Monthly Archives: April 2019

Work hacks – upset those work routines

Nothing is more seductive than (work) routines and the notion of ” that`s the way we’ve always done it”. When we work reliably then we get reliable results – but rarely something that surprises, that is new or leads unexpectedly to completely new findings. Sometimes just small changes help teams to come to new conclusions.

Can only software specialists hack? No, in the meantime, the term “hack” has become generally accepted as an unusual and creative way of solving a problem. In this sense, much can be “hacked” – even the work.

Continue reading

What do publishers want librarians to know?

A little research project from the UK linked to the full anonymised dataset of messages from publishers to librarians.

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1pSsgShb5Dj6gwjT3V7ZHHWqSLn_a6U_j

The author Bernie Folan:

“I carried out a similar project (collecting messages from librarians to
publishers) a couple of years ago and that data can be found here
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/0B1bAnTSVq-LkcnVGUUtTVklMYlE as well as summarised in this
Insights article http://doi.org/10.1629/uksg.390
Please share within your organisation and encourage relevant departments and
senior management to read the messages so they can ensure they hear what
their partners and customers are saying, in a low-effort way.
Results of all research are made available openly and completely anonymously
with no mention of organisations or names. The objective of these research
projects has been to increase understanding and improve communication within
the scholarly communication environment, without any commercial objective. “

How to Host a Virtual Poster Session

The Instruction Committee of the Association of College & Research Libraries (ACRL) Distance Learning Section (DLS) hosted its first virtual poster session April 1st-5th 2019. The committee sent out a call for proposals to a variety of listservs including ILI, DLS, and RUSA in January of 2019 and accepted a total of 38 posters that related to teaching and learning online. Committee members worked together to develop the call for proposals, select the poster platform, advertise the event, and create an evaluation survey for participants and presenters to submit feedback.

The committee investigated several platforms for hosting the event including Canvas, LibGuides, Padlet, Moodle, and Google Sites, but ultimately decided to host the posters on the Distance Learning Section’s own website which is hosted on WordPress. The DLS website was chosen to bring more visibility to the section and because participants could view and comment on posters without creating an account.

The poster presenters were asked to actively monitor their posters during the first week of April and to respond to any comments or questions that were posed. From April 1st-5th there were 19,609 page views, 1,853 visitors (including repeat visitors), and 298 comments (including a few trackbacks). Though the poster presenters are no longer actively monitoring and responding to the comments on their posters, an archive of the event is freely available on the DLS Website at https://acrl.ala.org/DLS/2019-virtual-poster-session/

Thanks to Michelle Keba, Associate Librarian for Reference, Warren Library, Palm Beach Atlantic University and
Jennifer Shimada, Library Director, Relay Graduate School of Education for this blog post.

Leadership lessons from fiction? What we can learn from Game of Thrones

Have you read George R.R. Martin’s series of novels, A Song of Ice and Fire or do you know the HBO adaptation Game of Thrones?

Bruce Craven teaches Leadership through Fiction at the Columbia Business School in New York and he gives some advices:

If you must face a difficult challenge then accept that challenge and face it.

One central character says “When you play the game of thrones, you win or you die. There is no middle ground.” But she is wrong. Of course there is a middle ground. “It is the realm of thoughtful decision making, with a full appreciation of other people’s values and beliefs. If you decide to play the game of business, learn to understand and leverage your abilities in this middle ground.”

https://www.strategy-business.com/article/Leadership-lessons-from-Game-of-Thrones?gko=33bc5&sf210284958=1

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Game_of_Thrones

 

Is hugging completly off-limits in the workplace?

There is a Xing newsletter and sometimes they really draw attention to interesting articles. It seems a bit strange in times of me too discussions and times where managers avoid being alone with just one employee in the elevator to ask if hugging is completly off-limits in the workplace or not. But it is also a cultural problem. For some societies it might be remarkable to have physical contact and in others it is not because it is part of the communication system and the welcoming. Are you interested to discuss the situation at your library or in your country? I would love to receive your comments.

Is hugging completly off-limits in the workplace?

Recording: Benefits of International Exchange Programs Webinar

In this free webinar, run jointly by the IFLA New Professionals Special Interest Group (NPSIG) and CPDWL, and supported by the American Library Association (ALA)’s Association of Research Libraries (ACRL), you will hear from five librarians from Germany, South Africa and Canada as they discuss their experiences with international exchange programmes.

Join Ulrike Lang, Hella Klauser, Flippe van der Walt, Dee Winn and Cate Carlyle to hear their stories and to get their advice on good practice for exchange activities. For full details on this great panel discussion, please visit the CPDWL website

Recording here

Hamburg Open Online University

In 2015 the Hamburg Senate, the government of the City and the state Hamburg in Germany, founded a digital strategy to bundle up all digital processes and create structures for those. For education, the Hamburg Open Online University (HOOU) stands for this. This cross-university project is funded by the network of the six state-owned Hamburg universities and the government.
In the future, the HOOU wants to enrich and supplement the classical teaching of the Hamburg universities with the possibilities of digital technologies. The learning offers of the HOOU are to be made freely accessible to all interested in the Internet.

The peculiarity of the concept lies in the desire to create a digital space in which students, teachers as well as the interested public can meet to work together on interdisciplinary, cross-university projects with academic aspirations. And it also should be a low-threshold offer for refugees.

Four aspects serve as guiding principles:

  1. Orientation on learners and collaboration
  2. Science
  3. Opening up to new target groups and civil society relevance
  4. Openness /OER

The content is constantly growing and a number of learning courses and webinars are in different languages, for ex. interactive programming courses, topics in law and economics, sonic environments for healing, project management in urban design or the sounds of the Port City Hamburg.

Beside this they offer a lot of materials (eg texts, pictures, videos or links) on a specific topic, such as a specific research question or learning unit.

If the content of HOOU is not interesting for you it might be interesting for your users and customers.