Four useful librarian webinars in August

We are sort of just over half way through our term break and some of you might have spare time to tune into some of the upcoming webinars listed below. The suggested topics for August cover collection development, library user engagement, library advocacy strategies, and oral history services.

Collection Development Tips and Tools
Thursday, 6th August, 19:00 – 20:00 IST
Join Library Journal, Ingram Content Group, and special guests for a lively discussion about Collection Development. We’ll have a dynamic discussion about the challenges Selectors face – from predicting popular titles in advance, to dealing with patron demands, to staying on top of titles in the media and much more. Our expert panelists will have some solutions for many of these challenges, and we hope you’ll join the discussion!

As an aside, JISC have just created a new email list to discuss collection management issues (shelving, stores, gifts, policies, relegation, CCM tools, etc.). See LIS-COLLECTION-MGMT for details.

Individual Programs: Anything but Passive
Tuesday, 11th August, 22:30 – 23.30 IST (no registration required)
Individual programs have been called many things (self-led, passive, proactive, and more), but one thing remains the same – these are a great way for any library to encourage interaction from people who may not normally attend programs while using less library resources and staff time. Join us for an interactive webinar where you will help lead the discussion. Bring your questions, your previous successes, and even your failures to share with others! Learn how to give your patrons a voice and participate on their own time, regardless of the size of your location or budget (provided by the Colorado State Library).

Because Advocacy Never Stops: New Tools for Taking Action
Thursday, 13th August, 19:00 – 20:00 IST
This webinar will highlight free, newly revised downloadable materials for public libraries distilled from landmark advocacy and awareness-building programs. Learn about two resources scheduled for release in summer 2015: updated curriculum from Turning the Page including tools, worksheets and training materials you can adapt locally to grow your team’s advocacy knowledge and abilities; and a new online guide that walks through each step of planning and carrying out a local library awareness campaign modelled after Geek the Library. Hear from library leaders who have put these ideas to work to build advocacy know-how, increase staff confidence, and engage more deeply with the community. Whether you are looking to get started, or seeking to maintain momentum following a recent advocacy effort, join us to discuss strategies to take your library to the next level.

Oral History @ Your Library: A Beginner’s Guide
Monday, 31st August, 18:00 – 19:00 IST
Are you interested in fitting oral history into your library’s repertoire, but don’t know where to start? This one-hour webinar will provide an introduction to the ways in which libraries can use oral history for everything from collection development and programming to community engagement. We will begin with the basics — what is oral history? What does it contribute? — and also offer programming ideas for all ages, information about related technology (what type of equipment to use in which circumstances), and a wide range of resources for those who would like to follow up on the topic. At the end of the webinar, participants should have a better idea of how they might be able to utilise oral history in their libraries, and they will have a basic sense of what steps they would need to take to implement that vision.

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Bear V Shark (...or Discovery platforms V Google Scholar)

This post has been prompted by many sources: my own experiences as both a teacher and a researcher; a keynote at the recent Lir Annual Seminar on Thinking the Unthinkable - Utrecht University Library's decision to drop their discovery service and rely on Google Scholar; articles like this which highlight that whilst Google Scholar may be lacking in authority it offers an attractively comprehensive index; and this one too, which finds "no significant performance difference between the two discovery services [Summon & EDS] and Google Scholar for known-item searches. However, Google Scholar outperformed [emphasis added] both discovery services for topical searches" (Ciccone & Vickery, 2015*).

I'm perhaps a little unusual as librarians go, in that I firmly consider myself a pragmatist. A lot of the time, I subscribe to the 'good enough' approach when it comes to searching for information - enough being the key word here (caveat: obviously this is in the context of the specific user's needs i.e. most people I see are not doing systematic reviews or PhD level research but studying to get a degree and a job in the real world). Most students don't need every article ever published; they need a reasonable selection and more importantly in my opinion, the ability and skills to filter,evaluate and use them. For the most part, our graduates will not go on to be academic researchers; they will become teachers, entrepreneurs, office workers, policy analysts, managers. They will leave our libraries behind, and with it, their access to subscription databases and content. Where can they look for information now?

Most of us would agree that discovery platforms are not ideal for detailed, systematic or comprehensive searching, but rather work best when used as a scoping or initial searching tool to inform further searching on specialist academic databases. Indeed this is where they excel - and the same goes for Google Scholar. Yes, the volume of results is overwhelming. You would never be able to look through them all, but that's really not the point. Moreover, most library discovery tools are exactly the same in this respect. GS is intuitive, it's simple, and it's associated with one of the biggest brand names in the world.  When linked to a library's subscription resources, it provides easy access to paid-for content, as well as a lot of openly available content that may not show up in a discovery service (repositories and hybrid journals for example, for more on the latter see here). Sure, library visibility may be lower on GS than with an in-house or rebranded discovery platform, but if we are relying solely on generic, widely available publisher content to demonstrate our value to our users, we probably won't last long anyway.

Discovery services do offer one big advantage over GS, that is, the inclusion and integration of the library's catalogue. However, our catalogues are still very useful tools in their own right, and sometimes people just want to see what books we have on the shelves without the noise and inconsistent metadata that discovery services can sometimes open up. There is also the obvious risk that libraries might potentially become very dependent on Google, who could simply remove their Scholar service overnight if they so wished. This possibility is extremely unlikely in the short term in my view, and in the long run, well...

For some libraries, especially smaller ones, using GS instead of a discovery product may free up valuable resources (both financial and human) to concentrate on other areas where we can create much more value for our users, such as developing our unique and distinctive collections, and focusing on the expertise that our staff can offer our users. We are always claiming our users want a "Google search experience". If this is true, why not give it to them?



*Ciccone, K., & Vickery, J. (2015). Summon, EBSCO Discovery Service, and Google Scholar: A Comparison of Search Performance Using User Queries. Evidence Based Library And Information Practice, 10(1), 34-49. Retrieved fromhttp://ejournals.library.ualberta.ca/index.php/EBLIP/article/view/23845/17954

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Using LibGuides: from simple online guides to complete library websites (ANLTC - UCD 25th March 2015 - Report)

Guest post by Maura Flynn Health Sciences Librarian at UCC Library

As a novice LibGuides user I was very keen to attend the ANLTC training on LibGuides.   The training course had been organised for both regular users and prospective users in mind.  For anyone who is unfamiliar with LibGuides, it is a content management system which enables libraries to develop, reuse and share their content and library resources via an easy-to-use interface.  More information is available here at the Springshare site.

Some academic libraries in Ireland have been using LibGuides for a number of years while others are just embarking on the journey.  The morning session featured a number of case studies from individual libraries about their experiences implementing LibGuides and their future plans.

The afternoon session was divided into two streams to accommodate existing users and new users.  I attended Track B for newcomers.  Because a lot of common themes were explored throughout the day I will provide a brief overview of these, outlining:

• development and implementation; 
• experiences of the users (advantages and disadvantages); 
• possible uses and future directions.

Development and Implementation
Speakers described how long they have been using LibGuides, for example:
• Athlone Institute of Technology (AIT): 2010
• Dundalk Institute of Technology (DkIT): 2012
• University College Dublin (UCD): 2013
• University of Limerick (UL): 2014
• Maynooth University: 2014

Accordingly there was an interesting mix of experiences presented by the speakers.  Different processes were used to develop LibGuides within the institutions.  For example, UL employed a co-op student to get the project up and running, while in Maynooth University, one staff member (Celine), was instrumental in developing the project.  Other Universities employed a team approach, such as UCD which developed their LibGuides using a pilot team.
The importance of collaboration among many different members of library staff to make LibGuides a success was also evident. For example, the important contribution provided by Digital and Technical colleagues was highlighted by Anne McMahon from UL.  Josh Clark, UCD, emphasised the importance of ensuring that you are using the correct links for everything and involving your colleagues in the library to do so.   Similarly, most universities engaged with Subject Librarians to develop subject specific guides.
Interestingly Una O’Connor (AIT) pointed out that the Subject Librarians in AIT are responsible for their own creative content but that initially the staff were keen to have a template of sorts to follow when getting started.

Libguide from AIT

Ric Paul from the University of Southampton Library also provided a fascinating presentation about using LibGuides to replace their Library Website. This presentation demonstrated the immense possibilities afforded by LibGuides, particularly version 2.  Some institutions, such as UCD and University of Southampton are currently using the upgraded version of LibGuides, version 2, while other speakers are planning to upgrade.
Anne McMahon (UL) provided an excellent overview of the UL experience of migrating to version 2, which was quite positive with good support provided by the company, Springshare.  Version 2 seems to provide enhanced functionality, such as enhanced mobile appearance and greater flexibility when adding content.
Another perspective is provided in the JMLA by Coombs (2015).

UL Libguides

Experiences of users
 The experiences of using LibGuides shared by the speakers was overwhelmingly positive.  Some frustration was evident that the release of version 2 was delayed, but those who have upgraded seem happy with the process and interface. Some advantages of LibGuides include: 

• Prolific usage worldwide, which means that guides exist on a huge number of topics 

• LibGuide users, by and large, operate as a community of practitioners who willingly share their content. Sharing, customisation and re-use of content. E.G. Maynooth University developed their Bibliometrics guide with the help of Michael Ladisch from UCD. While the UCD Data Management LibGuide was developed by reusing content from the University of Queensland and elsewhere with acknowledgement.

• The vendor, Springshare, provides good online support with speedy response to queries. 

• The guides are easy to update.

• Significant customisation and enhancement is possible, if desired, by using Java script and cascading style sheets (CSS) coding. 

• Useful features of version 2 such as the Asset Manager, which makes sharing and reuse of content such as PDFs, images etc. easier.

• Ease of obtaining usage statistics, which can be enhanced with Google Analytics.

• Professional and aesthetically pleasing appearance LibGuides provide.

• Ease of integrating other SpringShare and non Springshare products into LibGuides.  For example, UCD integrate an RSS feed with UCD Library News, UCD Library Twitter Feed and LibCal (another Springshare product to showcase training activities). LibSurvey is another product that was also mentioned.

• James Molloy, UCD emphasised the scope to partner with Academics to embed relevant content for users and the ease of editing LibGuides enhances this.  

Possible disadvantages include:
• There is an annual fee for LibGuides and the fee for version 2 is slightly higher than that of version 1.  One must question the likely future costs associated with this product and whether Libraries may feel, having migrated the majority of their Web content onto the platform, that they may have to continue using it even if it no longer serves their purposes in the future or indeed pay more for an improved system.  A couple of speakers raised the issue as to the longevity of LibGuides, which raises the question as to whether it is a sustainable long term platform or a current fad?   

• There seems to have been a significant wait time for the release of version 2.

• Longer term users of LibGuides, such as Una O’Connor (AIT), expressed a strong desire to migrate to version 2 to explore new possibilities and perhaps being strongly aware of the limitations of version 1. 

• Java Script/CSS coding skills are required to make significant customisations and enhancements. Coding skills offer huge potential to transform the content.  While many of the current users felt that coding skills were a desirable skillset for a member of staff to have, others also questioned the benefits of a package which is “easy to use” if coding is essentially required to create an enhanced look and feel.  

• Claire Fox, DkIT, questioned how interactive LibGuides really are, even with the possibility of including surveys/quizzes.  It may be a challenge for Libraries to glean meaningful feedback if students aren’t encouraged to communicate with us via LibGuides. 

• The impact of LibGuides was also queried.  One pertinent issue is trying to determine if the usage is primarily by people outside of the institution and possibly even other Libraries assessing other offerings from across the globe.  It was also noted that if LibGuides are used in hands-on IL sessions this will immediately cause a spike in usage, but may not be indicative of value or benefit afforded to students.

Possible uses and future directions

The scope to use LibGuides in many different ways is a hugely attractive feature.  Suggestions made include: 

• Instructional tool and platform for orientation and IL purposes

• Showcase collections, as UCD have done with their Map Collection which is a very popular LibGuide

• To promote Library roles in Research Support and Outreach and specialist services

• Replace Library intranet, as UCD have done  

• Project site (password protected access is possible)

• Work with Academics to embed content in Blackboard

• Use for short periods to promote campus wide events, as Maynooth University have done

• For news, marketing and promotional purposes 

• Replacing the entire library website with LibGuides, which Ric Paul explored and which Leeds Beckett University have done

Popular Libguide for UCD Students

The training day was very useful and provided a good introduction to LibGuides for a novice like myself.  As aforementioned the afternoon session was divided into two tracks, so I would be very interested to hear the thoughts of more experienced users who attended the other session.   

My take home messages from the event are: there is a wealth of knowledge amongst colleagues about LibGuides and that many institutions both in Ireland and abroad are happy to provide permission to share content.  LibGuides afford Librarians immense possibilities to shape and customise their web offerings while providing a user friendly interface and scope to embed lots of different kinds of content.  

The annual costs associated with the product are a serious consideration however.  Similarly, if this is something that is invested in we need to develop very meaningful feedback loops to ensure value for money and an excellent user experience.  

Thanks to all of the speakers and other attendees who shared their experiences and expertise so freely, links to their LibGuides are below.  Thanks also to ANLTC and UCD for organising and hosting the event.   

Some examples.

Dundalk Institute of Technology LibGuides:  

Athlone Institute of Technology LibGuides: 

University of Limerick LibGuides: 

Southampton University Library LibGuides:  

Maynooth University LibGuides: 

Leeds Beckett University LibGuides: 

UCD LibGuides: 

References:

Coombs, B. (2015), 'LibGuides 2', Journal Of The Medical Library Association, 103(1), 64-65. 

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Building the habit of excellence in library services

“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit” - Aristotle

Lately I have been thinking a lot about what we mean by "excellent" customer service in libraries. I think whilst we may often talk about delivering excellence, a lot of us probably don’t, but this is intrinsically a good thing! By excellence, I mean true excellence (itself a rather nebulous concept that means different things to different people), rather than very, very, very good – the latter I think is something a lot of us definitely do deliver on. To me, being very, very good means delivering effective, efficient and consistent services, but crucially acknowledging that there is still always room for improvement – and more importantly, the desire and willingness to improve alongside it.

Indeed, when we look at our services there is probably always something that could be improved upon in an ideal world if resources were plentiful, be it operational factors (more staff, longer opening hours, a broader or deeper collection) or infrastructure (a bigger and better building in which to serve our users for example). Moreover, we live in a dynamic world where the goalposts of excellence are constantly moving, and so it becomes a concept that is almost impossible to define. However, as long as the opportunity to improve exists, we can keep pushing incrementally towards it, and ultimately it becomes ingrained as a habit. It is this mindset and philosophy that I think is so important in service delivery, whereas the mindset of “perceived excellence” can be a dangerous thing. When the day comes that we think we have achieved excellence, complacency can often set in and we stop looking for ways we can do things differently and better.

For me, true excellence or “gold standard” customer service is perhaps something we will never reach in practice, but rather an ideal that we drive towards asymptotically. The key thing is that we are continually working and moving towards it, delivering better services than we did yesterday, and I believe this is far more important and much more tangible for our users than whatever "excellence" might look like.

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Semesterisation - observations from the Library

Last week the national press  reported on sit in protests at UCC Library. This protest was organised by UCC Student Union over what students saw as the less than adequate opening hours of the main Library building in the wake of the recent semesterisation of the academic year at UCC.

Though these protests attracted the attention of students and media they are, for me as a librarian, the least interesting and least surprising aspect of the switch to a semester based model.

UCC Library has always been very much used as a study space by students. Particularly at peak times of the academic year.  Our students flock to the library when they have deadlines. The more deadlines they have the more flocking they do. With semesterisation students have more deadlines and the time between deadlines is reduced. Ergo, more flocking. Therefore no surprise.

But there are other aspects of this change that could be of more interest to other librarians whose institutions might be moving over to a semester based model. A number of these are probably obvious but as the sit in protests show - not all of us think of the obvious things all of the time.

The number of information / reference queries being handled from undergraduates has significantly increased this year.
Students are under more pressure. Both time and resource pressure. As there are more students doing more assignments at the same time there is greater demand on our hard copy resources. Core texts are being checked out quicker, earlier and more often. There are also more holds / requests being placed on these checked out items.

This has provided an opportunity for us library staff.
Students are needing, and actually seeking assistance, from frontline library staff at an earlier stage of the year. They need to find material as their recommended reading material is more often not available. This puts us in a position of influence - they need us to show them how to maximise their use of our resources to find equally relevant material. It allows us to introduce them earlier to our e-resources. This has the added value of increasing the use of our e-resources.
A happy side product, hopefully, is that we instill good research practice in undergrads from the very start of their academic career.

The amount of items being shelved has increased. The increase in students using the library as an information resource, as opposed to a study space, has led to increased usage of our hard copy resources. 
In recent years we had found that the number of items needing to be shelved had reduced significantly, year on year, This slide has been halted. And gone swiftly the opposite direction. The number of items being circulated and requiring re shelving has shot back up. Obviously this means that Library Staff and Student Help are all busier as regards shelving.
Shelving is taking up more library man hours.

We are requesting more items from the store.
Every summer we relegate items to the store. This relegation is based on usage. When an item has not been checked out for a number of years we tend to relegate. This year we find that more of these relegated books are being requested as students seek alternatives to the items on their reading lists.

There is more browsing of the shelves by students. 
As students cannot find the actual book they are looking for they browse the Dewey area more. Thus leading to different materials being borrowed. I imagine that lecturers will be marking papers with plenty of 'unusual' / different items / material being referenced.


Many books with historically low circulation stats are now being circulated.


Undergraduate student help are finding it harder to stick to rosters due to assignments.
We in UCC Library hire a number of student assistants every year. They work twelve hours a week and most of them spend their shifts helping with stock management. To put it more plainly - they shelve books and tidy the shelves.
This year we find that undergraduate students are finding it difficult to commit to rostered times due to the amount of assignments they are working on at any one time. This means that it requires a flexibility on our side to work around their schedule. We have had to work on a weekly, sometimes daily, basis to ensure that the student help can work on their assignments and work their required hours. A number of students have had to give up their hours or pull back on their hours due to their study commitments

In conclusion, as  I see it, Semesterisation has been a good thing for UCC library.
The physical building is much busier.  Students are using the library more and earlier in the year.
Our information sources - both physical and virtual are being utilised more.

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Improving wayfinding signage through combined digital/analogue signposting

A year ago I wrote about library-signage redesign efforts at CSI Library, which has led to improved wayfinding for students and increased circulating-book transactions.

CSI’s challenge was to better bridge the retrieval gap between virtual OPAC identifier and physical shelf location. The same challenge applies to our context here at DBS Library.

Over the summer we looked at how a similar feat could be accomplished in our library. As opposed to CSI Library (three-floor building) our setup is somewhat more straight forward as the main lending and reference collections reside on one floor; the bays are also for the most part sequentially aligned.

We sat down and first of all looked at how physical signage could be improved. This involved enlarging fonts and a clearer layout of subject descriptors, as well as splitting double-sided bays into separate logical units and class number ranges: A (front) and B (back).

To make orientation for students easier, we also added alphanumerical perpendicular(ish) signs, which were attached above the main bay labels.

This covered the physical layout aspect.

Catalogue records were also adjusted to account for digital signposting at item level. We originally suggested to recruit two MARC fields for this purpose:

Tag/subfield	Data element	SQL column	Description	Notes
952$c	Shelving location code	items.location	Coded value, matching the authorized value list 'LOC'	To account for the alphanumerical bay label
952$u	Uniform Resource Identifier	items.uri	A URL or URN, which provides electronic access data in a standard syntax.	To account for a digital location map (e.g. hosted on the cloud)

The SQL table ‘Items’ was adjusted to include the shelving location code 952$c.

Item Record in local Koha instance

There were two options looked at regarding the inclusion of links to maps in the OPAC. The first was to include 952$u in the catalogue records. The problem with this was twofold. One catalogue record might relate to different physical locations, which in our context are: Aungier Street Main Lending, Aungier Street Reference and Dame Street Main Lending. Second, it is not possible to do batch catalogue record modifications at present in Koha. However, there is a workaround using MarcEdit for batch bibliographic record modification, but the problem with multiple item locations within one catalogue record is still not addressed – which map would you link to?

The second option was to add the link to the map to the item records. This could be done by batch item modification but the issue here is that while you can add a URL to the item record you cannot add a note to describe it. So the library user would only see the standard message as below “Link to resource”.

Catalogue Record in local Koha instance / Holdings

We are considering to include a global digital map (one for each site) with relevant bay-sign markers. The maps would then be placed prominently on the OPAC homepage.

As an aside, the consequence of adding a shelf location code is that library staff must take note when shelving not to shift books from one bay to another (or one side of a bay to another) without updating the relevant item records.

Below is a sample screenshot of a catalogue record with a bay location identifier at item level (example: AS Bay 3A).

Essentially, the library user has now information about the physical location of the shelf in addition to the call number. In this example, Violence : six sideways reflections with the call number 179.7 ZIZ lives on shelf 3A. This additional piece of information reduces the burden on the user to identify the correct shelf. Within our context, all the user has to do now is look down the aisle and keep an eye out for the perpendicular(ish) sign 3A.

The term has just started and I took the liberty of asking some students in situ (at the OPAC station) what they thought of the additional location descriptor (i.e. digital with analogue linkup). Their responses were uniformly positive. The idea, ultimately, is to empower students and reduce wayfinding queries at the reference desk, as well as reducing library anxiety.

Credit goes to my colleagues Trevor Haugh, Marie O’Dwyer and Colin O’Keeffe. This project would not have been realised without their expertise, enthusiasm and active support.

It’d be great to hear from other folks out there who have tried to improve wayfinding in their library context through a combination of digital/analogue signposting via Koha (or any other LMS).

References:

Amy F. Stempler, (2013) Navigating circular library stacks: a case study on signage. Reference Services Review, 41(3), 503 – 513.
Wilson, A. (2012) QR Codes in the Library: Are They Worth the Effort? Journal Of Access Services, 9(3), 101-110.
Hahn, J., & Zitron, L. (2011). How First-Year Students Navigate the Stacks: Implications for Improving Wayfinding. Reference & User Services Quarterly, 51(1), 28-35.

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CONUL Information Literacy Seminar June 10th 2014

This is a guest post by Ger Prendergast Subject liaison librarian, Business and Social Sciences UCC Library

CONUL Information Literacy Seminar June 10th 2014 (Long Room Hub Trinity College Dublin.)

Programme
It’s been a while since I heard anyone mention Ranganathan’s five laws of library science. The first speaker at the CONUL Information Literacy Seminar, Chris Pressler from DCU brought us back to basics with his presentation What do librarians really think about-radical tradition in a time of change. In doing so Chris showed that in today’s ever expanding information world, Ranganathan’s fifth law, ‘The library is a growing organism’ has never seemed more relevant. Librarians think about (among other things) organizational change, student support, data, research, expertise & academic status. It was good to hear Chris say that the library would continue to be important as a physical space in spite of ever increasing access to e-resources. According to Chris, we as librarians need to be creative and take risks and think about different approaches to what we do. Be unexpected!

Ronan Maddden (UCC) and Liz Dore (UL) spoke about the key themes of LILAC 2014 which they attended in Sheffield this year. The message to future attendees at LILAC was to plan in advance and book sessions if possible.

The Pecha Kucha presentations are an integral part of the CONUL IL seminar and provide a useful overview of what is happening with IL in other libraries. This year’s sessions were lively and engaging, as ever.

The morning Pecha Kuchas began with a presentation from Evelyn Bohan on integrating the Library & IT helpdesks at NUI Galway. A need to cut costs and demand from students to have IT & library queries dealt with in one place were the main drivers for this change. Effective change management was seen as an important factor in the success of the implementation of the service.

The next two Pecha Kuchas dealt with gathering statistics. Laura Connaughton of NUIM spoke about Gathering meaningful statistics using KnowAll Enquire, an enquiry management software package. This was purchased by NUIM in 2012 and set up for several library departments as well as subject librarians. It retains information about individual queries thus building a bank of knowledge which can be used to answer future queries. A custom reports function allows you to sort queries by contact method or subject and identify busy times. An infograph can be generated which allows information gathered to be shared with users.

Lorna Dodd’s Lego themed presentation described how UCD library uses Unishare, a unique UCD product, to collect statistics. This links to student records as it works within the student hub system. Past queries from individual students can be retained by the system thus giving a holistic view of student activity. A major advantage of this system is that there is no direct cost to the library and no maintenance and IT issues.

The final Pecha Kucha of the morning came from Dr. Irina Ruppa-Malone the Academic Writing Centre (AWC) manager from NUIG. The AWC offers one-to-one tutorials on essay writing. Students bring their written work to the centre and an AWC tutor works with them to improve their writing. Group workshops and online courses are also available.

Ruth O’Hara, a PhD student from NUIM, provided a useful insight into libraries from the user perspective. Unsurprisingly, opening hours, finding material, access, study spaces and access to pcs were all areas of concern for the student. Ruth mentioned that students found a staff presence on the floors more student friendly than having to approach an information desk. She urged librarians to let people know what services we offer as students don’t always know.

The last session before lunch was by Mary Antonessa from NUIM. Mary presented some preliminary findings from her Doctoral thesis which she hopes to submit to the School of Education, University of Sheffield shortly. She discussed her work which takes information literacy out of Library and Information Science and positions it into Education. By doing this she explored how information literacy is more than a library skill and how it is a knowledge concept necessary for teaching, learning and research in Higher Education. She spoke about the value of critiquing information and how this is increasingly a challenge considering the vast online information landscape that staff and students continue to struggle to negotiate. She also spoke about libraries have a critical role to play as partners in the teaching and learning and research goals of our institutions.

The first presentation of the afternoon was from Irene Glendenning from Coventry University. Irene spoke about the IPPHEAE project. This is an EU funded project which investigated policies and procedures in place in Higher Education Institutions across Europe for detecting and preventing student plagiarism. Findings for Ireland indicated that poor quality systems or inconsistent use of systems in some institutions may have led to cases of plagiarism. The number of Irish students (77%) who selected both inability to cite and reference and difficulties in paraphrasing as reasons for student plagiarism, along with the finding that there was uncertainty as to what actually constituted plagiarism, suggest that there is plenty of work for librarians to do here.

Virginia Conrick presented the first Pecha Kucha of the afternoon. Entitled UCC first year student experience: where is the library? the presentation highlighted the evolution of the library undergraduate programme which is run for first year students in UCC library. The programme takes place over four weeks at the start of the academic year with four workshops on different aspects of IL.

Jessica Eustace-Cooke from TCD spoke about Professional use of social media, a tutorial which she developed for Nursing & Midwifery students. While social media has many uses professionally, inappropriate use can impact negatively on our professional lives. She advised separating your private and professional information on social media as well as respecting privacy, confidentiality and professional boundaries.

Jenny Collery’s presentation dealt with her experience of adapting a plagiarism tutorial from IT Tallaght and translating it into Irish for use in UCD. Jenny worked with Bord na Gaeilge and the School of Irish in UCD on this project. She used social media, professional lists and conferences to showcase the product. Bord na Gaeilge promoted it to the Irish language community. Two other colleges now link to the tutorial and it has had 216 pages views to date.

Catherine Cooke from DIT spoke about The move to Grangegorman campus and the challenges involved in adapting an old building for library use. The additional space in Grangegorman means that there will be more facilities available for the delivery of IL sessions.

The final Pecha Kucha of the day was an interesting presentation from Jack Hyland of DCU who adapted an interactive business information literacy tutorial for female only students in PNU Saudi Arabia.

Many thanks to the CONUL Teaching & Learning Committee for organizing this useful and informative seminar.

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Libraries must embrace the liquid revolution

Guest post by David Egan, academic library user and mature student

Imagine you are a fourteen year old boy who wants to learn how to use a cool piece of audio software - Garageband for example - and ask yourself which would you prefer to do: read a manual that was written by a team of software engineers who are not inclined to use a comprehensible word if there is an incomprehensible technical alternative, or listen to a teenager who is fluent in both the programme, and your particular strain of the English language, talk you step by step through the basics while you watch his computer screen illustrate exactly what yours should be doing.

If you chose the former you probably are a software engineer who prefers acronyms to euonyms. If, on the other hand, you chose the latter, you are, I suspect, normal. This option is not only more painless but it is also arguably far more effective. Using this approach, as with the manual, you get the semantic meaning of the words, however, you also get the audio stimulus of hearing the words being spoken and you get a visual display that reinforces memory and assists understanding. This argument has been well made by many lecturers to their students promoting the virtues of attending lectures above simply reading text books.

Since returning to college as a mature student, I have needed little persuasion on this point. I enjoy lectures far more than I do reading textbooks. I have also rediscovered the pleasures of being back within the walls of an academic library. The silence, the smell of books, the sheer weight of intellect that lines the aisles lends these halls a literary gravitas that cannot be matched in the architecture of lesser places. In spite of this, in the context of the technological world in which we live, if the Web is analogous to the teenager in the Garageband instruction video, it pains me to say it, but academic libraries are analogous to the comparatively daunting and difficult Garageband user manual.

Whether we like it or not, this is the age of the Web. Instant, excellent and unlimited entertainment, communication, titillation and education, and it is especially in this last sector that libraries are suffering by comparison. Wonderful places though they are, compared to typing the word "Descartes" into Youtube, libraries are intimidating and difficult. Kids today, while researching video game cheats or school projects, have learned how to go about getting answers on the web and, given a college project in a few years’ time, I suspect that many of them will at least begin their search with this approach. As YouTube and Google get better and better at bringing up easy to perceive and easy to understand answers, it could be predicted that fewer and fewer kids will bother to progress beyond their computer screens.

I love reading, but as a student with a full time job and a full time family I don't get as much time as I'd like to settle down with a book. In spite of my attraction to them, libraries are often not an option. I do however possess an iPhone, and these days, although I cannot read while traveling heat sealed into a Luas, while walking from stop to destination, while unpacking a dishwasher or while mowing a lawn, thanks to all-you-can-eat data, I can listen.

On Youtube, I can listen to debates, discussions and interviews involving some of the greatest thinkers in their fields. On Topdocumentaryfilms.com I can listen to over 2,600 documentary films or collections, on topics from “nine-eleven” to Nietzsche, and on iTunes-U I can listen to some of the finest lecturers alive or dead delivering whole semesters of recitations, crafted over many years, for the most privileged of students from the worlds best universities. Mooc-list.com lists 140 colleges and institutions currently offering “massive, open, online courses” or MOOCs (see Laura Connaughton’s post of July 17) and most of these courses include free audio or video content. Thanks to this technological revolution I have been lucky enough to sit (stand, walk, mow, etc.) through hundreds of hours of these lectures from the hallowed halls of Oxford, Harvard, Cambridge, MIT, Yale and Stanford.

This, if you will, is liquid literature (though “vociture” might be a more etymologically correct term), and its volume is growing by the day at a rate with which its older relation, solid literature - that which involves the written word - could never compete. As documented elsewhere on this blog (including Alexander Kouker’s post from January last on the first digital-only public library, BiblioTech, in Texas) libraries have done well in their efforts to adapt to the emergence of the soft version of solid literature - e-books, pdfs, electronic articles and blogs - however, it seems that they have been far more resistant to embracing the liquid revolution and as a result, they may lose out to the charm and convenience of the most popular and brilliant librarian ever: Google.

So, if this were true, what could be done to arrest the demise of our beloved libraries? Writing in a recent issue of a college newsletter Alexander Kouker moots the idea of librarians roving the aisles equipped with iPads aiming to assist unsure patrons. This is a good idea for a couple of reasons. First of all, if I may judge fellow students and fellow males by my poor standards, while blindly fingering entirely the wrong shelves with feigned command, a student is about as likely to ask a librarian for help as a lost male driver is to ask a passerby for directions. Secondly, this allows the librarian to expose the true, virtually (if you'll forgive the pun) unlimited potential of the library to direct the user to their goal.

These roving iPad librarians (I will resist the temptation to refer to them as iBrarians!) could approach unsure users, direct them towards the correct shelves, and advise them of what is available locally and in other libraries. Roving librarians could be in communication with each other by way of Viber or a similar app, and one who is less qualified in a particular field could instantly summon a colleague with the appropriate knowledge of Web resources required by the user.

If, going one step further, libraries were equipped with a number of simple computers - with nothing more than a basic capacity to browse the Web quickly - and a continuous supply of cheap, airline type disposable headphones, the roving librarian could guide the user to one such station, and Viber that machine with the relevant links that they have called up on their iPad enabling the user to read, watch or listen to the remote literature available in their area of interest.

As Alexander pointed out there are obstacles that need to be overcome before such a scheme could operate smoothly,  cost and noise being the two most obvious. With regard to the former, if libraries were directing large volumes of traffic to income generating sites like YouTube, perhaps they could use that traffic as collateral in negotiating some small fee. There may also be advertising opportunities that they themselves could exploit. The issue of noise is a physical one that could conceivably be dealt with by way of quiet areas closed off from semi-quiet areas as is currently the practice in many libraries including Iowa University Library (see their noise policy here).

For better or worse, we are raising a generation of kids who are used to convenience learning. Some may argue that the realm of academic libraries, or libraries in general, is limited to that of solid literature and that audio and video are for some reason out of bounds. However, if one looks at the purpose of a library, it is hard to see why one should make such a distinction when what differs is, after all, simply the method of recording. Can it seriously be argued that an idea is worth more if it is recorded with written words instead of spoken ones? If this is true, should we disregard the teachings of Socrates? If it is not true, why should libraries limit themselves to the epistemology of the written word? In fact, one could argue that, given the relative absence of a structured catalogue of liquid literature, libraries have an even greater role to play in this area in that they are well positioned to impose such a structure, at least upon the more important works of the medium.

Posted upon the blog of John Blyberg of the Darien Library in Connecticut is a document entitled “The Darien Statements” which arose out of a summit there concerning the future of libraries. It is a grand, concise and optimistic list of statements that the authors believe to be true about the library including the notion that “the library has a moral obligation to adhere to its purpose despite social, economic, environmental, or political influences.” It goes on to state that “our methods need to rapidly change to address the profound impact of information technology on the nature of human connection and the transmission and consumption of knowledge. If the library is to fulfill its purpose in the future, librarians must commit to a culture of continuous operational change, accept risk and uncertainty as key properties of the profession, and uphold service to the user as our most valuable directive”.

It is a bold aim, but one that is surely worthy of continued pursuit.

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IM reference chat etiquette

Providing accurate and reliable information to library patrons during synchronous virtual reference interactions (instant messaging) is not all that matters. It is also important to consider what impact formal or informal language use by reference librarians can have on the level of success in IM reference chat. The idea of a social 'face' also applies to virtual environments and not just the all-familiar face-to-face encounter at the traditional reference desk.

Verbal language style, prosodic signals as well as facial expressions and body language augment expressively to the "what's going on" in face-to-face information exchange. The challenge of IM reference is the apparent lack of these cues due to the physical separation of patron and service provider. Hence, IM reference librarians solely rely on written language to compensate: the question is whether to use a strictly formal or informal register.

Necessarily, effective IM reference delivery is

determined by two basic variables: quality of information provided and use of written language style. Waugh (2013) considered this very question and conducted semi-structured interviews with five 17- to 25-year-old university students to find out how formality of language affects their perception about librarians they encounter during IM reference situations. The interviewees were asked to pass judgement on two IM reference transcripts (one uses formal, the other uses informal language), and subsequently share their opinions about perceived levels of professionalism, competency and credibility displayed by library staff. The quality of interpersonal connection was also considered.

The results of this exploratory study were a mixed bag. And that's no surprise, really, because the researcher looked at personal perceptions about the effects of language use in two very different IM reference transcripts. For example, the formal transcript was considered robotic and impersonal by some respondents, but also valued as competent and trustworthy. Essentially, there was no clear preference expressed for either - formal vs. informal - language use in IM reference interactions. Both styles bring with them inherent advantages and disadvantages, which are perceived differently depending on the situational context and individual patron.

The basic challenge is that IM reference interactions take place place in a vacuum, because so many signifiers are absent.

To compensate for this, I tend to simulate the patron's language style in IM reference. But the 'right' style of language can sometimes only reliably figured out by buying some time. Depending on the situation, I do this by deploying a neutral welcoming statement. This is an effective way to establishing a socio-emotional relationship despite the obvious constraints in doing so in the first place. Tuning into the patron by adopting their IM lingo has to date worked quite well. It's an intuitive and adaptive approach more than anything else as I don't subscribe to rigid formal or informal language styles. This is one of the main reasons why I don't use pre-formulated (canned) replies as they just don't work in most interactions.

In addition to 'appropriate' language use, it is also important to let the patron know what's going on at all times during a VR reference chat session. It is particularly important to spell out instructions as clearly as possible in order to avoid any misunderstandings. Not doing this can have two very negative effects; 1) unnecessarily prolonging the conversation, 2) potentially turning a positive exchange into a negative one.

Use of emoticons, abstractions and abbreviations can also work well for IM reference relationship building. However, I tend to use these devices with caution, and only if an informal rapport has been truly established.

Without trying to downplay the argument over which language style is most appropriate (formal vs. informal), at the end of the day it is the patron who sign-posts the level of formality in IM reference chats.

Ref. & resources:
Waugh, J.. Formality in Chat Reference: Perceptions of 17- to 25-Year-Old University Students. Evidence Based Library and Information Practice, North America, 8, mar. 2013. Available at: http://ejournals.library.ualberta.ca/index.php/EBLIP/article/view/17911.
IM and SMS References Services for Libraries
libsuccess.org / Online Reference

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