The Librarian Errant

AI virtual study day

I’m dusting off my blog to write up a few reflections about today’s AI workshop, which was an event organised by Health Education England. The use of AI in a library context was something about which I knew virtually nothing, so it was a great opportunity to improve my understanding of this topic. As always, this post is not a blow-by-blow recap of the event, but rather a collection of highlights…

I’ve just finished attending this year’s virtual CILN Forum. The topic was information literacy in the time of COVID-19, and there were three presentations:

Dr Ruth Carlyle, speaking on health literacy and the COVID-19 pandemic

Dr Jane Secker, who spoke and then facilitated a brief workshop on moving information literacy teaching online

Dr Deirdre Cijffers, who spoke and facilitated a discussion…

Webinar: rapid qualitative evidence synthesis

I attended a webinar by Evidence Synthesis Ireland on the topic of rapid qualitative evidence synthesis. The webinar has now been made publicly availble via Youtube, so it is possible for people who missed the live version to watch the recording.

The webinar consisted of a case study of the experiences of several of the authors of a COVID-19-related rapid review published by Cochrane: Barriers…

UHMLG forum: rapid reviews

It’s been a two-online-webinars-in-two-days kind of week. This morning, UHMLG hosted an online forum led by Mala Mann of Cardiff University. The topic was rapid reviews, and in particular the challenges and successes experienced by Mala as she and colleagues set up Palliative Care Evidence Review Service (PaCERS). The main points of Mala’s talk are as follows:

Rapid reviews draw on systematic…

Pivoting to online webinar

I’ve just come out of a webinar delivered by colleagues at the Open University. Given that all students at the Open University are remote learners, OU librarians are definitely experts at online teaching — and I was very grateful to be given access to their expertise. The session was split into three sections: technical considerations, designing for online, and accessiblity. I will summarise my…

Online training: an update

I’ve now been working — and teaching — from home for just over two months, and I thought I’d check in with a brief update of more lessons learnt since I first wrote about it.

In the past week, I’ve been at a webinar delivered by my university about moving teaching online, a forum with several university colleagues to share our knowledge and experiences, and another forum with NHS librarians with…

I want to start this post off with a round of applause for the conference organisers, who transferred this from an in-person day conference in London to an online conference of 350 participants at very short notice, and even managed to record all the presentations. That’s a significant amount of work, and it’s great that the conference was able to go ahead.

The focus of this year’s forum was on…

Like many people reading here, I’ve been working from home for the past couple of weeks. As my job involves delivering a lot of face-to-face research support and information literacy training, I’ve had to adapt rapidly to an online landscape. So far I’ve delivered two training sessions via Google Meet, and I thought I’d offer some tips about the process. Bear in mind that these tips come from…

Navigating the Deep Web

Last week the Medical Library hosted two repeat sessions of a workshop on ‘navigating the Deep Web,’ hosted by the amazing Karen Blakeman. The sessions were aimed at NHS and other health librarians whose job roles involve either conducting literature searches on library users’ behalf, supporting library users in their own searching, or both. Since I definitely fall under that category, I was very…

I have trained my last one-to-one student, my final group training session was last week, and things are very, very quiet in my library. Although I am also working a half-day tomorrow, it feels very much as if things are winding down and holiday mode is kicking in. This felt, therefore, like the right moment to write a summary of my year’s professional highlights.

2019 was a pretty good year for…

Yesterday I attended a Librarians In Training session on academic integrity, delivered by Dr Ruth Walker of the Cambridge Centre for Teaching and Learning. The session was wide-ranging and discursive, and while we did not reach any firm conclusions about the best way to encourage a strong culture of academic integrity in our institution, there were some interesting points made.

For me, the most…

MOOC on Open Science

Over the past six weeks, I’ve been taking part in a new-to-me experience: doing an Open University MOOC course. While I’ve of course undertaken training and studies which had an online component, I’d never done anything that was entirely online, with mandatory forum discussions, and so on. It was an interesting and worthwhile experience.

The course covered open science in its most expansive…

Innovation in libraries: USTLG meeting

Yesterday I attended a day conference run by USTLG (University Science and Technology Libraries Group), which was a chance to learn from colleagues and share some innovative practice of my own. It was also a great opportunity to visit a library in a very different sector — in this case, industry — as the venue was TWI, an organisation providing advice and safety assurance about welding, joining,…

LILAC and UHMLG Spring Forum slides now available online

This spring has been a particularly busy one for me, and I have already presented at the UHMGL Spring Forum, and the LILAC conference. Both conferences have now uploaded presenters’ slides, and I share them here.

You can find the slides from my UHMLG lightning talk here. The title of the talk was ‘Teaching literacy: preliminary outcomes of a PGCERT in teaching and learning in higher education on…

Speaking and listening: 2019 LILAC conference

I’ve returned to Cambridge with my head bursting with ideas from last week’s LILAC conference. It was my first time attending this conference, and I was a little daunted at the prospect: not only was its focus, information literacy, a major interest of mine, but I’d also been accepted to present not one but twopresentations at the conference. I shouldn’t have been worried. Both of my…

Context, collaboration, and reframing: 2019 Cambridge Teaching Forum

I’ve just left this year’s Cambridge Teaching Forum, an annual event that brings together external speakers, and all those at the University of Cambridge with responsibility for, and/or interest in, teaching and learning in a higher education context. The theme of the day was very much inclusivity and widening participation, but for me these higher level, overarching themes were distilled down…

The theme of this year’s UHMLG Spring Forumwas ‘Literacy in all its forms – digital, academic, information, health, and more,’ but from my perspective, the theme was very much about the crucial role that collaboration and engagement play in ensuring that library services are as effective as possible. This theme permeated every presentation, whether the library in question was academic, NHS — or…