Graduation and All That Jazz

Well probably the high light of this week was our graduation ceremony at the Guildhall in London on Tues. Arrived bright and early at 8.30am to be robed in a very handsome black gown with a gold and burgundy sash (and cap, of course). Most of my friends off my course came (we were all full-timers) and it was a very nice ceremony with full faculty parade, brass band and all. The Library and Information Studies class came right near the end so we had to sit through a lot of names before it was our turn. I had never been to the Guildhall before and thought it was a lovely building, full of history.





Back to the grindstone on Wednesday with my first Systematic Reviews workshop and a Learning Awareness Week stand outside the hospital canteen. I had two doctors sign up for the Systematic Reviews course, but only one turned up. He was very keen though and interestingly he had already done a systematic review recently. He wanted to know more about tracking down articles and making sure he everything written on a particular subject. So I ran through my presentation and we sat down and did a little literature search later on. I'm not sure how useful the course was to him but I did try to encourage him to ask the library to help out with his literature searches! He is coming along to the Reference Management and Finding the Evidence Improvers this week (one after the other, phew!).

Learning Awareness Week went pretty well - the stand outside the canteen on Wednesday attracted a fair amount of attention (lots of freebies!) and we got people to fill in slips of paper with their name, job title and something they wanted to learn or something they had learned this week. We then made these into a long chain, which is now hanging proudly on our journals shelf! On Thursday we had a drop-in session for people to make the most of their Athens accounts but in the end only had 2 takers. Still it was worth doing and all-in-all a good chance to get out and interact with some potential users. The most interesting and rewarding part of the week for me was meeting a patient who came up to our stand and wanted to know more about where to find medical information. We had a really good chat and I pointed her in the direction of NHS Evidence and NHS Choices, both excellent, free sources of information for patients and carers.

Managing References and Other Things...

Well this week saw the launch of my new information skills workshop 'Managing Your References', which was very well attended and much lively discussion was generated. Who would have thought managing references would be so controversial? But they are, especially when university degrees are on the line! The workshop started out with thinking about why we might want to manage references in the first place and what we might want to use references for, then moved on to different styles of referencing and managing. It was the referencing styles that seemed to get everybody's goat and where there were the most questions. And I have to ask myself really - just why are there so many styles of referencing? Harvard, Vancouver, Chicago, Turabian, APA, MLA, ACS....the list goes on and on and on. And it's so difficult to get a definitive answer about any of them. My basic advice to my trainees was to find out what style your university or the journal you are writing for prefers and use that, otherwise Harvard is a safe bet. But whatever style you choose or is chosen for you, stick to that one and that one alone.
I then talked a bit about reference management software, which none of my trainees had used before. I had hoped we would have got a subscription to RefWorks before this workshop took place but that seems a dim and distant hope now in our world of NHS budget cuts. We have Reference Manager on all of our library PCs but I find the program is clunky and unwieldly to use. Plus if you don't have it loaded on your own machine you can't use it at home! So for the practical session I got the trainees to register for CiteULike, a lovely little online programme that uploads RIS files, allows manual, URL, ISBN and DOI entries, creates a neat bibliography in a range of different styles and basically does most of the other things a reference management program should do quickly and easily online wherever and whenever you want. Plus there is nothing to download and it's free!
The first task I had set for the trainees (besides setting up a CiteULike account) was to enter a reference manually. I had assumed this would be quite an easy task to ease the trainees into using the site but was surprised how flumoxed they were by entering things like author, title and year into separate fields. I suppose as a librarian I am used to such things from cataloguing books and registering members and it was a sharp lesson on the importance of controlled fields - making sure you have all the fields entered uniformly. Importing references with an ISBN, DOI or URL or even better as an RIS file makes it all so much easier as the hard work has already been done by the database indexers! (Thanks guys....)
The workshop seemed to go down quite well though and it was an interesting topic to present.
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Preparation for that took up the first half of my week and the rest of it was spent getting geared up for the next few weeks which are full of training sessions, inductions and meetings. Looking at my schedule on Wednesday afternoon made me wonder if I might have some sort of mental health death wish. I am hoping to get the majority of my FILE presentation done this weekend so I can concentrate my efforts on the staff training sessions but the next few weeks are definitely going to be hairy....
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And a bit of good news this week was that we finally got the date for library school graduation! May 18th shall see me walking down the gilded aisle at London's Guildhall in my cap and gown to mark the end of a VERY long year!