The conference proceedings of the 2013 event at Manchester, edited by Emma Coonan, have just been published!
You can download a copy from the ProQuest web site.
The proceedings are released under a CC-NC-SA License, so please feel free to share them with colleagues 🙂
You can now find photos of material from  Emma Coonan’s breakout session “Shifting the focus from key skills to higher-order learning outcomes” here. They give a great insight into some of the topics discussed and comments made during the session.
You can watch the video recording of this lightning session here.
In this lightning session, Tim set the scene by talking about University College Oldham (UCO) itself and its partnership with the University of Huddersfield, focusing on how organisational factors impact on the way information literacy is taught at UCO. He then went on to describe how they use Summon as a starting point for most of their students and to detail how they teach Summon, basing  information literacy sessions around specific assignments, emphasizing the importance of refining searches and giving students the time to explore Summon for themselves.
You can now find videos of all the presentations and lightning sessions recorded at the 2nd UK Information Literacy & Summon Day on the Summon IL YouTube channel:
http://www.youtube.com/channel/UCcuPB_XDSaxcvceYsDKi0Fw/videos
We have kindly been provided with an excellent set of notes from the 2nd UK Information Literacy & Summon Day by Catherine Finch (https://twitter.com/Cath_Finch). They summarize what people were saying, as opposed to giving a word-for-word transcript. However, in doing so, they allow the reader to get a really good insight into proceedings.
You can watch the video recording of this lightning session here.
This presentation was part of the lightning sessions, delivered to delegates as it would have been to library users. It is aimed at students at Manchester Metropolitan University (MMU) and looks at how to use Library Search, MMU’s branding of Summon, to find full text resources online in five minutes. The emphasis was very much on quickly giving users the basics they need to get up and running with Library Search themselves rather than going into information literacy skills in any particular depth.
You can watch the video recording of this presentation here.
This was a slightly tongue-in-cheek presentation themed around applying the Gartner Hype Cycle to the various phases of delivering a discovery service, based on experiences at Huddersfield and from discussions with numerous librarians over the last 3 years.
Technology Trigger
The federated search product we had at Huddersfield was failing to meet the needs of our users and was widely disliked for being slow, clunky and unreliable. Increasingly we were seeing traffic to library e-resources being driven from Google Scholar and, anecdotally, students were telling us that their lecturers were advising them to use Google Scholar as the library provided service were too difficult to use. Although we could point to growing evidence that Scholar was an imperfect solution (e.g. partial or unknown coverage of resources), the reality was we simply couldn’t compete on ease of use.
We knew we’d have to make a radical change to improve the situation…
Peak of Inflated Expectations
As we started to look around for ways of improving e-resource provision, we saw an early version of Summon during March/April 2009 and it convinced us that we could potentially deliver a Scholar-like experience for our users. After going out to tender, we selected Summon and began implementation during late 2009.
I should point out here that I’m not implying Summon is a hyped product, but simply that our expectations are often set a little too high (“yay, shiny new toy!”).
Trough of Disillusionment
Matt Borg explored this topic during his session, but one of the issues around implementing Summon is the need to understand that it was designed from day one as a tool to support the information seeking behaviours of students and researchers. To paraphrase a comment Matt made at the 2012 MmIT Conference…
The trouble with Summon is that students don’t need to be taught how to use it, but librarians do
That isn’t an easy pill to swallow and I suspect is one of the reasons why some libraries choose to implement alternative discovery service products that behave more like a traditional library database.
During the “disillusionment” phase, it’s common to become fixated on issues such as:
The end result is that it’s common for libraries to take a cautious approach to launching their discovery product. At Huddersfield, we launched Summon as a “beta” service in January 2010 and ran it in parallel with Metalib until July 2010.
Slope of Enlightenment / Plateau of Productivity
For me, this is what the two #SummonIL events have been about — an opportunity to share best practice and to discuss how Summon has altered the approach to teaching. The common refrain from presenters at both events is that Summon frees up time to concentrate on the delivery of information literacy.
You can watch the video recording of this presentation here.
Emma kicks off with @emergencypuppy!
Emma says we need to move from “finding” to “decoding”.
Sessions keyed around phases of research.
Emma covering how the sessions have changed from pre to post Summon. Previously, issues around describing the relationship between the various library silos.
With Summon, emphasis on:
* understanding reading lists
* how to critically evaluate the list
Pre-Summon, Emma has “the most depressing hand out in the world”!
Post-Summon, Emma can concentrate on what the various resource formats available actually are. She’s moved away from the “find it here” mentality.
You can watch the video recording of this presentation here.
Step Up to HE is a well embedded pre-enrolment course at the university.
The course helps students feel confident that they’re up to taking a full university course.
Info Lit and Step Up sessions
1) finding info – intro to library resources, terminology, peer-review, etc
2) evaluating info – using pedagogical approach devised by Anthony Beal (Jisc) @redsontour
3) using info – referencing, organising saved references, exporting, etc
The future…
* looking forward to Summon 2.0!
* develop material for shorter sessions, online quizzes
You can watch the video recordings of Adam’s presentation here and his lightning session here.
Like Sandy from SHU, Adam covers a variety of subject areas.
Summon has been a huge enabler for Middlesex and has freed time up to do other things during teaching sessions.
Issues…
* sessions aren’t always embedded in teaching
* teaching opportunities can be inconsistent
* teaching can sometimes be repetive
* timing of sessions can be bad
* lack of info skills — computing students don’t always know how to search!
* teaching methods and “death by Powerpoint”
Librarians and teaching…
* we spend too much time being generic
* tool based and didatic
* can be uninspiring
* too much content
Going forward!
* less is more — quality not quantity
* don’t try to clone students into mini-librarians!
* learning by doing
* learners, not the taught
Games!
* fun
* quick
* simple
* easy
Before Summon…
* separate training for different databases
* things get missed
* dull and confusing
* no time for Kleine topics
With Summon…
* lots of time saved during teaching
* have a go approach
* inspires confidence
* “Summon is better than Google because…”
From here…
* rolling out the new info lit framework
* developing activities
* improving attendance
* revalidation
Summing up…
* the changes have worked!
* teaching is much more fun!
* Summon saves time!
Info Lit & Summon 2013 