This annual meeting is run by the SCONUL Access Group for Access reps from all the libraries who participate in the Access scheme. This year it was held at Kingston University and Karen Senior and I were invited to give a talk about our Guidelines on Library Services to International students, which were originally commissioned by the Group. Karen described the background to the report, the research we had done and the reasons why we felt it was timely. I went on to pull out some themes, namely managing expectations, managing resources, information literacy, staff development, publications, communication and strategy. We wanted to demonstrate how the key concepts we had identified in the report link into these themes and to explain in more detail some of the thinking behind these issues. In order to garner feedback from participants on how the Guidelines relate to their own library situations, we asked them to discuss individual themes in break out groups. I’ll be posting the results of the group discussions on the blog as soon as they have been collated.

Outside the Nightingale Centre, Kingston University,showing the new extension to the library – you can see the chairs of the cafe through the window. (photo from Pippa Jones from Leeds)

The slides from our presentation are here:

I have just realised that a short practice report which I wrote for ELiSS (Enhancing Learning in the Social Sciences), a new online journal, is available on their website. I’m not sure how long it’s been there! It’s basically just a summary of my NTF project, what I’ve been trying to do, some of the methodology and some preliminary results.
Access to ELiSS is free, you just need to register

Pippin at work…

http://www.eliss.org.uk/C…54/Default.aspx

Great to see that podcasts of some of the presentations from the LILAC conference are now available on the website

Edinburgh Castle again

http://www.lilacconferenc…_programme.html

Phil Sykes, David Clay and I ran a workshop at the SCONUL Conference on the topic of Research Support. Phil had gathered some data from SCONUL Libraries about what they currently provide in the way of research support and his presentation summarised the results of his survey. It’s got some very useful information in it. Mine briefly covered the seven ages of research model which I have mentioned on the blog before (just discovered the last set of slides I uploaded to the blog have been viewed 265 times!) David looked at the future of research support and highlighted some of the issues we need to consider.
Slides from the presentations are here.

To see David’s slides, click this link. You can see his accompanying notes too

Moira’s slides

Phil’s slides

Having just read the CIBER report, I was pleased to see Ian Rowlands was our second keynote speaker. Ian emphasised that not all of the “Google generation” are addicted to technology, in fact only 20% are “very wired”, 60% are “fluent” and 20% are “digital dissidents”, turning thier backs on technology. He cited the Ofcom report which states that silver surfers use the internet at least 4hrs a week more than GGs (certainly true in my house!). Ian also talked about power browsing – people viewing rather than reading and buzzing around rather than settling on websites. he feels that abstracts are becoming increasingly important and that maybe in the future full text will become redundant for most people.
One of the issues Ian touched upon was that young people no longer have a mental map of the library as an interconnected holistic organism and no sense of the interconnectedness of the internet. He didn’t link this to their information literacy though and to me that’s part of what being information literate is all about, understanding your information environment. In fact, I was disappointed that in the discussion afterwards, many of the perceptions of information literacy which were expressed seemed to demonstrate an information skills perception (and most of the people there were university librarians or deputies, so this is a bit worrying!)

Edinburgh Castle peeping through buildings

http://www.sconul.ac.uk/events/agm2008/

I was invited to the SCONUL conference to help run a workshop on research support (I did a short presentation based on our 7 ages of research model) and was delighted to have the opportunity to listen to some eminent speakers.
Lorcan Dempsey, gave the first keynote on “The network reconfigures the library” making the point that we can no longer expect users to build their workflow around the library, we must now build our services around the user workflow and define our services based on what people are doing.

Photos of Edinburgh in the next posts…

Caitlin (my daughter) abseiling off the Tyne Bridge to raise money for her upcoming trip to Lesotho

http://www.sconul.ac.uk/events/agm2008/