Strangers in a strange land

Summer training event

I recently attended one of this years summer training event looking at the International Student experience. It was an interesting session and thanks again to the organisers.

We had a speaker from the ASK Student Services who provided a useful overview of some of the challenges facing international students especially in the first few weeks of arrival. One of the group exercises was to list the differences an international student will face coming to the UK, ie the diet, weather, expense, social etiquette, humour etc. There is more information on the culture shock of arriving in a new country available on the ASK webpages.

We also had the opportunity to hear from an international student about his first impressions of coming to the country. The pace of life took a while to adjust to alongside the balance between an academic and social life. Something I was interested in, but unforutnately owing to time didn’t get a chance to ask, what are the highlights to studying in the UK.

After the talks we had the opportunity to reflect on what we were doing well as a service and where improvements could be made. One of the areas mentioned was the recent successful bid for extra funds to purchase books on the british culture for 3 of the libraries.

A key fustration/challenge that was raised was the language barrier,  which sometimes makes it difficult for staff to get a message across to students. While the students are required to meet a level of english, this may not always be possible especially during the early months of arriving to the UK where some of the services we provide could be of real value.

Some of the solutions suggested was to get a better understanding of the needs of international students to help inform our services. The library has recently held focus groups with international students aw well as using a social networking tool for students to raise issues and then prioritise them. This will be repeated with the new intake in Sept and then hopefully provide an interesting and useful body of evidence as well as recomendations.

Personally I think technology could also be useful, whether helping to create social networks, provision of online resource, translational tools, provision of online material in various languages and format etc

JISC Conference 2010

Fiery-blooms at Kew 2009

The theme for the jisc conference this year was  ‘Technology: at the heart of education and research’ and links to presentations and more is available in the Virtual Goody Bag

The keynote speaker Martin Bean set the tone of the day with an enthusiastic, dynamic talk on the ‘learning journey’. Even though I wasn’t completely convinced of everything he said I was encouraged by his visionary outlook and he reminded me of the value of education.

He saw a clear place for libraries  but with a move from helping students retreive information to helping students make sense of the information and saw ‘trusted content’ as key. Personally I have always seen part of the information retreival process as identifying the trusted content first. I look forward to the day when we can spend less time showing staff and students how to access the content easily and have less authentications problems to resolve.

The 3 parallel sessions I attended were focused on collections and discovery. In the morning I went to the session on ‘Navigating the UK’s libraries, museums and archives: A vision for resource discovery’. Their vision was ‘UK students and researchers will have easy, flexible access to content and services through a collaborative, aggregated and integrated resource discovery and delivery framework which is comprehensive, open and sustainable’

I think this is an exciting vision although the complexity of the landscape is a worry. During other sessions in the day I learnt more about  new collections being built and developed. As the landscape continues to grow and become more complex I was left wondering how this vision to provide easy flexible access is achievable. I am also not completley sure what place ‘resource discovery solutions’ have in this landscape as they build their large indexes of aggregated data. I am however looking forward to seeing this develop and there are looking at some quick wins in this area which was encouraging to hear.

Another trend I noticed from the sessions I attended was the importance of showing value, an outcome of the current political and economic climate. Alongside showing value was also the need to be flexible and find sustainable business models, as talked about in the session ‘Business models for sustaining digital resources’. It was interesting to hear how the National Archives are generating £7m of income. The growing trend in interest in family history has been effectively targeted by the National Archives to help generate income . The ina.fr, an archive of french TV & radio are also looking at monetizing their collection, through DVD sales although do also provide free access to their content as well.

The final session I attended was ‘Community collections and the power of the crowd’. It was fascinating to hear about how networks and communities are creating such valuable  & exciting resources.  Oxford were able to show the difference in cost in creating a crowdsources collection the ‘Great War Archive’ compared to the cost of a professoinal sourced collection ‘First World War Poetry Archive’ and not unsurprisingly it was much cheaper to crowdsource, £3.50 per image as opposed to £40. They encouraged people to submit their own scans & set up roadshows for people to bring along items to digitise. While this approach was experimental they were pleased with its success and are now providing a resource for others to do something similar, RunCoCo. It is interesting to see how these collections fit in & compare with more established publisher colletions.

Over lunch I also had the opportunity to hear about some work Mimas had done to get feedback from users. They were able to get some good qualititative and quantative data in a short period and to use to show their value. I was especially interested to hear what feedback there got from academics and researchers on their use of Zetoc, COPAC and Archives Hub and was encouraged to hear how much value they place on these services. I think this helped confirm my belief in them as a trusted source and a reason to recomend them

I enjoyed the day and the highlight for me was the opportuntity to meet more professional staff whose enthusiasm and vision make be have confidence in the future of education and the role of technology

Resource discovery: demonstration by EBSCO

Following on from our autumn programme of visits, EBSCO are making a return visit to demonstrate their EBSCO Discovery Service (EDS) which was launched over Christmas – this time the demonstration will be in the Library Teaching Room, Mary Seacole Library on Wednesday 3^rd March, at 2pm.

Look forward to seeing you there !

image credit: NASA

Being ‘tickled’ by resource discovery

Ken Dodd sculpture at Liverpool Lime St station

We visited Liverpool University library today and talked to Terry, Roy and Dave about their experience of search tools, Summon and Ebsco Discovery Service (EDS).

Liverpool have been beta testing Summon for approx 9 months and have just recently begun beta testing Ebsco Search Discovery http://www.liv.ac.uk/Library/e-library/discover.html. Like us, and many libraries, they are looking to provide a ‘quick, simultaneous access to the Library’s quality-assured print and electronic resources’

Having had the sales pitch from the vendors we were keen to see the other side of the coin and hear about a live implementation. We were fortunate that Liverpool were happy to share their experience of Summon to date and this presentation, delivered at a recent JIBS usergroup -  ‘Holy grail or leaky cup’, provides a great summary.

The look & feel and speed of search results  in Summon were definite positives. However a key issue was with the content in terms of currency, quality, coverage and linking to the full text (via SFX).

Liverpool are just about to start beta testing Ebsco Discovery Service and intial thoughts have been positive. In terms of content as Ebsco were able to clearly identify what resources they have access to index. However the look & feel of the interface is more cluttered.

Liverpool found the implementation of both Summon and the Ebsco product very straightforward and both are hosted. It seemed that there was more opportunity of easy customisation with Ebsco. One of the features I like about Ebsco is the possibility of allowing searches of only selected resources, this could be used to provide more targeted services to groups of users.

I was disappointed to note that discovery tools were facing the same issues federated search encountered at the beginning such as a more US focus to the coverage,  not all publishers allowing access to the data etc.  I had hoped we would have learned more  from that experience.

It seemed clear that the success of these tools is about how much of  the libraries collection is able to be harvested, but as noted in an earlier post, Ebsco indicated that publishers would be unwilling to allow access to their data. I think it is worrying to see these signs of exclusivity between the publishers and it erodes a potentially valuable service.

What I took away from the day was to focus more on our collection, I am keen that we take a close look at our resources and confirm which can be effectively searched and results displayed within these tools.

I am also interested to find out more about how our users want to find this information, while I appreciate that everyone wants the simplicity of Google I am unsure how this can be provided with more complicated data such as statistics, reports, images etc.  I am hoping someone has the answer.

Many thanks to Terry, Roy and Dave for such a useful day

Creating Future Proof Graduates

Birmingham City University

Last week I dropped in on the ‘Creating Future Proof Graduates’ exhibition which was showcasing the 8 resources created to help students identify and prepare for problems when in the ‘real world’. Birmingham City University  was awarded  the National Teaching Fellowship Scheme (NTFS) project in 2007, which includes funding from HEFCE, and this exhibition is the first of the projects to reach the dissemination stage.

Who, What Where

The resources include a board game, an animation, online course material etc. One of the resources was created by some of the library’s Learning & Teaching team -  Who, What, Where.

This is a short course which can be accessed independently providing information to help students fully prepare for job interviews.

During the exhibition John, Carol and Christiana were at hand to talk to delegates and demonstrate the course. There was a lot of interest in the course including discussion of possible additional resources, linking with other communities etc. Personally I think this is a really good reference resource and it also highlights the value libraries provide in supporting students both in study and personal development .

The delegates all recieved a ‘compendium’ of resources and they are  available online.

ebook roadshow @ De Montfort Leicester

We were kindly invited to participate in an ebook roadshow organised by Mitchell Dunkley at De Montfort Leicester. The roadshow gave library staff & academics the opportunity to meet with vendors/publishers and discover more about the available content, pricing models, search features etc. Chris and I also pitched up, armed with statistics and photos from the ebook world tour, to provide information on Birmingham City University library experience with ebooks.

We had a very enjoyable and informative day, it was great to share our experience with the library staff and discuss the common issues. It gave me the opportunity to get a better picture of our ebook collection and identify the challenges we face.

As well as share our experience I also had the opportunity to talk to some of the publishers, find out more about De Montfort’s  institutional repository, DORA and chat to the systems librarian who showed us a page  providing direct search to other library catalogues and maps of their location.

This roadshow also inspired me to think about providing a similar event for our library staff to meet some of the publishers who provide our electronic resources.

Visit to Huddersfield Library

I had an interesting time at Huddersfield library yesterday, we had a packed programme hearing about their experience in customer service excellence, enquires, staff development, reading lists, marketing, the library catalogue and much more.

We also had a tour of the recently refurbished library which I felt was a very welcoming, light & colourful space with great features, such as shelf ends with pictures of student work to really help define that area of the library floor.

One of the highlights of the day was hearing Dave Patten talk about his work on the library catalogue, where he has been able to tweak, add & remove features. He has introduced some great customer focused enhancements such as

• spell checker
• serendipity search
• RSS feeds for keyword search
• borrowing suggestions
• Email alerts for search terms
• tag cloud of search terms

This constant tweaking and trying out new things on the catalogue is really refreshing to hear about and I think chimes with the type of implementation of  Prism that Talis propose.

A big thank you to the staff at the library for such a warm welcome and useful day, it provided me with lots of food for thought and things to be envious about.

RFID Conference

I attended the CILP RFID in Libraries conference on Tuesday in London, where I got the opportunity to hear some interesting talks and chat to the suppliers.

One of the key issues was the welcome announcement of the adoption of the new standard ISO 28560 which will hopefully pave the way for some  interesting innovations and exploitation of the technology, including the possiblity of using technology/equipement from different suppliers to provide the perfect solution. While excited by the possiblities I am also aware that there is still plenty of work to go in this area before the benefits are appreciated including personally more thinking about what services and development the library would like to achieve with RFID.

One of the highlights of the day was a case study by Sarah Pumfrey, Team Leader (Systems) at Liverpool John Moores University. Sarah talked about the drivers behind implementing self service, the process and lessons learned, it was  a really useful personal perspective which I could relate to.  It also made me realise how beneficial opportunites for libraries to work together in resolving many common issues could be, so will be signing up the the LIB-RFID-UK mailing list.

I attended Track 2 in the afternoon aimed at those libraries which have already implemented RFID and was looking to the future, I particulary enjoyed the talks where there was an element of future gazing  such as library robots to do stock checks, location awareness tags etc. There were some inspirational ideas which helped highlight the potenial of RFID but it also reminded me that I am keen to see it deliver the functionality that is available currently today.

It was an enjoyable day and I was really pleased to meet some twitter folk. I unfortunately didn’t get to meet Mick Fortune but highly recomend his blog for all things RFID in libraries.

Digitisation

I attended a couple of  workshops, last month, funded by JISC under the JISC ITT Workshops  & Seminars:  Achievements & Challenges in Digitisation & e-Content strand.

‘Digital Media collection +100 years’

‘High Volume Digitisation’.

Copies of the presentations are availble on each site.

There was an interesting mix of people at both events including librarians, academics, musuem curators highlighting the diverse range of people involved in digitisation.

A number of issues raised at the seminars mirrored those raised at the JISC Digitisation conference early this year, which I blogged about.

The importance of planning for successful digitisation was clear at both seminars. It is important to be considering preservation issues early on in the digitial life cycle otherwise data will be lost and in some cases currently is. For large scale digitisation planning in advance and recognising  common problems would also be more effective.

The question of what to digitise was also raised and for many items out of copyright are the easiest to digitise.  I had also only been thinking about print material so it was really interesting to hear from the National Media museum about the issues they face in preserving new media such as games consoles and computers, not only preserving the technology but also the experience.

Once digitised there is also the importance of adding value  to the collections in terms of metadata and discoverability. It was interesting to hear from the British Library regarding the British Newspaper collection, a free resource to UK HE and they now provide a version for anyone to search with payment options for downloading, thereby opening the collection much further.

Resource discovery: demonstration by EBSCO

The 3rd of the demos we’ve organised  from resource discovery system suppliers takes place on Friday October 23rd at 10:30, when EBSCO will be talking about their Discovery Service, together with their federated search tool EBSCOhost Integrated Search

Please come and join us for tea, coffeee, biscuits and another peek at what resource discovery for our students might look like in the future

image credit: alef