My colleague David and I are going to be running some Welcome Host Customer Care courses for some of the Library and IT staff at Durham University in the next few weeks. Welcome Host is a great course – whenever I do it, it reminds me to think about staff and students as individuals and that we should always listen carefully rather than apply blanket rules.
Thinking about this reminded me about a recent poor experience I had as a “customer” at Cambridge University Library. I popped in whilst visiting my daughter, hoping that as a visiting librarian I would be welcomed and would have the opportunity of looking round what I’ve always assumed is one of the best university libraries in the UK. Maybe I’ll never know now! I’ve visited libraries all over the world and have always been made welcome, but sadly not in Cambridge. I wasn’t given a chance to explain who I was and what I wanted, I was just told that there’s a rule that only members are allowed in and no staff were free to talk to me. What a shame. I can’t imagine that anyone would be turned away in this manner in my own library, however busy we were.
In the Welcome Host course, we talk about how quickly the message about poor customer service can spread and how “nice” customers don’t make a fuss, they just go away and tell others. I guess this blog post is a perfect example of that!

This is as close as I got to the books at CUL! However, they are very neat twirly books!

I enjoyed the latest meeting of the University Science and Technology Librarians’ Group last Tuesday. The Royal Society of Chemistry hosted our meeting at Burlington House in London – lovely venue and a great lunch!
Other folks have already blogged about it fairly comprehensively, so I’m not going to repeat their posts.
You can read Gareth’s blog here
And Lex’s blog here.

The theme of the meeting was “new technologies” but there were some other common threads which came through all the talks. One key issue related to us going to where the users are and also ensuring that we remember the learner experience is at the heart of what we do. Jon mentioned this when he was talking about his presence in the VLE at Nottingham Trent and Mark when describing MyLibrary at Newcastle.
Skills also came out for me as an issue, both for library and academic staff. Linda and Paula described workshops in which they addressed Web 2.0 skills for academic staff – integrating new technologies into their teaching. Is this a good opportunity for library staff?
As usual Gareth made me feel so far out of date with his talk on blogging and microblogging, but he’s sent me lots of useful links which I’ll add in below.

Gareth’s Slides on SlideShare

Videos from Gareth (starring the famous Goose and weasel – can you believe Gareth even wore a weasel tie on tuesday!)
Contrasting Blogs, Twitter & Library News Pages

Explaining Twitter

Kangaroos on the golf course, Port Kennedy, WA

http://www.leeds.ac.uk/li…ing10/index.htm

Last week I went to chat to some postgrad students at Sheffield University. We were talking about my NTF project and what it was like to be a “practitioner-researchers” One area which interested them was the concept I introduced in my NTF report of an Information Literacy Landscape. This is how I descrobed it in the report: “The information literacy landscape through which an individual moves is shaped by external factors as well as a range of personal attributes and perceptions. The IL diagram illustrates the complexity. If we want to develop information literate students, we need to be aware that the landscape in which they are developing will be influenced by a wide range of different factors. Too rigid an approach may result in an individual losing their way through their own personal IL environment.”

I’ve put a copy of the IL landscape on a slide and you can see it here:

http://www.slideshare.net…eracy-landscape

We had a productive meeting of the Information Handlong Working Group hosted by RIN last week, discussing ways in which we can work more closely togther to develop more IL researchers. I’m encouraged that the development work we’re planning in the SCONUL WGIL Group on expanding the 7 pillars model to make it more relevant to researchers will be taken on board by Vitae in the new Researcher Development Framework, due out soon.

The Tornado at Shildon

http://www.rin.ac.uk/news…nd-competencies