Just Like Starting Over?

http://bit.ly/177OohM Sean Marshall Flickr

In June I moved back into librarianship management after being involved in eLearning management for 11 years and to celebrate I have done my own mini-relaunch with a new design in homage.

However, the world of information management has changed over the last 10 years and the provision of learning and teaching is more aligned with the support of teaching provided by eLearning and library services and likewise the relationships between those that support these services is much closer. This is reflected in the title of the team that I jointly manage which is called the Academic Skills and Knowledge team, where most of the members are called Academic Skills Tutors and provide, study skills, librarianship and information technology services. However, I am aware that we need to address the continued challenge of working collaboratively across all our services supporting learning and teaching, as we increasingly share services we also need to share practices.

Yesterday  the new Birmingham Central library opened to a mixture of praise and criticism. It is a mash-up of services and designs, and illustrates the way we need to start working together to provide seamless physical and virtual access to physical and virtual knowledge. The Dutch female architect (yes a woman architect!) Francine Houben , says, (quoted in the Guardian article by Rowan Moore) "libraries are the cathedrals of nowadays… the most public space in the knowledge economy...they will always be about learning, no matter what you do there". The same could also be said for Universities no matter how they morph.

During my first 2 months in my new role have had to get to grips with new systems at a new University, although there are a lot of similarities with my previous institution and I have maintained my optimism, despite some cultural knock backs (not unlike Birmigham's new library).  I have great hopes for the professional world I have returned to. The relationships I developed with librarianship colleagues, the skills I developed in research, learning design, project and change management from elearning in previous position, and my own librarianship skills which I have safely stored, have helped with my adjustment and the continuity from the old to the new. Increasingly the information professional elegantly reinvents itself to address the new challenges in the areas of resource discovery, academic skills and digital and information literacies, I am excited to be supporting and driving this with my new colleagues.

I have, also, had the opportunity to network with colleagues outside of my organisation. In July I attended the Information and Literacy and Summon at Manchester Met . Summon by ProQuest is a resource discovery service providing a one stop shop for searching most of a university's printed and electronic stock, in attempt to enhance the student searching experience. The day provided a range of presentations on the use of Summon, from using it as the searching start point for new undergraduates to using it to replace the library catalogue. The day gave delegates the opportunity to discuss some of the challenges such as publisher services that are not integrated and supporting advanced search skills within this simplified context.

Another event I attended in July was One Year PebblePad Celebration Symposium in Birmingham as this the tool my University uses for students to reflect on their graduate attributes and the main support is provided by my team. It was interesting to see the variety of support models for PebblePad mostly by learning technologists or elearning developers rather information skills or library teams. The use cases were mainly in disciplines where reflective practice is integral e.g. nursing.

So is it just like starting over? In some ways yes acquisitions and cataloguing has changed with respect to systems and processes but there are opportunities for librarians to work with library assistants to jointly delivers this service. Having just undertaken my first induction some of the resources are new but the approach to using these is not, as I continued to use library resources for conferences and research when I was not in this area of work. The back-end infrastructure is new to me but the skills I have developed in change management and implementing systems and tools is already helping me in this area...It's a little bit like starting over but in a good way.