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.
........................................................................................................

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....
.........................................................................................................

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!

You've only got one chance...

I often think the most tricky part of my job is knowing what our library users want from a library and information service, especially when it comes to training. Even when I do manage to convince someone they could do with a little information skills training I sometimes feel like I only have one chance to win them over and the best way to do this is to find out what they really need in terms of information to carry out their job. Of course the easiest way to find this out is simply to ask but it so easily slips my mind...the other day a GP came in for a refresher session and just before she arrived I had been battling with Reference Manager (which, btw is the most complicated, unwieldy, user unfriendly reference management program I have ever encountered) and no sooner had she sat down then I immediately launched into my usual spiel about accessing the the databases and building search strategies. After a few minutes the poor woman looked at me and said 'actually I wanted to find out about Map of Medicine...'
Of course you did. And if I had actually bothered to ask what you wanted out of the session before launching into automatic pilot I would have known that. Luckily I managed to recover from the mistake and she went away happy but I came away resolved to be much more proactive about finding out what the user needs first, rather than just assuming I know what they need.

....................................................................................

I did my first 'Critical Appraisal: Qualitative Research' course this week and overall I think it went quite well. Most of the attendees had come to the Quantitative course a month earlier and were quite keen to chip in and share their thoughts and opinions. At the end one of the attendees actually expressed an interest in setting up a journal club, to keep the critical appraisal skills fresh and the others seemed interested in this too. I have no experience of setting up and/or facilitating a journal club but I think it would be quite fun and a way to reinvigorate the Trust's evidence-based practice and build upon the research work already taking place. If anyone has any experience of journal clubs I would be very happy to hear them and will keep you posted on any progress made!

.....................................................................................

In other news, I had the supreme privilege and delight of being filmed doing a presentation this week then had to watch it in front of my colleagues and get feedback. This was part of the Facilitating Information Literacy Education (FILE) course run by Susie Andretta at London Metropolitan University, which I have been doing since January. I can highly recommend the course and have learned a great deal from it but this was one of the more stressful weeks by far.
The filming bit wasn't so bad - we were put in front of a camera in a pokey little TV studio at the university but my fellow FILEers made up the audience, so after the initial shock of being in front of a camera I forgot it was there and it was just like giving another presentation.
Watching back later on was much harder and I felt a strange, almost out-of-body experience watching myself on the TV. I realised I spend way too much time looking at the screen, rather than the audience and definitely fluffed more than a few of my lines but all-in-all it wasn't too bad. I looked a lot more confident than what I felt and I didn't talk too fast or too quietly, which I am wont to do. I certainly wouldn't want to repeat the experience but I've definitely learned a lot about my presentation style and will work on my weak spots in future sessions.

....................................................................................

Luckily I had Thursday and Friday off to recover from the trauma. This has been very pleasant but I am rather worried about my reference management training workshop next week, of which I have done barely any preparation for yet...oops! Will report back on how it goes (or doesn't go) next week.