London Health Libraries ‘Library Assistants’ Day’ 2013

Library Assistants’ Day is an event run yearly in the London Health Libraries network. I attended this event last year as a non NHS delegate and found it helpful and informative. It was a fantastic opportunity to meet new people and learn about key changes to the NHS. When I began my current post in an NHS library in April, I was already looking out for the 2013 event.

This year, Library Assistants’ Day was held at The Royal Free Hospital in Hampstead. Delegates were welcomed by Richard Osborn, Strategic Library Services Development Manager, who introduced us to our first speaker, Jane Moore, NICE Implementation Consultant. Jane told us more about her role and the resources provided by NICE for healthcare professionals. She discussed the guidance and standards that NICE produce, including Clinical guidelines; Quality standards, Technology appraisals, Interventional procedures, Medical technologies, Diagnostics guidance and Public health guidance. Jane also discussed NICE Pathways, which consolidate information regarding evidence and recommendations in a accessible way. Each pathway contains an introduction, information for the public, and information about relevant updates. From each pathway, you can link straight through the the relevant guidance and quality standards information for the pathway you have selected. As well as the resources mentioned above, NICE have produced three smartphone and tablet apps, the NICE Guidance App, NICE BNF app and the NICE BNFC app. You can find out more information about these apps here. An NHS Athens account is required for access.

For more information about NICE resources, you can take a look at Jane's presentation.

The second session of the day was led by Daphne Grey and Ziba Nadimi who are part of CLIST (Clinical Librarians and Information Skills Trainers). Their session was on searching the Cochrane Library. Daphne explained that the Cochrane Library consists of seven databases;

• Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews
• Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials
• Cochrane Methodology Register
• Database of Abstracts of Reviews of Effects
• Health Technology Assessment Database
• NHS Economic Evaluation Database
• About The Cochrane Collaboration     

 These databases are useful for accessing systematic reviews and for gauging the effectiveness of clinical interventions. The databases use MESH subject headings and a 'search manager' facility to pull together the different elements of your search.You can register for an account, which will allow you to save your searches and allow you to sign up for alerts and information about particular areas of interest. I found this session particularly helpful as I had no previous experience searching Cochrane. I will certainly be using this resource regularly in my role going forward.

Daphne and Ziba's presentation can be viewed here.

The final session of the day, was led by John Nyman of Imperial College London, who presented on 'Searching Google and Google Scholar'. This session was really engaging and provided some really good suggestions on how to 'tame' Google and preform more efficient search tasks using the search engine. John firstly explained how Google works and the algorithms that enable its results, and explained that Google uses page ranking to determine the importance of a particular webpage, which influences the results we see. John gave us some handy tips on how to focus our search using Google, including searching by file type and date range. We also talked about Google's advanced search facility, which allows you to filter results by reading level and usage rights.

After providing us with some useful information on searching Google, John's presentation moved on to discussing Google Scholar. Google Scholar searches across disciplines and sources to retrieve articles, theses, books and abstracts from a wide range of academic and professional sources. What I found particularly interesting about Google Scholar, is that you can configure its settings to access your institution's full-text e-journals. Finally, John pointed us towards some other search engines which we might find useful, including;

• www.bing.com
• http://blekko.com
• https://duckduckgo.com
• http://www.zuula.com

For more information about John's session, I would recommend taking a look at his presentation.

You can access the resources and handouts for this workshop at http://www.londonlinks.nhs.uk/events, alongside information about other events that have been organised by the network.

London Health Libraries visit the British Library

I wrote this report for NHS London Links, to summarise the recent LHL visit to the British Library. It was a fantastic visit and I thought I would share the report here.  

On Wednesday 12^th June, two groups of library staff from London health libraries visited the British Library (BL), the national library of the United Kingdom. I was really interested in going on this visit to learn more about the BL collections and to explore some of the history behind the organisation itself.

History of the British Library

The tour started in the main hall and our guide told us about the history of the BL and how it came to be in its present location. The BL was originally integrated with the British Museum, but moved location in order to acquire more space. The library became legally separate from the British Museum in 1973. The original library was created to house the royal library of George III which was given to the British Museum in 1757 under the conditions that the collection was;

-kept intact

-kept on display

-able to be used

These conditions have been followed through to this day, with 60 titles still being used on a regular basis.  The King’s library collection is today a centerpiece of the BL’s building at St Pancras, often called ‘the jewel in the crown’ of the library’s collections. The collection is presented in a glass display cabinet in the centre of the library; allowing a full a view of the items intricate bindings. This ‘foundation collection’ provides a stunning introduction to the library and illustrates the historical and cultural significance of the collections held at the BL.

The library building itself is a product of the work of architect Colin St John Wilson, work which took over thirty years to complete. The building is an example of Brutalism and was the largest public building constructed in the UK in the 20^th century. The building has total floor area of 112,000 sq meters and is spread over 14 floors (nine above ground and five below). St John Wilson’s vision and process for the building was anecdotally summed up by our guide who informed us that the architect wanted each of the 10 million bricks in the building to ‘smile’. The British Library moved fully from the site of the British Museum and its other numerous locations, to its new home on Euston Road in 1997. We were informed that when the collection moved from the British Museum, it was the largest book move in history.

The British Library collection requires over 625 km of shelves and grows by 12km each year. This works out as 2 million new items each year. The BL is unable to extend any further on current site due to a medical research development and half of the collection is held in Yorkshire at the Boston Spa site. This is where almost all cataloguing is completed and their document delivery service takes place. The library collects from all countries in 400 different languages and has specific language cataloguers based at its Boston Spa site. 
Since the 18^th century, the BL has been a legal deposit library, receiving a copy of every publication produced in the UK and Ireland. The library operates on a budget of £100 million each year from government. We were told of research that was carried out that showing that for each £1 the BL is given, it produces £5 revenue for the UK, mostly from its Business and IP centre. You can read more about this research here: http://bit.ly/80niCo. We were informed that the library is not immune to staffing and service cuts, having suffered staffing cuts of 10% in 2012, mostly to its site in Yorkshire.

Collections

There is no classification scheme for books in storage; each item is given a unique identifier number on arrival. The exception to this is that books on open shelves, for example in the reading rooms, are classified using Dewey Decimal. We were shown the bust of former librarian Anthony Panizzi (1831-1866) who decided to shelve the library’s books by size to make the best use of space. The BL still uses card catalogues in many of its reading rooms and also uses Microfliche and microfilm readers on a regular basis, because of the stability and preservation benefits of this technology.

The library’s holdings range from material over 3,000 years old, to today’s newspapers. The library has a collection of; 310,000 manuscript volumes, 4 million maps, 260,000 million journal titles and the world’s largest music manuscript collection, after acquiring the Royal Music collection in the 1950s. The library has an automatic acceptance policy from publishers.

Digitisation

The BL is currently involved in several digitisation projects, one of which involves archiving 65000 websites, in order to preserve sites which are culturally significant and may be of value to research. You can find out more about this project here: http://bit.ly/19mOiTQ. Staff are also working with Google on an ongoing basis to make 250,000 books available online through Google Books; digitising 40 million pages from 1700-1870. Information about this project is here: http://bit.ly/149VP4X

Reader Services

We were taken to have a look around the reader registration area, where all users must first register for a readers pass by showing proof of address. You can order books in advance of your visit to the library through their website. All items are ordered from storage and library rooms are interconnected by track way to transport books to required areas. This track way covers 30003 ways around the library. We were advised that generally, readers should expect to wait up to 70 minutes before their item is delivered to their chosen reading room, although on many occasions this period is considerably less. Until recently, readers had to apply for a readers pass and a separate manuscript pass, although this is no longer the case. The library has gone through a process of widening its audience in recent times where previously use of the collections was only open to postgraduate students, academics and final year undergraduates.

The rooms open to readers are as follows;

Asian & African Studies Reading Room

Business & Intellectual Property Centre

Humanities Reading Rooms

Manuscripts Reading Room

Maps Reading Room

Rare Books & Music Reading Room

Science Reading Rooms

Social Science Reading Room

Treasures Gallery

Our visit ended in the Treasures gallery where we viewed some of the library’s rare and valuable material including the Codex Sinaiticus, which was written in the middle of the 4^th century. This codex is the earliest manuscript of the complete New Testament. The treasures gallery is also home to other important items such as Magna Carta, one of Leonardo da Vinci’s notebooks, a collection of the early works by Shakespeare and Beatles manuscripts.

I would like to extend thanks to Elisabeth Chalmers for organizing the visit and to the British Library staff who provided such an informative and engaging tour.

Change, library visits and exhibitions

The last few months have been busy and filled with change, trying new things and looking forward. I have been very fortunate to have been recently offered a new position of Library Assistant within a NHS library, which will provide an excellent opportunity to continue developing skills in health librarianship, a sector which I'm really enjoying working in.

I've recently been re-reading past posts and thinking about what I have learned during my time as a graduate trainee. Aside from working with knowledgeable staff and an outstanding collection, one of the highlights has been without a doubt, the opportunity to engage with lots of different library services and sectors. I recently visited the Wellcome Library with the University of London library trainees- a really interesting visit which exceeded any expectations I may have had.
The visit involved a comprehensive tour around the library and stores with one of the librarians (one of 70 members of library staff) who gave us a good idea about the content and organisation of the collections and informed us of the projects and resources library staff got involved with. One thing that surprised me about the library was just how much was freely accessible to the public. Once registered, users have access to a wealth of modern and historical materials, ranging from medicine, society and culture. To any trainees outside of London looking for an interesting library to visit, I would definitely recommend it. 

This month also saw the opportunity to host a visit from the University of London graduate trainees and give them an insight in to what it's like working in a health library. The head of the library organised colleagues from other health libraries to come and present about their roles and routes in to librarianship. I found the talks really useful as both visitors were working in very different roles within Health information services and it was interesting to hear what skills they thought were important for information professionals working in health. It was good to talk a little about my role and what I have enjoyed while working as a graduate trainee and was a nice opportunity to reflect on how the experience has developed me professionally and personally. Harriet Lam, graduate trainee at the Courtauld book library wrote an excellent summary of the visit which can be found here.

My final project in post will be finishing the exhibition on the life and work of early epidemiologist John Snow with the assistant archivist. We've been captioning, organising and putting together a biography and it will be great to see the exhibition process through to the end. The next steps will be putting it all together and publicizing it to members of the college and the public through the website and Twitter. I'm really grateful for the experiences I've had as a graduate trainee and I'm really looking forward to continuing to learn about the information profession.

Graduate Trainee- Month 4.5

I'm almost halfway through my traineeship and have already had lots of fantastic experiences within the library world. Much of my time recently has been spent aiding the implementation of the library's new e-journal subscriptions, which has been beneficial to the service and has given me a great insight in to the processes that are involved with acquiring new subscriptions. My work around this area has involved checking the holdings information for subscriptions and organising the upload of all new and revised information on to the library's link resolver. I have also been asked to write a report on the content of my traineeship to date and to present it at the next library committee meeting. Writing the report encouraged me to be reflective after the Christmas break and got me thinking about what I have gained from the experiences and the scope of the projects I've been involved with.

I'm lucky to be attending several library visits this month, including a visit to the Courtauld Library organised by ALISS and a visit to Senate House Special Collections and Archives, organised by the London Libraries Trainee Scheme. I'm really looking forward to these visits, as these particular libraries are sure to be rich in history and fascinating items. It will be interesting to see how these libraries operate on a day to day basis and what systems they use.  An interesting future project I'm due to be involved in is organising an exhibition in the library on the work of John Snow. Over the last month I have got involved in the preparation of an exhibition on the work of Andreas Vesalius, compiling information and a short biography. The Snow exhibition will give me the chance to see the exhibition process through from beginning to end.

London Health Libraries 'Library Assistants' Day'

On the 7th December, I attended the 'Library Assistants' day' at Stewart House. The event was run by the NHS London Deanery and is a yearly event aimed to allow library assistants from a range of London health libraries a chance to engage with current issues and network. Although not based in a NHS library, I was keen to attend due to the insight the day would give to wider issues within the health sector and for an opportunity to meet those working in similar roles within different institutions. The day began with introduction by Richard Osborn, Strategic Library Services Development Manager, NHS London and a presentation on 'How is the NHS changing? How might these changes affect our library services?' Richard provided an overview of the current organisation within the NHS and explained the timeline for the proposed changes to take place. The infographic below was referenced which details how the health and care system will look from April 2013.

 Richard continued to explain that the changes within the system are based on two principles from the Health and Social Care Act 2012, being that;

1.  Patients should share in every decision about their care
2. Those responsible for patient care should have power to continually improve care for patients 

 After a summary of the proposed changes, Richard referenced the Peter Hill report of 2008 in order to explore the purpose of NHS library services and their influence in developing the health and care system. In line with developments in electronic publishing and accessibility, he announced that the NHS would move towards journals being  delivered primarily electronically by January 2014 and for information services to promote and pilot mobile access to information resources.
The second aspect of the day focused on comparing the work of Library and Information Assistants across the network. It was great to hear from others what their day to day duties consist of and to discuss the levels of responsibility that library assistants have in different institutions. It was clear from the discussion that working in the information sector provides you with transferable skills; focused on customer care, effective administration and information provision and retrieval. I enjoyed the opportunity to discuss with other assistants what we 'like the most' about working in health libraries, to which I contributed that I enjoyed the aspects of specialist research involved in providing a health information service and the opportunity to provide healthcare professionals with the support and resources needed to further their learning and practice. e-Learning was next on the agenda and the resources available to those within the London and national networks.
Following a discussion on e-learning resources, Richard headed a particularly helpful session on answering enquiries. The session involved group discussion and some useful tips on how to best manage the enquiry process. The importance of ascertaining exactly what a user is asking for was re-enforced and follow up questions were suggested in order to clarify important information. Richard suggested agreeing deadlines with users to ensure they are kept informed of the progress of their enquiry. As a conclude to the day we were introduced to Sian Aynsely, Information Skills trainer for the South London Healthcare NHS Trust, who gave a presentation on Social Media and its usage in London NHS information services. She discussed a survey that herself and a colleague had conducted within the London health library network and it's findings. She confirmed that social media is widely used within the network and discussed the drawbacks and access issues that can arise within the network while accessing social media platforms, although she noted that access to social media is widely assumed.

For more information about the content of the event, you can view Richard's presentation slides here, where he provides links to useful information and resources discussed. You can find out more about the London Health Library network on the London Links website, where details of upcoming events are posted.

Reading for New Professionals

       

As a trainee/library assistant it can be difficult to know the best resources to use when preparing to undertake an MA course. It may be that you want to find out a little more about the profession before investing in a degree, or you may be just researching ways to develop in your current role. In either case, I've been lucky to have some really good reading recommendations from colleagues and friends and thought I'd share a few.

Prior to starting my graduate traineeship I had a browse around Facet publishing's website, on the lookout for a general introduction to the library and information sector that would give me an idea about the day to day skills I would need to develop during my traineeship and an overview of different cataloguing and classification schemes. I found the new professionals section of the site really helpful and invested in Librarianship: An Introduction which I've found useful in providing an overview of Librarianship, I think it provides a good starting point for further reading. Ordering books from Facet can be quite expensive if you are a student or just starting out, but CILIP members are offered a 20% discount if you enter you membership number when purchasing.

I was very lucky to have been recommended Bethan Ruddock's, The New Professionals Toolkit by the Information Services manager, which I found accessible, humorous and extensively detailed in coverage. After having a really interesting discussion with the Collection Development manager about her role, the college's collection development policy and the future of managing collections, she recommended I take a look at Peter Clayton and G E Gorman's Managing Information Resources in Libraries. This text is on the UCL Library and Information Studies reading list, along with Graham P. Cornish's Copyright which provides an extremely useful resource for understanding the copyright issues that affect the information profession and how to ensure information services adhere to legislation.

CILIP members (on proof of membership and ID) can get a readers pass for the British Library, who have a collection of Library and Information Science books and journals. I plan to make full use of the resources during my traineeship so I have a balanced understanding of all the basics before I start a course at library school.

I'd love to expand upon this list, if anyone can point me towards any more pre-course reading to add, I'll welcome all ideas.

Applying to library school- issues surrounding LIS vocational masters

Last Friday, I attended an event organised by the M25 Academic Libraries Consortium on 'Applying to Library School'. I was particularly interested in attending this event as it involved presentations from past and current students studying the MA and a selection of representatives from different library schools.

There were several speakers throughout the day, the majority being recent graduates of library school themselves. The speakers made some really interesting points about the pros and cons of different modes of study, allowing attendees a balanced view of what it is like to study whilst juggling part-time or full time work. The speakers included Sarah Maule (Ravensbourne), Sarah Ison (University of Brighton), Helen Murphy (Trinity Hall) and Sophie Pattison (UCL).
Vanda Broughton, Programme Leader for MA Library and Information Studies at UCL also gave a talk, which went in to detail about the types of skills that a library qualification provides and the different jobs and sectors a selection of UCL graduates had progressed to recently. Vanda suggested that prospective students should ensure that they are making sure the institution they apply to is right for them, by looking at staff and student blogs, researching courses and asking relevant questions at interview.

The course fair, which was held at lunch time, allowed me to have some interesting conversations with the course representatives from the different institutions. One thing I really wanted to clarify was the statement that I had heard from time to time in regards to funding, that being only students with a 1:1 at first degree level will be considered for AHRC funding, or in some instances funding in general. I've heard mixed opinions around this 'statement' but understand that universities holding AHRC block grant partnership awards have a great deal of pressure put on them to put forward 1:1 students for funding, even though the AHRC guidelines state that students with a good second class degree will be considered. I heard mixed opinions again from talking to the course representatives, but I did get the impression that course leaders are looking for well rounded individuals who are taking steps to develop themselves professionally outside as well as inside academia. This provides hope for the profession's development in encouraging new professionals with a host of  professional skills and experiences, from a wide range of backgrounds.
 I would be really interested to hear from anyone who had a different route in to librarianship, or managed to secure funding or financial support during their qualification without that 'elusive 1:1'.

 Funding a postgraduate qualification that is almost essential to career development seemed to be a hot topic at the event. Vanda Broughton explained that 2013/14 will be the final year for the AHRC's 'Professional Preparation Masters' funding, which LIS qualifications have fallen under for several years. Upon further research of the AHRC website and looking at their proposed plans for funding, it is made clear that UK research councils are pulling away from vocational MA/MSc's and looking to fund only at masters level where courses lead subsequently to PhD level study. You can find out more about the AHRC's plan's here.

I would  recommend the event to prospective students as it's a brilliant opportunity to learn a bit more about the application progress, especially in regards to what library schools expect from potential students. It also provides a chance for trainees and library assistant's to meet some new faces and share thoughts and ideas about their course choices. I found the panel discussion consisting of three very different LIS students really engaging, especially as they were all in very different services and holding down differing levels of  professional work and volunteering whilst studying.

Take a look at the hash tag for this event #applis12 to see other people's thoughts.