ARLIS 2014: The Journey Continues

Two things I did at the conference I didn't write about in the last post because I wanted to give them a fair hearing: the visit to the John Rylands Library and the break-out sessions I attended.

The visit to John Rylands is mostly just pictures. Someone else wrote about it, and made notes on all the facts during the tour, so I didn't bother, I just snapped the things that interested me.

We started here, at the sculpture of Archimedes. Some wag had left a deflated balloon hanging out the corner of his mouth.

We walked past Chinatown, which is the second biggest in the UK (after London) and has the second biggest gate in the UK (after Liverpool).

The round Central Library, just peeping out from behind the other building there.

And here is the John Rylands Library, looking very imposing.

My phone isn't great with handling bright lights and dim corridors, so lots of blurriness I'm afraid. We meet Stella Halkyard, the Visual Collections and Academic Engagement Manager.

We're taken round some of the exhibition spaces. Some are rotated fairly frequently, while others are only removed for conservation care.

The very grand entrance hall - much more forbidding than the modern bit they've attached now!

This is the Historic Reading Room. We were given a lot of the history of the building, and John Rylands' wife, who sounded a pretty imposing figure!

Now we get to the really interesting, behind-the-scenes stuff. One of the issues is that over the years, librarians knew how to deal with the books that came in, but there was a more haphazard approach to images and other non-book items, so we learnt a bit about the challenges Stella faces.

Although you can't really tell, the floor here is glass, to allow light through three floors of bookstacks! In the right spots, you can see down past the floor to the storeys below. The ceilings here were really low.

An interesting door. Taking this picture I nearly got locked into the basement stacks!

One of the original toilets (I think)!

I did enjoy the Victorian Neo-Gothic architecture, although being so used to the really old buildings round Cambridge I couldn't help but feel that it just didn't look crumbly and dilapidated enough! It was really interesting finding out about the history and ethos of the library, and what they're doing in outreach now. If Manchester was a bit closer, I'd definitely try and come along to one of their workshops, which sound like a lot of fun.

Break-Out Sessions

I attended Gaming in the Library and the Update to RDA - one for me, one for my work! The RDA update was really useful, even though we were a very small class, and I learnt about forthcoming opportunities to improve my RDA knowledge and practice, and about resources already available. I'd never heard of the Yellow Book (Art exhibition documentation in libraries), which I've now ordered for my library. Also if I can spare the budget I think it would be really useful to have the print copy of the RDA Toolkit, since I get logged out of the online one entirely too often!

Gaming in the Library was interesting too. The slides are available from the link in my previous post, but I also took a few pictures of some of the games Andrew Walsh brought with him.

These are Library A-Z cards, which we used as visual cues for challenges we face in our work. We had to pick a picture that spoke to us, and explain what it meant and what challenge it represented. This method works as a safe space to talk about things and make them less scary, and apparently works really well with Lego, and getting people to build the challenges.

These are two of the card games. The first was designed to teach students how to build references correctly, and the second a quiz to test information literacy. There was also a Top Trumps style game, Top Resources, where students could fill in the cards with the resource they were using, and give it marks on ease of access, breadth and depth etc.

The point Andrew made was that playing these games would take about as long as lecturing students on resources or skills, but by playing the games, the students are more actively engaged in their learning and therefore more likely to take on board the message behind them.

After that he discussed gamification - using gaming mechanics in non-game environments. I have to be honest here, I loathe gamification. On the one hand I'm too competitive and perfectionist, which means I get sucked in unwillingly and will do all the ridiculous things necessary to get 100% on everything. On the other hand, I'm really not a social gamer *at all*. I'm not interested in seeing how I compare to other people, and my favourite games are single player.

So something like Lemon Tree, which is gamification of library usage at the university, seriously wouldn't appeal to me (or at the most I'd try it out, quickly get really annoyed with it and delete it or never use my library card again). However, for those people who enjoy that sort of thing, I guess I can see how it works, and best of all (imho), it was entirely optional for the students.