L&LR staff blog

Welcome to the first blog about the new Staff Buddying Scheme that is currently being piloted within Library & Learning Resources. The scheme offers you a real opportunity to work with colleagues to develop your skills and knowledge. Full details of the scheme along with details of future training sessions can be found on the Training and Development area on the  staff portal pages.

https://portal.lincoln.ac.uk/C4/C17/TrainingDevelopment/default.aspx

Why do it?

Buddying provides an opportunity for you to:

§ Develop your knowledge and experience of each other’s roles and responsibilities

§ Appreciate an insider’s view of what it is like to do a particular job

§ Enhance your own performance

§ Improve your potential employability

§ Buddying could contribute to other developmental processes such as the new competency framework or the Personal Development Review (PDR)

If you would like to sign up as a volunteer during the pilot that is running between now and Christmas; please speak to either your Team Leader, Di, Marishona or Pam who will be able to give further guidance.

If you have any comments or feedback, please leave them here.

We are now taking bookings for Learning Development Workshops for weeks 5 and 6.

Workshops on offer are ‘Overcoming your Fear of Presenting’, ‘The Effective Use of Grammar and Punctuation in your Assignment’, ‘Introduction to RefWorks’ and ‘Finding Journal Articles’.

All students and staff are welcome to attend; you can book your place from the Library’s Workshop page or by texting the relevant code to 07972 455457.

Click here for a list of workshops and dates.

We will advertise the workshops for weeks 7 and 8 in a fortnight.

..that will be of interest.

Read the rest of this entry »

On 17th September, Jill Partridge (Library & LR) and David Young (University Research Office) attended the faculty of Media, Humanities and Technology annual research conference where they delivered a short presentation on open access, the repository and benefits to staff. Here’s David’s write-up of that presentation, to be published in the faculty’s newsletter, Ada’s Notes.

It appears that the campaign to increase our RefWorks reach is having a positive effect (graph for impression only; no numbers):

N.B. #1 – the total number of RefWorks accounts in current use – i.e. our ’share’ – has doubled since last year, thanks to a relatively huge number of new accounts created this year.

N.B. #2 – we have a number of loyal RefWorks users who’ve been with us from the beginning!

Thanks to Stephanie RefWorks-COS for sharing these additional stats.

Kudos to Social Work (i.e. Kev!), for being the first to use one of my formatted RefWorks books feeds in anger – see below a screenshot of Kev’s Social Works new books feed embedded into a live Blackboard site using feed2js (click for bigger):

If you have created your own feed, could you please:

1. Let me know.
2. Consider using Google FeedBurner to allow email subscriptions [which has worked well at Holbeach]; also to create a sensible feed URL à la http://feeds.feedburner.com/SWNewBooks
3. Add the feed to this UL wiki page?

And to see how ingesting an RefWorks feed into a VLE (Moodle, in this case) ought to be done, you might want to take a look at these videos on Owen Stephens’ TELSTAR project blog.

“TELSTAR is working on three main types of integration between the RefWorks reference management software and technology enhanced learning at the Open University.”

We are now taking bookings for the Learning Development Workshops for weeks 3 and 4. Workshops on offer during this fortnight are Decoding Your Assignment Title, Assistive Software, Using the Internet for Academic Research, Introduction to RefWorks and the perennial Finding Journal Articles.

We’re asking students to  book through the  Library’s Workshop page, which sends an email to asl@lincoln.ac.uk or by texting the code for the workshop to 07972 455457.

https://portal.lincoln.ac.uk/C13/C0/Workshops/Lists/Workshops/Future%20Events.aspx

This semester we’re only advertising the workshops a fortnight at a time to prevent students booking weeks in advance and then forgetting to turn up.

Judith and Helen

Colleagues: I’d welcome your thoughts on this. Please post comments to Bernie’s original blog post.

Two trips to the British Library for this year have been arranged:

Wednesday 25th November 2009 (slips must be in by 3.30pm on 16th November)
Wednesday 17th February 2010 (Slips must be in by 3.30pm on 8th February)

The trips will leave from outside the library (last time the trips went from the side road adjacent to the Engine Shed) at 8-15am.  They will return back to the university at around 6pm.  Students must book a place at the ground floor library desk and pay a reservation fee of £5.  If a booking is being taken at Riseholme it is essential that whoever takes the booking rings through to the ground floor library desk at Brayford so that their name/s can be added to the master list. When they book, please give the students a booking pack which includes a guide to using the Boston Spa reading room, request slips, and help guides for completing the slips and what to expect on the day.

It is essential that students fill out slips prior to their visit.  These must be returned to myself the week before the trip – for the exact dates, see above.  Please can staff at Riseholme post these slips directly to the British Library rather than sending them down for me to post at Brayford.  Please check that the shelf number (required for journals as well as books); date of visit, name, address and tel number of student is stated on the forms.

More information and guidance is available on the Portal, including help sheets instructing students on how to fill out the forms as well as how to prepare for their visit and what to expect on the day.

Thank you

Marie

I was pleased to spot the other day that the new version of the OpenBook plugin allows you to create links to your own catalogue (or any other service)…

An initial hack (very quick & dirty – look for the bold text!):

I need a bit of time to explore this further: but think of the possibilities where http://nn.nf/7398 + http://nn.nf/7408 + http://nn.nf/7418 = ???