Presenting with Prezi

This post is part of 23 Things for Professional Development.

Prezi

I began this task with some degree of trepidation, having explored Prezi in the past but failed to make it do what I wanted it to do.

However, now that you can ‘Prezify’ Powerpoint slides, I am finding Prezi much easier to use, and here is the outcome of my recent efforts:

Welcome to St Hugh’s College Library on Prezi

I know I’m still a long way off being a ninja Prezi user, but it has restored my hope that I can learn how to use this, and will definitely have another go with it the next time I’m presenting.

Slideshare

I use Slideshare for stashing presentations I’ve made so that other people can access them (sadly only one on there at the moment).

Highlights from Oxford Social Media Day 2011

Oxford Social Media Day 2011 took place on 8th September.  I live-tweeted the event and you can search for #osm11 on Twitter for all related tweets.

Now that many libraries are using social media, this aim of the day was to be inspired to take it further.  Our  five speakers did an excellent job and here are my top take-home tips.

WhoAmI.com – marketing yourself and your skills online

View more presentations from Jo Alcock

• Jo talked about how librarians interact with many different groups of users and stakeholders in our work, and asked us each to prepare a 30-second elevator pitch to market our skills to one of those groups.
• This was great for practising my skills in “selling” the library and its services to senior management, students or academics.
• People will infer things from your brand even if you don’t actively manage it.  For the next exercise, we had to think of 3 words or phrases to describe the brand we would like to convey.
• Use namecheckr  to see if your username is available on a range of social sites
• It’s important to keep your brand consistent across different social media sites
• In social media, commitment to community not the tool is important – go to the sites where your users are.

Public library social media policy #osm11

View more presentations from michaelstead

• Public libraries & museums act 1964 – key legislation relating to how public libraries operate today
• Some things you don’t know in advance, and can’t predict if a venture will work – you just have to try it out
• Need qualitative data to assess effectiveness of service delivery
• Risk aversion makes things difficult (same problem in universities)
• Use social media for service delivery – go beyond using it simply as an announcement service
• The worst possible social media strategy: “we want a Facebook/Twitter/whatever page”
• Libraries can get involved in online forums as well as the main social media sites
• What would you expect from a public library’s social media presence?

Ideas from the audience: Mumsnet, catch kids young, involve community groups, book clubs, humour

Ideas from people on Twitter: Direct contact with someone who can answer queries, not just referral to an FAQ page (via @stormfilled); Up-to-date info & speedy, personal, informal response to enquiries (via @archelina)

Marketing academic libraries in a web 2 world

View more presentations from Ned Potter

• Social media gives great opportunity to listen as well as post
• No one cares about the “how” – focus on benefits not features, outcomes not process (in the words of @radfemburlesque: Don’t say “hey, we have books” – say “hey, we can get you a first / make your 2.1 less work”)
• Recommended sites for Twitter analysis: Twocation, Tweetstats, Klout. Focus on improving engagement stats rather than how many followers you have
• Use Facebook to rescue buried treasure – highlight features of the library
• “One minute on… “ technique for making short and snappy videos. e.g. One minute on e-journals
• Use focus groups to get useful and honest feedback about your service

Andrew Hood from Lynchpin Analytics on Measuring social media success (presentation available to download)

• Monitoring vs measurement – translating what we’ve measured into “has it worked?”
• The monitoring challenge: capture, collate, filter, category, sentiment, classify, trend, risk analysis, respond
• Risk analysis – or opportunity analysis (turn problem into opportunity?)
• Don’t report on something if you can’t do anything about it – use metrics for factors you can influence
• Monitoring tips: set up RSS searches and collate
• Measuring tips: document KPIs, use Google Analytics, benchmark by traffic source & engagement

Duncan Smith of iCompli on Social network sites: managing risks (presentation available to download)

• Something defamatory + published = libel. Things previously said in private now published publicly
• Not allowed to run competitions on Facebook
• Contempt of court: do not publish anything to do with a court case (esp. imp. for local authorities)
• Employee use of social networks – employees with access should have ‘basic’ legal training
• BBC’s guidance/policy docs on social media – managers “should not adopt an overly restrictive approach”
• You are responsible for moderated comments on your blog because you authorised/published them
• Good idea to have a “notice and take down” procedure – could be just an email address to contact
• Data Guidance - good for legal info (subscription resource)

A very thought-provoking day… I find myself dwelling on issues of the last presentation in particular.

I would love to think that most employees are intelligent enough to know what is appropriate use of social media (or ask if they’re not sure) and I worry that too much bureaucracy will extinguish the sparks of imagination and creativity that make social media such a dynamic and fun way to reach out to our users.

I’m pondering how to write a titanium* social media policy that would still have enough oomph to be meaningful and act as a useful tool for staff; while avoiding being just another work-related document that you have to sign to say you have read but then forget about**.

*Low density, lightweight but strong.  See what I did there?

**Examples: equal opportunities policy, smokefree policy, use of IT policy, health and safety policy, fire safety policy (I could go on)… all worthy aims but bogged down by documents that can feel more like a noose than an airbag.

Reflections on ‘the other place’

Earlier this week, Oxford hosted a conference of college librarians from the universities of Oxford and Cambridge.  The theme of the day was ‘co-operation, collaboration and competition’: we had speakers on this topic in the morning, followed by a choice of library/archive visits in the afternoon and time for networking.

The college libraries combine providing information for students and academics like a higher education library; within a physical environment which is part museum, part den; and an atmosphere which is generally more permissive and accommodating than the faculty libraries.  I think our college libraries are quite unique in this way, and it is a great help for us to get together to share ideas in a context that recognises our peculiar situations.

At this event, I spoke about my experiences of working at the Bodleian Libraries compared with working in a college library, and where the main areas of co-operation, collaboration and competition are:

The Bodleian Libraries group is a large organisation (some 750 employees, full-time-equivalent) and I enjoyed the big community aspect of working there.  By contrast, working in a college can be quite lonely, and I’m glad that I came to my current role with experience of working in Oxford libraries, so I have professional contacts close by.

On the negative side, because the Bodleian Libraries group is so large and has so many layers of management, the process for making decisions can be cumbersome and slow.  Also, there have recently been many staff changes at a high level in the organisation, which can bring problems such as a lack of continuity and stability if not handled very carefully.

In the college environment, I enjoy the budget freedom that I have from being the head of my department.  There is top-level support for personal and professional development, which I find very encouraging.  When a decision is made, for example at Library Committee, the decision will generally be backed up and not challenged further after it has been made, which is a great spur to getting things done.  Although colleges and their libraries vary considerably in many respects, we can benchmark against each other.  Bodleian Libraries do not really have any comparable organisations (not even Cambridge, as their libraries as less integrated than at Oxford), but it should not be assumed that this means they are automatically the best at everything.

The working environment in a college is much nicer, especially as college staff have a free lunch every day, and tea and coffee are provided in the mornings and afternoons.  We also have all-staff social occasions at least once a year.

However, colleges are very hierarchical places to work, and I find that social differences such as separate common rooms and lunch arrangements for staff of different status reinforce the divisions between us and can act as an obstacle to everyone working together effectively.  It can also take a long time to become accepted in an organisation that is by nature conservative and resistant to change.

Another interesting point is that as a college librarian, you have to be multi-skilled because you need to cover a great range of skills in a very small team.  I think it would be interesting to develop more skills-sharing between colleges, and if anyone wants me to come and show them how to navigate SFX/OUeJournals or MetaLib/OxLIP+ more effectively, I would be glad to!

I have now had three different jobs at the University of Oxford, and I have sometimes been surprised at how low the expectations can be.   Broadly speaking, the expectations seem to be that keeping a service running is sufficient; not improving or developing it.

Before I moved to Oxford, I expected that the libraries here would be leading the way in user education, resource discovery and the use of space in libraries, but I often worry that we are in fact falling behind other UK higher education libraries.

Finally, here are some examples of co-operation, collaboration and competition between the Bodleian Libraries and the colleges:

Cooperation

• Graduate trainee scheme: trainees from colleges and Bodleian Libraries participate in the scheme together, and there is a mutual benefit to learning about each others’ roles and experiences
• Most Bodleian staff development and training events are open to college library staff at no cost
• During the current decant of closed-stack Bodleian items from Oxford to Swindon, the college libraries have helped readers by allowing them to access texts in college libraries when the Bodleian copy is in transit and inaccessible

Collaboration

• In the summer of 2011, the OLIS library management system is being switched from GEAC Advance to Aleph.  The steering group for this project has Bodleian and college library representation
• Circulation Forum and Cataloguers’ Forum involve staff from a range of libraries
• There is a wide variety of skills in our combined staff pool e.g. cataloguing, conservation, management, social media – and we could make even more use of this

Competition

• E-resources cancellation fees: the fees incurred when college libraries cancel subscriptions to print periodicals are not paid by the colleges but by Bodleian Libraries.  Colleges have made very small contributions to this cost in the past, and discussions are now under way to increase this amount in order that colleges provide a fairer proportion of the total cost
• Non-Bodleian libraries which use OLIS pay an annual subscription which stayed the same for many years, and an agreement has now been reached to bring this charge up-to-date with current costs and include a proviso for future review
• The Bodleian has very strict cataloguing standards for adding records to OLIS.  This is because much of their material is in closed stacks, so readers need detailed records in order to judge if the item is what they require, as they cannot browse the shelves; and as a legal deposit library, OLIS catalogue records are regularly exported to other databases so the standard needs to be high as other institutions will be copying these records.  However, this standard is rather over-the-top for a college library such as mine, where students can access the vast majority of our books on open shelves, and are usually looking for items from a reading list, so a simple author and title search will normally suffice.  I would be keen to develop a system whereby I could create simpler catalogue records for items unique to my library, and have a filter applied so that these records are excluded from the exporting pool.

Note: ‘the other place’ is a term used by people at Oxford or Cambridge to describe those at the other; and perhaps from now on, to be used in the same way by people at Bodleian Libraries or colleges!

Recruiting the next generation of librarians

Yesterday I took part in a school careers evening and talked to many students about what a career in information means nowadays.

Many thanks to Ned Potter for allowing me to modify his original If you want to work in libraries presentation.

Although most of the young people I spoke to told me that they wanted to be a doctor, architect or primary school teacher, I hope I managed to dispel some myths and maybe in years to come they might remember this interaction and give librarianship a second look.

How I became a librarian and found job satisfaction

As part of today’s Bodleian Libraries’ Personal Development and Career Planning Day, Kerry Webb [Deputy Librarian at the English Faculty Library] and I co-presented a session entitled “How I became a librarian and found job satisfaction”.  This is a summary of my section of the presentation.

I began with a brief outline of my career path so far:

*OULS = Oxford University Library Services, now Bodleian Libraries

Job satisfaction in my current role

• Getting things well-organised
• Being creative in use of space, ideas for new collections
• Using technology to make things better: RFID, combined copier/scanner/printer with card swipe
• Project management: combining short, medium and long-term projects so that essentials get done and non-urgent tasks are still progressing, and crises are avoided
• Learning to be a good manager
• Classification geek

Making the most of your current role

• Do your job well!  Add value to the tasks you already do
• Especially if you are aiming for a grade increase at your next job, expect to work above your current job description
• Volunteer to take part in committees and special projects (for example, I organised 23 Things Oxford and the All Libraries Pub Quiz outside of work)

Think about future jobs

• What are you interested in?  What are you good at?  NB: these may not be the same!
• Keep an eye out for job adverts and see how your skills match up.  Identify any areas you need to improve on
• Approach skills gaps in a variety of ways – use experience from your personal life (sports captain, choir treasurer, managing a family, secretary for a CILIP group.  Use the appraisal system to ask for training (some may benefit you in your existing job, such as IT skills)
• Be open-minded about jobs you would consider.  Not all jobs are sexy, but you can learn a lot from any job you do

Some all-round good ideas

• Be prepared to move around to develop your career.  There’s a big world outside beyond Oxford
• Consider Chartership – not much recognised at Oxford, may well be an advantage elsewhere
• Take responsibility for your own professional development: reading, meeting people, reflecting on your current role.  Tools I use include RSS feeds and Twitter.  Meeting people outside your department/sector is invaluable

And a final thought (attributed to Thomas Edison)

“Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work”