e-Fair

I spent the whole day today at the RSC (regional support centre) east Midlands e-fair. It was a brilliant day, I was able to find out so much just from networking on top of the great information given to use during the break-out sessions.

Being quite new to my post my knowledge of libraries is limited to what I have learnt in the last two months and my own experiences of university and public libraries so the networking session was a real eye opener to me. I have been educated in the Shibbloeth Vs athens conundrum as authentication portals and ease of use ( we use athens at our college).

I also found out about Drop-box - which is similar to cloud technology in that you download the software to your devices and then you can load documents, pictures etc into your drop-box and then you can access the drop-box from anywhere at any time.

There was a very interesting debate in learning providers using facebook as a tool to assist students with their learning. A lot of people agreed it is a great resource to connect with students but there are a lot of issues surrounding privacy and 'acceptable use'. We apparently have a facebook page for our library but whenever I search for it on facebook I only manage to find it as a place but no group. We also have a web page and a blog but I am unsure as to how well known and therefor used by staff and students in our college. I am a firm believer in using social networking to encourage students in their work. I don't advocate being 'friends' with your students but I see no harm in creating a group where we can post helpful tips and advice and students can ask questions and receive answers.

My last session of the day looked at students using their own devices in their learning again a very informative session and got me thinking about how we could make our library more interactive for our students. They can already access moodle and the library catalogue through our wifi but I think we could push this more and encourage students to use their devices to make full use of the resource available to them in the library.

Overall it was a great day, definitley worth going to and I would highly recommend it to others. I have previously been to an RSC meeting and information skills forum both of which have been beneficial to me and I have always walked away with ideas to implement in my own library.

sorry it has bee a mammoth post today (and I've been really restrained) but it makes sense that when you want to blog about something you're passionate about to express that passion.