DMU visit

Last monday I visited one of our affiliated universities - De Montfort University - to find out more about their Library. I was amazed at the size of it and the amount of space available for students and can imagine its a great place to study.

One of the first things I noticed was the proliferation of self service machines in the Library - this seems to be the way forward for many libraries and especially those that are opened (but not staffed) 24hrs. When I enquired further I did deiscover that they are not particularly well used at the moment as student prefer to go to the issue desk and have a more personal experience (which I can understand as I do the same at the bank). So at least ther service users appreciate the value of a staffed library rather than a self service one.

I also got the opportunity to sit in on a Class (Centre for Learning and study skills) session - something I could have done with whilst I was at university as it exmplored reading and writing styles. We do some information skills sessions in our college and the most popular one seems to be on referencing, however I thinks sessions on essay writing could also be popular if targeted at the right audience.

I was suprised to find out that the university also struggles in encouraging student's to use e-books, this is something we have diffculty with at the college so it was a great opportunity to consider some marketing strategies, one method they use at DMU is to have an e-book roadshow that showcases the e-books on offer and gives students the opportunities to meet publishers. We also agreed that the best way to get students on board with books is to eduate teaching staff about them as they will recommned useful resources to thier students.

During the visit I got ot meet so many lovely people who do such varied but key jobs in order to keep the service running effectively and smoothly. I learned so much in just one day and I only saw a small sample of the work that goes on behind the scenes. I would definitley reccommend visiting a variety of Libraries as I have taken away something useful from each of my visits and it is an excellent way to netwrok and build relationships with others in the safe field of work.

William Harvey Library

Yesterday I spent the day at the William Harvey Library at George Eliot Hospital in Nuneaton. I really enjoyed my day as it gave me the opportunity to experience a different type of library. Prior to my visit I hadn't really ever considered working in a hospital library as I thought it may have been too specialised. However I was delighted to be proved wrong, whilst they do use a different classifying system (The Wessex Classification Scheme) it was still fairly easy to find my way around to re-shelve books and locate journals. I also had the chance to see how Inter Library Loans for articles worked (something we no longer do at the college as there isn't a demand for it) as whilst I was there we recieved some articles from the British Library and also copied some articles for another NHS library. It was also great to see how the SLRA had implemented some of the procedures she had seen art our library on her visit, such as texting library users when library books are due back.

In additon to getting the opportunity to seeing 'behind the scenes' of a hospital Library it was a great opportunity to network with other library staff and discovered that the SLRA had also done CPD23 and we compared our experiences and whoed each other the prezi's we had worked on from thing 17 she also very helpfully pointed out that she had to chase her certificate for CPD 23 and found out you have to have done all the 'things' to get it which has inspired me to check which ones I may not have done and speak to the CPD23 people about getting my certifica

I enjoyed the expereince of a day at a hospital library and has caused me to think about the different types of library work there are and not to be so closed minded about what library work I see myslef doing in the future.