A couple of weeks ago I followed the live streaming of Martin Weller‘s talk at the LSE’s NetworkED Seminar Series. The presentation was titled “10 Digital Scholarship lessons in 10 videos” – the slides are already up on Slideshare and I’m sure at some point you’ll be able to watch a recording of the session on the NetworkED website.

As I sat down to look over my notes for this blog post, in which I was really just going to summarise the talk, a thought hit me – a lot of these lessons also apply to libraries in the digital age. From Martin’s 10 lessons I have picked out 5 to focus on:

1. Researchers are caught in a dilemma
   The dilemma for researchers is that the potential for innovation is curbed by the conservative context of the research environment. Essentially, little value is assigned to non-traditional research methods and publishing models at institutional level. I see the same happening in academic libraries where new methods for delivery of services and resources are still seen as add-ons. It seems to me that the biggest barrier against this is time. And lately I have found the perfect response which comes from Andy Priestner in a blog post about Twitter for researchers: “you make time in your working life for those activities you consider to be valuable”. He is speaking here on a personal level, however I believe the same should be true on a wider scale.
2. Operating in an attention economy
   Martin introduced the shift from a pedagogy of scarcity to a pedagogy of abundance in terms of teaching. In a world of the pedagogy of scarcity we teach one to many, in a lecture scenario for example. But what happens in a pedagogy of abundance? We have live streaming (of events such as this), engagement with the teacher online as well as face-to-face etc. In terms of libraries I’m thinking of this as a shift from the old adage of librarian as gatekeeper that seemed to fit in a world where information was scarce. Now in this information-rich age what are we? The best word I have come up with is conduit – our role is to aid the flow of information. Please suggest your own in the comments.
3. New skills will be required
   There is no doubt about this, the key questions seems to be how we will acquire these new skills. So far it seems that those who are using digital tools within the workplace are self-taught; they learn by doing or from the experience of others. As the roles of librarians diversify I think there’s an argument that we should be looking outside of the library world for training. This training does not have to be formal though, as we’ve seen through initiatives such as Code Year – and perhaps this goes back to the previous lesson and the pedagogy of abundance?
4. It’s all about alternatives
   This is a common theme of any talk I give about the use of social media in libraries – there is no one-size-fits-all model. Everyone wants to consume information and engage with it via a different route and as information providers (or conduits) we need to be aware of this and provide alternatives. We need to find different methods to suit different audiences.
5. Don’t focus just on risk
   And finally it’s the big one. Risk. Once again I think here we’re talking about the perception of risk at an institutional rather than individual level. Certainly in libraries there are pioneers of non-traditional methods at the local level, but at institutional level there seems to be more fear about making these initiatives part of the core offering of the service. In his presentation Martin said that if the academic publishing model was sold to researchers now it would be seen as crazy and I believe the same could be said for some of the core services of libraries. Nothing changes however because the focus is on risk and loss rather than opportunities and benefits.

Yesterday I sat down at my desk and set out my mission for the day – to conquer my email. I have been meaning to do it for a while, ever since I upgraded to Office 2010 a few months ago in fact. Yesterday I couldn’t move forward until it was done. Now that I have succeeded in my mission I wanted to share the process here.

Before you read on there’s one thing to note – the first two steps require Outlook 2010.

1. I began by turning on the Conversationsfeature to nest emails by subject. I use Gmail for my personal email and this is a feature I really value. Until yesterday I didn’t realise that it could be done in Outlook too. Hurrah! This instantly gives the illusion of a less cluttered inbox.
   

   How to turn on Conversations

2. Next I used the Clean Up tool which becomes enabled when you use Conversations. This deletes any duplicate content in conversations. There’s a good video from Microsoft Showcasedemonstrating the Clean Up tool, but unfortunately I can’t embed it here. If you use the Microsoft Exchange server you will need to switch to cached mode before you can use this feature.
   

   How to de-duplicate your email

3. The next step for me was to set up a new folder structure. I previously had quite a complex hierarchy of folders within folders. This is great in theory, but in practice it becomes a real chore to move emails out of your inbox and into the right folder. So I’ve simplified things. I now have 7 top level folders, only 3 of which have sub-folders and in total I’ve only got 2 levels in the hierarchy. This will allow me to roughly group emails by theme and then I will use search to find specific items.
   

   Folder structure

4. Finally I checked on my rules. This is a really easy way to filter emails directly into folders. I mainly use this for emails relating to the Business Librarians Association for which I have two rules set up, one for committee emails and the other for the LIS-Business mailing list.

And there we have it.

As I explained in my introductory Library Day in the Life post for round 8 I have been keeping a detailed record of my work activities. My aim was to use this record of an average week to see if some estimates I had made previously (for how I spend my time over a term) were anywhere near accurate.

The charts below show the percentage of time I spent on various activities that were identified as the main tasks of an Academic Support Librarian. The first chart shows the time I spent on each activity during the past week. The second chart shows the estimates I made for how much time I spend on each activity during the Spring term (January – April).

Comparing to the two has left me fairly happy with the estimates I made about how I spend my time. The activities missing from my work this week, that came quite high in my estimate, were teaching and project work. I’ve done no teaching this week, but have already done some, and will be doing more this term. As for project work, a lot of the work I did this week that I classed as production of teaching materials was also project work for an information skills tutorial I am creating.

Given the job I do I think it is unsurprising that liaison and enquiries came out as top activities on both charts. Within liaison in this week’s tracking I included all work I did on email (6 hours and 22 minutes in total) as well as meetings with staff in the business school and the one Student Staff Liaison Committee meeting that I attended.

One thing I was particularly interested in, having been asked a few times lately, was how much time I spend on Twitter. My total for the week was 1 hour and 33 minutes, an average of a little under 20 minutes per day.

Professional activities scored quite highly this week as I’ve been doing quite a bit of work on developing a new website for the Business Librarians Association. I also used the “Other” category this week which I had used for the estimate. Within this category I included the time I spend doing general admin and planning my week.

New things used to scare me. Until recently, I had a long mental list of “things I don’t do” and would have no trouble saying no if there was even a hint that I might be asked to do something on that list. This attitude was fixed and applied both at home and at work.

You will note that I’ve been writing in the past tense and I hope you’re asking “so what’s changed?”, well here’s where the story begins…

Over Easter last year I went on a trip to New Zealand. This was a holiday and the chance to meet the rest of my in-laws (Laura’s mum is a New Zealander and the majority of her family live there). During the trip we spent a lot of time with Laura’s aunts, Sue and Sharon, in and around Wellington. Whilst getting to know each other we talked about our outlooks on life and plans for the future. Through these conversations I learned a lot about myself and took some valuable advice and inspiration from Sharon. When we were leaving she gave me this card and I have been using the words as my mantra ever since:

What prompted me to write this post was an experience on the WAMP workshop a couple of weeks ago. As part of a session on performance management we did a role-play exercise. You know that mental list I had of “things I don’t do”? Role play was definitely on it and 12 months ago I would have found it difficult to take part. Now that I am saying ‘yes’ more often there was no doubt in my mind that I would give it a go. I was a little scared but my overriding thoughts were that it would be a really good opportunity to get some practical experience of performance management and that I could learn a lot from it.

I found the whole role-play experience tiring and challenging but ultimately extremely useful. As well as doing our own role-plays it was really good to get the opportunity to observe others in action and see how different people and personalities approached a range of issues.

New things used to stress me out, but I’ve found that by saying ‘yes’ more often I’ve become more relaxed about the things that life throws at me and I feel I can take them on with confidence. Give it a go and see if it helps you too!

Every time I have participated in Library Day in the Life I have taken a different approach to it:

• Round 2 – detailed accounts of my day
• Round 3 – summaries of my day
• Round 4 – daily summaries with pictures
• Round 5 – daily summaries based on my to do list
• Round 6 – videos!

After the videos of round 6 I clearly felt I’d reached my peak and didn’t participate last time around. For round 8 I’m getting back into the game and have yet another new approach. This time I won’t be posting daily, instead I have chosen to keep a detailed log of how I am spending my time during the day and will post an overall summary at the end of the week. I am doing this for one specific reason – to see exactly how much time I spend on different tasks in an average week. I was asked to do this recently for a review of a subject librarian’s activities, but without the time to log exactly what I do the form I submitted contained estimates. I’ve got no idea whether I was even close with my guesses so I’ll be interested to compare that to the resutls from this week’s log.