were there was a sign of deep personal failure. But the journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step (so says Lao-tzu). There's a Zen proverb I really like that goes as follows:

A young but earnest Zen student approached his teacher and asked the Master, "If I work very hard and diligently, how long will it take for me to find Zen?"
The Master thought about this, then replied, "Ten years."
The student then said, "But what if I work very, very hard and really apply myself to learn fast. How long then?"
Replied the Master, "Well, twenty years."
"But, if I really, really work at it, how long then?" asked the student.
"Thirty years," replied the Master.
"But, I do not understand," said the disappointed student, "Each time that I say I will work harder, you say it will take me longer. Why do you say that?"
Replied the Master, "When you have one eye on the goal, you only have one eye on the path." 

In all of our lives there is work that is right in front of us. It's probably not glamorous or prestigious. We may not earn any recognition or praise for it. But it's there and waiting for our attention. This also means knowing when to set your professional work aside because the work that is in front of you is the crucial work of self-care, of getting enough sleep, of spending time with your friends or hobbies. Right livelihood to me is about doing the work that is in front of you, as Marcus Aurelius said, with humanity, with compassion and with energy. That is where I have found happiness and satisfaction in my work: doing what is in my capacity to do, giving everything I have in that moment, with compassion for myself and others.

And, fortunately, the work is never finished.

I know that this is not everyone's cup of tea so I thank you for bearing with me if you've read this entire post. I hope it's given you something to think about. None of the things I have discussed is really inherently or exclusively Buddhist: they're ideas that can be explored by people of any - or no - belief system. That I am engaging with them through Buddhism is merely a reflection of my own personal resonances and proclivities, but it has been through dedicated engagement with these ideas that I am at the point I am now: both having travelled a great distance and having so much more ground to cover.

Time to reflect

Lately I've really been enjoying my work. I've been able to choose projects I'm interested in including developing a series of UX studies to get a better sense of what direction the library should be moving in, I've built a pretty decent social media presence for the library, I've worked on redesigning our webpages and I've started thinking about in-house outreach we can do to help our students engage with our historic collections.

This has come out of a situation that initially I found absolutely awful, however: one in which I got very little feedback and had very little direction from above. I've learned to not let it bother me, assuming that the lack of feedback is a good sign, and the bits of feedback I have had are all positive. It was simply not a situation I was used to and I eventually had to come to terms with the idea that the freedom to shape my own role came with a lack of direct mentoring and oversight that I've tended to rely on my whole life. It took me this long to realise, though, that there is a way I can get feedback: I can get it from myself.

So, I'm going to do a bit of reflective writing on what I'm doing and where I see it going. This is primarily an exercise for myself, but I'm sharing it because I hope it's interesting or helpful to someone else too.

User Experience (UX)

After my recent write-up of the class I took from Georgina and Meg, I've started looking at studies I can do in the library. This morning I've finished a proposal for a series of studies that will culminate in a report including recommendations about where I believe the library can improve in terms of UX.

It's become a bit of a preoccupation of mine lately, thanks to Cambridge hosting the UX Libs conference. I didn't get to go to that but I followed the conference's Twitter hashtag (#UXLibs) avidly and got involved as much as I could, including going to see the final pitches and chatting with some of those involved.

A meme based on Heidegger's phenomenological terms for users' experience of technology. Source: http://twitter.com/HogwartsUXLib/status/580280726421147648

I'm not sure where I'm going with UX other than it's a tool I find really interesting and useful and I want to have it in my toolkit. Like that thing on Batman's utility belt that has a grappling hook shaped like a bat and an unbelievably strong wire that can apparently hold the body weight of several fully-grown henchmen and at least one Boy Wonder. I want to keep reading about UX and I'm looking forward to actually doing some studies of our users. I admit I'm a little intimidated by the idea, but excited by what insights we'll gain by doing them. More on those later, I'm sure.

Outreach

Last Thursday I attended an Oxford/Cambridge College Libraries exchange. It was hosted in Oxford and I gave my first ever conference-type presentation, about my library's digitisation project and how we are promoting it through social media and other channels. I got really nice feedback from that and despite how nervous I was I think I did okay. As with any conference, though, the best part was the conversations after the presentations. I met some really nice people and had some great talks.

My favourite presentation of the day was by a couple of college librarians talking about getting students to access historical collections. I loved their ideas and they really pushed me out of my self-created digital pigeon hole. They had some great, creative ways of increasing the visibility of librarians and historical collections to members of the college and I can't wait to propose some of them to my manager.

Social Media

Probably one of my proudest achievements has been the social media presence of the library, but I am certainly not perfect at it and I am learning a lot as I go along. The more I engage in professional and academic conversations on social media, the more I learn and the more excited I get about it. I think I find this arena very comfortable, though, because of its anonymity and the lack of personal contact. I am trying to be aware of how easy it is for me to slip into a mentality that assumes social/digital media is all the outreach you need. In my own experience, face-to-face outreach is still by far the most effective.

Oddly, I've also learned a lot more about Twitter in the last couple of weeks through using a fake account. It's highlighted for me some things I do wrong or that others to right, it's helped me think about things like voice, timing and so forth more than my personal or work accounts have. It just goes to show you that you never know where you're going to pick up useful skills.

Where am I going (and why am I in this hand-basket)?

A lot of people don't realise how many different directions there are to go in librarianship. Outside of libraries many people I know assume that it's a straightforward hierarchy, the top of which is Head Librarian and that of course that's everyone's goal. The fuzzy, diaphanous nature of information science these days, though, means that these old hierarchies and traditional roles are breaking down, if they ever really existed in the first place. There are dozens of distinct library/information roles I could reel off without much thought, and probably dozens more I haven't heard of. In ten years there will probably be even more library roles that we haven't even considered yet. Still, between CPD courses, CILIP Chartership, networking etc. I've been given the distinct impression that most library folks know pretty much where they want to go and how they want to get there.

Can I really be the odd one out for not knowing what I want to be doing in ten years? Or five? Or one? Is it so important to have a set destination in mind? This time last year I would have been vehement that it does matter and that anyone who said otherwise was probably unambitious, as if that's the worst thing you can be. I don't really know what I want for me, but I know what I want for my library in the next year, or five, or ten.

I want it to be better, and if I can help make that happen, that will be awesome.

In conclusion: the state of Library Sphinx

Ultimately I think if I were to give myself feedback about all of this, I'd say that I'm doing interesting research and coming up with good ideas but where I fall down is in having the guts to implement them. Because I don't have someone telling me to do a UX study, or arrange a library literacy course, I tend to balk when it comes to actually doing it. I need to be braver and see my ideas through. The OxCam conference showed me that doing things I'm intimidated by can be a great learning experience and a lot of fun. It can also open up new opportunities and ideas that I wouldn't have encountered otherwise. 

So, Self, be brave, be open to new experiences and keep working hard to make libraries more awesome. 

UX and Ethnographic Methods for Librarians

I feel extraordinarily lucky to work where I do. I have a lot of latitude, including the opportunity to really shape my own role, I have been able to usher in pretty major changes in the culture and services at my library working from the bottom of the hierarchy and I have a pretty sweet work space from which to research exhibitions, explore avenues of outreach and publicity and keep up with what's going on in other libraries.

One of the nerve centres of the UX revolution (AKA my desk)

One of the best things about working here - and in Cambridge Libraries in general - is the focus placed on the CPD (continuing professional development) of library staff. We have great opportunities to learn and grow as a community, not least of which is the Librarians in Training courses that run throughout the year. If you're working in Cambridge libraries and haven't yet taken advantage of these, you should really think about doing so. Not only can you learn a lot from courses targeted to Cambridge librarians, but it's a fantastic opportunity to meet people from other libraries who will be your allies and resources in projects you might want to take on in future. (And they're all lovely people, it goes without saying!)

I attended a course yesterday afternoon entitled "UX and Ethnographic Methods for Librarians" taught by hippest-of-the-hip Cambridge librarians Meg Westbury (Wolfson) and Georgina Cronin (Judge Business School). Both of these women are inspirational innovators who really care about providing great services to library users and it's fantastic to get an insight into how they've done what they've done at their own institutions and for the wider Cambridge library community. The class itself was pretty much a perfect mixture of instruction and activity as far as I was concerned. I think I'm not alone in having had a really good time with it.

Introducing UX and ethnography

Meg began by defining and explaining UX and ethnography. Very briefly, UX (user experience) is a term originating with Apple, who are masters of the art. It encompasses UI (user interface) and usability (a term that itself encompasses how easy a tool or service is to navigate, learn, remember etc.), but goes beyond both to look at the qualitative dimensions of experience, emotion and cognition at the point where users interact with products or services. Essentially, it puts the focus on the individual's motivations, needs and feelings. It looks at barriers to use as well, trying to determine who is missing and why. Ethnography is writing about culture, with the worthy goal of doing so from ground level instead of top-down. As much as possible the aim is to understand the shifting points of view of the individual user without imposing assumptions or putting them in a static, statistical box. You can learn more about students from an ethnographic study with four participants, Meg said, than from surveying 100 with a standardized questionnaire.

Ethnographic UX research in libraries is growing rapidly as library professionals confront the fact that not only do we not necessarily know best about how to meet our users' needs but maybe we don't even know their needs as well as we like to think. As so-called "disruptive" technologies undermine the privileged position libraries have occupied as the sole gateways to information, how can we change our relationship to the information landscape and to our users in ways that will create meaningful, inspiring opportunities for our users? Luckily, UX research can be a lot easier to implement than more traditional research. Since you're looking for qualitative data that is not exhaustive so much as a window into a single user's experience at a single point in time, study design can be more flexible and creative. Many of the methods utilize things as basic as users' own mobile phones and post-it notes and require less planning and preparation than a questionnaire.

Methods

The majority of class time was spent looking at a few of the potential methods with Georgina, including trying them out for ourselves! First off was my favorite, cognitive mapping. The task was to draw from memory a map of your working spaces. The exercise lasted 6 minutes, and we changed pens every two minutes. This highlighted what was most significant in our minds, what was lower priority and what was most peripheral. (The order was blue, red, black, in case you want to psychoanalyze me based on the drawing below, i.e. I drew the Space Marine figure on my monitor long before drawing a representation of reshelving).

My cognitive map of the places I work. Don't judge me. I have not the skills of an artist.

Normally participants would label their maps and discuss them with the researcher, but before doing that we swapped maps with someone else and tried to interpret theirs without any labels. This clever exercise showed how easy it is to misinterpret or assume you know what something means when actually you have it all wrong. It was also interesting to experience firsthand how it is slightly nerve wracking to do the drawing but really quite fun to talk about the drawing afterward.

The other main activity was looking at observation. Georgina herself learned a lot about how users move through her library simply by sitting and watching for an hour at a time on different days. She created a heat map and a list of activities performed by library users and got a better idea of how people were actually using the space. We went out into the wilds of the University Library to try it out! It's surprisingly difficult to be discrete, especially when you're an adult in a student space. A few people were asked if they worked for the UL. Not so subtle. It is interesting how much you can learn even from five minutes. On the top floor I found that no one really stayed up there to work but rather came and got their books and left, but that there was some difficulty locating items, meaning users were backtracking a lot and looking at the signage to try to work out where their book was. There were many other interesting observations from the other participants as well. I think it's a useful method, but would work better in conjunction with something that elicited user responses as well, for instance maybe I would interview a few students about what spaces they avoided in the UL and why, or ask them to do a photo diary of places they feel confused in the library.

We received handouts at the end with a list of resources to get started (which I will copy below) and an expanded list of methods (which I won't copy, but I'm sure Meg and/or Georgina would be happy to supply if you email them). I'll be hanging on to these long-term, I think, and referring to them for inspiration.

Conclusion-y type things

After a discussion about analyzing and presenting the results, the class ended with a brief discussion of ethics, which boiled down to common sense: let participants know how you're going to use their data, and don't let incentives create an imbalance of power or a sense of obligation. When in doubt, use a consent form, and let participants know that they can leave the study at any time. Also, food-based incentives are often more than enough to make participants feel appreciated for giving you their time.

One thing I would have liked to discuss in more detail is what kinds of questions lend themselves to these sorts of studies. I came away feeling like people might just pick a study that sounded fun without first designing it to address a specific gap in knowledge. I think it would be more useful to start from a particular aspect or question you wanted to investigate, as in this passage from Nancy Fried Foster et al.:

"Our first task was to identify one trenchant research question to guide the project. The question we developed was, What do students really do when they write their research papers? Between the assignment of a research paper and the finished, submitted product was a black box that largely concealed the processes undertaken by the student. We wanted to take a peek into that box to see what we could find. We felt that this question accurately reflected our ignorance of student work habits while providing a manageable focus for our information-gathering activities." - Studying Students

I like that this passage acknowledges the ignorance of the researchers. In studying social science research methodology for my librarianship course I often felt that studies commenced with researchers already having an idea about the results in their heads. It left little room for flexibility and possibly influenced interpretation, especially when studies attempted to fit qualitative experiences into quantitative data. Statistics have their place, of course, but they don't tell a story and they certainly don't put the individual at the heart of research.

I will certainly be using some of these methods to conduct studies in my own library and have already started annotating my hand-outs with potential research topics/questions.

I'm sticking notes on so I can keep the handout for longer. Yeah.

I really enjoyed this course and got a lot out of it, most importantly the confidence that this is something very achievable and useful to do. I am excited to find out what my library users need and want, and how we can more closely align our services to those real needs. Thanks, Meg and Georgina!

Resources to get started

• Nancy Fried Foster et al., Studying Students: A Second Look. Free download at http://bit.ly/1Bj5QMp
• ERIAL Project Toolkit: http://www.erialproject.org/publications/toolkit/
• Donna Lanclos, The Anthropologist in the Stacks: http://www.donnalanclos.com/
• Cennydd Bowles and James Box, Undercover User Experience Design (2010)
• Leah Buley, The User Experience Team of One: A Research and Design Survival Guide (2013)
• Sam Ladner, Practical Ethnography: A Guide to Doing Ethnography in the Private Sector (2014)
• Martyn Denscombe, The Good Research Guide for Small-Scale Social Research Projects (2010)
• #UKAnthroLib blog: http://ukanthrolib.wordpress.com