It seems like another lifetime when we launched a pilot of Senior Management Team (SMT) surgeries (actually July 2019) via this blog https://blogs.ucl.ac.uk/libnet/2019/07/11/launch-of-smt-surgeries/.  This was one of a range of measures we had discussed to address feedback from colleagues via the last Library Staff Survey and other channels that the SMT weren’t as visible as you would like and that it wasn’t always clear who we are and what our roles are. You can find out (along with a bit about what we each do) here https://www.ucl.ac.uk/libnet/about-us/committees-and-working-groups/senior-management-team.  You can access the minutes of regular SMT meetings from this link if you are interested.

While the number of staff who attended the pilot SMT surgeries was quite small, they were well received and we will continue to offer them on a monthly basis (alongside other channels of communication).  Dates have been scheduled until the end of the year.  We will hold them on Teams for the moment, and once ‘normal’ service is resumed they will be offered alternately online and f2f.  All members of the SMT have been timetabled to run these surgeries and the dates are below.  In addition we will be briefly attending team meetings over the next couple of months to talk about the surgeries and we will be in touch with managers of teams across the service to make sure this happens. Please email to book a slot.  We will send a monthly reminder email via Liblist.

• 28th April 2021 2 – 3 pm:  Rozz Evans, Karen Jeger, Andy Pow  (email rosalind.evans@ucl.ac.uk)
• 25th May 2021 12 – 1 pm: Peter Dennison, June Hedges, Martin Moyle (email p.dennison@ucl.ac.uk)
• 21st June 2021 3 – 4 pm:  Sarah Aitchison, Rozz Evans, Ben Meunier (email s.aitchison@ucl.ac.uk)
• 29th July 9.30 – 10.30 am: Paul Ayris, Kate Cheney, Andy Pow (email a.pow@ucl.ac.uk)
• 29^th September 2021 2 – 3 pm: Karen Jeger, Margaret Stone, Michelle Wake (email k.jeger@ucl.ac.uk)
• 25th October 2021 11 – 12 am: Jennifer Brown, Lara Speicher, Martin Moyle (email jennifer.brown@ucl.ac.uk)
• 23^rd November 2021 10 – 11 am: Anna Di Iorio, June Hedges, Ben Meunier (email j.hedges@ucl.ac.uk)

We will also be running an evening surgery if there is demand.  Please email rosalind.evans@ucl.ac.uk if this would be your preferred option and we will organise it.

People also expressed the desire for more opportunities to interact with us directly, formally and informally.

We have created a new online SMT Feedback form https://ucl-global.libwizard.com/f/smt-feedback.  You can choose to submit comments, questions and suggestions via this form.  If you give your name you will receive an email response although you can also choose to do so anonymously.  We will take all comments and suggestions seriously and regular updates will be shared regarding feedback received at the termly full meeting of the SMT and more widely as appropriate.

We’d also like to establish far more regular visits to teams and sites.

In order to find out what you would like from us we will begin by setting up meetings with groups of team managers to talk and share ideas about how to develop this.  We understand that while some may want to hear more about the area of responsibilities of particular SMT members or receive briefings on particular developments, others would welcome the opportunity to show what they have been doing within their sites and teams. Others would like something even less formal – maybe to invite a member of SMT to their team meetings or just for a coffee and chat?  In the meantime we are always pleased to be invited, so please free to email any of us individually or via our group email (lib-smt@ucl.ac.uk).

We are always interested in your ideas about this as one of the most important things about working for UCL Library Services is that no matter what our roles we are united in our wish to be the best we can be.  Please do make full use of the range of opportunities to help us improve in this area. However you do it, please do make sure you have your say!

Facilities & Projects Team Blog – Our team information can be found at the following link Facilities & Project Team

Project update with regards to the Fire Alarm upgrade installations throughout DMS Watson, Petrie Museum and Energy Centre.

the 4th floor is now reopened.

Work on the 3rd floor will commence on Monday 26^th April 2021. This area will be closed off and there will be some noise disruption permeating through the building. Users of these spaces will need to be remined of additional bookable study spaces in other locations during this time.

We will continue to provide further updates as the project progresses. Please speak to your building manager if you have any concerns or queries and they can feed back to the team.

Our team information can be found at the following link Facilities & Projects Team

I hope you are all keeping safe and well and looking forward to Spring Break!!

Staff and students will be returning from 12^th April 2021, there will be Estates project work taking place at this time. Fire Alarm upgrade installations throughout DMS Watson, Petrie Museum and Energy Centre.

Work on the 4^th floor will be begin on 12^th April 2021. This area will be closed off and there will be some noise disruption permeating through the building. Users of these spaces will need to be reminded of additional bookable study spaces in other locations during this time.

We will provide further updates as the project progresses. Please speak to your building manager if you have any concerns or queries and they can feed back to the team.

In order to aid with the decision making process when considering work life balance requests we have produced a new checklist for Library managers which complements UCL’s Work life balance policy.

The document also includes guidance for managers in terms of the process once they receive a request.

The checklist entitled Work life balance approval checklist can now be found on LibNet.

Wednesday 22^nd April 2020 is World Earth Day. Across the world, individuals and organisations mark the day through participating in various ‘green, sustainable and environmentally friendly’ practices.

The mission of World Earth Day is: “To build the world’s largest environmental movement to drive transformative change for people and planet”.

Every year there is a theme to mark the day, and this year the theme is Climate Action. Furthermore, this year World Earth Day is going digital, and there is a digital interactive world map, which people can visit to see what virtual events are taking place across the world to mark World Earth Day.

Sustainable Stanmore

In line with World Earth Day 2020, the Institute of Orthopaedics Library Team would like to share the green and sustainable initiatives we have participated in.

Prior to the remote working, we were involved in Fairtrade Fortnight 2020. The Fairtrade Foundation supports local farmers and communities through a range of initiatives. They also focus on protecting the environment, ensuring farmers have good soil and water quality which is important for communities and the environment.

In addition, on the 17^th March 2020 our plants – the Oxilis and the Joseph Coat plants (scientific name of the plant is Amaranthus gangeticus) were ‘adopted’ by team colleagues – Jas, Danny and Beth. They are now very happy and flourishing in their new homes during the remote working period.

Below are comments from the team about Fairtrade Fortnight and our library plants.

Veronica Parisi (Acting Librarian)

Throughout Monday 24^th February to Sunday 8^th March, the Institute of Orthopaedics Library was involved in the Fairtrade Fortnight and several activities were organised to engage library users as well as library staff to raise awareness about Fairtrade.

The library provided an information stand at the entrance where users could read more about Fairtrade while sipping a complimentary Fairtrade tea, coffee and tasting delicious Fairtrade chocolate.

Library users also took part in fun and informative activities such as ‘storybombing’. This was a story hunt where users had to find in the library 5 different thought-provoking stories about the lives and conditions of women cocoa farmers. Once the stories had been found, users were celebrated with a sticker and Fairtrade Chocolate at the library desk.

Two library staff Fairtrade food and bake events were also organised where staff brought in homemade chocolate cookies, courtesy of our baker Maryam, and treats made only with Fairtrade products. Our baker Maryam also shared some delicious Fairtrade recipes from Fairtrade Foundation and the Co-Op. For pancakes lovers, there are some great ideas for Fairtrade topping .

This was an enjoyable and informative two-week period and it was rewarding to engage with library users in different ways whilst contributing to raise awareness about Fairtrade.

Throughout Fairtrade Fortnight, library staff will be hiding one of the Fairtrade Stories in the library. Chocolates and Fairtrade Stickers will be given to whoever finds it on the day. We will keep you posted once it has been hidden! #FairtradeFortnight #Fairtrade #SheDeserves pic.twitter.com/gBw7ms9K5s

— Orthopaedics Library (@Ortho_Lib) February 24, 2020

Maryam Ali (Library Assistant)

It was great to organise the Fairtrade Fortnight event at the Institute of Orthopaedics library. The main purpose was to raise awareness about Fairtrade and the work the Fairtrade Foundation does in an engaging, fun and informative way.

It was wonderful to see our users stop by at the Fairtrade Fortnight Information stand, speak to library staff about Fairtrade, the Fairtrade products, how they can get involved in the ‘Storybombing’ activity and tell us how good the Fairtrade Coffee tasted! We used biodegradable cups to try to make the event as sustainable as possible, and encouraged staff and students to bring their own cups too.

I also learnt more about the work the Fairtrade Foundation does, and the range of Fairtrade products available.

Library staff tweeted throughout Fairtrade Fortnight to raise awareness. Thank you to everyone who supported and participated during Fairtrade Fortnight.

Roberta Wiseman (Senior Library Assistant)

I enjoyed the Fairtrade Fortnight event organised by Maryam (who made some very delicious biscuits!), and feel that my awareness of the work of the Fairtrade Foundation has increased.

It is important that everyone is paid appropriately for their labour, and that people all over the world have access to healthcare, education, and the opportunity for a happy life.

I also enjoyed the excitement of having a scavenger hunt in the library throughout the fortnight, with chocolate prizes.  I think our users appreciated it too!

The first Fairtrade Story has been hidden in the library. Find it, read it, pass it on – and enjoy the Fairtrade chocolate!
Hint: Look for pediatric neurology…. #FairtradeFortnight #SheDeserves pic.twitter.com/d3czR4wtDm

— Orthopaedics Library (@Ortho_Lib) February 24, 2020

Danny Williams (Evening & Weekend Library Assistant)

I participated in the ‘storybombing’ activity mentioned above. I hid the second one of the StoryBomb leaflets on one of the library shelves, informing work colleagues of where I hid it. I then posted a tweet on the Orthopaedics Library’s Twitter account, informing library users of the leaflet. I also brought in a bar of Sainsbury’s milk chocolate, which had a Fairtrade logo on it, for use by library staff.

I am currently looking after one of the Orthopaedics Library’s potted plants whilst working from home, and until the library re-opens. It’s an Oxilis, with crimson-colour leaves, and I water it once a week. It also gets plenty of sunlight.

Elizabeth Metz (Evening Senior Library Assistant)

I was delighted to offer a temporary home to one of the Joseph’s Coat plants, which is thriving in its new home!

Further information

World Earth Day 2020

Fairtrade Foundation

Written by the Institute of Orthopaedics Library Team: Veronica, Jas, Ma’ali, Elizabeth, Roberta, Danny and Maryam.

orth-libary@ucl.ac.uk

It is more important than ever to take time to unwind and relax. Even if you are at home for most of the day, there are great things you can do either on your own, with your household or remotely with friends or family.

Creative outlets

• The Institute of Making
• London Drawing
• Time Out posts ‘What to Stream Today’ on their Instagram page .
• Grayson’s Art Club Weekly show on 4 OD. First episode 8 PM on Thursday 16/04/20

Opera/Theatre/Dance

• Fleabag- the original one woman play – available on Amazon Prime or via Soho Theatre website (£4).
• Sadler’s Wells Digital Stage: A programme of full length dance performances and workshops
• NT Live: Free full length plays every Thursday at 7pm, available for 7 days.
• Globe Player: Free Shakespeare plays every week.
• The Bolshoi Ballet are sharing their performances on YouTube.
• Cirque de Soleil: 60 minute perfomance every Friday.
• Free Theatre Screenings (Google List) For a full list

Museums and galleries

• 12 Museums offering virtual tours 
• BBC Arts announces Culture In Quarantine programme
• Secrets of the Museum Go behind the scenes at the V&A (on BBC iPlayer).
• ICA Talks via British Library
• Tate on Youtube includes Curator Tours of the Warhol and Beardsley exhibitions, tutorials and interviews.

Documentaries

• Documentaries from International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam
• NASA makes their media library publicly accessible 

Film/Series

• Netflix Party allows you to watch something online with your friends

Books and Poetry

• The Poet Laureate Has Gone to his Shed: BBC Sounds show fronted by Simon Armitage.
• Actor Samuel West is reading his favourite poems on sound cloud.

Courses

• Learn French with French children’s stories 
• Free online courses, e-books, and audiobooks 

Take up ballet

• Free online ballet lessons
• Royal Academy of Dance at home

Fitness

• NHS Live Well 
• Mr Motivator
• Joe Wicks and The Body Coach
• UCL Staff yoga  – via Zoom*
• Jeff Phenix, (Pay as you can – by donation) via Zoom*
• Tai Chi for Beginners: Tai Chi Fundamentals 

Colouring books

• Free colouring books from 113 Museums 

Cooking

• Vegkit Recipes
• BBC Food and Baking

Games

• Board games are a great way to connect with households
• Jigsaw planet online jigsaws
• Twitch stream your video games
• Cryptic crosswords (from the Independent)

Nature

• Chris Packham’s Self-Isolating Bird Club
• Lockdown birds list of birds you might see from your window

Share your knowledge, discover new passions

This list was created by Occupational Development as part of Remote, not Distant and by UCL Acrts and Heritage, as part of #CreativeComfort.

For more ideas, join colleagues in the Break Room on Microsoft Teams and have a chat, swap tips and share photos of cats.

Stay well everyone and have a good weekend.

(Note: UCL do not provide or recommend Zoom. It remains the recommendation of ISG that staff should use UCL provided or recommended tools where practical as these have been subject to scrutiny for security and GDPR compliance. In the unusual circumstances we find ourselves in, with services rapidly moving online, staff may decide to use non-UCL provided solutions where the UCL solutions do not fulfil their requirements.  On the use of Zoom, if this is used, ISG recommend using the web based rather than the app- based client. This allows greater control of the information shared with the provider. There are concerns about Zoom’s approach to privacy.  Any user should ensure they read and understand Zoom’s privacy policy).

 

Student Support and Wellbeing and Students’ Union UCL are together launching the ‘I ❤ Consent’ campaign today (27 November).

The campaign encourages students to take a brief sexual consent online training course on Moodle – no longer than 15 minutes to complete. The aim of the training is to help promote healthy and respectful relationships within the UCL community and beyond.

The campaign will be promoted to students via digital screens and messages in myUCL and local communications?

Once students have completed the training, they will receive a ‘I ❤ Consent’ badge on Moodle.

If students come along to the Student Centre Wednesday 27 to Friday 29 November (this week) and show us their badge, they will be able to collect a reusable ‘I ❤ Consent’ cup and a free hot drinks voucher!

The training does cover some difficult topics, so if a student needs support around this, please direct them to the Report + Support website, which has much more information.

Along with the LaSS library team, I help to maintain our Facebook and Twitter accounts, and social media is probably our main method for outreach at the moment. Also, I am part of the communications team for Astrea, the UCL network for women in Professional Services, and being a somewhat tentative user of social media myself, I felt it would really benefit my various work roles to learn more about using social media more effectively. So, I recently attended a course on Better social media for libraries at CILIP.

The course was practical and fun, and I came away with lots of ideas and things I want to try out. LaSS has a reasonably healthy following on Facebook, and we’ve recently run a successful series of ‘Meet the Team’ profiles, introducing the LaSS team to our library users. Our Twitter account is less established,  but as the course focused mainly on using Twitter, attending made me feel more confident about trying new things with the LaSS account. In particular, seeing examples of fun things that other libraries, museums and archives have successfully carried out on Twitter was quite inspiring (see Museum Wars, Orkney library using a Twitter thread to tell a story, and the viral ‘absolute unit’ post).

Over the course of the day, we also discussed social media strategies, analytics, and scheduling. The trainer proposed “1 in 4” guidelines for Twitter activity, structuring and varying Twitter activity as follows: a reply; 1 in 4 Tweets directly about the organisation; a link to something useful; and a ReTweet. The course highlighted the importance of developing a strategy of what you want to convey on social media, advised against just broadcasting (but rather interacting on social media), and also not simply Tweeting about the library every time.

Using analytics can help you to identify which posts were most popular with your audience, and what times they are most active, which can help you to plan your social media output more effectively. Creating a social media calendar was recommended, along with using free versions of software such as Hootsuite or Tweetdeck to schedule posts.  Planning posts in advance means you don’t have to be constantly coming up with new ideas – you can do things in bulk, as a team, and schedule content to be published at an appropriate time.

The course emphasized that linking your social media marketing with other marketing helps both, so we need to make sure we are joining up all of our marketing at LaSS. For example, we have monthly ‘library hacks’ posters (featuring timely, handy hints about using the library) that we put up around LaSS, and we will start putting these up on social media too. We could link these together with a unique hashtag on Twitter too, to make them easier to find (e.g. University of York have used #UoYtips to tag all of their library tips on Twitter).

We also discussed the importance of using images on social media, and part of the course looked at creating images for this purpose. Canva was recommended to create images with the right dimensions for whichever social media network you use (i.e. they have free templates for Facebook and Twitter posts), as well as options to create a variety of other content, such as posters, logos and presentations (in other words, Canva can be a useful tool beyond simply creating images for social media).

It’s also useful to have an image to accompany a blog post, as it makes it more engaging for your readers (apparently). Unfortunately, I didn’t take a photo while I attended the course, but I’ve included one I made earlier on Photofunia (a non-subscription, fun website where you can edit photos online for free in a matter of seconds resulting in high quality photo collages).

Image of LaSS Library and Lavender, our library cat, created using Photofunia

Towards the end of the course, we also briefly covered Instagram, which is something we’ve been considering getting at LaSS.  I know a few UCL Libraries are already using Instagram (e.g. IOA, SOP, Main, IOE, and Special Collections), and I am keen to have a go with LaSS too, even more so having attended this social media course. Instagram isn’t a news feed in the same way as Twitter, so it can be used as and when to show off collections, buildings and library staff! Also, Instagram Stories are perfect for covering one-off, on-the-day events we hold in and around the library.

The final 3 social media tips from the course were to be creative, be brave, and to be joined up. I think we’ve made a good start on doing this at LaSS (it’s pretty brave to post a ‘meet the team’ profile about yourself!), and I think we can definitely build on that in the future too.

The third SMT Surgery will be taking place on Monday 4th November.  SMT members Peter Dennison (Head of Customer Service ) and June Hedges (Head of Liaison and Support Services) will be available between 11.00 and 1.00 in Room 102  in the Roberts Building.

Please email lib-smt@ucl.ac.uk to book a particular time-slot.  Alternatively you can just turn up on the day (although you may have to wait a short while if SMT members are already speaking with colleagues). We can also arrange Skype but please let us know in advance so we can ensure we have the necessary set-up to.  You can come on your own or as part of a small group, and can specify that you would like to see a particular member of SMT (from those available) if you prefer.  In the first surgery, a colleague attended bringing a number of questions and issues on behalf of their team which was a very useful and productive conversation so that might be something worth considering.

This is a pilot and will be running until December, so if you are unable to attend on the 4th November, future agreed dates are:

10^th  December (5.00 – 7.00 pm)

We welcome feedback throughout the process from those who attend and those who don’t!  During the pilot, the surgeries are being run by a small group of SMT (Rozz Evans, Karen Jeger, Peter Dennison, Andy Pow and June Hedges).  If it proves to be something that is useful and becomes an ongoing thing, on the full SMT will take turns to run the surgeries. In the meantime, if there are particular SMT members you would like to meet with, please let us know.  Notes from previous SMT meetings are available on LibNet too.