bookpluscoffee

Things generally longer than a tweet about being bookpluscoffee

[bookpluscoffee]

#MackLibMemories #2

As a student, I'd also been a shelver for the main Glasgow School of Art library in the Bourdon building across the road from the Mack. After I graduated, I was lucky enough to get a job in the main library as a library assistant. It was only a Saturday job to begin with, but when I managed to get a six month full time contract to cover maternity leave, I was also given a weekday shift in the Mack library. Unfortunately/fortunately it was generally quiet, and I spent some time getting to know little pockets of the collection. I was a very green information professional at that point, overwhelmed and timid. I wish now that I'd pulled much more out the shelves for a look. I'm an illustration graduate, and I remember many beautiful things: artists books; and gorgeous Walter Crane, and Jessie King illustrations; and fragments of Sappho, translated by E.M. Cox, illustrated by Lettice Sandford. On p30 there is this - From my distress: let buffeting winds bear it and all care away.

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#MackLibMemories 1

In the summers of being a student at the Glasgow School of Art between 2000 and 2004, I gave guided tours to visitors to the Mack Building. I'm not necessarily the most comfortable public speaker, but I love the building, and I tried hard to engage the people. The Mack library, however, brought out the dramatist in me. I remember that as we would collect together from coming down the stairs from the furniture gallery above the library, I would get them all around me at the glass panelled door before I opened it. I would tell them a little about it as they looked through the door at the unlit space with the tall windows beyond. All those verticals, and the balance of darkness and light. Then I would let them in, and give them a couple of seconds to get into the space and look around; and then I would flick all the lights on as quickly as I could, and make the sun come out. People would sigh and stand slack-jawed with awe at the library, and I'd swell with pride in the thing for a couple of seconds before I gave them the script about it.

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Private notes, and public presentations

The other day, I drew the map above to help unpack a densely worded webpage of text interspersed with many long initialisms. It worked: I was able to do the job I had to do with the information. I don't know if you'll be able to understand from the drawing what it was I was trying to understand. And thinking about whether I had to make a map other people could read reminded me of being at Biggerplate Unplugged last year, where Hans Buskes talked about standardising mindmapping language, and tidying it up. This is probably important if you use mindmapping to communicate with your customer/team/management. The job I had to do with the understanding I gained through drawing the map got done, so is it important that anyone else can read the map that got me there? I'm not sure it's important to tailor all your mindmaps for others, unless you're only using the maps to communicate something to someone. It's fair to say that you wouldn't turn up and make a presentation with your scribbled notes, because they were part of your own understanding, and needed to take the form that did that best. But it would be silly to not to make the scribbled notes for your own sake.

[bookpluscoffee]

Visit to The Library at The Bridge

Last year, while studying for the MSc, there was a guest lecturer at uni, Principal Librarian for Glasgow Life, Margaret Houston. During her lecture Margaret told us an anectode about the opening of The Library at The Bridge, one of the most recent of the Glasgow libraries. At the opening, library staff had been outside the library talking to passers by, and they had noticed an old man standing a bit away and just looking at the building. On being approached and invited into the library, he said it wasn't for him; in the manner of someone who didn't think they deserved it. And of course, the library staff corrected him and got him into his new library space. We students were much inspired by this story, and it became one on our list of libraries to be visited at the earliest opportunity. It's taken a while, but six of us got round to it on the 22nd of February.

The Library at The Bridge is part of a shared facilities site, housed with Platform Art Centre, Easterhouse Swimming Pool, and the Easterhouse Campus of Glasgow Kelvin College. Designed by Gareth Hoskins Architects, and completed in 2007, the library space is high-ceilinged, bright and spacious.

The library is constructed over two levels, and the book collection is displayed on a sloping floor of seven tiered sections with access to each tier at either side. On one side is a run of gentle steps and the other is an all-access slope.

Each section feels like a mini library, and we spent some time just sitting in the craft section soaking up the feel and sound of the place. We noticed the way we felt like we were in a large airy space and a small intimate study space at the same time. We noticed the sound levels and how the breaking up of the larger space into semi-contained spaces and perhaps the wood and other surfaces meant that sound didn't carry and reverberate around the library the way it might have done with such a lovely high ceiling. I noticed another library user studying at a table in another section later. There were kids running around with music playing on their phones; and I thought the way the space was contstructed might build distance in between different user activities. We had a lovely visit, and one of the library staff had created packs to help us around the space. Staff on duty on the day were also happy to answer our questions.  We also took some time to look at the Glasgow School of Art exhibits situated around the Platform space. I was particularly charmed by the bus seat floor seats by Andrew Sim.

And I borrowed a book: a rather eyecatchingly well drawn graphic novel called The Gigantic Beard That Was Evil, by Stephen Collins...

[bookpluscoffee]

I haven’t blogged for a while, and I feel a bit out the habit. Something caught my attention recently and I just thought I’d make a little post about it to try and pick up the thread again.

I’d started making a fairly consistent typo, and I was a bit puzzled by it. Every time I typed or wrote ‘research’ I would for no apparently good reason spell it ‘reasearch’. This appeared to come out of nowhere.

Then the other day, it came to me. I was filling out a record in a database I use most days at work. There’s a field on this database where the options are ‘research’ or ‘reference’, and I made the typo.

Say the two words to yourself for a moment and think about the first syllables and how they’re spelled. Depending on your accent, you may or may not notice much substantial difference in the sounds; but I often say them ‘reee-search’ and ‘refrince’. I speculate; but I wonder if in my brain somewhere there was suddenly an issue with these circumstantially co-located words, having the same spelling but a different sound. And I wonder if my brain then felt the need to compensate for the discrepancy and stuck and ‘a’ in after the ‘e’ in research.

This research/reference wrinkle was beginning to get to me around the same time as the Royal Institute advent lectures on the topic of chromosomes started, and it was great to bump into chromosome 7 and the FOXP2 gene that humans share with song birds. It’s thought to be what makes us and the songbirds share sophisticated, variable and alterable communication.

#RiAdvent 7: http://youtu.be/I0J0WqssIqo

Being able to learn and react to language, and make changes to one's own usage are amazing brain plasticity experiences. And since I’ve been thinking about this, I appear to have stopped making the mistake, like I’ve been able to fix the mistake in my head just by paying it some attention.

[bookpluscoffee]

Some short thoughts about space/place.

So I'm in the midst of dissertation writing about space and place; and that's a strange location in itself. This MSc dissertation process is very different from the BA dissertation process for a kick off. I feel quite tied into a location, into a sequence of positions, in a way I don't remember from the undergraduate dissertation. Also, being in the location of postgraduate dissertation writer is different from being that of a person interested in thinking about space. There are acts that I need to perform in this place. I need to polish off my introduction before I can really make a start on any writing. That feels back to front for me, although I see the virtue in it as a planning tool. I've had nearly a year of learning about vision and mission statements here (I will complete this MSc to the best of my ability; I will manage this dissertation) and how they should guide the goals and action plans. Even so, I feel a sense of friction in the process; like not really moving, like stasis. The words seem to get in the way. I tweeted a link to Suzanne Vega's Language from @bookpluscoffee the other day. I want to go to library spaces and be in them. But why? I went to the first Edinburgh Libraries Tweet-Up last week. We went to the Scottish Poetry library, and I got lost on the Canongate trying to find it. They need a bigger sign, and I want to make it. (I just don't have time for that sort of activity where I am right now.) Outside space, and performance. Can you hear me back there?

Surfaces, covered in poetry and textures

And the bit that blew me away, a whole floor of rolling stacks that transforms into a performance space. Like being in two places at once.

And Colin talked about online places, and I remembered that it was the place that is the @ByLeavesWeLive twitter feed that made me want to visit the library in 3D; I followed them ages ago when I was in the location of maker on @alittledrawn. I haven't really been in the location of tweeting from @alittledrawn for most of this MSc. It's a time thing, and an energy thing. I haven't really drawn anything for most of this MSc. I've committed time and energy to this MSc thing at the exclusion of most other activity. I'm beginning to really miss making. But I do like librarying. Where is my place?

[bookpluscoffee]

Mind-Mapping, Exams and Dyslexia

The fourth and last exam for the MSc happened on the 15th May. It was for the long thin module, the two semster, CS961 Organisation of Knowledge. I wasn’t as nervous about this one as the exams in January. I was very anxious in January, based on earlier bad exam experience. Happily, because I was better prepared, the results for those three exams turned out just fine. The CS961 course tutor had given us two recap classes of ‘what cannot be avoided’ for this semester’s exam, and without hesitation I made a mind map for that information.

(The screengrabs give a sense of scale; for details, the mindmaps included are probably best viewed online through the links included beneath each map. A link to the May 15th map online: http://www.mindmeister.com/289324400/msc-ils-organisation-of-knowledge-exam-prep-15th-may-2013)

I met with a researcher from Plymouth University on Friday 24th. Kassandra Clemens is writing a thesis about dyslexics in higher education. I first got involved in her research last year when I completed an online survey about my experiences as a dyslexic in higher education. We got onto the topic of mind-mapping on Friday, and for the last week I’ve been thinking again about how I’ve made use of it this year.

I came to mind-mapping quite late in learning really. I’ve always been a very visual learner, lots of drawings to understand and remember things, and doodles to concentrate. I didn’t find out I was dyslexic until I was 27 though, when I was struggling to organise my thoughts around my undergraduate dissertation. As soon as they diagnose you dyslexic, they start recommending mind-mapping to you. At first I was intrigued, and tried hand drawing mind-maps, but I quickly grew frustrated by the inflexibility and difficulty of developing complex ideas on paper. I don’t like erasers, and I don’t like redrawing (I’m that kind of one-take line artist, and mind-mapping by hand feels like drawing). Then I was introduced to Mindmeister, which, being electronic and cloud-based, lets you rejig layout, swap ideas around, and develop areas as you go along.

But I didn’t fully embrace mind-mapping until I started this MSc. Of course, I anticipated being pretty overwhelmed this year. It’s the increase in content, concomitant with edging up the academic tree, that’s the killer for dyslexics like me. So much of it is in words, and the volume of it is dismal. I can get text to sit still most of the time, I just get really tired processing. It can take me a while to unpack content wrapped up in words; looking at the words, and digging out their meaning, and connecting each word to the next. And it’s the only way to get anywhere, trudging through this kind of content. Word based content is everywhere in academia; lectures, books, papers, conversation. After a while of chomping through content, I get so damn tired that even an everyday chinwag becomes hard work. Getting my own thoughts in order after contact with a lot of word-based content has occasionally been very problematic indeed.

Especially under exam conditions. There were no timed examinations at art school, only essays, but I had a good exam experience after my undergraduate degree, when I completed Higher German at Cardonald College. The College granted me extra time for the exam, based on the psychologist’s report from art school, and the tutor prepared us all well. I got an A. This filled me with the courage to have a go at an undergraduate art history module with the Open University, which would be a different experience from my art undergraduate experience. After I enrolled, declaring the dyslexia, the OU told me I would need to arrange a skills assessment meeting at John Wheatley College in the east end of Glasgow to be granted extra time in the exam. I was working full time at this point, on a short six month contract, and on a very steep learning curve with Microsoft Excell. Maybe it’s manifestly dyslexic, but I just couldn’t manage to organise the needs assessment meeting, it felt beyond me. I made the best of things, reasoning that based on past experience I could probably manage the essays, or Tutor Marked Assessments (TMAs), and since I’d managed other written exams, (no hassles at school, ever) I thought I might get by there too. I was right about the TMAs, no problems, but I was so wrong about the exam. Although I’d got hold of the past papers, I didn’t seem to quite know what to do with them. I ignored the alarm I felt when when I read the questions, supposing it was just exam nerves. I hoped that it would just be like writing the TMA essays, only faster. In fact, exam essays are totally different beasts from essays with weeks to dither over and think out. Three essays in three hours is really hard work, even when you know the subject well, as I felt I did. It took this experience for me to understand the weaknesses in my approach. The exam questions covered precisely the same areas as the the TMAs, I recognised all the subjects, but I could not read the selection of possible questions quick enough to choose the three to work on. I could not corral, and deliver all my thoughts in response to my understanding of the questions quick enough in order to write them on the paper. It was a horrific thing to do to my head, and it put me off education for a bit. I flunked that exam.

When I finally decided to attempt the MSc, I heavily invested in trying to identify efficient working methods very early in the year. I got myself an iPad and tried out text editing apps that would be compatible with Microsoft Word. I got a Dropbox account, and synced everything up, so I could note take on the move, and it would be workable with on the laptop when I got the chance, to save on typing time. One of the things that suddenly seemed to work well for digesting and processing content was mind-mapping using Mindmeister, which can also be exported to Word. At MSc volume of content, mind-mapping has facilitated research, reading, and planning.

Below is a partially complete mind-map of the technical services section of Strathclyde University’s Information Services website, completed as part of the research for the second assignment of the module CS962 Libraries Information and Society:

(A link to the Information Services map online: http://www.mindmeister.com/268944028/information-services-technical-services)

Below is the mind-map made to prepare for the exams in January. I was This was the first of the seriously large maps, and I was assisted in its construction by my partner Graeme, an MA in Online and Distance Education student with the OU (@thegrimmbrother). This map helped tremendously in planning and targeting revision, and time-tabling writing. It was this map that made me a committed mind-mapper;

A link to the January 13 Exam map: (http://www.mindmeister.com/240555204/msc-ils-exam-prep-jan-2013)

Mind-mapping has been such a great way to unpack a paper, and it’s meant that I haven’t generally needed to reread so much. Coupled with digitally annotated PDFs using the Adobe Reader app, refinding references has been so much easier too. Below are a couple of examples of mind-mapped papers:

(A link to a map of a paper by Vasileiou and Rowley: http://www.mindmeister.com/261165051/vasileiou-m-rowley-j-2011-marketing-and-promotion-of-e-books-in-academic-libraries-journal-of-documentation-vol-67-iss-4-pp-624-643)

(A link to a map of a paper by Vårheim: http://www.mindmeister.com/255281061/v-rheim-a-steinmo-s-ide-e-2008-do-libraries-matter-public-libraries-and-the-creation-of-social-capital-journal-of-documentation-vol-64-iss-6-pp-877-892)

What I’ve realised by mapping papers is that although words arranged in sentences travel in a physically fairly predicable linear zig zag down a page, the contexts thus expressed are more often than not more web like in ther interconnections. Maybe non-dyslexic brains can hold these interconnections in a conceptual way; I know I struggle with that when the concepts are new or very complex in their interconnections. Mindmapping records the interconnections and structures for me, and takes the pressure off me holding them in my head.

Mind-mapping was only part of the strategy for the exams though. Because the exams are all hand written, I also did a lot of hand writing to prepare for January’s batch. It was important to develop writing muscle memory and coordination, and to have written paragraphs remembered that could be adapted to more than one question. I had a lot of help from my partner on this aspect of exam technique. Being an OU graduate, he has had plenty of practice of end of module exams.

It became like learning to draw the shape of the exam; parts of it from memory; and sometimes I could create diagrams to remember a sequence of points that was even more effective than a bunch of words. Below is a drawing I made that allowed me to remember twelve features of RDA (I wonder if anyone else can figure it out…).

So by the tine I got to the exams I found that I wasn’t trying to recall seven or eight different related things and fashion them into sentences, but some paragraphs/diagrams of my own making. Maybe that’s what everyone does, but it feels like I fashioned new mechanisms to augment existing ones inside my head. It worked in January, and I got similar marks to my essay marks for the semester, which made me very happy indeed. Let’s hope it also paid off on the 15/5…

Collectively these experiences have shown me the plasticity and adaptability of my own brain, and that’s been interesting to experience. None of this, as far as I understand, has made me undyslexic, whatever that might be. I don’t know what I am any more. Almost a useful Information Professional, I hope.

Maybe there’s an irony in making a massive blog post about mind-mapping that isn’t in itself a mind-map. Funny that.

[bookpluscoffee]

GLTU9 - The City of Glasgow College Library

I went on my first Glasgow Libraries Tweet-Up on Thursday. This was the 9th tweet-up, all of which have been organised by Anabel Marsh, @AnabelMarsh on twitter. Twenty of us were visiting The City of Glasgow College Library, where we had a fantastic tour from Tony Donnelly, the Chief Librarian. The tour really sparked my brain for dissertation writing. I'm just going to bash down a few thoughts here on the blog, so this post might be a little fragmented. Tony gave us an outline of the mergers that the college has gone through, and how this has impacted on the information and library services. The current college library is split over two floors, and each has different characteristics because of the two different building periods. Level 1 was completed in 2007, and Level 2 was completed in 2012. The political climate was not great in 2007, and some things had to be compromised in the design process for level 1. There's no real path through the floor, although it is still well used; I think it was last years footfall figures that were 156,000 compared to 74,000 for level 2. However, computer use is inversely in favour of level 2, but I missed noting those figures. The ICT suite on level 1 is slightly like a call centre, but the staff had less control of this at the time. PCs are crammed into the space, and close to the wall, when staff would have preferred clusters. However, cables cost money and money was tight. I wonder about the price of copper, and it's effect on ICT facility layout. Tony acknowledged that the design of level 2 had been inspired by the intuitive and 'invisible' design of the ICT suite at the Mitchell library. Although level 2 is so new, its life expectancy is only five more years. In 2016 there is to be a new library built as part of a larger development for the college. I wish I'd got a photo of the level 1 Service Point. It was lovely. Well used though, and I didn't want to be disruptive taking photos. Staff love the room for storage and find it very ergonomic. There's certainly plenty of room for staff computer terminals and processing issues etc, as well as breathing room for reshelves and holds. Students appear to find it very approachable. There was a good consultation process on this facility, and staff were heavily involved in the design by David McGill. Tony was obviously very engaged with the topic of zoning. He cautioned us against sending a muddled message to students with the design of space. What the library learned through use of the group study area as designed on level 1, was that the large booth enclosing many group study desks at the back of the floor could invite behavioural issues. He spoke of the rethink on group study areas during the 2nd floor remodel, and we saw the lovely cluster of smaller, long tabled booth arrangements, and how well they were being used. Tony also spoke of techniques of zoning using the wall decal art, designed by the illustrator Tony McKay. The artwork features Alexander Thomson, resolutely avoiding any Rennie Mackintosh! An increase in colour and density of elements within the design indicates a more noisy area, where conversely less coloured, less busy design indicates a quieter zone.

Sound is also manipulated by ceiling design. Large shell like structures capture and focus sound in the ICT cluster area, and I think we all felt the compulsion to drop our voices in that area.

On the second floor there is a cutting table situated behind the printers. It is a thing of beauty. So obviously and perfectly useful in situ, so eminently sensible; however, we all wondered if we would ever have thought of it unprompted.

It was good to hear that the college was very supportive of the library service. All through the talk, Tony advocated getting as close to any project management processes as possible. He advised investing in design and good furniture, as the students respected the furniture they had bought, and it was wearing well. He was frank about the mistakes they felt they had made in design, and proud of the successes the library had achieved in its design. Tony's enthusiasm was contagious, and it was a great visit which has given me much food for thought on library space design in practice. I was reading the first paper in the IFLA Library Building Guidelines the other day, The Top Ten Qualities of Good Library Space, by Andrew McDonald, and had been thinking about practicalities of zoning. McDonald talks about "...sound and visual clues, layout, style of furniture, and types of technology in different configurations" (p18), citing a JISC publication from 2006. So it was really great to have Tony talk about this in practice. I've just downloaded that JISC paper, so I'm off for a read at that now...

[bookpluscoffee]

Women of the Necropolis Walking Tour

I enjoyed the Women of the Necropolis Walking Tour yesterday, organised by the Glasgow Women's Library. Glasgow Necropolis makes for a fascinating wander amongst the Victorian wealthy and powerful, and the scale of the place is stunning. Our guides from the library were Esther, Joyce, Lesley, and Christine, and they painted a lively, but also sad, picture of Victorian attitudes to death and women. They told us of the history of the necropolis, and its part of a general European shift in the hygienic suburbanisation of death. And what of the women buried there? Put concisely, the best way a Victorian woman could assure a marked stone in the cemetery was to marry a rich or powerful man, and/or be philanthropic. A number tombs of women were identified on the tour. We saw the large monument to the Elder family, including Isabella Elder (née Ure).

Left with a fortune after the death of her husband, Isabella embarked upon philanthropic work. This included buying the land for, and establishing, Elder Park. She founded Elder Park Library, and also encouraged the development of the Queen Margaret College. Ultimately this college allowed Marion Gilchrist to become the first female doctor to graduate from Glasgow University At the marker for the Jewish part of the cemetery, we heard of Deborah Ascherson, a woman buried just outside this area because she married outside the faith. We heard of Carlinda Lee, who married George Smith. Because of the large families joined in this marriage, they became known as the Gypsy King and Queen. The tombs of the Misses Buchanan of Belford, philanthropists of Glasgow, were spotted perched high upon the crest of the hill. There was the sad story of Lillias Scott (née Ure), who died in the sinking of the S.S.Orion, on her way home from Canada to begin a new life in Glasgow. John Knox was mentioned in passing, his tall monument and misogyny being hard to ignore. And there was talk of witches, and the sad case of Margaret Aitken, the Fife woman who claimed she could identify witches by something in their eyes, and thus condemned many women to their death. Eventually she was found out, an enquiry was held, and she was put to death herself. But what a mess made in scrambling for survival. The grave of Barbara Hopkirk Hill, wife of William Henry Hill, has recently been rediscovered, after spending a long time under thick ivy. Barbara produced thirteen children. (Which makes me think, 'ouch!').

Barbara was one of the first women to be interred in the necropolis. The very first was Elizabeth Miles, stepmother to the superintendent. The ivy is much removed in general since my last visit, quite a few years ago now, but remains of stumps show just how well established it had become. The plants don't care about human monuments; no respect.

It was an interesting afternoon, great to make remembrance of some of the women buried in the cemetery; to see them present in the vastness of the necropolis. And it was lovely to share some conversation with the women from the library and the people on the tour. I'm left frustrated by the gaps in my knowledge of the Victorian women, and puzzled how this angel came by a flower.

I think I'll be going to more of these walks... ---------- http://www.clydewaterfrontheritage.com/elderpark.aspx http://womenslibrary.org.uk/ http://www.universitystory.gla.ac.uk/biography/?id=WH0024&type=P

[bookpluscoffee]

Saved by the cloud.

It's been a bit of a week. The final two group class assignments for the MSc Information and Library Studies had deadlines within days of each other, and there have indeed been sleepless nights of work to achieve them.This was bad enough. Wednesday morning was a stinker though. I was tasked with the final edit and proof read of the group assignment for module CS962 Libraries Information And Society. I started work at about half ten on Tuesday night. I had two Word docs, owing to a small misunderstanding about versions, each about 1500 words over the word count. So the first task was to get one doc sitting around 6600, before I did anything else. That took me about three hours. I had recently saved to Dropbox, and I was just trying to get rid of a pesky page break around about the section three, when the Spinning Wait Cursor (aka The Spinning Beach Ball of Death) appeared, and nothing would move. For about ten minutes. I had to force quit Word. Then I tried reopening the doc; more SBBOD. I restarted the mac and reopened the doc; alas yet more SBBOD. By which time there were tears in my eyes. There was no time for tears on this. I dried my eyes, and I had a rethink. I accessed the Word doc on the iPad through Dropbox. It can't open Word docs, but I am able to copy the text and paste it into a PlainText file. This automatically backs up to Dropbox, and I am able then to open the PlainText file in TextEdit on the mac, copy the text into a new Word doc, and lo, the essay is saved! Of course, all of the formatting is gone, and the process has replaced parts of the punctuation with gibberish. But the c.6600 words are not gone. Three more hours of reformatting, reinserting images, and making the links in the bibliography work again and we are good to go. I just want to say, thank you Dropbox, and PlainText, and TextEdit, you saved the day.

[bookpluscoffee]

March

March was a great month. I came out of February feeling really quite off the map owing to a combination of closely packed academic deadlines and dyslexic manifestations, but getting out and about in March picked me right up.

(L-R: Lauren Tuckerman; Fiona Tinto; Katie Edwards; Hartwig Pautz; Katy Loudon; Christine Gallagher; and Sinéad Carroll, at the mobile library, outside Edinburgh City Council Head Offices. Sarah Jane Brown was with us that day too, but had to dash off before this photo was taken.)

Edinburgh City Libraries. In the first semester of the MSc we were set an assignment to analyse and critique Edinburgh City Libraries’ Next Generation Library and Information Service Strategy 2012-15. One of my student colleagues, Hartwig Pautz, suggested that we approach Edinburgh City Libraries with our findings to see if they would consider meeting with us. We felt that the academic exercise had been very dry, and that it would be useful to hear the Libraries Information Services Management Team talk about their side of making the strategy take shape, and what factors they felt had influenced its final form. Fantastically, a meeting was arranged, and a focus group of LIS students set about collating student paper findings from the six class assignments into one report. Our anxious troop of ten took this report and presentation to the head office meeting on the 6th March. Our nerves were soon dispelled by the warm welcome we received from the Head of Service, Liz McGettigan, and her team; Jim Thompson (Digital and Information Services Manager), Paul McCloskey (Customer Services Manager) and Sarah Forteath (Business Development Manager). They had also prepared a presentation for us, and a lively question and answer session ensued.

Glasgow School of Art Library. I worked here for a time. As a student shelver through three years of my undergraduate degree, and after my B.A., as a Saturday assistant, and then full time Library Assistant, for a year. It was this library that sparked the librarian in me. I’ve worked in other libraries since then, but this is a special library space and collection, and I wondered if my library student colleagues knew about it. They didn’t, so I contacted Architecture Librarian David Buri to ask if he would allow a group of us to visit, and perhaps tell us what the library has been up to recently. He said yes, and on the 15th March a group of us descended on Garnethill. Graduate Library Assistant Jennifer Higgins took us through a slide show of the development of the Art School and its library, and she and David Buri gave us a tour around the main library as well as the Mackintosh Library. There was discussion throughout, and we came away with a real sense of the art, design, and architecture student demographic catered for at this institution, and how a paper book codex might endure for longer there because of the strong paper-loving browsing culture.

(L-R: Sinéad Carroll; Hartwig Pautz; Christine Gallagher; Katie Edwards; Elin Lien; Lauren Tuckerman; Katy Loudon; Fiona Tinto; Sarah Jane Brown; and me, in the Mackintosh Library, Glasgow School of Art. Photo courtesy of Jennifer Higgins, @Jenny_say_quoi)

Mitchell library, Glasgow. It would be impossible to construct a series of library tours useful to students (although this isn’t what we actually set out to achieve, to be honest) without including the Mitchell. Hartwig organised this one, and our little group spent two hours being totally bowled over by the sheer vastness of the Mitchell Library collection. I was so bowled over I neglected to make any visual record of our time there, which is slightly annoying in retrospect. What stacks though! Really, if you ever get a chance to visit the Mitchell Library’s stacks, grab it with both hands! The extremely informative tour was lead by Librarian Myra Paterson, and was much enlivened by anecdotes which we all enjoyed. We were also introduced to the schools outreach, and acquisitions departments, and Business @ the Mitchell.

I’m indebted to the kindness of those in practice above who took time out from their schedules to meet and talk with us. I know I’m not alone when I say that these three visits breathed some life onto the bones of our coursework.

[bookpluscoffee]

Bearpit Pedagogy

It was great to hear Steve Wheeler talk yesterday at LILAC 13. I accessed his keynote speech for the first day of the event through the live stream on the LILAC website. I really appreciated this facility, as I couldn't organise time off from studies to physically attend. His thoughts about Prensky's Digital Native terminology are well worth pondering. The idea that a group of people are somehow more canny about a technology by mere contact through childhood is moot. Students still need to learn about good information seeking strategies. Those of us who grew up with books had the same journey towards avoiding misinformation and lies. If anything it's less easy for undergraduates nowadays, as there is much more distraction and wastage for them to wade through. It's bad customer service as a librarian to assume that the kids are alright just because they appear manually quite accustomed to using hand held devices. I wondered about Bearpit Pedagogy. The description of the process reminded me of my experiences as an art student. As an undergraduate I had weekly or fortnightly crits to attend for four years, to defend my thinking behind my work and its execution, and question that of others. This was intended to develop our critical faculties, I'm sure. My own experience was that after quite a short time, students tended towards a very non-confrontational approach, and learned a technique for smoothing out the process. There was a quiet understanding that criticism was only considered worth making under extreme circumstances, and that criticism for the sake of filling time was worthless; what goes around comes around. Sometimes, particularly in second year, there could be as many as sixty students to crit, and it would take all day, getting quite lifeless by the end. It was interesting to hear people talk about their work though, and there would always be a some dialogue about how something worked or why it did what it did; but after first year, it was almost never overtly critical. I don't think its exactly true to say that students are passive in this template, but I do think it needs to be made clear to them what the objective is for it to take on a particularly proactive shape. Otherwise students will practice self-preservation and tacitly cooperate in keeping things calm. I'm curious how it works at Plymouth University. Of course, students training to become teachers might just be somehow different from students training to be artists. Image credit: Honey Bear, by Pascal Walschots. Picture taken 8th May 2011, accessed 26th March 2013, (CC BY 2.0)

[bookpluscoffee]

Introduction to the DDC - Notation

"The dot is not a decimal point in the mathematical sense, but a psychological pause to break the monotony of numerical digits and to ease the transcription and copying of the class number."