The quiet before the storm

I am just picking up my blog again after being off work on holiday for several weeks during the summer, if you can call it that with all the endless rain we have had.

Summertime is traditionally a quiet time for academic libraries with few students in the building, but this is when all the hectic preparation happens before the start of term. Some of the changes we have seen are the new Wyse terminals installed in the computer cluster. The new Zones4Learning flexible training suite is ready. We have had equipment training to help us use the variations of training equipment for student inductions, e.g. TeamMaster, laptop and projector projecting onto the Smartboard screen. I hope I can become competent using this equipment when we are ready to go! And of course, there have been numerous projects to complete, e.g. the online tutorials for Skills Plus.

Some of the early starters have arrived for their courses, e.g. St Georges students on a franchise course from the University of Grenada, studying biomedical sciences. I assisted one of the Subject Specialists with a St Georges induction. I learnt a lot about evaluating different medical-based websites, some credible, some not. Criteria such as having verifiable contact details, a recognised web address, which audience the web site is targeted it, whether the website contains peer-reviewed articles, helped with this exercise.

I also increased my knowledge on searching on one of the subject databases, namely Medline. I was able to assist students with their exercise, combining search terms, and placing limiters.

I have enjoyed this small respite during the summer before the deluge of student inductions start very soon now.