On 7th July 65 Business librarians decended on the Hilton Hotel Liverpool for the Business Librarians Association Annual Conference.  The theme of this year’s conference was “The Research Agenda” with a promise of addressing the following questsions:

• How can Business Librarians discover and meet the needs of researchers?
• Would we be better placed to help researchers if we have some involvement in research ourselves?

This was my first BLA Conference as a newly fledged Business Librarian and I was looking forward to the opportunity to network and share ideas/expertise with other Business Librarians and I wasn’t disappointed! A lot was packed into the 3 day conference and I have decided to provide a summary of the highlights from each day below.  For a complete report of the conference take a look at Andy Priestner’s blog Libreaction

Day 1

After a warm welcome from Andy Priestner the day kicked off with the Library Director’s presentations by Maxine Melling (Liverpool John Moores University (LJMU)) and Phil Sykes (University of Liverpool). One of the key strategic drivers at LJMU is to support the sustainability of the research culture.  Maxine outlined some of the strategies employed in supporting researchers at LJMU including: providing space for researchers; research support web pages; targeted spending on research based resources and the development of digitial collections.

Phil Sykes started his presentation with a quote from Tale of Two Cities  “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…” He used this to illustrate that the environment in which Business Librarians currently operate is the “worst of times” and that we need to plan for adversity and look for opportunities in which Business Librarians can contribute to the competitive success of business schools.  Some of the opportunities he outlined include:

• In the traditional way by providing timely and appropriate information provision which is embedded, evangelical and evidence based.  We need to be better at proclaiming the value of the library and demonstrate that what we do adds value
• Helping to promote and disseminate the fruits of research through institional repositories
• Developing links with the private sector and research sponsors

To finish of the first day there were a couple of members’ sharing sessions.  Carolyn Smith gave an interesting presentation on how they support PhD students at Cass Business School.  The types of services they are currently providing are: small group inductions; 1-2-1 appointments; a PhD library guide; posters on library services in PhD offices; engagement with research supervisors and a research support seminar series.  They had tried to hold a focus group to find out what they want from the library but nobody turned up and Carolyn asked the delegates for ideas.  Suggestions to attract more participants were to provide some sort of payment (cash or vouchers) and there should be a neutral person (non library) leading the focus group to encourage open and honest discussion.

The final presenter of day 1 was Lydia Matheson who spoke about the small scale research projects that have been undertaken at Aston University.  Projects included the use of smart technologies, VLE inductions for distance learning students, information literacy, a reading list project and an enquiries blog.

Day 2

Mark Greenwood (Manchester Business School) provided the third members’ sharing session with his presentation on Manchester Business Answers 24/7 an online FAQ database which was set up to help students navigate around resources.  Mark gave a live demonstration of the databases which is searchable and can be accessed anywhere at anytime.  All the answers in the database are tagged so that users have the option to browse or search for answers.  Mark explained that it is another way of getting to the information which is already on the library website.  As well as the answers links to online tutorials, guides and materials provided by other libraries.

Following on from lunch on the second day was a panel discussion on support for research.  The panel was made up of Val Stephenson, Head of Research & Learning Support at LJMU, Stéphane Goldstein (RIN), Professor Andy Young (Director of Research at LJMU), and David Glauert (Academic Account Manager at Thomson Reuters).  The key message from the panel discussion (and the conference as a whole) is that librarians need to demonstrate impact in supporting research in the academic community and beyond.  Any Young made some particularly thought provoking points on the key challenges ahead:

• Funding cuts not only affect research but research support
• Research is funded by public money so needs to reach a wider audience and researchers need to demonstrate the benefits of their research to UKPLC
• To increase invisibility there needs to be a widers dissemination of research results.
• Integrated research management systems help to make life simpler for researchers and academics.
• Librarians have a role to play in supporting researchers through providing advice and guidance (particularly to early career researchers) on where to publish and interpreting journal rankings

Day 2 ended with a chance to explore some of the sights of Liverpool followed by a fantastic gala dinner at Liverpool Town Hall.  A great night was had by all.

Day 3

Day 3 began with the BLA AGM followed by the option to attend one of three interesting workshops on ‘mind mapping’, ‘healthy lifestyles’ and ‘colour me beautiful’.  I attended the healthy lifestyles workshop where we had an interesting group discussions led by a team from the Food and Nutrition Research Group at LJMU.  We worked in small groups and were meant to cover five topics but our group just had a general discussion on nutrition and exercise.  One of the Research Group Deborah was facilitating our group and provided a wealth of knowledge on the science of nutriton and measures of health.  I came away from this workshop feeling good about my current lifestyle and eating habits.

The final session of the conference was the Members’ Forum where we had the opportunity to discuss in groups a number of issues surrounding supporting research.  The three topic covered were: how can we measure the impact of the library service and its training? How are we coping with budget cuts? and ideas for the BLA Conference 2011.

So what did I think of my first BLA Conference? As a new Business Librarian I found the conference an excellent opportunity to network with fellow librarians and I have come away with lots of ideas and new contacts.  Even the journey home was inspiring where  Emma Cragg and I had an excellent brainstorming session on ideas for teaching and inductions! I hope to be able to attend BLA 2011 in Sheffield next year.

Sarah Arkle from the University of Bedfordshire was first up and she gave an introduction to LolliPop.  LolliPop is an information literacy (IL) course for enquiry desk staff. The programme develops IL skills and teaches enquiry desk staff to transfer these skills into the work place.  The programme originally called POP-i was developed for public library staff and with a few changes evolved into a tutorial for HE staff.  Sarah provided feedback from the first pilot which tooko place at Loughborough University and University of Hertfordshire.  The course ran for 13 weeks, with 27 participants and covered 10 units.  Staff were given 1-2 hours a week to complete the course.  Various activities were included such as: keeping a reflective journal; forums and formative quizzes.  Feedback from staff included: too much reading and not enough doing; liked content; liked quizzes; liked informs tutorials and they liked the forums.  Following on from the pilot a second version called Evidence Based LolliPop was developed.  This time it included tools for learning such as wikis, blogs, Flickr, Twitter, Delicious, YouTube etc.  The pilot group for version 2 were University of Bedfordshire, University of Worcester and Worcester College of Technology.  The aim of the course was the up-skilling of staff over the summer for the new academic year. This looks like an interesting course that we could perhaps deliver to our front line staff?  The advantages of LolliPop is that it has been written in HTML, therefore can be uploaded into any Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) or onto a website. Content changes can be made easily using Dreamweaver. LolliPop is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales License.  The disadvantage is that some staff will not enjoy learning in an online environment (you can’t please everyone).

Next up was Craigie-Lee Paterson and Helen Stephen from Goldsmiths and they talked about their experiences of studying for the Open University course “The Evolving Information Professional: Challenges in a Digital World“, a course which is wholly delivered online.  The course was based around the concept of the ‘magic triangle’ consisting of you, your users and your service and how they connect together.  Overall they enjoyed the course and thought it was relevant to their job.  They felt there was a lack of collaboration with no interaction with other students.  The course states that it will take around 30 hours to complete but it took both of them much longer than this.

After a well deserved coffee break and opportunity to network we heard from Anne Pietsch and Brian Kilpatrick from Roehampton University who provided an evaluation of the LolliPop scheme at their University.  They condensed the course into an 8 week course and did a HUGE amount of editing for it to work within WebCT (you wouldn’t need to do this for Moodle).  I think their approach to the course worked well as pre-course they had a training day for participants.  There were six onine learning units to be completed which were released weekly.  The advantage of this was that everyone was at the same place.  At week 3 the group had a feedback session with tea and cake (i particularly liked this approach) and at the end they had a project evaluation survey and quiz.  Feedback from the participants was good.  Overall the volunteers enjoyed the experience and learned from it.

Over the course of the day it was quite clear that a lot of University libraries are removing their enquiry desks and replacing them with one desk staffed by library assistants.  The frontline staff are then expected to deal with enquiry work and with this comes a need for a systematic approach to enquiry based training.

University of Sussex are one such institution which are going through a library refurbishment which will result in the ‘information hub’, a one-stop point of contact for enquiries.  Some library staff at Sussex have raised concerns about the planned changes and have asked for additional enquiries training.   Emma Walton, Learning and Teaching Support Manager took the opportunity to look at new ways of training staff to reinforce exisiting enquiries skills and she came up with the University of Sussex Library – “Pub Quiz”.  The staff worked in teams with use of a laptop.  Questions were organised into rounds consisting of 3-4 questions.  Prizes were given to all participatns with a larger prize for the winning team.  As a fun way to end the afternoon we all took part in a short CPD25 Information Skills for Library Staff Quiz to give us a taster and prizes were awarded all round!  I really liked this as one approach to staff training as it allows groups to work together, it’s informal, it’s fun for both participants and the host and it’s just a different way of delivering a staff development session.  I am already planning on running a similar session for library staff at RHUL and thinking about how I can combine this with the clickers?!