All Librarians in Training courses

In order to be successful all Chartership portfolios must include a reflective statement linking together the record of professional development and the evidence. Most submissions fail as they are too descriptive rather than reflecting on experiences and this can be daunting to those not used to producing reflective writing. This session will offer some tips and tricks to get you started as well as how to add more reflection to your portfolio and then offer attendees a chance to put this into practice. You are also more than welcome to just use the session for as a quiet time to get some work done on whichever aspect of your Chartership portfolio you choose.

This session will focus on the PKSB (Professional Knowledge and Skills Base) which is the first step for many in building a Chartership portfolio. A brief introduction to how to use the CILIP assessment tool will be followed by a chance to work through it, better understand your individual skill level and how to use the document to build your portfolio. You are also more than welcome to just use the session for as a quiet time to get some work done on whichever aspect of your Chartership portfolio you choose.

• Surveys are a popular way to collect data on a range of topics related to your library service but it is all too easy to get them wrong. If you struggle to design effective surveys you are not alone – they are often far more complex than they look.

• This interactive session will outline the basics of designing a survey, how to draft questions to get the answers you really want, some of the common pitfalls to avoid, the different software options available to help you and some tips and tricks for using surveys effectively. At the end of the session attendees will be able to put together a successful survey on a range of topics. If attendees wish to bring a draft survey that they are working on to use during the session they are welcome to do so.

If questions at the Enquiry Desk such as “How much of this can I copy?”, “Can I scan this book on someone else’s behalf?” and “Can I use this image in my teaching presentation / coursework / published article?” sound familiar, this is the course for you!

This session aims to provide you with a framework for analysing copyright enquiries, considering:

• Who owns the item, and does this make a difference?
• What is the copy to be used for?
• What are the specific exceptions to copyright you should be aware of?
• Where can you seek additional information on copyright issues?

There will be an opportunity to submit examples of copyright enquiries you receive in advance of the course or you can bring them along on the day.

In this workshop, you will take a tour of one of the most popular My Learning Essentials Workshop at Manchester University, Critical Reading. With the help of a narrator and facilitator you will see both sides of the workshop looking glass, that of a student and that of a workshop developer. As a student you will develop key skills for effective critical reading. You will learn and practice techniques to help you identify key points and main ideas and gain an understanding about what is required to read critically. There will also be opportunities to discuss strategies for making connections between different articles, journals or other materials in order to aid understanding. As a developer you will hear about the research that underpins the content of the workshop.

Instructors: Sam Aston and Michael Stevenson

There are hundreds of databases available to us in Cambridge. How confident do you feel navigating them and recommending them to end users? For this session we have four faculty librarians who will demonstrate Scopus, ArtSTOR, Lexis and Westlaw and statistics and markets business databases. There will be plenty of time for questions.

• Decolonising knowledge is one of the hot topics of the moment, stirring up universities as well as the media. How can we approach this fundamental and much needed change in our libraries while still dealing with our daily workloads?
• Join us to hear diverse perspectives: Eve Lacey (Newnham College), David Rushmer (English Faculty Library), Mehves Dignum (Engineering Faculty Library) and Clara Panozzo (Collections and Academic Liaison, University Library) will share their thoughts and experiences.
• This will be followed by a workshop and an open discussion (with tea and biscuits in the middle!).

In this session, you will have a tour of the studio and facilities in the DCU as well as the opportunity to learn how the digitisation process works and what services are available through the University Library’s Digital Content Unit.

NB: A short break will be included during the session.

This session will provide you with a brief introduction to some of those technologies and highlight how you can delve deeper with them. We will look at the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI), text and data mining, and the International Image Interoperability Framework (iiif).

NB: A short break will be included during the session.

Impact and sustainability are very important to researchers. Social media brings with it the advantage of making outputs easy to share but can also be a minefield. Whilst the new tools and methods utilised by the digital humanities provide exciting new ways of working, we also need to bear in mind their limitations and be able to understand the results. Attention is also being turned towards sustaining digital outputs, so we will also explore developments in this area as well.

NB: A short break will be included during the session.

This course is aimed at those faculty librarians who purchase their own ebooks and those who may be interested to start purchasing their own. The course will introduce librarians to our ebook suppliers, including ebook license models, how user-friendly they are and how to identify them on the supplier platforms. We will also look at Digital Rights Management (DRM) and ebooks; what are the implications for users, and why we should try to buy DRM-free ebooks where possible. We will demonstrate searching, interpreting results and purchasing ebooks from the main vendor platforms. We will also cover what happens after the ebook order, including creating purchase orders and invoices, cataloguing, and portfolio administration within Alma.

There will be chance to ask questions throughout the session, and an accompanying ebook supplier checklist to take away.

Bewildered by business models? Dubious about DRM? Flummoxed by formats? Come to our ebooks training session where we will try and demystify all things ebook and help you to support your users.

We have re-vamped the content of this session this year, we are not concentrating so heavily on the basics, and will instead introduce some new information on aspects such as troubleshooting, file formats and accessibility.

The presentation part of the course will run for an hour and there is an optional 30 minutes where you are welcome to stay and work through the workbook of practise exercises. In the presentation we will introduce the ebooks@cambridge service, investigate the differences between purchase models, licenses and supplier platforms, and talk about Digital Rights Management (DRM) and ebook formats. We will also demonstrate ways of searching for ebooks in iDiscover and in Alma, how to use/download/print ebooks, and look at the differences between purchased and electronic legal deposit ebooks. We will discuss some common problems reported to the ebooks team, and touch on accessibility issues (including alternative format requests).

After the presentation attendees will be given a takeaway workbook of ebook-related exercises which will give them a chance to familiarise themselves with the breadth of our ebook collections. Librarians from the ebooks Advisory Group will be on hand to help answer any ebook-related questions you may have.

This session is aimed at newer members of library staff and those who would like a refresher on all things ebook.

Most institutions are now using Instagram as way to connect to their readers. However, keeping your feed full of exciting content can be difficult. Luckily, we have a brand new class to help manage your Institution's page. Barney Brown from the University's central Communications Office and Naomi Polonsky of the New Hall Art Collection at Murray Edwards have kindly offered to host a workshop demonstrating how effective Instagram can be as a social platform. As well as talking about the basics they will be delving into why we use Instagram, what makes Instagram a good platform to connect with readers, what tips and tricks they have to maintain a healthy feed, what mistakes they have made and what to avoid as well as deciding on an institution style.

Scopus is a citation and abstract database of peer-reviewed literature that can be used by researchers to determine the impact of specific authors, articles/documents, and journals. It contains over 76 million records in the areas of science, technology, medicine, social sciences, arts, and humanities. In Scopus, it is possible to perform quick searches by document, author, or affiliation. You will learn how to perform basic searches, analyse the results, check affiliation and researcher profiles and consult journal metrics for the over 23,000 titles currently in Scopus.

This session will be delivered by Dr Charles Martinez, Senior Customer Consultant, Elsevier.

Please bring your own device so you are able to follow along with the session examples.

There will be an opportunity to address user case studies in this session. Please send any case studies to Lynne Meehan (lm746@cam.ac.uk) by 17/1/2019.

• Have you started an application for HEA fellowship but have no time to write?

Would you like a day to work on your application with no disruptions?

• Alternatively, have you heard about HEA Fellowship and are considering applying? Are you curious about the benefits of Fellowship and which level (AFHEA, FHEA, SFHEA) best suits your experience? Would you like help brainstorming evidence for your application?

• On 10 December, Librarians in Training are sponsoring a day-long writing retreat to work on applications for HEA fellowship. Come be in a room with others experiencing the same pain and just write. We will have writing sprints of about an hour and then a short break. Repeat until the end of the day!

• The retreat will be held at the Institute for Manufacturing on the West Cambridge site in a lovely seminar room with lots of natural light. Coffee/tea/biscuits and will be served in the morning and afternoon (but you’ll need to bring your own lunch or purchase food in the common room or in a nearby café).

• The IfM is large, so if you’d like to discuss HEA fellowship generally or brainstorm aspects of it, we can easily meet up in the common room. Or if there is interest from everyone at the beginning of the day for a short plenary session, we can do that as well.

• You can sign up for just a half-day or both the morning and afternoon sessions. Numbers are limited to 10 people per session.

• You will need to bring your own laptop. Please come a bit early so that we can start at 1.00pm sharp. If you need to arrive later, that is fine. Just please tip toe in and get set up quietly.

Can’t come on December 10th? There will be two more writing retreats for HEA applications in 2019: 22 March and 21 June. Bookings for those sessions will open approximately a month before the date.

• Have you started an application for HEA fellowship but have no time to write?

Would you like a day to work on your application with no disruptions?

• Alternatively, have you heard about HEA Fellowship and are considering applying? Are you curious about the benefits of Fellowship and which level (AFHEA, FHEA, SFHEA) best suits your experience? Would you like help brainstorming evidence for your application?

• On 1 April, Librarians in Training are sponsoring a day-long writing retreat to work on applications for HEA fellowship. Come be in a room with others experiencing the same pain and just write. We will have writing sprints of about an hour and then a short break. Repeat until the end of the day!

• The retreat will be held at the Institute for Manufacturing on the West Cambridge site in a lovely seminar room with lots of natural light. Coffee/tea/biscuits and will be served in the morning and afternoon (but you’ll need to bring your own lunch or purchase food in the common room or in a nearby café).

• The IfM is large, so if you’d like to discuss HEA fellowship generally or brainstorm aspects of it, we can easily meet up in the common room. Or if there is interest from everyone at the beginning of the day for a short plenary session, we can do that as well.

• You can sign up for just a half-day or both the morning and afternoon sessions. Numbers are limited to 10 people per session.

• You will need to bring your own laptop. Please come a bit early so that we can start at 9.00am sharp. If you need to arrive later, that is fine. Just please tip toe in and get set up quietly.

Can’t come on 1 April? There will be one more writing retreat for HEA applications on 21 June.

Led by members of the UL Reference team, this course will explore the varied reasons why readers struggle to find items they need on iDiscover. There will be a chance for you to solve some of the enquiries which are handled by Reference Staff, brush up your own searching skills and discover some lesser known functions of iDiscover.

The UL Reference team will be answering participant questions submitted prior to the course.

Information about the UL’s iDiscover training for readers will also be available.

Please note: Since this session was last offered, web accessibility has become increasingly important. The session has been revised to cover both usability testing and assessing the accessibility of websites.

This session will help you get started with website usability testing. The session will be interactive and activity-based, which will give you a chance to try out some testing and to reflect as a group on the experience. It will also provide you with some tips and tricks that can be used to help you conduct your own usability testing. If you’ve ever wondered how people actually use your library website, or are currently thinking about how to best revamp your Libguides to match the approaches and needs of your users, this one’s for you!

Do you use Instagram for your Library but would like some pointers how to make your posts more creative? This is the masterclass for you. With the help of the Digital Content Unit, you will learn how to construct photographs and videos that grab readers' attention, and to utilise Instagram tools to give you the best results. Please make sure you have an Instagram account set up and remember to bring your phones! We look forward to seeing you there.

Recruiting staff is becoming an increasingly integral part of our role, so knowing how to interview well is a key skill to have in your toolkit. This session aims to share some best practice in order to help you navigate your way through an interview process, resulting in recruiting the best candidate for the role. The session will be interactive, and will dispel some common myths, as well as sharing with you some practical hints and tips to take away. Topics covered in this session range from what questions to ask a candidate at interview (and those to avoid!), note taking during an interview, scoring the candidates and using the right documentation. There will also be an opportunity to ask any burning questions at the end.

This course is a short introduction to cataloguing in the Alma metadata editor. It’s suitable for beginners who have some knowledge of MARC or experience of editing holdings and items. We will look at creating records from templates, downloading records from external databases, editing information in catalogue records and practise cataloguing some novels.

This course is an introduction to the core fields in MARC21, the format we use for catalogue records in Alma. It’s suitable for beginners and also for those who have done some cataloguing but want a more formal training session in MARC. We will look at MARC coding for author, title, publication information and physical description, and highlight the important elements to check in control fields.

A two-hour session designed to introduce you to the skill of compiling back-of-the-book type indexes. Indexing is a useful skill for anyone working in a library or information environment and also provides opportunities for self-employment and working from home. We will touch on the basic processes, standards and conventions, the Society of Indexers’ course, and embedded indexing, and we will have a go at creating a basic index. Feel free to bring a laptop but they are not essential.

Making LibGuides which are usable, accessible and look great is not always an easy task, but it definitely can be done! This introductory training will cover everything from the basics – how to add text and images, edit and rearrange content – to presenting content in an effective, usable and attractive way. We’ll also discuss how you can ensure that your LibGuides meet accessibility standards.

This course is particularly aimed at people who are new to LibGuides editing or any current editors who feel that they would benefit from a refresher. If you don’t have a LibGuides account, or access to a LibGuide to work on during the session, please contact the course leader (hem37) in advance so that an account and a training guide can be arranged for you.

Do you see these subject headings in the catalogue records and wonder how they work? Do you add these subject headings yourself but sometimes wonder if you’re doing so correctly? Are you studying librarianship and would like to add some subject heading skills to your portfolio? This is an introduction to the workings of LC subject headings, an opportunity to ask all the questions you want, and get some practical experience of adding headings to catalogue records.