New Year, New Library

It's taken two months, but we've almost made it. As of last week, the Library - as we're now known - has a respectable number of working PCs, functional printers and much happier students.

Perhaps it was naivete, but I hadn't expected that there would be so much more to do when we returned to work on 5th January. Lots of the major problems were outwith our control, like the skee whiff positioning of the power boxes and furniture, or the upheaval associated with the installation of new networks. This unfortunately didn't stop us being the ones receiving complaints. We got up and running with what we could, but the truth was that we could only provide a limited service for most of January and February and my worry now is that we have some work to do to win back the confidence of our students.

I'm beginning with a run of informal inductions to welcome students into their new library, giving them the opportunity to find out where everything is and to ask us questions. We've been trying to think of more effective ways to communicate with students and I've invited myself along to the next meeting of the Student Representatives so that I can listen to their concerns and do what I can to resolve any complaints they might have. We're also going to spend some time on marketing, starting with a flyer campaign in the refectory and break-out areas.


Aesthetically, our surroundings are mostly quite pleasant. I've never worked in a new building before and it's taken more adjustment than we expected to get used to the new way of working that's required when your workroom and issue desk are completely different. The library is probably the most visually stunning space in the college, and our new furniture is attracting students who have few other places to spend breaks. We have high windows and good light, lots of space to expand our book stock, brightly coloured beanbags and a dedicated children's area.

The campus is scheduled for completion in August 2010, so there's a way to go before the students have their own recreational space. We've relaxed our policies on noise mainly because we have no choice when we're situated next to a cafe area that's completely open plan. In the future we'd hope that soundproofing could be introduced for the benefit of those students who come to us looking for a quiet space to work.

Overall I think we'll be able to improve the service we provide, but it's going to take time. Until then, I think we'll need to be satisfied with small victories.

Where Am I?

The October break has just finished, and I'm taking a breather. The new term was particularly frantic this year, given that we had two new staff starting work at the busiest possible time. Staffing continued to cause me some stress. We have fewer people, less experience across the team and still two campuses to cover. Add in illness and holidays and a solid month of inductions and workshops, and there is quite the juggling act.

Not to worry! The new staff appear to be settling in well, and the team will change again at the end of the year, which will be a positive move and I hope will make us much more cohesive. The move into the new building provides an opportunity to update our model of service provision and I hope that we can move away from the shusher behind a desk routine to something much more involved with helping students out on the library floor.

Our self-service PC booking is already a success, and if we can also introduce self-service book issue from January, this should encourage the students to be more independent and enable the staff to do more with the time we have. Our model of flexible learning is under review, as are - inevitably - our general policies on the use of the library. The layout of the new space will make it difficult, and possibly undesirable, to insist on low noise levels and it may be that we have to accept that being perceived as a social space (rather than a study space) by the students is not necessarily a negative thing. We shall see. We are also going to change the name of our service to something more forward-looking, a decision which has received wide college support, and we are involving the students in choosing the name (by way of financial bribery!).

I have never been so busy, but I've found that I quite enjoy having so much to do and so little time to do it in. The time is passing so quickly, and the library continues to be involved in many other cross-college projects, which increases my workload, but maintains and improves our links and visibility throughout the college.

Looking Forward

This is how part of our new library looks just now. It's due to be ready by 19th December and I got my first peek yesterday on a tour of the new building. It seemed like there is still a lot to do to get the habitation certificate by the deadline, but the company appear to be confident that we'll all be setting up quite happily in there when we return after the Christmas holidays.

Not being one to make things easy for myself, I've embarked on a runaway RFID train. The Gazette that dropped through my door this morning is all about RFID, coincidentally. Scotland got an abbreviated tartan conference last month. The speakers managed to demystify quite a bit of the process of implementing RFID and I subsequently visited a local university library that had made the change several years ago. The students there use it without a second thought. I also arranged a meeting with a sales rep from one of the main suppliers in the field, and have the support of the college's management team to implement such a change.

If we proceed though, I want to do this well, and will have to spend much more time on some careful investigation of the practicalities of getting the system in place. The articles in Update and the Gazette always imply months of careful research, tender documents, and consultations. A librarian with more time on their hands may well choose to make the move as cautiously as possible, but my timescale is quite short. Even though we have a relatively small collection of stock, we're still talking over 45 hours of staff time for re-tagging. I suspect we'lll be busy with other things when we return on 5th January, so I'll have to give this much more thought.


Having seen the new space yesterday, I'm feeling really positive about the potential there. Unfortunately, quite a lot of the move procedure is still fuzzy. We're receiving information from the move company on a need-to-know basis, which is a bit frustrating, particularly when we have such a large area to move. One of our new staff members has already been involved in a large-scale move, and said that it was relatively pain-free, which is encouraging. All we can do for now is continue to bombard them with questions and plan as much as we can for any eventuality.