All Librarians in Training courses

This is a workshop that Ruth Walker has run with Master’s students in Cambridge this year, and which has been recommended by a member of library staff attending it. By going to this workshop, staff will understand Academic Integrity and how it impacts students, and it will inform good practice for teaching opportunities.

The role of liaison librarian is common in UK academic libraries and is changing with shifts in digital technologies and universities’ research agendas. What are the key practices of academic liaison librarianship? Do we embody them at Cambridge? What challenges do we face and how can we improve and overcome them?

In this class, we will explore the nature of academic liaison librarianship through discussion and small-group activities. By the end of the class, you will have an understanding of the practices associated with being a liaison and key areas or services you would like to improve.

The following short articles give different perspectives on academic liaison librarianship. Please read them before the class so that we have a base of shared knowledge to build our discussion on.

Crawford, A. (2009). Academic liaison librarians-where do we stand? SCONUL Focus (45).

Parsons, A. (2010). Academic liaison librarianship: Curatorial pedagogy or pedagogical curation?

Woods, L., & Dunn P. (2016). Relationship management as a tool for engaging with the academic community. SCONUL Focus (67).

Everyone wants their teaching to be as engaging and successful as possible, right? But how often have we found ourselves talking to a group of students from behind a podium and thinking “there must be a better way to get this group more involved?” but aren’t sure where to start? Active learning is an approach that makes the traditional, passive approach to teaching more active and this session will explore how to harness good active teaching techniques in any educational scenario, whether you’re doing a 1-2-1 with a student or teaching a big group of people in one go. The session will be built around active learning principles so be prepared to get involved and get engaged in your own learning and teaching practices.

Please bring an internet-enabled device (phone, tablet, laptop etc.) to help with engaging in some of the activities.

• Backward design, which uses learning outcomes to determine assessment approaches and course content, is an approach to curriculum design that was developed by Wiggins and McTighe (2008) and plays a vital role within the newly developed ACRL Framework.
• This hands on workshop will provide participants with an overview of backward design and its pedagogical underpinnings as well as the opportunity to create a backward-designed lesson-plan that can be used as a basis for running a session in their workplace. Focusing on the development of learning outcomes, assessment methods and class content, this workshop is suitable for people looking to get started with teaching as well as for those who are looking to consolidate and strengthen their teaching practices.

• Alison Hicks is a lecturer in Library and Information Science at UCL. Her research and professional interests lie in the areas of information literacy and information practices as well as in various aspects of academic librarianship.

A growing number of images from cultural heritage institutions around the world are available for use and re-use by scholars through IIIF (the International Image Interoperability Framework http://iiif.io). This framework and community facilitate comparison of materials across repositories through a common protocol. It also allows for the use of a number of lightweight tools that can be hosted at your institution, or on your laptop, for viewing, annotation, transcription, and collection-building.

No previous experience with IIIF is required. The workshop will be led by Dr Anne McLaughlin, Sub-Librarian of The Parker Library, Corpus Christi College, and Andy Corrigan, Cambridge Digital Library Co-ordinator.

Please note: This course will be cancelled if booking numbers are insufficient.

You’ve seen the gorgeous photos of hand-drawn planners on Instagram and thought, “I would never have time to make my diary look like that.” Or you’ve bought pre-made planners before only to abandon them after a week, but still prefer to have a paper-and-pen backup to your online calendars. Or maybe you’re just curious about what a bullet journal is. Whatever the case, Emma and Kirsten have you covered! With six years of bullet journal experience between them, they’ll talk you through the basics of bullet journaling, show you some of the ways you can customise yours and get you started on planning your life with paper and pen. Participants should bring their favourite pens as well as their appointments and to-do lists for the day of the session and the next day. If you have a notebook you were already going to use as a planner, feel free to bring it. Otherwise, scrap paper will be provided for practice.

In 1906, Melvil Dewey wrote that ‘what we call books have no exclusive rights in a library. The name “library” has lost its etymologic meaning and means not a collection of books, but the central agency for disseminating information, innocent recreation or, best of all, inspiration among the people.’

Most libraries contain mostly books. But most libraries have other things in them too. Some of these objects – films, musical recordings, maps, sheet music – have established cataloguing standards, developed through communities of practice. Others are more problematic. What should we do with our flashcards, skeletons, jigsaws, bookstands, postage stamps, DVD players, and the other odds-and-ends we collate, curate and circulate?

Should these things be catalogued? Perhaps. Can they be catalogued? Certainly. This course provides an introduction to the theory and practice of cataloguing ‘realia.’ Examples will be provided for group cataloguing activities, but feel free to bring along your own unusual library materials too.

• A short interactive session that will focus on hints and tips to help people who Chair meetings do so more effectively.

Recording your professional development activities is a vital part of the Chartership process. This session will demonstrate how to compile a CPD log on the VLE and how this can be transferred to a portfolio for assessment or revalidation. There will then be plenty of time to put this into practice and record your development in the session. You are also more than welcome to just use the session for as a quiet time to get some work done on whichever aspect of your Chartership portfolio you choose.

Chartership portfolios rely on candidates displaying a range of evidence of their development but it can be hard to know where to start. What counts as evidence? How many pieces can I include? How do I choose what to include in my submission? This session will answer these questions and offer attendees tips, tricks and the chance to work on compiling their evidence. You are also more than welcome to just use the session for as a quiet time to get some work done on whichever aspect of your Chartership portfolio you choose.

In order to be successful all Chartership portfolios must include a reflective statement linking together the record of professional development and the evidence. Most submissions fail as they are too descriptive rather than reflecting on experiences and this can be daunting to those not used to producing reflective writing. This session will offer some tips and tricks to get you started as well as how to add more reflection to your portfolio and then offer attendees a chance to put this into practice. You are also more than welcome to just use the session for as a quiet time to get some work done on whichever aspect of your Chartership portfolio you choose.

This session will focus on the PKSB (Professional Knowledge and Skills Base) which is the first step for many in building a Chartership portfolio. A brief introduction to how to use the CILIP assessment tool will be followed by a chance to work through it, better understand your individual skill level and how to use the document to build your portfolio. You are also more than welcome to just use the session for as a quiet time to get some work done on whichever aspect of your Chartership portfolio you choose.

• Surveys are a popular way to collect data on a range of topics related to your library service but it is all too easy to get them wrong. If you struggle to design effective surveys you are not alone – they are often far more complex than they look.

• This interactive session will outline the basics of designing a survey, how to draft questions to get the answers you really want, some of the common pitfalls to avoid, the different software options available to help you and some tips and tricks for using surveys effectively. At the end of the session attendees will be able to put together a successful survey on a range of topics. If attendees wish to bring a draft survey that they are working on to use during the session they are welcome to do so.

If questions at the Enquiry Desk such as “How much of this can I copy?”, “Can I scan this book on someone else’s behalf?” and “Can I use this image in my teaching presentation / coursework / published article?” sound familiar, this is the course for you!

This session aims to provide you with a framework for analysing copyright enquiries, considering:

• Who owns the item, and does this make a difference?
• What is the copy to be used for?
• What are the specific exceptions to copyright you should be aware of?
• Where can you seek additional information on copyright issues?

There will be an opportunity to submit examples of copyright enquiries you receive in advance of the course or you can bring them along on the day.

In this workshop, you will take a tour of one of the most popular My Learning Essentials Workshop at Manchester University, Critical Reading. With the help of a narrator and facilitator you will see both sides of the workshop looking glass, that of a student and that of a workshop developer. As a student you will develop key skills for effective critical reading. You will learn and practice techniques to help you identify key points and main ideas and gain an understanding about what is required to read critically. There will also be opportunities to discuss strategies for making connections between different articles, journals or other materials in order to aid understanding. As a developer you will hear about the research that underpins the content of the workshop.

Instructors: Sam Aston and Michael Stevenson

There are hundreds of databases available to us in Cambridge. How confident do you feel navigating them and recommending them to end users? For this session we have four faculty librarians who will demonstrate Scopus, ArtSTOR, Lexis and Westlaw and statistics and markets business databases. There will be plenty of time for questions.

• Decolonising knowledge is one of the hot topics of the moment, stirring up universities as well as the media. How can we approach this fundamental and much needed change in our libraries while still dealing with our daily workloads?
• Join us to hear diverse perspectives: Eve Lacey (Newnham College), David Rushmer (English Faculty Library), Mehves Dignum (Engineering Faculty Library) and Clara Panozzo (Collections and Academic Liaison, University Library) will share their thoughts and experiences.
• This will be followed by a workshop and an open discussion (with tea and biscuits in the middle!).

In this session, you will have a tour of the studio and facilities in the DCU as well as the opportunity to learn how the digitisation process works and what services are available through the University Library’s Digital Content Unit.

NB: A short break will be included during the session.

This session will provide you with a brief introduction to some of those technologies and highlight how you can delve deeper with them. We will look at the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI), text and data mining, and the International Image Interoperability Framework (iiif).

NB: A short break will be included during the session.

Impact and sustainability are very important to researchers. Social media brings with it the advantage of making outputs easy to share but can also be a minefield. Whilst the new tools and methods utilised by the digital humanities provide exciting new ways of working, we also need to bear in mind their limitations and be able to understand the results. Attention is also being turned towards sustaining digital outputs, so we will also explore developments in this area as well.

NB: A short break will be included during the session.

This course is aimed at those faculty librarians who purchase their own ebooks and those who may be interested to start purchasing their own. The course will introduce librarians to our ebook suppliers, including ebook license models, how user-friendly they are and how to identify them on the supplier platforms. We will also look at Digital Rights Management (DRM) and ebooks; what are the implications for users, and why we should try to buy DRM-free ebooks where possible. We will demonstrate searching, interpreting results and purchasing ebooks from the main vendor platforms. We will also cover what happens after the ebook order, including creating purchase orders and invoices, cataloguing, and portfolio administration within Alma.

There will be chance to ask questions throughout the session, and an accompanying ebook supplier checklist to take away.

Bewildered by business models? Dubious about DRM? Flummoxed by formats? Come to our ebooks training session where we will try and demystify all things ebook and help you to support your users.

We have re-vamped the content of this session this year, we are not concentrating so heavily on the basics, and will instead introduce some new information on aspects such as troubleshooting, file formats and accessibility.

The presentation part of the course will run for an hour and there is an optional 30 minutes where you are welcome to stay and work through the workbook of practise exercises. In the presentation we will introduce the ebooks@cambridge service, investigate the differences between purchase models, licenses and supplier platforms, and talk about Digital Rights Management (DRM) and ebook formats. We will also demonstrate ways of searching for ebooks in iDiscover and in Alma, how to use/download/print ebooks, and look at the differences between purchased and electronic legal deposit ebooks. We will discuss some common problems reported to the ebooks team, and touch on accessibility issues (including alternative format requests).

After the presentation attendees will be given a takeaway workbook of ebook-related exercises which will give them a chance to familiarise themselves with the breadth of our ebook collections. Librarians from the ebooks Advisory Group will be on hand to help answer any ebook-related questions you may have.

This session is aimed at newer members of library staff and those who would like a refresher on all things ebook.

Most institutions are now using Instagram as way to connect to their readers. However, keeping your feed full of exciting content can be difficult. Luckily, we have a brand new class to help manage your Institution's page. Barney Brown from the University's central Communications Office and Naomi Polonsky of the New Hall Art Collection at Murray Edwards have kindly offered to host a workshop demonstrating how effective Instagram can be as a social platform. As well as talking about the basics they will be delving into why we use Instagram, what makes Instagram a good platform to connect with readers, what tips and tricks they have to maintain a healthy feed, what mistakes they have made and what to avoid as well as deciding on an institution style.

Scopus is a citation and abstract database of peer-reviewed literature that can be used by researchers to determine the impact of specific authors, articles/documents, and journals. It contains over 76 million records in the areas of science, technology, medicine, social sciences, arts, and humanities. In Scopus, it is possible to perform quick searches by document, author, or affiliation. You will learn how to perform basic searches, analyse the results, check affiliation and researcher profiles and consult journal metrics for the over 23,000 titles currently in Scopus.

This session will be delivered by Dr Charles Martinez, Senior Customer Consultant, Elsevier.

Please bring your own device so you are able to follow along with the session examples.

There will be an opportunity to address user case studies in this session. Please send any case studies to Lynne Meehan (lm746@cam.ac.uk) by 17/1/2019.

• Have you started an application for HEA fellowship but have no time to write?

Would you like a day to work on your application with no disruptions?

• Alternatively, have you heard about HEA Fellowship and are considering applying? Are you curious about the benefits of Fellowship and which level (AFHEA, FHEA, SFHEA) best suits your experience? Would you like help brainstorming evidence for your application?

• On 10 December, Librarians in Training are sponsoring a day-long writing retreat to work on applications for HEA fellowship. Come be in a room with others experiencing the same pain and just write. We will have writing sprints of about an hour and then a short break. Repeat until the end of the day!

• The retreat will be held at the Institute for Manufacturing on the West Cambridge site in a lovely seminar room with lots of natural light. Coffee/tea/biscuits and will be served in the morning and afternoon (but you’ll need to bring your own lunch or purchase food in the common room or in a nearby café).

• The IfM is large, so if you’d like to discuss HEA fellowship generally or brainstorm aspects of it, we can easily meet up in the common room. Or if there is interest from everyone at the beginning of the day for a short plenary session, we can do that as well.

• You can sign up for just a half-day or both the morning and afternoon sessions. Numbers are limited to 10 people per session.

• You will need to bring your own laptop. Please come a bit early so that we can start at 1.00pm sharp. If you need to arrive later, that is fine. Just please tip toe in and get set up quietly.

Can’t come on December 10th? There will be two more writing retreats for HEA applications in 2019: 22 March and 21 June. Bookings for those sessions will open approximately a month before the date.

• Have you started an application for HEA fellowship but have no time to write?

Would you like a day to work on your application with no disruptions?

• Alternatively, have you heard about HEA Fellowship and are considering applying? Are you curious about the benefits of Fellowship and which level (AFHEA, FHEA, SFHEA) best suits your experience? Would you like help brainstorming evidence for your application?

• On 1 April, Librarians in Training are sponsoring a day-long writing retreat to work on applications for HEA fellowship. Come be in a room with others experiencing the same pain and just write. We will have writing sprints of about an hour and then a short break. Repeat until the end of the day!

• The retreat will be held at the Institute for Manufacturing on the West Cambridge site in a lovely seminar room with lots of natural light. Coffee/tea/biscuits and will be served in the morning and afternoon (but you’ll need to bring your own lunch or purchase food in the common room or in a nearby café).

• The IfM is large, so if you’d like to discuss HEA fellowship generally or brainstorm aspects of it, we can easily meet up in the common room. Or if there is interest from everyone at the beginning of the day for a short plenary session, we can do that as well.

• You can sign up for just a half-day or both the morning and afternoon sessions. Numbers are limited to 10 people per session.

• You will need to bring your own laptop. Please come a bit early so that we can start at 9.00am sharp. If you need to arrive later, that is fine. Just please tip toe in and get set up quietly.

Can’t come on 1 April? There will be one more writing retreat for HEA applications on 21 June.

Led by members of the UL Reference team, this course will explore the varied reasons why readers struggle to find items they need on iDiscover. There will be a chance for you to solve some of the enquiries which are handled by Reference Staff, brush up your own searching skills and discover some lesser known functions of iDiscover.

The UL Reference team will be answering participant questions submitted prior to the course.

Information about the UL’s iDiscover training for readers will also be available.

Please note: Since this session was last offered, web accessibility has become increasingly important. The session has been revised to cover both usability testing and assessing the accessibility of websites.

This session will help you get started with website usability testing. The session will be interactive and activity-based, which will give you a chance to try out some testing and to reflect as a group on the experience. It will also provide you with some tips and tricks that can be used to help you conduct your own usability testing. If you’ve ever wondered how people actually use your library website, or are currently thinking about how to best revamp your Libguides to match the approaches and needs of your users, this one’s for you!

Do you use Instagram for your Library but would like some pointers how to make your posts more creative? This is the masterclass for you. With the help of the Digital Content Unit, you will learn how to construct photographs and videos that grab readers' attention, and to utilise Instagram tools to give you the best results. Please make sure you have an Instagram account set up and remember to bring your phones! We look forward to seeing you there.

Recruiting staff is becoming an increasingly integral part of our role, so knowing how to interview well is a key skill to have in your toolkit. This session aims to share some best practice in order to help you navigate your way through an interview process, resulting in recruiting the best candidate for the role. The session will be interactive, and will dispel some common myths, as well as sharing with you some practical hints and tips to take away. Topics covered in this session range from what questions to ask a candidate at interview (and those to avoid!), note taking during an interview, scoring the candidates and using the right documentation. There will also be an opportunity to ask any burning questions at the end.

This course is a short introduction to cataloguing in the Alma metadata editor. It’s suitable for beginners who have some knowledge of MARC or experience of editing holdings and items. We will look at creating records from templates, downloading records from external databases, editing information in catalogue records and practise cataloguing some novels.

This course is an introduction to the core fields in MARC21, the format we use for catalogue records in Alma. It’s suitable for beginners and also for those who have done some cataloguing but want a more formal training session in MARC. We will look at MARC coding for author, title, publication information and physical description, and highlight the important elements to check in control fields.

A two-hour session designed to introduce you to the skill of compiling back-of-the-book type indexes. Indexing is a useful skill for anyone working in a library or information environment and also provides opportunities for self-employment and working from home. We will touch on the basic processes, standards and conventions, the Society of Indexers’ course, and embedded indexing, and we will have a go at creating a basic index. Feel free to bring a laptop but they are not essential.

Making LibGuides which are usable, accessible and look great is not always an easy task, but it definitely can be done! This introductory training will cover everything from the basics – how to add text and images, edit and rearrange content – to presenting content in an effective, usable and attractive way. We’ll also discuss how you can ensure that your LibGuides meet accessibility standards.

This course is particularly aimed at people who are new to LibGuides editing or any current editors who feel that they would benefit from a refresher. If you don’t have a LibGuides account, or access to a LibGuide to work on during the session, please contact the course leader (hem37) in advance so that an account and a training guide can be arranged for you.

Do you see these subject headings in the catalogue records and wonder how they work? Do you add these subject headings yourself but sometimes wonder if you’re doing so correctly? Are you studying librarianship and would like to add some subject heading skills to your portfolio? This is an introduction to the workings of LC subject headings, an opportunity to ask all the questions you want, and get some practical experience of adding headings to catalogue records.

This course aims to provide instruction and practice in the creation of bibliographic records for rare books from the hand-press era so that attendees will be equipped with the basic skills to catalogue their library’s early printed books to national standards. Focus will primarily be on 17th-18th Century books printed in England and/or in English.

Basic knowledge and familiarity with MARC21 and AACR2 is essential. Laptop optional (paper templates provided for exercises)

Referencing software is a great way for students to make the referencing process easier. But how much do you know about the different tools that are available?

In this session, several demonstrations of popular referencing tools will be given in order to increase your knowledge and understanding of how they work, and help you troubleshoot if students come to you with queries. The demos will include Zotero, Mendeley and BiBTEX. Please bring a laptop or other personal device if you wish to follow along.

A forum for Library Assistants and assistant staff across Cambridge University libraries with a series of talks and discussions around what the role means and how we can diversify and make the most of it in different library contexts.

This course will look at how to create metadata for online catalogues and digital libraries, concentrating on special collections material. We will be using TEI (Text Encoding Initiative) as the most suitable metadata standard for the description and presentation of manuscripts and rare books in a digital environment. The course will focus on the descriptive element of TEI, but will also touch on the possibilities for transcription, translation, and the presentation of digital images. There will be a taught element (1 hour) followed by the opportunity to have a go at creating a description in TEI yourself.

Moodle is being used for all kinds of things at Cambridge, but do you know really what it can do?

From adding content to marking student papers, we will run through the activities and resources that can be used to support teaching in Moodle. The idea being to familiarise library staff with the possibilities and provide some areas of where we can support teaching staff on how to make Moodle work for their teaching practices.

Please come with questions and if there are any particular areas you would like to make sure we cover drop us an email (elj26@cam.ac.uk) as soon as you can and we will do our best to include it.

• Are you completely new to Twitter and struggling to start? Or are you already on Twitter but know you could be making better use of it to promote yourself and your library? Join Librarians In Training for an interactive workshop aimed at helping librarians to make the most of their time online.

• This interactive session will give you the chance to enhance your Twitter skills. For those new to the platform there will be guidance on what Twitter can be used for and how to get started whilst those already using Twitter will benefit from learning how to engage library users, promote their service and enhance their own professional network.

• The session will include both advice and practical exercises so you can put your new knowledge to the test.

This session will explain what learning outcomes are and how you might design your teaching session according to different teaching styles e.g. Behaviourist or Constructivist. There will be an opportunity to practice planning a session and to link the content of the session to the Information Literacy Framework using the new CILN teaching template. There will be opportunities to discuss and work in small groups or pairs during the session.

Attendees should try to bring an idea for a session they have delivered, or would like to deliver, to use as an example for the session activities.

This participative workshop will include a discussion of the barriers for students with mental health difficulties using the library, and reminders about the support available outside the library services. Through discussion of case studies we will look at improving practice with students with mental health difficulties and improve the understanding of common diagnostic labels.