On 7 June I attended a CILIPS conference session on Decoloniality and the library: the case at Goldsmiths, University of London, by Marilyn Clarke, Director of Library Services at Goldsmiths, University of London.
Marilyn started off with a quote from Desmond Tutu “If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor.” What can we do as librarians to be more than neutral?
At Goldsmiths, a Liberate our library working group was set up to look at this question. They started out by asking : do students see library spaces, books on the shelves, which looks like them? Do students see themselves when they come into the library?
On Monday 5 May I attended the Critical Approaches to Libraries 2021 conference, a really interesting and dynamic gathering exploring all aspects of critical practice in libraries. My first session was A novel data solution to analyse the diversity of reading lists – The case of Imperial College London Masters in Public Health by Robyn Price (Bibliometrics Manager) and Mark Skopec (Research Assistant – Primary Care and Public Health) at Imperial. This was a research project piloted on a masters course at Imperial, which aimed to create a decolonisation reading list checklist/toolkit, addressing diversity and geographic representation in reading lists. Continue reading →
When coronavirus restrictions began in March 2020, the University of Edinburgh had to close some libraries and change some library services. But Academic Support Librarians haven’t gone away. We may have been working from home, but we’ve been busy helping students to get the best out of the library. So what have we been doing?
Keeping you updated
From the start of lockdown the Library Academic Support team web editors have maintained the Library Updates page to provide an overview of the library services available to you during coronavirus restrictions.
Helping you to get the books and journals you need
Coronavirus restrictions made it difficult to access the print library collections for your courses. We listened to what you needed and worked with our Library Acquisitions colleagues to purchase new digital versions of texts you could access remotely. We couldn’t get everything we wanted – sometimes publisher prices were just too high (see this reported in the press) and sometimes what you needed simply wasn’t available as a library e-book. But we worked to spend hundreds of thousands of pounds on new digital content to meet student needs.
Giving help and advice for your dissertation research
We understand that researching your dissertation during coronavirus restrictions is a huge challenge. We’ve offered you help and advice on your library research by email and, if you needed it, a chance to meet online for a chat, with multiple librarian appointments available every week (we’ve met over two hundred students so far this academic year). Plus, we’ve run online Dissertation Festivals in October 2020 and March 2021 with events highlighting the wealth of digital resources available from the library and beyond to support your dissertation research.
Writing an information literacy online course
We want every student to have the digital skills they need to use online library resources, so they don’t miss out on any of the resources and support that’s available to them. So we’ve written an online course, LibSmart, to help you develop key information literacy skills to navigate the library landscape for your studies and succeed at university.
Making videos
We’ve delivered over two hundred live information literacy classes to students this academic year, but during coronavirus restrictions we know that you can’t always make it to a class when it’s happening. That’s why we’ve created over a hundred videos, many of them bitesize, so you can find out what you need to know about the library, when you need to know it.
Christine Love-Rodgers, Academic Support Librarian
If you need a complete book, consider whether you can purchase a cheap second hand copy yourself, eg using an ethical online bookshop such as worderyhttps://wordery.com/or bookshop.org https://uk.bookshop.org/
For more information about open access educational resources and advice, take a look at the University of Edinburgh Open.Ed resource.
Pixabay License. Free for commercial use. No attribution required
Welcome to the Academic Support Librarians blog! You can find out more about the Library Academic Support team here.
We’ll be using this blog to highlight our generic information literacy activity, events and projects. We already have several great ASL blogs for individual Schools, but this will be a blog for every member of the ASL team. Above all we’re aiming to tell the story of the work our team does to support students and staff at the University of Edinburgh.
