Yesterday I went to the University Medical Library on a visit hosted by Isla Kuhn, Reader Services Librarian and Anne Collins, Deputy Librarian. I visited along with a school librarian from Bedfordshire whom I met at the Cambridge cilipfuture conversation in June, and who came to St John's College Library afterwards with few from the Medical Library who missed the St John's tour last month. I could write quite the (dry) essay full of facts and figures gleaned during the tour, but instead I've just written up what particularly struck me, and have attempted to reflect a little on it.
Introduction
The Medical Library is located in the Clinical School building at Addenbrookes Hospital. Its readers include undergraduate and postgradaute medical students of the University, other members of the University, the staff of Addenbrookes and the MRC in Cambridge, and also NHS staff from across the East of England. It has about 7,000 active users. All borrowing users have the same allowance - 5 books for 4 weeks - and everyone with a library card has access to the extensive electronic resources provided.
Impressions
The library is clearly focussed on meeting and anticipating the needs of its users. This was clear from the determined and positive attitude to a recent refurbishment requiring a reduction in hard-copy journal holdings and the benefits that it would bring, and in the commitment to user education.
The library is currently most of the way through a refurbishment and redevelopment, involving the re-shaping of the entrance area, the creation of new IT areas, the reduction of holdings of paper journal backruns, and the creation of more group working space. I was surprised to learn that the library is creating new computer rooms, as the trend at St John's appears to be away from the use of computer rooms towards the use of computers (either library-provided or personal laptops) at study desks throughout the library. This difference arises because the Clinical School requested that the Library create a new IT study room to enable them to use more computer-based modules and exams.
The Librarian, Peter Morgan, presented a paper about the journal de-selection project at the 10th International Conference on Medical Librarianship in 2009. His paper and slides are available online, so I don't need to summarise the project here. I was interested to learn from Isla about a couple of features of this project: its place in the wider UK Research Reserve initiative (something I hadn't previously heard of) and the use of online surveying to obtain opinions from library users.
Isla provides user education sessions throughout the year, and will talk to individuals (from her help desk in the library entrance area) and groups (in the IT seminar room) about searching, databases, and referencing "for as long as they will listen". I got the impression that she will try and sort-out any library problem that people come to her with, whether it's something she knows a lot or a little about. I'm sure that this can-do attitude encouages users to view the library staff as a help in finding what they want.
Thoughts
In common with many libraries, the medical library has multiple 'masters'. In its case, theses are as one of the Dependent Libraries of Cambridge University Library, as a departmental library for School of Clinical Medicine, and as an NHS library. My impression was that the material required by users from these groups would be broadly similar, but that membership of several different master organisations can bring some difficulties in terms of restrictions on participation in some co-operative schemes, for example.
St John's College Library has fewer masters but still has several functions to the various user-groups it serves. Undergraduates require core texts and past exam papers, undergrads and postgraduates look for somewhere to study, general interest books, audio-vidual materials (for pleasure or study), photocopying and IT facilities, and research advice. The Fellows of College appear particularly to use the reference books, paper journals and newspapers, as well and the knowledge of library staff on all manner of issues. Researchers from across the University and beyond use the resources of the special collections, and researchers, family historians and many others consult the Biographical Librarian.
In previous employment I discovered the world of libraries in the Church of England and other Christian demoninations. Within the C of E, diocesan libraries, for example, seem to also to feel the pull of multiple organisational or user-group allegiances, both local and regional, both from the diocese but also from other affiliated instituions. Whether or not its obvious on the surface, most library services have to balance the needs of competing user groups and governing bodies, and it's necessary to recognise this and to create clear guidelines and plans for the service in order to manage such conflict effectively.
What I will apply at work
In the staff area I saw a small bookshelf with copies of professional interest journals (including Update, Gazette and several others) in boxes so that staff can browse through them over coffee. I'm not sure how heavily-used these are, but it seems like a very good idea to me. I find it hard to get round to read Update at home, but if it were on or near the coffee table at work, I would probably pick it up and discuss some of the articles with colleagues (we certainly do discuss any reading material - such as the Unviersity newsletter or Grazia - that turns up). We receive some magazines at work as part of institutional body membership, and I'll see if it's possible to leave these somewhere more visible and accessible.
And finally...
...a big thank you to Isla and Anne for showing us round. If I've got anything round here please correct me in the comments.
Showing posts with label health libraries. Show all posts
Showing posts with label health libraries. Show all posts
Thursday, 12 August 2010
Wednesday, 11 August 2010
News in brief
 |
| A stack of newspapers by DRB62 on Flickr |
- The UL's Sassoon Project blog has an interesting post about their outreach work to secondary schools. I'm pleased to see the UL trying this out, and am hoping that we can pick each other's brains about schools outreach, as it's something to which the Hoyle Project is actively committed.
- (This one's important) Cambridgeshire Libraries are undergoing a Service Review in advance of making budget cuts, and you can contribute to the review by completing the survey and/or attending a public meeting (full details of which are available in this press release). If you're in Cambridgeshire, fill in the form and tell your friends.
- I went on a visit to the lovely University Medical Library this morning, and had a most informative and (chartership alert) evaluation friendly and future-performance influencing tour from the lovely medical librarians. I shall write that up in full soon.
- Don't forget to sign up for camlibtm. We've added a new section for those who want to come to the post-match TeachEat, too. Add your name if you want to have a drink and a bit to eat to carry on the conversations afterwards, and let us know if you know somewhere good for us to go!
Wednesday, 23 June 2010
Cambridge Conversation (1)
This is the first part of my report about a discussion between health, academic, business and school librarians held in Cambridge on Tuesday 22 June as part of the CILIP Conversation. Part 1 is all about CILIP and part 2 is about the future of libraries.
Lots of the other participants have also reported: Anna, Anne, Isla, Niamh, Sheila, and Jenni.
What do we think about the Conversation?
CILIP asked us to say what we think will happen in 10 years time, but we really can’t do that; it’s a job for futurists. What we can do is to evaluate what has changed in the last few years, and how this might develop in the next 1, 3, or 5 years, and we could have been asked about this in more detail in the survey.
We really didn’t like the CILIP survey much ; it felt irrelevant and lacking in detail. Some of the questions just didn’t even make any sense at all, such as ‘do you think that expectations of your role are increasing’. We also wanted more detailed questions about what we want from CILIP.
What do we think about CILIP?
CILIP feels distant, remote and irrelevant to many - particularly those working in business, school and health libraries – it seems like Update and Gazette have little that reflects our working lives.
The principal of chartership is worthwhile, but there was opposition to having to remain a member of CILIP for life to retain it. Personally, I understand this objection, but I suspect that this is the case for most professional bodies and that it isn’t just a CILIP issue.
CILIP CPD courses are expensive. Many people were very impressed with the courses organised by special interest groups, at very reasonable prices, although it was noted that speakers for these courses are often only paid travel expenses. CILIP courses are much more expensive than those from other similar professional bodies such as the Museums Association, and they’re not reliably good enough for people to want to risk spending £400 to attend them.
CILIP’s building in London is very unpopular; issues regarding its costs and value have been addressed elsewhere.
We read Update and Gazette for the job advertisements, and some people (those training and chartering) try to read it all, but we don’t find much that is relevant or interesting to us. The job advertisements are sometimes for such poorly paid jobs that we wonder whether CILIP should be advertising them at all. It was also noted that it’s so expensive to advertise in Update and Gazette that many jobs are missing.
It was thought that there could just be one CILIP magazine, possibly delivered online only. (I have a lot of thoughts about the online magazines, and the CILIP website in general, but I’m saving them up for another post.) It was even suggested that the magazine format could be dispensed with in favour of personalised news bulletins. There is an e-bulletin feature already, but there’s not a lot of refinement to it.
So why do people continue to pay for membership? Some jobs do need chartered status, and for professionals without an LIS degree, chartered status is important evidence of competence. People couldn’t praise the special interest groups enough – they seem to make membership worthwhile.
We do want a professional body
We want it to advocate for us, and to have good PR abilities and a strong public and media profile. The Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors was mentioned; we’d all heard spokesmen from it on the TV and radio. We really want CILIP to have someone whose job it is to appear on Newsnight, instead of making excuses about how hard it is to face up to Jeremy Paxman.
We approved of Phil Bradley’s idea that it would good to see a proactive CILIP that gets things wrong sometimes, instead of seeming to sit back and let us get on with it.
The example of Micahel Rose advocating for children reading was made. Andrew Motion (chairman of the MLA) wrote in 2008 about libraries in a way that suggested he hadn’t been in many recently, but he has been speaking up for them in the last few weeks. His opinions may not be nuanced enough to capture all the issues that concern librarians and information professionals, but CILIP could benefit from having someone similar to make a public impact.
Lots of the other participants have also reported: Anna, Anne, Isla, Niamh, Sheila, and Jenni.
What do we think about the Conversation?
CILIP asked us to say what we think will happen in 10 years time, but we really can’t do that; it’s a job for futurists. What we can do is to evaluate what has changed in the last few years, and how this might develop in the next 1, 3, or 5 years, and we could have been asked about this in more detail in the survey.
We really didn’t like the CILIP survey much ; it felt irrelevant and lacking in detail. Some of the questions just didn’t even make any sense at all, such as ‘do you think that expectations of your role are increasing’. We also wanted more detailed questions about what we want from CILIP.
What do we think about CILIP?
CILIP feels distant, remote and irrelevant to many - particularly those working in business, school and health libraries – it seems like Update and Gazette have little that reflects our working lives.
The principal of chartership is worthwhile, but there was opposition to having to remain a member of CILIP for life to retain it. Personally, I understand this objection, but I suspect that this is the case for most professional bodies and that it isn’t just a CILIP issue.
CILIP CPD courses are expensive. Many people were very impressed with the courses organised by special interest groups, at very reasonable prices, although it was noted that speakers for these courses are often only paid travel expenses. CILIP courses are much more expensive than those from other similar professional bodies such as the Museums Association, and they’re not reliably good enough for people to want to risk spending £400 to attend them.
CILIP’s building in London is very unpopular; issues regarding its costs and value have been addressed elsewhere.
We read Update and Gazette for the job advertisements, and some people (those training and chartering) try to read it all, but we don’t find much that is relevant or interesting to us. The job advertisements are sometimes for such poorly paid jobs that we wonder whether CILIP should be advertising them at all. It was also noted that it’s so expensive to advertise in Update and Gazette that many jobs are missing.
It was thought that there could just be one CILIP magazine, possibly delivered online only. (I have a lot of thoughts about the online magazines, and the CILIP website in general, but I’m saving them up for another post.) It was even suggested that the magazine format could be dispensed with in favour of personalised news bulletins. There is an e-bulletin feature already, but there’s not a lot of refinement to it.
So why do people continue to pay for membership? Some jobs do need chartered status, and for professionals without an LIS degree, chartered status is important evidence of competence. People couldn’t praise the special interest groups enough – they seem to make membership worthwhile.
We do want a professional body
We want it to advocate for us, and to have good PR abilities and a strong public and media profile. The Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors was mentioned; we’d all heard spokesmen from it on the TV and radio. We really want CILIP to have someone whose job it is to appear on Newsnight, instead of making excuses about how hard it is to face up to Jeremy Paxman.
We approved of Phil Bradley’s idea that it would good to see a proactive CILIP that gets things wrong sometimes, instead of seeming to sit back and let us get on with it.
The example of Micahel Rose advocating for children reading was made. Andrew Motion (chairman of the MLA) wrote in 2008 about libraries in a way that suggested he hadn’t been in many recently, but he has been speaking up for them in the last few weeks. His opinions may not be nuanced enough to capture all the issues that concern librarians and information professionals, but CILIP could benefit from having someone similar to make a public impact.
Cambridge Conversation (2)
This is the second part of my report about a discussion between health, academic, business and school librarians held in Cambridge on Tuesday 22 June as part of the CILIP Conversation. Part 1 was all about CILIP and part 2 is about the future of libraries.
Other peoples' reports are also available: Anna, Anne, Isla, Niamh, Sheila, and Jenni.
What is ‘librarianship’?
There was some debate about whether libraries and librarians need to rebrand as ‘Learning Resource Providers’ or something similar, but this term seemed far too narrow. Maybe there’s something else we could call ourselves, or maybe we just need to be clearer about what librarians do.
One good summary of librarianship (or information professionalism, if you like) that we thrashed out was:
The emphasis was very much on personal interaction and support. The organisation of data can happen from anywhere, but user support and training is best done face-to-face, and one-to-one. This 1947 promotional film emphasises personal interaction in the role of the librarian. Why are we having to work to re-emphasise this now, when it’s surely never stopped being true?
This level of personal interaction and help needs professional staff. There’s definite concern about the de-professionalization of public libraries, and in a similar way about also the closure of government libraries: what impact will this have in the long term?
We discussed some of the ACRL predictions for future of academic libraries, in particular the idea that in 2025 there will be ‘no need to search’ (link to pdf page 16, item number 17 ). This ‘no search’ environment (we wondered if it would be something like foursquare, about which I know nothing) will surely require a lot of unseen work in the background, and it will need common languages and standards across all sources and platforms, and not continual re-invention of standards as we see today (apparently the Europeana project isn’t using Dublin Core standards for metadata but inventing some different standards [I've been corrected in the comments - Europeana are tweaking Dublin Core instead of using it straight, which is clearly better but still not ideal]). Librarians will have to keep interpreting what people say and want until the semantic web is very, very good indeed, and that won’t be soon! Users expect intuitive interfaces, and need to be shown that there are benefits to learning more complex search techniques.
In 5 years time...
We ended the discussion by trying to imagine the future of libraries and information services on a more manageable timescale than the 10 years asked about by CILIP. If you have thoughts about what your library or service will look like in 5 years (both best and worst case scenarios!), then please continue the discussion in the comments.
School Libraries
School librarians can be very isolated. They rely on local networks, feel distant from CILIP, and unrecognised by teachers. School budget cuts means that there may be no money at all for CPD.
School libraries will have to adapt to match evolving teaching methods and to provide tools to help students find what they need outside the physical library, as well as providing project collections of books for use in the classroom.
There are currently not enough computer resources, but this might change as increasing numbers have their own laptops. Even with their own computers they will need help to locate resources online, and in the physical library.
Academic/Faculty/Subject Libraries
Subject librarians will have to know their subject more so as to be able to provide tailored search and indexing services. They might not need to be the academic, or doctor, but will need to speak enough of their language not to sound stupid, but to sound reliable and useful instead.
Business Libraries
Publications need more detailed metadata, for example about the precise materials used in engineering. This has to be added somewhere in the process, but it will be a lot of work, and it’s unlikely that author or user tagging is the answer.
A Cambridge College Library
What can we do to improve the situation?
Other peoples' reports are also available: Anna, Anne, Isla, Niamh, Sheila, and Jenni.
What is ‘librarianship’?
There was some debate about whether libraries and librarians need to rebrand as ‘Learning Resource Providers’ or something similar, but this term seemed far too narrow. Maybe there’s something else we could call ourselves, or maybe we just need to be clearer about what librarians do.
One good summary of librarianship (or information professionalism, if you like) that we thrashed out was:
Librarianship is helping people to work what question they’re really asking.
The emphasis was very much on personal interaction and support. The organisation of data can happen from anywhere, but user support and training is best done face-to-face, and one-to-one. This 1947 promotional film emphasises personal interaction in the role of the librarian. Why are we having to work to re-emphasise this now, when it’s surely never stopped being true?
This level of personal interaction and help needs professional staff. There’s definite concern about the de-professionalization of public libraries, and in a similar way about also the closure of government libraries: what impact will this have in the long term?
We discussed some of the ACRL predictions for future of academic libraries, in particular the idea that in 2025 there will be ‘no need to search’ (link to pdf page 16, item number 17 ). This ‘no search’ environment (we wondered if it would be something like foursquare, about which I know nothing) will surely require a lot of unseen work in the background, and it will need common languages and standards across all sources and platforms, and not continual re-invention of standards as we see today (apparently the Europeana project isn’t using Dublin Core standards for metadata but inventing some different standards [I've been corrected in the comments - Europeana are tweaking Dublin Core instead of using it straight, which is clearly better but still not ideal]). Librarians will have to keep interpreting what people say and want until the semantic web is very, very good indeed, and that won’t be soon! Users expect intuitive interfaces, and need to be shown that there are benefits to learning more complex search techniques.
In 5 years time...
We ended the discussion by trying to imagine the future of libraries and information services on a more manageable timescale than the 10 years asked about by CILIP. If you have thoughts about what your library or service will look like in 5 years (both best and worst case scenarios!), then please continue the discussion in the comments.
School Libraries
School librarians can be very isolated. They rely on local networks, feel distant from CILIP, and unrecognised by teachers. School budget cuts means that there may be no money at all for CPD.
School libraries will have to adapt to match evolving teaching methods and to provide tools to help students find what they need outside the physical library, as well as providing project collections of books for use in the classroom.
There are currently not enough computer resources, but this might change as increasing numbers have their own laptops. Even with their own computers they will need help to locate resources online, and in the physical library.
Academic/Faculty/Subject Libraries
Subject librarians will have to know their subject more so as to be able to provide tailored search and indexing services. They might not need to be the academic, or doctor, but will need to speak enough of their language not to sound stupid, but to sound reliable and useful instead.
Business Libraries
Publications need more detailed metadata, for example about the precise materials used in engineering. This has to be added somewhere in the process, but it will be a lot of work, and it’s unlikely that author or user tagging is the answer.
A Cambridge College Library
In five year’s time the physical library with books in it will still be here. Students are currently very clear that they want to have the physical space to work in, and not even all new academic books will be available as e-books by then, never mind the older texts that are still needed.
Special collections are being digitised, but this can’t replace the importance of the books and manuscripts themselves, and will often lead to increased reader numbers through improved publicity. Digitisation also isn’t futureproof.What can we do to improve the situation?
- Collect evidence of what we do in order to prove our worth.
- Ask our readers and researchers what they want from libraries: this might include help with copyright, and with getting published, more detailed enquiry answering about specific items (see Greening the material text).
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