Network, network, network

Flickr:Photo by zzathras777

Today I met with Janice Tullock (Janice Tullock: Archive and Heritage Consultants) who offered to meet with me to discuss setting up as a freelancer.

I’ve met up with a couple of people who freelance already and it’s been invaluable, but it’s not something I’ve been doing consciously it’s just something that’s happened by chance – either from setting up a coaching session with an experienced freelance trainer and coach, to Janice offering to meet me for a coffee through Twitter, or to my friend Gil asking her friend Tim whether he’d mind having a chat with me.

My meeting with Janice was no exception to this rule (I hope she won’t mind me quoting/paraphrasing her) and one of things she feels is really important, is to have a network of other freelancers at your fingertips. She said it’s useful on so many levels – knowing people who do ‘what you don’t or won’t or can’t’ is great – because when someone asks you to do something and you know it’s not something in your portfolio, then you can recommend someone else. You can, as I did today, get advice from those more experienced than yourself or those who have different experiences. It gives you someone to bounce ideas off.  You could even, if disaster struck and you became ill, pass work on to someone else. (Which would mean that your client isn’t disappointed and not put off from using freelancers in future.)

I hadn’t really thought about developing a network of other freelancers as such – it’s been more vague than that, more of a ‘ooh they’d be interesting to chat to’. I’ve been concentrating my thoughts on developing a network of contacts who would want me to train for them.

So from now on it’s going to be something that I consciously do, because it’s sensible, because I’m nosy and it’s really interesting to find out what other freelancers do, and because you really do pick up some cracking advice from those who have done it already.

Tags: advice, freelance, freelance trainer, freelancers, freelancing, training

The momentous decision

Hello 2012. Happy New Year to you all.

Photo courtesey of Lisa Charnock.

I’m starting out 2012, incredibly motivated and excited. But then, 2012 is the year of the momentous decision.

Well, when I say momentous I really mean incredibly well thought out and fairly cautious decision.

So, really I suppose we can say that 2012 is the year of THE decision. Heh. Alright I’ll get on with it.

I’ve reduced my working week to four days.

There, I’ve said it. and also I suppose, gone and done it.

Today is my first ‘non-working day’. And that really should have quotation marks round it because actually I’ve been working all day. But not for Mimas. For me. You see, I’ve decided to set up my own business as a freelance trainer.

It’s something that friends and colleagues have been aware of for a while. After all I’ve been talking about it for at least two years. Only I’ve been too scared to try. I talked a good game but I never ever got off my behind and did anything about it. I even had the support of a fantastic friend and boss, who said ‘go for it’, ‘you’ll be brilliant’ etc. Only, I sort of ignored her. (Sorry @joypamer, it was cos of the fear!)

Then in the Autumn, I had lunch with the wonderful Antonio Perkins. Antonio took voluntary redundancy in January 2011 to set up as a freelance graphic designer. (Gratuitous plug of Antonio’s website here: www.badbuffalo.co.uk) and along with lots of sage advice about putting 20% of each fee earned into your savings account for the taxman, took away my fear of failure. He didn’t say “Lisa Jeskins, you are soooo amazing you cannot possibly fail” (in case you were wondering) He just said, when I asked him about failing…

“So?”

“No really, so what? You fail? And? Does it matter? No, but at least you’ll have given it a go.”

So I went back to the office that afternoon and asked to reduce my hours. Which I have and I started today. Da Boss and work colleagues have been incredibly supportive. I can’t thank them enough really. Marvellous people, all round. I’ve also had a coaching session with Deborah Dalley who was brilliant and a huge help as always.

I’m eventually going to be putting courses together on social media, customer service skills, networking/communicating and presentation skills. However for now I’m starting with putting together course outlines on social media and customer service skills.

I’ve also got to get a website together. I’ve started this – kind of. What I’ve got so far is quite frankly and to quote an old colleague. Kak. (Sp?) I’ll let you know when it’s fit for human consumption

Just so you know… It IS scary…AND I’m probably never going out ever again. Well at least not for the next few months… until I make some money. And you know – you’re welcome to come round. I’ve got gin.

It might be scary, but it’s also really exciting and has motivated me in all sorts of ways I hadn’t anticipated. AND… if I get to do, what I REALLY want to do, which is train people, all the time, then if I get to do that, it will all be worth it, won’t it?

Tags: career development, career path, training

What SCARLET means to me.

This month I was asked to write a guest blog post for the SCARLET project. (Special Collections using Augmented Reality to Enhance Learning and Teaching). The project is really interesting and offers good opportunities for archives.

I thought I’d post the link here so you can have a look. What SCARLET means to me.

There’s a rather nice picture of the TARDIS too.

Tags: ar, augemented reality, dr who, guest blog post, jrul, SCARLET

Winging it. To plan or not to plan…

I was recently asked to organise a social media training session for a group of community digital learning champions as part of the mosi-along project.

As an information professional that has predominantly worked in academic libraries – I’d say that the majority of my training sessions have been to students or peers. Until this year, when I’ve been let loose in the community. This year I’ve done social media training sessions for the public at MOSI (Museum of Science and Industry) and at Wythenshawe, Hulme and North City Public Libraries.

For anyone like me who hasn’t worked with the general public (not since I temped at the AA anyway) – it really is a completely different experience. For all our talk that we shouldn’t make assumptions about levels of learners and that all learners are different, at an academic institution or when training peers, there are certain commonalities that it really is safe to assume.

After all, when you are from the same institution or you all have the similar basic work experiences, there is a certain amount of shared knowledge that can really help you to focus your training.

So to train the general public the first time, I meticulously planned these sessions and then had to throw everything out of the window when faced with various issues. These issues ranged from all social media being blocked (yes there’s a lesson to learn…check what technology or software you have available – rookie mistake…although thinking about it, the training was organised by someone else and very quickly.) to learners having such a range of different abilities that  one–to–one training was pretty much the only way to go.

So for this session, not only had I checked all the technology beforehand but I planned not to plan. That is to say – I thought about various different scenarios, and felt sure that if I asked them what they wanted, I could then decide what to do from there.  The idea being that I wouldn’t be completely thrown if I had to change anything on the hoof. I will say that I have delivered social media training a lot over the past couple of years so I felt confident that I had a lot of knowledge in my head that I could draw from. (With thanks to the lady sat next to me on the train, I couldn’t work out what word to use here and she came up with ‘draw from’ )

After introductions, I realised that again I had a really wide variety of different life and work experiences and ages which I would have to accommodate. I had charity workers and community development workers and even teachers from adult education. I even had a researcher from the University of Manchester who was looking at community involvement in social media. (No pressure there then.)

I asked everyone around the room to tell me what experience they had of social media. I then wrote their answers up on a flip chart. This allowed everyone to see the wide variety of different experience levels of social media. It literally went from some who were using ‘everything’ to others who were complete novices.

I then asked everyone to tell me what their expectations of the session were. The idea (in my world) being that I would get a common majority and we could agree as a group on what I should focus on. The best laid plans of mice and… Everyone had a completely different expectation. Completely. However they had all come to learn something about social media. So after a flustered search of my mental database of training, I explained that as everyone wanted something different, that a hands on session wouldn’t really work and asked them if I could talk to them about and demo different aspects of social media. To which, thankfully they all agreed.

So, I talked to them about social media. I demonstrated social media. I spoke about the pitfalls and benefits. I talked to them about privacy issues. I talked to them about their audiences and what style to use. I explained that some people don’t like it. I explained that they wouldn’t reach everyone if they decided to choose only twitter. I explained that social media offered people choices and this could only be a good thing and would tap into different learning styles. I asked questions and got them involved. I got them to discuss what they were going to when they got back to the office, so that I could see what they had understood from the session and got them to reflect a little on what social media might mean for their organisations.

So they got a little bit of everything. Essentially from the top of my head.

And just to prove the old adage that training has to be relevant and just in time, they all seemed to really enjoy it. They were engaged and seemed to find it really interesting. I believe this was because they had a training need and I fulfilled it, even though at the outset all 10 people had a different expectation of what they wanted. I asked them what they wanted and then was honest about what I could provide. As I asked their opinion and got their agreement on how I should proceed, they all felt they had got what they wanted from the session. Was it the slickest training I’ve ever given?

Well, no.

But I enjoyed it. And I think they did too. So sometimes winging it is ok. In fact, sometimes winging it is the only way to go.

Tags: demonstrations, learning, learning styles, mosi, mosialong, socialmedia, training

Enable, encourage and enthuse… or becoming a CILIP mentor.

I’ve decided to become a chartership mentor. (the title gave it away didn’t it?) I’ve been talking to a lot of people recently about mentoring. About having mentors and about being a mentee. About formal mentoring and informal mentoring and how much people have been getting out of this sort of professional relationship.

Helen Stein, Caroline Cooke and I were chatting on the train back into London after the IL day that CoFHE LASEC held. Caroline was incredibly enthusiastic about her experiences with mentoring and couldn’t recommend it highly enough – she’s a great advocate for the CILIP programme. I started to think that this was something I should do. The fact that I’d been asked to be someone’s mentor might possibly have helped to get the ball rolling.

So I started to investigate what I had to do and discovered that we’d possibly started a little back to front.

Usually people decide they want to be a mentor, sign up for the Mentor training, DO the mentor training and then register with CILIP. Once they have been added to the CILIP mentor database – mentees are then free to choose you as their mentor if they feel you could be the right fit to mentor their chartership process.

So having already agreed to be a mentor, I found out that you can only be a mentor if you have gone through mentor training. (Emily Hopkins is the Candidate support for NW and Linda Ferguson is the NW support for mentors and they are incredibly helpful.) The programme is quite flexible and you can have done different mentor training other than CILIP’s. However, although I do a lot of informal mentoring at work, I’ve not had any formal training. So I signed up for the very next lot of training and filled out my registration form.

The following is a short review of the key elements of the training.

Mentoring training

I attended the CILIP’s PTEG Mentor Training run by Linda Ferguson and Emily Hopkins. It’s a good day and value for money too.

The morning session is about mentoring skills and the afternoon session explains more about the process and procedures that you have to go through with your mentee.

Parsloe and Clutterbuck are the key writers in the field. Parsloe states that mentoring is “to help and support people to manage their own learning in order to maximise their potential, develop their skills, improve their skills and become the person they want to be”.

CILIP list the key skills a mentor should have as ‘active listening, questioning and giving feedback’. We got the chance to put all of these skills into practice and I found the exercises very useful and liked the fact that we got a change to ‘have a go’.

Mentors are there to guide mentees in their professional development and help them to start ‘steering their own course’. You are also there to encourage them to reflect on what they are doing and on any training courses that they are attending.

Linda also underlined that whilst you would take the lead initially – the chartership process wasn’t about you, so you should not be the one doing the talking. (as a talker – I feel this is something I should particularly take onboard!) and that celebrating success is a crucial part of any mentoring process.

Linda also stressed that it’s important to get your mentee to think about their portfolio and evidence by thinking about questions and statements such as:

“I did this and it was important”, “What impact did it have?”, “Why is it important? So what?”, “Why is that bit more important than this bit?”

Key mentor qualities: a mentor shouldn’t be biased or judgemental – you are not there to criticise but to motivate and inspire.

Chartership assessment criteria (See Laura’s Dark Archive, on the road to chartership: http://darkarchive.wordpress.com/2011/05/20/on-the-road-to-chartership/)

• An ability to reflect critically on personal performance and to evaluate service performance
• Active commitment to continuing professional development
• An ability to analyse personal and professional development and progression with reference to experiential and developmental activities
• Breadth of professional knowledge and understanding of the wider professional context

Mentees need to demonstrate all four criteria!!

I thought it was interesting to note that Chartership assessors work in pairs. – if they decide to fail someone then the portfolio is given to a new pair of assessors to see if they agree.

The day was very practical and I found it useful to have the opportunity to practice some of the skills expected of me. I also appreciated the opportunity to have a look through some successful chartership portfolios.

Userful Chartership Links

Michael Martin is a CILIP Adviser from the Qualifications & Professional Development Department and has the following presentations online that will help mentors and mentees.

• PPT: CILIP: Framework of Qualifications
• Prezi: Creating a chartership portfolio

CILIP Mentor Scheme: http://www.cilip.org.uk/get-involved/ways-to-get-involved/qualifications-and-professional-development/mentor-scheme/pages/default.aspx

CILIP’s Five steps to chartership: http://www.cilip.org.uk/jobs-careers/qualifications/cilip-qualifications/chartership/pages/stepguidecharter.aspx

Laura’s Dark Archive: On the road to chartership

Parsloe: http://www.mentorset.org.uk/pages/mentoring.htm

Clutterbuck: Everyone needs a mentor, fostering talent in your organisation: http://www.cipd.co.uk/Bookstore/_catalogue/LearningAndDevelopment/1843980541.htm

Tags: career development, career path, chartership, coaching, mentoring, training

Link to my slideshare presentations

http://www.slideshare.net/LisaJeskins/presentations

PPTs from ARA2011, the CoFHE LASEC IL & Teachmeet Day, FIL 2010 and Hub PPTs on EAD and social media.

oh and – just thought I’d say – I’m getting the Liverpool students to create twitter accounts before the lesson.I’ll let you know how it goes.

Tags: lasectm, presentation style

Best laid plans… or reflection on a training event that didn’t quite work

I recently did a training event on social media for librarians and I wasn’t particularly satisfied with how it turned out. So I’ve had a think about some of things I did wrong/could have been better and thought I’d blog about it, so that you won’t make the same mistakes I did. (isn’t that a song?) and by the way, yes, with my experience of training, I SHOULD have known better.

Mistake 1.

First things first. If the course outline has been sent out, don’t add anything extra.

Even if the organiser asks you to.

I added extra topics into my session and it just didn’t work. I ran out of time because I was trying to cover 5 things in 2 and half hours. I ended up asking the room which topic they would rather I cover, blogging or youtube? The majority voted for youtube but I still feel I let those down who wanted to learn about blogs – after all that’s what I said I’d cover in the course blurb.

You end up trying to cover too much in too little time. After all, there was a reason for your original lesson plan and timings and people signed up for that original plan and are expecting to get that. If a course organiser wants you to cover extra stuff then you can always provide extra handouts to ‘plug the gap’ or re-negotiate the timetable so that you can fit everything in.

Learning outcome 1. Above everything else, always match what you are teaching to what the attendees (argh) are expecting and don’t try to do too much.

Mistake 2

Now for the real rookie mistake. Remember if you are the only trainer and you are doing hands on, that your maximum limit for participants is 12. TWELVE. Not 24.

You simply cannot get around to checking that 24 people are all ‘getting it’ and helping all those that aren’t. You also end up running around the training room like a lunatic which is not a good look. AND exhausting. It is also really easy to ‘lose’ someone when there are so many people in the room, which means they won’t have a satisfactory learning experience, they won’t ever book on one of your courses again and your evaluation won’t be great.

Learning outcome 2. Always place a maximum limit of 12 on all hands-on training, if you are the only trainer. (This could be even lower if your personal levels of becoming flustered are high! Or if all else fails – get someone to help!)

Mistake 3

I always tell people to check the venue and the equipment if you are training in an unknown location – as I’ve been scuppered by this in the past. I still remember getting to one room and there not being a projector. Or a teaching pc. Luckily our slides were on Slideshare and so everyone could look at them on their own pc. Even knowing this golden rule, I forgot to ask about sound. And that library induction video from Brigham Young University which is a parody of the Old Spice ads – NOT funny without sound. For those of you who do have sound – New Spice:

Learning outcome 3. When checking venue/equipment/software – look at what you are planning to do and remember to ask about sound! If there’s no sound – re-think your lesson plan.

Mistake 4.

I’ve done similar sorts of social media training before probably about 3 or 4 times now, and one thing has happened every time. Twitter crashes. Seems to be if 15 or more people are all creating accounts in the same room at the same time.  (Or if Wills and Kate announce their engagement, but then NO-ONE could create an account) This means at least 2 or 3 people won’t be able to do the exercises properly.

Learning outcome 4. Not completely sure yet. I have thought about where possible getting people to do some pre-workshop work and come to the session with their new twitter account created but I am concerned as to whether people will do it. I know it really does only take 5 minutes but will they? Is this just lack of training confidence on my part? My other plans are to ask other social media trainers what they do and also to ask twitter and see if anyone else has reported this.

So those were the out and out mistakes, but I also didn’t feel that everyone was prepared to share their thoughts and ideas and I think I need a better (but not groan inducing) ice-breaker. So I’m going to do a little research and see what I can come up with. Something short – that can be done just after the intros, that gets everyone into the spirit of things! Any ideas gratefully received.

So there you go. Judging by the evaluation it wasn’t a disaster – but it certainly felt like it at the time. But then I am a bit of perfectionist – so there’s another learning outcome – don’t be so hard on yourself!

Tags: training, twitter

This week I’ve been mostly reading…

…the following blogs and articles:

DELILA (Developing Educators Learning and Information Literacies for Accreditation. Or my friend Jane’s project @jsecker & http://elearning.lse.ac.uk/blogs/socialsoftware/):

DELILA Project blog: http://delilaopen.wordpress.com
DELILA Outcomes and reports: http://delilaopen.wordpress.com/outcomes-and-reports/

Journal of Information Literacy: http://ojs.lboro.ac.uk/ojs/index.php/JIL in particular the Welsh IL project – great work in getting IL embedded in the curriculum.

Education Needs a Digital-Age Upgrade By Virgina Heffernan: http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/08/07/education-needs-a-digital-age-upgrade/

David Lee King’s blog: http://www.davidleeking.com/

David Lee King’s article on facebook for libraries: http://americanlibrariesmagazine.org/features/05272011/facebook-libraries (good practical advice if your thinking of having a library facebook page)

Ned Potter’s blog http://thewikiman.org/blog/ – in particular: 7 reasons people don’t use twitter… : http://thewikiman.org/blog/?p=1506 and the library sterotypometer: http://thewikiman.org/blog/?p=1671 (and yes I like gin, social media and cats)

Phil Bradley on Google +: http://philbradley.typepad.com/phil_bradleys_weblog/2011/07/google-plus-an-overview.html

Tags: DELILA, facebook, google+, infolit, information literacy, twitter

CoFHE LASEC & IL Group: Information Literacy & Teachmeet Day.

Today I had a great day. I was delighted to be asked to help Jane Secker, facilitate an information literacy and library teachmeet day at Kingston College in Surrey.

The day was really enjoyable and I got chance to meet some tweeps and further education librarians that are passionate about IL.

I’ve decided to put my notes and slides up so that people can have a look at what I said in my talk – apologies though there is a bit of duplication from my ‘Working abroad‘ and ‘Library Routes‘ posts. For the session I considered what IL means to me and for my institution.

What does information literacy mean to me?

Good morning everyone, my name is Lisa and I’m the promotions and outreach officer for Library and Archival Services at Mimas.

Does everyone know what Mimas does?

We’re based at the University of Manchester and funded by JISC to create online services for research and education. Mimas creates services such as my services, Copac and the Archives Hub but also things like Zetoc, Landmap, Jorum and Hairdressing Training and we were also responsible for Intute & the Virtual training suites.

I want to talk to you today about my experiences of info lit and what it means to me.

I started out in libraries volunteering at an FE college, just to see if I liked working in a library. And I did. I liked it a lot. So then I did the usual – graduate traineeship, library school and the whole shebang and I ended up back in Manchester as a first professional at MMU in 2000 I first started being interested in IL when MMU started the Big Blue project in 2001. As a result of the big blue MMU created a specific post for IL which I was then lucky enough to get. I was responsible for creating a generic WebCT tutorial that was customisable. The aim was that I was to teach all of the subject librarians how to make it subject specific. The role also involved a lot IL advocacy with academics as we tried to sell them on the idea of assignment specific, just-in-time and iterative IL training from the library.

The role gave me a passion for teaching IL and also a CLIP teaching certificate. The teaching certificate has been invaluable to my career. As well as giving me the knowledge of how to plan, design and deliver different types of training, it’s also given me a lot of confidence in presenting and facilitating sessions. It’s basically been an overriding theme in my roles and responsibilities over the span of my career.

People

One of the things that I that really enjoy about being involved in infolit is that you get to talk to and teach people. All sorts of people. I love seeing someone get the light bulb moment, which I’m sure is the same for everybody in the room.

A few years ago I worked as a Faculty Liaison Librarian at Dubai Women’s College. DWC was a further education college that was for 16-20 year old Emirati women. One of my major responsibilities was to redesign student orientation and to introduce an information literacy programme. Luckily my boss Garry was an Australian who had worked at QUT and was a big fan of Christine Bruce so I got a lot of support, but it really was a challenge for me. Extremely rewarding, but a challenge none the less.

Teaching IL to women in English when English isn’t their first language means that you have to re-think a lot of your approaches. Particularly when the women you’re teaching are from a completely different culture to your own. The same old examples won’t work, these women haven’t got the same freedoms or experiences as you, so there isn’t the same shared common knowledge. In a country that has a predominantly oral culture, reading is often looked down on by older family members as this takes time away from spending time talking with your family. This also means that anything that is written down, either in a book or on the Internet is treated as the truth.

Plagiarism is rife because in an Islamic culture students see copying work as sharing and helping their friends. Something which is considered to be an extremely good thing within their concepts of Islam. They also seem a lot younger and more naïve than their western counterparts because they are more sheltered and aren’t exposed to information that hasn’t already been censored for their consumption. This meant I had to go right back to basics. I even produced a library vocabulary sheet for them that defined terms such as reference books, dictionaries and the issue desk. I got the older students involved by taking photographs of them using the things I was describing and including them in the sheet so students would also have visual clues to what the words meant. I had to make sure I had their permission and it is sensible not to photograph students who are completely covered. However the students involved really enjoyed being a part of it and loved seeing themselves on the library documentation. Every aspect of what I had come to think of as ‘the rules’ had to be modified in some format.

Training

As I said previously, I’m the promotions and outreach officer for the Archives Hub and Copac and I plan and deliver our user training. I also train masters level archive students in online cataloguing and how to use social media, for networking, current awareness and marketing their archive services. Because of the nature of the services that I work for, the majority of my user training is to post-graduates. It’s also something that I’m finding increasingly challenging in the light of the current economic climate and the more I consider this challenge the more questions arise that I’ve not found the answers for yet.

I work in a small team and I am the only trainer. Fewer and fewer people seem to be coming to our courses as they are usually optional. This means it can end up being quite a poor return on investment, especially if you consider the time taken to design the training, my travel expenses and possible overnight accommodation and then the time where I’m not in the office because I’m training. I do have some very good links with our local universities and London Met. I’ve managed to get a couple of my training courses into the taught part of the Masters English programme at Salford which is obviously ideal and Postgrads at London Met have a great programme of research methods training, which although optional, they really value and I recently taught 20 postgrads how to find primary and secondary source materials using Copac, the Archives Hub and Zetoc, but these are the exceptions not the rule. We’re not sure how to get at researchers, and as there is only myself I simply can’t travel to every university offering them our training and attempting to develop the same level of personal networks that I have in Manchester. I’m just about to review our marketing and communication strategy to try and come up with some hopefully innovative solutions to these issues.

Market research, motivation and marketing

So to this end, Mimas has been working on what we are calling the market penetration project, specifically aimed at finding out why researchers don’t use the services, Archives Hub, Copac and Zetoc. Focus groups and interviews have been done with researchers who haven’t ever used the services. The results are starting to come in and they’re fascinating and for me, have such meaning for IL training and the way that we’ve been doing this at Mimas. The results are showing that those undergrads that were only using Google to find information are now Post grads and their information seeking behaviour hasn’t changed.

This has really underlined, the fact, that as with all IL education that we really need to get to students in their first year, but the issue we have, is that undergraduates rarely have to find information from anywhere other than their own library. I’m really looking forward to the seeing the whole report and believe it will mean not only a change in how we train our users but I think it will radically change how we develop our services in the future.

I’ve also used the terms motivation and marketing here. I believe the two are inextricably linked together. Over the past few years we’ve been seeing libraries and information services moving away from feature led marketing to benefit led marketing, which is crucial in trying to reach students – the age old questions of ‘Why?’ and ‘What’s in it for me?’ are vital in any successful library marketing programme, and, as I’m sure you’ll all agree, in IL training. In my opinion, marketing and IL are extensions of each other. In marketing your services you have to find those hooks which will motivate your students to use your library services. You have to do the same for IL training, and your training shows them how to use those services. I’m sure the first things you include in a training session are the benefits of attending that session.

I’ve come to think that developing a good working relationship with your marketing team (person?) is important so that you can be sure that they consider aspects of IL in everything that they produce and so you always think of those marketing links in your training. I realise that if you work in an FE library that you might not have a designated marketing person for the library. However the college might have someone and it might be useful to chat to them about how they go about marketing the college to prospective students. I’ve found incorporating marketing ideas in my training has really made me focus on the benefits of our services. Last year for example, I did a series of telephone interviews with users of our services. We wanted to know why they used the services and what they would do instead, if they weren’t there. We got some really interesting responses and we were able to use these to show the value that our services add to researchers’ work, but also we managed to get some great quotes. These quotes have been invaluable in showing our value and impact to our stakeholders in marketing our services but they can also show benefits during training. I can say that using Copac will save you time when you are doing your lit. review, but will they really believe me? I feel it means more when it’s coming from a peer or a lecturer and makes it more relevant to them. We anonymised our quotes, simply stating things such as ‘postgraduate law student’, but in future interviews I’m going to ask for permission to use people’s names as I think this helps in making the quote feel real.

Communication

For me, after considering marketing then it’s time to talk about communication. Think about every time you talk with student, whether it be at the enquiry desk, when you’re roving, or answering email enquiries. I believe that what you are doing is marketing and Information Literacy. Having a communication plan as part of your marketing plan allows you to examine all the opportunities that you have to interact with your users. Thinking of them as short moments of marketing and IL may allow you to revamp some of your existing practices and make each interaction more meaningful. Are there any barriers to the communication? Are there things you can say each time? What documentation do you have that can back you up? Are you doing and saying things consistently? Having a strategy that synthesises all of this, will not only help with your workflows, but can also help give your students learning cues if they have a similar experience each time. It could also help new members of library staff as they learn how to answer enquiries and feel more confident about their interactions with users.

LILAC and the IL group

My last slide is a picture of Duncan Chappell, with IL award judges, Gaynor Eyre and Liz Chapman, Duncan was the 2011 IL practitioner of the year. As well as IL being a part of my role at Mimas, I’m also involved in helping to organise LILAC and am the newly appointed training officer for the IL group. As part of the LILAC committee I am responsible for sponsorship, a position I was given because of my experience as an exhibitor for Mimas. (I’m often to be found at a stand pontificating on the joys of Mimas services). This year was my 2nd yr as sponsorship officer and it’s something I’ve really come to enjoy – even when couriers misplace sponsor equipment! Luckily LILAC has some of the nicest, most laid back and low maintenance sponsors on the conference circuit! Being involved in the LILAC conference is hard work but I really enjoy it and always learn tons of new stuff to take back to my role. One of the highlights for me this year was being involved in the pecha kucha sessions – some of them were just fantastic, particularly “Can we do it? Yes we can! Information literacy perceptions among Croatian school librarians” by Sonja A Špiranec and Mihaela Banek Zorica. They described an initiative from academics and school librarians in Croatia in the form of a fairy story… AND they used PREZI! I’m only just starting my new role as IL group training officer so still have a lot to learn. My next task is to sort out the training bit on the IL group website.

So that’s what IL means to me. Does anyone have any questions?

Tags: infolit, information literacy, lasectm, training

Teaching with Social Media.

In November I did my first session teaching social media and using social media.

We had two 2hr slots with the Liverpool Archive students. Our first session was to introduce them to EAD and the EAD editor. Our second slot was an Introduction to Social Media and Archives.

The EAD session can be quite a complicated session for them to get their heads round but they all mastered it pretty quickly. We finished off Session 1 by showing them how to create a Twitter account. The idea being (and these ideas are adapted from Jane Bozarth’s book ‘Social media for Trainers‘) that we’d get them set up and following myself, @bethanar, @archiveshub and @UkNatArchives and to have had a quick search for #archives. They then had a few more suggestions of who to follow and then they had a week to post one thing they had learned about twitter or from twitter since they had joined. They also had to mark the post #hublucas.

Well that was the idea. Best laid plans of mice and women etc. Wills and Kate announced their engagement.  Twitter crashed.  And then it crashed a little bit more. Luckily I’d produced step by step instructions on how to create an account and told them exactly how to use hash tags and provided suggestions of who to follow. So I asked them to create their accounts in their own time. I also said that we would go over their findings in the next lesson and that I would of course be looking for what they’d written using #hublucas.
I really wasn’t sure whether anyone would do it. I was really pleasantly surprised that the majority of students did their ‘homework’ .  Some of them only just before the lesson. But they did it. One ‘wag’ when asked by a friend what #hublucas was, commented ‘just a way of forcing us to join twitter’.

(Having also run workshops on social media for peers and colleagues, I have learned that resistance is ALWAYS part of social media training. Some people just don’t want to engage with it. It might be that they are frightened by technology. They might not want to let go of the control that they have with their own website or library/archives management system. It might clash with their learning style. They might be introverts and not want to put their personal ‘self’ out there. That doesn’t mean that they shouldn’t know it’s out there. It also doesn’t mean that they won’t come to see the benefit of an institutional use of social media. It just means it might take a bit longer for them to accept it or they might only ever have an organisational twitter account. )

When we rejoined the next week I did a presentation about what Web 2.0 and Social media was. I then asked Beth (@bethanar) to explain how social media has helped with networking and professional development or as I dubbed it for the session ‘Marketing yourself’ (Much to Beth’s distress.) I then told them how I use and have used social media to market the Archives Hub, Copac, the LILAC conference and our launch of the new Mimas brand.

I then got the group to discuss twitter after having experienced it for themselves and then seeing how we used it. During the week the students had posted a lot of the negative comments. They couldn’t see the benefits and some of them just thought it was trivial. However once we’d explained the benefits as we saw them for our services they were a lot more convinced but Twitter and could see why an archive might want to have an account.

It occurred to me that I could offset the negative comments by doing this the other way round and have subsequently tried this with the Aberystwyth archives students. Funnily I’m not sure it really matters and part of me, likes the instilling of learning that happens when you change someone’s mind in the way we did at Liverpool.

After twitter, I got the students to look at Facebook fan pages and Blogs and then in pairs talk about what they thought of the pages and blogs they were reading. I got them to think about the voice which was being used in each case, what was different about each one, Did they like it? In the case of the Fan pages, I also asked them “Would you want to work in this institution?”

The students seemed to get a lot out of the sessions and so did I. I was gratified to see them really examining the pages and blogs that they had been introduced to and felt they were really starting to  think about social media in terms of the ‘business case’ or as a marketing tool for their archive.

Pretty pleased all in all and not bad for a first effort. (Well I didn’t think so)

Tags: blogs, facebook, training, twitter