A small reflection on budget news

Today, I sent an email to my library team. It's full of questions; I am sure the answers will start coming soon too. Slightly edited, here it is:

Last night, I went to bed thinking about cuts: additional £11,5 billion the government shaves off the public sector (1/2 billion will come off education, i.e. you and me) and – I have been told – £xx,000 of our college library budget (after licences, travel and photocopying, this means the “book budget” will be half of what we’ve had this year).

Next year will not be disastrous for the service – we’ll be leveraging on the collection built in previous years. However, we’ll have to cut magazine subscriptions and purchasing (e)books straight away.

The service will eventually become irrelevant *if we continue focusing mainly on providing learning resources* – we’ll have not enough them to satisfy the demand anyway + I think, in the situation of very limited resources, mass unemployment (i.e. many students will not be able to afford even a textbook already costing almost half of the weekly jobseeker’s allowance) etc., teaching will be moving towards freely available resources, printouts, handouts on Moodle etc.

I am both sad with the cuts and hopeful that this will prompt us, the library team, to a radical reflection. We should spend some time thinking where the future for the library service in the college may be. Here is a blog post which has stayed with me for over a month now - http://philbradley.typepad.com/phil_bradleys_weblog/2013/05/envisioning-the-future.html Please look through it – long; read carefully the last three paragraphs. It’s talking about public libraries, but many thoughts are applicable to us as well.

The college’s mission is Transforming Lives and Unlocking Potential (I hope I remember it well) – how can the library, i.e. us, the team, be in the centre of that?

So, we need lots of creative thinking, engaged talking, supporting each other and going an extra mile where it makes sense (as well as surrendering anything that is just unnecessary balance).

Google Removes Links to WordPress

Writing the previous post, I noticed that Blogger (i.e. Google) removes hyperlinks to WordPress content unless the the URLs are spelt out.

For example, a link blog should take you to the http://nwhclibrary.wordpress.com ... Well, it's greyed out and disabled. 

Looking At The Library Blog Statistics: users choose value-rich content

For almost three years, the college library has been using a blog (http://nwhclibrary.wordpress.com/) for marketing and user education. It’s been one of the most exciting and defining developments in the library’s recent practice.


I have learnt a lot since then, also by making mistakes. We have experimented with using the blog as a social platform for soliciting views and interaction with the users. We have tried to teach them how to follow blogs, and this blog in particular, using RSS feeds… to a very little effect. One of the important lessons I learnt was that the library users (and learners in general) will not flock to the specially designed for them virtual spaces. They may stumble upon the library where they are already spend their time, e.g. Facebook and Twitter, but any form of an active engagement on their part there is very unlikely – a college library simply can’t compete with our users’ own interests, hobbies and concerns. They may, however, look for the library when they need a quick fix of the forthcoming assignment or the OpenAthens access details – either for e-books or shopping discounts.


Top pages and posts for the first three months of 2013



Annual Report for Marketing Library Service*

From several colleagues of mine in the FE sector I have heard that they produced annual library reports addressed to their line managers, but they rarely heard feedback or observed any change following those reports. The documents were likely to be lost in among other papers or forgotten in the emails inboxes.

Few years ago my college colleagues and I spend some time thinking on effective marketing for the college library. One of the bottlenecks identified was the lack of meaningful communication with the college managers and key stakeholders. The library has much to showcase and the college – to be proud of that, but the venues for speaking about our contribution to the college successes are extremely limited within the institution almost solely focused on measuring learners’ progression.

As any other college service or team, the library produces its annual self-assessment report which is then incorporated into the departmental/directorial SAR; at that stage it is probably archived. The college librarian’s line manager is the one who sees the document and, hopefully, makes some conclusions out of it; then its content is virtually lost for the college.

Plasma Screen for Marketing

One of the most interesting ongoing projects I have been involved, was developing a marketing strategy for the college library which would embrace a variety of media available to us. A year ago I blogged on that experience and then contributed to a JISC webinar on the same topic.

Our approach is open-ended: it should be able to embrace new solutions that become available to the library. The idea is to re-use the content the library generates in a variety of ways. Here is another example of that.

Last year the library got its hands on old(ish) plasma screen and PC; the screen is now mounted on the wall next to two MFDs (multi-functional devices: printer, scanner and photocopier in one piece). These MFDs are the most used in the whole college, mostly by learners: small queues are a normal picture there, so the location for the plasma screen is perfect.

The screen is used for publicising library services and resources, as well as tips and advice. Recently, other college services have started approaching the library for publicity opportunities.

We use PowerPoint to create simple slides which then are displayed as PowerPoint show on the loop. Most of the content comes from what's already been published on the library blog, - the main repository of the content generated by the library. Roughly once a week the slides are refreshed, new content is added, something removed.

Here is an example of the file used on the screen (PDF).

More on iPads in the Library and Across the College

Last Friday, I contributed to a webinar of the use of mobile devices in education organised by JISC. I spoke on the library's iPad project. The slides are here. Some notes - edited for the presentation, rather than for a blog post as such - are below and interim reflections on the project were published on this blog a couple of months ago.

Our iPad project was born out of many conversations with art tutors and their stories of what amazing things creative folk do with them. David Hockney’s exhibition at the Royal Academy of Art prompted us to put together a bid to the college’s Innovation Fund for funding. We were awarded £2,500 to develop the project specifically aimed at art tutors. Six iPads 2 were purchased plus accessories and App Store vouchers. Why iPads? – They are the creative industries' standard.

We contacted Apple, they were sufficiently helpful to make sense of the licences and technology implications. We attempted managing iPads with iTunes, however the application’s functionality was partially disabled on the college network; no Apple Configurator, therefore. Each iPad is linked with its own iTunes account. Email aliases are used for that; physically, all emails from iTunes come to one live email account.

Why Amazon is bad for all of us

Amazon is bad for all of us. Let me explain what I mean. As a hobby, I have started a tiny niche publishing house specialised in Belarusian studies. My first book cost £4 to produce; before Amazon, major book distributors commanded 50% slice of the full price. My book would probably cost £9 then. Now Amazon, virtually controlling the book market in major English-speaking countries, demands at least 70% off. This allows Amazon to offer deep discounts, however, you may have noticed that such discounts are given only to mainstream titles sold also by supermarkets and Waterstones - the only real competitors to Amazon. Via Amazon, my book has to cost at least £12 just to break even if I'm lucky. The problem is not with Amazon as such, of course; a problem is with the economical system favouring market consolidation and concentration of capital. Should we boycott Amazon? I don't think it'll change anything, it's just too late to recover the traditional book market. Just read this and buy another book or, even better, borrow it from a local or college library.

Blogging - notes and handout

Blogging is getting old-fashioned a bit - everyone is talking about Twitter and that kind of real-time media now (it's not social media anymore!). In a sense, it's true: no doubts young people I see are switching from Facebook to Twitter very actively.

Still, blogging has it's value, certainly in FE, which has not been explored fully yet, I believe. Narrative-based blogging is a potent literacy development tool, for example. This year, however, I can see an increasing interest for blogging from Art tutors: they are looking for a simple for them and learners solution to gather, create and share.

Today I delivered a session precisely on that: blogging for learning. The group was great and we almost covered the planned material. The RSS bit (i.e. reading blogs effectively) and copyright were left out until next week.

Here are my notes and the handout for learners. All - free to use/re-use.

iPads in the Library: Interim Observations

This is my article written for the college Staff Bulletin.

Last spring, the college library, supported by the College’s innovation fund, started a project of introducing tablet devices for supporting classroom-based and independent learning in the college. Tablets are a new kind of technology and it is not yet clear what are the best ways of using them in education. The purpose of the project is to learn what tutors and learners will do with the tablets; then evaluate their appropriateness for teaching and learning, as well as to identify the barriers and problems related to their use.

The six iPads purchased for the project have become the most used resource offered by the library. Within the first two months alone they had been borrowed 170 times, with 85% of overall loans by students and 15% by tutors.

The iPads are mostly used in classrooms for research where learning involves a lot of interaction and change of activities. For example, Performing Arts students very quickly switched from laptops to iPads for use in their studio. Students have been using tablets for taking photos, making videos, editing photo and video content, and taking interviews for their research projects.

Staff have discovered how convenient iPads are for video recording the evidence of students’ work in a classroom; how easy is transferring those videos to Dropbox, sharing them with the whole group, linking to Moodle and embedding them into PowerPoint documents.

Also, staff from support areas use tablets in their work. Kelly C. promotes the Job Shop to learners who enquire about the career development opportunities (on the photo).

John T., Engineering, has been using tablets with his level 1 learners for four days every week. In his opinion, tablets allow more flexibility and enhanced interaction in the classroom: they can be easily shared, passed around or placed in the centre of a group of students working on the same project.

His students reported that they preferred working with tablets to textbooks: they liked an easy access to a lot of information and the whole experience of using a physical touch. For the majority of learners this was the only occasion when they used iPads; in spite of that, they quickly learned the basics and showed each other their discoveries.

Among the difficulties, learners mentioned occasionally unstable wi-fi in their classroom and inability to easily transfer their writings over to their personal computers. This should be rectified when Microsoft apps for iPad are released next year. Surprisingly few tutors requested apps to be downloaded to the devices; it seems the concept of apps is more complex than the devices themselves.

The library has already had to deal with the first e-safety incident taken place when a learner was using one of the iPads.

These are only interim observations; they are encouraging – there is incredible buzz about iPads in the library: learners love using tablets in the classroom and outside. As this technology and our experience of using it develops, tablets will successfully compete with PCs for the place in education; and it will happen very soon.

Blogging Journey (A Possible Representation)

This year my colleague, Lin Armstrong, and her new students on 2+2 Childhood Studies programme are to start blogging – as their predecessors did in previous years. When I spoke to them at our first blogging session, it occurred to me that the journey these students would have to make could be expressed in terms of transition from collector to curator to creator.

My usual advice to blogging newbies is to start with cutting and pasting the weblinks and YouTube videos, perhaps adding the titles of those pieces of content as well. This should be easy enough.

The next step is to provide a short description of what’s there, behind the weblink. Then another step – to provide also a short response to the viewed/read: I like it because…, I disagree because… Eventually we should reach the stage where the original reflection prevails; it well may be inspired by another piece of content, of course – an article read, TV programme watched, conversation heard etc. On the whole, the blog becomes a reflection of the author’s interests and abilities.

Blogs are not only a tool for reflective practice; they are also portfolios and depositories of useful materials. Therefore, it is quite appropriate to approach blogging as a collector would: to regard it as a huge box for storing all kinds of useful stuff for the future. In that aspect, a blog will provide evidence of the breadth of reading and other forms of content discovery. It seems to me that majority of people on Facebook stay forever in the collector’s slippers: they bubble away about what they see.

Curation starts with first strategic decisions: my blog will be about this and that, only materials on specific topics will be of interest to me and my audience, I would like to be perceived as someone knowledgeable on certain topics and adhering to certain values. Of course, every student has a manifold of interests and the blog should reflect that. At this stage paying attention to the blog’s audience is important: What would I like my readers to discover, get inspired by? The author is likely to move away from the collector’s excitement of “Wow, that’s interesting! I should keep it” to conscious researching decisions: “I need to pay attention to certain fields of academic (or any other suitable) discourse to build my knowledge and my own story and arguments”. Curation involves not only arranging and pointing out, but “collection development” too, using the librarians’ language.

Becoming a creator is exciting. It involves developing one’s own voice and – developing further – interests and passions. Does everyone has to be(come) a creator? – I think it’s a wrong question as everyone is a creator in one or another aspect. Life and learning are processes: we move from one experience to another, being changed for better or worse, feeling more inspired or less so. When we feel frustrated or discouraged, or just lazy sometimes to write anything longish, we should move back to cutting and pasting, and just commenting in few words, and so to starting all again – from collector to curator to creator. The ideal is being all three at the same time.