Buildings, books and blockbusters: balancing access and preservation

In November I attended (and co-organised!) the 2019 Historic Libraries Forum conference, which was a great opportunity to explore issues around access and preservation. It took place at Westminster Abbey and we were lucky enough to get a look round the new Queen's Diamond Jubilee Gallery at the Abbey as part of the conference. These are well worth a visit in their own right, offering both spectacular views of the inside of the building and a chance to encounter myriad items from their collections. Photography isn't allowed inside the gallery, so all my images are of elsewhere in the Abbey.

The Cloisters

The conference kicked off with Caroline Bendix, exploring what we mean by access -  any means of using a book, including reading, seeing, touching, smelling, hearing. Of the 25 causes of damage to books, 14 of these can be attributed to poor handling, which is why it’s so important to have handling guidelines and make sure they are followed, especially by staff, who are setting an example to users. She offered some tips, including:

• Have supports readily available to readers and make sure staff know how to use them, eg they need to be adjusted as different pages are opened.
• Provide regular training to staff on handling books and archives.
• Train staff to intervene positively when they see a reader exhibiting poor handling technique (eg by offering "help").
• The key is to reduce the rate of deterioration to the lowest possible. Users may not understand the need to handle books in a particular way - so it's helpful to have some spectacular examples of the results of poor handling to show them.

The damage that can occur, includes:


• Abrasion from removing from shelf.
• Shelves at the wrong height
• Historical application of leather dressing (too much and to books in too poor condition)
• Wrong boxes used (eg box too big for book so it can move around). Boxes and enclosures need to provide support.
• Using acid free paper slips for shelfmarks in the book cuts down on handling
Books on brief display can be preserved by:
• Creased sheet of melinex on top of book will stop some damage
• Mitchell book shelter – protects book whilst making it available
• Blickling Hall put books on temporary display with one person by each book to talk about it and ensure it is protected.

Remember – any step taken is a positive action to reduce deterioration

Susan Jenkins from Westminster Abbey collections then provided an introduction to the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee Gallery, followed by our visit.
The Gallery has been a very positive development to showcase items from the collections. Creating them had been a lot of work:

• Work had to stop everytime a service took place in the building.
• Light plans undertaken to understand how light would fall around cases.
• Computer modelling of the space used to work out where to lay out objects.
• Annual lux budget decided to try and get balance right.
• Continuous programme of improvement eg clerestory windows were discovered to be letting direct light in in March and October.

Visit was very inspiring with a chance to discover all of the treasures gallery – well worth a visit - I highly recommend!

View from the conference room

After a delicious lunch and the HLF AGM, Rosemary Firman (Hereford Cathedral Library) spoke about Screen sharing: the role of broadcasting and the media in extending access
Hereford Cathedral is the only library remaining where all books are still chained to shelves. References to chained libraries generally echo Hereford, but they have a total lack of control over people using images of chained libraries eg Game of Thrones is assumed to have been filmed at Hereford (it wasn’t!). The publicity is good but it can lead to increased requests for more access – observed increase in visitor numbers after TV programmes, but often little control over what is said in them, with much repetition of basic facts. Hereford doesn’t charge for factual/documentary filiming but filming can take up large amounts of staff time.
Some top tips:
• Don’t expect producers to be well prepared
• Have some key messages ready for them.
• Review recordings before release (this may be difficult to arrange)



She was followed by David Iggulden on Empowering Global Research: the Biodiversity Heritage Library
These are natural science research collections – literature and archives critical to studying life on earth eg species descriptions, info on extinct species, history of scientific discovery. Lack of access to this literature impedes scientific research especially in developing countries.
The BHL provides open access to digital library, inspiring discovery through free access to biodiversity knowledge. Much of the material is out of copyright but agreements are negotiated for the rest. 57 million pages – Kew was a founder member and the initial idea was a joint union catalogue. Reduces the need to consult physical items although the digital should exist alongside the physical. Had nine million users since it started.



Molly Bigwood, a student who had researched the balancing act between conservation and access, then spoke about her study into how historic libraries manage preservation and access as part of her undergraduate degree. There have to be concessions on either side eg the optimum temperature for storage isn’t compatible with reader comfort. She compared four collections.
Seeing books in worse condition can be beneficial to their future – the visually shocking helps emphasise the point.


Sarah VanSnick (The National Archives) finished off with a talk on mouldy books: preservation improving access
Over 1% of TNA’s collections are mouldy and they have changed their processes so that readers can still access them. They clean on demand, as they don’t have time to clean everything, but have to be careful as mould damage is cumulative and is classed as a biohazard. They carried out research to inform risk assessments and looked at how access could risk cross-contamination. It was found that boxes were good for keeping the fungal count low, so additional mechanisms were not necessary for moving items around. They now clean based on the risk of transfer. Readers now requesting mouldy material are given a list of the risks, and provided with an apron and mask (if they want to use these) – which means they now have access to a mouldy item when previously they would have had a long delay for cleaning before being able to use it.


It was a great conference, and included plenty of networking time in breaks too, so I left with plenty to think about! My actions to take forward:


• Review our handling guidelines and ensure readers know what to expect
• Review staff training to ensure staff are confident to help readers handle books correctly. Make sure volunteers are confident to handle items correctly and understand why it is important.
• Work on a media pack, including key messages for film crews etc about our collections
• Look into the Biodiversity Heritage Library (personal interest)
• Have a couple of “worst examples” available (physical and photographs) to demonstrate consequences of poor handling

Citation capture: what's in a name? Citing collections consistently for greater impact

The view from lunch

This was a one day workshop at The National Archives to explore the findings and recommendations made in the report Citation capture: enhancing understanding of the use of unique and distinctive collections within academic research published in 2018 by RLUK, TNA and JISC. It brought together practitioners from across the research lifecycle to look at the future direction of this work and how it might be taken forward. I particularly appreciated the chance to network with a wide range of practitioners on this topic.


As anyone who works in Special Collections will know, there is no standard way of capturing citations recording use of our collections. This makes it difficult to demonstrate impact (particularly crucial for funding applications) and meet KPIs, as well as understand how collections are used.


Some repositories do provide guidance on citation, but this often has poor visibility and is not provided pro-actively to users. Many currently depend on researchers telling them about citations (which is our current approach at work, although we do follow up pro-actively with researchers who have given their consent).


The report identified that there is no silver bullet in terms of tools and platforms. Two key approaches were identified in the report:

• 3 letter code
• ARCHON code (a unique code that each repository already has, but which would mean academics would either have to find the correct code to cite (they aren't intuitive, ours is 1975!) or the code would need to be included within catalogue references.

Then, several speakers talked about the implications around citation capture for their particular area:
Eleanor Harris (Herefordshire Record Office) - using citations for internal advocacy
Christina Kamposiori (RLUK) - measuring impact for Special Collections
Michael Rowlinson (University of Exeter) - quantitative capture of citations to archival material via Google Scholar
Jo Pugh (TNA) and Ben Crabstick (JISC) - citation capture in practice
Frances Madden (British Library) - persistent identifiers in an international context
It was very clear that improving the way in which citations are captured which make a big difference to a wide range of institutions holding archives. It would improve internal advocacy (as evidenced by the Herefordshire Archives example, where they had used citations as evidence to show the true extent of their users and the impact of research done using their collections), show that archives inform research that ends up in highly cited articles, raise awareness of the role of libraries and their collections in creating impact, learn more about researcher behaviour and interests, and the relationship between cataloguing of collections and use.


In our groups, we then went on to consider the best way forward. One possible route would be to include widgets in catalogues, for example Discovery and ArchivesHub, to make citation much easier. Another would be to involve publishers. By the end of the day it had been decided that JISC, RLUK and TNA would coordinate sorting out the requirements, and it was recognised that it would need to meet the needs of all types of organisation (eg, not every archive has its own catalogue, and it may not be online).


One to watch with interest!

Historic Libraries Forum conference 2018: Any other duties as required: skills for non-traditional library responsibilities

Our conference venue - the beautiful Christ Church, Oxford

It was great to be back at another HLF conference, having organised the previous year's! This one was especially pertinent to many of us, because who hasn't found themselves dealing with all sorts of things as part of a library job? Particular highlights for me included:




Ann Sylph (Zoological Society of London) on managing the many weird and wonderful items that make up their collections - as well as books and archives, this includes sculptures, paintings, pictures, slides, transparencies. She described how they had done a SWOT analysis, identified their USPs and a vision of where they would like to be in five years' time and then worked on this. They had begun by

• Spending an initial six months focussing on documentation and doing a strategic review, which then led the way forward.
• addressing storage issues by obtaining suitable boxes, monitoring the environment and for pests (all of which we do already in Special Collections) and developing a disaster plan. Evidence from the monitoring was then used to improve conditions.
• Celebrating outreach wins - eg produced bookmarks rather than leaflets as these are more likely to be kept, featuring in magazines and newspapers, putting on talks for staff enabling them to get to know the collections, using zoo events to attract a different audience, lending items to exhibitions external to the zoo. They also targeted historians to publish about their collections eg by targeting history of science departments.
• Did a monthly blog to highlight examples from their collections, rather like we did with Brunel 50 library objects

Ann's suggested actions were to:

• Multi-task!
• Constantly promote and use to engage
• Have a disaster box
• Use volunteers to help in practical ways
• Be inventive/creative
• Read. Go on visits and to conferences
• Seek advice and talk to others in a similar boat
• Don't forget the bigger picture - the rest of your organisation and the world
• Take opportunities when they come up
• Have work-life balance

Louisa Yates (Gladstone's Library), the only residential library in the world had won a grant from the Carnegie Foundation in New York. Over the previous six years they had brought upon a huge increase in usage, from no data being kept and no strategic plan, and only an average of three people a day using the library, they now have a plan, six years' worth of usage data and are now at daily full capacity, with bedrooms at 95% occupancy. The grant was to pay for a project they had always wanted to do - digitisation of Gladstone's books, thus making them available to a much wider audience. He had carefully collected books that were important to them, and annotated richly. It was quickly realised that the original plan, to digitise 350,000 items would be impossible, as they weren't catalogued and very limited metadata already existed, and transcribing this amount of material unrealistic. A revised, much more feasible, bid was written, detailing the digitisation of 15,000 letters (70,000 pages) and 5734 books and involved establishing a digital studio on site, with crowd-sourced transcription of a limited amount of the material. They had used SMART goals to set the project stages but did encounter problems along the way:

• Images couldn't go onto the existing server as they were too big and the cost of alternative storage hadn't been included in the bid.
• Adding subject keywords, whilst straightforward for trained library staff, wasn't a suitable task for many volunteers or work experience students.

Her learning points from the bid experience were

• People delivering the project should have been involved from the start.
• Library staff needed improved knowledge of tech
• Get paperwork in place before recruiting staff, eg manuals and workflows

I also enjoyed talks by Freda Matassa on valuing your collections, Judith Curthoys who managed to make a talk on implementing GDPR very amusing, Dorota Antoniak on accessibility and Sian Prosser and Laura Dimmock-Jones on developing professionally.

Oh and the conference lunch venue - Hogwarts!

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.

Developing collaboration between archives services and Higher Education

The National Archives

I attended this day long event at The National Archives in June - it was designed to launch a refreshed guide to collaboration between archives services and Higher Education worked on by History UK.

Background
The previous guide was produced by RLUK in 2015, based on research done in 2014, so this is a much needed update. It had been found that individual archives were being approached by academics keen to collaborate, but archives were unsure what REF2014 was, and the relationships that formed were not particularly resilient as they were often reliant on a single academic. From this the DCDC (Discovering Collections; Discovering Communities) series of conferences emerged.

The new guide
Includes refreshed case studies and references to REF, TEF and KEF, the 2017 HE Bill, UKRI and the Office for Students, all of which affect the landscape in which collaboration is now happening.

Several case studies were offered. These included Our Criminal Past, which brought together academics and archivists through engagement vehicles such as workshops, an advice forum and social media. They used HistoryPin to allow members of the public to add information about their criminal ancestors. I found the case studies particularly useful as they outlined the obstacles they had found to collaboration. It was apparent the same issues cropped up repeatedly, namely:

• Time/resources - without the resources for an assistant it becomes very difficult to keep the momentum of the project going.
• Maintaining relationships with the other collaborating organisations, each of whom may have their own interests/objectives, which are different to yours.
• Collaborators will have their own routines, working practices, lack of expertise and skills. There may well be several layers of processes that each collaborator has to work through internally before a project can happen
• Managing a website, particularly the costs of developing and maintaining it
• Copyright issues, particularly around using images
• Lack of awareness of the amount of work involved, eg the timeframe to produce an exhibition is usually years
• Some funding streams aren't available if you're not an accredited archive service

My group worked on identifying the challenges and benefits of collaboration

The audience at this event was fairly evenly split between archivists (working in a variety of sectors) and academics. We weren't allowed to just sit and listen either, there were several group exercises including "speed dating" where we had a few minutes at a time to talk to various academics in turn about what we were hoping to gain from a partnership. These were a great way to meet academics engaged in a variety of areas, plus people looking after other collections. 

The guide itself outlines the steps needed to be taken when instigating a collaborative partnership, and encourages the answering of some key questions, such as who are the key decision makers, finding out what is important to each partner and getting everything in writing. It also provides a complete project template to use.

Priority cards

The final exercise was to arrange a series of priority cards into a diamond nine shape, which encouraged us to explore in groups why others had different priorities and how they might align with ours. I particularly liked this diamond nine produced by another group, who had added an extra priority card for 'budget for cake and refreshments'!

Prioritising cake!

Actions
As a result of attending this event, I:

• have joined the HEAP (Higher Education Archive Programme) mailing list so that I can remain informed about developments in this area
• am looking into using HistoryPin to put our collections on the map
• have put a reminder in my calendar to check for the publication of the new collaboration guide this summer
• have followed up with a couple of academics from other universities who are interested in using some of our Special Collections in their research and/or teaching
• have put a reminder in my calendar to check on work being done to track citations of archive services across published papers and journals

Engaging younger children with heritage

This post is part of my 2017 chartership revalidation reflections - I explored how libraries and other heritage institutions cater for the youngest age range.

Since having a baby in 2015 I've got very interested in how heritage "attractions" deal with their younger visitors. Taking a baby to many of them is relatively easy - slings mean you can transport them all over historic buildings easily and safely and most places have baby changes available. Babies are extremely portable and don't really mind where they are as long as they get to eat and sleep! Last year I led all the tours of the 17th century parish library I look after with my baby daughter in a sling. She initially mostly slept through the tours, but later on got rather good at rolling her eyes and theatrical yawns as I was talking.

It isn't so easy with a toddler, although I still lead the tours, now with added commentary from a small person at my feet! Many heritage destinations offer family-friendly activities, but they all seem to be aimed at school-age children, often with National Curriculum tie ins. What we have found is that visiting many of the places we'd have gone to anyway offers lots for a toddler to see and do, you just have to be prepared to do it at whirlwind speed!

In the last week I've visited Tewkesbury Abbey and Osterley Park with my family, and we had loads of fun at both. Small people can get away with doing things that the rest of us can't - such as crawling through the quire stalls exploring every nook and cranny, or lying on the floor to look at the ceiling. Maybe more of us should try these things?!

Looking up in Tewkesbury Abbey

Historic houses offer huge amounts of things to explore - the rooms are so huge compared to the rooms at home, and more decorated. Osterley had a children's tour that involved counting marigolds around the house. My daughter was too small to operate the clicker provided, but we could still look for the marigolds. There were big and little rooms to have a look round. Reins are really useful for easy grabbing when the occasion arises, but easy to tuck in so they can get on with exploring otherwise. Osterley also had sports equipment outside in the park for everyone to try, and, on the day we went, craft activities in the stables area which a wide age range were enjoying.

Heading down the Long Gallery at Osterley Park

A particularly good example was at The Collection in Lincoln, which I visited back in July with my daughter. We had gone intending to see the Battles and Dynasties exhibition, and went in at around nap time, as I was hoping she'd sleep in the pushchair in the semi-darkness whilst I went round. This didn't happen, but she spent the whole time removing her shoes and socks very slowly so I was able to see the whole exhibition. This was encouraging as it means I feel confident now about attending other exhibitions I'd like to see, having not been to any during the year I was on maternity leave. 

The exhibition is well worth seeing, by the way, with loads of lovely rare books, manuscripts and pictures on display - it's on for another week so get to Lincoln! A lot of the material is on loan from various places, including The National Archives, British Library, Lambeth Palace Library, Lincoln Cathedral and Eton College, which must have been a logistical nightmare to organise.

And, quite apart from the exhibition, was the wonderful families area we then went to explore. I don't think I've seen anything quite like it in any museum, but do leave a comment if you know of anything similar. They had a huge emphasis on play and fun, and the area was suitable for babies upwards with soft play available. The play was all themed around the periods covered by the collections held at the museum (such as magnetic medieval pot pieces to put back together). You could play that you were in a portrait, with several backdrops available, including a Roman amphitheatre.

There were lots of books on shelves, freely available for browsing, and everything from baby board books to material suited to older children, all of it on a museum and/or art theme related to the collections. They also allow you to join Lincolnshire Libraries at the museum, so you can carry on exploring books.

Bigger children could borrow themed activity backpacks to take around the museum.

And your portrait might even end up featuring on the wall!

We had a brilliant time, and there are even more fun things to do on the museum's website. Oh, and all the children's things and the main exhibition galleries (not the special exhibition) are free!

This is a fantastic place for engaging children with heritage, and learning that it's lots of fun.

Getting organised

I've always been interested in organising things (I am a librarian, after all) and I've always done a lot with my time: work, volunteering, hobbies and now being a Mum so was keen to learn more about being organised and making my life more streamlined so that I could get more done and make the most of the time I had available. In a previous job I read up on time management, and tweaked what I did a little, and a few years ago read Jo Alcock's series in CILIP Update on Getting Things Done, which I adopted. I was quite late getting a smart phone (in 2013!) and I am still only on my second phone, but have appreciated the opportunities offered by apps for helping with productivity and organisation.




Back in May I did some staff training at work called "Stress less, achieve more" run by Think Productive. I thought it was going to be more about time management, but it was more far-reaching than that, and involved not trying to stuff more things into an already over-stuffed day, but working on prioritising and working more effectively in the time I have available. Escaping from the tyranny of the to-do list, to evaluate what is on the list and why so that you free up brain space to actually do things. We also looked at dealing with interruptions, paperwork and keeping the ideas flowing. I found it a really useful day, particularly as a chunk of the afternoon was devoted to implementing what we'd learnt in the morning into our own workflows and schedules. That meant I could be quickly up and running with a new way of doing things. Since then, I've worked with the new system, making a few tweaks as I go.


Some of the key tools I'd already implemented are:

• Inbox zero. I keep my email for incoming items only. This makes it a lot less overwhelming to look at. There is a link to Jo Alcock's advice on this above.
• Calendar management. Make sure I add all appointments, meetings etc to my calendar and keeping an eye on upcoming events so I don't miss anything.
• IDoneThis is grammatically awful, but a useful way of keeping track of CPD activities. I have it set to send me a daily email on the days I'm at work, to which I reply with a short summary of what I've done that day. This is really helpful when it comes to reflect on CPD, which I try and do monthly when I update my revalidation log.
• Saying no. I've struggled with this one for years, until I heard someone say that it isn't rude to say no, but it is rude to say yes, but then have to back out of the commitment at a later date, which cast a whole new light on the matter! I still feel guilty when I have to say no to things, but at least I know now that this is the best option in the long run.

Other areas I've worked on the last year or so and made changes are:

Calendars
I've had a play around with various tools over the years and am still tweaking what I work with. For a calendar, I've found that using my iPhone personal calendar with my work Outlook calendar connected to it means I can see at a glance what I'm doing when, and, because I'm part-time and occasionally change days or work different hours, it avoids any problems with an event being in one calendar and not the other. Whilst I was on maternity leave I found that having an old-fashioned diary-style organiser worked better for me outside work than an electronic calendar, and I've carried on with this since coming back to work. I still use my Outlook calendar for work commitments and this still appears in my iPhone calendar too. So, I use that heavily at work, and to check in with it easily when I'm not at work, but my outside work life now goes into a Life Book from Boxclever Press (used to be called Organised Mum, which annoyed me hugely as I'm sure other people than Mums can be organised too). I was very very tempted by Bullet Journals, as I love their appearance, and that might be something I explore more in the future. I have integrated some bullet journal things, such as habit tracking, into my Life Book, as well as the use of different colours...




To do lists
The Think Productive course advocated having one place to download all your projects from your head, whether work or home related, and then have actions relating to them. I didn't like the idea of having work and home all together like that, so having tried it for a couple of weeks, I now have a spreadsheet for work productivity, and use my Life Book for home productivity. With both methods I review each week what I've done, what needs doing and any upcoming activities, whether it's a meeting to prepare for, a big project to organise or a birthday to remember. I also do a tiny five minute review every day which keeps me on track. I've found that it's meant I arrive at work very focussed on what I need to do that day - usually five tasks chosen from my actions list (I have found that three big tasks, plus a couple of smaller ones works well) and it's also created more headspace for me outside work, which means more time to spend with my family and doing hobbies!






Email and phone
Can be really disruptive whether you're at work or at home. At work I have notifications turned off so I check my inbox when I choose to, rather than reactively, which tends to steal time away. Similarly, I keep my mobile on silent (it is set to ring only if my daughter's nursery calls) when I'm at work so that I'm not interrupted by personal calls.




Helping your future self
Can't find the minutes for that meeting, or forgotten what you need to buy at the shop? I started storing information based on when I would need to use it, rather than when I first came across it. At work I use Outlook, and at home my Life Book. This has revolutionised the way I deal with things and meant it's much less painful to get up to speed with upcoming events as I already have everything to hand. Admittedly it doesn't always work perfectly - a couple of weeks ago I found myself in Sainsburys with a shopping list but without my purse!


Please leave me a comment if there's anything you've used to help be more organised.