February 6, 2012 Playing host
This week in What I Learned About LIS: conferences.
Royal Holloway was host to the PURE UK User Group 2012 last week. PURE is the Current Research Information System (CRIS) used by the university and its purpose is to collate and manage all of the research data and publications of the college. This falls under the remit of m’colleague, my manager and often overworked types from IT who are in charge of juggling the quarterly software updates and at the same time answer silly questions on usability from tke likes of me. In the early days I was involved with the mammoth information bulk upload task whereby we offered to do the legwork in terms of uploading previous publications for our academics. Nowadays, I edit e-theses records from time to time and ask silly questions. I think PURE is an interesting piece of software (and quite pretty to boot) but I have enough e-stuff for one small human and so my contribution to the Research Management of the college is as such limited.
There is a less biased write-up of What PURE Is For here, at the RSP blog.
Senate House. (The Ministry of Truth)
PURE are run by a Danish company, Atira, and they have under 20 UK users. As such, every year the UK User Group (UKUG for those of you who love your acronyms) meet at one of the member institutions for two days of discussion, idea-wrangling, occasional tension and in some cases laughter. This year it was the turn of RHUL. Typical of a small campus university, we hadn’t enough room of our own for all 50 attendees, and so we used rooms at the University of London’s central London base: Senate House.
It’s probably worth saying here that when I say ‘we’, I mean ‘my manager’. As mentioned above, I have limited knowledge of PURE, and certainly of its technical capabilities, and so I was attending in mostly an administrative capacity as well as for my own information.
So what did I do? I showed up early, and welcomed. I made up a couple of name badges, but mostly said hello. I took minutes. Lots and lots of minutes. Surprisingly, working through minutes with colleagues after the event (as the hosts we have to provide the official minutes), takes less time than expected, even with reams of paper to look through. I’ve also learned that minute-taking, while not a particularly fun process, really does help to jog the memory – and that it’s much better if done in teams! I ate sandwiches and thought about networking. I’ll be honest here, I didn’t really take full advantage of the networking opportunities presented by the UKUG. I’ve not really an excuse, other than I don’t know a lot about PURE. I also attended the dinner. It was nice. It wasn’t amazing, but it was good to talk to people I work with outside of work. I missed the train home and got back at 11.30pm instead of 10.30pm. Oops. Second day was much the same – minus the dinner. And minus the ‘let’s work on the minutes in the pub’ idea. Totally not my idea.
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What did I learn? Hosting is hard work (not for me, but you know, it looked stressful). I’m not great at the whole networking thing. If there were a conference circuit (maybe there is!), I’m not cut out for it yet. I need to get better at talking even if I don’t know much about a thing. Or, I need to learn more. What’s the best option here? Guidance, please! I learned that I’m not too bad at taking minutes, and that after 2 days my handwriting is still legible. And I learnt that Senate House is really BIG.
In other news:
- RGU term 2 began this week (perfectly coinciding with Conference Week). So I’ve ALSO learned that classification is fun! (So sue me.) It was only the basic principles of Why Bother Classifying Stuff, but it was
surprisinglygood. Surprisingly – who am I kidding? I alphabetised by books when I was 11. I love ordering Stuff. I liked it. - In addition to Cat and Class, we have a second module: Knowledge Management. Happily for me, these two modules seem to complement each other, and are both about things I find interesting and not budgeting. Again, so far it’s only been an Intro to… but again, it’s been good. It makes sense, the notes are comprehensive, I’ve completed all of the activities (to a degree that probably annoys my fellow students) and I’m looking forward to doing more reading. Remind me of that in a fortnight when I lament the whole thing.
- I got my results for RGU term 1. The Information Literacy Module: B (66%) and feedback that showed up how lame Microsoft Word is: two of my examples were in the wrong order and I DIDN’T NOTICE. Fury. But hey, what can you do. Word re-arranges my essay, I’m too laid back to notice. I deserved my B, they did have to accept my first answer.
- The Digital Age (a module I still don’t quite get – kind of an introduction to Everything Else Ever): A (70%). What about that? Apparently bitching and moaning and reading a crate-full of books (no lies, my back hurts) are all you need to succeed. GO ME.
In fact, go all of us. Well done to all RGU students. Not that any of you are reading. But wherever you are, congratulations.
Tags: Current Research Information System, Information science, Knowledge management, Library and Information Science, reflection, Robert Gordon University, Royal Holloway University of London, Senate House, University of London
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- Posted under Library school, What I Learned About LIS This Week
