Even though it’s almost 3 years since we wrote the SCONUL guidelines on library services for international students, we do still receive invitations to talk about them and Marie Scopes and I are off to the University of East London on Thursday. I have been collecting feedback from folks who have used the guidelines and hopefully we will be able to add some links to the SCONUL site soon to sites which have been developed using some of the ideas in our report. Once we have given our talk, I’ll add a set of the slides to my blog too.

Panda at Chengdu, July 2010

I’ve been pleased to be involved with Laura Jeffrey’s initiative to develop a network of folks who support researchers in developing information and data handling skills. With support from RIN and Vitae, Laura is inviting interested people to a launch meeting on 14th Feb from 10.30 to 3.00 in the Research Beehive here at Newcastle University. There is more info on the RIN website
It’s a great opportunity to get a mix of people together to think about how we can work more closely to support researchers so I do hope we get a good response.

I haven’t added any posts to my old info lit blog for over 6 months now, so I thought I would start 2011 with the usual good intentions to start again! I’ve finally decided to move from the Newcastle hosted blog to Blogger, partly because it is easier for me to access from anywhere to add posts, but mainly because folks couldn’t leave comments on my old blog, which was very frustrating. The first few posts are “old” new posts which just never got added to the old blog!

I’ll carry on including photos, as they seem to be popular and make it more fun for me too.

Here I am in the Forbidden City in Beijing, July 2010.

I’ve recently started tweeting! We’ve been tweeting for a while as a library team – you can follow us here but I wasn’t sure quite how to use it more personally. However, Gareth Johnston gave an inspiring talk at the USTLG meeting recently and convinced me that I should try. It’s very addictive and I’m also impressed by the way in which tools like Hootsuite can help monitor activity. So if you want to follow my inanities on Twitter, you can do so here…

The garden again

One of the activities being undertaken in the SCONUL WGIL at present is to develop the original 7 Pillars model to make it more relevant to research. Ruth Stubbings and I are working on a draft of the expanded version at the moment, mapping it across to the Researcher Development Framework.

River Wear in winter

http://www.sconul.ac.uk/g…ation_literacy/

After a request from Phil Race on the NTFs list for examples of questions about teaching which folk wanted answers to, I decided to use this as a basis of a library staff workshop. 10 library staff participated, all involved in different kinds of teaching activity – some doing well integrated information literacy work, others running practical workshops, some doing outreach with local school children, others working with archive material. We submitted questions beforehand and structured small group discussions around this, reporting back to the whole group and then comparing our thoughts with the answers from the draft chapter of Phil’s book, which he knidly shared with us. We all felt that we got a lot from the workshop and it went on for almost 2 hours as no one wanted to stop! We’re planning to have a follow up in the summer, where we will look at the suggestions again and see if anyone went away and tried any new approaches and if so, how it went. We’ll also probably carry on with another set of questions and build up our own little set of suggestions.

You can see the questions we discussed and the suggestions we came up with here:

Vitruvian Man sculpture at Vinci, Italy, 2009.

Over the last week, I have been running some workshops as part of our Postgraduate Researcher Development Programme. This particular workshop challenges PGs to start thinking of themselves as both producers and consumers of information and what it really means to be an information literate researcher. Interestingly, when they self assess their own IL level, very few give themselves top marks, so that gives us a starting point for discussion. We talk about way to get started with writing, thinking about writing book reviews or opinion pieces maybe and they think about their IPR rights, retaining their copyright, their views on Open Access publication and their responsibilities to their peers to cite correctly.

The Library in Hadrian’s Villa near Rome, July 2009

I still haven’t got into twittering about myself, but we have started to tweet in the Library. We’re tweeting separately about Science/ Engineering topics and Arts topics. I’m finding that it’s good fun to do, very quick and easy and a great way to communicate ephemeral pieces of information. At the moment we don’t have a mechanism in place to judge how effective it is – I’d be interested to know from others who are twittering about their library how they measure this. We can’t just count “followers” as you can still read the tweets and even set up an RSS feed from them, without being a follower.

A hot day in Florence, Aug 2009

http://twitter.com/nulibsage

Readers of my blog will have realised that I have been very remiss in adding new posts recently. In fact, a few people have even contacted me about it, which is nice, as at least it indicates that folks are finding it worth reading! So here are some of the cumulated posts that I have been writing in draft form over the last couple of months but not managed to publish. I have a wealth of new pictures now, so I hope you enjoy them too.

Lea Gardens, Matlock, May 2009