A varied career

A sunny start to June saw Jacky Mathewson come and talk to CILIP in the Thames Valley about her varied career and, more specifically, about her work in prison libraries. She started with an inspirational quote from an ex-colleague and Young Librarian of the Future 06/07, Simon Smith, which she felt summed up how she felt about working in public libraries, and probably struck a chord with every librarian in the room:

“I love being part of a public space and organisation which people can use in so many ways – for help, relaxation and enjoyment.  Libraries are important because no one else offers access, help, inspiration and education to everyone without asking for anything in return.”

Jacky started her career working for The Economist Intelligence Unit, then moved onto the Arts Council of Great Britain, then as a freelance researcher’s assistant.

She finally found herself in Holloway Prison library for eight hours a week. Initially the prisoners were not able to benefit fully from the prison library; her job there was to try and help the women find books they would like, but with timetable restrictions she found herself with five minutes to help 20 inmates find a book. Needless to say, this had to change. They managed to make the library part of the ‘free-flow’ schedule, meaning that ladies who wanted to, could stay in the library for the entire two-hour period. This meant she could work with them on reader development. She also ran a course for the inmate library assistants so that they could show they had been doing something of worth while they were inside. She was dealing with women from wide ranging backgrounds, including non-English speaking women who had been caught drug smuggling to support their families, so many were in shock once they had landed inside. Understandably this was problematic in trying to find books they could connect with.

After a move to Reading, Jacky then found herself working part-time on the reference desk of Reading Central Library, a job which she enjoyed for its variety, with enquires ranging from wedding speeches to spider identification, and everything in between! This then merged with other reader services and she was put in control of acquiring the library’s stock of large print and spoken word, and she started a reading group for visually impaired people.

After seeking out more hours she was given shared care of the library within what used to be Reading Gaol, of Oscar Wilde fame, and which is now an institution for male young offenders. If the history of the institution interests you, Anthony Stokes, an ex-officer of the prison, has written a book, entitled Pit of shame (Winchester:Waterside Press, 2007). However, in the present day, what used to be the old chapel is now the recreation area, and the library is housed there. With no computer, a thorough knowledge of their stock is required, so they can keep track of the boys’ favourite titles.

They are dealing with some low levels of literacy so they have started a number of initiatives to encourage these boys to use the service; they regularly put together games packs, with word searches, spot the difference, and other puzzles. They also run the SixBooks Challenge every year, in which participants try to read six books, and write a small piece about them. At the end they receive a reward and a certificate which means a lot to boys who find reading a struggle.

They also run the Storybook Dads scheme, where a recording is made of an inmate reading a children’s story, which is then edited together with sound effects and sent to their child. However, in the prison service, inmates can be moved with little notice so organising future individual activities can be a struggle.

In segregation there are no televisions, so they always ensure these boys have access to games and books and, unsurprisingly, they are always welcomed! One of the great successes was a talk Jacky organised by Andy McNab, an author the boys like - no mean feat, as for obvious reasons, the security protocols in a young offenders’ institution are rather stringent.

There is a prison librarian’s network which offers valuable training and support;  all prisons have libraries though they vary greatly.

Many thanks to Jacky for such an interesting insight into this unusual branch of librarianship.

CILIP Presentation by Julia Hordle of TFPL

Our AGM event saw Julia Hordle of TFPL give an interesting insight into recruitment in the information profession. Even those of us that have participated in the recruitment process recently, from one perspective or another, learnt a thing or two. It has been kindly reported for the blog by one of our committee members:

Julia began by introducing the audience to her own varied career and how varied roles can be in the information sector. Although there are few generic proscribed roles for a librarian, there are common skill sets, for example: Communication, methodology, organisational skills, an enquiring mind.

Librarians have hard skills (cataloguing, literature searching etc) and soft skills (which can make you more competitive in the job market (problem solving, preparation and approach to discussions and meetings, developing empathy (active listening, keeping in touch, showing interest, consistency), an analytical mind, ability to inform/influence stakeholders etc. To identify these Julia suggested reviewing your own value to your peers, taking lessons & feedback from appraisal, using your wider network (other non-library peers) and considering what recipients value in your work. Look at your competencies & examples, think about evidence of communication excellence.

We then moved onto CVs and reviewed the many roles a CV can have, from obtaining a job, identifying your skills gap, promoting your role to management, career mapping and many more (see list below). Find and harness your USP (unique selling proposition), use your CV for this, even if you have no immediate plans to leave your current role.

Purpose of a CV:

• Obtain an interview
• Gain promotion
• Professional biography
• Assessment tool (for HR & self)
• Record of achievement
• Measure of progression
• Self analysis
• Matching requirements
• Compliance (company record)
• To show desirable/essential requirements
• Meets organisational requirements
• Value matching
• Where personal meets professional

Your CV has the value of being a reminder and a representation of you. It is a way to find opportunities both within and external to your organisation, a way to differentiate yourself from other candidates, showing where you bring value and acting as a showcase of your talent

CV Tips

• Develop a CV profile
• Use case study examples
• Select referees that reflect/support your assertions about achievement
• Try mind mapping to avoid over-simplification
• AVOID function, dwell on your achievement
• Include keywords for your CV that will ensure you are “found” for jobs you are targeting
• Use a framework for self-assessment
• Plan themes e.g. outputs, results, functional domain, contextual knowledge (industry or sector), methods & frameworks-research & analysis, IL retrieval analysis, technology, sources and tools, leadership, strategy. 
• Advancement-personal development
• Learning
• Partnering arrangements and working
• Find a balance between the personal and the professional
• ALWAYS tailor your CV to the application.

It’s worth considering when you submit your CV for a new job whether  it is targeted to an automated recipient i.e. online form or to HR department for an initial shortlisting. You need to identify essential requirements and make sure you answer these.  The applicant needs to be self analytical, aware and purposeful.  Applicants should overcome self consciousness and tackle an application with direction, a sense of adventure and good planning (time, resources, focus).  Remember that covering letters are often stored separately and may not be viewed by the assessors. Prepare for & “harness” interviews, noting that interviews are often EVIDENCE based these days

Determining your market value

Finding the appropriate value of your role can be a challenge. Look for precedence in the information sector or business sector. Review how pertinent are your skills, performance & contextual knowledge to the role. Supply & demand will also have an impact, but remember it is the price of the role rather than the person

We finished with a look at the extensive range of job titles and roles that encompass jobs in the information sector – always something to remember when doing an online  job search. It was a thought provoking session and we would like to thank Julia sharing her expertise.

Adding semantic mark-up to optimise your webpages for search engine

We didn't have a meeting last week due to our AGM taking place later this month (for more details see our events page), so in lieu of that we have a guest post from Georgina Tarrant about her work as a Taxonomist. Great to to be able to showcase the varied landscape of the information profession! Take it away Georgina...

Hello, my name is Georgina Tarrant and I am a taxonomy specialist.  I have worked on yell.com for a number of years and during that time I observed a shift from using in-house business listings data to using third party taxonomies and data providers to help us to achieve our organisation goals.

One of the simplest and most effective of these projects was creating mappings between schema.org taxonomy headings and specific Yell.com classifications to improve the way our business profile pages are displayed in organic (i.e. free) search engine results using content mark-up.

Schema.org was chosen for this project as it is an open source taxonomy created collaboratively by Google, Bing and Yahoo.  Using the schema.org taxonomy creates semantic mappings that help search engines to make use of our content.  We started small – we simply added mark-up to our business listings pages which told the search engines that the page was about a local business.  We didn’t even say what type of business and yet this simple change led to a dramatic improvement in how our pages appeared in the automated summaries in search engine results.  Google have a test that web masters can use:

Website mark-up languages like HTML are used to specify how webpage content should be formatted.  Schema.org tags are different because they specify each different type of content on the page in a way that search engines can understand.  This enables us to control how our business profile pages are displayed in automated result summaries e.g. we can make sure that addresses and telephone numbers are correctly formatted as they are elements of the local business taxonomy term.

The next logical step was to tell the search engines what type of business each page was about.  The types of business were sub-categories of the local business heading.  My task was to create a new ontology structure to recreate the schema.org headings in and then to match them to the Yell.com classifications that each business was classified under.  Now Google and other search engines can tell when it is looking at the business listing page for a bakery and when it is looking at a restaurant or takeaway – hooray!  Adding the mark-up made it worthwhile having all of our extended content such as maps, user reviews and opening hours displayed correctly.

We started with local business and food establishment Schema headings but our intention was to roll this out across the whole yell.com classification set.  Hopefully this will improve our search engine rankings and make use of the rich content we have!

PLEASE NOTE

We are very sad to announce the death of our Research Officer Norman Briggs, a long-standing member of the CILIP in Thames Valley committee, and a vigorous champion of professional issues within CILIP. Norman died peacefully in hospital on Friday 8th March. The CILIP in TV committee would like to extend our condolences to Norman's family.

Running a Reading Group for Mental Health Patients

Our first meeting of 2013, held in Reading in March, was well attended and this may have had something to do with our new later time of 6.30pm for a 7pm start. We have made this move so that people in the Thames Valley who live further away from our usual venue can make it after work. However it was probably to do with the guest speakers visited us from The Reader Organisation and the Prospect Park mental health unit. Sue Colburn, a reading leader and advocate, and Sue McLaughlin, a Nurse Consultant at Berkshire Healthcare Trust, came to tell us about The Reading Organisation’s work leading reading groups with vulnerable people.

The Reading Organisation’s method is to read the whole text of a piece of literature together, slowly, so people can interact with the text and each other. In newer groups they tend to work with a lot of poems and short stories, but with more established groups they get through whole literary classics. They use literature as an in-road to helping people with their problems – many finding a way to talk, confront, or contemplate their problems by identifying with the literature. Participants can be as active or as passive as they like, but they can rely on the reading group running week in, week out, except Christmas, giving them a constant source of contact, release, or comfort when they may not feel they have this in other areas of their lives. They have open access public groups in some libraries across the country and others are help in care homes and mental health units.

At first the group at the Prospect Park unit was run as a pilot course, called Tea & Tales, which grew week after week. Some of the success of this may have been due to the fact it flattened the hierarchy, during the reading nurses and patients were all just participants. For a while they could not find the funding to continue running the group. The problem was finding a way to measure the success of these groups. They had qualitative evidence in the form of patients’ reactions and they ran demonstration sessions, but they seemed to be missing out to other things. The good news is that they have now found funding from the Healthcare Trust and hope to start up again in April. They intend to train four nurses to run sessions and run a session at Wokingham Public Library for outpatients that want to continue to use a group. They are also learning how to measure the outcomes of the programme to support their case and prove their value, however they believe that qualitative evidence should not be discounted, how people feel should count.

Currently the programme is little known in the Thames Valley, the only open group run here is in Wokingham Library. If anyone would like to become a group leader they can train to do so through the Read to Lead course, the details are on The Reader Organisation. It was a very inspiring evening and The Reader Organisation is a really worthy charity that makes a difference to lives through literature, what with being a librarian, something I have always believed in. I haven’t done it justice here but hopefully we can do our bit to spread the word in the Thames Valley region; as well as their website they have a blog, you can follow them on Twitter @thereaderorg, or email for more information: info@thereader.org.uk.

#uklibchat – don’t panic! – a beginner’s experience

Our new guest post comes from Slough Library's Audience Development Officer, Gaby Koenig. She has supplied a most welcome crib sheet to a first try at #uklibchat. If you are someone who has intended to join in for months and yet never got round to it (like me), this may encourage you to give it a try, because you won't have to figure out all this stuff for yourself. Over to Gaby...

What do you use twitter for? Some people use it for professional development or just as part of their profession. For others of us it’s more of a personal general fun tool, perhaps a bit like an RSS feed for sites we’re interested in with added bonus material. Some of us have no clue what we’re doing there and are making it up as we go along.

#uklibchat is a monthly twitter chat about libraries and library and information work in the UK. But what is it FOR? I could just say ‘professional development’. More specifically it’s more about having conversations that interest you with other people in the field, making connections to people you might not otherwise meet or speak to and learning about different ideas and working going on in other locations.

That all makes it sound extremely simple. It is, however, both exciting and incredibly confusing to first time users. It’s a bit like being in a room where everyone is talking at once and you have no idea what is going on. Due to the nature of twitter, tweets in a conversation are not grouped together, everything is in precise time order.

Because it is so immediate, it’s very tempting to try and hurry to catch up on the latest comment, but if that is the third reply in a conversation other people have been having on q4, you’re probably going to have to backtrack and by which time it won’t be the latest thing any more.

The two things that will save you from drowning are being prepared and being very clear about what you want to do or say, although being a speed reader doesn’t hurt.

Every chat has a public overall topic and agenda. This is hosted on Google Docs, where anyone can add their own questions but personally I prefer less questions and responding to what’s there rather than adding to the agenda, which may not be got through anyway. Reading the agenda in advance is a good idea, as is keeping it open while you are involved, as with only 140 characters, people may just reply to a question with just “q2” and #uklibchat without any preliminaries to explain what went before or what they are talking about. This gives you a good key to follow topics or when a certain question has come up. I also plan any responses to any questions that particularly interest me or at least what I might like to say.

During chat I have several tabs or windows open. One for the agenda, one for my twitter interactions, one following the hashtag and one following @uklibchat – the twitter feed for the organisers. I try and make sure I follow etiquette and include the question number I am talking about (eg. Q3) and the #uklibchat.

Once the chat starts, I try to do two things, firstly skim for anything that interests me and secondly watch out for prompts that the question I want to answer is officially up for answering. I try really hard not to attempt to join in with every conversation,  to avoid trying to read every single tweet and only respond when I have something to say. This takes a certain amount of self control.

Some people use twitter clients to help them follow the chat. Of these Tweetchat does look rather good and doesn’t require you to create a separate account for it. If you aren’t going to use it to respond, you don’t even have to log into twitter. Best of all though, it automatically adds the hashtag you are following to your tweets when you reply, which is easy to forget in the heat of the moment.

The organisers of #uklibchat asked us to mention the help they can offer new uklibchatters. They have a page that gives a bit of info about how to tweetchat: http://uklibchat.wordpress.com/guide-to-uklibchatting/<http://uklibchat.wordpress.com/guide-to-uklibchatting/ and if you ever get lost or need help, people are very welcome to ask @uklibchat, either during, before, or after the chat, as they can answer questions while it's happening. So now there really is no reason to not join in. Many thanks #uklibchat for the extra pointers.

Library Camp 2012: 13th October, Birmingham

This guest post comes from Charlie Lythgoe (@maniccharlie), Assistant Information Specialist, NHS Blood and Transplant, Oxford, about her experience of the runaway success that is Library Camp UK, which took place last month.  All the more welcome as we had to cancel our November event. Over to Charlie...

On Saturday 13th October, I attended Library Camp 2012 in Birmingham. This is the second year a UK-wide Library Camp has been held, and there have also been smaller regional spin-off events. Library Camp is described as an “unconference”, which their website defines as an event where “participants decide on the programme at the beginning of the event, working on the principle that the sum of the knowledge, experience and expertise of the people in the room is likely to be greater than that of those on the stage at traditional conferences.”

This democratic, participatory approach was also evident during the planning stages, as a wiki was set up where participants could suggest ideas for sessions they would either like to present or to attend. Oh, and suggestions for cake too! Apparently, library camps are renowned for their cakes. Unfortunately, I didn’t have to time to bake anything but many people were more organised than me and turned up with an astonishing amount of whoopee pies, tiffin, brownies, cupcakes etc etc ...

The day began with people pitching ideas for sessions they’d like to lead. These were placed on post-it notes and a rough-and-ready programme was quickly assembled on a flipchart.

The first session I attended was on mental health in libraries, led by Penny Bronchia. This examined the language and attitudes we use in libraries to deal with mental illness in library users and colleagues. We discussed the way that mental health is still a taboo topic that unsettles many people, in a way that other issues (e.g. sexuality and race) largely do not. Should people with a mental health condition be “out” at work? While this may initially cause awkwardness, it can help raise awareness and tolerance among colleagues. Also, by not disclosing a mental health condition, it can be harder to access any support or assistance that the organisation can provide. We discussed how managers can best support employees with mental health conditions and we heard about schemes and reading groups some public library services run for their users.

For my second session, I chose to hear about free and open-source software from Liz Jolly and Andrew Preater. Andrew has already written a comprehensive blog post about this session, so I won’t write at length about it. We talked specifically about what OS software is and what roles it can play. But we also placed it in context by discussing why organisations may be resistant to OS software, how the collaborative mindset present in OS development can trickle in to other areas of work and what skills are necessary in the OS workplace.  I was struck in this session, as in many of the others, at the incredible depth of knowledge and expertise possessed and shared by those who weren’t leading the sessions. If this were a “normal” conference rather than an unconference, then these views would largely remain unheard.

Next, I went to a talk about classification. This session wasn’t as lively as the first two ... perhaps we’d all gone too long without a trip to the cake tables. We shared experiences of classification successes and failures, the pros and cons of in-house versus standard (e.g. LC or Dewey) systems, and the tendency for classification decisions to reflect the need of library staff rather than the need of the user. We wondered how libraries could go about systematically measuring the success of different classification schemes, in terms of how quickly users could find what they needed. We mused on how relevant traditional concepts of classification are for e-resources, especially since there isn’t the “I can only put this book in one place, even if it addresses two topics equally” mindset. E-resources can be “located” in as many locations as the user needs them to be (I recommend the book Everything is Miscellaneous for a good discussion of categorisation in the digital world).

Some participants felt there was a lack of sessions focused on academic libraries, so Christina Harbour squeezed a general academic libraries forum on to the flipchart. I feared that this was too big a topic to generate any meaningful dialogue, but we all had a very good attempt! I’ll just list some of the questions that were thrown in to the mix:

• What impact will the rise in tuition fees have?
• (How) should libraries ‘brand’ their e-resources, to demonstrate the link to the physical library?
• How can we involve academics in the work of the library?
• How do we demonstrate or quantify the value that libraries have?
• Are converged library and IT services a good idea?
• Does outsourcing work? If so, what services can be outsourced?
• Should members of the public be allowed to use academic libraries?
• How do libraries contribute to the employability agenda of universities?

Whew! I feel like we covered as much ground as I did in a whole term of the Academic Libraries module of my MSc, mainly because of the wide range of experiences and backgrounds that were shared.

I then went to a session about the logistics of lending out iPads to library users. Personally, I’d be concerned about the chances of loss or damage, but those sharing their experiences said that this was minimal. We discussed whether users should be allowed to use the iPads outside the library or off the premises, and what state they should be returned in (i.e. delete all photos and log out of Facebook and Twitter). The range of educational apps (for students, medical professionals, scientists etc) is growing all the time, but it can be hard to evaluate the quality of these, and whether they represent value for money. It seemed to me that any library wishing to start lending iPads or other tablets to their users could learn an awful lot from other libraries who’ve already taken the same step.

For the final session of the day, I intended to go to a session on open access. Due to my muddling up the rooms, I ended up in a session on Roaming Libraries. By the time I’d realised my mistake, I’d already got into conversation with the people sat next to me, so thought it would be easier to stay put. A fortuitous mistake! The speaker, whose name I didn’t catch, runs The Itinerant Poetry Library. The name is fairly self-explanatory - she travels all around the world with a poetry library, which opens up for a time (this time can vary) in bars, cafes etc. Depending on how long the library is in a city, readers may be able to take books away with them. They can then check on Twitter to see where the library will be over the next few days so that they know where to return the book.

 I learnt about Radical Reference, who are a group of professional volunteers working with political activists in the USA. Any questions that can’t be answered on the ground can be relayed back to a back-up team who will use their resources to find the answer. And then there’s the Mile High Reference Desk, who provide an information service to passengers on planes! Unlike in many other sessions, this was an area that very few of us had experience in. But it was the last session of the day, and I liked how everyone shared related experiences and anecdotes from earlier sessions they had intended. For instance, there was an earlier session about living libraries, so someone fed back their experiences from this and wondered whether a roaming library of people would be feasible. Once again, if this were a “normal” conference, this opportunity to share and synthesise ideas from other sessions may not have been possible. So, while I don’t know what I missed in the open access session, I do now know some of the amazing ways that librarians are challenging our ideas of what and where a “library” is.

There was a tremendous amount of energy and passion on display at Library Camp 2012, which was particularly impressive since everyone had given up a day of their weekend and many of us had travelled a long way early in the morning.  The conversations that started at Library Camp have continued on Twitter and blogs, and will hopefully generate some great new ideas and good practice.