Sunday 8 August 2010

Library Day in the Life - round 5

This is my contribution to round 5 of the Library Day in the Life project. But rather than a day in my life, what follows is more a round-up of what this Scottish Government Librarian has been up to in the last week.

This year the Scottish Government Library was at last able to secure accommodation in one of our key offices - Victoria Quay in Edinburgh. So I'm now working peripatetically between two sites. This week, working 3 days at our office in Saughton House, Edinburgh and 2 at Victoria Quay.

So. What's a week in the life of this Government librarian like? I'm part of an 5 strong enquiry team, which shares the enquiries desk on a daily rota. Of course, this is great as I never know what I'm going to get. Although in truth many requests are for copies of publications, which our super-efficient Library Assistant answers usually within 15 minutes. Though I had my share of more detailed enquiries this week which ranged from a member of the public requesting copies of responses to a fairly old consultation conducted by the Scottish Government on regulations for milk quotas for farms in southern Scotland, to finding a copy of the consolidated version of the Railways Act (1993). On average over the past three months 4.4% of our requests came from members of the public.

As part of my job I also conduct literature searches. These are varied, often interesting and topical. For example, this week I conducted literature searches across a wide range of subscription databases (beat that, Google!) on:

Flexible staff resourcing
Imaginary companions in adults
Decriminalisation of drugs

Can't resist the swipe at Google, but I mention it because one of the requesters for one of these searches had searched Google and came to us when he found very little. Some carefully built search strategies and considered choosing of databases soon revealed quite a few 'spot on' publications he hadn't found on Google.

This leads me onto my information literacy work, which largely involves me co-writing and co-delivering information skills training for Scottish Government staff.

Our training is part of the course programme for the whole organisation. With the next programme running from October to March, I'm involved with other team members in pulling our library programme together. This week myself and my boss had an initial discussion sketching out the programme. With growing waiting lists for our courses (which is quite flattering) the discussion led onto our desire to deliver our training as elearning packages so all Scottish Government staff can access our courses on their desktops. Probably via Moodle. This is something we really want to do urgently. But to do it well will take some time.

Incidentally, anyone can see our training materials here.

This week also saw me complete a stage of a big project I'm managing, and all of us in team are working on, to create a subject based library of RSS feeds via Netvibes for Scottish Government staff. Or in fact, anyone who would find it useful. It's still in development, but you'll find the completed Government through to Planning and Building pages here.

Particular challenges the project threw up this week had me scratching my head over why some EBSCOhost RSS feeds appear to break after a while, and considering the merits of RSS to email services offered by Feedburner and MailChimp.

Yes. RSS to email. The irony of having folk check in on a Netvibes page to see results of RSS feeds hasn't escaped me, so part of this project is to offer an RSS to email subscription service. Which you can also try out right now on our Netvibes page if you wish.

And that, is a week in the life of a Scottish Government librarian.

Friday 2 July 2010

What on Earth have I been doing?

I've been doing some tidying up on my holidays. I have. And look what I found down the back of my sofa. Only my blog! So apologies for being so rubbish at updating, but here we go...

It's been a busy old time since I last wrote. The thing that has been foremost in my mind about my work is the spectre of public sector cuts. Next year could see changes to what I do. The thing I do most and seems to carry most kudos is the Internet skills training I write and deliver with my colleagues. The value of the other information services I and my colleagues supply seems only to be fully appreciated by our customers, in the most part. My point is training seems to be the way to go. And that will evolve. We'll do differently. Change emphasis. Produce eLearning packages. But there is an understanding that information literacy skills are needed.

So, I look forward to continue co-writing and co-delivering our various Internet skills packages (also available for all to see at http://sglibraryservices.wordpress.com/ generous, sharing, publicly funded types that we are). I suspect I'll be helping to do a fair bit of updating over the next few months.

Then there's newspapers. Staff in the Scottish Government buy print newspapers. Lots of newspapers. For much of the past year we seem to have been chasing various online news options as a more cost-effective alternative. But with News International and now other publishers wanting money for individual online access, and the likes of LexisNexis charging more than we can afford with our budgetary contraints, it's proving to be a real challenge. I wonder how other libraries (public libraries excepted) are providing news. Are we all just encouraging users to go on Google News? Which I see has just had a makeover, incidentally.

On a more positive note last year I spent sometime with a colleague giving our 'Alerts Centre' an overhaul. It's a one-stop-shop for Scottish Government staff offering advice on how to keep up-to-date on their subject areas. Job done. I thought 'right then, now we really must do something to encourage staff to use RSS'. RSS is something covered in our Web 2.0 Workshop and is a new, even strange concept to most course attendees. All of whom are Scottish Government or Agency staff.

I'm really pleased that the idea enjoyed alot of support from colleagues and I ran with it until I ended up building a Netvibes page to include RSS feeds by subject. Having demonstrated a draft version on 26/4 and 8/6 to colleagues, this was given the go ahead and we're now at the stage of populating the various subject tabs. Check it out if so inclined at http://www.netvibes.com/sglibraryservices.

I did come across some really good examples of organisations offering RSS feeds via Netvibes which helped alot when developing ours. Not least Shrewsbury and Telford Health Libraries: Team Knowledge Update. See http://www.netvibes.com/sathlibraries.

If only I can get Google Analytics to work (it did on the test tabs I had running!) I'd be a very smiley chap. I hope Analytics is just being slow at producing the first statistics.

Monday 5 April 2010

Why we need to teach information literacy skills for the Internet

On 26th March I was lucky enough to see Tara Brabazon deliver the ISG (Scotland) Annual Lecture.

Portrayed by the media as being 'anti-Google' and a controversial commentator on the digital world her assertion that the Internet isn't a library and Google isn't a catalogue is, unsuprisingly, very much in tune with librarians' thinking.

She states the Internet is far from being an inclusive place where everyone can equally publish and access information. Fair to say, librarians know this and agree.

She highlights there are many in our society who for a variety of reasons are excluded from digital information and describes an information literacy matrix she uses with her students to build an 'information scaffold' enabling them to apply information literacy skills.

To illustrate, she described traditional models of literacy (citing Mary Macken-Horarik's 4 tier model of literacy) as being horizontal (or linear) and using teaching strategies to progress from the easier skills to the harder skills right through to the top tier. All very familiar. But then there's the Internet. A place where people do their online shopping, and routinely cut and paste stuff they think must be accurate because it's in the first page of their Google search results. She went on to describe the movement of information on Web 2.0 tools as "bouncing on the crust of knowledge". People's representation of an event as the story is bounced around the Internet. Where is the truth?

Tara argues the shallowness of this online information seeking behaviour requires an information scaffold to enable us all to apply information literacy skills to the Internet beyond simply how to use particular Web 2.0 tools. In short, she argues information literacy skills are required to take us from the 'how' of Web 2.0 to the 'why'. This is why we need to teach information literacy skills for the Internet.

Tara Brabazon is Professor of Media Studies at The University of Brighton.

Sunday 14 February 2010

My library route

This is my contribution to the Library Routes Project. I, too, am an accidental librarian. I remember childhood trips into Edinburgh with my Dad most Saturdays would include a visit to Edinburgh Central Library. More worryingly, I vividly recall 'cataloguing' my own books based on the Browne system used by my local library in Inverkeithing. Which I was recently saddened to discover has been closed and relocated into the town's Civic Centre. Although, to be fair, it was about the most inaccessible library I've ever seen.

During my teenage years I didn't pay libraries much mind. I was an infrequent user, but always held the belief they were a good thing - that anyone could walk in of the street to a public library and avail themselves of their services free of charge. After a few jobs after college I successfully applied for the Library Assistant post at NHS Health Scotland (then known as the Health Education Board for Scotland). And so, my career in librarianship commenced at 9.30 on the 31st March 1993 in a small library of 5 staff in leafy Morningside, Edinburgh. The fact that remember this so well indicates I found my niche.

OK, so initially I photocopied articles and performed various admin duties. But I soon became more interested in undertaking a wider range of tasks. It was by this time I knew librarianship was for me. I enjoyed alot of support from our Library Services Manager, who allowed me to take on more para-professional tasks. I enquired if I could take the BSc(Hons) Library and Information Studies by Distance Learning at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth. I started the course in 1997, completing in 2001 whilst continuing to work full-time at HEBS. Summer schools in Aber were a hoot. I met some wonderful friends there. Oh, and I shalln't forget the lock-ins in the Black Lion just down the road from the Llanbadarn Fawr campus.

Armed with my degree and 9 years experience, I felt ready to leave HEBS and so I started as solo librarian at ASH Scotland in August 2002. Looking back, being solo librarian brought its own challenges I hadn't anticipated. Mainly being incredibly busy single-handedly running a small library whilst developing new services (with support from my line manager). Such developments included negotiating access to The Knowledge Network (formerly the NHSScotland eLibrary) and improving the production, content and delivery of a weekly current awareness bulletin on new tobacco control publications. This in turn paved the way for me to produce a 'daily digest'. These bulletins proved very popular and our emailing list included addresses from all over Scotland and beyond.

With this post came a greater need for me to offer user education to ASH Scotland staff. This involved me offering training sessions on database searching and the production of a range of guides to databases and the library collection. A library assistant was appointed about a year after I started which helped share the workload a great deal.

After 2 years I decided I needed a change. A move to somewhere bigger. So in September 2004 I moved out of the health sector and joined the Library at Lauder College (now Carnegie College) as an Assistant Librarian. By now user education was becoming a far bigger part of my role. Giving library tours, lots of 1-2-1 student training on relevant resources to support their course work, and being involved in curriculum group meetings all served to show how important user education was. Looking back, I can see I was playing my part in teaching information literacy skills to our students. I just didn't know it then.

However, development opportunities were limited so I decided to move on, and in June 2005 I joined the Library Service at the Scottish Executive (now the Scottish Government). It was great to return to bigger library, and initially I was with our acquisitions team. With its emphasis on managing the library's document supply service and helping to manage contracts, I felt this was valuable experience. No doubt. But I did miss being on the front-end. In April 2006 I moved to the enquiry team. I've been there ever since. I currently conduct literature searches to support Scottish Government policy, and find myself involved in all manner of tasks to offer and develop information services to such a large and geographically widespread organisation. And information literacy has now become very much a central part of my job. Postings on my blog (hint, hint) will give you a measure of the specifics of the work I currently undertake.

Posted via email from Paul Gray's Blog

Monday 8 February 2010

Library Day in the Life - round 4

This is my contribution to the Library Day in the Life project. But rather than a day in my life, what follows is more of a round-up of what this Scottish Government Librarian has been up to in the last 2 weeks.

I joined Civil Pages (a social networking site for the UK civil service) and Yammer (enterprise microblogging). Continued to administer and deliver a range of Internet skills courses (Internet Skills in the Workplace and Web 2.0 Workshop) for Scottish Government staff.

I co-delivered our Web 2.0 Workshop on 28th January. Two colleagues delivered our Internet in the Workplace session on the 2nd February in our training room, but found the room double booked. Not our fault! Some quick thinking by colleagues secured us another training room. But I checked all future bookings were OK. Thankfully, they were! This course is always popular. We have 22 people on the waiting list, so having arrange 2 additional sessions recently, I arranged a third for 23rd February.

Attended EBSCO A-Z WebEx training on 2nd February. Quite impressed by WebEx as way to deliver our own library tutorials.

Tried Ping & Posterous for ‘life-streaming’ – a quick way to update my various social media tools at once with one email. Pretty nifty!

Attended a quarterly meeting of Scottish Government librarians on 27th January in New Register House. Seeing colleagues again in a glorious building, even getting a tour, an exhibition and whisky chocolate. A wonderful morning!

With our appraisal year ending on 31st March, I arranged a progress meeting with a colleague on two of our objectives - developing our current awareness services and Library Intranet pages on 26th January. Happily, we are well on track with both. However, I did volunteer to pilot how feasible and beneficial it would be for librarians to provide an alerts service based on RSS to complement our more traditional alerting services.

Arranged for a Chartership candidate working at another library to visit us on 3rd February. Our team gave him an overview of how we operate, focusing on current awareness and marketing. Quite alot of information to cover in one morning, but he seemed to get alot out of it. He arrived back at his library to an email containing a load of links and docs we thought he would be interested in.

One of our core services for Scottish Government staff is our literature search service. Our searches are fairly comprehensive involving detailed searching of carefully selected resources, then neatly presented as a reading list in an easy-to-read Word template. Subjects I searched include:

Charging models or schemes relating to planning fees
Abolishing patient charges for prescriptions
Business models
Multi Disciplinary Practices

Posted via email from Paul Gray's Blog

Thursday 4 February 2010

BBC World Service programme on the use of Web 2.0 in everyday life

Clare Gordon at Castlemilk High School writes…

Interesting program on the BBC World Service last night about the use of Web 2.0 in everyday life. Among discussions of whether social networking is beginning to define us as individuals, there was a really interesting point about how social networking sites are beginning to be the central point around which we live our lives, rather than being an interesting added extra.

Jaron Lanier was critical of the use of social networking sites for commercial advertising, but didn't really discuss its use for making public services more accessible to users who were "born digital".

It's worth a listen: http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/console/p005zyp8

Posted via email from Paul Gray's Blog

Sunday 10 January 2010

Library: the vanguard of Internet training

There is clearly a demand for our Internet skills courses. We have 21 people on the waiting list for Internet Skills in the Workplace and 11 people on the waiting list for our Web 2.0 Workshop. To help reduce this I’ve been arranging additional sessions. This means we are almost running a course a week. And noteworthy that the Library alone is providing these courses. This obviously has resourcing implications for the Library. However, we have received very good feedback from delegates so far, and it appears we are delivering what the organisation needs. So it's all absolutely worthwhile, and right that this is what the Library should be doing.

It has also become clear that due to the speed at which the Internet changes both courses will be in perpetual Beta. I have already helped to make quite a number of revisions to course materials in light of feedback from delegates, Library staff and new resources we felt should be included. But by being aware of changes to the Internet and new tools, it will be fairly easy to keep our materials updated. Whilst this will take some resource to manage, the benefits of up-to-date course materials make this investment in effort worthwhile.

So, no surprise that since my last update I have been involved in a lot of development of Library course materials. Specifically:

Internet Skills in the Workplace
I completed co-writing the Internet Skills in the Workplace course materials and ran through the new Internet Skills in the Workplace course with the rest of the team for comments.

Web 2.0 Workshop
I completed co-writing the Web 2.0 Workshop materials. As with the Internet Skills course this includes trainers and delegates manuals, presentation, exercises and the course checklist for the trainers.

We received feedback on Web 2.0 Workshop exercises from Library colleagues, and redrafted the exercises taking comments on board. This proved to be particularly useful as the exercises provide much of the course content.

So far, I have been co-presenting all Web 2.0 Workshops. But next Wednesday all Library staff will be given training which will enable all Library trainers to deliver this course.

Web 2.0 for Policymakers
I co-wrote the course materials for Web 2.0 for Policymakers, although a colleague did most of the research on this, finding may relevant examples of Web 2.0 in Government. The course was successfully delivered on 26/11.

After further updating and tweaking, course material for the Web 2.0 Workshops and Web 2.0 for Policymakers is now complete. The resources we added to the policymakers course helps ensure the focus is on tools for Government staff. Therefore it was decided to put all the content into our Web 2.0 Workshop and run that for everyone. Trainer’s notes will help ensure we focus on resources relevant to delegates.

Corporate Induction
Having co-presented a Corporate Induction session on 29/9 it was agreed to make the Library part a bit more interactive, and we would spend a couple of minutes asking delegates what they thought the Library could do for them. Writing their ideas on a flipchart before revealing what we do via the ppt slides. This simple change does seem to work and liven up the session a bit.

SG Web 2.0 blog
I set up a test SG Web 2.0 blog (http://sgwebtrainingtest.wordpress.com/) as a place to easily make our course materials available and to encourage discussion amongst SG staff on Web 2.0. If you wish to see our current course materials, take a look. However, we are considering other options, so very likely we do this via another tool. Watch this space!

A-Z list of Library resources
I’ve also been working with our Digital Comms team to make the Library’s list of resources more accessible. Applying metadata to each resource will enable us to do much more with this potentially useful list.