Tom Roper's Weblog

The College Library in Changing Time: Len Closs, final plenary

The conference programme had a pleasing symmetry to it: having started with an address from a university vice-chancellor, we ended with an FE college principal, Len Closs, Principal of Northampton College. One of those too-rare beasts, a principal who values libraries, he showed his philosophical training with a presentation that quoted Schopenhauer, Sartre and Frank Zappa.

Libraries are the future of universities and colleges, he said and library staff are full of creative ideas for college development. But are we valued and respected? He took a brighter view of the national situation than Steve Smith, believing that the crisis would not last as long as Steve's valley of death metaphor would suggest, but referred to the closure of the Middlesex University philosophy department, of which he was an alumnus.

There's a plethora of ways in to knowledge, and libraries can support them all, with relevant materials to support learning. In further education learners have a greater range of needs and can be challenging, both individually and in groups. He expected class sizes to become bigger, programmes to become leaner, and students to have fewer taught hours and undertake more independent learning.The raising of the participation age (RPA) would bring more challenges, but here is an opportunity for librarians.

Len recognised the barriers: senior manager priorities, teacher attitudes, closed doors; resources constraints and poor accommodation; he thought marketing and PR the key to establishing FE libraries as the learners best weapon.

At Northampton the library is consistently nominated for staff awards and in spite of the LSC building debacle, Northampton got some of their bid and the library will be at the heart of a new site, so as to demonstrate that learning is pivotal. The college library at Northampton is heavily involved in networking through the CULN (Colleges University of Leicester Network), through links with the University of Northampton and with the JISC RSC. They have two studies on the LSIS Excellence gateway, on ClickView for capturing television for use in the classroom and on embedding information skills into the curriculum. The college supports staff development, with two staff doing a level 3 non-professional qualification and three on postgraduate diplomas.

He concluded by offering us the motto, 'hands on, hands off' and by quoting Franz Zappa's dictum, 'if you want to get laid, go to college; if you want an education, go to the library' (though I have searched for a precise citation for the latter and have not located one yet).

I asked a question about the future of the relationship between HE and FE. Len answered that he thought that shared services would become much more important and that there would be a great deal more delivery of HE in FE, and closer working.

Wednesday workshop: QR codes

I attended Andy Walsh of the University of Huddersfield's workshop on mobile technologies. Andy (@andywalsh999, who also blogs at http://librarymobiles.blogspot.com/) asked us how many of us had implemented a series of mobile technologies in our libraries. The results were something like this:

• QR codes: some
• text a librarian: none
• mobile-enabled search: none
• mobile-friendly web pages: a few
• location aware services: none
• SMS reminders: some
• mobile friend;y video: none
• podcasts lots
• mobile apps: one

I blush to admit that I was unable to add South Thames's name to any of these. It was a practical session and I admire Andy's trust on us, circulating his iPhone round the room for us to experiment with QR codes. For the first time, Andy showed me how QR codes, which I've known about vaguely for a year or two, could be useful. He showed how they could be:

• embedded in the catalogue (Huddersfield use Horizon and Andy said it was the work a =of a few minutes to add these to the catalogue)
• in handouts
• on or near print copies of books or journals also held digitally
• on print credit machines, linking to a video showing how to use them
• on shelf ends
• for bookings

Andy admitted that take-up, so far, was low.

He uses text a librarian and mass SMS reminder services, supplementing inductions. Though they currently ask students to opt-in to receive the service, next academic year they will ask them to opt out. None of us were using location -aware services. Andy showed us Huddersfield on Foursquare, but I have to say I find the way Foursquare works a little childish.

Tuesday workshops at CoFHE/UC&R joint conference

On Tuesday morning I attended Maria Carnegie's workshop. After a game of 'spot the FE/HE student', which is not as easy as you might think, she presented with admirable clarity a case-study of the development of the University of Derby's Buxton campus, which 1636 HE students and 2520 FE share. The campus contains Buxton College and the School of Culture and Lifestyle, which includes hair and beauty, public services, sport and catering. They open for seven days a week, through the Easter break and the service needs to function for 40 weeks a year, because of the disparities between HE and FE term and semester dates. She mentioned one inequitable aspect: while FE students have access to all the University's licensed content, the HE students can see everything except the FE content. Their student data systems make it easy to distinguish between FE and FE students, using different prefixes for the student number. On the other hand FE students are not entitled to inter-library loans. There are some tensions between the groups, and HE students sometimes blame the FE students for behaviour which they too exhibit. On the whole, the experience has been very positive, and there have been benefits for all, and cross-fertilisation between the two sectors.

For more detail see her article in SCONUL Focus:

Carnegie, Maria
Library services for all ages, all abilities, and all levels - welcome to Buxton!
SCONUL Focus 45: 125-127 (2009)[pdf]

In the afternoon I went first to hear Emma Illingworth and Jo Alcock (aka @wigglesweets and @joeyanne) on library brands and the student experience. Once again I found this a difficult session to summarise and would refer the curious reader to Lex Rigby's far better account at http://www.lexrigby.com/2010/06/23/cofheucr-fifth-joint-conference-%E2%80%93-day-2-pt-3/

Finally Ihar Ivanou of North Warwickshire and Hinckley on professional development and career progression in FE. Ihar had posted a survey on the CoFHE Jiscmail list, and summarised his results. This is vey timely work and deserves wider dissemination: I suggest he might want to write it up and consider publishing. A lively discussion covered areas such as the educational levels required of non-professional staff, the fact that very many of us appoint very highly qualified people into these roles, and some of the deficiencies of the current routes to qualification and progression.

CoFHE/UC&R second plenary: the student voice

We should have heard three student voices, but had to make do with one. Neither Usman Ali, Vice President of NUS for higher education, nor the president of tExeter College students union, turned up. However Llywelyn 'Taffy" Morris, Education Officer for the Exeter Guild of Students (the SU) rose to the occasion. Introducing him Liz Jolly said that students are at the heart of what we do, but we make too many assumptions about them. Now librarians are, at last, listening to students.

When Taffy came to Exeter in 2006, Facebook was unknown, and Blair was Prime Minister. The 2010 intake on the other hand have never known unwired life. Now academics use Facebook, and YouTube is referenced in essays.

Taffy has an impressive network of 100 student course representatives and surveyed them. 71% didn't know who to contact if they had a complaint about the library. He felt that librarians too often make blind guesses about what students want. The Exeter university library has been plagued by power cuts, a source of some frustration to students with deadlines, but when Taffy raised it he was told that the library had only had two complaints [it occurred to me that if the library were to listen to what students were saying in social media, they might have picked up the problem-TR].

Following some of the remarks Steve Smith had made the previous day it was interesting to hear Taffy say that the library was the one tangible thing students felt they received for their tuition fees. His reps felt there were insufficient copies of textbooks, and the brighter students resorted to tactical use of the reservation system.

50% of his sample used a mixture of print and digital resources, but he drew attention to the staggering costs of printing, if he wanted a paper copy to annotate or highlight, Only 4% of his sample said they could find e-journals easily, describing it as a game of hide and seek which the journals always win. Who teaches library skills he asked? Lecturers, it seems, and that poorly. He achieved his degree without ever using an e-journal. Students also wanted more desk space and more computers.

This lead to a lively discussion. When asked what might be the best time for library skills to be taught, he suggested that librarians take over teaching time, invading classes in a guerrilla way.Asked if he bought core texts, he replied that it depended on the subject. He did a joint politics and economics degree, and bought texts in economics, but not in politics, where the sources he needed to use were more disparate.He thought libraries should use focus groups more. He thought the National Student Survey unhelpful, because it only reflects the views of final year undergraduates. He goes to the library often, partly for social reasons. He was shocked when he found out the amount of material sitting o the shelves that had not been borrowed in over ten years. He hadn't been very involved in planning the new library space. On when to survey students he thought mid-year was best. I asked him whether he could see any difference between postgraduate and undergraduate attitudes to the library; he replied that, like most student unions, they have some difficulty in organising postgrads.

Monday workshops

it's difficult to blog workshops. So much of the content is in the exchanges between the participants, hard to capture except in a video of the proceedings.

Ruth Curry of the Research Information Network presented on the theme, Library what library? Building on Steve Smith's remarks, she pointed to a future of prolonged significant cuts. It's too late for efficiency savings, which have already been made. There will be a much greater emphasis on shared services, including sharing with FE. Stock and staff will be hit hard, and it remains to be seen whether ring-fencing of STM (science, technology and medicine) will persist. Journals budgets have been growing at the expense of book budgets. Extra student places have been cut by half, Welsh universities are starting to share, we must expect significant losses.

There will also be, though neither Ruth nor Steve Smith referred to this, some institutional closures and take-overs, in both FE and HE. The weak will go to the wall.

In the new situation, libraries have to show how they add value to educational institutions. Among the services that could be shared are access, purchasing, management of digital resources, catalogues and cataloguing, the LMS, storage, disposal and training. How much use is made of other peoples libraries? [In FE, zero-TR]

We need to focus on academic priorities, on research and user needs. Ruth shared some work RIN had commissioned on researchers' behaviour. They value speed and convenience, use a narrow range of sources, and are put off by pay walls. They continue to need quiet space. Students show many of the same characteristics. They tend to pick and dip and use services in the early hours.

Then we worked in groups and were encouraged by Sally to think the unthinkable.

The second workshop, by Leo Appleton, on branding a super-converged service, is less easy to describe; I would have liked to have heard more about how he and his team had developed their service, and less about the general aspects of brands in the modern world, which was mostly devoted to multi-national monopoly capitalist organisations.

CoFHE/UC&R session 1

Oh calamity. I seem to have deleted, or not saved, my notes of the first session on Monday afternoon. From memory, Michele Shoebridge, who runs a super-coverged service called Academic Services, including libraries, IT and student services, welcomed us and talked us through the plans for new buildings on the campus. Then the V-C, Professor Steve Smith, spoke, giving his view of the current and future state of higher education funding. Many of his arguments can be found in his recent Observer article, but the main points I recall are

• We need not fear the budget too much; it is the autumn's Comprehensive Spending Review which we should fear more; he expects it to require cuts of 20-25% over four years
• He talked at some length about tuition fees, a misnomer, he was keen to point out, and what might happen after the Browne review reports. He sees us descending into a valley, whose depth we do not know, and eventually ascending on the other site, but to what altitude?

We ran out of time so, though I had my hand up, I couldn't ask him, as I intended, to ask him to describe how he saw the future of HE and FE partnerships.

That doesn't do justice to a rich and thoughtful analysis. But if my notes ever appear, I shall amplify it. I also commend to you Lex Rigby's account: http://www.lexrigby.com/2010/06/22/cofheucr-fifth-joint-conference-day-1/

CoFHE and UC&R Joint Conference

I'm off to Exeter for the CoFHE and UC&R Joint Conference next week. I've created, as a service to conference-going humanity, an iCal calendar of the programme. To subscribe, go to webcal://ical.me.com/tomroper/UCRSCoFHE.ics; to view online, go to http://ical.me.com/tomroper/UCRSCoFHE

The twitter hashtag #exeter10 is already seeing a lot of traffic. But are we the only event in Exeter this year?