Being a better Chair

This weekend, I attempted to get to inbox zero in my gmail account and in doing this I discovered loads of bits and pieces I really should have filed earlier. I saved various links to Diigo, cut out webpage adverts and clutter from saved webpages with Evernote Clearly then saved them to my Evernote account and archived emails accordingly. One useful document I found in my inbox was about being a better Chair of meetings. With Fish: a tap essay fresh in my mind (thanks for reading this to me, idleformat) I was determined to actually read the document, actually think about it and then maybe actually write something about it.

One of the things I took from Fish is that I'm a typical web user, flitting between shiny sites, saving stuff to various places (hello Pinterest!) and then rarely going back to them later. I do occasionally try to change this behaviour and this blog as well as projects like CPD23 have encouraged me to consider and reflect on issues, rather than dash on to the next thing without looking back.

Globe Chair by Haldane

Anyway, I have no memory of where I came upon this document about being a good Chair, but it is the product of The Resource Centre, a Brighton and Hove charity supporting voluntary groups in the area. There are some excellent resources on there, including this one, which advises on the role of the Chair.

My job requires me to attend and Chair many meetings but I have never had training on Chairing a meeting. I have learned much from others - both what works and what not to do - but nothing formal, so this fact sheet was useful to read. The main things I took from the short and sweet factsheet:

"A good Chair helps the meeting to run smoothly and efficiently. They will make sure that:

• all the business is discussed
• everyone's views are heard
• clear decisions are reached
• the meeting starts and ends on time" 

Very clear, very simple - but do these things happen always happen at every meeting you've been to? I know they haven't at all the ones I've attended or chaired. Ahem. 

There are many barriers to overcome in order to cover all the business, hear everyone's opinions, make decisions and end the meeting on time: one of them is that there isn't always enough time to do all of these things. I can be one of those people who prolongs a meeting by wanting to talk about every idea so these tips made me think not just about being a Chairperson, but also how to be a good committee or meeting member. For instance, are the words about to come out of my mouth useful or interesting? And related to the topic being discussed? If not, I should think twice about saying them because I may be preventing the meeting from ending on time, allowing others to contribute and ensuring that the agenda is covered. 

Does anyone have any other tips or resources to recommend on this topic (chairing meetings, not me keeping my mouth shut)?

Actually doing something

Iconfinder

This post is part of a project for CPD23 Things which is 'a self-directed course aimed at introducing you to a range of tools that could help your personal and professional development as a librarian, information professional or something else'.


Thing 15 is all about involvement in organised events such as conferences and seminars. Although I have been part of regional or local library committees and groups for most of my professional life  (and therefore helped with organising events), it wasn't until recently that I had what felt like a key role in organising an event. And I found the experience both very time-consuming and very rewarding. And I learned a lot. A lot. So, this is a good place to reflect on this and think about what I would do differently next time around. 


The four events that will provide good fodder for this are:

1. I am the lead person for my campus' Staff Development Hour. This involves organising fortnightly one hour sessions for staff at my library which can tackle specific tools and skills or topics which cover the wider university or higher education context. 
2. Co-ordinating a CILIP Mentoring training course held at my institution recently.
3. Co-organising a one day conference at my institution focused on supporting learners in their transition into HE (this took place 2 weeks ago).
4. Ongoing contribution towards organising the third DARTS conference, as part of the Universities, Colleges and Research Group, south west (UC&R south west). 

Key things I have learned, not necessarily in any particular order:


Ensure you are clear about what your roles and responsibilities are. If you're not (or other team members aren't) you will forget important tasks or miss them out altogether. I remembered to provide information about visitor parking at the mentoring training event but remembered too late for the supporting learners event. This resulted in a last minute email reply to a delegate who had to park in the car park furthest away from the event - not ideal. 


Utilise resources that are available to you. If colleagues or others can support you in any way, ask for their help. I wish I had known what our Library Admin team could reasonably provide in terms of support, which would have saved me a few stressful hours dealing with a jammed colour printer and collating the conference packs. 


Have a checklist. Even if you're not the main organiser, it will prompt you to suggest tasks which may need to be carried out. I'm definitely going to start a checklist which I can amend and add to depending on the event I'm helping out with. I'll be using headings (or maybe pages if I use a wiki) devoted to areas like travel, room bookings and equipment, communication, conference packs and catering with added details such as deadlines (e.g. when visitors' parking spaces need to be booked or when the catering order needs to be submitted). Templates could also be useful which might remind me of asking if delegates have dietary requirements etc. 


Have a shared space to save information, chart progress and remaining tasks and divvy out jobs. For the DARTS conference, I set up a PBworks wiki with pages devoted to areas such as conference organisers' contact details (for contacting each other nearer the time or at the conference), speakers' contact details, a working tasklist where jobs get added and crossed off as we get nearer to the conference, information about the presentations (should one of the organisers get ill or something, the vital information about the speakers etc won't be lost) and a working page where we note down queries and tasks as we think of them. I think it's been really useful and has provided a one stop place to get a view of where we are, rather than tracing back details through numerous emails. 


Try to eliminate the unknowns. For instance, the supporting learners event took place in a room I'd only stuck my head into once before. On reflection, I should have considered the need for microphones because the room was huge. One of the sessions was a Q+A with a group of students who were understandably a little nervous and not especially loud so we should have had microphones set up for this. 

Image courtesy of the Noun Project

Timekeeping is vital. The mentoring training (not led by me!) overran and I fed back that this was the only thing I would have changed, but then my colleague and I let our supporting learners event overrun - uh oh. One thing I could take from this is to be firmer with presenters to alert them when they are nearing the end of their slot. This has to be pre-arranged and made clear to all the presenters or else they might be wondering why I'm glaring at them and tapping my watch. 


Another thing I'd do differently is stick to time even when delegates are having a really good discussion. It is so tempting to allow these to continue when you can see people are getting something out of it, but ultimately sticking to time is important.   


Broadening your horizons and networking with colleagues far and wide can supply you with inspiration. My campus' staff development hour tries to cover practical skills (such as time management tools), institutional and higher education issues (such as student support services ) and numerous other themes (such as our upcoming Student Union 'Question Time' event) and I don't think these ideas would have occurred to me or come to fruition if I hadn't have been inspired by people I've met at work or ideas discussed on blogs and on Twitter. For instance, I heard about Nirvana via JoeyAnne Libraryanne's blog, which will be covered in mine and Rachel's upcoming getting things done staff development hour session. 


I also used an idea from a colleague at the supporting students event, which worked well. Delegates attended from my institution as well as from other local colleges and schools so we wanted to ensure that when we got to the first group discussion on the programme, each group included a range of delegates. To engineer this, we printed the case studies on several shades of coloured paper: the colour of the paper dictated which table you joined for the discussion. This worked well and avoided the hassle and time-consuming task of delegates either reluctantly mixing themselves up or working out from a printed list where they should go.  


As a novice organiser, I would love to hear from anyone with tips on how to organise successful events - what else could I put into practice next time?

Evernote Peek

I am revising for an exam next week and am pretty clear about what I need to remember. When I asked my partner to test me on the British Association of Counselling and Psychotherapy's ethical principles, he happily asked me some questions for all of 2 minutes before excitedly recommending Evernote Peek as the answer to all my problems.

Intended for use on the iPad, Peek uses Evernote and your smart cover (or you can use a virtual one) to test you on whatever you want. You need to set up a quiz in your Evernote by creating a new notebook then adding notes to that notebook. For each note, the title is where you type your 'question' and the body of the text is your 'answer'. So, the notebook might be 'Counselling', the title of a note within this notebook might be 'Ethical Principles' and the body might list these principles, with as brief or full details as you choose.

Evernote screenshot showing my notebook and note

You can create multiple notes, of course, each one representing a different question.

Once you've done that (and synchronised your Evernote notebooks if you've created your notes on a different device than your iPad), you open Peek up and choose which notebook to download.

Once this is done, close your smart cover and lift up the bottom of it to peek at the bottom line, which should be your 'question' (e.g. Ethical principles). Then when you're ready to see the answer, lift the entire cover up to see the body of your note AKA the 'answer'.

Now for the bad news: I said above that your answers can be as brief or lengthy as you choose. Not true. I discovered that only about 4 lines of text is visible after you've peeked (pook?...pook should be a word) so it isn't great for a lot of detail. This makes Peek best at short snappy Q+A type quizzes. All in all, worth a look but almost too much bother for my uses. Fantastic for a bit of procrastination, however!

For an idea of what Peek does, here's Evernote's video:

#libday8 - days four and five

Nothing to do with Librarian DITL... except this was
an amazing savoury danish I ate with gusto in the
Town Mill Bakery in Lyme Regis the Saturday before
Librarian DITL. It was my way of preparing. (And Sean
Hughes was in there! I know!) @tixylix

The end of my week for Library Day in the Life project, Thursday and Friday were spent doing the following things:

• doing a return to work discussion with one of the people I line manage. He had been off sick the day before and dragged himself in on thursday, worrying that work would pile up. After reassuring him that his health was more important than work that could easily be covered, he went home. I organised cover for his desk slots that day and for the following day, in case he didn't come in. 
• I finished going through one section of a load of spreadsheets, which gave me a rough estimate of the additional stock which will need to be moved to the large campus this summer. An extra 25% will either have to be duplicated or moved. 
• I presented my summary of the stock and workload situation in relation to the planned 2012 moves at the relocation meeting (the one I had been preparing for all week) and was thanked for its comprehensiveness - phew! I was pleased that I was able to highlight some of the concerns about the move and useful information was shared too.
• I received some book requests from one of our library reps (academic colleagues who act as a liaison between their programme team and the library), which I then passed on to our acquisition staff 
• I corresponded by email with a colleague about circulating my report on peer-assisted learning (PAL)
• Regrettably cancelled my place on a staff development hour session on the University's masterplan due to a rescheduled department committee meeting
• I checked out some random boxes of DVDs and videos in the main office to work out what on earth they were
• I spent a total of 3 and a half hours on the Enquiry Desk (in addition to the hour on the Service Desk) dealing with enquiries about joining SCONUL, searching for specific reading list material and other bits and pieces.

Oh yeah and I noted that the hour I did on the Service Desk (the desk staffed by Library Assistants, dealing with the self-service queries and handing over reservations or interlibrary loans) to cover my colleague who was off sick, was actually much more interesting and busy than a typical Enquiry Desk slot, at which I normally sit. Students often come to the Service desk first and on my shift they asked a range of questions. It was quite refreshing to be busy and actually feel helpful. Not that working on the Enquiry Desk makes me feel unhelpful, it's just that you get far fewer requests for help. 

In our recent annual planning review, some staff felt that they had lost that informal contact with students now that we have self-service machines and that they missed this interaction. I did empathise with this at the time but somehow working on the Service Desk for that one hour highlighted that those of us working on the Enquiry Desk are actually further down that path than our Library Assistant colleagues because students seem more and more reluctant to ask Enquiry Desk staff for help without Service Desk staff directing them to us. It's sad, but true. Before I get into the realm of surmising why this is, I'll stop and pick this up another time. 

And so ended another library day (or week, really) in the life. It's never 'typical' because there never is a typical week in my work or in many other librarians'. But that's probably why lots of us like it so much.  

#libday8 - day three

The Wonder of Numbers... by slightly everything

Work today revolved around preparing for a meeting on Friday where the proposed move of two courses will be discussed. I am dreaming about spots and spreadsheets at the moment because each course team has been or is about to put coloured spots on the books and audiovisual material they want relocated this summer and I'm managing it all with spreadsheets listing items at all the libraries and cross-referencing them. The two courses are moving from two different campuses to the same large campus library. Probably. I say probably because a lot of plans have changed over the last three years. A lot. So I'm going with the flow and making sure things will go smoothly but equally if plans change, c'est la vie.




I was on the Enquiry Desk from 10-12 and it was average in terms of types of enquiries - queries about fines, problems with placing holds on items at other campuses, directing a student to material on literature reviews, sorting out PC booking issues - while bouncing back to my beloved spreadsheets in between.

I exchanged a few emails with my colleague about the Friday meeting and noted some more bits and pieces that we need to remember - like making a decision about where the duplicate items should be ordered from and where they should be kept in the meanwhile, what we do about off-air recordings which need campus-specific covers, what fund codes we need to use and create, occasional ponderings about whether all the work done a year ago will actually be worth something or whether it will all need to be done from scratch (answer: not completely from scratch) and in the back of my head remembering I must leave early today for my dentist appointment and having flashbacks that the last time I visited the dentist, I came out after 45 minutes in the chair with a swollen face, a prescription for some penicillin and the wisdom tooth STILL firmly in place.

Anyway. I had a catch up with my line manager about the Friday meeting (can you spot the theme here?!) and after getting to the titles of the film books beginning with T on my spreadsheet, I saved and closed everything and went to the dentist.

#libday8 - day two

It's an indication of the busy day I had yesterday that I'm writing this post on Wednesday for the second day of Librarian day in the life project...

8am - got into work early to go through the session plan for the two History level 1 sessions I delivered today. I always find it more difficult delivering someone else's session plan (as opposed to one I've done myself) and this one was especially important for me to feel confident with as history really isn't my subject area and I am less familiar with their databases. I went through the plan and added a few notes and examples, saved the weblinks to my favourites so it was seamless in the session and delivered the first session at 9am. It was in our teaching room which has 14 PCs around the edge of the room. The group's tutor was present too so it turned into a little bit of a team teach, which was really good as she offered examples of her own research and insider tips as we went through the demo.

The session started late and overran so it was past 10 before I had a very quick break. I checked my emails and sent a few including:

• email conversation with one of our peer-assisted learning leaders, who was enquiring about booking a study room. I asked if she'd be interested in getting involved with a one day event I am helping to plan looking at supporting students in the transition to HE, particularly in relation to study and information skills. She said yes so I now have a couple of people who are willing to share their stories about their educational history before coming to University.
• contacting IT about some PC booking problems. I've helped set this system up at our library recently and although it's going well overall, there are some teething troubles. 
• replying to a student contesting fines for short loan items

My second History session was in a PC lab, set out as poorly as you could imagine - a tiny blurred projector screen, 4 rows of PCs with the monitors on a high shelf, restricting some from seeing the screen and most of the students from seeing me (sat at the PC connected to the projector, which was in the middle of one of the inside rows of PCs), freezing cold and the two lecturers whispering to each other throughout the whole thing...but it went ok and the feedback was good.

A quick lunch in our staffroom and then I was on the Enquiry Desk from 1-3pm. It was a busy slot with questions mostly around IT and printing. 

Off the desk, I spent an hour and half preparing a summary for where we are with the move of two programmes to another campus this summer. Revising figures relating to the journals, AV and books is more complex than it should be, as previous calculations took into account the move of a whole campus. 

#libday8 - day one

So here we are again, another round of librarians doing a show and tell about their week using Twitter, blogs, Flickr and numerous other platforms I'm sure. More information on the Library Day in the Life Project can be found on the wiki, which lists all the library workers documenting their week.

I'm a librarian in a UK university library. My role is part subject librarian, part a million other things as I work at a small campus library.

Today I caught the train to Exeter for a conference planning session. I'm a member of what was the University, College and Research Libraries Group, South west division (officially now ARLG but we're clinging onto the UC&R name for one final fling!) and we're planning the third DARTS 3 conference. I have only been a member of the committee for just over a year but am already aware that I'll miss the people who have chosen not to stand for the new ARLG regional group when our meetings (as we know them) come to an end after the conference. I have decided to stand for the new ARLG committee so fingers crossed I get on...!

I joined the group for a few reasons: firstly, I shared the concerns and interests of UC&R, which I felt  were relevant and pertinent to me in my work as an academic librarian and I wanted to get involved with a group which delivered events designed for people like me.

Secondly, it was a social/networking thing. I went to the joint CoFHE/UC&R conference two years ago and felt really lonely! I spoke to some really nice people and met up with an old library school friend but I realised I knew so few people in my profession and I wanted to change that. Back in Sussex, I had worked in three or four different libraries, was a member of the Sussex branch committee so knew lots of people but those links largely slipped away when I moved west. That was before Twitter and blogging and all that so the landscape is very different now. Anyway, I wanted to get back into professional development and networking and just meeting some more people in librarianship.

Thirdly it was about my own professional development, the chance to contribute to something worthwhile and improve my own skills and CV while I was doing it. I've done this by designing our blog and tweeting from our Twitter account (follow us!), as well as contributing towards the events we've planned so far.

Anyway, to summarise: the meeting was productive and we fleshed out the programme, plus I've offered to find the best solution to storing our working documents - maybe Dropbox or a wiki will do the job...

A delayed train meant that it wasn't viable to go back to work (what a shame...!) so I met my partner for  coffee in Cafe Kino and then walked home. I checked my work email and answered some queries from academic staff (relating to recording programmes on Box of Broadcasts, noting a postponed programme meeting, responding to a query about digitising a book chapter etc). Then on to the real work of the evening - preparing for History teaching tomorrow morning. The session, planned by my colleague, focuses on demonstrating a large number of electronic resources to illustrate the wealth and breadth of our collections for a module which requires the students to utilise a variety of sources. I don't like revising teaching so late but it couldn't be avoided and I just have to hope my 11 years teaching experience of occasionally winging it sees me ok (ahem, I mean my excellent preparation). Anxiety about tomorrow's sessions is ramped up by the fact that I'm teaching one of the sessions in a lab I've not taught in before and which isn't set out very well for the sort of session I'm going to do. Fun and games. I'll update you tomorrow on how it went (or not, if I have a panic attack and need a week off work).

Tomorrow I have two teaching sessions and a two hour desk slot lined up, as well as my very long to do list plus another blog post to write of course!