RBSCG conference 2018: The library as classroom

At the beginning of September I attended the first day of the CILIP Rare Books and Special Collections Group conference, at the beautiful Downing College in Cambridge. The theme of the conference was around teaching using Special Collections, a really good fit with my job where we already do quite a bit of teaching using our collections. I was hoping to pick up some tips and tricks for how other libraries with special collections used those collections in teaching, as well as make the most of the networking opportunities afforded by the well thought out conference space.

First up was Jessica Gardner, the Cambridge University Librarian and Director of Library Services with an inspirational keynote Memories of wonder and discovery which really emphasised the career changing moments brought about by encounters with special collections.

"Fundamental turning points in a learner's journey"

Hers had been with a medieval manuscript in the Brotherton Library at Leeds University. She talked about embedding content in undergraduate learning, first through the Adam and Eve projects at Exeter University back in 2002 - 2005, to the video poem earlier this year by Imtiaz Dharkar showing the digitisation journey from shelf to screen at Cambridge University Library.



and leading on to breaking down barriers between developers and scholars with a medieval manuscripts hackathon - creating webapps using manuscripts from the University Library's collections.



The next speaker was Tabitha Tuckett, rare books librarian at University College London, with particular responsibility for academic support and events across their Special Collections.

https://www.ucl.ac.uk/library/special-collections. She talked about how the Connected Curriculum was implemented across the university - this was a research based curriculum which enabled students to actively engage with research and enquiry.

Strong collection management is the key to learning and teaching

Object-based learning is something that Special Collections have been engaged in for years, so the Connected Curriculum represented a brilliant opportunity to broaden the reach of this. The Connected Curriculum means students have to meet and work with other professional staff, connecting to workplace learning eg getting involved in producing exhibitions and having their assessment based on a presentation about this. Students are trained as 'professional researchers' so receive handling training so they can access the books in Special Collections. It also involved setting their own research agenda, so coming up with problems experienced by Special Collections and then using other depts., such as Maths or Medical Physics to solve them. One project used a tool normally used to look at images of the back of people's eyes to investigate how hard woodcut images in early printed books were pressed into the paper.

Concrete physicality stimulates imagination in research

After Tabitha, Sarah Mahurter, Manager of Archives and Special Collections at the University of the Arts London, spoke on Archival pedagogics: exploring the significance of teaching as a creative endeavour using Archives and Special Collections. They had created a vision in their library research strategy that all students should have the opportunity to experience Special Collections, and have established a community of practice within the university to help make this happen. They created several workshops:

• researching skilfully cutting across subject divides, which included skills in handling, examining and curating, whilst introducing students to a range of collections.
• researching with archives giving practical skills in searching and finding archives and what to expect when using them
• escape room session was offered as part of their annual Library Services staff conference and as a staff development opportunity.

The second part of the day was given over to academics providing their perspective on teaching using Special Collections. Simon Eliot, Professor Emeritus of the History of the Book, spoke on teaching book history at MA level and the need to provide vivid material examples (likening the experience as a relic to a pilgrim), for example comparing the actual Geneva and King James Bibles provided both comparison of their physicality as well as their content. However, this was hard to timetable and teach because of needing access to the books themselves. He had eventually assembled a collection of battered books solely for use in teaching, which then instilled confidence into the students when handling them. The module on the book in the ancient world had proven particularly difficult to teach with physical examples due to the rare and fragile nature of the survivals from this period. They had got round this by displaying fragments but couldn't allow handling. And a course on modern first editions had shown the need for the actual book to be studied, as it was impossible to distinguish between editions, impressions etc from digitised versions alone.

Teaching shows the need to look at the book itself rather than pictures of it

Finally, Jason Scott-Warren (Reader in Early Modern Literature and Culture at Cambridge University) and Andrew Zurcher (Fellow and Director of Studies in English at Queens' College, Cambridge) did a double act on teaching the early modern material text. They likened undergraduate students' engagement with texts in a nice tidy modern edition as being as far removed from the creation of the book as the image of a stork bringing a baby is from an actual birth! Engaging undergraduates with the process of making the book is what helps those students to stand out from the crowd, but then also creates a pressure to work with original texts. The students are still encouraged to learn quasi-facsimile transcription as it helps to develop a systematic understanding of the printing of a title-page, and the same with collational formula

πA⁶(πA1+1 πA5+1.2) A-2B6 2C2 a-g6 χ2g8 h-v6 x4 “gg3.4”(± “gg3”) ¶-2¶6 3¶1  2a-2f6 2g2 “Gg6” 2h6 2k-3b6 (collational formula of Shakespeare's First Folio)

This loosens disciplinary identity for the students and allows the teacher to develop intimacy with the collections, as well as changing teaching methods, such as writing blog posts about their subjects.

Organised classes and events are what gets students into Special Collections

Questions at the end of the day included, "Where does cataloguing sit with this?". The answer was that academics should feedback that they need to have things catalogued in order to use them and to encourage libraries to prioritise cataloguing.

It was a great conference, and, although I could only be there for one day of it, I learnt a lot. My main take away points are:

• the importance of cataloguing when needing to use collections, whether that is for teaching or displays.
• ideas around developing workshops for researching skills rather than on a strictly subject basis.
• ideas around problem solving using other subjects.
• to have a look at A Connected Curriculum for Higher Education by Dilly Fung (available as a free download at that link)

Many thanks to the committee of the RBSCG for all their hard work organising the conference. You will find tweets from the conference using the hashtag #rbscg18 and there is a Wakelet bringing together all the tweets in one place.

Training: Train the Trainers

Train the Trainers was a morning workshop run by the Educational Excellence Centre at work, aimed at the subject liaison librarians, who are in the same team as me. SLLs do more teaching than I do, but I still found the hints and tips I picked up through the morning useful for the teaching that I do - mainly training staff, students and other users in how to handle material, introducing groups to Special Collections, and running sessions, such as Using Special Collections in your dissertation.



Me, during a workshop for a community group visiting Special Collections for the first time

We discussed what the difference is between training and teaching. The trainer can only provide the opportunity and environment for learning, it is the individual's responsibility to take their own learning from there. We then moved on to talk about the process of learning and teaching. Apparently the average attention span these days is only 11 minutes (I'm sure it was 20 minutes when I was a student!), so, in an hour's session, you should make sure you change activity 3 or 4 times per session to keep their attention.

We moved on to talk about the key components of the learning and teaching process:
Aims - Goals - Objectives - Methods - Assessment - Evaluation - and back round to Aims again. So a training cycle would look like:
Identification of training needs - Plan & design course - Deliver course - Evaluation of course
Learning objectives are essential, as without them you don't have a clear direction for the students to go in. Objectives should be expressed using action verbs and be specific, so "understand" isn't one as it isn't specific enough. 

We touched on learning theory, Kolb's Learning Cycle (basically, what you learn as a child, when you touch a hot radiator, discover it's too hot to be comfortable, and then don't repeat that behaviour) and Honey and Mumford's Learning Styles, which led to us each doing a questionnaire about which learning style suited each of us best. I am a mixture of three of them! These need to be borne in mind when planning teaching.

Then we looked at deep learning versus surface learning, as it is important for students to develop deep learning: learning for life, which encourages critical analysis of ideas, how to apply them and use them for problem solving. And then how to design teaching for deep learning.

Finally we looked at facilitating a learning and teaching session.

I found the session a useful way of learning more about teaching and learning. Hopefully I will get a chance to apply some of what I've learnt in Special Collections.

Archives for All?

Last week I went to a day's workshop with the Education and Outreach department of the National Archives.

I found it a really useful day, with plenty of networking opportunities with other attendees (especially over a free lunch!), and a range of speakers.

First of all, Krishna Kaur (TNA Equality & Diversity Co-ordinator) talked us through Equality and Diversity at the National Archives, and we discussed the question how does your organisation promote Equality and Diversity across policy and practice?  in groups. I found this really interesting, as I've done Equality and Diversity training in both my current job and my previous one, but wanted to know how to take it to the next step, as it came up whilst I was putting together a funding bid. Not only is it important to remove physical barriers to people using your service, but how do you actively promote it so that a broader range of people use it? We talked about the protected characteristics (age, disability, gender reassignment, marriage & civil partnership, pregnancy & maternity, race, religion & belief, sex, sexual orientation) and how to actively promote equality and diversity through all kinds of areas such as: providing alternative formats for information (exhibition captions, for instance), positive action at interview (such as the Positive About Disabled People symbol that some organisations use in recruitment), and what events are recognised and celebrated through work at the archives/special collections. We also discussed barriers: time, money, resources, perceptions, listed buildings, conservation requirements.

Then the Outreach Manager, Sara Griffiths, talked to us about the new directions their outreach is going in, to inspire creativity as well as research. Their Caribbean Through a Lens project had made the most of social media, and encouraged participation by inviting comments and contributions, as well as working with community groups.

After lunch we heard about educational resources on the web from the Education Web Manager, Clare Horrie, and a colleague. This focussed on the lesson plans and more that TNA has available on its website, mainly about history and centred on their collections. It looks amazing, although I was a bit overwhelmed by the amount they had available (and how much work it must have taken to get it there). However, the ideas are scaleable. This is their document of the month feature, which is quite relevant to one of the collections I work with... They are also making a lot of use of Pinterest, Flickr, Facebook and Twitter, which is good to hear.

Sarah Hutton, the Onsite Education Manager, with Lizzie Skeaping, the Education Officer, then gave us a taster of various educational activities they offer, including a table full of documents to have a look at, and a Magna Carta lesson where we all got to play with iPads. Did people take Magna Carta seriously? is taught by TNA but the children are in their own classroom back in school. It was fun having a go at the activities, and it also helped to see the range of things on offer, some of which I can imagine using. TNA is moving to a WordPress platform for their online lessons, which is free, so something that could be used in many places.

Finally, Fleur Soper and Kate Wheeler (Collections Knowledge Managers) talked to us about the Archiving the Arts programme (which I've already participated in at work by submitting details of some of our collections), and related areas to support the arts. This included a discussion touching on a range of issues, including funding. It is looking like the introduction of the Archives Accreditation standard means that most, if not all, future funders will expect the recipients of their funding to be accredited.

I really enjoyed my day at TNA. I had several useful discussion over lunch, and also learnt a lot from the speakers and activities. It was an interesting day, that had been thoughtfully arranged to include plenty of networking opportunities and hands on activities. My thanks to TNA for organising it.

Special Collections feedback

I've been looking into getting feedback from users of Special Collections, so last week I asked on lis-rarebooks and Twitter about what feedback other special collections libraries ask for and how they use it. I received many responses, as well as many requests to share what I had found, so I thought I'd blog about what I found out.

As I'm sure I've already said on this blog, librarians are the most incredibly lovely helpful people out there. I received a lot of attachments with examples of feedback forms, so the list below summarises questions asked.

Some collected category of user (e.g. undergraduate, postgraduate, academic), usually combined with whether they were from that institution or a different one.

Some had age range and gender tick boxes.

Tick boxes about enjoyment/whether staff were friendly and helpful/whether the visit was informative, rated between 1 and 5 (this was from an organisation that did tours of the library area), plus space for comments on what was particularly enjoyed and whether any improvements could be recommended.

Many institutions had very simple suggestion slips or cards (about postcard size) which any comments could be written on, with a postbox provided. Sometimes these were handed to users, sometimes they were left out on reading room tables to be picked up.

Exhibitions often had a comments book at the end for visitors to leave feedback.

Other ideas

In conjunction with Love Your Libraries Day (14th Feb) one institution (not solely Special Collections) asked for freetext feedback on heart shaped post-it notes from students, who received mini packs of Love Hearts in return.

Timing

Some institutions gave a survey form to every visitor. Others either did an annual survey or tied in feedback with a national survey and only surveyed visitors during a certain time period.

The PSQG (Public Services Quality Group for archives and local studies) survey was one of these, with past survey results available.

Common questions

What is your area of research?

How did you find these items were in Special Collections or in xx institution?

Which collection did you use (often combined with tick boxes if there weren’t many collections to choose from)?

What would you like to see displayed (from an institution running quarterly exhibitions to highlight their materials)?

Did you expect to be permitted to see items in xx library?

Could you have seen the items anywhere else?

Would you have been able to use a digitized copy of the items for your research? Would you have preferred this?

How did you find Special Collections supported your research?

Tell us about what you enjoyed (this was aimed at tour visitors)?

Do you intend to tell others about our collections as a result of your visit?

Have you used collections from other institutions to support your research? If so, please give details.

Do you have any suggestions or comments to help improve the xx Special Collections?

Online feedback

Several respondents reported that a lot more feedback was received from online exhibitions and/or blogs, where it is easy to leave comments, “like” a post or tweet a link.

Twitter and Facebook were both often used as a means of getting feedback.

Virtual Users Groups were mentioned by a couple of respondents as a way of getting feedback and asking for comments.

Website hits were also counted, and it is usually possible to find out which country most hits are from, plus referring sites and commonly used search terms.

Some websites also had a feedback link, although this tended to be used for issues about the website.

How feedback is used

For many institutions collecting feedback seemed to be a relatively new phenomenon and/or not enough responses had been received yet for anything to be implemented. Several institutions mentioned not having had enough time yet to analyse results!

There were various comments about how it was hoped to use the information:

• Track usage of collections
• Useful evidence for the university’s research output
• Improve user experience
• Where contact details are left to respond directly to any specific questions from users
• Online feedback was used to tailor blog posts and exhibitions (for example, by seeing which search terms were used most often, and what was popular).

More ideas

The Special Collections handbook (2011) has a section on feedback and complaints, as well as social media and feedback, and researching user needs.

The Customer Service Excellence Standard was mentioned as a practical tool with self-assessment of customer service.

I like to illustrate my posts, but I couldn't think of a way to illustrate "feedback", until I remembered my old cat, Sooty, was excellent at providing extremely vocal feedback about anything and everything. And, yes, he did only have three legs.