Client: Catherine Finch
Event: Summon IL conference
Electronic Notetakers: Jenny Barnard, Heena Patel
Speakers: Dave Patten and others
Date, time & place: Thursday 25th July 2013, 9:30-16:00, G.26, MMU All Saints
Welcome and Presentations
[All presentation slides will be on the blog and the Serials Solutions user group]
Dave Pattern: Good morning, welcome to Manchester Metropolitan University
for the 2nd Information Literacy and Summon event. This time last year we had
the first one at Sheffield Hallam and we will copy the format of that event. We
have presentations and this afternoon we will have breakout sessions. We've got
a lot to pack in so we will keep the speakers to time. We will fit the agenda
perfectly! We will be live streaming and swapping over so bear with us for any
technical problems.
`
Thanks to David and his colleagues for arranging this today. I'm sure it'll go
smoothly and please buy them a pint after! I'll get Dave to do housekeeping in a
moment. Also thank you to the sponsors. Thanks to all the speakers who will be
presenting today. Dave, can you do some housekeeping?
David Jenkins: OK, to run through some housekeeping, in terms of fire exits
there are huge ones at the back with the big exit sign on. If you head out to the
left hand side door there is a big double door ahead of you there. Toilets are on
the left, through stair 3, there are toilets through the door. Or you can take a left
through stair 2. Some breakout sessions will be in a different room on the 5th
floor. The toilets are also up there, we will have people there to direct you if you
need any help with that or the fire escape. You come out of the seminar room
and take a left to stairwell 3. There will be a break at 11.30am. There are no fire
alarms planned. If an alarm goes off treat it seriously. Let's start!
Dave Pattern: I get to go first as the Chair! I'll get my presentation out of the
way.
Presentation: Riding the Summon hype cycle
I'm linking Summon into the Gartner Hype Cycle. If you haven't seen this it's a
tongue-in-cheek graphic. Let's say a company sees a gap in the marketplace so
that's a Technology Trigger. In January 2009 we heard about Summon and
there was a huge buzz about it. That created expectations, but those can go way
over what can be delivered so then we get the Trough of Disillusionment.
Then we may be in there for a while and we have a Slope of Enlightenment.
We can then do some useful stuff with the software. Let's apply that to Summon
and our experiences at Huddersfield.
We had a research product and the students and faculty hated it. OPACs are
worse. Google Scholar is popular but not perfect. Around 25% of traffic to the
link was going to Google Scholar. We could poke holes in that all day long but
students love it. Going back a few years Library 2.0 was about having things in
different places in the library. That was our Technology Trigger as we wanted to
replace our federated research products.
This is a summary of the session.
Page 1 of 36
Client: Catherine Finch
Event: Summon IL conference
Electronic Notetakers: Jenny Barnard, Heena Patel
Speakers: Dave Patten and others
Date, time & place: Thursday 25th July 2013, 9:30-16:00, G.26, MMU All Saints
Around April 2009 we had presentations about the early version of Summon and
our jaws dropped because this was what we wanted. It indexes everything,
fantastic! We don't need to teach database interfaces anymore. Our MARC
records were being used properly, we were so excited with our new toy!
We didn't realise this back then, we've heard that Summon is a disruptive
technology but I'm not convinced that all are like that and some are more
disruptive than others. Any technology will change the way you work. We've
seen that we've had to change the way Summon works because our students are
using it in ways that we're not expecting. Some of our librarians got into the
Trough of Disillusionment. It's got a single search box, it doesn't index everything
that's out there. Some of the platforms that begin with E, not everything is in
there. It's not 100% of databases. We found that some of our staff get fixated on
the wrong things, they can't search the stuff that isn't in Summon. We will still
need to teach database interfaces.
The music scores are copy catalogued as audio CDs. We were sad kittens for a
while! We couldn't see the wood for the trees. As we were applying some our
traditional database ideas. We were in the trough for a while longer. Then we
started to see that students loved Summon and we ran it in parallel with a
research engine. We got really good feedback. Many academics love it, not
everyone. E-resource usage has had about 400% increase. That's brilliant but
it's harder to do cancellations.
We tried to put everything into it first but we realised that not everything had to be
in there, many had dodgy interfaces that students struggled with. As a developer
the Summon API is amazeballs! We've had to develop a load of new services
based on this.
That leads to the Plateau of Productivity. Let's have a show of hands, who's
had Summon for 3 years? We're the old timers. 2 years? Maybe 1 year?
Anyone who's just launching it for this academic year.
Many different
experiences. On that curve you may be in different places. This day is about
sharing experiences, no matter where you are on that curve, we can all learn
something. Today is about sharing of these toys!
I think that's all I'm going to say. Let's close that down. Any questions? I'm sure
there would be from that kind of presentation! Please chip in. Silence. Let's
have Matt to come up and get ready. I'll do a tap dance for a few minutes!
Presentation: Where no one has gone before, Cultural Changes
Matt Borg: Hello everyone. Who is from Manchester? Who is from outside
Manchester? From down south ? Outside of England? Where are you from?
Glasgow. Anyone further? I don't count Denmark.
This is a summary of the session.
Page 2 of 36
Client: Catherine Finch
Event: Summon IL conference
Electronic Notetakers: Jenny Barnard, Heena Patel
Speakers: Dave Patten and others
Date, time & place: Thursday 25th July 2013, 9:30-16:00, G.26, MMU All Saints
Comment: I'm from Newcastle.
Matt Borg: I've got one pack of buttons for the furthest people, [speaking to the
webcam audience], if you had come to the conference, you could have got
buttons!
We're trying a new thing. Always good with this much technology. You can follow
this if you have an iPad or tablet. I will talk about the troubles before Summon at
Sheffield Hallam and the culture of changes associated with implementing this
kind of system. We could call it WNOHGBCCWIADS as a Twitter hashtag! I try
to butter up the audience using images like the kitten, but Dave already beat me
to it, so I won't try it!
I think we went live in September 2011 but had a test period first. The discovery
journey is a phrase I keep referring to when students access information whether
it's a book or e-resource or video. Whether it's their first time or they are doing
dissertation stages, how they access the information is important, so we need to
look at the old discovery journey. We used to say to first years, "Welcome, you
need to start searching for information". They will say, "I've been searching for
information since I was young." Google has met their needs but then they met
complicated search interfaces. These are created by librarians for other
librarians. It's like we created it as if information was dangerous. Database tools
are expert facilities so students do struggle [reads Tweets out].
This is still our competition. This helps the librarian focus on the journey rather
than the tools. The first cultural change I will look at is Help. The library
profession is about helping. This is what we were taught to do. It's been a driving
force for the profession but has been a blessing and a curse. Tools designed to
impede the discovery journey rather than helping.
People were saying that it wasn't what they were expecting. Librarians were
supposed to promote it as a great tool. I got nervous and went to meditation. I
discovered Shoshin from Shunryu Suzuki. When I started applying this
concept during the beta test of Summon, I realised why my results weren't
satisfying. Once I started looking at it more like a first year student, the results
were more meaningful which lead to this quote [reads from slide] I apparently
said this on Twitter but I refuse to own up.
Expert Listening: for years we follow our intuition when we work. I'm sure we've
been to meetings when we think up a load of FAQs for new students which they
won't even think of. Intuition is fast but not always accurate. I can teach you how
to listen to a student in my lightning session. [reads from slide] This works for
students. They understand Google.
OPACs (or NO-PACs): I worked a long time on that title! There has been a lot
published on why OPACs aren't great so we moved it off the front page of the
library website. It can have delays. I don't think this is a problem. It's not
significant enough of a problem.
This is a summary of the session.
Page 3 of 36
Client: Catherine Finch
Event: Summon IL conference
Electronic Notetakers: Jenny Barnard, Heena Patel
Speakers: Dave Patten and others
Date, time & place: Thursday 25th July 2013, 9:30-16:00, G.26, MMU All Saints
What students want to know is "Is the book on the shelf?" We can bookmark the
library catalogue for advanced users and librarians. It was hard moving OPAC
from the website.
I know Dave at University of Huddersfield and UWE have been doing work on
this. We need a shift which is useful for librarians and users. You can start
rearranging stuff and making it responsive for when people need to use it. If we
use discovery tools properly we can be facilitators of learning rather than
information gatekeepers. We share these experiences and there will be similar
ones at other Universities.
I was nervous about using this quote from Katie Wrathall but she said it was fine.
I think this is apt. Professionalism can come across as arrogance and we need to
move away from that as it creates barriers. We can be facilitators of learning if we
use Summon. We are not our patrons. We are not quite at this stage. I love that
mock-up. If we do this, we can be very happy. Thank you.
m.borg@shu.ac.uk
@mattborg
Question: Hello, with regards to making cultural shifts and perceptions of
librarians have you done any staff development, have you changed the mindset?
How do you make that move?
Matt Borg: I do stuff, the question was how do you enact that cultural change,
how do you work with your colleagues to get them on board? Rod's in the room
somewhere, we work together and a lot of the work we do about this (webinar
talking over him), if you want to make a change, I can speak to 12 people, tell
them what we want to do with the Library Gateway and get their feedback. We
have monthly seminars where we get the department together and we tell them
why we're changing things. We video people using the systems and ask them to
talk out loud 'I'm going to click here, I think I will find this book here'. We do a
monthly showcase to show how they're struggling, we then make tweaks and we
show our gradual progress in helping the students. We haven't done away days,
I usually ask for forgiveness after I've done something and explain it and why it's
working well.
Dave Pattern: Let's try to keep ahead of schedule and have a longer lunch
break. This is Sarah from the University of the West of England (UWE).
Sarah Brain: I'm Sarah from UWE. I'm a subject librarian for Education, Politics
and Linguistics there at the main campus. I'm going to talk to you about how
Summon has impacted our Information Literacy training. There may be some
things that have been talked about this morning. It's based on my own
experiences but those of colleagues also at UWE.
I'm firstly going to show you what it looks like on our library website so you can
see it in context. Then I'll talk about the impact, the challenges also.
This is a summary of the session.
Page 4 of 36
Client: Catherine Finch
Event: Summon IL conference
Electronic Notetakers: Jenny Barnard, Heena Patel
Speakers: Dave Patten and others
Date, time & place: Thursday 25th July 2013, 9:30-16:00, G.26, MMU All Saints
We've had Summon since February 2012, so this has been our full academic
year with it. One reason for using it was a desire to be able to find information
easily and have that Google-like search experience. Let's have a look at it.
UWE homepage: this is our library page with a link to the search box. We don't
call it Summon, we call it Library Search. It’s got a single search box, it's got
about 87% of our full texts subscriptions. It has our library catalogue and our
research repository also. When students search it, we decided to exclude some
sources and others have done this too, such as newspaper results. The linking
out to papers in Nexis isn't great! As you may know also. We've excluded book
reviews too. We found that flooded the results and students got excited when
they found something relevant but then realised it was just a book review.
Also our results from our abstracting and indexing databases only come up if we
have the full text available because it’s a full text database. We don't have the
database recommender switched on because the recommendations are not
always useful. Finally I'll show you the subject web pages, let's go into
Education. This shows you the asterixes which show the databases that are
included in the library search.
Impact: My first bullet point isn't on there! Information Literacy framework: the
introduction acted as a catalyst to how we do our information and training. We
have a framework relating to Information Literacy that applies to all levels from
Undergraduate level 1 up to Researchers. It gives guidance on the skills needed
at each level depending on student and staff need and their information needs.
Within that we have reference to Summon because as far as we're concerned it
can be used in different ways depending on the information you need. It's
formed an integral part of our Information Literacy framework.
On a practical level we tend not to demonstrate it at library inductions, we let
students use it. One thing we found with the deep searching, students don't
need to know whether they're looking for a journal article or a book title, they
don't need to know the difference at the first search. Two colleagues of mine did
3 identical inductions for mature students. In the first session they showed
Summon, in the 2nd they mentioned it, and in the 3rd one they didn't mention it at
all. They found that during the sessions, the use of library search was no better
or worse. All the students found Summon and they found results they were
happy with.
Because we're not focusing on mechanics we have more time for critical
evaluation of resources which is interesting for us and the students. Getting
them to think about the results they find; they do get lots of results, which can be
a challenge. We get them to think about evaluating the source's authority, the
currency and the format of what they've found. It's a chance for us to engage the
students at a higher level rather than the mechanics of how you do X, Y and Z.
This is a summary of the session.
Page 5 of 36
Client: Catherine Finch
Event: Summon IL conference
Electronic Notetakers: Jenny Barnard, Heena Patel
Speakers: Dave Patten and others
Date, time & place: Thursday 25th July 2013, 9:30-16:00, G.26, MMU All Saints
Lastly on the impact, in a subject area where they have redone their Information
Literacy from levels 1 to 3 based on Summon. That's our Health and Social Care
department, Summon searches 80% of their coverage. They only show
Summon, no native databases at level 1. At level 2 they cover refresher and
native databases and at level 3 they do more advanced searching.
You've got Summon as a starting point, but at higher levels they get to move onto
to other sources.
Challenges: Coverage is limited for some areas such as Law, Creative
Industries such as Art and Fashion. My colleague said that their training has
been impacted less because of that. They still have to teach the native interfaces
so Summon has had less impact on their training. It raises an issue that there is
a perception that Summon is a one-stop shop to finding resources and it's on our
homepage. The reality is that some databases aren't included. A challenge for
users is knowing what's included and what isn't and when to stop using it and
move onto another resource. In our Information Literacy training we've been
aware of this and that comes into the IL framework we've written too.
Also we have low usage of other databases that aren't included in Summon. The
usage stats have dropped significantly. Are they more hidden now? They may
not be, but it's for us to say that Summon is great but also don't exclude all other
resources.
Volume of results can be a challenge, we get feedback from academic staff about
that so we've done advocacy work in that area. With some of the academics I
work with, I attended some of their meetings and showed them how to best use
Summon. They want to find out about particular journals and for them that was
important but it's not completely obvious how you do that when you first use the
search.
Also we've found tension between the use of filters and the Google-like search
experience. We've observed students in our sessions and notice that they don't
see the left hand side filters, whether or not we show them to them at the
beginning. It's like they're treated Summon like Google which is what we want,
it's a search box, however Summon is not exactly like Google because it has
limiters and options for advanced searching. It leads to a tension there.
Summon agility: that can be a challenge. This is a good thing but the fact that
it's updated often, every 3 weeks. That can lead to changes in the search
environment. The challenge for us is if we plan demonstrations there may be
changes that weren't there before. We have to adapt to that. We don't always
show detailed demonstrations because of that.
Comment: Hi, I’m Neil from City University London. This is more of a comment
really. We're implementing it. We took it to our Law librarians and we thought
they'd say it was a disaster but they loved it and saw that you could search all the
legal literature. We said that they could do further research in another search
engine, such as Halsbury's Laws. We were surprised by that.
This is a summary of the session.
Page 6 of 36
Client: Catherine Finch
Event: Summon IL conference
Electronic Notetakers: Jenny Barnard, Heena Patel
Speakers: Dave Patten and others
Date, time & place: Thursday 25th July 2013, 9:30-16:00, G.26, MMU All Saints
Sarah Brain: Did you all hear that? I'll summarise. Neil said that the Law
librarians liked Summon, they were pleased because students could search the
journal article aspect and the social aspect of law which was in Summon and
they could advise students to go elsewhere for the more hardcore aspect, such
as case law. They were able to make that split nicely.
Question: The facets and the tension between Google, I've seen students using
it, and because of eBay and Amazon they have that knowledge. Do you think
Summon will have to be a slave to the changes, say everyone develops clever
searches. Do you think it will have to mirror that?
Sarah Brain: One main reason we got it was because we wanted that Google
like search experience so we're having to respond to those trends really. I see
your point.
Question: You said that you use it as the frontend of your catalogue, we do that
at Wolverhampton also. How many people use it as the library catalogue?
Sarah Brain: About 5 people in the room, there are about 80 people here.
Question: Students are not using the filters, was there an indication that it's
because they're down the side and not at the top?
Sarah Brain: I don't know why they don't see them on the left, it's possible that's
why.
Comment: When we did usability testing we found students thought it looked
like Google but behaved like Amazon. There was a clash.
Sarah Brain: It's that tension between the 2 different websites and how they
work.
Question: I like that link you've got that shows you the databases that are
involved, how many people use that?
Sarah Brain: Those pages that link to the databases for your subject and which
ones are included are the 2nd most used webpages on the library website.
Question:
librarians?
Can you tell if that is usage by students, academics or other
Sarah Brain: I don't know, possibly not.
Dave Pattern: Thanks Sarah. We're still ahead of time, so we can have an early
lunch.
This is a summary of the session.
Page 7 of 36
Client: Catherine Finch
Event: Summon IL conference
Electronic Notetakers: Jenny Barnard, Heena Patel
Speakers: Dave Patten and others
Date, time & place: Thursday 25th July 2013, 9:30-16:00, G.26, MMU All Saints
Presentation: ACES, SHU (Sheffield Hallam University)
Sandy Buchanan: I'm Sandy from Sheffield Hallam. I look after engineering and
maths. The faculty has a bizarre mix of subjects, and seems to be made of a
wide range of offcuts including Engineering, Maths, Computing, Art, Design,
Journalism & PR, Media. Different students have different needs depending on
what they want and how they use information. There is no standard method of
teaching because our students use the search in different ways.
We call Summon the Library Search here. There are subject guides, broken
down by different types of material and then the databases are listed. Maths and
engineering students are generally very practical and won't usually be
researching until their final year, but what they will use is quite esoteric like
market research.
This area has done well out of Summon. We have things you can find easily
using Summon like e-book. We can now find Standards and ASTM documents.
Academics have been here for years asking for British Standards and now we
can get them easily. We do an induction in the first year and depending on the
class, we can talk more about evaluation and referencing. If they haven't done
much searching before their dissertation, we will train them more. Postgrads will
get extra training as well.
Business and marketing is a big part of the Art and Design students’ research.
They are really keen on creativity and inspiration. We don't set them tasks to tell
them to find things because they don’t work well like that. They like to try things
out rather than get told what to do. There is a lot of important material which is
not available electronically. They are browsers who like to flick through and
prefer to go to shelves directly, so we need to tell them where to find stuff. They
tend to study nebulous subjects like wanting to do a dissertation on spirituality.
This will bring up a lot of irrelevant results. We have specialised searches for
these. Art and Design benefits from encyclopaedia results. They can find really
good resources as quick as they could use Wikipedia. Our contact with them is
often 1 to 1 to help them find what they need.
From Day 1 the Journalists / media / PR students do a lot more academic
research so need to know how to research. These are more like traditional social
sciences with a broad focus and want to research anything. They will need to use
resources Summon doesn't cover at the moment. Newspapers and Nexis UK
don't work well on Summon so we have to refer these out. Again, they have first
year induction but get heavy doses on library searches in their second year as
there is so much they might want to use. One of the great things about Summon
is it requires little teaching, even if you are not very IT-literate or don't use English
as a first language. All the students who ignored training didn't have many
problems. Students help each other out or they will ask librarians for help.
If you deliver dozens of sessions you get bored quickly because they try it out for
themselves, but their tries make things different which stop you going insane.
This is a summary of the session.
Page 8 of 36
Client: Catherine Finch
Event: Summon IL conference
Electronic Notetakers: Jenny Barnard, Heena Patel
Speakers: Dave Patten and others
Date, time & place: Thursday 25th July 2013, 9:30-16:00, G.26, MMU All Saints
They can look up very strange subjects. You don't need to know how databases
work, as people will help each other. Summon is really good for teaching journals
because they show up in Summon searches and it is a great way of telling them
about peer review.
Some students won't be using journals or researching until their final year. How
much will they remember if you tell them in the first year? Our students use a lot
of material, conference papers and trade papers. We concentrate on academic
journals and not what else is out there. We deal with explaining the difference
between searching for journals and journal articles. Because it's easy to find a
journal article, you can go straight to it and don't need to explain. But you still
need to understand the process of getting to a particular article. It's really good
as an introduction to other databases. the results it gives have a similar layouts to
other databases and search engines.
We can show off things like Advanced Search and Boolean which they will
need for dissertations and postgrad work. If they can use Summon, they can use
other search facilities. They learn transferable skills. Citation searching and
complex syntax searches might need to be done elsewhere. We talk to students
primarily about Summon.
With first years, do I tell them about anything but Summon? I probably will. We
are giving people sausages; processed items which aren't how they started. It's a
good way for students to think of it as Academic Google, a collection of
information brought together. It can lump a lot of information together and
students may not know why they have been grouped together. This is something
that a lot of search engines and databases do, so it's not unique to Summon but
does need addressing.
What happens when things go wrong? Students need to know there are other
resources if something is broken or missing. There will be oddities. Sometimes
you get new book editions missing an entry or there will be two separate entries
so the entries are not consistent. The British Standards are classed as e-books
but they’re not! Students need to understand that a lot of results have been
brought together here. If you want to know any more, get in touch. Any
questions?
a.buchanan@shu.ac.uk
Comment: I'm from Middlesex Uni. It's so unfortunate that British Standards
have appeared as e-books.
Response: We're working on it and might be able to get feedback on that.
[Break]
This is a summary of the session.
Page 9 of 36
Client: Catherine Finch
Event: Summon IL conference
Electronic Notetakers: Jenny Barnard, Heena Patel
Speakers: Dave Patten and others
Date, time & place: Thursday 25th July 2013, 9:30-16:00, G.26, MMU All Saints
Dave Pattern: I forgot to talk to you about the breakout sessions, mine will be
about the Trough of Disillusionment so if you find yourself in that, or you're out
the other side, come along and we can discuss it. I can help you get out of the
trough.
Presentation: Michael Latham & Mike Ewen from the University of Hull
Mike Ewen: We're here to give you an overview, we're new users of Summon
from September 2012. We'll cover what we've learnt and how we'll build on it.
When we found it was being live streamed all of Hull University stopped to watch
this! I'm hoping they've missed us by now.
We launched in 2012 and looked at 5 tools and got feedback from library and
academic staff. We decided on Summon after doing usability tests. It's managed
by a project team made up of library staff and we work with IT. It's from all
departments within the library and we talk about it once a month. A subgroup
promote usability testing also.
Marketing: we only got access in August 2012 so we pushed it as a soft launch.
We weren't sure of the capabilities of it, so we didn't feel fully confident in
launching it fully. We took it as a one year trial and we wanted it to grow by word
of mouth to see how it would be taken forward.
We also decided to implement Talis reading lists and LibGuides. We didn't
create any promotional material but started it for the summer exam period, when
we thought we'd be continuing with it. We didn't touch too much on staff support,
but we did some demonstrations for frontline library staff. We didn't do hands on
training, but we regret not doing that. We didn't go to academics or show it to
them directly. It was all soft launch and word of mouth.
Information Literacy sessions: these were only for certain departments so we
only saw a small number of students. We found it hard to fully show the
capabilities because we weren't 100% sure of it. We used a generic search that
we knew worked, that involved Rupert Murdoch because he's a good way of
showing how you can use the facets and use advanced searches. It was
presented as an additional service, we'd do our normal Information Literacy and
we'd do Summon at the end of the presentation. It wasn't at the heart of the
session.
Following this we wanted to see if students had found it, we asked for feedback
through an online survey. We did this twice, once at Christmas and again in
June. For the first student survey we offered a £50 Amazon voucher so we got
100 responses. In the June one we offered only a £20 voucher and so only got
30-40 results! We didn't offer anything to the staff so got about 15 results. The
Christmas survey was a promotional tool so we asked 'have you heard of
Summon and if not, go and try it and let us know what you think'. We asked
some basic questions, what you like, dislike, do you see it as a valuable tool etc.
This is a summary of the session.
Page 10 of 36
Client: Catherine Finch
Event: Summon IL conference
Electronic Notetakers: Jenny Barnard, Heena Patel
Speakers: Dave Patten and others
Date, time & place: Thursday 25th July 2013, 9:30-16:00, G.26, MMU All Saints
We gathered some quantitative data.
We also used a student focus group, in January 2013. That gave us some
interaction with the students, we had 10 students in a room and we talked about
it. What they thought and what it could offer. We also did some usability testing
in the library where we ran through about 6 exercises with users. We broke
down our assumptions of how people would use it. We feared that people
wouldn't know how to use it, but the focus groups showed that once people found
it and used it, they were very capable and finding the material they needed. They
used the facets, we watched them doing it! They used it easily and understood
them. It was a positive message that we took.
We gathered qualitative data from the workshops and these clouds which are out
of date! The library is a key point, but also Google is one of the main points. We
wondered how to promote Summon and whether we should also promote
Google. The summer survey showed that Summon does appear, people had
started using it. Our figures showed that despite a lack of promotion we had a
high usage, up there with our other databases. We asked what people liked
most, people had tuned into everything we'd wanted them to do. It's quick, easy,
relevant, useful and a large number of results. They'd intuitively picked up on the
power of Summon and what it can provide.
The main thing that came from the research was that people didn't know about
Summon, due to our soft launch. We'd hidden it a bit. On our library homepage,
we had our catalogue search. We had a tab where you could go to Summon.
But why would you click on it if you didn't know what it was? People struggled to
find it. Our web presence is in flux at the moment. We took all of this information
and learnt from our experiences. We need to more greatly promote it, which
Michael will talk about.
Michael Latham:
Promotion 2013-14: for the next academic year we're focusing on marketing,
staff support and Information Literacy delivery. Firstly there will be more of a
Summon presence on our library webpages but mainly our Reviewed LibGuides
which are our resource gateways. We will use promotional materials such as
those springy flags that you can fix to PCs. We will use pop-up banners which
are banners you pop up! You dot those around the library and in promotional
events.
Staff support: this is very important. How do you get those two clipart
animations to work? They do move! Front line library staff will get training to
increase awareness and so they're more confident about demonstrating Summon
and answering questions. We get continuity of messages and students will get
the same advice. For Academic staff we will do drop in workshops and
mailshots.
This is a summary of the session.
Page 11 of 36
Client: Catherine Finch
Event: Summon IL conference
Electronic Notetakers: Jenny Barnard, Heena Patel
Speakers: Dave Patten and others
Date, time & place: Thursday 25th July 2013, 9:30-16:00, G.26, MMU All Saints
The main part of the promotion is in Information Literacy delivery, we will catch
students at induction and in embedded information sessions.
We do this across all levels and faculties. We get students to engage using
active learning techniques. We will have drop in sessions for specific resources.
We deliver on postgraduate research training modules, using interactive
techniques. Our skills team do initiatives on peer-assisted learning.
LibGuides: the cornerstone of our strategy for promoting Summon is through
these. These are under review, this is a draft new one. This is the starting point
page on screen. We've put Summon prominently on the front page. There are
links to other resources such as journals and articles and you can see it
prominently along with tutorials on how to use it.
We think it's important to promote it but not to the exclusion of the other
resources that we've got to offer. We want to integrate access to resources with
advice and Information Literacy support and guidance. Students welcome advice
about research pathways and what to use and when. We've got a mix of
Summon, Information Literacy advice, advice about finding articles and using
subject and multidisciplinary databases. We've got information about Information
Literacy advice and planning research. There is a guide about doing web based
research and how to start it. We're mixing them into a package that people can
get everything they need from.
To sum up, Information Literacy delivery through LibGuides. We want to
transform these into subject and Information Literacy gateways. They're the
centre piece of our face to face and online Information Literacy delivery. We use
LibGuides in embedded sessions and online, there is a continuity of the
message. Summon is a prominent part of that information finding narrative. It's
important to provide that choice as a starting and / or ending point, depending on
the level of study, context etc. It's important to provide access to other resources
also.
We haven't got conclusions because it's an ongoing project. We have discussion
points, we'd be interested in your comments. The issue of striking a balance with
Summon and other research resources; the continuity of the message, how can
we better use feedback and usage data? The issue of user training and how
often we do that and provide top ups.
Any questions?
David Jenkins: Andrew Taylor is online and has a question: the soft launch was
giving staff time to get to grips with it? Would you agree? Would you do it
differently now?
Mike Ewen: We were trialling it for a year so we didn’t want to raise
expectations. The soft launch did help because we didn't have much of a run-in
time.
This is a summary of the session.
Page 12 of 36
Client: Catherine Finch
Event: Summon IL conference
Electronic Notetakers: Jenny Barnard, Heena Patel
Speakers: Dave Patten and others
Date, time & place: Thursday 25th July 2013, 9:30-16:00, G.26, MMU All Saints
If we started it now, we'd need more of a run-in time so we could prepare
materials and how we were going to use it. One big thing we found was that we
have the data to show, when people have used it without training it's been
successful. We have the knowledge that it's worked.
Michael Latham: The main reason for the soft launch is that it was a pilot.
Comment: I haven't seen your website, could you go back to where Summon is
placed on it?
Mike Ewen: This is where it is on the LibGuide which is the subject guide. We
don't have to scroll down on our computers.
Comment: For uptake for the users you could make it more prominent.
Mike Ewen: We're aware of that. I'll show you how we have it on our library
page with the tab box. This is being revamped for the start of term.
Comment: Your brand is Summon and not 'Library Search' is that because of
the soft launch or will you call it something else?
Michael Latham: Due to the soft launch really but it's easy to brand it as
Summon. If we rename it, we then have 2 things which sound like a catalogue.
Mike Ewen: We may change it but we have 2 separate things so we may not.
Comment: How are you using the Talis Aspire reading list with Summon?
Mike Ewen: The best thing I've found with Summon is that the people inputting
the reading list, you can find the article and link it in.
Michael Latham: We link between both but the reading list project is at stage 2
and there are at least 3 stages with inputting the reading lists. It will evolve, the
relationship will change including the VLE.
Comment: You use LibGuides as a subject portal; how do you get students to
find the right portal? Who looks after them? How do you ensure that it's good?
Mike Ewen: When they were created each academic librarian worked with
academics to ensure the correct material is on there. When we revamp we talk
to the departments. We have a guide page for our LibGuides. We're hoping that
Summon 2.0 may have the personalisation bar on the side.
Michael Latham: We're trying to link between the VLE library homepage
including LibGuides and Summon is something we're trying to improve.
Dave Pattern: Thank you both.
This is a summary of the session.
Page 13 of 36
Client: Catherine Finch
Event: Summon IL conference
Electronic Notetakers: Jenny Barnard, Heena Patel
Speakers: Dave Patten and others
Date, time & place: Thursday 25th July 2013, 9:30-16:00, G.26, MMU All Saints
Comment: This needs to go live on the index.
Dave Pattern: We have half an hour at the end of the day where the speakers
can stand at the front and answer your questions.
Presentation: How Summon saves time for fun games
Adam Edwards: You might notice a slight pop music theme. I'll leave you to
work this out. I’m the Liaison Manager for Law, I support users and I do
collaborative partnerships. I do this usually with Vanessa Hill and a lot of this is
her work as well as mine.
Summon has been a huge enabler along with other things which have helped
with teaching. Summon has freed up time for us to do other things so I will talk
about it in the context of teaching. I will talk through issues and how we solved
them. Anyone who wants to have a play with these can talk to me afterwards.
‘Not embedded’ is a cliché. You'd like sessions but they aren't enjoying them. It's
not clear which module you need to see students on. There wasn't a great deal of
coordination. Students would go onto a module and say they had done it before.
Some people would have to repeat things as they had missed it before. This is
one of the problems we had. I love the assumption that computing students know
how to search. A professor claimed they were information literate and I
challenged him. The other issue is 'death by PowerPoint' and it all get a bit
boring.
We can spend too much time being generic and teaching the tools. Summon
frees you from learning how to use the tools. It's too didactic and not inspiring.
I'm scared that students will ask me something I don't understand. We teach
information searching, not the subject. It's ok when searches bring up stuff they
don't expect, so don't be scared of that.
We spend too much time cramming the students. Don't try to make the student
into a mini-librarian. They don't need to know about Boolean operators. Our
teaching is about getting them to talk about things amongst themselves and
talking to us. We want to activate and stimulate their prior knowledge. It's about
working it out, not doing as we tell them.
Games are a great way of doing this. I went to Susan Boyle's session at
University College Dublin which was inspiring. We talk about games but it's
about activities which are quick, simple, easy and promote the activity. These are
just laminated paper printed on a colour printer. It's about making the students
talk about it. Susan inspired us and I'm grateful. Although these are generic
games, they will apply the words to the subject area. The cards just prompt them
to talk about it. They are an enabling tool. It’s about searching, analysing,
evaluating, synthesising, selecting and rejecting.
How do we map employability skills and fit the schools plan and structure?
This is a summary of the session.
Page 14 of 36
Client: Catherine Finch
Event: Summon IL conference
Electronic Notetakers: Jenny Barnard, Heena Patel
Speakers: Dave Patten and others
Date, time & place: Thursday 25th July 2013, 9:30-16:00, G.26, MMU All Saints
We would need to go into schools. We made a menu of sessions with different
pieces we could use to adapt to what people wanted. Before Summon, we had
three different databases with different interfaces. There is a the problem of
missed things and confusion of learning 3 interfaces. We look at that in 2nd and
3rd year but not first year.
Summon has saved time: that has been the biggest thing. I teach one thing and
this leaves time for discussion, game-playing and thinking about keywords before
you plunge in. We want people to have a go. The best example is CMT1300,
where people were looking for the Oyster Card and they came up with oyster
flavoured ice cream. The students admitted they could have used a better
keyword and this example is memorable. They learned from their mistakes.
We also talk about the limitations of Google. We get them from a blank stream to
referencing. The best compliment I had was, "That is sick, man," from a London
student. People who used Summon tended to used better marks than people
who used the library catalogue.
Where do we go from here? On and on as the song says. We keep coming up
with ideas for activities and games. We are pushing hard to get learning
objectives in. Vanessa and I are listed as tutors for CSD4040 which is one of the
Masters computing modules which means lesson planning for us. It's working
with embededness.
Summing up: the changes have worked, teaching is more fun, it saves time and
the impact means that if you get training on Summon and then use it, you get
better marks and we promote this. There are some references at the end. Any
questions?
a.edwards@mdx.ac.uk
Question: Phil Stark, Birmingham University. Can you talk more about the
games? Were they most of the session or at the end?
Adam: We tell people to sort out cards in groups of 3 and which will be most and
least useful. We get them to ask questions like 'what does peer review mean?'
from the cards.
Phil: So it's a small percentage of the time?
Adam: Yes. We don't want one activity to be too long. Starting, searching and
generating a reference would not be more than 20 minutes.
Question: Do you do it as an icebreaker?
Adam: There are about 20 people and we get them to play the games in groups
of 3.
Question: Are you doing this across the institution?
This is a summary of the session.
Page 15 of 36
Client: Catherine Finch
Event: Summon IL conference
Electronic Notetakers: Jenny Barnard, Heena Patel
Speakers: Dave Patten and others
Date, time & place: Thursday 25th July 2013, 9:30-16:00, G.26, MMU All Saints
Adam: Other people are using it. Different people have used things in different
ways such as a Business librarian who has added in business reports. It’s not a
‘one size fits all’ idea. We have developed our own way of doing it. Most of what
we need to teach is covered by Summon. EBSCO-based areas are less keen to
use it.
Dave Pattern: Thanks.
Presentation: Summon, Information Literacy and Step up to HE
Eleanor Johnston: We're asked to do practical examples so this is what I'll be
doing to show you what we're doing at the moment. I work at Staffordshire. I'm
going to talk about our programme Step up to HE and how we implement
Information Literacy in that programme.
Introducing Step up to HE: the programme is aimed at people who have been
out of education or weren't thinking about University. It's a free programme and
encourages people to come to HE. Here is a short film about it.
Film
Toby Lucas (student): it gave me a chance to think about University. It provides
me with information and tools and the skills to study at HE level.
Alex Jones (tutor): There are a good number of students who had been out of
education for some time. The course is fantastic, the oldest person has been 67
and the youngest was 18. The life experience is valuable.
Eleanor Johnston: That shows you what the course is about. We're trying to
get the students to realise they can study at HE level, we're delivering accessible
and interesting sessions for them. Instead of thinking about complicated ideas
and things students may forget, they may not have used a database like this.
Step Up gives them some confidence to do this.
We've been involved in the programme for 4 years; we have three 3-hour
sessions that we deliver. We cover finding information, evaluating it and using it.
We always team-teach the sessions, usually me and a colleague from Study
Skills or student ambassadors. We don't use the word 'teach', we do sessions
and then people work together.
Session 1: we talk to people about what the library does and how they can use
it. We focus on the library catalogue and in the last 12 months we started with
Summon. We explain the difference between Summon and the other search
engines such as Academic Google. We get access to resources that aren't
available elsewhere. We take them for granted but people on the programme
don't know about these things.
This is a summary of the session.
Page 16 of 36
Client: Catherine Finch
Event: Summon IL conference
Electronic Notetakers: Jenny Barnard, Heena Patel
Speakers: Dave Patten and others
Date, time & place: Thursday 25th July 2013, 9:30-16:00, G.26, MMU All Saints
Students often don't know what academic databases are and what peer review
is. We talk about academic journals, abstracts, citations. It's not complicated, it's
an introduction to discussion. We give them information about subjects and we
see how we can write essays for example.
Session 2: this is where we critically evaluate. Anthony Beal who works at JISC
talks about a particular website called www.martinlutherking.org and we ask
students to tell us about it. We ask them for their feedback. It's a great exercise
and shows them what can happen. We show them that they can use Summon
and they can find the peer reviewed stuff. We get a lot of feedback about that.
This shows the awful website, that web page has been about for years, it's poorly
designed and used as an example of how you can get a racist website that's full
of rumour and lies. That is still on the front page of the Google search. It shows
you how Google gets that on the front page. We look at it on Summon and it
shows the full text articles from academic resources such as History Today. You
can see that's an academic article. It's not about us showing them but students
also have a go themselves.
The feedback is immediate, we use post-it notes for this. We get them to write
down what they think 'critically evaluate' means. We ask them what they think of
the session and what they'd like in the future. One feedback note shows 'use
Summon for researching, not Google'.
Session 3: using information and how to reference. They work in groups and we
collate resources and we ask them to reference. They think about what makes
up a reference. We want the ideas in the students' minds. They do this course
before September and so we can introduce them to things like putting results into
folders and them putting them into a Harvard referencing format. They find it
amazing but we ask them to check it with their lecturers. Summon 2.0 will allow
you to create a personalised version of folders that aren't session-specific.
The future: for Step Up we'll keep using it, it's not an overwhelming version of a
federated search, it's easy to use and the results are fast. We're looking forward
to 2.0. We're lucky to have 3 sessions with students but we need to develop
more quizzes and elements for shorter sessions and other students. That's it and
thanks.
Question: I was drifting away sorry, but when exactly do students do this in
relation to their course?
Eleanor Johnston: They run it throughout the year, it's a 5 week course, then
they would start in September. They run them usually in March but they can do it
during the year. The short course then encourages them to start their full
academic course in September.
Question: Do you tie in your work with the Assignment Survival Kit tool?
This is a summary of the session.
Page 17 of 36
Client: Catherine Finch
Event: Summon IL conference
Electronic Notetakers: Jenny Barnard, Heena Patel
Speakers: Dave Patten and others
Date, time & place: Thursday 25th July 2013, 9:30-16:00, G.26, MMU All Saints
Eleanor Johnston: That gives people a rundown of the work needed to
complete an assignment and gives them a calendar with reminders of what and
when to do. In session 1 we talk about finding resources and that survival kit.
We put everything together in '10 things you need to know'. We point it out at
that point in the sessions.
Question: How do you cope with teaching different levels of information such as
IT skills?
Eleanor Johnston: By the fact that some students are scared of touching a
keyboard, and the way we do the work over the 5 weeks is that they get to know
each other and work together. They help each other. A student who is confident
will automatically help another student. That's how I've seen it happen, I don't
teach them how to use a keyboard. It's powerful and makes a big difference to
them.
Question: Am I correct in saying that it's a 5 week course in March?
Eleanor Johnston: The sessions run all the way through. The groups are
around 25 students. When there is enough demand they run another. There are
usually 3 or 4 sessions a year.
Question: Is there a cost to it?
Eleanor Johnston: No, it's a free course.
Question: It's in March, do they get time off school to attend?
Eleanor Johnston: Most of the people are people who have had children or not
been to university. It's an area where we get people into learning who have been
out of education.
Question: Do they say 'I want to do something'.
Eleanor Johnston: If there's a demand the tutors will run additional sessions for
that. I'd do that and find someone else from my department to team teach.
Dave Pattern: Thanks Eleanor. Emma, do you want to do your elevator pitch?
Emma Coonan: I'll do that after.
Dave Pattern: Our final speaker before lunch is Emma from the University of
Cambridge.
This is a summary of the session.
Page 18 of 36
Client: Catherine Finch
Event: Summon IL conference
Electronic Notetakers: Jenny Barnard, Heena Patel
Speakers: Dave Patten and others
Date, time & place: Thursday 25th July 2013, 9:30-16:00, G.26, MMU All Saints
Presentation: From ‘finding’ to ‘decoding’:
a Summon before-and-after
snapshot
Emma Coonan: As some of you on Twitter will know, I have no pictures, so
thanks to Penny for pointing me to this picture of a puppy.
I will look at how we will move teaching on. This is about a change in verb. My
bugbear is on the word 'find'. I want people to analyse and use. This is a
snapshot of one class in 2011 before Summon and in 2012 after Summon. Note
the change in verb. This 2011 class is based on finding things.
This is for all students from all areas. I don't have the luxury of tying them in with
students from the same areas. It is useful for students new to the Cambridge
library system. We have eight million things [i.e. resources] in the library and five
million of those are on the catalogue. There are many libraries across all the
colleges here. This session is good for people doing essay writing, so tracking
down known items rather than unknowns.
In 2011 we wanted people to learn where to search for what. That took up 90% of
the session and was a poxy tour of the interfaces. Part of it was if you know
where to go you can save time but it's not a great pitch. We have Library Search
Plus and an A-Z list of journal titles. Students don't search for journal titles.
In 2012, the learning outcomes are different. The reading list is a tool. History
first years have a 100-page reading lists. How would you know the order to read
it in? How do you know how much to read? How do you know how to critically
evaluate before someone tells you how? We need to teach them how to
recognise incomplete references given by tutors.
Pre-Summon, we had a depressing handout which looked like this: [slide]
In 2012, we can now can start talking about what these things are. Students can
learn what a journal is in an academic context. What is your essay title, your field
and scope? Maybe a monograph might be more useful than a textbook. The
2012 handouts are on the web. Use it if you like and adapt it if you need to.
I can now talk about decoding expectations in academia. Once you know the
minutiae and oddnesses of academia, you start to become part of a very
exclusive academic community which puts up barriers. This is the first step to
decoding scholarly expectations.
In 2011, I would explain that you should search by the book title not the chapter.
It's boring!
In 2012, I'm saying “Now you have things, how will you use them?” Think about
your question. It should take you along a nice straight path. I use the image of a a
white rabbit. 'A white rabbit' is an attractive distraction, but if you follow it, you end
up falling down a rabbit hole. What is 'being critical'?
This is a summary of the session.
Page 19 of 36
Client: Catherine Finch
Event: Summon IL conference
Electronic Notetakers: Jenny Barnard, Heena Patel
Speakers: Dave Patten and others
Date, time & place: Thursday 25th July 2013, 9:30-16:00, G.26, MMU All Saints
You need to return to your question and not get sucked in. You need to keep
critical distance.
The indications for learner agency is what excites me the most. I want to help
students become part of a community of practice. It's one of the hardest things
becoming a student, especially if you have come from other backgrounds. We
want to help them become part of the academic community.
I will do a breakout session this afternoon and I will show you a diagram which
looks like a pizza. I want to move away from key skills outwards to levels of
learning. How do you fit it in to your subject context? How do you manipulate it to
use it in your work?
In my breakout session I will look at moving from key skills to higher levels of
learning. I'm done. Thanks very much.
Dave Pattern: Any questions for Emma?
Comment: Do you adapt your teaching for law?
Emma Coonan: I don't teach law students. They have their own excellent
module for that.
Comment: Does your research skills appear on the student record?
Emma Coonan: It does now. I had to manage all these courses manually which
was very frustrating. They get transferable skills added.
Comment: So it's not accredited but will help them with employment?
Emma Coonan: Employability is a hard concept at Cambridge. The assumption
is if you go to University of Cambridge you will just get a job. The things are on
their records, but it's doubtful they will use it in that way.
Comment: It was good to have yours and Eleanor's presentations side by side
to compare the two kinds of students.
Emma Coonan: I'll repeat that: it's good to compare how we deal with elite
students and students coming in to academia who are new to it.
David Jenkins: Can we get your presentation?
Emma Coonan: It's already on SlideShow.
David Jenkins: We will get all of this on the IL blog.
Emma Coonan: Great. Is it lunchtime?
This is a summary of the session.
Page 20 of 36
Client: Catherine Finch
Event: Summon IL conference
Electronic Notetakers: Jenny Barnard, Heena Patel
Speakers: Dave Patten and others
Date, time & place: Thursday 25th July 2013, 9:30-16:00, G.26, MMU All Saints
Dave Pattern: We are ahead of time. I don't know if food will be ready, but we
will come back at 1.30 for the lightning sessions.
----------------Lunch break
Lightning Sessions
Dave Pattern: Let's have a show of hands, we're proposing to have the panel
session in the pub, we'll ring ahead. At 3.15 we will go to the pub, do networking
and we can do the panel session there if you fancy it. Who wants to do that? If
you don't want to do that, put your hand up. If that's OK, we will finish at 3.15.
After the breakout sessions we will go to the pub to continue. I did a Webinar to
the Skills solutions group in Australia and they did their meeting in the pub.
We thought it would be fun to invite people to do a 5 minute Summon
presentation, an Information Literacy sales pitch to you, to pick up tips. I'll be
brutal and keep everyone to 5 minutes.
Tim Leonard from University Campus Oldham
Tim: Hi, it's not snowing in Oldham today! I will talk about UCO to make sense
of how we teach Summon. UCO a partnership between Oldham and University
of Huddersfield. UCO students are Huddersfield students so they have access to
Summon and the e-resources. We've got a diverse range of courses, our largest
cohort is Education. I support all of these subject areas on the screen which is a
challenge! There are 600+ students. We use Summon as the starting point for
these areas apart from Law which is still based around Nexis. It's a good single
search for all our other searches.
We always use subject specific assignment examples. I always ask for the
assignments and tailor the sessions around that. Then use that as a starting
point and get them started on identifying key words, we bring in Summon later
on. We look at freely available web resources, there is good information online
for Health and Education areas. We've already thought about choosing sources
then we move to Summon and show them that it provides good quality
information. We use Huddersfield's platform so it's the same. We start basically
and treat it like Google and that doesn't scare the students.
We look for 'reflective practice' at first. It comes up like Google, it makes
suggestions. Reflection in nursing comes up. That may be useful for some of
our students doing Health and Community studies. Let's click on 'reflective
practice' and we find 64,000 results. We have access to loads of stuff. Our
students can use Huddersfield's library but they don't have to go to Huddersfield
to do that. They click on things online, we challenge them. How many of these
results will we get electronically from the 64,000?
This is a summary of the session.
Page 21 of 36
Client: Catherine Finch
Event: Summon IL conference
Electronic Notetakers: Jenny Barnard, Heena Patel
Speakers: Dave Patten and others
Date, time & place: Thursday 25th July 2013, 9:30-16:00, G.26, MMU All Saints
Comment: 50,000.
Tim: More or less? 57,000 results I think! No, 59,000. You get a feel for
guessing how many you will get. You don't always have to plan it in advance.
Basically our students use these facets, they can refine their search. They use
the facets a lot. Our students like using scholarly publications. I prefer to use it
by journal article. If they like using certain things that's fine, it's customisation
and using the facets that work for you. I spend little time showing them what to
do, but I show them how to date order them. That may be useful. Then they
experiment with the facets for 15 minutes. I ask them to take what they've been
doing, their mistakes (such as typing their entire assignment question in there),
and searching within e-books. I tell them to start generally on Summon and then
be more specific for e-books. That's it.
Dave Pattern: Don't sign out of the Webinar. Our 2nd library tour is David from
MMU.
David Jenkins from MMU
David Jenkins: This is the bluntest introduction, this is what I'll do with my new
students in September. Any feedback is welcome. Good afternoon, I'm the
academic librarian in Didsbury library, we'll look at getting full text articles in 5
minutes. We'll use Library Search; what is that? Have you used it before? Oh
well, for those who don't know, it lets you access e-journals, print journals,
newspapers and everything else. We'll focus on full text articles online.
Next, where is this wonderful search? It's on the MMU library website. Let's
have a look at that. Scroll down the homepage, in the 2nd column there is a link
to Libraries. You'll come to the Library homepage. We don't have the Summon
search box on our homepage yet, use your imagination! We have the Beta
version hidden here. We're in. There it is, Library Search. What do we do next?
How to use it. Have you used Google? Excellent! You can use this then. You
just have to enter a few keywords and hit 'search'. In the next session we will
look in more depth for choosing more keywords.
A quick example: 'e-learning assessment'. This is a topic close to your hearts. Hit
the search button, then we'll get a list of results. There are things that relate to
the keywords we've put in. You can hover over the title and it gives you a brief
description of what the article is about. How do we see the full text? Simple, just
click on the title to see the full text. We don't have the full text for everything and
we show that with the sunburst which shows that MMU have the full text online.
You will be taken to the MMU login page.
Enter your network username and password, just the once. Then you will go to
the page where you can access the full text. Next, when you've found the full
text, how do you make your search better and find more relevant things? There
are some quick ways, we can refine our search.
This is a summary of the session.
Page 22 of 36
Client: Catherine Finch
Event: Summon IL conference
Electronic Notetakers: Jenny Barnard, Heena Patel
Speakers: Dave Patten and others
Date, time & place: Thursday 25th July 2013, 9:30-16:00, G.26, MMU All Saints
When you use Google you will think nothing of going in and changing the
keywords. We can change the search to 'e-learning assessment classroom'.
You can refine your search further on the left hand side. You can limit it to items
online. You can limit it to things that just have the word 'education' linked to
them.
My 5 minutes is up, quick recap. We've seen what Library search is, we know
where it is, we know how to use it, keywords, hit search button, the end. We've
seen how we get through to the full text, we know how to refine your search. In
your later sessions we will look at that further. My contact details are on the
screen so you can email me, call me or drop into the library and see me in
person.
Dave Pattern: Our final one is from Adam and will hopefully involve laminated
cards!
Adam Edwards from Middlesex University
Adam Edwards: This is heavy around the neck. What's it done? It's gone back
to the start.
CMT1300 [name of Middlesex University module]: let's imagine this. Please put
your trousers halfway down your bum and adopt a North London voice! This
module doesn't exist any more. This is what we did with them. They did a
project on public interactive systems like smart cards in transport. This is what I
did to get them thinking. We did the card game, sorted them and they
understand the resources they will find and why academic journals are more
important than Wikipedia.
What do you see in this picture? Fruit. Be specific. Bananas, limes,
strawberries, prices. What else? Cost, other words. What are the prices in? £s.
What does that tell you? England. Who are the people? Customers.
Consumers. shoppers. Other terms? Public, punters, shoplifters? One student
said, “Shoplifters.” Describe them. There's a lady with grey hair, an older
person: elderly, OAP etc. In this project they had to focus on who they were
designing the system for and who the end users would be. Iceland is in the
background.
We've found different keywords, we've narrowed the search down from people to
customers and to specific fruit. What's the relationship between the market stall
and Iceland? Competitors, rivals, businesses, economy. From a natural
sciences point of view what might fruit lead to? Organic, five a day, health. The
final one because we've got broader things is to the false drops and say 'fruit
that's also technology' such as Apple, Orange, Raspberry, Blackberry.
When you do Summon searching then you will have to look for things and it's
searching everything.
This is a summary of the session.
Page 23 of 36
Client: Catherine Finch
Event: Summon IL conference
Electronic Notetakers: Jenny Barnard, Heena Patel
Speakers: Dave Patten and others
Date, time & place: Thursday 25th July 2013, 9:30-16:00, G.26, MMU All Saints
Then apply it to the real thing. We put this on screen and say give us keywords.
Public, interactive, system, railway. This is what led to the oyster flavoured ice
cream. Then we say follow the instructions and do your actual search on
Summon. Thank you!
Dave Pattern: 4 minutes 20 seconds!
Adam Edwards: I hadn't timed it.
Dave Pattern: Now, we will come off the live screen.
Adam Edwards: I forgot to say, if you want the materials, cards etc. they're on
the Draw Room site, the URL are on the end of the presentation I'll put online.
Dave Pattern: Huddersfield Library. Never type and talk at the same time, that's
what I've learned from years of experience! We have 10 minutes to have a quick
look at Summon 2.0. Hands up if you haven't seen Summon 2.0. You need to go
back to your libraries.
Comment: It is exactly where I put the preview.
Dave Pattern: Put in Summon, then your library name. I've got some logins to
do. I'm doing one search to show you visually how the concept of pages has
disappeared from Summon. You get a timer and then more and more results so
it's like Twitter and Facebook.
I have been to a few summer camps and I've seen at least one person who is
annoyed that things are changing. We love that Summon is changing, but it can
be hard. This is basically a screen shot. Saved items have moved to the top. You
can customize. The down arrow leads to a search which supports Boolean. On
the left hand pane some visual clutter has gone. If you move your mouse cursor
into it, the facets start to appear. Subject headings: a lot of students don't use
them very much. You can keep selecting facets and the page will automatically
reload and be updated. There is a thing called query expansion. With certain
search terms it will bring up certain related search terms e.g. 'Arab revolution' will
bring up results for 'Arab spring' but you can also get it to just bring up results for
'Arab revolution'. Newspaper search results are bunched together, like in Google.
If you subscribe to image collections, you can get a whole bunch together.
If you're getting to the bottom of the page, your searches are probably too vague.
All searches are based on what people have searched for before. On the right
hand side, when you do a search, by default, it will filter out reference sites. We
will get scholar profiles which will show who the most prominent researchers are
and their research. I don't know what comes up for related topics. It's annoying to
click on the magnifying glass.
This is a summary of the session.
Page 24 of 36
Client: Catherine Finch
Event: Summon IL conference
Electronic Notetakers: Jenny Barnard, Heena Patel
Speakers: Dave Patten and others
Date, time & place: Thursday 25th July 2013, 9:30-16:00, G.26, MMU All Saints
All you have to do is hover your mouse over the entry. If you hover over the book,
you will get rich content in there as well. I will ask Phil and Helen, have I missed
anything out?
Helen: LibGuide [?]. If you go back and just put 'Dartmouth' in. Search 'biology'.
You can see that is pulled from LibGuides and soon we will be able to pull the
content out.
Dave Pattern: Responsive design isn't there at the moment. The stream gets
narrower. Things will move around the page so it looks more sensible on
something like an iPhone. If you are using a mobile, it will revert to Summon 1.0.
Comment: If you hover over an e-resource you need a [can't hear].
Comment: The feedback we got was people want to know which database it's
from, so if you hover over it in the meta-data, it will tell you. This is on some test
data, not live data.
Comment: [can't hear]
Helen: [can't hear]
Comment: The interface is nicer. The yellow star has gone and you will be able
to customise the header with colours.
Dave Pattern: You should all have preview versions of Summon 2.0. The next
release is 7th August. You should cross-reference the email from Andrew and
Aggie as to what is available on it. If you're cautious, there is a 6-month, maybe
less, time period to decide if you want to roll it out. There has been enough
international pressure from people who don't want to roll it out mid-year.
Comment: What about the thing with the user profile?
Dave Pattern: It has temporary saved items. Missing functionality will be online
in the next few weeks.
Comment: Will references in that folder be put into Harvard style?
Dave Pattern: If I go into Summon 1.0. Long term students will be tied into
authentications so they can save more. Some of these options will reappear in
2.0.
Comment: [can't hear] will come along later?
Dave Pattern: I don't know of time scales, but I expect we will see more of these
options. Hopefully you will be able to play around with it and see the impact on
your existing materials. OK, I think we're ready.
This is a summary of the session.
Page 25 of 36
Client: Catherine Finch
Event: Summon IL conference
Electronic Notetakers: Jenny Barnard, Heena Patel
Speakers: Dave Patten and others
Date, time & place: Thursday 25th July 2013, 9:30-16:00, G.26, MMU All Saints
Breakout sessions
David Jenkins: Breakout sessions: There are 3 to choose from. Each session
will run twice. From now until 20 to three and them from quarter to three to
quarter past. Can everyone who signed up for Round 1 Session 1 to follow Dave.
Natalie can escort you to the lift.
Emma Coonan: Shifting the focus from key skills to higher-order learning
outcomes
Emma: I come from an extreme end of a spectrum, from content management
and knowledge creation. If we assume this is useful to expand what we do, lots
of what came out last year from the Summon day is starting to do other things
instead. What else can we ask technology for? What can we seek out that
technology can enable to support that? What can we do in our teaching to
support that? What can underlie that to support it? Are those good starting
points? I only got told 2 days ago that I'd be doing this session.
Can you hear me OK? Awesome. What else could we do with technology? I
don't mean for someone who is a coder to come out with complicated answers.
Summon is about getting everything in one place. What else can technology do
to support how we think about this? Why not ask for the moon?
What else can we do in our teaching and our thinking? It's over to you! Would
you like to work in your groups? Pick an aspect, throw them out and take
something else perhaps? I'll put my diagram on the board and you'll see what
I'm talking about. How about higher-order thinking? Laura, and Adam, you can
help?
Adam: We couldn't get onto the 5th floor from the stairs without a swipe card!
Emma: Become a group, pick a question and think as many things as we can
that we can do, ask for and change in our approach. I can come and help also.
[Discussion in smaller groups]
Nicola: The technology question I'm not sure about. What about our teaching?
Jane: With Summon?
Nicola: I think so. Now we've got Summon we've got more time to do different
things in our teaching? Have I got that right? I think it might mean teaching with
other departments and Student Support Officers. We're not spending all of our
time...
Emma: If I put this on the table will it pick up the other participants?
This is a summary of the session.
Page 26 of 36
Client: Catherine Finch
Event: Summon IL conference
Electronic Notetakers: Jenny Barnard, Heena Patel
Speakers: Dave Patten and others
Date, time & place: Thursday 25th July 2013, 9:30-16:00, G.26, MMU All Saints
Nicola: I think that's an assumption that librarians make, that students do know
what a journal is.
Nicola Ward: We're hoping that Summon will help this, I end up doing hands on
sessions with first year history students, I show them the library catalogue and
have to ask them if they know what a journal article is. We don't even have time
to evaluate the resources. For me, it's exciting to think about games.
Catherine: So much teaching is teaching them how to get into a journal article
and Summon will sometimes take you to the link. Teaching them technical
things, knowing and having the skills and knowledge so you can predict what will
happen.
Jane: The idea that he used with the sorting of cards, do you do that at MMU?
Nicola: Some subject areas have the opportunity to do that with small groups
but that's not on our agendas. Ours are in big lecture theatres so we have to
cram it all in, it's not effective. That's because we need more sessions in the
year.
Jane: Is there mileage in doing something larger of that nature? People talk to
each other when they play a game, they work out what's useful and what's not.
Is there some scope for doing that in a lecture theatre on a screen? Moving
things on a whiteboard?
Anna: You could do more with the voting pods. Have you used those?
Jane: That type of thing. Using the games in small groups, recognising the
value and can we skill this up? Not just technology for technology's sake.
Catherine: One of my colleagues use those everywhere, their phones. You type
in a code for yes or for no, it will come up on the screen. It's engaging and
students like it.
Jane: The Bring your own Device thing, that's powerful and IT have that on their
agenda in the future. We need to investigate a system of that nature, like what
Cardiff have done.
Nicola: We used the voting pods, even in smaller sessions, but the questions
will change that we ask. We've always tried to incorporate activities, trying to
teach Boolean or truncation. Activities can be based around different things now.
It's not about using interactivity or not, it's the content which will change. You're
not taking so much time showing databases or search techniques.
Jane: What did you talk about in the first bits today? I missed it. Was it about
their teaching?
This is a summary of the session.
Page 27 of 36
Client: Catherine Finch
Event: Summon IL conference
Electronic Notetakers: Jenny Barnard, Heena Patel
Speakers: Dave Patten and others
Date, time & place: Thursday 25th July 2013, 9:30-16:00, G.26, MMU All Saints
Nicola: Sandy talked about how different it is for different subject areas for
Summon. Not only because different databases are indexed, or the gaps in
coverage.
Nicola Ward: Art and design students; lots of their stuff was more in use on the
native databases.
Nicola: Students will need to use academic material at different stages in their
degree. Some programmes won't have to look at academic publications until
their 3rd year, but Business students have to use it from day 1.
Jane: Is it about doing a whole new scheme of work? A new set of what people
should do at different times? Having a blend and getting everyone up to speed?
Nicola: Yes.
Nicola Ward: We used to have a whole set of generic presentations that we'd
deliver and that's gone over the years as things have changed. It may be worth
revisiting that now, in terms of basic usage and then more advanced searching.
Jane: What about the usability idea? Working with students about how do they
engage with it? We look at that, how they get feedback, could that form part of
your information skills development? We could give you feedback or you could
join us? Then you know what students like.
Nicola: We could inform our sessions, the feedback we get isn't much use until
they've actually used it for a long time.
Nicola Ward: How can you say if it's been useful until you've used it for a while.
Many say what they think the librarian wants to hear, they should tell you if you're
dreadful!
Jane: {joking} Ruth's got a dossier in her office about all of us!
Nicola: Could have been me they're talking about!
Jane: The usability thing may be something we could do.
Nicola: What's the last thing? Something thinking.
Jane: Higher level skills and things?
Nicola: Critical thinking.
Jane: Higher level thinking skills, evaluating.
Nicola: What does she mean?
This is a summary of the session.
Page 28 of 36
Client: Catherine Finch
Event: Summon IL conference
Electronic Notetakers: Jenny Barnard, Heena Patel
Speakers: Dave Patten and others
Date, time & place: Thursday 25th July 2013, 9:30-16:00, G.26, MMU All Saints
Nicola Ward: Come up with a new Facebook!
Nicola: Does it mean suggesting improvements?
Emma: Did the questions make sense? Keep going your discussions. You
could talk about something else.
Nicola: We talked about our teaching, we were trying to work out 1 and 3.
Emma: My whole session was based on technological improvements. If I switch
that and I want to do other things in my sessions what technological
improvements could I ask for? What if I could ask for anything? What might be
useful in underpinning this approach? It's Summon Information Literacy day so
it's about an interface but I don't like being pinned down by an interface, it's the
learning that leads the tool use rather than the other way around.
Jane: A simple thing to do on Summon is about people not knowing what things
are and what they're good for. It says it's a journal article but what would you use
it for? Put it into the laps of the users so it joins up as an aide-memoire to what's
gone on.
Emma: Nice. Incorporate my scrappy handout into it... you've got a handout on
the interface. I love it. It's simple and painless but no one's thought of it.
Jane: That would be good if it was customisable. A journal article for one
person, how they'd express it, your presentation compared to Eleanor's.
Nicola Ward: Some of my students would be offended if I tried to tell them what
a journal article was, but some of the first years have no idea so need to know.
Jane: The hover over is useful and would support what you're doing.
Emma: That's what I was hoping for. I talked to Adam about his approach with
his coloured cards. I could use that approach but I wasn't sure if I could at
Cambridge because the learners are there and have a huge imposter syndrome
and take themselves seriously. They like lectures because they think it's the real
thing and proper learning. I can't make it fun because they want it to be hard! I
need to test this out.
Nicola: We find that the Education students are up for the interactivity and
games. Some interactivity and sessions don't work with Business students.
Emma: They take themselves very seriously. If you make it too much fun they
will say it's a load of wank, sorry!
Nicola: You have to read the group, what works for one doesn't work for
another.
This is a summary of the session.
Page 29 of 36
Client: Catherine Finch
Event: Summon IL conference
Electronic Notetakers: Jenny Barnard, Heena Patel
Speakers: Dave Patten and others
Date, time & place: Thursday 25th July 2013, 9:30-16:00, G.26, MMU All Saints
Emma: How can we phrase this? Different levels of humour and attitudes to
learning. I teach engineers but that department is massive with 1200
undergraduates and 1000 postgraduates. They're divided into 6 groups, civil
engineers who make bridges and then design engineers.
The bridge-builders don't do group work, they want a lecture then they want to
argue about it after. The designers want to interact and fill in worksheets. They
talk! That's just one department. Different levels of fun.
Catherine: We don't get a chance to teach that much and it varies from
department to department. It's building that level of confidence and building the
activities in. The first time you may wonder if it'll work.
Emma: How much time we get to teach anyway.
Anna: It's online teaching a lot too.
Nicola: We do that and everyone contributes in some way. Our big thing is
creating short videos to give a demonstration of a particular database. There will
still be a need for those. You're doing the same with the library search.
Jane: We've done some intro ones, nothing to do with the evaluation of what's
useful in the content, the different materials you will find, it's something that
needs doing. We haven't approached that yet.
Nicola: Will it have to be evaluated in terms of subject areas?
Jane: Possibly.
Nicola: The subject librarians may have to feed back on their experiences of
using Summon.
Jane: We need to see what students think, we may think we have to do these
things but we don't have to. We have to see how they take to it as well as
evaluating it.
Nicola: You'll need students from all subject areas then covered to...
Jane: Hopefully. We need to get an intern in place for September, their role will
be to go out and get people and get their feedback, spot problems, celebrate
success.
Nicola Ward: Worth speaking to the student union too.
Jane: Yes, as soon as we get the person in we're done.
Nicola Ward: Emma, the next group are outside.
This is a summary of the session.
Page 30 of 36
Client: Catherine Finch
Event: Summon IL conference
Electronic Notetakers: Jenny Barnard, Heena Patel
Speakers: Dave Patten and others
Date, time & place: Thursday 25th July 2013, 9:30-16:00, G.26, MMU All Saints
Dave Pattern: Getting out of the ‘trough of disillusionment'
Dave Pattern: I don't have anything really prepared, but I wanted some main
points about Summon, what is in the Trough of Disillusionment. I'm sure some of
you are in the Plateau of Productivity or some of you are getting excited about it.
What are your comments?
Comment: The database recommendation seems to be a bit of an issue.
Dave Pattern: How many people have turned off the database recommendation?
Comment: I've heard other people have. Sometimes it comes up with
something sensible, sometimes nonsense.
Comment: MLA doesn't come up with a lot.
Mike: We hope searches can be saved and then we can turn off the database
recommendation.
Dave Pattern: With LibGuides, we wanted to switch off the wiki resources. Best
bets seemed to give good results. You can go into your admin side of Summon
and find out most popular searches. A lot of people will put 'Mintel' in Summon
and get an article about it rather than Mintel itself. You can get rid of
recommendations and go for best bets.
Comment: On 2.0, you don't have subject headings. On version 1.0, are the
subject terms from all the different databases. If you're using on database [can't
hear]. I wondered how they worked and why is it shoved down the list on 2.0.
Dave Pattern: There is the issue of getting files ffrom different records. Summon
tries to merge these together. You tend to see 'united states' come up quite a lot.
They try to do the best with a bad lot. The data from publishers is probably
problematic. A lot of students don't use subject terms.
Comment: [missed]
Dave Pattern: Summon 2.0 has moved to discipline-based searches. They map
this to data about Ulrichs. A journal in education with an article about chemistry
would get mapped across to a chemistry search. A lot of stuff doesn't get mapped
across and that is a problem. Anything else?
Comment: That is useful.
Comment: Broken links.
Dave Pattern: When you demo Summon, some people at Huddersfield prepare
things that work because they know some things don't work. What do you do?
This is a summary of the session.
Page 31 of 36
Client: Catherine Finch
Event: Summon IL conference
Electronic Notetakers: Jenny Barnard, Heena Patel
Speakers: Dave Patten and others
Date, time & place: Thursday 25th July 2013, 9:30-16:00, G.26, MMU All Saints
Adam: I explain because of commercial rivalries, some things don't work and
they accept that.
Comment: Things do go wrong, it's not foolproof. When they don't find what
they want, they appreciate a contact point. You might have to refer things on if
you can't find things.
Dave Pattern: Do you ever refer them to interlibrary loans? When we launched
Summon and someone said you can't find it, we can pay for the loan or subsidise
it.
Comment: A few links don't work in Summon and they [students] say, "This
wouldn't happen in Google." And then they will use Google.
Catherine: It's about expectations as well. Students were clicking a link but each
one is different. It can take you to the record, or the article. There are pitfalls you
have to explain to students otherwise they will give up.
Dave Pattern: We shouldn't set up expectations too high. It's how you set it up to
the students.
Adam: I think it was oversold initially at work as doing everything. When
colleagues discovered it wasn't, staff might not want to use it and that is a barrier.
There is resistance around it and so you can't sell it in that way. It's not helped by
EBSCO.
Dave Pattern: Does anyone need this explaining? The first one is EBSCO don't
give their data solutions. They used to give it out to Ex Libris, but have gradually
stopped. Serials Solutions have tried to get the data from elsewhere. They can't
get that article information for some journals. You have a whole bunch of journals
aren't there.
Some US libraries are worried about what is not there. Some librarians were
happy it wasn't there as it was filler journal content to bump up the journal
numbers and it was low quality. It varies in subject area.
Linking is an issue. It's a wing and a prayer if you get to the right article or if it
works at all. We've had EBSCO reps at Huddersfield and asked them to fix it.
They said no and we should have bough EBS. in the US there is a library with Ex
Libris who had the same problem, maybe called Orbis Consortium. They wanted
cooperative working, but that request was ignored. They could do things to
improve it but it looks like they are using it as a selling point for EBS. If you
Google that you will find a whole lot of letters going back and forth.
Mike: Consortiums [sic] are only interested in selling proprietary databases to law
firms. Universities are small fry in comparison.
This is a summary of the session.
Page 32 of 36
Client: Catherine Finch
Event: Summon IL conference
Electronic Notetakers: Jenny Barnard, Heena Patel
Speakers: Dave Patten and others
Date, time & place: Thursday 25th July 2013, 9:30-16:00, G.26, MMU All Saints
Dave Pattern: Law reports can't be found well using Summon. If you want to do
a broad search, it's great, so you need to know what works well and show
students the best route to go down. Mintel indexed quite well. Hopefully more
publishers will go on board. Certainly, as a UK user group we can help to
prioritise this content.
Question: Which publishers said no?
Dave Pattern: One name I'm not allowed to say. They signed a contract with
EBSCO so articles are not allowed on Summon.
Mike: Serials Solutions provide lists I think.
Comment: I was just testing you there!
Dave Pattern: I hope it becomes public knowledge. Seal Solutions asked for a
non-exclusive content. EBSCO found out and offered more money for an
exclusive deal. EBSCO are quite predatory, I think.
When we cancelled the package, one of their reps shouted at one of our
librarians by phone and reduced them to tears!
Comment: If all the EBSCO reps have to report back, does it not put pressure
on EBSCO? I had a similar experience with an EBSCO rep. Why invest more
money in EBSCO? Google Scholar will win and take over EBSCO's business.
Dave Pattern: It's not in EBSCO's long term interest to carry on like this. I love
bashing EBSCO! What other issues have you had? What has kept you in the
'trough'?
Comment: Keeping motivation up. We've seen the benefits but it's hard to keep
other people interested.
Dave Pattern: Academics might have a favourite database and recommend that
to students.
Comment: We should just tell them to use Athens!
Dave Pattern: I think it is about brand names. One thing we learned from OPAC
is a lot of people type in what they want to do in the library, so they might want to
link in to their library account or look at opening times. I think Serials Solutions
needs to improve [missed]
Adam: Something is not right. It's gone very quiet when I've contacted them
about something.
This is a summary of the session.
Page 33 of 36
Client: Catherine Finch
Event: Summon IL conference
Electronic Notetakers: Jenny Barnard, Heena Patel
Speakers: Dave Patten and others
Date, time & place: Thursday 25th July 2013, 9:30-16:00, G.26, MMU All Saints
Dave Pattern: We have time to talk about one more thing.
Mike: The item thing is quite confusing. I might want to do one or more of those
things but it could be made clearer.
Dave Pattern: One thing we wanted to do was change it to 'items in the library
catalogue' so it means something slightly different.
Comment: How much is the text on the left configurable? It's quite wordy.
Comment: That is reduced in 2.0. It's just 'full text online'. That was one thing
which came up as confusing so I'm pleased it's changed.
Dave Pattern: Any final comments? Anyone who got out of the trough, keep
powering through. We do have a usergroup but if you think it will be useful to you
and your colleagues, it can happen. If you want to come along and do
presentations, let me know. There will be mailing list for the conference. It will be
low bombardment. Thanks very much. I think we're going downstairs to wrap up.
Q&A session
Dave Pattern: Hi everyone, we'll do a wrap up now briefly. Are there any
questions you've not had a chance to ask the presenters? Any comments?
Thoughts about today? Your feedback is welcome.
Comment: On one first slide you said that e-resource usage had skyrocketed,
have you got figures for that?
Dave Pattern: I don't think we've put anything out in the public domain, let's
think, Emerald was one that went down. The usage had been high because
Business students were told to search that. They now discovered that there was
a whole load of other stuff to look at. Some of the EBSCO ones have gone
down, we've tried to prioritise more reliable platforms for linking.
Other ones have gone up. Some can count downloads. There's been a huge
increase, some 500% increase, one has had 800% increase. If we have to cut
the resources budget that's problematic. Summon is a great leveller of eresource platforms. Expect to see those resources usage go up.
I talk about the Trough of Disillusionment and what it means, why do we get more
downloads and what does it mean? Any more questions? It can be to other
presenters, not just me.
David Jenkins: Can we get all the speakers sat, not in an uncomfortable way at
all, at the front? Just makes it more visible and interactive.
Question: The suggested alternative search terms, are they drawn from
previous ones done at university or are they universal?
This is a summary of the session.
Page 34 of 36
Client: Catherine Finch
Event: Summon IL conference
Electronic Notetakers: Jenny Barnard, Heena Patel
Speakers: Dave Patten and others
Date, time & place: Thursday 25th July 2013, 9:30-16:00, G.26, MMU All Saints
Dave Pattern: Universal ones, like nursing ethics which we found was used in
Australia. It's from analysis of Summon searches. It would be nice to tailor it to
searches at your institution.
Comment: Perhaps international, showing US usage, UK usage etc.
Dave Pattern: Useful to see Americanisms for example.
Question: A boring management question! Issues around broken links and
maintenance, what kind of saga is this? Are you sharing it with other teams or
does it sit on one person's shoulder? Do you have streamlined enquiries?
Matt Borg: the link we've got goes to our Systems team. Depending on what's
happened it bounces around. Open access material can cause issues, links in
strange ways. One thing is what do we do with the open source material and
how much we want.
Adam Edwards: Three people, I chair the southern group and we head the
Library Systems team. Becky in Data Services looks after the 360 core thing it
feeds off, she makes sure it's correct. Yvonne is a Serials Solutions technical
person who has re-jigged the results page which had far too much information
on. It needs streamlining. Ours is now clearer but we don't have an in-house
Dave who can do Java script. She's done that for us. It helps to point people in
the right direction. You don't want that to happen in the first place.
Comment: We find out where the problem lies. With Summon is it 360? Use of
proxy? Is it accessing from home and the password? Paul Johnson up there
helps. Nexis imports additional headings. I've emailed them and do that every
month and it's a long process!
Matt Borg: We tell the academic librarians it's part of their role, if they spot
something wrong, report it to the E-resource help link, not just complain about it.
We have a lot of people who will check the links and report them if they're
broken. Serials Solutions can often just sort that out.
Comment: At UWE our Journals team deals with it, they sort out broken links. I
don't know what happens at that point. The Library IT team may get involved or
Serials Solutions.
Dave Pattern: At Huddersfield we added a link to report problems but few people
use it. One thing we thought of was collecting the results that people have said
about Summon, the link resolver for example. We created a list and thought to
hire students to check which links don't work. We could then identify the problem
platforms and let the providers know. We've not done that yet!
Comment: We report it to the Library team.
This is a summary of the session.
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Client: Catherine Finch
Event: Summon IL conference
Electronic Notetakers: Jenny Barnard, Heena Patel
Speakers: Dave Patten and others
Date, time & place: Thursday 25th July 2013, 9:30-16:00, G.26, MMU All Saints
Comment: Our information management team, the Summon project group work
on it. We do on screen support for problems.
Emma Coonan: I work in the area of telling people about stuff but I don't
maintain it. I would try to find the help form and then give up after 20 minutes!
Dave Pattern: Does anyone else have a solution to these problems?
Comment: There are a variety of models there. It's to do with work loads,
responsibilities and how people deal with resource management.
Dave Pattern: Serials Solutions are going to redevelop the 360 link. They're
going to proactively go ahead with the user, maybe not show the link and report
the problem back to the library.
Comment: One quick point, on SHU's helpdesk, I'm one person who deals with
it, students often try to follow broken links, that's an organic way of finding out
what's broken. We log them there and then and feed that back. It's a way of
discovering things quickly and as it happens.
David Jenkins: One thing was Matt saying he didn't like the term 'keywords'.
Search terms is more accessible and meaningful to students. Are there other
words we could use?
Comment: Bradford [University] have made a nice booklet called 'Library Jargon
Busting', aimed at international students. It breaks down 'catalogue', 'journal',
'article' etc. People keep suggesting more to go into it. Everyone has used it.
Comment: We've got a LibGuide called Words and Meanings.
David Jenkins: Should we have jargon in the first place?
Matt Borg: How do you write the word 'e-words'? Summon uses little e and big
E books. If we use Summon we need to make sure we use the right terminology.
When we talk about e-Books we use little e and big B.
----------------------End of session
This is a summary of the session.
Page 36 of 36