Book Exchange in Paris

During a short trip to Paris, I popped in to a cultural centre somewhere on outskirts of the city – exhibitions, workshops, a courtyard used for theatrical shows, bookshop and book exchange trailer: take what you want and leave what you’ve already read. Just like in my college where the Book Exchange has been going from strength to strength for over two years now.

User-driven acquisition practice

Involving learners in shaping their college experience, including learning itself, has become an important aspect of educational process. This has affected libraries too.

A few years ago it was almost an axiom in my library that stock acquisition was driven by curriculum and tutors. The librarians kept some funding aside for replenishing the lost and damaged stock and subsidising collections for new programmes. We also kept a note of unresolved enquiries – to purchase the resources on the topics which were not covered in the library collection sufficiently enough.

On the surface, this is still mostly the same: the library allocates 2/3 of its budget to curriculum areas to spend on tutors' requests. However, the emphasis has moved heavily towards active observation of what learners borrow and enquire about. On that basis, I research available publications.  While we rarely receive requests for particular titles from learners (despite encouraging that), I keep my eyes wide open to what is borrowed. Usually this observation takes place while I am at the enquiry/issue desk or talk to users in the library. Often I check bibliographical databases (Nielsen BookData is particularly good for that) what else has been published by the same author or in the same series. It is not unusual for the library to have superseding editions of the titles on reading lists provided by tutors.

Being at the issue desk has become for me an exciting time of listening to learners: what they borrow and what they enquire about, even – sometimes – what they talk to each other about. From all that I deduce what’s in demand now and what will be in demand soon.

This all will be impossible when we - hopefully, next year - introduce a self-issue station. Interaction with users will decrease, and with that - an immediate knowledge of what they borrow and why. This is unavoidable: what I described above is not cost-effective in a middle size college library as ours. Usage reports from the LMS in universities can be informative taking into account that those libraries can employ subject libraries who can make sound judgements based on those reports. Unfortunately, this is not the case in a FE college library employing one or two librarians. Therefore, a radically new acquisition model for FE is badly needed.

Free e-books - we are competing not only with Google Books

When a couple of weeks ago bookboon.com, a source of few dozens of free e-books, was featured on TV, I received several emails from the college colleagues alerting me about the site, and few others stopped me on the corridor to share the same news. I was perplexed: what is so amazing about free e-books?! Our library has been offering few thousands of them for last two years. And Google Books has millions.

Just in case, I have added the link to the list of e-book providers on the library website our learners may find useful. I have mixed feeling, however: travel guides are definitely a big No (I checked Paris and Barcelona) - they can't compete with any guides produced by major publishers. Being free doesn't help - there are plenty of much more interesting free blogs, e.g. Europe a la carte.  Information is thin and dry, nothing to suggest that proper field research had been done. The business section, especially personal development guides, seems more promising: bite-size titles have been produced by a consultancy company. I haven't looked at textbooks yet.

It seems to me that the only Bookboon's selling point is its being free. Contemporary retail practice has taught us not to trust full prices, expect discounts and freebies all the time. Widespread music and film piracy, perhaps, makes people to expect - by implication - that books must be free too. As with everything free, Bookboon's stuff has limitations: books contain advertisements and quite a lot of them. Google Books has limitations too - their under copyright titles cannot be printed out or copied and pasted. Arguably, fewer limitations are with library e-book titles - only authentication is required. The simpler it is, the more likely is that we'll be competitive with full-price and ad-supported services. Downloading to users' devices is also the must - that's what people expect when they ask me for e-books.

E-Learning: A Study Visit to Slovenia

Professional development opportunities for FE librarians may be found not only in the traditional places like our own establishments, universities, CILIP or JISC.

Last March, I spent five full days in Slovenia as a participant of a study visit, Creation of Innovative E-learning Resources. The participants of the group came from all over Europe, from a variety of educational and business sectors. The visit was funded by the EU as part of its Transversal programme, similar to the better known Erasmus programme.

The purpose of the visit was to share knowledge and learn new skills in the area of our particular interest, namely – e-learning. My expectations about the visit were quite different to what the visit actually offered: it was surprisingly hands-on, more about practical skills than the theoretical side of e-learning. Despite that, it was useful and engaging.
It was extremely interesting to learn that the government of Slovenia, a tiny Balkan country, sees e-learning as a priority. It encourages the development of new materials and the conversion of existing educational content into new formats. As an example, we were presented with a course book on Statistics for the Travel Industry. Once published as a printed book, it has been transformed into a Flash-based interactive object with animation and tests.

Computers in a classroom - distracting or helpful?

In the last few years, more and more learners bring their computers into a classroom and use them during a class, seminar etc. I found it peculiar delivering information skills sessions to such classes: the dynamic of interaction there seem to be different, not so straightforward comparing to a traditional classroom.

Yesterday I found myself - for the first time - in the role of a learner who had a computer with unlimited internet access in front of me. The most of the time I followed presentations quickly switching for Google to look up the mentioned topics and notions which I found interesting or confusing. I saved linked into Delicious to read some of the discovered content later on. When the presentation seemed to be going too slowly and during shored breaks between them I checked my email, but eventually felt that it was not helpful to deal with my Inbox right then.

As many other things, personal computers and the internet in a classroom has positive and challenging aspects. Ability to create my own flow of engaging with the classroom delivery and material, to enrich it by parallel searching for supplementary content was very helpful. Without a strong determination to learn in that classroom, however, I could easily be distracted with facebooking or online chatting. Hence, it seems to me, a tutor should decide at what extend computers are admissible to the classroom (I am not talking about computer-based learning in this case): not every learner or group has sufficient interest in learning to cope with temptations of socialising online; at least in the FE sector. Tutor should know the group to make such a decision.

Barriers for e-learning

It seems to me that two main barriers for better implementation of e-learning are:

• Fragmented and unequal IT experience and information skills of learners and teachers & the lack of systematic approach to addressing this across all the levels - national, particular educational establishment etc.
• Most of e-learning solutions, especially those based on e-learning objects, require comparatively large initial funding or investment, e.g. time. Hence, employers and state funding bodies must learn from Google's "20% rule" - allowing time for development and innovation.

Professional development and progression opportunities in FE libraries

My CoFHE Conference 2010 paper.

A year ago, when I was acting College Librarian, I had to look at the recruitment practice in my College and I was somewhat puzzled: only "good GCSEs/O-Levels" were expected from candidates for posts as Learning Resources Assistant (LRA). A minimal library-related qualification was expected from Senior LRAs.

I was puzzled because the vast number of learners coming to the library with enquiries were on programmes exceeding GCSE level. An apparent discrepancy in qualifications and skills of library support staff on the one hand, and learners’ needs – as I understood them – has bothered me. Our employers would not dream of allowing the same to happen in classrooms.

Another issue I got concerned with was the virtual impossibility for support staff to move up the ladder to professional posts in a library.

This paper is an attempt to look critically at the current situation with recruitment practice and professional progression and development opportunities in FE libraries.

Library as a means of social change

Access to learning resources will be an important issue in education in the context of addressing the socio-economic inequality that a recently passed Equality Act is talking about. I hope libraries in FE colleges will have a chance to contribute hugely to giving free and equal access to learning resources, information and IT facilities to learners from all the backgrounds.

In the student's shoes

One of unexpected outcomes of entering the Award for Teaching in the Lifelong Learning Sector course, PTLLS, was my ability to look at learning resources provision in the College through the learners’ eyes. It made me question some assumptions librarians get during their professional training.

Being a student in Atherstone, one of the College's outreach centres, means having a limited access to books; at the same time, very few core texts for Teacher Training have been published as e-books yet. To address the difficulties, the College library has done several things:

• we checked all the resources on the reading list whether new editions were available;
• purchased additional copies of the most popular texts even if it meant having a dozen or more copies of the same title (to make sure that nobody has to wait for more than a couple of weeks for a core text);
• created a simple search (http://bit.ly/ptlls_read) on the library online catalogue, Heritage, which would bring up on the screen all the recommended resources in one click;
• made it possible to request library books online for collection and return in Atherstone;
• and finally, promoted all our efforts to students.

After seven months, we have looked at the results and they were astounding. We expected an increase in book loans by PTLLS students, but nothing like 643% we got, from 143 loans previous year to 920 in 2009-2010! (The increase in students' number was very small.)

Another way for literacy development

The Guardian published a story of a (used to be) reluctant reader who found iPhone exactly what he needed for getting into reading. He also mentions why smartphones can be helpful for people with dyslexia. - http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2010/apr/06/iphone-makes-reading-books-easier