Interview with a librarian at RGU - New

So far during our MSc LIS (or ILS) course we have had very interesting visits from Guest Lecturers and a lovely visit to the Central Library in Aberdeen, and all so well represented in our blog.

For Group C’s turn we ruminated through several options for our reflective blog. There were events during Scottish Book Week and the invitation to volunteer for the Scottish Children’s Book Awards, as well as several events towards the end of November which we felt would be too near the publishing date for the blog effort.

After careful consideration of the time restrictions (like assignments being due) we decided to take up the offer by RGU Library to ‘Book a Librarian Group Session’ http://libguides.rgu.ac.uk/classes (an option for all students in groups of 3 or more) and set to work on choosing suitable questions for the occasion that would be most beneficial to our class of budding Library and Information Students.

Victoria Farmer has been a Liaison Librarian at RGU for 13 years. She initially started in the Health and Social Care Faculty and is now responsible for the Faculty of Design and Technology.

Q: Victoria, what type of library management system do you use here?

V: We use Symphony WorkFlows, which is a SirsiDynix system. As subject librarians, we only use certain sections of it, for the most part the cataloguing area, and maybe the circulations area as well, although I also take a look at the budget area on there to keep an eye on the spending in my budgets and things like that.

Q: So you’re personally doing cataloguing then?

V: I’m not, I do a bit of classifying, but most of the classifying is actually done by Faculty Information Coordinators, who work with us, so we (myself and my two colleagues) only do bits and pieces. Cataloguing is done in a different section, but we’ve all done bits and pieces of it all, we all know how to go in and make some changes if we need to (for example if there’s a problem and there’s only a certain number of staff in and things like that).

Q: How accessible do you find MARC21?

V: It’s… this is going to sound awful [laughter], you don’t need to know as much about it as you used to. With the advent of ebooks and the fact that we actually get a lot of our books through subscription packages and things like that, there is actually no earthly way we could catalogue and classify the over eighty thousand ebooks that we have. I’m not too sure, to be honest, that any university library could do that unless they had, like, a team of thirty people doing nothing else nearly all of the time. What we primarily do is rely on the subject headings and things like that to make them findable to people, so a good proportion of the material is not as in-depth classified as it used to be. They usually do come through with the classmarks, that’s part of the MARC records that get downloaded, but we don’t … you know, do an extra-check and update as we used to when they were all paper copies back in the day. I mean, obviously all the paper stuff gets classified and I personally have not found it (MARC21) inaccessible but I don’t do as much in-depth as other people in the teams do. They would probably be able to talk a bit more about the vagaries and which bits work and which bits don’t work and things like that. From my perspective, the main thing is that all of the important fields are there and that there are searchable subject headings which can be used for resource discovery, which is the big thing from a subject librarian perspective.

Q: So as a subject librarian do you deal with research enquiries as well? What is the weirdest enquiry you’ve had?

V: Yes, “Can you help me find the green book?” [laughter] You always think it’s a bit of a myth that people are going to ask that. You know, they say it jokingly to people and it’s on social media and you think, “Nobody ever asks that”, and then they do and you think, “Because I’m psychic?” But the thing is you actually find that in some subject areas you do know exactly where the green book is. When I was in the health area, when people asked that, it was always a specific book that they were after and they’d forgotten what it looked like except that it was big and green and you were like, “Aha! I know exactly which one that is!”, and you looked bloody brilliant when you showed them! But topic-wise there isn’t really anything that weird, because people are doing so much. You might  hear something and think, “Oh god I’ve never been asked that before”, but it always ties in with one of the courses, or something like that. I mean, there was something about emotional intelligence in Chinese theatre the other day (which was quite difficult to track down resources for) but you know, it’s all about knowing where to go to find it. From how we look at it, it is about enabling people to get to the right places and find the materials themselves. Obviously while I have an English literature degree, I don’t have a Computing, Engineering, Art or Architecture degree… you learn about things, there are common things you get asked about, and you work out and find out what the key words are, and where to go, and where people are researching it… and you find that out as you get through the enquiries and you work your way through it. As long as you know which databases and where to go to on the web and where the books are, you can usually find just about anything really.

Q: So what would you say would be the central skills in the working environment?

V: Well, it all sounds a bit bad again [laughter], because a lot of them aren’t actually specialist library skills (which obviously sounds awful). I mean I enjoyed my degree, there was a lot I got out of it, but what gets me on best in my particular role is, well, things like the skills to use the databases, to know how to present them to people and to be able to communicate that with others and be able to work with people of all different levels and all different areas. It sounds a bit cliché, but the old teamwork and working independently thing makes a massive difference as well. There are projects such as the one where myself and a colleague led the introduction of the Aspire reading lists here (we did the pilot for it) and the team-working part of that was essential because we couldn’t have done it if we hadn’t been able to get everybody working from all the different areas together, but equally and amongst that, there were times where you just had to go, “This is what we need to do now!”, and you got on with it. Specific library skills-wise, it’s all useful, it’s all relevant when you start. Thing is that you have to keep it up to date and not let it remain static. I did (as a part of my course) a class on creating webpages and I loved that, it was great, I enjoyed myself, but, you know, the technology changes and shifts, so I’ve kept relatively up to date with that. I can still do a decent webpage and I do a lot of the online stuff for us, but it’s vastly different now than it was twelve years ago. If I hadn’t kept those skills up to date, I wouldn’t be able to do the things that I do now. So it’s keeping up to date and continuing to learn as much as anything else. And to a certain extent customer service skills, that’s the easiest way to put it really, encompasses a lot, you know. Being able to work with people will always stand you in good stead no matter what role you go into. And you can know everything in the world, but if you can’t sit down with people and show it to them, it makes absolutely no difference at all.

Q: Does RGU have a training plan for you or development plans to keep you up to date?

V: There are quite a lot of different things in different areas, really, it often depends on what team you’re part of. The front desk staff for example, they’ve been on courses to do with customer service and things like that. I went through the Chartership when I first started and I’m looking at the Revalidation for next year, that’s a voluntary thing but we’ll do it. To be honest, you mostly work with your line manager and come up with whatever is most appropriate for you. I don’t know if it’s maybe different in other RGU departments, but I work with the Associate Director who is in charge of our team, and each year we go through an EPR (professional development)  process where we can identify specific things that we want to find out more about and different ways we can do it. Sometimes it’s going on a course, sometimes it’s going to a conference, and things like that, so… That’s a bit vague, I know, but yes, there are plans, but it varies depending on who you are and which department you’re in and things like that. Ours is probably slightly more open because we’re expected to just keep up to date all the time to be able to continue to use all the new resources, so my EPR tends to focus on things outside of that that I want to find out about, you know, that I think will benefit me or that we want to know more about. It depends on what you’re doing. In fact myself and two colleagues are off to a relationship management conference in a couple of days, which is a new way of looking at how to work with academics and students and things like that. I mean, a lot of it will be looking at things we’ve done or are doing already but hopefully with a different way of approaching it.

Q: Is that important, relationship management?

V: It is more and more to be honest, I mean it’s  a  different way of approaching the relationship. A lot of what we all do is finding the best way to get academics to work with us, or for us to work with academics, however you want to approach it. They are extremely busy people.  When they’re not preparing, they’re teaching, when they’re not teaching, they’re marking, when they’re not marking, they’re preparing the exams, etc. And of course they’re all supposed to do their research and sit on committees and various other things at the same time. So we’re always looking at ways to work with them in a more streamlined fashion, a way to make it easier for them and for us, a way to make sure that we’re getting everything we need for the students but also getting them the support that they  need. And it’s an ongoing thing, I don’t think any university has the ultimate answer for it, like, “If you do these things, everything will be perfect.” That would be great! We all go to these conferences occasionally hoping that somebody will have this golden set of rules. People are always coming up with slightly different ways of approaching it, and yes, some of it may be things you’ve done before, but that slightly different view on some things might just work for the three staff you’ve not been able to get reading lists from before and so on. Relationship management as a concept is becoming more prevalent as well. But this is, I think, the first conference that has been about it.

Q: You briefly mentioned getting reading lists. In terms of acquiring resources, is that something that requires you have a good relationship with academic staff? How does that process work?

V: Lots of begging and pleading! [laughter] Well, a little bit (sometimes), but yeah, you need the relationship. You need (ideally) staff to be sending reading lists “X” amount of weeks in advance of the semester because you have to be creating those lists, checking for updates, buying new things, looking for ebooks. It isn’t an instant process despite what the Amazon world has made people think, because we have to go through certain suppliers and organisations and people we have deals with and things like that. It’s all about getting the staff to understand that they need to do that (though you know whenever lists come in we will always do our best to work with them as quickly as possible and make things available), and e-mails, blog posts, meetings, more emails, seeing people personally… any way you can speak with people about it, is what you do. Some stuff comes from module coordinators, some stuff comes from the e-learning people in the schools, some stuff comes from distance learning coordinators or maybe the course leaders, they can come through a variety of different routes. We have a team that deals with making them available now because we have an online reading list system and that has helped us get more lists than we ever used to. It’s not 100% because there are always people who you find it’s very difficult to get material from and modules that don’t have lists. I’d be lying if I said it was 100% and you’d be laughing at me probably because I’d imagine there is  even the odd module you’re doing that doesn’t have a reading list. But it’s improving all of the time and one of the big things we’ve been doing is trying to persuade people to use more online material as well (if they’ve got a distance learning course the requirement is that it has to be online). So you go through all sorts of formal things and informal things but basically the key with that (and basically everything else we want with academics) is to take every opportunity possible. It doesn’t matter what it is, you could be running into someone in the canteen downstairs, or through something much more formal, you take every chance you can, without, you know, nagging. [laughter]

Q: Is it ever the other way? Do you ever make suggestions to the academic community?

V: Yes, yeah, it happens, I mean it all depends on the person and what comes up. Some people we’ve worked with  very closely (to come up with new material for them) because what they’ve wanted has been slightly older or out of print meaning students can’t get it, so we’ve made other suggestions. We’ve worked with people as well to start trying to expand their reading lists, so it’s not just books, but journal articles and web pages and things like that. And we do have budgets where we buy things for ourselves as well, so we’ll sometimes buy things that we know will be important (updated editions, things like that). And I know one of my colleagues  sends out lists of new materials to certain people who she knows will be interested in them. You have to judge your audience a wee bit. There’s people who I know, for example, would be just deleting it. You have to strike that balance between getting that information out there and overloading them, so they’re not deleting everything that comes in and therefore miss the important things, and others who read absolutely everything you send and will reply and go, “Let’s order twenty copies.” Um, I can’t afford that! [laughter]

Q: Who decides then how many copies you take into the library?

V: We have guidelines in place. Our budget is split two-ways, we have a reading list budget and a sort of collection development budget. So the reading list budget is obviously for items on reading lists and if it’s on a reading list, then it gets ordered, no matter what time of year it is. We prioritize e-books first and then, depending on how many people are on the course, a certain number of print books (if it’s only available in print), and it also depends on whether they were told if it’s essential or just optional. If it’s optional, you’re not going to buy five copies… you buy one or two, depending on what it is. But no, it’s e-books first. And then the collection development budget allows us to build up in areas where research is going on and just out of general interest. You know, reading list material is great, but we do a lot more than that so it allows us to take other recommendations from staff, you know, “This will be useful for this course/this is good for this research area”, and that’s where we (if we spot things as well) would buy material.

Q: In terms of outreach, how do you guys find social media?

V: It’s great, I mean we have a library account that is sort of an official library account so there’s a bit of, “Can’t get too personal on it” and things like that, but yeah we’ve gradually increased our numbers. 1,250 now, we did a little dance when we got over 1,000 followers, so we’re gradually pushing it up all the time. We have the blog, we don’t use Facebook as much to be honest but we do link through to the blog notices and things like that. I think it is essential, you can’t not use it these days and I think we’re doing quite well. But there are some libraries out there who have a fantastic social media presence. I like the University of Liverpool’s twitter account (if you have a look at that) and Orkney Public Library is always good for a laugh actually. You have to make this choice either to be very official or very personal with it and they’ve both got pros and cons, really. Updating is shared between various people so you’ve got to keep a certain voice, you know, if you’re going to be jokey and funny about it, it needs to be the same people doing it so that you can keep the same tone and you can be responding to everything in the same way. But it is absolutely essential, you can’t get by without something on social media these days because everyone will expect it and everyone will use it. You also have to be aware of the limitations. A notice on twitter does not get to everybody (no matter what everybody thinks), it’s a real-time thing and you will not be, by putting something on twitter, making sure everybody knows about it. So you have to have a combo of ways of getting your information out there.

Q: What are your favorite aspects of the job?

V: Actually, doing classes, [laughter], and the one-to-ones with people. Doing a successful class and feeling that everybody is understanding it and that they’re actually getting something out of it makes a big difference. I mean if you do a class and everybody’s been dragged along and they don’t want to be there and you can see them checking facebook or doing their e-mails or something, I mean, it doesn’t stop you doing it, you carry on, you try to get as much information out as possible. But when you do get that kind of engagement with people and that sort of real, “This is going to make a difference to… referencing RefWorks, finding their information”, it feels really good. That translates down to the one-to-one sessions too whether it’s just one person or a small group or a much larger group or even if it’s two hundred people in a room, it’s very satisfying. Yeah, that’s probably the main one for me.