This week I submitted (and received back) my final assignment in my final subject for my Master’s in Teacher Librarianship. YAY!! It did, however get me thinking about balancing stress.
Throughout my Master’s journey, I have received distinctions or high distinctions on every assignment. Yet, with every submission I worried that I would fall below the standards I was aiming for. On the one hand, stress about my assignments was beneficial: stress about meeting deadlines meant that I got them in on time, and stress surrounding fitting all the requirements from the rubric into the word count led to fairly tight, high quality writing. On the other hand, stress led to snapping at my family, losing sleep and making poor exercise and eating choices. There is definitely a balance between the beneficial and detrimental aspects of stress, and I often found myself on the wrong side of that balance.
As the school holidays draw to a close and I start feeling stirrings of stress about the coming school year and the tasks I want to accomplish, I find myself hoping that I can find a better balance. I hope for the control to allow enough stress to spur me on to accomplish things and meet deadlines without falling prey to its detrimental aspects.
Some tips that I have come across (The Leaders Institute, 2002 – 2019; WebMD, 2005-2020) that I will try to implement:
Eat a balanced diet – this is something I try to do, but I have started tracking my eating to keep myself accountable to healthier food choices;
Exercise – I have signed up for a fitness passport membership to encourage me to do some intentional exercise weekly;
Analyse and schedule tasks – I am looking into better ways to manage my task lists and schedule my time so that no facet of my job or life responsibilities gets overlooked;
Take breaks – make sure that I take at least one break period in every work day… some time when I am not trying to get jobs done, plus make sure I take at least one day of my non-work days where I do not do ANY school-related work;
Relax, stretch, be mindful – when stress rises in ways that start inhibiting performance, I will stop and take time to consciously relax (breathing, stretching or some other mindful stress-managing and releasing activity).
How do you manage and balance stress?
References
The Leaders Institute. (2002-2019). The key to balancing stress in the workplace. In The Leaders Institute. Retrieved from https://www.leadersinstitute.com/the-key-to-balancing-stress-in-the-workplace-work-smart-live-smart/
WebMD. (2005-2020). Ten tips to manage stress. In WebMD. Retrieved from https://www.webmd.com/balance/guide/tips-to-control-stress#3
The diversity of a TL’s roles. Copied from Facebook post by CBCA, South Australia. (Levin, n.d.).
An effective teacher librarian (TL) fully engages with students and staff as both teacher and librarian. The TL supports teaching and learning experiences by: resourcing the curriculum in a manner that considers the local context; providing access to and implementing current research in best teaching and learning practices; developing the information literacy and fluency capacity of students and staff; and inspiring a love of literature and ethical information use. The TL also develops themselves and their library by keeping up to date with best practices in the information services industry and responsibly managing its resources.
Part B: Thematic Reflections
I have focused my reflections on the themes of leadership, technology and literature. These themes are ones that recur throughout most, if not all, subjects in the course and are areas where I could see growth in my understanding and application to my practice throughout the course.
Leadership
At the outset of ETL504: Teacher librarian as leader I was sceptical about the claim that leadership is part of the role of the teacher librarian. As I detailed in my initial blog post for the subject, my experience with school leadership structures did not resonate with the idea of the TL being recognised as a school leader. Through reading the discussion forum and blog posts of other students on this topic, I realised that perhaps it was my understanding of leadership that needed to change. I therefore engaged in the subject with a mind open to entertaining such a paradigm shift.
Hot on the heels of my feelings of triumph and competence came the creeping panic and overwhelming stress of the end of the year. Last Thursday, I had little stress flutters all throughout the day, which was not helpful when trying to accomplish the tasks that I assume were setting off these attacks. I am lucky that I work in a small school with supportive staff. Several times that day I was asked if everything was okay and help and support were offered to me. This was helpful on the one hand, on the other hand I felt like something must be seriously wrong for everyone to notice that I was so stressed out. I want to project the image of having it all together and being a source of support and assistance – not the beneficiary of it!
I guess my lesson for today is: it takes a village to build a library (and to build a librarian). None of us can be truly successful on our own – together we are stronger, better, and brighter. So, I am giving a shout out of thanks to the staff members who asked after me and offered their help on Thursday. I am also giving a big shout out to Lindy at Abbey’s Bookshop who helped me find some library award books on Friday – the time spent poring through the children’s section with her was deeply restorative to my soul and equilibrium. And today or tomorrow, I will also try to take a piece of advice given to me by my library assistant recently and make a list of what needs to be done. I did not really want to face everything in black and white, but I think I need to organise and prioritise my tasks to get it all done.
How are you handling the mad rush at the end of the year?
In my placement report, I reflected that one great benefit of the placement experience was to be able to measure my competence as an information services professional through working alongside others in a larger organisation. Receiving a glowing report from my placement supervisor and feeling that I had made meaningful contributions to the Sydney University Library in my time there gave me the confidence I needed to step forward in courage in my school library.
A few months ago, a member of my teacher librarian network was asking on Facebook whether I knew how to run a report on loan statistics to compare the current year’s circulation figures to previous years’. I never had to figure it out because she figured out how to do it before I had a chance to try. At the time I considered finding out how and running the report to see what my statistics looked like. However, I chose not to do it because I was afraid I would find out that there was no change or that we had gone backward since I arrived. With my newfound confidence (and a complete year of borrowing finished) I ran the loan statistics report this past Wednesday and found that borrowing had increased by more than 40% in 2019 as compared to 2018. Given that enrolments had risen by less than 10% I found this to be a meaningful increase.
I encourage you to face that feedback you’ve been avoiding – you might find it brighter than you imagined!
The time has flown by and here I am at my last day of my professional placement. It was time to wrap up the different activities I had done over the course of ten days and bid farewell to Sydney Uni Libraries.
Walking to Sydney Uni through Victoria Park on my last day of placement (c) 2019 Marika Simon
My fellow placement student, Julie, and I finished our curriculum collection shelving improvements project and presented it to my supervisor and the other staff who had forwarded information from prior efforts to us. They gave some suggested tweaks but said it sounded like it was on target. We finished up the report and submitted it to our supervisors, who will take the proposal to the director.
I passed the affinity diagram themes that I had recorded from our map to my supervisor. He will merge that with the work he has done over the past week and call that phase of the project finished.
I also got to see some of the furniture that my supervisor had ordered for the Law Library and Fisher Library in situ and being used by students.
My supervisor gave me positive feedback and signed off on my evaluation and it was time to call things a wrap! Who knows? Maybe I’ll be back sometime!
One of the initiatives my supervisor was currently working on was to purchase a vinyl cutter for the Library. For the Learning Spaces area, this would be useful for creating signage decals. A proposal had been put forward to the Director to combine staff and student use for the vinyl cutter by purchasing it to be housed in the Library makerspace, Thinkspace, and therefore provide value to library users as well as the administrative staff. Five models had been included as potential recommendations in the proposal. I was tasked with doing some further research on these models and meeting with my supervisor and the manager for Thinkspace to present my findings. I was pleased to have my recommended cutter requested, with some of my arguments used to support the suggestion, and ordered.
Screenshot of sample user persona template created on Xtensio.com
Research on persona templates
The initial plan for the user experience (UX) research for the Conservatorium of Music (the Con) Library was to get information from students representing different courses, subject streams, years, and so forth and create personas to inform renovation plans. To that end, I was asked to look into potential persona templates to use in the project. Creating personas is frequently used in marketing and commercial UX projects. Many of the persona creation and template sites had a high amount of demographic and “buying habits” information that was not useful for our context. I found a simple, straightforward and easily customisable template at Xtensio. I created an example for our project on that platform.
The plan for the day was to do more user experience (UX) interviews at the Conservatorium Library (the Con). However, the morning provided an
A beautiful spot for a bit of work – “The Con” (c) 2019 Marika Simon
interesting insight on the unpredictability of the Learning Spaces coordinator role. A delivery of tables came for two library sites at 7:30 in the morning, with the email notifying the coordinator of the timing coming overnight. On arrival at 9 am, we went running around sorting out various issues and providing a liaison between the delivery worker, the staff at the various sites and the installer (who was meant to show up at 7:30 with the delivery, but did not arrive until around midday) to ensure that everything was in a reasonable space.
After a brief lunch break, we headed out to the Con and I scribed a couple of interviews led by my supervisor and then continued on my own until around 4:30. I tried to catch people either as they entered or were about to settle in to a study spot or to catch them when they were up and moving around. I attempted to get users from each of the study areas on the level we were targeting, hoping that I could also get a reasonable cross-section of student types. The plan is to start pulling out themes and creating an affinity diagram next Monday.
Friday
Today was a “find out more about the library in general” day. I got an intro to frontline services with one of the access services managers and access to the online training for the ALMA library management system (LMS). I also got a chance to shadow staff at the main information desk and in the returns room, along with a TAFE placement student. The final learning experience for the day was touring the non-traditional library spaces – where the collection is not books and traditional information material formats, but rather human resources, technological devices, and study space. Highlights from the various experiences follow: Continue reading “Placement diary week 2”
What role does technology play in the relationship information agencies develop with their users?
Technology was a common theme in the presentations of information agencies across a broad spectrum in the Sydney 2 study visit session. The uses of technology within the information agencies were integral to the relationship each agency had with its users. Though different uses of technology developed different aspects of the relationship between agency and user, one of the key roles played by technology was that of “connecting”. Technology used by information agencies connects users: to information; to personalised expert help; to the selection process; and to community. These connections create, change and develop various relationships between agency and user.
Technology connects users to information held by information agencies. Furthermore, technology has enabled the location for information exchange to no longer be confined to the library’s physical location, but rather freed in a new virtual mode of relationship between agency and user. Many of the information agencies on the Sydney 2 itinerary had online public access catalogues (OPACs) and e-Resource collections and had digitised selected items from their collections. Providing round-the-clock access to information and resources online extended the reach of these agencies, both geographically and temporally. This enabled them to forge relationships with users that they would not have had contact with otherwise due to distance or time constraints on users’ ability to physically access the library during opening hours.
For instance, the Caroline Simpson Library of the Sydney Living Museums has been contacted by users from around the globe in search of rare items that they have made available through their OPAC and through digitised items hosted on the Internet Archive (M. Stephens, personal communication, October 1, 2019). This interest from abroad in a small, specialised library whose main purpose is to provide support for the interpretation of historical houses would have been almost unheard of in the pre-Internet era. Woollahra Library owes approximately 10% of its circulation to e-Resources. It reports that a significant and growing number of its active membership maintains an exclusively virtual relationship with the library – never setting foot in any of the three physical branch locations (V. Munro, personal communication, October 2, 2019). Those are just two ways that we see technology connecting users to information and developing geographically extended and virtual relationships between information agencies and their users.
I am doing my placement in Sydney Uni Library’s Learning Spaces division. This comes under Site Services/Facilities Management for the library. My understanding of the mission is to improve the various spaces under library management to optimise the user experience.
Sydney Uni Fisher Library (c) 2019 M Simon
Here are some rough-and-ready thoughts from my first week:
Corporate culture and leadership
I find it much easier to see the value of the material on leadership styles, corporate culture and change management in this large, established organisation. My usual small primary school context is set within the larger Department of Education corporate culture, but the relevance of that is harder to see on a daily basis. In my placement, I can see more value in viewing events and interactions through a leadership theory lens. Being able to understand where attitudes and procedures come from and how to deal with initiating and overcoming resistance to change has daily practical value in this environment. Learning Spaces is all about change management. The remit is to observe and analyse what is in place, then collect evidence, and propose changes to improve the space (and then implement those changes.) Issues such as giving time for staff ownership of change and the need for an iterative process were evident. For example, in the SciTech library the reference and circulation service points have been changed from a large circulation desk to smaller height-adjustable pods. The intention of these pods is to be standing-height service “touchpoints” where staff have one to two hour shifts providing front-line service to users. When touring the libraries, these pods were set at seat-height and the staff I observed were sitting and working on the computers on their pods and did not even look up to take notice of users, such as myself, entering the library. This seems to be an example of a change that has been implemented but that has not been “owned” by the staff and will need to be re-visited to optimise the service. Continue reading “Placement diary week 1”
Reposting on 30 December 2019 as the original post seems to have disappeared
Part A:
Essay
What role does technology play in the relationship information agencies develop with their users?
Technology was a common theme in the presentations of information agencies across a broad spectrum in the Sydney 2 study visit session. The uses of technology within the information agencies was integral to the relationship each agency had with its users. Though different uses of technology developed different aspects of the relationship between agency and user, one of the key roles played by technology was that of “connecting”. Technology used by information agencies connects users: to information; to personalised expert help; to the selection process; and to community. These connections create, change and develop various relationships between agency and user.
Technology connects users to information held by information agencies. Furthermore, technology has enabled the location for information exchange to no longer be confined to the library’s physical location, but rather freed in a new virtual mode of relationship between agency and user. Many of the information agencies on the Sydney 2 itinerary had online public access catalogues (OPACs) and e-Resource collections and had digitised selected items from their collections. Providing round-the-clock access to information and resources online extended the reach of these agencies, both geographically and temporally. This enabled them to forge relationships with users that they would not have had contact with otherwise due to distance or time constraints on users’ ability to physically access the library during opening hours.
For instance, the Caroline Simpson Library of the Sydney Living Museums has been contacted by users from around the globe in search of rare items that they have made available through their OPAC and through digitised items hosted on the Internet Archive (M. Stephens, personal communication, October 1, 2019). This interest from abroad in a small, specialised library whose main purpose is to provide support for the interpretation of historical houses would have been almost unheard of in the pre-Internet era. Woollahra Library owes approximately 10% of its circulation to e-Resources. It reports that a significant and growing number of its active membership maintains an exclusively virtual relationship with the library – never setting foot in any of the three physical branch locations (V. Munro, personal communication, October 2, 2019). Those are just two ways that we see technology connecting users to information and developing geographically extended and virtual relationships between information agencies and their users.
This virtual relationship has changed some of the collection management practices of information agencies from “just-in-case” models, where resources are acquired and held by the agency so they are present just in case a user needs them, to “just-in-time” models, where eResources can be acquired instantaneously (or nearly so) and made available to a user just in time to meet their need (Neatrour, Callaway, & Cummings, 2018, p. 8). This is an example of technology connecting users to the selection process.
When technology connects users to the selection process, it changes the relationship between users and agencies from dependence to partnership. The Australian Film, Television and Radio School (AFTRS) Library (personal communication, October 2, 2019) and Sydney University Library (personal communication, October 3, 2019) both experimented with a patron-driven-acquisition model for the Kanopy audio-visual streaming service whereby three instances of users viewing any program for more than 30 seconds continuously would trigger a purchase of the program (AFTRS Library, personal communication, October 2, 2019). Both agencies found, as others have before them (Lukes, Margren, & Thorpe, 2016, pp. 112- 113), that this pure patron-driven-acquisitions model led to a rapid blowout of their budgets. Sydney University Libraries have moved to an evidence-based-acquisition model with a set 12-month expenditure (personal communication, October 3, 2019), and AFTRS have opted for a model using librarian selected titles, guided by user suggestions (personal communication, October 2, 2019). Therefore users are still connected to the selection process, though not directly and instantaneously, and users and agencies relate with increased partnership when compared to traditional resource selection models.
Technology also facilitates the connection of users to expert information through the development of a
RFID Returns and library help point Woollahra Library (c) 2019 Marika Simon
more personal relationship between users and the agency and a more proactive relationship between agencies and their users. This is accomplished by using self-service RFID technology for circulation and return of items, and OPACs with access to various online datasbases and streaming services for initial search processes. This frees the expert staff to give assistance, whether at designated stations (Sydney Uni, personal communication, October 3, 2019) or by roaming throughout the library (V. Munro, personal communication, October 2, 2019). Freeing the frontline staff from routine circulation and return duties gives them more time to serve users on a one-to-one basis, making the relationship more personal. In the case of Woollahra Library, where the librarians then roam the library to be more approachable and accessible (V. Munro, personal communication, October 2, 2019), it also makes the agency’s relationship with users more proactive.
Another common thread amongst information agencies was the trend towards digitising portions of the collection and making them available online, through the agencies’ own websites or OPACs, through catalogue aggregators like Trove, or digital libraries like the Internet Archive. This practice allows information agencies to provide access to rare, fragile, or unwieldy items while minimising the handling of those items to facilitate longer-term preservation of them (Matusiak & Johnston, 2014). This brings us to the next connection that is enabled by technology use.
Technology connects users to their community, developing a richer and more contextualised relationship between users and information agencies. Providing access to digitised items is one way that agencies connect users to their communities. Woollahra Library has started digitising its local history collection, this access – combined with increased opening hours and staff presence for the collection – has enabled many users to connect with their personal and community histories (Woollahra Library, personal communication, October 2, 2019). Jessie Street Women’s Library has also used digitisation as a way to minimise handling of their poster collection while providing broader access. This effort has actually created stronger ties with the poster-creating community, resulting in donations of more posters and strengthening the library’s collection (Jessie Street Women’s Library, personal communication, October 3, 2019). Libraries such as Woollahra (personal communication, October 2, 2019) and Jessie Street Women’s Library (personal communication, October 3, 2019) also use social media, their library websites, and targeted e-mails to tell digital stories and advertise library events that bring their user communities together. These uses of technology connect users with the community in multi-faceted ways, creating a rich, contextual relationship between user and information agency.
Therefore, through the experiences of information agencies participating in the Sydney 2 study visit we can see the connecting role of technology. Through this multi-faceted connecting role technology facilitates relationships between users and information agencies that are more extended, virtual, partnership-oriented, more proactive, richer and highly contextualised.
Reflection
The study visits contextualised my coursework through the observation of real world examples. An area of learning that was brought to life for me was the relevance of leadership theory material to my practice as a teacher librarian – particularly the evaluation of corporate cultures, library networking and promotion, and establishing my personal network with colleagues.
Seeing the differences between large, established organisations like Sydney University Libraries, Ultimo TAFE Library, and State Library New South Wales gave me real-world insight into the difference that corporate cultures and leadership styles can have on the direction of information agencies. To my eye, these organisations occupied a continuum of responsiveness to users and resilience for change ranging from Sydney University Libraries at the most conservative end and Ultimo TAFE at the most flexible. I could see the potential for applying theories of leadership styles and change management from ETL504 to understanding the workings of these institutions much more clearly than I have been able to do in relation to my small primary school.
I was impressed with the user-responsiveness and community networking of the Woollahra Library and Jessie Street Women’s Library in particular. Their engagement with their respective communities and use of technology and digital storytelling to network with their users inspired me. Library promotion and community involvement are two areas that I would like to focus on in my practice. Seeing the example of these two libraries that are within my local area and being able to make connections with staff there was a helpful step on that journey for me.
Finally, meeting classmates and instructors in person helped to strengthen my personal learning network and community of support. Even though I have connected extensively with classmates online, meeting in person adds an extra dimension to those relationships. I believe that these meetings have helped to strengthen existing ties and begun forging new bonds that will continue beyond this course to support, encourage, and challenge me in my ongoing practice of teacher librarianship.
References
Lukes, R., Markgren, S., & Thorpe, A. (2016). E-book collection development: Formalizing a policy for smaller libraries. The Serials Librarian, 70, 106 – 115. doi:10.1080/0361526X.2016.1153329
Matusiak, K. K., & Johnston, T. K. (2014). Digitization for preservation and access: Restoring the usefulness of the nitrate negative collections at the American Geographical Society library. The American Archivist, 77(1), pp. 241-269. Retrieved from httpds://www.jstor.org/stable/43489592
Neatrour, A. L., Callaway, E., & Cummings, R. (2018). Kindles, card catalogs, and the future of libraries: a collaborative digital humanities project. Digital Library Perspectives. doi:10.1108/DLP-02-2018-0004
