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Slides from Social media: Can you tell if it’s working yet?

On Friday 1st July we held our summer event, “Social media: Can you tell if it’s working yet?”. We really enjoyed the afternoon – thanks to everyone who attended.

As promised, please find below the slides from the afternoon. If you have any questions, please contact us by leaving a comment or tweeting us @ARLGNW.

Sarah Mallen and Michelle Bond – ARLG NW event slides July 2016 (PPT)

Tom Mason – ARLGNW Presentation 1.07 (PDF)

 

ARLG NW presents Social media: Can you tell if it’s working yet?

Date: Friday 1st July 2016, 1.30 (for a 1.45pm start) to 4.30pm

Location: Manchester Central Library

Event description:
ARLG NW are pleased to announce our summer event, “Social media: Can you tell if it’s working yet?”

So your service has started dabbling in social media, or you’ve been working on it for a while. But do you know if it’s working? Is it worth the time and effort you’re putting in? And do you know what your goals are? What’s the point of your social media presence? This afternoon event will address all these questions and more. This event is suitable for people at all stages of planning for their social media presence.

Outline of afternoon

1.30pm-1.45pm Arrival for 1.45pm start

1.45pm – 2.30pm  Experiences of social media, policy and practice

Sarah Mallen, Information & guidance coordinator at University of Manchester Careers Service & Michelle Bond, Faculty Librarian at Liverpool Hope University 

Sarah and Michelle will talk about their experiences of running social media accounts for their services, with a focus on process and why it’s important to get organised and set goals. They’ll consider important questions such as “what do you hope to achieve?” and “what messages do you want to get across?”

2.15pm – 3.00pm Tom Mason, Social Media Coordinator, Communications & Marketing, The University of Manchester

Tom will be talking about social media from a wider university perspective, covering areas such as which social media to use, analytics, and tips and tricks to encourage engagement.

3-3.15pm Refreshments

3.15pm-4.00pm Creating your social media framework / policy – activity

Working in small groups, attendees will have the opportunity to start work on their own social media framework or policy, specific to their institution. This is also an opportunity to exchange experiences with other attendees, and get support from Sarah, Michelle and Tom in creating your own policy.

4pm-4.30pm   Your experiences – Advice & questions from the floor

The final session is for attendees to share experiences with the wider group and ask any final questions of the presenters or other attendees. We’ll bring together the strands of the afternoon and try to create a master list of tips.

Booking information:

Cost?  £20 + VAT for non-members

£15 + VAT for CILIP members

£5 for students

To book your place, please email Annette Ramsden ARamsden@uclan.ac.uk with the following details:

Name:

Institution (if applicable)

CILIP membership number (if applicable)

Name and address for invoicing

Access or support requirement

Booking deadline: Friday 17th June 2016

CILIP’s Professional Knowledge and Skills Base (PKSB) – this event is linked to the following criteria:

  1. Customer focus, service design and marketing: 11.2 Communicating with stakeholders
  2. IT and communication: 12.4 Social Media and Collaborative Tools
  3. IT and communication: 12.5 Communication Skills

Event report 2: Making your message stick, with Ned Potter

ARLG NW and CILIP NW offered 2 free student places for our October event, Making your message stick, with Ned Potter. We’re pleased to present write-ups from both students. We published the first yesterday, by Christine Tate. Today is Katie Nicholas’ turn. Katie’s a student at Manchester Metropolitan University.

Prior to this training I had a basic understanding of how to create a PowerPoint but Ned’s training introduced me to so many features I had never made proper use of, including picture formatting options and textbox features. Tips about using minimal space on the slide and the importance of fonts have already been incredibly useful for presentations I am delivering at university and for work.

Ned introduced us to a plethora of great websites where one can source images to create backgrounds without breaching any copyright laws or licenses. The time provided in the session to try each resource and experiment with PowerPoint meant I could ask questions whilst using the new tools. This meant I felt more equipped to use them on my own after the session. The training also gave advice on using these techniques in real-world situations such as working with organisational templates and branding.

The training offered advice on lowering the risk of technical issues by describing the anatomy of a slide and issues with projector alignment – for example not placing vital points near the top or bottom of a slide where they may be lost or obstructed by members of the audience or the projector screen. It is easy to forget about delivering a presentation for real when you are immersed in creating content, making the presentation aesthetically pleasing and remembering what to say so this was a welcome reminder.

The afternoon sessions gave an introduction to Prezi and an overview of presentation and communication skills. I was aware of Prezi but had never used it and was unsure how it worked. Ned effectively used a Prezi to explain the features, pros and cons and most importantly when not to use it. The main message I took away was that Prezi is great for specific kinds of presentations but should be used with caution. Practice is also a necessity! The interactivity and zoom in and out features are fantastic for dipping in and out of material or if you want a more holistic approach as the user sees the whole presentation from the start. Ned advised us to map out our Prezi before adding text and images in the online templates to create more cohesive end results – this was helpful as it is quite a different way of approaching presentations compared to PowerPoint where you can input a structure into slides and amend the visual features later.

By outlining the pitfalls and strengths of Prezi I felt more comfortable experimenting with the templates available and armed with enough knowledge to know when it may be appropriate to use.

The final session gave concise and cohesive advice about planning and preparing any presentation. The importance of researching, structuring and practicing your presentation was highlighted and tips like using the 3:3:3 approach will help organise my ideas in future. Tips on timing information on slides, rehearsing and familiarising yourself with the material and not just memorising will all help me deliver better presentations.

The day has given me lots of resources, tips and real-world advice that I am already venturing to use and has reminded me of the effectiveness and potential of PowerPoint when used in different ways.

Thanks to both Christine and Katie for their thoughts, and to Ned for hosting the workshop.

Event report: Making your message stick

ARLG NW and CILIP NW offered 2 free student places for our October event, Making your message stick, with Ned Potter. We’re pleased to present write-ups from both students. The first is from Christine Tate, a current student studying the MA in Library and Information Management at Manchester Metropolitan University.

I was pleased to receive a student place on the ‘making your message stick’ event by CILIP NW Member Network and ARLG NW. I am a full time student on the MA in library and information management course and I thought that this event would be a valuable opportunity to develop my presentation skills.

The workshop was led by Ned Potter and we started the day with a presentation on how to create Powerpoint presentations that would engage your audience and leave them thinking about your key message. Ned explained that your presentation should address the overlap between what you know and what your audience wants or needs to know. It is too easy to fall into the trap of using a presentation to express everything you know about a subject and therefore providing more information than the audience needs. Ned demonstrated how this could be done by formatting and presenting your slides in a way that helps people to learn, avoiding common pitfalls such as an over-reliance on bullet points and putting too much content on each slide. We were then given an opportunity to put this into practice when Ned provided us with three different methods to create effective presentations depending on how much time we had or what type of presentation we had to give. I thought the workshop was a good balance of theory and practice, we were given time to explore the resources and try out the new techniques.

After lunch we moved on to look at Prezi. Ned gave us a presentation on how to make the most of Prezi by utilising the useful features that it contains that Powerpoint doesn’t. Ned warned us that due to Prezi’s tendency to make some people feel seasick it is often best to only use it when there is a specific reason to justify its use. Through the presentation I learnt that Prezi does indeed have some unique content that distinguishes it from traditional presentations, the example that stood out the most was the ability to use Prezi to create an interactive map which could be used in a library setting to allow the user to explore the collection and seamlessly access tools and information on how to use resources. The day drew to a close by examining the practical aspects of giving a presentation. Ned gave us advice on how to deliver presentations and work with any nerves we might be experiencing.

It was encouraging to see the progress in the presentations I was able to create by the end of workshop compared to the basic Powerpoint and Prezi presentations I could make at the start. I am sure that the skills and techniques I developed at the workshop will be of assistance in my academic work this year and in any professional post I am able to gain after completing the course. I am giving a presentation in a few weeks time on special libraries in Manchester and I am excited to put my new presentation skills into use.

Thanks to Christine for her thoughts; tomorrow we’ll hear from the other student place winner, Katie Nicholas.

ARLG Conference 2016

Have you seen the news? The dates for ARLG Conference 2016 have been announced!

The conference is titled “Are you being served? Serving our learners in a changing climate”, with the theme of the conference being customer service.

Conference dates: Monday, 27 June 2016 – 9:00am to Wednesday, 29 June 2016 – 1:00pm

Further information on speakers, programme and workshops to be announced shortly.

Bookings are now being taken via Eventbrite.

Hope to see you in Birmingham!

Event announcement: Making your message stick, with Ned Potter

CILIPNW Member Network and ARLG NW are delighted to announce this joint one-day event:

Making your message stick

Date and time: 16th October 2015 10am- 4.30pm
Location: Wolfson Rooms (situated in the Harold Cohen Library at University of Liverpool)

This is a hands-on, interactive workshop about presentation skills. The morning focuses on the golden rules of creating presentations, finding free to use (and legal to use!) images, and producing slides. Everyone knows about Death by PowerPoint, but it can be a brilliant tool when used properly; we’ll look at three different methods of creating slides to use depending on how much time you have and how important the presentation is. Although you’ll learn to produce beautiful slides, this will be a by-product of making EFFECTIVE presentations which help your message stick in your audience’s minds – everything in the course content is backed up by research into multimedia communication.

In the afternoon we’ll have more hands-on time to explore Prezi, a zooming presentation tool – we’ll look at what Prezi is, how it works, why you might want to use it and why you might NOT want to use it. We’ll discuss creating engaging Prezi presentations which don’t leave the audience feeling sea-sick.

The final session is about presenting itself: what works, what doesn’t, quick tips, and conquering nerves – but don’t worry, this isn’t the kind of training where you have to give a presentation at the end and be critiqued by your peers – it’s a pressure free environment for learning.

About the Trainer:
Ned Potter is an Academic Liaison Librarian at the University of York, and a Trainer for various organisations including the British Library and the Bodleian, as well as PiCS in Australasia. His book The Library Marketing Toolkit was published by Facet in 2012. Ned can be found online at ned-potter.com and on Twitter at @ned_potter. You can see examples of his own presentations at slideshare.net/thewikiman.

Feedback for previous versions of this workshop:

“Tips and tricks about perfect presentations – it was fantastic! Very informative, very attractive content of the course. I’d recommend it to anyone.” Bodleian Libraries 2015

“Ned was fantastic, and there was a great balance of practical exercises, and presentation of examples and tips.” CILIP NE 2015

“This workshop has undoubtedly helped to get me out of the rut I’m definitely in – my PowerPoints will be changed immediately! Thank you, I thoroughly enjoyed it.” LIEM 2015

Booking:  Please email Dawn Grundy – D.Grundy@bolton.ac.uk

Cost, including lunch, tea/coffee as follows:
CILIP/ARLG members – £15
Non CILIP members – £50
New professional (less than 5 years) – £5 (max. 3 places)

Maximum no. of places = 20

Additionally, we are also offering two Student award places to current students enrolled on an LIS course.
To apply for this please send a letter of application (no more than 250 words) to Michael.Cook@BOLTON.GOV.UK  stating why you would like to attend and what you would gain from this event. Deadline for applications is Monday 5th October 2015. The successful applicants will be asked to write a short report of the day for the groups, within a month of attendance. This report will be published on the ARLG NW Blog and in the CILIPNW newsletter.

CILIP Conference – Part 2

ARLG NW offered a bursary to attend CILIP Conference 2015, held in Liverpool. Michelle Bond, Faculty Librarian at Liverpool Hope University, was the winner of our bursary. Her report on the conference appears in 2 parts, with the first part found here.

In my second post, I’ll cover a couple of sessions I attended that really stood out – one from each day of the conference.

Day 1

From Day 1, the highlight was Phil Bradley’s session on ‘Developments in Internet search’. Phil is always good value, as proved by the fact I had a front row seat due to the room being packed out! The last time I encountered Phil was when I was a graduate trainee way back in 2011 I think – at CILIP’s New Professionals Day, where I remember him exhorting us to be militant librarians and feeling mildly terrified at the end. This time, as a much more grown up new professional, I was really pleased to be able to update my knowledge of search (with Phil speaking much more quietly).

Phil started out talking about Google and how it’s dismantling its search engine, and starting to lose credibility. He mentioned the loss of synonym and reading level options as well as the limited advanced search options as reasons. In addition, he reminded us that Google are an advertising firm who just use search to make money. They want to give us information without us having to think, but this isn’t good – Phil used the example of searching “what happened to dinosaurs?

Phil moved on to discussing the pressures on Google search, of which there are many! These mainly come in the form of social media – Google is focussed on websites when the world has moved on to social, with the importance of the individual going up and the website going down. Social media provides a more personalised search, and allows users to turn to “experts” among their network rather than  asking Google and having to scroll through lists of results. Google has failed at social media (Google+ anyone?) and so cannot compete in this area.

Other Google problems include increasing competition from other search engines, competition from other sites (Twitter, for example is better at prediction and more up to date), and political issues such as the right to be forgotten and potentially contradictory laws from different countries that they will need to abide by. Google is attempting to fight back by giving us information before we know we need it in the form of Google Now, with Phil saying that search in future will be increasingly embedded into what we’re doing.

A few alternative search engines Phil recommended trying:

General:

DuckDuckGo

Yandex

Social media search:

Social searcher

Topsy

Icerocket

Fun:

Tellyads.com

Vintageadbrowser.com

There are many more suggestions on Phil’s slides – http://cilipconference2015.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/Information-Literacy-2-July-15.05-1.-Bradley-Phil.pdf

Day 2

Moving on to Day 2, my session highlight was Naomi Korn’s “master class in copyright compliance, management and strategy for your organisation”. Whilst I don’t have any responsibility for copyright in my organisation, it is one of my chartership areas so thought I might learn something new.

Naomi’s masterclass was, in a word, brilliant. She made a very dry sounding topic come alive and seem totally relevant. She started off by saying that copyright is now an intrinsic part of digital literacy – for people to be able to create, share, reuse, repurpose, etc. they need to understand copyright. There has been a huge cultural change since the 1988 Copyright, Designs and Patents Act was introduced – teens have a different attitude to materials, and feel they can do what they want with anything they like. Unfortunately, copyright law has not kept up with the pace of change.

Naomi stated that we need to be strategic with copyright, and manage risk, particularly with regards to the new introductions to law as no one is yet sure how far the boundaries can be pushed. Risk management involves confidence – and there is correlation between organisations having a copyright officer and their confidence in risk management. Naomi then spent time explaining why copyright is an essential issue for every organisation:

An information management issue – need to be sure you have somewhere to store licenses

A knowledge management issue – need to know what is in the licenses

A people management issue – making sure all staff know their roles and responsibilities

A policy issue – not abiding by copyright should be a disciplinary offence

A strategic issue

Essentially, copyright needs to be embedded into practice, and stopped treating as “other”. Core to this is staff engagement through policies and tools they can use (forms, summaries of key licenses, etc.). Copyright needs to be built into procedures and policy should be a living breathing thing.

The final thing I learned from Naomi was that being incredibly passionate about your topic makes a huge difference! Her half an hour talk was very engaging and she really made copyright come alive for me, fully convincing me to march out of the room and start making changes. A genuinely excellent talk.

Thanks to ARLG NW for supporting me to attend the conference. It was so valuable and I now have plenty to write up for chartership. All of the slides from the conference can be found from the conference programme at http://cilipconference2015.org.uk/programme/

Event report: An introduction to copyright (Part 2)

ARLG NW offered two free chartership places to our Spring event, An Introduction to Copyright. Both chartership candidates wrote for us their thoughts on the event. Our second post is by Lynn Roberts-Maloney, Digital Resources and Collections Assistant, Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine. 

Gordon Sandison from the University of Liverpool Library presents on their digitisation pilot.

Gordon Sandison from the University of Liverpool Library presents on their digitisation pilot.

I attended my first ARLG event on Friday 27th March 2015 – ‘An Introduction to Copyright’. Copyright is a subject that I personally find quite challenging so it was a perfect opportunity to increase my awareness of this tricky subject. I have recently enrolled for Chartership and on reading through the PKSB I had identified point 5.3 Copyright, intellectual property and licensing under section 5. Information Governance and Compliance as one of the areas I would like work on. Therefore I was delighted to see this event advertised and I was very fortunate to gain one of the free Chartership places kindly offered by ARLG.

The speakers – John Kelly from Jisc, Neil Sprunt from University of Manchester, Louise Koch from Manchester Met, and Gordon Sandison from University of Liverpool – were engaging and very informative providing details of copyright in practice. John Kelly provided a background to copyright legislation and explained the new updates to the policy that were introduced in 2014. Neil, Louise and Gordon’s presentations about copyright in their respective Universities, particularly in relation to managing digital content, gave valuable insight to the complexities and challenges of complying with copyright in an educational setting. As I work in an institution that has recently been granted Higher Education Status I particularly found this part of the afternoon very interesting. I came away from the event feeling more informed about copyright in general but also with ideas to look at how things are done within my own institution and what, if any, changes we can implement to make copyright compliance a priority and in turn easier to manage and achieve.

rsz_1arlg_copyright_event_-_captain_copyright

Captain Copyright himself – Neil Sprunt from the University of Manchester library.

 

The ARLG NW committee are very pleased that both our chartership attendees found the event valuable and were able to write for us on their experiences. Thanks again to all of our speakers and attendees for making it such a successful afternoon. 

Event report: An introduction to copyright

ARLG NW offered two free chartership places to our Spring event, An Introduction to Copyright. Both chartership candidates wrote for us their thoughts on the event. Our first post is from Evelyn Webster, Library Officer at Pinsent Masons LLP (Leeds office).

I was extremely grateful to have gotten one of the chartership places offered for this event, so that I could find out how students and academics commonly use copyrighted material, and how libraries try to regulate that use.

I was not expecting to see so many parallels with my experience working in a commercial law firm library, because the assumption is that more copying is permitted for educational use than for commercial use. As John Kelly explained, that’s true if you’re relying on statutory exceptions, but in reality the CLA HE and law firm licences allow both types of organisation to do largely the same things – the law firm licence just costs more per person.

In addition, libraries face the same types of challenges (i.e. users assume that because they found something online, or because their library has a copy, that it’s okay to redistribute it), and the same complications (i.e. there are different licences and permissions for different materials, uses and users).

The three presentations from Manchester, MMU and Liverpool universities showed ways in which libraries are making it easy for users to comply with – and fully exploit – the licences available, without overburdening the library staff.

MMU and Liverpool libraries are aiming to provide the easiest way for lecturers to offer course materials to students electronically, by integrating a digitisation request and copyright check facility into their existing reading list software. Manchester library are aiming to provide the easiest way for academics and students to check whether they can do X with Y, via their copyright webpages, FAQs and upcoming click-through flowchart.

I came away with a lot of ideas (as well as confidence and motivation) to help refresh our firm’s copyright guidance – after all, no one wants to be the test case for copyright infringement!

Our panel answer questions from the audience near the end of the afternoon.

Our panel answer questions from the audience near the end of the afternoon.

ARLG NW event announcement: Introduction to copyright

ARLG NW presents An Introduction to Copyright

Date: Friday 27th March 2015 – 1pm (for 1.30 start) – 5pm

Location: Taylor Room, Sydney Jones Library, University of Liverpool

Accessing the Sydney Jones Library: http://www.liv.ac.uk/library/using/access-sjl.html

 

Event description:

ARLG NW are pleased to present our next event: An introduction to copyright. The afternoon will start with John Kelly from Jisc covering the basics of UK copyright law. Other speakers will present on their experiences of interpreting copyright in their own institutions. This will be followed by time for you to ask questions.

 

More details to follow – see https://arlgnw.wordpress.com/ and follow us on Twitter @ARLGNW

 

Booking information:

Cost?  £40 + VAT for non-members

£30 + VAT for CILIP members

Two free places offered for Chartership candidates on a first-come, first-served basis

 

To book your place, please email Louise Minta – louise.minta@burycollege.ac.uk with the following details:

 

Name:

Institution (if applicable)

CILIP membership number (if applicable)

Name and address for invoicing

Access or support requirement (some information available at link above)

Please state if you would like a free chartership candidate place – these will be offered on a ‘first come, first served’ basis.

 

Booking deadline: 20th March 2015

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