Beyond the Horizon: Bringing the Information World Together
May 16th 2022
Event review shared by Louise Masson (Faculty Liaison Librarian, Newcastle University (and NECILIP Committee Member)
The NECILIP committee held our annual conference “Beyond the Horizon” online. As part of the committee, I had been involved in doing some of the logistics to get it organised but unfortunately I was unable to attend on the day. The joys of Zoom and being able to record the conference has meant I was able to catch up afterwards. We will be making the recording publicly available in due course on our Events page
The event was chaired by Dr Biddy Casselden who teaches at Northumbria University.
The afternoon conference consisted of a range of short papers and lightning talks from a range of professionals across the sector and even a talk from America! (again the joys of online conferences and time differences.)
Helen Lawrence, a Community Reading Facilitator covering County Durham was up first covering the “reading for wellbeing” initiative. This project is a pilot which is running until the 31st of October 2022. It involves promoting reading as a tool for wellbeing. It was interesting to hear about how the project came about with a call to action from local author, Ann Cleeves. In 2019, she spoke to health professionals at a conference and challenged local authorities to match her promised funding to employ some staff to look at this area. This challenge was taken up and in 2022 there are seven project workers across five local authorities in the Northeast. The different authorities have tackled the project in different ways however the target is the same to simply encourage people to read to improve their own wellbeing. The project workers were trained in different areas especially in terms of how to talk to people about their own lives and circumstances and to identify ways in which reading might help them. This was focused on reading for pleasure and not improving literacy levels. A lot of research has been done into why reading is important in terms of increasing social intelligence, enhancing empathy and tackling issues with loneliness. The reading groups gave people an opportunity to not only meet with others but provided them with a topic or actual book which acted as a common ground or starting point with other attendees. The books could be on any topic or area of interest to that particular person. They weren’t necessarily focused on factual books about illness or mental health conditions.
The project is to be evaluated by researchers at Newcastle University and it will be interesting to see the findings. Attendees were asked to evaluate their own wellbeing and consider how positive they feel. These surveys were repeated at different stages. Many participants were happy to fill these out despite original concerns from project workers about how people might feel about the data being recorded in an official system.
It was heartening to hear of examples of specific people who have benefitted from this project. Encouraging people to re-engage with a topic area they used to read when they were younger, or switch to audio books so they could craft and listen at the same time. Listening to people’s individual circumstances seemed to be the key.
Different initiatives included book groups, 1 to 1 reader development sessions, home visits, book drops, family story sessions and book recommendations.
These were held in different places and not necessarily anywhere near a public library. Successful examples included drop-in sessions at a foodbank, a reading group in a supported housing complex, and community organisations who offer free meals. Participants didn’t need to make an extra effort to visit a public library but received the books and the support in a place they would have been anyway.
Despite the challenges of COVID and the pandemic, it was clear that successes had been made to link people up with right book for them and engage them with reading in terms of pleasure and escapism.
The next short paper was from Jennifer Hillyard who is the Library and Archives Manager at the Common Room with a great title for conference paper “in, out, shake it all about!”. Jennifer covered the background to the project from the allocation to the National Lottery fund grant to make the building accessible and fit for modern use to the re-opening after completion. This involved creating a new charity, “The Common Room” which would be able to run the events programme, and deal with public engagement. So the Mining Institute is now simply part of a wider organisation.
Jennifer liaised with other professionals at other institutions including Durham University and Tyne and Wear Archives as well as reading information from John Rylands who had recently gone through a similar process in terms of packing up their collections. Jennifer also highlighted a great series from the British Library in terms of their care booklets.
It was clear for a project this size a lot of thought and preparation has gone into. From sourcing crates (800 in total!) to the logistics of volunteers packing them in the correct way and then moving a 25kg crate down and out of the building when there isn’t a lift! Jennifer outlined how meticulous the labelling system was and the creation of a spreadsheet just in case a reader urgently needed an item retrieved.
The building itself provide many challenges but these were resourcefully overcome with design of their own book chute to move books from the shelves on balconies to lower areas ready for packing. They also need to purchase a Genie Platform hoist to slide boxes down on to the lower floor of the building, ready for the removal company.
The packing up also involved objects and paintings as well as the book collection. So, an audit needed to be conducted to ensure that fragile items were managed and handled in the correct way.
The new library area now contains a fit for purpose strong room and a dehumidifier if it ever needs to be used.
It was clear this was a very complex project in terms of dealing with stakeholders, lack of access to the building during COVID to be involved in decisions regarding library space as well as managing off site volunteers doing meta data projects. Jennifer passed on some great top tips, and we look forward a NECILIP visit to The Common Room in the future.
After a short break, attendees heard from my colleagues at Newcastle University, Anne Archer and Lorna Smith who are Assistant Liaison Librarians. They covered an essential skills programmes called “Your Skills”.
At Newcastle University they’ve had mixed success with drop ins and take up of sessions held by the Library. There were pockets of success especially from the Writing Development Centre (WDC) who ran a “write here, write now” initiative together with “Feedback Friday” where students could discuss feedback from their academics with members of the WDC team.
During COVID, the University created buffer weeks to allow student to catch up with teaching materials or for academics to schedule in additional teaching if needed. These weeks also provided an opportunity for the Library to deliver online one-off sessions. During this period the Library also employed a new team of Academic Skills Advisors. This provided new opportunities to look at the offering and content of workshops and lectures from teams based within the Library. They also decided to trial Libcal from Springshare which sits along other products from this company to organise a mini standalone programme of sessions.
This has now morphed into a full programme of sessions covering the whole academic calendar. The planning team was made up of different colleagues across the service to look at the content, who was delivering, how to market and how to evaluate. Many of the sessions were based on existing content which were used within modules and programmes already by the Library.
These sessions were for all students and session times ranged from 30 to 60 minutes. The Library also started to bring in other teams with specialisms in Wellbeing and the hope is to deliver some with the Careers Service in the future.
Some sessions were recorded although this wasn’t appropriate for workshop or more interactive ones. Materials in terms of the PowerPoints and recordings of ones which were suitable were housed on SharePoint for attendees to return to if needed.
In the first Semester attendance was quite disappointing but for the next Semester the project team used a huge variety of different marketing channels and not just relying on the library website or newsletters to students through staff-student committees.
Announcements on Canvas (Newcastle’s VLE) proved persuasive and there seemed to be direct correlation between the post going live and bookings coming in on LibCal. They also used paper leaflets stuck to toilet doors, student noticeboards, plasma screens and Yammer (a companywide announcement board for internal University staff).
They have run 110 events which originally had 1634 bookings. Confirmed attendance for these workshops was 474 students. Popular sessions were generic ones which included Referencing tips and help, EndNote overview and drop in, Planning your dissertation and Managing information. As expected, it was the more niche sessions which brought the lowest attendance including finding chemical data and finding business information (I’ll not take it personally that I ran the later of these!)
Feedback was collated through a form on LibCal where library staff can drill the data to see which subject School the student is with and what level they are (e.g., undergraduate or taught postgraduate) which is useful to see where the gaps are.
Lorna, Anne and the rest of the project team are doing a full review before planning sessions for next academic year. New avenues might be working with other teams across the University e.g., Careers, expanding the programme to include specific sessions for Research Postgraduates and creating a single promotion page with all content on one place instead of being spread across the library website.
The final lightning talk of the day came from Leanne Young who works as the Distance Services Librarian at the University of Sunderland about H5P.
The is an open source tool where you can create an account or download a plug in so you can use it within other products. Given the nature of Leanne’s job it was nearly business as usual under lockdown as the students which she supports will probably never set foot in the library in Sunderland due the nature of the programme they have chosen. However, Leanne is always keen to think of different ways to engage with distance learners and use new technology which might assist with this. Previously Leanne has used Articulate and Camtasia to create videos and online tutorials however this free platform is very easy to use and can be embedded within other platforms such as the VLE. Leanne outlined different layout or features such as multiple choices questions, hot spots, drag and drop activities as well as providing examples of how they looked to the user once they were created.
Leanne has written some additional blogposts that you might want check out if you are interested in using H5P and seeing it in action with some examples:
Examples of H5P learning objects - Beyond the Horizon 2022
Creating Interactive Teaching Resources with H5P
Creating Interactive Teaching Resources with H5P
Sign up from H5P for free at https://h5p.org/
The final short paper of the day came from Dr Rebeca Peacock who is an Instructional Designer at Boise State University. Again a bonus of being online means we can hear from projects in other countries.
Rebeca outlined the background to instructional design in America and how professionals within libraries were concerned they didn’t necessarily have the skills or knowledge to switch to online provision during the pandemic. Rebeca discussed how competencies have been researched by the Association of College and Research Libraries but not necessarily always covered the online teaching element. Historically most library instruction has been a “one shot” approach where students might receive an hour lecture or workshop. However there ae now many examples of how the library is embedded into the curriculum and sessions are delivered at different points throughout the whole programme. But there may be gaps in knowing what the best design or best practices regarding the creation of online library instruction is.
Rebeca covered how she researched and created a new competency-based needs assessment. McLagan (1997) defines a competency as the knowledge, the skills and attitudes one needs to possess in order to complete a competency. They can be useful to help with standardisation and provide several steps for professionals to focus on and engage with. She interviewed 18 high performers or experts in this field who were identified through University websites, LinkedIn or though her own personal contacts since she works in this area herself. She then transcribed and coded the interviews using In Vivo, Axial and code weaving to identify themes. She then created a model which was sent back out to participants for comment. This model involved five categories:
1. Designing online instruction.
2. Teaching in online environments
3. Learning Technology
4. Interpersonal communication
5. Attitudes.
Participants within the study identified various barriers including attitudes, job preparation and not being trained to create and deliver online, the technology itself, lack of funding for libraries and job load.
The research is round half way through however the competency list is meant to be aspirational and not a prescriptive list which I think is a useful way to think about it. It will be good to see in the future how this could be practically used by organisations to make cases for the creation of new job roles or staff training.
Thanks to all committee members involved in the organising and delivery of this conference. Special thanks to our chair, Biddy and to all of the speakers who took time to write, deliver and share their own projects and work with CILIP members.
Louise Masson, Faculty Liaison Librarian, Newcastle University (and NECILIP Committee Member)
