University of York Library

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Lights, camera, Action Plans!

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In academic libraries we're all seeking ways to deepen our relationships with the Departments we look after, and at York we've found a really valuable tool for doing this. Each year we come up with an Action Plan for each Department, and we discuss and modify this at a meeting with each Head of Department and Library Rep. Then over the following year we carry out the actions we agreed. It doesn't sound like that revelatory an idea, but the point is it's a genuine and meaningful piece of progress we've made - we get a lot done via this method.

For this year's Action Plans we made a change to the format and turned them into more of an annual report. The slides above are an adapted version of a presentation I gave at #BLA15, the Business Librarians Association Conference in Liverpool last month. It's only a brief overview, but it covers a process we've found really valuable, and which the academic Departments have found useful too.

The conference itself was great! As ever. I could only go to the first day but I enjoyed all the presentations I saw, and Jess has put together a really nice write-up of all the presentations which you can read on her blog here.

I particularly got a lot out of Emma Thompson's talk, which is worth checking out on Slideshare. Her idea about providing the library as a 'business' for PGT students doing their Market Research module to do actual market research about, is one I'm really interested in trying out here. The students get real experience and the library gets useful feedback - brilliant.

 

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Blogging to publicise research

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Yesterday I gave a talk to some Music Technology students about blogging. They're using blogs as part of their course, and I wanted to convince them to get the most out of the opportunity, and carry on after their Masters is done, because I think blogging is a fantastic thing.

I wanted the tips below to apply to anyone in academia who blogs, but hopefully also to libraries and librarians and other non-profits who want to get more out of it too.

This isn't the exact presentation I gave to the students - I've annotated it so it makes sense without me talking over the top of it. It covers building a readership, embedding multimedia, using the analytics, and a couple of other things too.

In case you're interested, here's a link to the Twitter Tips and Tricks post, of which there's a screen-shot in the presentation above.

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Twitter for Researchers: Improvers Tips + Tricks

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I delivered a workshop last week (mentioned in the previous post on hashtags) about Twitter for Researchers - it was aimed at people already on Twitter. There's an HE-centric Introduction to Twitter here, for anyone interested.

This one was at more of an improvers level, and covers setting up lists, saved searches, analytics and so forth. The slides are below.

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The Student Guide to Social Media is now fully reusable!

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This actually happened at the end of last year but I didn't get around to blogging about it at the time. It's about the Student Guide to Social media - there's background info below and in a previous blogpost written when it first arrived.

Click this image to open the Student Guide to Social Media in a new window

Click this image to open the Student Guide to Social Media in a new window

It was always Creative Commons so anyone can use it, but now we've taken the ND (Non-Derivative) part off, so it's just CC-BY-NC. In other words you can take it and do whatever you want with it, including repurposing it, remixing it, taking only certain bits of it and not others, and generally reusing it in a flexible way.

It was made in Articulate, and the Articulate source file is available via JORUM. So if you want to use it to make something new, please go for it.

Whenever we talk about or use this in York the students are really responsive - it often gets rated as 'the most useful aspect' of infolit sessions. There's a growing awareness among undergraduates that social media can play a professional and academic role in their lives, but they often don't know where to start - so this overview is something they find helpful.

There's a bit more info about the Student Guide to Social Media on JISC's Digitial Student pages, too.

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6 Useful Online Tools for Academics (and anyone else who teaches)

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I teach a session on the PGCAP (Post-Graduate Certificate of Academic Practice) at York - a programme of teaching-related workshops and classes over the course of a year, which every new teaching academic has to attend.

Here's the presentation from this year's workshop, EdTech: Useful online tools for academics:

It covers Blogging and Twitter (specifically their possible use in teaching, which is a lot less straightforward than their use in research, or academic profile building), the excellent Padlet which people always seem glad to be introduced to, Prezi itself, Slideshare, and sources of copyright free or creative commons images.

In previous years I've done a session on Information Literacy in the Digital Age - but I find it increasingly difficult to keep delivering the same things year after year. If I don't rewrite stuff, the feedback scores start to go down as I get less interested; clearly my declining interest is communicated to the audience somehow, despite my best efforts to prevent this. So last year when I had to submit the brief for them to put in the PGCAP brochure, I decided I'd redo the session and make it about useful online tools, and about trying to help the academics more digitally literate (rather than talk about student digital literacy) - that seemed to be the thing people enjoyed most about the previous version of the session, even though it was only a small element.

This academic year I've several times completely redone a workshop or teaching session, and stressed myself out massively in doing so, but ultimately felt much better delivering the new session and got better feedback too. It really is worth it. But it takes a huge amount of time and on this occasion I'd forgotten I'd need to do it - and the session was on the 3rd day back after Christmas... So it was a nightmare, really! But, ultimately, worth the time it took.

This kind of primer session on online tools is, in my experience, welcomed by academics. When asked about the most useful aspects of the session a lot of the feedback mentioned this, e.g.

  • Opened my eyes to new technologies and avenues to share teaching content.

  • Use of blogs images, twitter…all.   I had heard of many of these but the info was helpful to know how to use them effectively.

  • Seeing what is available, evaluated by presenter – gave good insight

  • Very objective analysis of tools and possible use..

  • Examples of how the tools had been used for teaching and learning

So something as simple as flagging up tools some may not have heard of, and giving examples and (objective, rather than evangelical) analysis of how they're used so that even those who have heard of them get something out of it, is often enough to be genuinely useful.

This is less and less of the case, however. I was talking with someone from the eLearning Team (not part of the Library or IT) this week and we agreed that a couple of years ago, just introducing these technologies to a group of academics was enough - but now there's much more understanding of the tools that are out there. So we have to up our game, and move onto more in-depth discussion of how to use these tools, rather than just what they are. Increasingly (albeit not in the presentation above) I find myself wanting to present things by user need, rather than by platform.