LMS Supplier Showcase (4th November, CILIP HQ London)

The LMS showcase is an important event to attend to keep up-to-date with the various suppliers and systems that are available together with their various features and prices. Therefore, attendance to this event is worthwhile even if you are not currently in the market for a new LMS.

Overview

The showcase featured a selection of many of the key companies that provide Library management systems for libraries (and in some case archives) to be able to manage their collections. It is also a relaxed non sales environment where the suppliers can be consulted for information and advice about their systems and services without the fear of being pressured for a sale.

The suppliers who attended this LMS showcase were as follows:

 

• Adlib
• Bailey Solutions Ltd
• Bowker (UK) Ltd
• CIVICA
• EOS International
• Infor
• IS Oxford
• Library Co-op
• Nucsoft Ltd
• OCLC
• PTFS Europe
• SirsiDynix
• Softlink
• Soutron

 

 

 

CILIP (South East Group) Surviving Redundancy: Positive planning from the front line for what you hope may never happen (but probably will!)

Content coming soon…

Sainsbury Library Visit – Saïd Business School (21st, 28th October)

General overview

The Saïd business school offers a range of programmes in management, leadership and entrepreneurship for undergraduates and postgraduates and is well known around the world for its MBA programmes. The business school was established and built in 1996 and is located in the centre of Oxford near the Oxford rail station The business school is also having an extension built which has been designed by the Dixon Jones architect practice and is classed as the Saïd business school phase II project.

Sainsbury Library

The Sainsbury library is located on the first floor of the building is an open plan space with many desks and open access computers. There are a selection of journals and study guides located in this area but the books are located off to the sides of the main reading area where students can either locate their own items or ask for assistance in locating them. The library service is geared towards self-service and a self issue machine is located near the Help Desk where students can check out their own items or alternatively go to the help desk for assistance.

Subject area and resources

As the business school specialises in the areas of business, management and finance the library provides information and access to resources on these specific topics, which includes access to resources from the following services:

• Books 24×7
• EBSCO’s Business Source Complete
• EMIS (Emerging Markets Information Service)
• Factiva
• FAME (Financial Analysis Made Easy)
• Investext
• JSTOR
• Mintel
• Nexis UK
• Passport GMID from Euromonitor
• Web of Science
• Zephyr

SBS’s Eureka Institutional Repository

The Saïd business school has its own Institutional Repository called Eureka. Eureka runs on Eprints software and was originally set-up by a staff member at the school. The repository was created to showcase and provide access to academic articles and teaching materials created by academic staff at the SBS. Although the repository is configured to accept material via self-archiving a large proportion of the content has been added to the repository by library staff. As is commonly the case with IRs populating the repository with content has not been the easiest task and at the time of writing this post a temporary staff member is currently employed to locate and add previously written academic articles to the repository.

Web/digital issues

The library employs a Web and Digital Librarian and this is not a commonly found role in libraries. Their role is to add content to the library web pages and maintain and manage the SBS’s library web presence, which includes utilizing and maintaining the library’s social media. As the Bodleian libraries have a consistent type of template for all the individual libraries that form the Bodleian libraries, the Web and Digital Librarian also has involvement with other university staff that are responsible for the overall library web presence of the Bodleian libraries.

Royal Society Library Visit (7th October)

The Royal Society is a fellowship of eminent scientist from around the world and its main offices are located in the heart of the capital on Charlton House Terrace.

The library’s collections are specifically related to science and the collection includes printed works an image library and an archive. The printed works collection consists of over 70,000 titles and the image gallery consists of over 6,000 photographs, engravings and paintings[1]

The visit consisted of a fairly detailed and informative tour around the building. The main offices of the Royal Society and the Society’s long history provided the Royal Society’s librarian with plenty to talk about and the sheer amount of history involved with the both the society and the building made the tour extremely interesting.

Many highlights of the visit included seeing a selection of items from the collection, such as the Royal Society’s oldest item (a small sized manuscript) and also Newton’s Death mask. It was also good to be able to go behind the scenes as it were by going into the stacks and seeing how the collection was being stored. The Royal Society’s stacks were typical of stacks and store rooms found in non purpose built buildings, as they consisted of many small unusual sized rooms with mostly low ceilings. Although their dimensions are not very practical for their function and day-to-day use, as a visitor they added character to the experience and made you even more aware of the age of the building.

 

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[1] “Lists and explains the collections of the Centre for History of Science | Royal Society”, n.d., http://royalsociety.org/Collections/.

 

The University of Reading Library Collections Project ‘Reshaping the Collections in a time of institutional Change’ (CILIP South East Group – October 5th- Reading)

In 2009 the University of Reading began their Library Collections Project, and at this CILIP South East Group meeting Rupert Wood (Head of Collections and the University of Reading) and Victoria Bird (Collections Project Co-ordinator) provided detailed information on the project.

This information included details on the background to the project, how the project was carried out and information on further stages of the project that have yet to be completed.

Project aims

The main aim of the Library Collections Project was to change and adjust the collections to enable them to more effectively meet the current and future needs of the library’s users, and to create a single and more improved library at Whiteknights. Within this main aim were additional aims related to the project that included the following: (These aims and other details of the project can be found on the university’s website)

• Provide easy access to the most needed books and journals (and also to lesser-used material – from storage or through reciprocal networks)[1]
• Improve the layout of the collections and the signs so that the Library is as easy to use as possible[2]
• Increase access to electronic sources of information when possible[3]
• Provide better long-term protection for stored books[4]

Background

The background to the project is related to a number of issues but the main factor I would argue was the desire to make the service more efficient. Subsequently, the project involved the closure of the Bulmershe library, and changes and enhancements made to the library at Whiteknights. These changes and enhancements have now made the library at Whiteknights the main library, and it is now more spacious, has an improved layout and provides more study spaces for users.  All these changes and enhancements at Whiteknights and the closure of the Bulmershe library have enabled the project to achieve its aims. As the library at Whiteknights has now been improved to more effectively serve the needs of its users, both now and in the future.

Off-site storage

To achieve many of the aims of the project an off-site storage facility needed to be found, acquired and prepared. It appears that it took some time searching to find the right place. Once found it also had to be suitably set up and equipped for it to be able to perform its role as a storage facility that could facilitate easy retrieval of journals and books. Finding and preparing this storage facility appears to have been an essential part of the project, and it has enabled the university to relocate many lesser used items from the collection to this facility. This again has been a move to improve the efficiency of the service by keeping the most used items onsite and at the same time providing improved access to the onsite items.

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[1] “Library Collections Project 2009-2013 – University of Reading”, n.d., http://www.reading.ac.uk/library/about-us/news/lib-news-collections-project.aspx.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ibid.

[4] “Library Collections Project 2009-2013 – University of Reading”, n.d., http://www.reading.ac.uk/library/about-us/news/lib-news-collections-project.aspx.

‘Building your Portfolio’ Career Development Group (West County Division) (16th September – Bournemouth Central Library)

Building your portfolio

In September I attended the ‘Building your Portfolio’ course organised by CILIP’s Career Development Group. The course was aimed at those interested in CILIP’s framework of qualifications such as Chartership, Certification or revalidation).

The course consisted of the following key topics:

• Learning Styles
• What is reflection
• Who knows regs
• Choosing your evidence
• Writing skills
• Keeping a learning log

To get us to participate and learn about Chartership and its requirements the course organisers began with introductions and then handed out a Chartership quiz sheet. To quiz was designed to enable us to discover what we already knew about Chartership and what we didn’t.  This was a good way to be able to learn about Chartership as we could all be actively involved in the learning process.

The course organisers introduced all of the participants of the course to the basics of reflective writing. Essentially reflective writing shows evidence of reflective thinking and involves aspects such as the following:

• Analysing an event or idea
• Thinking about what it means for you and progress as an information professional

They also explained evidence for your portfolio and the four key areas of criteria as follows:

1/ Ability to reflect critically on personal performance and to evaluate service performance

2/ Active commitment to CPD

3/ Ability to analyse personal and professional development with reference to experiential and developmental activities

4/ Breath of knowledge and understanding of the wider professional context

Some interesting helpful hints and tips were suggested on how to write up and keep a record of events and training you attend such as taking photos of information at course events and then uploading the images to services such as Evernote. They also suggested that using other services like eportfolio services such as Pebblepad and blogs could also be useful.

The most interesting aspect of the course was seeing examples of other candidate’s portfolios. This was incredibly revealing as the examples that we were able to view ranged in size and also in content.  This demonstrated that although essentially the structure of the portfolio may be similar the actual content and types of CPD activities undertaken would differ drastically from person to another.

Overall the course was helpful as an introduction to aspects of portfolio building but I would also recommend reading the following book as a companion piece to this course:

Building Your Portfolio The CILIP guide by Margaret  Watson

Internet World 2011

Internet World is the UK’s biggest annual event for digital marketing and online business, which features an extensive and free education programme. Internet world brings together leading individuals from areas such as marketing, IT and eCommerce and features information on the following five subjects:

• Digital and mobile marketing
• eCommerce and mCommerce
• Social media
• Content management
• Connectivity and hosting

With themed conferences on the following 6 topics:

• Hosting/Web Design & Build
• Online Advertising, Search & Affiliate
• Email, Mobile & Web Analytics
• Future of Social Media
• eCommerce & fulfilment
• Content Management

For anyone involved in managing or running an information service this really is an important show to attend, most particularly as marketing and brand management are such a key aspects connecting with the management of any modern information service.

Seminars attended:

• Inside and Outside: Technology for brand management and engagement – The Real Story Group (Jarrod Gingras, Analyst) http://www.realstorygroup.com/
•  The Principles of Human Centric Marketing – One to One  (IanKarnell CEO and co-founder) http://www.onetooneglobal.com/ Presentation: http://portal.sliderocket.com/OnetoOne/Human-Centric-Marketing
• Emerging trends in digital marketing -David Edmundson Bird (MMU Business School)  http://www.slideshare.net/groovegenerator/emerging-trends-in-digital-marketing

 Summary of seminars

Inside and Outside: Technology for brand management and engagement – The Real Story Group (Jarrod Gingras, Analyst)

Jarrod Gingras’s seminar provided information in the Real Story Group and provided examples of a variety of available technologies and their capabilities. The Real Story Group is a company specialising in providing independent vendor evaluations for anyone interested in investing in content technologies. They provide extremely detailed evaluations of many services to aid customers make good decisions on the types of tools/services they purchase. The company was set up by Tony Byrne out of a frustration with the technologies available and how they were being marketed and the void between the marketing and the reality of their capabilities.

A key aspect of the company is to be one hundred percent behind the buyer and to be totally independent.  Therefore, they do not consult with vendors on their marketing plans and nor do they participate in vendor webinars. Subsequently, they are committed to providing information to help the buyer make the right choices with technologies that fit their needs.  The types of evaluation information they provide cover areas such as the following:

• Digital asset management
• Document and records management
• Portals and content integration
• Web CMS

The arguments for seeking independent and detailed information on products and services are clear especially due to the costs involved in purchasing and implementation of any new technology, and most especially due to the potential costs involved in making uniformed decisions

The Principles of Human Centric Marketing – One to One (Ian Karnell CEO and co-founder)

Ian Karnell’s seminar led you briefly through the different evolutionary stages of marketing through beginning with the brand centric marketing, consumer centric and then through to the human centric marketing, providing examples of advertising campaigns that were created along the lines of these various methods of marketing.  The human centric approach is essentially about focussing on human values (not corporate values) and engaging with customers as human beings and connecting with them as individuals.

Emerging trends in digital marketing

David Edmundson Bird MMU Business School

David Edmundson’s presentation featured a wealth of information on emerging trends in marketing and also touched on aspects of the future of digital marketing. Some key points from his presentation were as follows:

Emerging trends:

• Digital marketing is going to get bigger (a bigger slice the marketing budget) and investment should be in social networking and social media (Digital marketing is about communicating to customers in a way that coincides with their new behaviour and their new behaviour is mostly in the digital environment)
• The key will be digital experiences of the brand – experiential marketing (however trying to translate experience through digital marketing will be a challenge)
• The main website is still extremely important but it is vitally important to invest and maintain the main website but it will need to be optimised for mobile
• Unpaid advertising is growing as customers experience a brand best from someone else – consumers are increasingly trusting messages from contacts rather than the brand itself
• General analytics are over but measuring CTR, hits and CPM traffic may not be helpful
• Measuring engagement might be more useful
  • Measuring brand awareness
  • Measure the number of leads generated by a marketing leader
• Market research remains important – research into how customers behave still needs to be carried out.
• Listening to via networks is vital – reading blogs – creating blogs where customers can comment – people will trust you more if you let them be critical

The future of digital marketing

• Marketing that targets the mobile will be important as the mobile phone will continue to be important to customers every year
• Tablets will replace laptops for casual interaction
• Neuroscience will become important to understanding customer behaviour

JISC Conference 2011 – Financial Challenges – Digital Opportunities (14 -15 March)

Conference overview

The JISC 2011 conference focused on the opportunities that digital technologies can provide and most importantly the opportunities they can provide in the current economic climate.

The programme consisted of a variety of sessions, workshops and demonstrations and to extend the reach and audience for the conference JISC utilised the web and social media technologies. This enabled non-attendees to view information about each conference session and it also enabled them to take part in questions and answer sessions.

Programme

The conference consisted of a welcome, introduction and keynotes from the following key JISC staff:

• Malcolm Read, Executive Secretary, JISC
• Professor David Baker, Deputy Chair, JISC
• Professor Eric Thomas, Vice Chancellor, University of Bristol

And then the following main sessions:

• Sustaining digital resources today
• Using digital media to improve teaching and learning
• The benefits of more effective research data management in UK universities
• Local developers: their value in innovating in difficult times
• Increasing research efficiency through the NGS
• Open educational resources – expensive extra or core commitment?
• Cloud solutions – risk or reward?
• Students as agents of change
• Pushing the frontiers of ‘open education and research’ – how to exploit the new opportunities with appropriate licencing and risk management techniques
• Effective assessment in a digital age – how technology can enhance assessment and feedback for learners and practitioners
• Innovation, collaboration and engagement with external partners
• The A-B-C-D of open scholarship (access, bibliography, citation and data)
• Better research management – strategies and tools
• The benefits of open standards
• Can you afford your data centre?
• How innovation helps to support an agile and efficient university
• Making the most of open content – stories from the frontier
• Preparing for a digital future – digital literacy for students, researchers and teaching staff
• Amplified events, seminars, conferences – what? why? how?
• What is the business administrative case for linked data?
• Outsourcing, cloud computing and the law – not as cloudy as you think
• JISC supporting your institution – flexibility, agility and the responsive business
• Value, efficiency and the benefit of shared services
• Rethinking libraries – innovation in a time of limited resources

And the following mini interactive workshops:

• Tools for effective online collaboration with Business and Community Partners
• Enhancing the user experience – innovative solutions for real library services
• Co-genT: an interactive staff development tool
• What’s in it for me? A business case for a Research Information Management standard
• The Design Studio: supporting innovation in curriculum design and delivery
• Opening Access to Film and Sound
• DIGIPEDIA: online guide to the digital life cycle

 Sessions attended

From the choice of sessions I attended the following:

• The benefits of more effective research data management in UK universities
• Enhancing the user experience – innovative solutions for real library services
• Better research management – strategies and tools
• Making the most of open content – stories from the frontier

Reasons for attending

My reasons for attending the JISC conference were as follows:

• To find out more about JISC and gain more knowledge of the types of projects they are involved in
• To gain more detailed information on recent and current JISC projects
• To gain more information on the types of institutions that are involved in JISC projects

Enhancing the user experience – innovative solutions for real library services

This mini workshop offered up a wealth of information on many JISC projects connected with JISCLMS (projects for enhancing library management systems) that includes the following aspects:

• Trials and implementations
• Personalisation
• VLE integration
• Mobile platforms

The actual range of projects and their specific titles include the following:

• Covprimo (Coventry primo implementation project)
• Swwhepsrch (Virtual Academic Library Shared Discovery Platform – Case Study)
• Summon4hn (Simplifying resource discovery and access in academic libraries: implementing and evaluating Summon at Huddersfield and Northumbria Universities)
• CReDAUL (Combining Resource Discovery Across University Libraries)

 

The Future of Research Skills Training Conference (2nd February 2011)

Conference overview

The conference was organised by Epigeum (one of the leading providers of online research skills training) and the theme of the conference focused on the benefits of elearning in the current climate of financial cuts.

The conference featured a range of speakers from a variety of universities who presented their own experience and knowledge of implementing online course programmes.  The themes explored by the conference and the speakers included the following:

• PhD programmes post-Roberts funding’
• How to successfully implement online courses’
• How to engage students in online learning’
• The value of e-Learning to universities
• Online learning pedagogy and assessment

The list of speakers and their individual topics are listed below:

• Dr Douglas Halliday, Durham University: ‘PhD programmes post-Roberts funding’
• Professor Alan Baird, University College Dublin: ‘How to successfully implement online courses’
• Tim Meldrum, City University, London ‘How to engage students in online learning’
• Professor Shelda Debowski, University of Western Australia: ‘Online research skills training – the      Australian experience’ and ‘Research leadership-next generation training’
• Dr Shirley Cooper, University of Liverpool: ‘Using Epigeum research training materials within an online course for first year skills training’
• Jean York, University of Huddersfield:  ‘How to engage students to use online training’

Reasons for attending

My reasons for attending were as follows:

• To find out more about Epigeum and the types of online courses they offer
• To find out how other universities use Epiguem courses and course content
• To discover more about online learning and they types online learning courses universities are providing
• To discover the ways in which universities are constructing their online learning courses

 Conclusion

The conference offered a vast array of useful information on developing and implementing online courses (most particularly research skills training courses.)  Furthermore, it also offered lots of useful information on the structure of universities and the types of online training they offer.  The general consensus of conference attendees was that Epigeum courses and Epigeum course content was considered to be a useful addition to courses that were running at many universities. In certain cases it appeared that the specific needs of many institutions differed slightly. Therefore, many universities seemed to be integrating the courses and course content being offered by Epigeum into training courses that were being created and offered to students by the individual university. Subsequently, Epigeum course content can and is being used by universities successfully in the following ways:

• As standalone courses
•  As parts of other courses/modules created by institutions.

CoFHE Mid-West Circle Meeting (June 9th Oxford Brookes University)

CoFHE (Colleges of Further and Higher Education Group of CILIP) Mid-West Circle Meeting June 9th Oxford Brookes University

Event theme:

E-books made easy: How to stop worrying and love your books online…

(and CoFHE Mid-West Circle AGM)

This event began with a short AGM for the CoFHE Mid-West Circle, which was then followed by the following programme of speakers:

• James Clay: Do you like books or do you like reading?
• Anna Vernon: The JISC E-books for FE project and the National E-book Observatory: lessons for libraries.
• Kate Price : Making the most of E-Books in Academic Environment

Brief details of speakers and programme in more detail:

James Clay: Do you like books or do you like reading?

James Clay is ILT and Learning Resources Manager at Gloucestershire College. In this role he has contributed greatly towards changing the college with the use of learning technologies and this has led him to become the ALT’s Learning Technologist of the year 2009.

James Clay focused on explaining the many positive reasons for adopting E-books as part of a collection management policy. Most notable of these points were the following:

• Access (including multiple access)
• Convenience (the ability to view material outside of library opening times)
• Mobility (the ability to use – certain – mobile devices to view content)

He also acknowledged that there were many problems associated with E-books but added that their potential benefits to compliment more traditional hard-copy resources had many advantages and possibly over time could become easier to use.

Anna Vernon: The JISC E-books for FE project and the National E-book Observatory: lessons for libraries.

Anna Vernon is a Licensing Manager at JISC and her role involves negotiating with publishers to obtain good prices and licensing terms for end users. A key project Anna ran was the LSC/JISC funded E-books for FE project.

Anna explained the findings from the National E-books Observatory Project. Such as the average time spent viewing/reading of an e-book to the time of day that users commonly access e-books. The findings from this study are revealing and provide useful details about how e-books are being used. Complete details of the E-books Observatory Project can be found at the following web address: http://www.jiscebooksproject.org/

Anna ended her presentation by talking about the E-books for FE project which has made 3000 E-books available to FE colleges. This project was essentially to try and help meet demand for e-books within FE, which has previously not been met. The project has made available a core collection of e-books suitable for FE. Further details of the E-books for FE project can be found at the following web address: http://fe.jiscebooksproject.org/

Kate Price: Making the most of E-Books in Academic Environment – Using Statistics for Non-statisticians

Kate Price is head of E-Strategy and Resources at the University of Surrey. Her role requires her to be responsible for staff involved in acquiring and cataloguing all forms of information resources. Kate is an active member of the UKSG and has given many presentations on the management of e-journals and e-books.

Kate’s talk focused on an introduction to using statistics for information professionals. She began with the basics such as the reasons why you might find statistics useful to compile. The key reasons Kate highlighted for creating statistics are listed below:

• Because you have to (mandatory reporting)
• To prove the effectiveness of a service or initiative (key performance indicators)
• To prove you are spending wisely
• To make a case for more money
• To ensure you have the right resources for your customers

Kate also provided information on how you get statistics for the use of e-resources as listed below:

• Logging into the admin website of the resource
• Requesting statistics from your supplier
• The use of third party systems to track usage (EZ Proxy)

Kate also highlighted some key types of statistics that would be useful to compile as can be seen in the list below:

• Using a standard time period (monthly etc)
• Collecting statistics on sessions, searches, full text downloads.
• Collect other useful metrics such as student numbers, subscription costs and comparison costs.

Kate’s talk finished with a quick overview of the UKSG such as what it does and the benefits of membership.