Articles to read!

Notes to self!

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/jun/22/manchester-central-library-book-pulping

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/shortcuts/2012/jun/24/why-is-france-shunning-ebooks

http://herslantfinely.wordpress.com/2012/06/23/health-information-obesity-the-new-epidemic/

http://www.jmir.org/2012/3/e91/

http://www.jmir.org/2012/3/e90/

http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/bigwideworld/2012/06/time-to-review-peer-review.html?DCMP=OTC-rss&nsref=online-news

http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2012/jun/25/doctors-leader-cautions-industrial-action

http://helen-ceridwen.blogspot.co.uk/2012/06/random-thoughts-on-subject-headings-in.html

http://presocraticatomist.blogspot.co.uk/2012/06/royal-conservatoire-of-scotland-library.html

http://jeahil.wordpress.com/2012/06/10/a-bright-future-for-librarians-experimenting-like-crazy/

http://lisainthehealthlibrary.wordpress.com/2012/06/11/thing-7/


http://lisainthehealthlibrary.wordpress.com/2012/06/08/thing-6-online-networking-10/


http://cpd23.blogspot.co.uk/2012/06/cpd-in-your-later-career.html

A Wordle

About UHMLG12 - I copy and pasted my entire (personal) report on Days One and Two into wordle. I would have expected the words 'qualitative' and 'quantitative' to feature strongly, but good to see PEOPLE, DATA, SERVICES, STAFF in there!

Made with wordle.net

University Health & Medical Librarians Group (UHMLG) Summer Residential: DAY TWO - Tuesday 19th June 2012

Link to Storified version of Day Two: http://storify.com/820460093/university-health-and-medical-librarians-group-uhm-1

DAY TWO – Tuesday 19^th June 2012

My day started by meeting Sarah Lawson over breakfast, which was a delightful way to network and get to know someone purely by the chance of us both being the last ones down for breakfast and having to queue for a free table.

Catriona Kemp, (Hull York Medical School Librarian, University of York), kicked off the day’s proceedings by telling us about her experience of surveying medical school students and making improvements based on their feedback, as recommended by Dr Judith Broady-Preston on Monday afternoon. The medical students that she works with have to cope with two different university systems: York Uni and Hull Uni. They do not match up, and the students of course want just the one library service to meet all of their information needs. Students end up with lots of different log-in/access details.

As the two university libraries ask slightly different things in their regular user surveys, the HYMS library service needed one central data collection exercise, asking questions such as: What texts would you recommend we purchase? They bribed the students with £100 (Amazon voucher?) or a kindle as a prize, and got a 14% response rate, which was better than Catriona and colleagues had expected.

What made her survey different, to my ears at least, was that they got initial feedback to to the students within a week and a half of the end of the survey. They reacted to the survey data quickly and proactively. They also put up their responses on Blackboard: “You asked… We did…”, which is something that I saw at York St John University library as well, on their plasma screens on the ground floor of the library.

Catriona and her colleagues created Libguides to meet the information needs of their students, to have one place for the information and links that they need. There is also a mobile version of Blackboard that their students use to find information on the move. The best thing about Libguides, apart from how easy it is to create new pages etc, are the statistics and data to indicate which links the students click on (Cochrane Library? Etc), and how they find the Libguide webpage (from Facebook, in some cases!).

The library survey is a live document. They are still acting on the results (You asked, We did..). It’s given the library a voice, and has enabled them to bid successfully for extra funding to respond directly to student demands.

Next up: a consultation in 2013 to validate the changes they’ve made in response to the feedback.

The second speaker on Tuesday morning was Linda Ferguson, NHS NW Health Care Libraries Unit, speaking on Standards for NHS Library Services in England. This was also relevant to our library, as we serve both the university staff and students and our local NHS Trust staff as our major stakeholders. I sat next to Linda at the Dinner on Monday night, and jotted down some advice about writing my evaluative statement for my Chartership portfolio, so was already hugely in awe of her before she even spoke. She’s worked for the NHS for the last 22 years. Before that, she was in HE. She is the Quality Lead for NHS Libraries in the North West. Therefore… she cares about impact and value, and she knows a lot about demonstrating and measuring impact, value, quality etc of library services.

NHS library services are assessed on:

1.      People – staff skills etc

2.      Money/ funding/ budgets

3.      Structure –strategic planning

4.      Library service

5.      Infrastructure and facilities

It’s all about self assessment and quality improvement. How does one library service compare to another, and how can they all be improved?

The third speaker of the morning session was Geoff Glover, Head of Health Sciences at the Higher Education Academy, who told us about the HEA and what he does. It wasn’t as relevant to my work and experience as the other talks, I must admit.

After a break, Helen Loughran (Planning and Marketing Manager, Libraries and Learning Innovation, Leeds Metropolitan University) talked about Customer Service Excellence and the CSE Standard. I am all for excellent customer service. I am a big believer in serving our customers to the best of our abilities, making sure we meet their needs and facilitating their use of our resources. Making sure they make the most of the library service and have a good time. If they have a good time, then they’ll probably come back to us and use our services again! It’s that simple.

The Customer Service Excellence Standard is a government award, although it is not known who “owns” it at the moment. Going for this Standard involves the following costs: staffing costs; project costs for surveys, focus groups etc; financial (etc!) costs of cultural change (time, effort, commitment); and the cost of the actual assessor, and running an assessment event.

Impact and Value:

1.      Student experience

2.      Enhanced services (What does this mean?)

3.      Enhanced profile (Does this mean raising a library’s profile, promoting it?)

4.      University library staff experience.

At Leeds Metropolitan University, they respect their students and listen to them, respond quickly to needs and demands.

Most interestingly, all staff at the university library service are recruited based on their “attitude not aptitude”, and all staff do at least one hour per week at the help desk areas, to get the customer care exposure and experience. I really like the sound of that. I think it is crucial for everyone to work with our customers/ readers/ library users for at least an hour per week, to remind ourselves of the value of our jobs and why we go to work: for the user. We wouldn’t have jobs if it wasn’t for them. As a result of this scheme, the library service has a very low staff turnover rate.

Last but not least, we had the TeachMeet session. Four presentations and Q&As in 50 minutes. Hold on to your hats…

1.      Sarah Lawson (Senior Information Specialist (NHS Support), King’s College London) – They gathered narratives from a survey to gather qualitative data about the impact of the library service. They surveyed a range of user groups in 2009 (university, acute, mental health, community and hospice libraries), and this time just focused on the one question about impact. They offered a Kindle as a prize, and had over 700 replies from users of six libraries. It worked really well to collaborate with other libraries to gather many more responses. She broke down the data into themes: eg. clinical decision making; commissioning; costs; and creating and disseminating research. There was also a theme about the importance of space, eg. the library is “a fantastic space to work and think [in]”. They used the results in their publicity materials. Why a survey?  The responses were used to bid for money; promote the service and raise their profile; and to defend the library services – to defend the use of space, and demonstrate a need to keep the space.

2.      Lisa Flint (Subject Librarian: Biosciences, University College London) – She ran a course in a different way this year, and reaped the benefits. She runs post-exam sessions for first year biochemistry students every year. The sessions focus on MeSH, Boolean, how to search, methodologies etc, and she usually does the traditional thing: powerpoint, demonstration, hands-on session. This year, she had 110 students to teach in two sessions, back-to-back. She decided to have a change. She did some research, talked to colleagues, and came up with a quiz style teaching session. She had a few introductory ppt slides, then put the students into groups. Each group picked a famous scientist, from a choice of 11, and they had to go off and answer questions about their scientist, with a mystery prize to bribe them onwards. They had to answer questions about the Scientists’ major works (i.e. highly cited books), and it enabled her to watch the students working together in groups. She answered questions on a 1-1 basis. The students got very excited and competitive about the tasks. The next day, she attended one of their sessions and handed out the prizes. In feedback from their Moodle, students said that the session was “really useful”, and most people were satisfied. The students learnt new skills, got to work together, the librarian experimented with doing something in a different way, and all benefited from the experience. I really like the sound of that. I don’t know how I can get it to work with my job, and training sessions that I do for adults, but you never know!

3.      Vicki Cormie (Senior Academic Liaison Librarian, Science & Medicine, University of St Andrews) talked about using Libguides with medical students. See http://libguides.st-andrews.ac.uk/medicine Libguides are easy to create, mobile-friendly, and you get lots of statistics from the package.

4.      Wendy Stanton (Faculty Team Leader Medicine and Health Sciences, University of Nottingham) spoke last, about feedback from an online searching course which really did change someone’s life. Well, searching has that effect on people! When you can finally find what you’re looking for… magic happens. 

After lunch, I went on a tour of the York St John University library. This has been recently refurbished, has three floors, and a plethora of plasma screens around the place to provide information to users. There are lots of open spaces to facilitate group sessions, PCs downstairs, and beanbags upstairs for quiet study. They also house the local NHS library. It was really nice to see a university library which has all the books in one place, even if they are shelved on different floors. You can browse different subjects, borrow a Jane Austen along with your healthcare research methods book, and enjoy seeing and talking to different students. Our libraries are larger, more specialist, and are slightly more intimidating and less accessible for people starting out in academia. I’ll get in touch with the librarians again when we get our plasma screen for the library, for tips and advice on what to put up on it and how to make the most of it.

University Health & Medical Librarians Group (UHMLG) Summer Residential: DAY ONE – Monday 18th June 2012

 18^th & 19^th June 2012, The Royal York Hotel

Measuring value, demonstrating impact: the importance of health libraries in a changing world

DAY ONE – Monday 18^th June 2012

In the beautiful, sumptuous setting of the Royal York Hotel, on a sunny day in June (a rare event, this year), the conference was formally opened after lunch on Monday afternoon by Erika Gavillet. We know how wonderful we are, as librarians and as representatives of our library services, but we now need to prove it, demonstrate our value for money, more than ever before.

Stephen Town, Director of Information at the University of York, gave a personal and theoretical presentation about the theme of Measuring Impact and Demonstrating Value. He has been researching these themes for the last seven years. York University was founded in 1963 and is now the top university out of those founded in the last 50 years. Their library and archives house over one million items, and they have over 100 members of staff. York University has the following values at its core: excellence; internationality (I didn’t know this was a word!); inclusivity; and sustainability. All good things for a library service to aspire towards. Town argued that relationships are part of the value of the library, which I agree with, saying that “value” means telling the story of the work and worth of the library to the people who fund the service. What we do and the outcomes engendered in other people. He considered the definition of “impact” in terms of “striking against”, and noted that we seem to take it to refer to outcomes.

The basic message was that no one knows (still!) what the best way to measure and demonstrate impact or value is. Library performance measures have adapted to the changing times: in the 1960s, libraries were “storehouses” for collections of materials. By the 1980s-1990s, libraries had become service-led, and now I would argue we are both, and therefore the performance measures must consider both aspects of the library service – how the physical items are catalogued and kept, and how well the services are delivered to help meet users’ information needs.

As someone with a degree in Social Anthropology, I was pleased that Town considered the cross-cultural meanings of “value”, although he didn’t go in to any detail, pointing out that “as a leader, my job is to demonstrate value”. He has been thinking about value in terms of the importance of library services for the student experience at university, the research impact, and the longer-term effect of libraries on people.

Town argued in favour of the library “as a place for knowledge”, which “provides a sense of academic enterprise” when you see the physical collections classified on shelves together, which is something lost in the virtual world.

If you ask users, “what do you value from libraries?”, you get a very different answer than when you ask them about what they need from libraries. He said that you must ask the right question to get an answer about values. He suggested a scorecard approach for demonstrating impact and measuring value:

·         Firstly, measure the library’s contribution to the reputation of the institution it supports. For example, the Bodleian Library (or Libraries) give Oxford University the “reach” for other scholars, and is an “obvious” measure of the Bod’s value, as scholars are attracted to the university because of the library. (Or: Scholars are attracted to the University because of the Library, to be more precise). How good is your library at external relationships? Or international relationships? Dr Sarah Thomas has certainly developed good external, international relationships between the Bodleian Library and scholars, philanthropists around the world.

·         Secondly, how can we measure our collections and our environments?

·         Thirdly, we must consider developing our social capital beyond the library. This is a qualitative measure about library values.

·         Fourth: Maintaining momentum. We have a “we’ll do it tomorrow once we’ve done some research and considered it” approach to new ideas, new technologies. We must benefit from starting early, being pioneers! This will facilitate research and improve learning capital.

In the Q&As afterwards, Town reassured his audience that we still need the SCONUL statistics (how many people are in the library space at 11.30 and 3pm on a Tuesday and a Thursday in a given, specified week?) as the “bedrock” of performance/ impact/value measures. But we also need “less hard data, and more narrative… [giving] pictures of the worth of what we do”.

Town argued that we need to tap into the “real value of a university degree: education”. Library services can and do form a huge part of that education. If we see students as “consumers”, and try to commodify, put into the hands of the market, our library services and their value, allow ourselves to be “driven by market ideology”, then that isn’t what education is about.

I’ve written 800 words on his talk, which was only allowed half an hour in the conference programme, but it was an important start to the conference and provided material for reflection. Who are we providing a service for? Why? Where are we going? What are we doing? How are we doing it, how are we going to do it in the future? When do we stop to evaluate our services, gather qualitative and quantitative data  to demonstrate value and impact but also to check that we are doing the right things, and improve on areas which are negatively assessed.

My ten-minute presentation about my personal reflections on the positive and negative impacts on my career to date was next. It was a hard act to follow. From the theoretical to the personal, practical understanding of ‘impact’ and the positives (jobs to apply for when I needed them; supportive colleagues/mentors/friends; an opportunity to attend an international conference and broaden my view of clinical librarianship; good restaurant on campus to help with morale and motivation) and the negatives (the building site opposite our office which is noisy, disruptive, distressing; economic crisis BLAH which means fewer job opportunities, less funding for further CPD or education; poor communications at work which creates stress and poor relationships between staff), and what to do about the negatives (make most of free CPD opportunities such as CPD23 Things, and have regular line manager meetings/ project meetings with other staff/ All-Staff emails to keep everyone in the loop/ make time for tea and cake with staff to celebrate the good times). I think I spoke with a loud, clear voice, but rushed it. Tried to look around the room and catch the attention of everyone there. But who am I to judge if I was any good or not?

Lesley Firth, Assistant Librarian at United Lincolnshire Hospitals Trust, Lincoln County Hospital, was the other bursary speaker. She has a blog and tweets. She has worked at the hospital since 2009, but only in the last few months has she made the most of her social media skills and online presence to communicate with other librarians and prevent any sense of isolation. I will follow her blog and try to keep in touch with her.

From the theoretical view, to the practical day-to-day realities of being a New Professional, to Prof. Ian Rowlands’ presentation about CIBER Research and Demonstrating Value – Student Satisfaction and Library Provision. The CIBER Report reviewed all available quantitative data to pick out positive trends from SCONUL statistics etc. He kept repeating the phrase, “why aren’t we shouting that from the roof tops?”, in relation to CILIP and the library profession generally not making more about the increase in loans, high content spend per FTE user, how “we out-perform academics” in university student satisfaction surveys, etc. He said that we need the “soft stuff” (aka qualitative data) and the quantitative data PLUS a hard sell of the results to shout about our value for our users and argue that we make a huge impact on them. Google “demonstrating value RLUK” - http://www.rluk.ac.uk/content/rluk-demonstrating-value-library-trends.

Wayne Sime, Director of Library Services at the Royal Society of Medicine, spoke before the break. He argued that libraries must be central to any organisation, as they form a core part of the business and can even rejuvenate an organisation. He has a good working relationship with the major players at the RSM and has worked hard to develop a library strategy for the next few years.

After the break, at which an Ovid rep came up to me and asked me if I know why the usage statistics for the Transplant Library are so high for our NHS Trust and University user groups, and encouraged me to carry on promoting the Transplant Library to relevant people (I seem to have developed a name for myself as The Transplant Librarian, which is interesting), Hannah Spring (Senior Lecturer – Research and Evidence Based Practice, York St John University) gave us her “Top 10 tips for doing research to support the value and impact of your service”. We’d had a lot of theory and thought about the meaning of “value” and “impact”, and we’d had some practical examples of how this works on the ground, and now we were given some ideas about how to improve our research methodologies when we want to collect data on this subject.

Research is fundamental. We all do it day-to-day, collecting statistics on 1-1 and group training sessions, or literature searches, or the daily headcount here at the Knowledge Centre, and in writing out qualitative vignettes for our boss’s reports, and in reading around subjects to learn more or research on behalf of readers.

Examples of her Tips:

1.      Just do it. Just write the evaluative statement for my Chartership portfolio. Just start.

2.      We already research on a daily basis. We just need to develop ideas further. For example, AUDIT means carrying out applied research within the workplace, and is associated with measuring or demonstrating effectiveness, “checking that the service meets a set of predefined standards”. Research is for new stuff.

3.      Use focus groups to develop key words for surveys, check language and meaning.

4.      Ethics! Think about ethical implications of what you want to do!

5.      What does under these headings?

a.       Title

b.      Abstract/ summary

c.       Background or rationale for project

d.      Aims and objectives

e.       Design and methods

f.       Ethical considerations

g.      Benefits of the study (and beneficiaries: NHS Staff, university staff, university students, library staff, other library colleagues, other health library colleagues).

h.      Resources, costs, time flows.

6.      Use a GANTT chart and project management skills to plan a research project.

7.      Publish and disseminate: on a blog, HLG newsletter, HILJ, Libraries for Nursing newsletter, etc.

Finally, we had Dr Judith Broady Preston, Senior Lecturer at the Department of Information Studies, Aberystwyth University. She talked about measuring and demonstrating the direct and the indirect impact of what we do, saying that it can be hard to describe what we do, as relationships can be hugely influential on individuals but are hard to capture. It is even difficult to demonstrate economic value and social impact. We can, however, work at gathering perceptions of our value from our stakeholders (which is what Sarah Lawson talked about at the Teachmeet on Tues 19^th June, in relation to the South East London Health Libraries impact study).

Is value…

... The same as impact or quality or satisfaction?

Consider the value and impact of the library service from the different perspectives:

·         Organisation vs consumer

·         Economic vs societal

Value and perception: morality, ethics, culture. What is the perceived value? From whose viewpoint?

She asked us to evaluate our services in relation to their purpose, and demanded that we think about seeking to continuously improve our services, based on results of impact studies (etc).

At this point, I had to leave to go and meet my Aunt for a much-needed walk around town to find the cats of York, and have a pint of beer. I leave it to Twitter to fill in the blanks.

 Link to Storified version of Day One Tweets: http://storify.com/820460093/university-health-and-medical-librarians-group-uhm

Peaks and Troughs

My concentration levels are definitely along the lines of the traditional bell-shaped curve. Starts low/ badly on Monday, gradually improves on Tuesday to peaks on Weds and Thursday, before sloping off again towards the end of Friday, and continuing into Saturday.

Having reached this conclusion, what can I do about it?

Nice literature searches to do on Monday and Tuesdays, when I'm constantly interrupted by the library assistants on duty and have 'KC Space project' things to do (currently).

Build up to writing and any serious management work on Wednesdays and Thursdays, when I line-manage most actively when BJ is here all day.

Friday - work on my Transplant /Renal/ Urology blog and other activities that require less concentration.

I need now to see if this ideal work flow matches up to my workload and whether it can be put into practice. Being away from the office in York at a conference on Monday and Tuesday this week has thrown me all off... but I'm doing remarkably well today, considering that I haven't slept well all week.

CPD23 Things 2012: Thing 4 - STORIFY!!

I am so excited. I've just storified Day One of the UHMLG Summer Residential!

I typed out my notes from Monday's sessions as a narrative, adding my own reflective thoughts and comments, and then went to Storify to simplify the 4 pages I'd written in Word by using other peoples' tweets.

I am so excited about managing this. I was terrified. I thought I'd fail miserably to create a narrative from others' tweets.

Storify:

I think this blogger has written the best summary of this service and she reassured me before I tried it out:
http://theatregrad.wordpress.com/2012/06/14/thing-4-storification/
and see her storified version of a few days in her life:
http://storify.com/theatregrad/libday8

My storified version of Monday's conference is here:

http://storify.com/820460093/university-health-and-medical-librarians-group-uhm

As I've indicated above, I'm very proud of myself for trying this out.

Twitter:

While I have a Twitter account, I don't use it. I could have used it on Monday and Tuesday at the UHMLG Summer Residential, as I had our eeepad and a good web connection, but instead I used it to keep tabs on what others were tweeting during the sessions (#uhmlg12) and found that the combination of taking my own notes, listening carefully, and seeing what others were picking up on enhanced my overall Conference Experience. I got to know a few people from their tweets and it made me feel more at home and comfortable with complete strangers.

RSS feeds:

As I've written before, I love RSS feeds and I have about 150 that I keep tabs on via Google Reader on a daily basis. I'm an addict. I need to know what the latest news from the Oxford Mail and the Guardian are, what other librarians are blogging about, latest Tables of Contents from my favourite journals. 

CPD23 Things 2012: Thing 3 - Brand

My personal brand, 'EB' as I'm known on the rota, has improved over the years. I'm now recognised by Ovid sales reps at conferences for being a Transplant Librarian. My boss is vaguely aware that I have a blog. A few people have commented on my blog, both in terms of Comments and in terms of 'oh I read your blog'.

When I started CPD23 Things 2012, I had a go at redesigning the blog so that it felt new and less stale for me. I created it in 2008, and it was time to change the background colour, move the widgets around the screen, make it more user-friendly for its primary user group: me. 

If I google my name, or variations on my name, I now get links for all the conference papers and presentations I have given over the last 2 years, and links for library webpages which mention me. I've hidden my Facebook page, hopefully, as I didn't want that kind of public attention any more.

I use a photo of me and my cat Bumble for both this blog and my Facebook profile, as I love that photo of me and my best feline friend, and it shows me for who I am: a cat-lover, first and foremost.

I try to keep my professional and my personal identity separate, which is why I've ticked the box to keep my Facebook profile off Google, but I've blurred the lines recently by beFriending current colleagues on Facebook. I wouldn't usually do that. I'd wait until they were ex-colleagues!  I don't want my current colleagues to know too much about my home life (with Bumble, and the mices that he brings me at inopportune moments, such as this morning when I was already late for work).

What to read this summer..

Amazing! Love this!

Via Teach.com and USC Rossier Online

Thing 3 - my brand/ why I made some alterations to the look of this blog - see http://cpd23.blogspot.co.uk/2012/05/thing-3-consider-your-personal-brand.html

Thing 4 - storify! http://cpd23.blogspot.co.uk/2012/05/thing-4-current-awareness-twitter-rss.html

Thing 6 - online networks http://cpd23.blogspot.co.uk/2012/06/thing-6-online-networks.html

Thing 7 - real-life networks (cilip in tv etc, bodleian people etc) http://cpd23.blogspot.co.uk/2012/06/thing-7-real-life-networks.html

Fantastic article in the Guardian about new initiatives at public libraries to open them up and make them more relevant and useful to different groups: http://www.guardian.co.uk/local-government-network/2012/jun/12/council-library-service-funding-cuts 

I loved this article! It's such a great idea.

CPD23 Things 2012: Thing 2

I investigate other blogs every day. But seldom do I comment on others' blogs. Until now, as I wrote a post last night about the CILIP in the Thames Valley meeting and then noticed that people had commented on my posts without me noticing. Hopefully I've changed the correct settings now so that I will be notified in future.

A nice person called Kate commented on my Thing 1 post:

http://fredonboard.blogspot.co.uk/2012/05/cpd23-things-2012-thing-1.html#comments

So I have just responded on her blog:

http://librarianheadspace.wordpress.com/2012/05/28/thing-2-investigate-other-cpd23-blogs/#comment-8

It's wonderful to communicate with other librarians on a global scale. I think this lady is in Australia... which makes me very jealous. Not just jealous, but very jealous.

Now, I've had a look at the Participants for this year's CPD23 Things project. It is a long list of blogs! Let's have an explore of a few and see which ones I'd like to add to my enormously long list of RSS feeds in my Google Reader:

• 23 Things (insert clever name here) - http://23thingsinsertclevernamehere.blogspot.co.uk/ - good title, and an olderer blogger, getting used to this way of communicating and exploring the world. This woman has character and I like her style. 
• 51st century librarian - http://51stcenturylibrarian.blogspot.co.uk/ - holy moley! This person is a Twitter fan and much more enthusiastic about it than I could ever be. She's also an Academic Liaison Librarian, a bit like me. 

I should get on with the LfN article now, before going off for a 1-1 somewhere in the nearby hospital, but I've just twigged that selecting some blogs by Really Different librarians is a good way of demonstrating the "understanding of the wider professional context" bit of the Chartership criteria of assessment, as well as demonstrating an "active commitment to continuing professional development". Chartership handbook:  http://www.cilip.org.uk/filedownloadslibrary/qualifications/chartershiphandbook10.pdf

Yes, Princess Eli, you WILL go to the Chartership ball...

My mind is a little addled because I'm hungry and thirsty, but I really want to write down somewhere official my thoughts and notes from tonight's CILIP in the Thames Valley session on Chartership, held in the King's Arms, opposite the New Bodleian/ Weston Library building site.

I must reflect more on what I'm doing, day to day, in work and at home. Otherwise I won't get the most out of what I do, or make progress. I need to find out what to do with myself on days such as today, when I found it very hard to concentrate on writing the article for Libraries for Nursing (although I have nearly 1000 words, so is not all bad), and get distracted by other librarians' blogs, BBC News, the library assistant needing help/attention, readers needing help/attention.. even though it wasn't meant to be MY day to be the Enquiry Librarian.

What did I do today? Well, we started with a small round-robin at the Cairns library, small owing to the number of staff on leave this week. We were informed that Eliz II is the third monarch to have ruled for 60 years, the other two being Henry III and Victoria. I 'wiki'd' this fact later, and according to that nonreliable source, Henry III only ruled for 56 years in the 13th Century. Became King aged 9, died age 65. Do some mathematical calculations.. Anyway, then we had a presentation on Colwiz/Zotero/Mendeley, focussing mostly on the latter, and intrigued by the slide at the end which compared the three. Which is best for the university groups that I increasingly work with? Which one is best for me, to manage my references for all my little projects? I signed up for Zotero and Mendeley as part of a Thing last year (CPD23 Things), but was never 'approved' for Colwiz and so have not been able to play with it. Something to add to my CPD plan for the coming year, especially if groups need my support in training them how to use Mendeley.

Caught up with colleagues, took some DVDs and CDs to the Headington library (and found that the front brake cable on my bike suddenly snapped, wah, which was disappointing and sad), before getting to the Knowledge Centre to see how colleagues were getting on, checking email, figuring out which request for help to prioritise etc, and then checking RSS feeds. This took most of the morning and afternoon. I spent about two, broken, hours working on the LfN article, getting more work done after 5pm when I was on the evening duty.

Hot footed it down to town for the CILIP meeting. I really do need to eat my supper and get some fruit tea inside me, so I'll make it snappy:

• Read the chartership handbook again. What's missing? When will I do it?
• 1000 word evaluative statement: break it down into FIVE chunks, to answer each of the FIVE criteria, with evidence. If I'm clever, I can figure out how to create hyperlinks within the word document, so that if people read it as an e-doc, they can go back and forth from statement to evidence, and back again. Which evidence for which criteria? Why? Why?
• How does our service meet the organisation's aims and objectives? How does WHAT I DO meet the objectives? Reflect! Reflect! Be critical! Who checks my progress? (Line manager). Who checks the progress of our services? (our stakeholders - people who like to read reports about how great we are). 
• Wider professional engagement. Reading, twitter, blogs... meetings such as the one tonight. There was a librarian from the Council there! From college libraries, school libraries, Bodleian departments, other university libraries. What's the benefit of going to the CILIP in the TV meetings? Well, I was strongly encouraged to JUST WRITE IT tonight, re evaluative statement, which is what I should do TOMORROW MORNING WHEN I GET TO WORK. Just write it! Then ... reflect on it, go back, review, send to mentor...
• Add a glossary/ acronym guide for the poor reader. 
• This is good opportunity for seeing the BIGGER PICTURE: What do I do? Why? What other jobs could I get? What do I want to do? How will I get there?
• Bibliography is evidence of wider professional knowledge, reading CILIP Update, Guardian news articles on libraries and closures... 
• What does our organisational strategy mean to me?
• Demonstrate that I'm committed to my own development: yes. That's why I'm doing the Chartership portfolio, writing an article, giving a brief presentation at a conference in a fortnight, making the most of where I am, the quiet moments at work, the training opportunities, the email from an Australian librarian interested in knowing why we are called the 'Knowledge Centre' - another chance to dream about Oz and interact with colleagues across the globe...
• Cut and paste, with the URL/reference - organisation's aims and objectives, then write below/above - WHAT THIS MEANS and critically appraise it all. Big to little, from the big organisation to little me. 
• The mentor log can be: 2/3/12 we did this and I did that. Then I did this! Include the date when I finally sent off the PPDP and the mentor agreement form to CILIP HQ. OH, and the date that I went on that Chartership Portfolio course, organised by the Bod staff development crowd... 
• WHAT DO I WANT TO DO? Why? How will i get to do it?

In sum:

1. Read the handbook again. And the M.Watson book. 
2. Write the 1000 word statement
3. Revise/review/refresh the organisational bit...
4. Ditto mentor log...
5. Add an acronym page, glossary, whatever
6. Read around and have a think, go back to the above
7. Organise it and make it look pretty. Word/formatting is crucial here.
8. Send to mentor with most humble thanks...
9. Send it off with the £50.