Heritage Intermediate Reports

Having spent nearly 2 years using Heritage as my LMS, I needed to get more out of it. Going on the intermediate reports course has hopefully helped me do that. Firstly it has given me a much better understanding of the syntax used in the reports and secondly, I can immediately see potential benefits for providing a better service and to help justify what the LRC does.

The training took place in IS Oxford's amazing headquarters The Chapel and as there were only 3 trainees, we all got a lot out of it. In addition to the reports training, the questions asked by the delegates has taught me even more. I now know that I can get a snapshot of my live data to practice on, that I can use the audit logs (as a last resort) to help sort problems and that I can set the system to ignore or include specific things.

I knew that Heritage was a powerful system that can be customised to individual library needs but until this training session, I had no idea how much tailoring can be done. I suspect that even this new knowledge is only the tip of the iceberg. So now what?

Work my way through the booklet provided at the session to consolidate my knowledge. Hopefully write the report that my Senior Librarian is after and then start applying my new knowledge to help determine priorities and work (especially for up coming summer jobs?).

Chartership Chat: Evaluative Statement

This was the first Chartership chat I managed to attend, previous ones I was working and had a family birthday. I was especially keen to participate in this one because I am currently writing my evaluative statement. This post is going to look at how I managed with the chat rather than what the chat was about, as this has already been blogged (Thanks to Katy Stoddard) and the chat archived (Thanks to Jo Alcock). I don't want to duplicate.

I found it quite difficult to keep up at first, I think this was because of how I use Twitter. I don't have a Twitter manager, I just use Twitter as is. I am considering using a manager but haven't got round to sussing out the best one (needs to work with Android, if anyone has any suggestions). I ended up having 2 Twitter pages open because the search results page doesn't have a compose a Tweet box, so I had my Home page open for this - going back and forth between these didn't help me in trying to keep up.

I thought initially that an hour might be difficult to fill but actually it went very quickly and Tina Reynolds did a great job of keeping the conversation moving forward. After the chat had finished, I was tired, I don't know if this was because of the fast pace of the conversation, normally I follow in my own time rather than real time, or whether it was the way I was following it.

I really enjoyed particpating and getting useful tips and ideas from others who are doing or will be doing Chartership. I look forward to the next chat on 12th April about mentor/mentee relationships.

Successful Curriculum Integration and Support Webinar

This was the 2nd of 4 webinars that JISC are hosting. This session was about your library being an integral part of the curriculum. Thus demonstrating your value and worth to senior managers as well as being good practice.

The first talk was by Jane Spellman from Queen Elizabeth 6th Form College in Darlington, who I know quite well through local networking. Jane said that we need to be professional, know your institution, spot gaps and be proactive and shout about what you do. It's great to know that we are doing all the right things, so where do we go from here? I'll start where Jane and her team do a lot more than us:

1. Using the Exam Officer to find out exactly which courses are running and which exam board they are using, so that we can then go and search online for upto date specifications.
2. Passing along everything we do for a department to include in their self assessment report, at the moment we only send resource information (how much we've spent and on what)

I also especially liked that Jane included the poll feature in her presentation. This made it more interactive than the other webinar I had done.

The second presentation was by Ihar Ivanov and Lin Armstrong about their information literacy programme which puts the emphasis for learning on the students. The librarians and teachers act as faciliators for students who learn through self discovery, with assistance from their peers and the facilitators. The learning is documented via reflection and recorded using various Web 2.0 tools.

Mike Parker from Burton and South Derbyshire College did the final presentation. The main point of it was that they are very involved with curriculum delivery and are very close to the teaching staff. It sounds impressive until you actually analyse what they are doing in more depth. In addition to the information literacy librarians traditionally deliver, they are delivering functional skills for 11 hours per week. So they are actually doing the teachers' work but on the salary of a librarian / library assistants. This caused a bit of a stir from the webinar delegates who thought that the library skills were not being valued.

More information on the session and links to the speakers can be found on the JISC RSC wiki.

NE CILIP AGM Social media presentation

I went to NE CILIP's AGM last month, where Phil Bradley was giving a presentation. Aude Charillon has already written a great blog about it, so i'm not going to write it up myself, just provide the link to Aude's Social media talk at NE CILIP AGM post.

I have seen Phil present before and always find him very engaging and interesting. I came away from the talk with a very long list of websites to look at. My intention was to look at one a day until the list had been completed. This naturally hasn't happened.

However, I have made a start and have finally got a new start page (Netvibes) to bring my various social media accounts together. I don't know if I've added them all, I'm fairly certain there will be something lurking around that I've missed. I've also taken another look at LinkedIn and added some new stuff, although my profile is in desperate need of attention. That will probably be one of my next tasks. 

I have at least another 10 websites to check out and I will get there eventually, no doubt just in time to hear Phil do another talk and end up with another very long list!

Promoting Your Service Effectively webinar

This was the first time I had done a webinar for real. Having had the trial run on the Friday, I was excited to be particpating in this session and it started inauspiciously with the PC failing to run Blackboard Collaborate, even though it worked on the PC on the Friday. I managed to get another PC to work and got myself set up for the session to start.

In this session, there was no video and the only people allowed to talk were the presenters and moderators, any questions had to be done through the chatroom. This I found strange and whilst I understand that not everyone would have a webcam, I thought the presenters would. It got even more strange when I figured that the moderators were controlling the presentation slides rather than the speaker. 

The session started with Ian Briggs from Walsall College talking about how they use Sharepoint to market their library services. They still have their VLE pages for students to use too and quite a few people wondered whether

1. this was confusing for the students
2. if there was a need to use both, as delegates thought there would be a lot of duplication

It was explained that Sharepoint was used to specifically market certain things to students, whereas the VLE contained wider information.

The second session Jane Parker gave an overview of New College Nottingham Learning Centre's Facebook project. Firstly students were asked what social media they would look at and Facebook came out top, which is why it was used. The most illuminating aspect of this project for me was that links are put onto Facebook about things that are subject specific, so if something has happened that students may want to read about (the death of Whitney Houston was used as an example), the Facebook page links to stories about that. I'd never thought about doing that, our Facebook page is used to say what is happening in the LRC but I think we could extend this to promote our electronic resources by linking to information of interest.

The next session was by Hazel Tickle at Wigan & Leigh College, talking about the use of Kindles and iPads. The Kindles are loaned for a week and students need to pay a refundable £5.00 deposit. Kindles are used to promote e-books with a wide variety being available. They can be voice activated and have a screen reader enhancement making them suitable for visually impaired students. I didn't know this and it is something that I will need to follow up in the quest to promote our Kindles more. The iPads can use the Kindle app and ebrary to help promote e-books but they also have educational apps on them. These are loaned out for 1.5 hours at a time to students.

Sadly at this point technical issues got in the way, the next presenter's sound was muffled making it difficult to hear and the final presenter's sound give up completely. It was therefore a rather mixed session. I found it very useful and have got some good ideas from it but it also shows that sometimes technology can be a hindrance rather than a help. There is a wiki page with information about the webinar.

Webinar

In preparation for last Monday's (5th March) Promoting Your Service Effectively webinar, I needed some training on how to use Blackboard Collaborate and to find out which of the LRC computers it would work with. As last Friday was a workforce development day at work, my manager organised for our regional RSC to do a webinar as practice and upskilling. I have used Skype before at home, which I guess could be considered similar, I have only had one to one video conversations on there though and never really use any of the other features it has.

After some initial technical hitches (some computers worked with Blackboard Collaborate and others didn't), nearly all of us managed to get signed into the session. Cam Swift (our moderator) took us through the various features and gave us tasks to do to reinforce what we were being taught.

Whilst we didn't have video, Cam did so we could see her. I got the opportunity to chat with my colleagues in either the communal chat room or in a private conversation, use the voting, emoticons and raise hands features and as we were seeing the different features it has, we got to draw over the presentation slides using the whiteboard annotations - everyone seemed to like that idea a lot, it is a good thing that the moderator can switch that part off though, otherwise there might be a lot of defaced presentations.

I very much enjoyed the practice session, I was very excited to be participating in the Monday webinar, whihc will be the next blog post I do.

MyPC User Forum

A few months ago there was an e-mail on the MyPC discussion list asking about user forums in various regions. The North East wasn't mentioned, so I replied asking if there was interest in one, offering a venue to host it etc. From there, I ended up organising one with the aid and assistance of Nick from ITS.

This is what I learned from the day:

Bradford College have moved from walk up bookings to advance bookings, to help with behaviour management. This is interesting as my LRC did that 3 years ago because we had no security having moved into a new building with teething problems. Now we are considering moving back to walk up bookings, as a way to move forward the service provision and free up staff time to do other LRC work. Our security is much better now, we have turnstile access (activiated by College ID cards) and classroom management software to block websites like Facebook at our busiest times. So if we move back to walk up bookings will the behaviour decline I wonder?

Features of MyPC that I would like to utilise that I didn't previously know about (this will require an upgrade - a summer job?).

• MyPC can be booked using QR codes
• Heritage can link with MyPC to show / block learners with fines or overdues. This can be done daily via updates for free or if you have the money, there is a live links version updating from Heritage Online.
• There is a web app to show availability, that can be used on smartphones.
• We can set locations so that only certain learners can use them (where we have specialist software on the PC) and retain the right to override if all other PCs are in use.

It was a very useful session with some great ideas to consider.