I’m at LILAC at the moment – the Librarians’ Information Literacy Annual Conference.

LILAC is a three day event starting this morning. I travelled to Liverpool with a librarian colleague from Aberystwyth – Joy Cadwallader – and the train wasn’t delayed! All connections made! A minor miracle, which seems even more auspicious when you take into account the gloriously shining sun. It almost made it worth getting up early (anyone who knows me well will testify to the importance of the ‘almost’ qualifier).

It may be worthwhile and appropriate to run through the original 5 W’s of information literacy that have been with us since Neolithic man: Who, What, When, Why, Where.

Who – myself and five others:
Lucy Collins, Cardiff
Michele Davies, Swansea
Nicola Watkinson, NEWI
Ellen Harris, Trinity
Amanda Bennett, UWIC

What – LILAC.

When – Until Wednesday. Today is Saint Patrick’s Day, which is apparently why I keep seeing drinkers in green wigs, and at least one librarian is touring Irish pubs in the city instead of coming to the LILAC social.

Why – We have received sponsorship from WHELF (the Wales Higher Education Libraries Forum), using a CyMAL grant. For this reason I consider us the ‘WHELFare Cases’. Our outcomes will include a talk at the HE Gregynog Colloquium, an article in Y Ddolen, and a report to WHELF.

Where – Liverpool.

[Enforced mingling at break- and lunch-times. BTW that is an apple core.]

I have been to four talks today:

“The library? Why would I go there?” – Library use by undergraduate students in China, India and Greece Anja Timm

This was the keynote speech – and at a time when institutions are keen to gain extra income from international students it is important for us as librarians to be aware of the different backgrounds and research cultures overseas students may have. For example they may expect much more supportive relationships with staff; or perhaps not consider citation to be important. Only by understanding our users’ beliefs and assumptions can we tailor effective programmes of information literacy to their needs.

Innovative Design: Using Problem-based Learning to Teach Information Literacy
Alexis Smith Macklin

For this and the following sessions there was a choice of up to five parallel strands. This was the first of two talks I went to today from a US perspective.

Alexis described how she began by benchmarking the current information skills of students in order to prove that there was a need for work in this area. Recent research has shown that our current students are comfortable with technology – but that is not the same as them being information literate. To be able to show this is a powerful weapon in then being able to do something about the situation, just as the first step at an addiction club is to admit that you have a problem (so I am told).

Moving on from this, Alexis worked on a program to get students to become more critically aware of their use and assessment of information. Students worked together in supported groups, and the results were impressive.

Crosswords, Library Bingo and Quizzes: Getting more active learning into our teaching.
Andrew Walsh & Sarah Munks

100 ways to liven up sessions – as well as bingo, quizzes and crosswords, Sarah and Andrew touched on the Cephalonian Method; use of music; voting systems (electronic or paper-based); and many other methods they used in a series of inductions where each one tried a new approach. Many of these methods were tried out on the audience in this sessions – I am very pleased with the bingo marker I got to keep.

Many of us have used or tried these methods in our own sessions, but it was good to see it all brought together with some fresh ideas and that most important ingredient – enthusiasm!

Teaching Every Student: Strategies for Reaching a Diverse Audience Online
Nancy O’Hanlon

The second US speaker, Nancy gave a succinct and enlightening summary of the many ways in which our users may differ in their abilities and demands, and how we can cater for those needs with flexible approaches to information literacy and information provision (from web accessibility to catering for different learning styles). Some of the tools demonstrated are things that I intend to investigate in more detail later.

It is not all work-think-work though, since librarians like to play too. The social evening took place at the Sefton Park Palm House, and I felt most refined standing near the amazing sub-tropical greenery of this fantastic building, the moon visible above through the roof, while an ensemble played a range of music, amongst which I recognised Gershwin and – appropriately, given the host city – a classical rendition of The Beatles (”When I’m 64″). I stayed until the last bus – it wouldn’t have been right to leave early when it was a free bar.

[Sefton Park Palm House - from the review here]

I attended a CoFHE Wales meeting on Friday 23rd November. It was a multi-site meeting via video conference, so I joined Ellen Harris (Trinity) and Mark Ludlam (Gorseinon College) at Trinity College, Carmarthen.

Ellen Harris gave us a tour of the library afterwards. Unfortunately my camera is broken so I couldn’t get any photos…

During the tour the three of us discussed the music video for ‘Librarian‘ by Haunted Love. Mark had used it during a session with students once, something that I had been planning to do as well! It can be useful in a few ways, e.g. in challenging expectations of what a library or LRC is like; or perhaps as a way of introducing a dry topic such as rules and regulations – “Does the boy deserve to be killed? What did he do wrong?” (Obviously not really suggesting murder as a penalty for breaking the regulations!)

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In terms of public transport adventures, on the way home there was a minor collision between a camper van and my bus. My bus won – the camper van lost its wing miror, which made one hell of a bang…

I thought it would be useful to create a summary post – to give an idea of some of the things I have been looking into recently (in no particular order), mostly with regard to learning resource use and the e-learning agenda. The breadth of subjects shows how wide-ranging the area of learning resources is, and how much a librarian needs to know! If you want to know more about any of the topics below then please get in touch with me.

Voting systems

Our Optivote voting system was used in some sessions by Coleg Gwent recently, which were apparently well received. I am thinking of collecting a few case studies on the use of voting systems in FE – please let me know if you would be interested in discussing their use in your college! (This may lead on to perhaps collecting case studies on other aspects of resource use in the future). Our RSC Wales Del.icio.us account has links to voting system suppliers.

[Optivote handsets and receiver]

Information literacy

As you may know, CyMAL has given the FE Learning Resources Managers’ network a sum of money to run more information literacy events, and RSC Wales is helping to organise them. Strand 1 – ‘Skills for success’ will be comprised of two events, one in North Wales (Deeside college, Wed 28th November) and one in South Wales (Swansea College, Fri 14 December). This will be followed by Strand 2 ‘Strategies for Success’, a one-day course aimed at managers and run by Sharon Markless (Thursday 24th January at the University of Wales College Newport Caerleon campus). For the Strand 1 events we want to have a couple of short examples of what librarians are doing to increase the success/impact of information literacy or induction sessions. It might be something online, it might be a classroom based activity, it might be marketing – anything really, as long as you have something achievable that you can show or describe in an enthusiastic way! If you are interested in perhaps talking about something from your college then please let me know. It would also be a chance to disseminate your work across the professional community in Wales. I often hear of interesting innovations (e.g. this September Coleg Powys used the Cephalonian method in their LRC inductions), and it is good to get those messages out to a wider audience.

I am also working on a Moodle module about Information Literacy (currently looking at what other UK RSCs have done) and need to get on with it, but other things have been taking precedence… As the Pet Shop Boys would have said, it is always on my mind…

Our RSC Wales Del.icio.us account has a ‘bundle’ (yes, that is the technical term) set up for information literacy.

Second Life

See my blog entry below. Zombie Greenwood lives! There are many possibilities here. If any FE librarians want to test it out as a communication medium then just let me know and I will teleport over!

Federated Access Management [FAM]

One Welsh FE college has expressed an interest in moving from Athens to FAM, and we are looking into it.

It is possible that there could be a UC&R Wales event on this in Spring 2008.

See the RSC Wales Del.icio.us account Access Management bundle for more information.

RSC Wales Del.icio.us account

You may have spotted the mentions of this above! I have been tidying, removing dead links, repairing broken URLs, updating, re-tagging, adding new categories, merging others etc. If anybody wants to suggest links or changes then just let me know. Hopefully it will be a useful resource. I have a few more routine updates to do when I get the chance. View it here – then feel free to bookmark it!

Welsh Heritage User Group

I had been involved in talks on the future of this group. Ian Cockrill (Swansea College) then did a survey of all Heritage users in Wales to gauge support, but due to the small number of reponses it was decided that, at this point in time, establishing a Wales Heritage User group appears non-viable. However Ian will continue to represent the FE/HE sector and Wales at the national user group, which Heritage users can join, and he offered to raise issues at that forum. There may be an option of a library management system event in the future – something that is under consideration.

RSC Wales website

The RSC Wales website has been updated recently. I have been updating some of the useful documents originally created by Samantha Edwards, and will be making them available on the website as soon as the new access arrangements are finalised. In the meantime subscribers to FE-LRC-WALES will have received some of them (free e-resources etc.)

[The new-look RSC Wales website]

College queries

Obviously these go on all the time, from queries about LMS bids to requests for copyright-cleared image sources.

One interesting query was about accessing electronic copies of articles to store in the institutional VLE. Some of you may be aware of the British Library’s new Higher Education Scanning Service, which could be a really useful resource in Wales, but the HESS service is currently HE only. I have spoken to staff at the British Library who were very helpful and said they would be looking to possibly roll the service out to the FE sector. However there may be some issues that need clearing up with the Copyright Licensing Agency [CLA] first. I have been in touch with the CLA and am awaiting a definitive response on the issue. If I get any news I will inform FE LRC managers.

Open Source Library Management Systems [LMS]

In FE in Wales we have seen proprietary VLEs replaced with the all-conquering Open Source Moodle. Just about every Welsh FE college is using Moodle, or about to, leading to a situation where colleges can easily share resources and be involved in a community-support situation.

Could this happen with Library Management Systems? There are a few possibilities listed on the RSC Wales Del.icio.us account, and a few of our colleges are looking at them. But there are many crystal ball questions: What is the situation elsewhere? Could an Open Source LMS become the de facto standard in FE libraries? Which are the best? What support could RSCs offer? Is the situation similar to what happened with Moodle, or not?

There does seem to be a growth of interest in this area. In the last few weeks I have been in communication with the head of a research consultancy and with a lecturer writing an article, both unrelated conversations, yet both people were interested in the potential for Open Source LMS.

I have raised the issue in the national RSC Forum, and will see what happens, and also what the findings of the lecturer I was in contact with are.

Team meeting

Thursday 27th September was an RSC Wales team meeting in Swansea. A good chance for me to catch up with the rest of the team – and a personal challenge to me, since I have to be up before 5am, and leave the house before 6am to walk into Aberystwyth to catch the X40 bus to Swansea!

Yesterday I visited Barry College with my RSC Wales colleague Hannah Dovey. Hannah was running some staff development sessions, and I helped out a bit. Doing joint sessions like this has a number of advantages: there is more opportunity during the hands-on sections for us to help people one-to-one; there is extra support in terms of making points or giving examples; one person can get away for a bit when somethign is required (e.g. PC speakers); but the main advantage for me was learning things from Hannah’s presentations.

We did two sessions on Web 2.0, including descriptions of various tools and their implications for teaching (I covered social bookmarking); then there was a hands-on session using Blogger, where the teaching staff got to create a blog. There was a lot of thought-provoking discussion, since the lecturers wanted to come up with ways that the tools could be used specifically in their curriculum areas, and many good ideas came out of it – for example one lecturer intended to video various technical aspects to do with his subject area, then make them available to students as examples.

The other two sessions were on mind mapping using VUE – a free mind mapping package. After Hannah’s initial talk we helped the teaching staff to use VUE to create mind maps, and staff seemed to enjoy playing with it. Some very impressive mind maps were created in a short space of time, and there was some good discussion of potential uses. One lecturer, Tony Crothers, created carpentry tool types, then had nodes for individual tools. He was going to bring it up on the interactive whiteboard, and get the students to drag things into the correct category, then vote on if it was placed correctly or not, and discuss why. They could then drag it back if necessary, or to another category. It was an interesting way of combining different technologies to be both interesting and useful for the learners. I learnt a lot from the lecturers we were showing things to!

I was able to visit the Learning Resource centre as well, and spoke to one of the managers, Rupert James, about their services to students.

I can’t resist a section on my adventures with public transport – this time specifically the joys of buses. Since I have been working for RSC Wales I have seen arguments; physical fights; drunks; people being told off for making lewd comments; and many other sights. I am not talking about the conferences, but about the Arriva X40 service. Don’t get me wrong, I love the principle of public transport; I love getting to my destination without being stressed from driving; I enjoy being able to work while I travel. It is just the implementation of public transport by some companies that takes away a bit of the fun. Using that bus to travel to Swansea or Cardiff has its own challenges. Arriva stopped using proper coaches a long time ago. It is now just a normal hard-seated bus, so a 4 hour journey to Cardiff is a torture for your bottom. And your bladder, since there are no toilets – so you dare not drink any water on the bus or for a few hours before, therefore dehydration can be added to discomfort. Thanks, Arriva!