UCL Copyright Literacy Community

My LCCOS colleagues understand all too well how copyright considerations shape decisions we make in our roles. In some cases, the answer to a copyright question is straightforward, for example whether using a resource is covered by the terms of a licence. However, more often than not the decisions we make (to share, digitise, include, copy, and support others in similar decisions) involve a degree of interpretation and risk. Copyright literacy is, among several definitions, about acquiring the knowledge, skills and confidence to deal with uncertainties around copyright (see, for example, Morrison and Secker, 2021).

A new UCL Copyright Literacy Community is being launched this summer. The community, which will have representation from UCL academics, students and professional services staff, will gather together to identify areas where an understanding of copyright is necessary for specific academic, research and professional practices, including open science practices. Members will have opportunities to discuss challenges they share in their area, put forward suggestions and work together on any projects that emerge. Crucially, the community will also review and enhance the current copyright programme at UCL. For more information, see our blog post or contact c.daouti@ucl.ac.uk.

CALL FOR ACTION. 

We are seeking academic staff and students to take part in the community. There are also some limited opportunities for LCCOS colleagues to take part in the community, with more places available in the future as the community expands. Copyright knowledge is not necessary, but an interest in this area, with insights on how it applies in your role, is what the community is about. Please share this information with your contacts and let me know if you are interested in joining.

New copyright resources

• A new ‘Copyright and your Teaching’ online tutorial has just been published. The tutorial is designed for anyone with teaching responsibilities in mind.

Like Copyright Essentials, this new tutorial addresses copyright scenarios inviting you to consider copyright exceptions and make some judgements. While Copyright Essentials appealed even more to Star Wars fans, this new tutorial is for anyone who likes the work of Christian Marclay (there are many copyright-related reasons to choose this example). GenAI is also addressed.

Please complete the tutorial when you have time and consider promoting it if you can. Your feedback is also very valuable.

• New guidance on Text and Data Mining (TDM) is now published on the copyright website, complementing the existing libguide. The guidance was developed in collaboration with colleagues from e-resources, Open Science and Library Skills. The guidance focusses on the copyright exception for TDM and other copyright considerations. Please also see our guest post on the Open Science blog.

Collaboration across LCCOS

Copyright support is all the stronger when informed by different areas of practice. The tutorial was reviewed and subsequently improved by the LCCOS Copyright Literacy Steering group. Likewise, the TDM guidance brought together perspectives from various colleagues and was approved by the LCCOS Collections Management committee. The aims of the new UCL Copyright Literacy Community reflect this spirit of collaboration.

If you would like to get involved or perhaps refresh your copyright knowledge first, please get in touch. Copyright sessions are also available on demand: please contact c.daoutis@ucl.ac.uk to arrange a session at your library site.

UCL Undergraduate Open Days are taking place on Friday 28 and Saturday 29 June 2024. Campus will be buzzing, and prospective students and their families are invited to come into the Main Library and Science Library, find out about LCCOS services, collections and resources and undertake our online self-guided library tours. In the Flaxman Gallery in the Main Library, we will have a staffed stand to welcome attendees, give information about LCCOS and answer questions, enabling us to showcase what LCCOS is all about, and inspire prospective students to come and study at UCL.

All LCCOS staff are invited to contribute to staffing the welcome stand. Full briefing will be provided. If you do not normally work on the days of the open days, you may claim time in lieu (any Grade of staff) or overtime (Grades 1-6), so if you don’t quite have enough annual leave left for that summer holiday you are dreaming about, this could be just the opportunity for you to earn extra time off!

Staffing of the stand will be in 1 hour shifts from 10.00-16.00 on both days. We invite you to contribute to between 1 and 3 non-consecutive shifts on either or both days, depending on your availability and the number of volunteers.

This is an opportunity to meet and work with other colleagues from across LCCOS, to broaden your experience of providing customer service and develop or enhance your professional skills.

To get involved, with consent from your line manager, please sign up by Friday 14 June and we’ll come back to you to finalise your contribution.

Sign up to contribute to the UCL Open Day LCCOS welcome stand

If you have any questions, please contact Angela Young angela.young@ucl.ac.uk

Contributed by Peter Dennison, June Hedges, Angela Young

Recent work by the Economics department ‘How diverse is your reading list? An analysis of BSc Economics curriculum’ has been published on the UCL Education Conference blog.

Economics approached the Library for help extracting data from ReadingLists@UCL to undertake a quantitative analysis of the diversity of their undergraduate reading lists.  They used the bibliographic data to look at the authors’ gender, ethnicity and geographic location, and discovered a ‘significant lack of diversity’ in their lists. After taking steps to diversify a reading list they also identified additional actions to expand this work.

For LCCOS this shows how Library teams (Subject Liaison and ReadingLists@UCL) can help support a department, working together to fulfil a novel request. It also showcases one of the ways the data in ReadingLists@UCL can be utilised to support faculty research or pedagogy.

• If you are interested in Liberating the Curriculum or other diversifying work, do visit the newly announced UCL Library Liberating the Collections webpages
• The ReadingLists@UCL Guide: Liberating the Curriculum page supports teaching staff to develop more inclusive reading lists
• And for more on reading lists see our ReadingLists@UCL webpages.

The Library Liberating the Collections (LLTC) Group are delighted to announce that we have just published some web pages about our work and the projects and issues we are engaging with in relation to improving the inclusivity and diversity of our collections.

The group formed in July 2020 to bring together and oversee strands of activity in the EDI space specific to our library collections.  Our focus is on assessing where collection development and management over the 200 years of UCL’s history reflect (and in some cases confirm) inherent bias and structural inequalities in the university and in society; and making changes to our processes and decision making to address the impact of this.

Our work aligns to the LCCOS Strategy Accessible Collections theme, specifically the goals around a) improving our local discovery and access systems for a better user experience when engaging with UCL collections and b) continuing to invest in the inclusivity of our physical and digital collections.

We have an action plan which is an agreed strategic set of actions intended to open up the collections, ensuring that works by under-represented authors on race, sexuality, gender and disability are more visible and promoted within UCL and to external communities.

We hope that the website will not only be a way to acknowledge and be transparent about some of the issues we are dealing with but also to celebrate our progress and, most importantly, demonstrate our commitment to this area of work and ensure opportunities for dialogue and engagement.

Image generated by Microsoft Copilot’s AI

If you haven’t engaged with our Summer School before, it is a series of training and professional development events open to all LCCOS staff but particularly aimed at staff who are customer facing and whose roles include providing information and support, responding to enquiries, or liaison, teaching and training. The Summer School aims to support colleagues in developing their knowledge and skills so they are better able to fulfil these aspects of their roles. Sessions are usually delivered by colleagues, sharing the knowledge and expertise we have across LCCOS, and some may be aimed at staff supporting particular disciplines.

The Summer School takes place during June and July, with a mixture of live online events that will be recorded, and face to face events.

Recordings and materials from previous years of the Summer School are available on the UCL LCCOS Staff Summer School Moodle course.

Please help shape this year’s Summer School by completing our suggestion form by Friday 3 May 2024. You can also use the suggestion form to request the enrolment key for the Moodle course, if you don’t already have access.

• LCCOS Staff Summer School: suggestion form

Are you involved or interested in teaching / training or academic engagement / liaison activities as part of your role? Then book your place now for the 2024 LCCOS eXperience eXchange, which will take place online on MS Teams on Wednesday 15 May from 2pm.

eXperience eXchange – what happens?

LCCOS colleagues come together to share ideas and good practice about teaching or training design and delivery or academic engagement or liaison activities through short presentations or other activities.

How does it work?

You are invited to give a short presentation or teaching activity (5-20 mins) to exchange your experiences on any aspect of your work relating to teaching or training design and delivery or academic engagement or liaison activities. This may include feedback from events or training you’ve attended, something new you’ve tried in your work, an idea you might have and would value some peer input, or simply giving colleagues an insight into your role and activities.

The event also includes Lessons from LILAC, a report by colleagues who attended this year’s LILAC: The information literacy conference.

Who can attend?

Anyone with an interest in teaching or training, or academic engagement or liaison. You can choose to present or simply to attend, but the event depends on contributions so please consider presenting – it can be as short or as long as you like! We particularly encourage LCCOS staff outside of Library Services to consider contributing. It’s a perfect opportunity for colleagues to find out what you do and enable cross-team innovation within LCCOS.

Image created by Microsoft Copilot’s AI.

Why get involved?

There are many benefits to being part of the eXperience eXchange, including:

• bringing colleagues together to give everyone a better understanding of activities happening across LCCOS.
• benefiting colleagues who may be inspired by your experiences to inform their work.
• an opportunity to get input and feedback from colleagues to help you develop your ideas.
• a development opportunity which can provide evidence for an application for HEA Arena fellowship or on job applications, giving opportunity to give a presentation or deliver a short teaching activity in a safe space with a friendly audience, and for sharing best practice with colleagues.
• an opportunity to try out new teaching activities or tools, including tools for presenting online, such as polls, breakout rooms and whiteboard features.
• an opportunity to gain inspiration from the work of your peers.

What is the format of the presentations?

This year we invite contributions in one of three formats:

• A short presentation (5-10 mins)
• A PechaKucha (20 slides of 20 seconds each)
• A longer presentation or activity (15-20 mins – allows time for more in depth presentations or opportunity for interactivity and input from colleagues).

If you’d rather not present, you can attend as an attendee only, but remember that the event depends on contributions.

How do I sign up?

Simply complete the registration form. We will send you the link to join and liaise with you over your contribution.

An updated Databases A-Z page will be launched on Tuesday April 23rd. This post provides more information about the new page.

The look and feel will be very similar to the current page. Changes to highlight are:

• A new alert box at the top, to be used for key messaging, e.g. technical issues, or updates.
• Changes to the search filters, which will allow users to:
  • search by keyword within “Subjects”, “Vendors” and “Database types”  (in addition to selecting from a drop-down list as they do now)
  • select more than one option from within a search filter, for example “Art” and “Biomedicine and Health” within the Subject filter
•  New or trial databases will be flagged when they’re added to the database list so that they appear in a New / Trial databases box in the sidebar on the right

Below is a screenshot of the new page, showing a keyword search for “history” in the Subject search filter. Users can then click on one or more of the resulting subjects to view relevant databases.

The URL for the page will change to https://library-guides.ucl.ac.uk/az/databases, but there will be an automatic redirect in place so we won’t need to worry about broken links initially. Those of you who maintain skills materials might want to identify any instances of images/videos of the Databases A-Z page that might need updating ahead of the new academic year, as well as any links to the page, as while the redirect will be in place, we don’t want to rely on that longer term.

Following the April launch, there are some additional, optional features we’ll be exploring, in consultation with Site Librarians and Subject Liaison Librarians. We aim to do this over the Spring and will be in touch with relevant colleagues about that at a later date.

If you have any questions, concerns or feedback following the launch of the updated page, please contact Sarah Gilmore via lib-eresource-help@ucl.ac.uk.

This post is about running a short course for colleagues on cataloguing.  I’ve written it to let people know what we offer, and to discuss too the benefits of sharing expertise for those giving as well as those receiving.

We started running introductory training courses on cataloguing in the IOE Library almost by accident.  Back in mid-2014 a member of staff working in Library Acquisitions in SSEES joined the ‘Peer Shadowing Scheme’, a brief joint IOE and UCL entity before the two institutions merged, and came to the acquisitions section of the IOE Library.  While with us, the shadower asked if he could see how we went about cataloguing too.  We showed him and gave him some to do.  The experience was very positive.  Our first student took to it so well he got a job as a cataloguer at LSE.

Since then a total of 21 library services colleagues have been through 28 courses.  Some have done both general and ebook cataloguing, some both those plus work on metadata for the IOE’s Digital Education Resource Archive (DERA).  Mostly this has been post-pandemic. In the chart below, LCCOS of course means ‘the rest of LCCOS not including the IOE’, just to be clear.  I make the distinction between IOE and rest of LCCOS simply to show how we’ve cast the net more widely over time. In addition to what’s on the chart, Tom Meehan (Head of Cataloguing and Metadata) has also been offering cataloguing practice courses and has seen 7 students (3 in 2022 and 4 in 2023). To find out what the boomerangs are doing on the chart by the way, you’ll have to read a bit further.

So what do we offer?  It’s not shadowing, it’s practice.  The student is given an introduction to the theory of cataloguing and its application here, shown an actual catalogue record or two, then given typically three items to take away and catalogue from scratch, plus a lot of links to documentation for reference.  A feedback session is scheduled on the practice records that result.  After another round or two of practice cataloguing and feedback, if the student wants to do more, we suggest they find items to practise on, then check the catalogue record to compare and if they have questions to ask us.

Those are the bare parameters but the course can be tailored according to what the student wants.  Some may simply want to know what cataloguing is and how it affects other areas of library work, others may have some items in their area of work which they want to be able to catalogue themselves with our guidance. Some may want to add knowledge and practice of cataloguing to their skill set for their own development (and their CV).  Some may even think they want to be a cataloguer, and others may just want an excuse to get away from their own desk for a while (it happens!).  All of the above is fine with us.

Three of the five of us in the IOE cataloguing team are directly involved in offering cataloguing practice.  Kristina Macdonald joined me doing this in April 2022.  She says she was motivated by wanting to gain confidence when explaining our work to colleagues, and a strong desire to demystify cataloguing which she feels is often a gatekept area of library work. And since last year Christina Egan has also been keen to offer an add-on course practising ebook cataloguing as well as our work managing the metadata for records on DERA. Christina cites her love of teaching as the main reason she wanted to join in – she says having that element to her role keeps her happy professionally. As her line manager, I’m happy about that! Plus there’s now Tom Meehan joining in too, and the three of us at the IOE and Tom all liaise on what we’re offering and how it works.

Five temporary staff have taken the course and three people (two of them temps) went on to take jobs either as cataloguers or involving a significant amount of cataloguing.  All three of those jobs were outside of UCL, but I can prove we’re not about providing an escape route: two who did the course and then went on to land a cataloguing job elsewhere, ended up a few years later getting cataloguing jobs back here at UCL. So that’s two boomerang students.  We don’t do the courses as a long-term staffing strategy of course, but well-trained new starters has turned out to be one of the benefits.

It’s also very good for us.  Having to explain what we do, how, and why, makes us think about our own practice, and all these new people coming in and asking questions gives us lots of fresh perspectives.  Those who’ve done the course and go back to their roles here in LCCOS will also have gained some understanding of our work and how it fits in or doesn’t with theirs, which can improve communication between different sections of the library.

A few years ago for a presentation I came over all Venn trying to illustrate how librarians feel about cataloguing knowledge (reproduced below).

How things might ideally be when library staff from other sections meet cataloguers.

How I fear they sometimes are.  (This will vary from individual to individual of course.)

I hope our Cataloguing Practice courses are helping bring those circles together.

Do you know a colleague or team within LCCOS that makes an outstanding contribution to support students’ learning? Consider nominating them for this year’s UCL Provost Education Awards.

Many congratulations to Jo Baines (Academic Liaison Librarian / Archivist – Special Collections) who has achieved the award of HEA Fellow, through UCL Arena Fellowship, which is testament to Jo’s commitment to professionalism in supporting learning and teaching in higher education.

Why apply for HEA fellowship?

HEA fellowship is a nationally recognised award and can be great evidence for your CV or when applying for jobs. In addition to gaining post-nominals, the process of applying for fellowship means you reflect on your teaching and work to support learning and develop your skills, identify areas for your future development and enhance your support of students so contributing to the user experience. There are various categories of fellowship depending on your role and experience, including Associate Fellow, Fellow and Senior Fellow, so it’s relevant to all sorts of roles across LCCOS. UCL Arena Fellowship provides an accredited route to HEA Fellowship and is free for UCL staff. Why not make working towards HEA Fellowship a development goal in your appraisal this year?

LCCOS support for HEA fellowship

Did you know that there are monthly peer-support meets for colleagues in LCCOS who are interested in applying for HEA fellowship? Jo found the meets invaluable for providing encouragement and support, as well as motivating her to get on with her application and get it submitted. Jo will return to a meet soon to share her experiences and what worked for her.

We also have an LCCOS Teams site for sharing friendly tips, asking questions and providing peer support and motivation for getting started and getting on.

How can I find out more?

The UCL Arena Fellowship website and Moodle course are great places to get started with finding out more, or attend a UCL Arena Fellowship initial guidance session. To join an LCCOS HEA Fellowship support meet, or be added to the Teams site, please contact Angela Young.