Rediscovery!

In the process of purging my old iPad and discovered the Blogger app. Embracing Twitter seems to have relegated blogging, and there are so many demands on my time.

Since the last blog entry I have changed jobs twice and I'm now working in the legal sector.

Same challenges, better decor.

I still haven't made any progress with my gardening. Squirrels dig up everything as soon as I plant it. 

We hope we might be seeing light at the end of the Covid tunnel.

We are living in "Interesting Times"

Successfully Revalidated and already looking at the new year

Flushed with the success of my last CILIP revalidation excercise, I am now logging all CPD activity in order to go through it again.  I know that CILIP members voted not to make revalidation mandatory, but I'm going to pretend they didn't. Something like revalidation is just the kind of incentive you need to re-focus on your own professional development when your working day is full of other priorities.
Latest in the list of training undertaken is Itslearning. The college is migrating from moodle to this new VLE platform over the next few months and my team are in the vanguard.
We are hoping to introduce a more modern and truly interactive VLE to deliver real blended learning. Very much relying on the tutors embracing the new medium.

CILIP Revalidation Ahead!

Social Media Interaction being an activity that counts towards revalidation, I had better get on and start blogging again!

GCC challenging times

So the college has decided to take part in the Global Corporate Challenge.  I have been fitted with a pedometer to count my steps and am captaining a team consisting mostly of folks like myself. That is to say, people who probably thought they were quite active until they found themselves, a week in, in the twenty-thousands globally while the leading teams have done about six times as much walking between them. 

Well, it serves to take the mind off recent stressful preparations for "the Inspectors". It had got to the point when our choice of potted plants on the window ledges was called into question by those with very little horticultural nouse. Anyway it is over now and I am about to embark on something new- the User Survey. More to follow...

VLEs - Moodle Doodling

Phew! It's taken a while to get back to the blog. Sorry about that.

I can definitely say I'm settled in to the job at the college now.
Today I finally banished the 'order card' that has been at the centre of stock ordering processes in the library since who knows when.  I have created a list library in Sharepoint on our intranet and it now serves as the place where books are requested, where the orders are logged, Dewey applied, receipt acknowledged and, most splendidly, statistics extracted.  There's only one item entered so far, but I have a good feeling about it. My team were positive about it so hopefully this will take off.

VLEs though. Very much enjoying learning about Moodle and have started mocking up some potential  sites (sorry, 'courses') for the Learning Resource Centre.  So far, I've created web pages, embedded youtube videos and added all sorts of whizzy things but will they end up in the finished product? who knows. The E-Learning Manager provided some great training and I am full of ideas, but I just have to make sure not to over-do it!

There is so much potential to promote the resources, and service by linking to areas of our course from the tutor course, I'm making sure that all the academic liaison meetings that the team have with tutors mention what we are doing and how linking to us will enhance their own course pages by providing additional resources.   We'll see how it goes.

We did some staff development today. This probably sounds quite basic, but it turned out that the team had used hardly any of the features of Outlook except to send and receive emails. So I was able to give them some handy tips for task lists, keeping track of follow-ups, sharing calendars, etc. The next aim is to banish the paper diary that haunts the issue desk!

We are preparing for Safer Internet Day when we will be helping to promote e-safety by having the SID videos and our college e-safety presentation on a loop on the big screen (biggish - you probably have a bigger TV in your living room...)

And finally, I was meant to be having some intensive training on the IS Oxford Heritage system in a couple of weeks, but the internal paper trail means it will necessarily be delayed. I'll probably blog about that once it's happened.

Anybook - a Work of Genius

So my first task in my role as supervisor of a College Learning Resource Centre was to deal with Withdrawn Stock.
The Manager had been through the collection like the proverbial dose of salts and extracted anything 'old' and anything that had not been checked out for the last five years.  This turned out to be several thousand items.
Firstly these had to be checked by the Tutors to ensure we didn't throw away valuable reference items.
Most Tutors had been through the mountain of books before my arrival and the process of removing their records from the catalogue had begun.
In my first week, I worked with my new colleague to review the remaining items and begin removing these from the catalogue too.  Using the Heritage system for the first time I logged a query with them about the quickest way to change the status of scanned items. I was surprised to learn that there was no quick and definitive way to do this.  Using Dynix in my last role I was able to ask the system to change the status of scanned items and then go through scanning one after another. This meant that if something was not recognised in the scan it was identified immediately and set to one side.  In Heritage, the method was to scan everything to a list and then run this list through a report that would change the status. Any items that had not been recognised by the scan had to be sifted out via a second report.
Not ideal.
However, eventually all the books were withdrawn from the system and the question remained about how to get rid of them.
There were more than would fit in the municipal bins, and only a third would have been easily recycled.  It was clear the college were not keen on arranging a skip or any other method of disposal.
I began to dispair until I noticed an advert in the CILIP Update about a company called Anybook.
Basically, Anybook will take any book off your hands and will either try and sell it, or recycle it humanely.  Understandably, Anybook are very busy and couldn't come immediately, but when they did come and collect, they took everything we had withdrawn.
Do you know, even if they don't sell a single item I'll be pleased as it was a no-hassle solution to my immediate problem. I'll keep you informed if they do manage to sell anything!

So, next task, getting the Tutors interested in electronic books...

Boxing clever

I have just finished my last week in the public library and this week I have been mostly boxing up the entire collection in preparation for a refurbishment project.  Not that the library is getting refurbished as such. A new lift and a ramp, some council offices, a couple of new doors. I suspect that customers will expect new carpets and a lick of paint but may be disappointed. Unless they are wheelchair users in which case they will be pleased they can finally get into the library.

The hope is that while all this work is going on, they might finally discover why the power keeps going off!

The packing was extremely well managed and was completed inside a week ready for the removal team to take it all away.  It was made slightly easier by the fact that the stock is not going to be made accessible while off-site. Some carefully selected tomes have made it to the temporary facility (situated across the road from Mary Portas' knicker factory) but customers will be using other branches in the interim.

I have really enjoyed working in this environment which has been very different from my previous roles.  Now I'm looking for the next challenge. But first, the application forms...

I would be interested to hear from anyone who has undertaken a project where they have had to pack a library, and what were the associated challenges.