The University’s annual teaching and learning conference today. Although they’ve cut it from a shortish day to just a morning now. There are still four tracks through the day, however, so the usual trauma of deciding what not to go to.
In the second slot, however, I’ve no choice – we always like to try and contribute something from the Library if we can and this year it’s fallen to me. Basically reporting on the student project we were involved with to produce a mobile app of various library web pages. We had to link it to research informed teaching though which has made it interesting.

Last week I was having something of a crisis of confidence – probably connected with ‘research’ aspect, but H (who’d offered to help but couldn’t make the day itself) took my simple slides and made them really look coherent with brilliant ‘design’ and some lovely images that gave me great confidence. Together with a Bob Dylan title that another colleague had provided (which happened no to include the word ‘library’ for a change which I think always helps to not put people off choosing our session), I felt well armed to ‘perform’.

Had the bright idea of using the Dylan track itself as a welcome to people gathering in the room and that seemed to give the session a real buzz from the start which I managed not to pour cold water on. It’s always difficult to judge and it usually goes well enough, but I think this time everything came together in a way that really worked and was a great success. My favourite comment afterwards was “I won’t see librarians in the same way again” – although I’m not entirely sure how to take that!