Teaching Skills: Peer Support course Day 3

Day 3, saw the arrival of the possibly dreaded nanoteach for the participants but we knew they could do it.  We felt it was important for them to have the opportunity to use the information given and deliver their own session for a number of reasons; firstly, so that we could assess their learning, secondly, so they could receive valuable practice in a supported environment and finally that they could receive confidential constructive feedback in order to make improvements to their performance.

The organisation of the nanoteach's was probably the most complicated aspect of the course, working out which planning team members were available when and how many nanoteach's we could fit into a morning or afternoon slot.  To facilitate this we emailed  the participants in advance of the course and asked whether they would prefer morning or afternoon slots.  We ended up with five groups in total during the day and one group on the following Monday morning, who were unable to make the Friday's sessions. Each group consisted of four participants and one planning team member who facilitated the proceedings.

The format for each group, was two nanoteach's, followed by a break and then the remaining two nanoteach's.  Each participant was given 30 minutes in total which broke down into:

• 5 minutes set up and say who the audience was

• 15 minutes for the nanoteach

• 5 minutes to pack up while the audience filled in their constructive feedback sheets 

• 5 minutes for the participant to evaluate and reflect on their own performance

My participants were quite concerned about running over time so we came up with signals to indicate that they had 2 minutes left and that they had gone over time, which helped them to stick to their time scales, although I don't think the other groups did this.  This could possibly be something to make sure we all do next year.  Running to time is extremely important for presentations, as I find the audience can have tendency to get fed up if you go over, especially if you can always see that one student clock watching - demonstrating they would rather be somewhere else!  This can be very off putting.  A good plan, practice and the use of a watch are ways to ensure you don't overrun.
In relation to the topic of the nanoteach, we left that up to the individuals and specified that we weren't necessarily interested in the content, more their teaching style and how they delivered the session.  To give people more confidence we suggested that they talked about something they were familiar with rather than library/information literacy topics if they preferred.  Some examples of the topics covered were map cataloguing, geocaching, understanding your reading list, knitting, over coming language barriers when dealing with international students, social activism, animal care and salsa dancing (with practical exercises)!

I also found that the participants in my group wanted my feedback, although this was something that we as a team had not envisaged, preferring that feedback was given by peer review not the facilitators.  In practice however I found that I did end up giving some constructive feedback which was appreciated and evaluation forms from the day showed that participants wanted that to be a feature.  I therefore think we should definitely include our own comments in the constructive feedback next time.

The final stage of the nanoteach for each participant was asking them to re-assess where their confidence lay after the course.  This was facilitated differently this time as we weren't together as a whole group.  Isla had produced certificates with their confidence level at the beginning of the course and we asked them to mark their confidence on a new line underneath, which would show whether they felt their confidence had improved, stayed the same or got worse.

I personally think that the nanoteach's gave the participants a chance to practice and hopefully showed them that they could give a brief training session with little notice.  I also loved the variety of topics that I listened to and definitely learned a lot from the different talks, such as re-discovering that I can knit one pearl one!

Looking at some of the comments from the course evaluation shows that the course was a success, which is brilliant news:

1.  I thought the content and encouragement from teaching staff first class.  It certainly filled a need for staff at Cambridge.

2.  Thank you for an inspiring week.  The format of 3 half days in one week worked really well for me as it made the business of thinking about and preparing for the nanoteach session more realistic since it was interspersed with other things.

3.  I feel much more confident about the mechanics of teaching. Would have been good too if as well as peer feedback on the practical sessions we got a bit of "expert" feedback from those running sessions. 

4.  Many thanks for my certificate. I did find the course quite useful, it was great to hear from a variety of people with their various teaching styles. It was also good fun as well as helpful.

5. Thank you all for the wonderful effort you put in to giving us such a useful and enjoyable course.  A lot of work went into the preparation and, of course, delivering it. I really appreciated it; I learned a lot and will definitely put it into practice.

6.   I took part in the Teaching Skills for Librarians course, organised by the Librarians in Training group. This was a new type of course, and an interesting experiment: after two days of lecture type sessions, we were asked to put together a ten minute long session, and present it to a group of fellow participants, in order to get immediate feedback on our teaching style. It sounded a bit daunting but, as we were in it all together, we accepted the challenge and enjoyed the peer support aspect of the course. For example, I learnt that handouts are very important, and they should provide additional information rather than just repeating what you said in your session. I also discovered that I am able to put a quick session together from scratch in a very short amount of time. And I finally learnt that I come across as confident (I must be a good actress then!), that my non-native English isn’t a problem at all (another thing that honestly surprised me), that I need to make sure I don’t laugh too much during my presentation as I might give the impression I don’t believe in what I’m saying, and that I need to slow down a lot when talking.

I applied what I learnt when delivering the Portfolio Building course last September, and I was really happy to hear that I spoke more slowly, and that attendees found the session clear and easy to follow. The course gave me the confidence to face classroom speaking in a calmer and more controlled way.

Teaching Skills: Peer Support course - Day 2

Day 2 started with the teaching activity audit, (see the introduction ), followed by a useful session on creating handouts. This was definitely something that I thought I need to work on in future.  Ryan informed us that handouts are the "lasting manifestation of our teaching" and part of the students overall learning, particularly in the case of the theorist learner.  Handy tips given were:

• plan your handouts in advance
• don't just print out your slides - this is one I know I can be guilty of!
• ensure your handout reflects your presentation
• make sure your handout can stand alone
• know when to distribute your handout

We were pointed to the key principles of Edward Tufte for designing documents: the design should be invisible, content counts most of all and maximize your users recognition time. We were therefore advised to use plain language and not library jargon, ie. OPAC, etc.

The main section of day 2 focused on reflective practice, peer review and constructive feedback, as we really wanted to emphasize the peer support element of the course moving forward. Time for reflection is extremely valuable in our daily activities and enables us to think about how things went or whether something needs changing.  Reflective practice was therefore introduced as a useful technique which went alongside delivering teaching sessions allowing individuals to evaluate their performance:

• What went well?
• What went wrong?
• Why?
• What could be done to make improvements

Best practice informs us that reflective practice should be a continuous cycle and not just a one time thing, so plan, do and review.  

Isla talked participants through peer review and giving constructive feedback. Our aim being to build confidence and improve support of both peers and students.  The underlying principles were to be constructive, developmental (not judgmental), formative  (not summative) and most importantly confidential to both parties.  Isla stressed the importance to comment on people's behaviours, such as, "I liked it when you did...." and "what I liked was when you said...." rather than " it was nice" or "your competent".

Participants were then given the opportunity to think about comments that had made them change their behaviours. After this exercise they were invited to watch and comment on a presentation given by myself, where I had deliberately included good and bad elements into the 5 minute demonstration. (I found this demonstration more difficult than giving usual presentations due to remembering to include the bad bits!) Participants were given a feedback form upon which they were asked to write down 3 positive points, 3 developmental points and 3 aspects to take away from the session.  The feedback from the participants was excellent, and demonstrated that they had taken on board a lot of points raised over the previous talks and picked up on all my mistakes. Feedback after day 2,

"it was a great idea to ask one of the trainers to give a wrong presentation, to teach us how to give constructive feedback",

showed that participants felt this was a useful exercise which would stand them in good stead for commenting on the individual nanoteach's during day 3 of the course.

Afterwards we moved on to what to do when it all goes wrong!  One of the other experienced guest speakers led this talk which went down very well.  This was broken down into two elements: technology and people.

The speaker asked for contributions and participants experiences throughout the talk to highlight those dreaded moments during a teaching session, when the computers don't work, the projector has broken or websites have changed overnight.  Tips for smooth sailing were as follows:

• practice in the classroom beforehand
• have the phone number of the IT department
• bring an extra memory stick
• put a copy of the presentation in the cloud
• be able to do the class without a presentation

People issues included, students grandstanding, texting or using the internet.  Above all we were advised to keep calm and take charge.

Participants were then giving a briefing about the "nanoteach" and what was expected of them for their individual presentations on day 3.

From my own perspective, day 2 seemed quite rushed.  We had listened feedback from the previous day and had included the "teaching activity audit".  This was a very worthwhile thing to do as it gave the participants and myself a more holistic view of the teaching going on in Cambridge libraries.  I hope it also allowed participants to think about the possibility of working together and sharing resources or collaborating with teaching.  This inclusion  meant that we cut down some of other aspects of the course, which was easy enough to do on the spur of the moment.  Hopefully this demonstrated the ability to be flexible. If we run this course again, we won't have this problem so we will be able to stick to the original lesson plan for that day.

The participants evaluation showed that they appreciated that we had listened to their feedback and had moved the projectors position and included the activity audit.  There was also a sense that the activity audit, Isla's teaching style and the what to do when it all goes wrong presentation allowed more discussion and made participants feel that everyone was in the same boat;

"Wednesday involved a lot more discussion from the group and I really enjoyed hearing from my colleagues/peers about what they were doing, ideas that they had, etc",

"it was reassuring to hear that even people with lots of teaching experience face difficulties and fears sometimes."

However there was also a sense of wanting more discussion time and a longer break in order to reflect on teaching:

"I know discussion can/and hopefully will continue beyond the sessions but it's often harder to take time out once you leave the classroom. Incorporating that time into the sessions would mean we would have a captive audience and dedicated time to discuss things further".

From a personal point of view I think this would be difficult to incorporate fully into the day and I think we were hoping that the peer support element would continue beyond the course, although I readily take the point that once you leave a course it can be difficult to find time to reflect on teaching.  Also if we do want time to discuss teaching as a whole in Cambridge and possibly collaborate, that might be better in a different event, as there are lots of librarians teaching within Cambridge who wouldn't be able to participate in that conversation, were it held as part of our course. However there would be no harm in organising a bit of both.

References

Edward Tufte, 2006, Beautiful evidence, Graphics Press.

Teaching Skills: Peer Support Course - Day 1

During the introduction on day 1, we emphasized the peer support element of the course. We felt it was important that participants learnt from each other.  Alongside this we asked that everyone contributed in order to get the most out of the program.

very confident----------------little confidence

Before starting we wanted to gauge participants experience in delivering teaching sessions and more importantly their confidence in teaching. as we wanted to measure their confidence after the course and 3-6 months later to see if there was a longitudinal improvement. We measured both experience and confidence using "string theory"; literally a long piece of string placed along the floor, one end being very experienced/confident and the other end being little experience/confidence.  We then asked participants to position themselves along the line and to write their name on a post it note, which we then collected up in order.

Our first session used a story technique developed by the English Faculty Library to identify who are students were, what their skills were and what we should teach them. The skills were then linked to ANCIL Information Literacy strands. There wasn't time to cover Information Literacy in depth but links were given to the main theories, such as ANCIL, SCONUL 7 Pillars, InformAll, etc, for participants to look at in their own time.

We then discussed the importance of learning styles in relation to the students learning and the way in which we choose to deliver our teaching sessions, as our own preferred learning style may have a bearing on our teaching.  We found out our own learning styles by using an activity example from Gravells, thinking about how you learned to use a new mobile phone.  This was a very quick and dirty method of demonstrating Honey & Mumford's learning styles: activist, reflector, theorist and pragmatist and I felt it worked really well without taking up too much time. We also looked at what exercises went best with each style and that it was best to use a mixture whilst delivering our sessions, to ensure we included all the students.

The rest of the first day's content looked at lesson planning, smart objectives, teaching methods and session evaluation.  The importance of having a session plan was discussed in order to give structure and confidence by ensuring that all the elements of a session were thought about in advance. Catherine also mentioned that creating one standard plan and re-using it saved time overall.  Key elements to this were the the learning aims and objectives.  Aims should state the purpose of the session and the learning need being met.  Objectives show the students the knowledge they should be able to take away at the end of the session.  These should be:

SMART objectives

are they clearly defined?

how will you know they've been met?

can they be met by your participants?

do they relate to the aim and needs of the participant?

can they be achieved in the time available?






The merits of different types of teaching method, such as lectures, demonstrations, discussions and assorted practical activities were discussed among the participants as an interactive activity. Participants were asked to think of advantages and disadvantages of  using each one from both the teacher and learner perspective.

Assessment methods were also talked about, as its important to know how you will assess the learners knowledge.  This is sometimes something which is perhaps left out when designing library sessions due to time practicalities, so choosing something suitable is vital.  Practical activities, quizzes, discussions, question & answer and group work can all be done during the session with time given for feedback and explanations of the answers.  Online assessment, peer assessment and learner presentations take longer as preparation time is needed by either the teacher or learner.  However once set up, this type of assessment can give more useful feedback on how the learner has processed the information given.

We finally introduced the idea of reflective practice by asking the participants to reflect on the sessions they'd seen and the different speakers. We deliberately used a variety a speakers throughout the course, so participants were able to see different delivery styles and methods. We wanted participants to see that each person has their own unique presentation style and that it was possible to get ideas for teaching from watching other presentations and presenters.

The participants evaluation of the first day was very positive which we were pleased about, especially the fact that they had liked the variety of speakers.  The Story technique was also very popular, one participant said "it was inspiring and interesting".  The planning team felt this was a great interactive session which was different to the usual lecture style of delivery and we are hoping to use it again this summer if we re-run the course.

The things to improve we took away to work on for day 2 were; an activity audit of what was already being done within Cambridge, the use of too many post it notes and the positioning of the projector which meant we had to stand in front of the screen.  However these are all things which the participants in turn will need to think about when delivering their own sessions.  Handouts and whether to give them before or after a session seemed to be split into the yes and no camp.  I don't think there is any right or wrong answers, it just depends on the individuals taking your course on that particular day.


References
Gravells, 2013, The award in education and training, Sage.

Honey & Mumford, 2006, Learning Styles questionnaire: 40 item version, Peter Honey Publishing.

Teaching Skills: Peer Support Course - Introduction

The idea for the Teaching Skills: Peer Support course came about after I attended LILAC 2012.  I remember listening to one presentation about the teaching identity and how their library staff had a support group, where they read and discussed articles on teaching to help their development as teachers.  I realised that whilst we do have a support group for librarians within Cambridge through our Brown Bag lunches, where articles on a variety of topics are discussed, we didn't specifically have anything for teaching.  As more and more librarians are now being asked to teach information literacy sessions to students, teaching is quickly becoming associated with a librarians role, especially for subject librarians and departmental staff who demonstrate electronic resources to students.  Even inductions and library tours need a certain degree of confidence and teaching or public speaking ability in order to impart information on your library to students and visitors, etc.  However it's fair to say that although some librarians undertake brief teaching skills course organised by libraries, CILIP and CPD groups, teaching is not taught in depth at library school.  More and more librarians are undertaking a postgraduate diploma or MA course in Teaching and Learning, have a PGCE or B.Ed degree or undertake a teaching qualification at regional colleges.  There are also a number of librarians who do not have teaching qualifications. Therefore Librarians can find themselves adrift when faced with delivering inductions and teaching sessions on a variety of subjects, such as, information skills, search techniques or referencing software.

Being the Chair of the Librarians in Training Group at Cambridge also gave me an insight into what training our librarians requested.  Top of the list was always teaching skills, how to teach and presentation skills.  I thought that with all the expertise and experience in Cambridge we could put on a teaching skills course in-house.  The planning team was formed of both college and departmental librarians (Ryan Cronin, St Johns College; Isla Kuhn, Medical Library; Catherine Reid, Lucy Cavendish College (now Clare College) and myself, Kirstie Preest, Murray Edwards College), with some assistance from 3 guest speakers, also from within Cambridge libraries.

The course itself took a lot of organising and planning but this didn't seem too onerous with four team members.  The team members all had something different to contribute in light of their experience; academic, NHS, & schools and in the different skills we had, for example, advertising, writing, presenting, etc.  We envisaged the course as a pilot project upon which we could build further after the first year, so were keen to ensure that the course was fully evaluated by ourselves and the participants.  We also demonstrated this aspect in practice by evaluating each day ourselves and by asking participants to do the same. This enabled us to change the course as we went along, taking into account any feedback received.  We felt it was important to demonstrate the fluidity, flexibility and a requirement "to think on your feet" which is sometimes required during a teaching session, when things don't always go to plan.

Activity Audit of Information Literacy Sessions

Another example of this flexibility is that we had not planned on discovering what teaching already existed in Cambridge libraries, rather just concentrate on the teaching skills itself.  However our first day's feedback showed that participants wanted this information to see if any overlap occurred.  So armed with this knowledge Isla and I changed the format of day two and included a "teaching activity audit".  Not only did this allow us to show that changing your session with limited time was feasible, it also allowed us to gain some useful data on what teaching already existed.  The image shown, details some of the data collected.

The main aims of the program were to:

• Build confidence and skills for librarians involved in teaching
• Cover the whole process of a teaching session from planning through to evaluation and reflection
• Establish teaching peer support within Cambridge for librarians 

For a reflection on each day of the course please see the other blog posts in the series. 

Writing research proposals and publications

After meeting with one of my mentees this week and saying that she should try to write about courses and events as she went along instead of way after the event, I thought I should practice what I preach, especially as I'm working towards my Fellowship.

So here goes..... After studying the PKSB I identified desk research and publication as being an area I was interested in and wanted to work towards for my Fellowship.  One of the reasons being that criteria three asks you to demonstrate what you've done for the library profession.  Research and publications are both ways of achieving that goal.  Not having many written many publications myself, other than brief write ups for various library newsletters, I thought I needed to find out more.

I was fortunate that Cilip ILG (Information Literacy Group) and Cilip LIRG (Library and Information Research Group) organised a workshop on writing for publication in September 2014 at Cilip which fitted the bill.  I must admit I was very dubious about the day as I'm certainly not much of a writer and thought this course might be over my head. 

The course was good and approached the subject of research and publishing articles, step by step:

• decide subject focus
• develop the question
• choose your strategy
• select your method
• arrange the practicalities
• collect data
• analyse findings
• report your findings

Quite a lot of this I knew, in relation to doing a literature review, searching for journal articles, collecting data, obtaining ethics permissions, etc, but it was useful to see the whole process.  As librarians we often help students or researchers find information and show them search techniques which will help their retrieval of articles, however we only see a very small part of the research process.  We don't see how they come up with their research question, or the statistical data they find or how they choose whether to use qualitative or quantitative methodology to analyse their findings.  This course was going to make us do just that! So armed with this methodology we delved deeper into the practicalities of doing the above steps.  I found this much harder than I imagined.

Writing the research question which would help answer our hypothesis was extremely difficult.  It needed to be concise, direct, focused on central issues and could be broken down into multiple smaller questions.  I think I failed miserably and was very grateful to the rest of my group who seemed to have more of an idea than me.  (It was at this point that I felt a lot of the other participants had done a lot of research already in their library roles and I felt out of my depth.)  For the rest of the morning we went on in groups to focus our question and think about the methods we could employ to find out the information we needed.


We also talked about the importance of doing a literature review to see if someone else had already done that research. We discussed what to do if your findings confirmed other studies and how a new angle could be looked at instead.  We also talked about finding that your piece of research broke new ground and the importance of identifying gaps in subject areas that hadn't been looked at previously.

The afternoon turned to writing proposals.  A good research proposal needs to be:

• pitched correctly
• clear and concise
• have the wow factor
• be achievable and realistic
• feasible
• have a degree of originality
• be intelligible to readers with no jargon
• *follow the guidelines given*

We then practiced writing that killer headline, like the Daily Mail which has an immediate impact, followed by a longer sentence with the key points.  Again this wasn't as easy as it sounded.


Writing for publication was next.  The presenter spoke about where to publish, who our audience was and most importantly to read the journal guidelines.  Another tip was to read other articles from the particular journal to give you an idea of how others had written their articles.  We were also told that if you were collaborating with other writers that it was easier for one person to write the first draft and the second person to review it, rather than trying to write it together. Otherwise the article could sound like it had two voices rather than one.  This was useful advice and I will hopefully put this into practice.


The day ended with a run down of some of the library journals we might want to publish in:

• Journal of Information Literacy
• Library and Information Research
• Innovative Practice in Higher Education
• New Review of Academic Librarianship
• Evidence Based Library and Information Practice

The course was very useful, although at the end I wondered if this was more in depth than I wanted. The research and teaching skills course which we had done over the summer, wasn't going to fit into this model as we hadn't sought ethics permission and come up with a research question and proposal.  Perhaps writing it up for Cilip Update or on a blog would be better.  Although if we were doing it a second time perhaps we could think about getting these things ready in case we wanted to publish something.

Having said that in November we did write a proposal for LILAC 2015 to talk about our in-house teaching skills course for librarians, as I felt it was a gap in the information literacy area.  The writing proposals section came in handy for this and must have helped as our submission was accepted.

The presentations for the course are all on slideshare:
Getting started - Alison Brettle

Writing a research proposal - Geoff Walton & Graham Walton

Tips for aspiring authors & meet the journal editors - Jane Secker & Angharad Roberts

Induction Week - October 2014

I always feel the start of term approaching with the arrival of Alumnae Weekend. This heralds two of the busiest weeks of the year for the library in College, where the warmth of welcome is essential to alumnae, new students and parents in making them feel at home within the college.

The library is very much involved in the arrival of freshers on Arrivals Day on Saturday.  Its a very smooth orchestrated affair which has been used for quite a few years.  The students and their parents are shown through the first room where they receive their tutorial pack and accommodation information. They then proceed to the library where we ensure that their cards are added to the Voyager Library Management System, followed by the IT Resource Centre where we make sure they received their email from the University Computing Service (UCS), telling them about their computer information, email and passwords, etc.  We also give them a USB with instructions for logging onto the network in their rooms and sell wired cables to those students who don't have one.  After this they are collected by current students and taken to the Porters Lodge to collect their room key and showed to their rooms.  Usually the Assistant Librarian and Library Assistant deal with adding cards in the library whilst the IT Manager and myself deal with the IT information.  This year was a little different as the UCS had sent out usernames and passwords before the students arrived.  Previously we had been responsible for helping students download their computer passwords from the web.  We did have a couple of issues however with the new system as some emails had been sent to school addresses which had been closed down after the students received their results.  Unfortunately this meant some students couldn't log on until the Monday.  I suggested that a few temporary accounts could be set up so the students could log on until Monday when UCS could resend their details.  This seemed to appease the situation.  This was fed back to UCS by the IT Manager, so hopefully they won't use school email accounts next year.

Library staff also attend Freshers fair on the Monday afternoon which gives us an opportunity to meet the students and hand out library bags with library information.  I chose free bags to give away instead of pens or usb's as we're always asked for bags in the library office. It also enables us to promote the library when the students use them for shopping!  We give library inductions but I also feel its important for students to receive library information in the bags as well. Some students don't attend the inductions or forget what you've said afterwards.

18 months ago, I suggested that we should move time of Freshers Fair to allow graduate attendance. They are often in the departments until 4.30-5pm.  Freshers Fair is now 3-6pm to allow graduates to come and feel part of the student body.  This year though some clubs and societies left early, even though it went on for another hour.  This meant that only a few stalls remained for graduates to look at and some thought the fair was closing up.   I fed this back so it can be included in next years planning.

The student inductions themselves start on the Thursday before Arrivals day for the early arrivals and international students and continue during the first week of term. They consist of a library tour and small online session on electronic resources which are voluntary.  This relates to my own teaching philosophy, that students learn at their own pace, when they want to or more likely when they need to and that essay deadline is looming!  Therefore, when I started at the library 5 years ago, we decided to do away with the compulsory induction.  I expected some discussion with Directors of Study explaining my reasoning but it didn't come.  Surprisingly there was a lot of support for this new idea. People felt that the students had so much to cram into the first 3 days of term, that it gave them the opportunity to have some time to reflect on the fact that they had arrived in Cambridge and what lay before them.   I personally don't feel its a productive use of time for myself or the other library staff giving tours or indeed the students listening if they don't want to be there.

In spite of the inductions being voluntary the attendance numbers have risen over the last 4 years which is very encouraging and shows that students do still want to attend.  Statistics kept of the tour attendances show an increase with a stabilization this year. This academic year (2014-15), saw 154 book and 115 attend.  In the previous academic year, 2013-14, 143 students booked and 116 attended, this was an increase of 45 students on the previous year (2012-13, 99 booked and 71 attended). Figures for earlier years are as follows: 2011-12 show 71 booked and 60 attended and for 2010-11, 71 booked and only 49 attended.

This steady rise of attendance could be because they think it is compulsory or it could be due to the shorter terms and supervisions in Cambridge, which means they need to get going on work straight away and have supervision essays each week. Therefore it is imperative they get to know how the library works very quickly.  Coming from much larger libraries such as UCL, University of Westminster and University of Chester, I got the impression that the students there had a longer lead into the term and weren't necessarily interested in the library until weeks 3 or 4. In our college library it is the end of induction week (week 1) and week 2 where the students utilize the library as they've just been given their first supervision essay.

For the first time this year I collated statistics on the level of students attending. This is mainly because college is looking at the graduate experience as well as the undergraduate experience. The library itself, for example mainly provides books to part 1 of the Tripos, with some provision of key books for part 2.  Books for graduates aren't really catered for, except for those on clinical medicine courses and Mphils in economics.

The attendance broke down into 120 undergraduates booking with 85 attending, 30 graduates booking with 26 attending and 4 PhD students booking and attending.  Its too early to really draw any conclusions as we have no previous data, but we can clearly see that a greater proportion of PhD and graduate students book and attend than undergraduates where the non attendance rate is much higher. This is probably because graduates and PhD student perceptions of libraries and what they can offer is much higher.  Although we also know that first year undergraduate students have a lot freshers events on offer, have lots of meetings to fit in at their departments and forget to cancel appointments or even forget about their bookings altogether.  It will be interesting to see what the figures are next year.