The Gift of a Prezi

Last week, I had the most exhillerating experience of my career so far: my colleague and I ran a training session for online resources to all the second year undergraduates who are preparing to go on their year abroad.

The year abroad is a compulsory requirement for our undergraduates; they spend their third year in another country either studying or working. They do a wide range of things, from working in a Peruvian school to working at the Hague or studying in Heidelberg. The one thing that they must all do by the end of their year abroad is complete a year abroad project. For this project, they need resources - books, articles, dictionaries - essentially, information. This can panic our students - they can't borrow library books for a year, what will they do for resources? Which is where this session came in very useful.

I have been running one-to-one information literacy and skills sessions for several years and in previous roles I have given training to subject groups on electronic resources and evaluation. Never before has it been on the scale of 140 students; it was an amazing experience. Working closely with my colleague for several weeks before the session was a really useful experience; although we did not always agree, we worked together to reach compromises and solutions which fit us both. We worked out how we would hang the information literacy strands off the framework of discovering resources: we plumped for off-campus access explanation, finding information, analysing information, storing your resources and references. These strands hung from the practical skills framework of finding and using ebooks, ejournals, LION and Web of Knowledge, bibliographies, other resources such as encyclopedias and dictionaries, concluding with different reference management options. We used our website as an aggregator; this page is the one-stop place to come to to find everything else. It went down well. I had some great feedback from students and the staff found it helpful too.

Thus our dynamic Prezi presentation served two vitally important purposes: it reassured our students that, although they will not be on campus next year, they are still supported by the University's ample resources and it also raised the profile of the library amongst our academic colleagues. This advocacy is vital to ensure our continued value as a library service at all levels of our institution. I thoroughly enjoyed preparing and running the session - I can't wait to develop in this area in the future.

Library Tours

As the year turns again towards Spring and I once again offer my apologies for the blogging pause, I've been thinking about library tours. There's been a lot of talk lately about library tours. Who do we give them to? How do we do them? And what do people think about them?

This is the library in which I work. A few weeks ago, I gave a library tour to a group of library and information professionals from across the East of England. I organised a day of tours and visits which included a college library with special collections, a busy faculty library, and a different type of academic library service. The aim was to give people outside the Cambridge academic sector the opportunity to see how things work and how different the different types of libraries really are. They serve different resource needs. The aim was fulfilled as participants came from Norfolk and Bedford and several different sectors were represented.

Organising the day was quite a lot of work. I prepared packs including maps on how to find the different libraries, I thought very hard about what I wanted to show and tell, and I collated feedback from participants to evaluate the event. Yet the whole experience of event management was a real development opportunity for me and my tour participants gained a lot from seeing other libraries and other ways of running services.

I think this is the key: library tours given by information pros to information pros need to be different to other types of library tour. We all work with information - we know how Boolean works! We might have a deeper interest in a library's in-house classification scheme than the average student. We might care about which Library Management System is used or how the use of ebooks is affecting print loans. We need to tailor our tours. And whilst it's true that it can become a lot of work for the tour-giver, giving a tour to fellow professionals taught me a lot about confidence and dealing with difficult questions!

So today we have another tour organised for our colleagues within the libraries of Cambridge's Colleges. I'm also giving a tour to some tweeple later on in March. By giving tours, we can reflect and muse on our policies and procedures as we explain them to others. It helps to keep us fresh and our services as relevant to our users as they can be. And giving reciprocal tours to colleagues across the profession is a great way to engage in CPD during economically challenging times!