Teach Yourself Twine: How to Create a Catalog Search and LC Call Number Review Game, by Jillian Sandy

My problem was this: after depending on a shelving tutorial borrowed from another institution for training purposes, suddenly the URL changed or the site no longer hosted this excellent (and free) resource. I thought I’d never have the time or the coding skills to make my tutorial. I was so wrong. I ended up creating a fun, low-stakes game that helped student employees a way to practice catalog searches and using the Library of Congress system, and I want to share with you!

The game additionally allows student employees to further explore catalog searching and to nudge them toward using the catalog to search for books--I created this game at the University of Dayton, where the default search option is UDiscover (OneSearch at many institutions), a tool we do not recommend for looking up books.

If you’d like to do something similar, here’s how: you will need to choose a free, relatively easy-to-use platform. I recommend Twine, open-source software created to build interactive stories. Though you can use this in-browser, I would recommend downloading the program for Windows, Mac, or Linux. You’ll have a lot more storage space for your game this way--important if you’d like to include adorable pictures of cats, gifs, or video to add some visual appeal.

Twine very easily lets you create a beginning and end to your game. You can also link pages to each other--for example, the pages student employees will see when they answer a question correctly or incorrectly, as well as links to the next question on their adventure.

Now for that pesky coding part of the process. You will need to do some coding to change font and image sizes, and perhaps to add images or create links (for example, when giving attribution for images). The good news: you can Google all of these things! I have very little experience with coding and managed to create this game--you can too!

One additional consideration with Twine is the use of images; first, you will need to find images that are out of the public domain, licensed by Creative Commons, or otherwise unencumbered by copyright restrictions. I found many images requiring attribution only at Vecteezy and Pixabay. I also like Unsplash for this kind of thing.

Unlike a blog or another site where you can upload images, images in Twine will need to be encoded. Again, you’re in luck--there are many sites where you can encode images for free! ou will need to turn your image into a rather lengthy line of code. I used a site called Base 64, which allows you to drag and drop images to transform into code. Below is an example of an image and the beginning of its code.

Another option in lieu of images are gifs. On sites like Giphy, the embed code is provided! All you need to do is copy and paste the embed code and the whole ordeal of encoding images can be avoided. 

When you have completed your game, you can export the file as an HTML file. This will lead to another consideration: hosting. Luckily, there are several places where you can host your Twine creation with no cost. I use Philome.la, which does require a Twitter account to sign up. If you do have an account, you will simply upload the HTML file you have created. No need to worry about the URL changing or the content suddenly disappearing! Be aware that you cannot change your game once you’ve uploaded it; if you need to make changes, you will need to edit the HTML in Twine and then re-upload as a new game (with a new URL). 

The game I created is pretty low key, requiring student employees only to complete the game and print or screenshot their “Purr-tificate of Completion.” However, the Twine Cookbook does outline the process of adding or subtracting points based on student responses (and provides some other helpful codes). Using a points system does provide an assessment tool for the game, though may feel more like a test to students than the interactive practice game I set out to make. 

In addition to training for student employees, I see the potential of this activity to be used as pre-work for library instruction sessions. Covering some search strategies ahead of time could give librarians more time to dive into information literacy concepts during class. 

If you’re feeling adventurous, play the game here: 
http://philome.la/JSandcat/searching-ud-catalog-a-roesch-library-adventure. You may need to search the UD Catalog to avoid any negative consequences from the game’s disgruntled cats: http://flyers.udayton.edu/search/X. (I've had some problems with Twine going down temporarily every now and then...but since it's free I have made do.I also have it hosted on Text Adventures here: https://textadventures.co.uk/games/view/aSyZJWezq0qdEwErOY11BQ/searching-the-ud-catalog-a-roesch-library-adventure) 


Jillian Sandy is a Visiting Research & Instruction Librarian at St. Mary’s College of Maryland. She can be reached at jssandy at smcm dot edu. Find many pictures of her cat on Instagram as jsheilas.

The Unexpected Manager: 8 Lessons Learned from Being Made a Library Manager Right Out of Library School, by Peter Shirts

[Editor's Note: This post is good reading for anybody in charge of something, not just for those just out of their graduate programs who are unexpectedly put in charge of something.]

After finishing library school, I accepted the first job offer I received as an academic subject liaison. I soon found out, however, that a major part of the job was not quite clear in the official position description—after a short, 9-month training period as co-manager, I would become the sole manager of an academic branch library with 8.5 full-time positions and around 20 part-time student workers. All of the full-time staff were older than I was, and some had been working at that location for over 20 years. While I would not wish a similar situation on other recent graduates, I gained valuable experience. Should you find yourself as an unexpected manager, here are 8 key lessons I learned:

1. Spend time listening. When learning about your new organization, listen more than talk. Acknowledge staff members’ feelings, strengths of the current way of doing things, changes desired by staff, and feedback about your new management.

2. Remember that change takes time. Ingrained procedures are not always a bad thing, but sometimes it is important to revisit why a procedure or policy was adopted and assess whether the conditions that led to its adoption are still the same. Try to frame discussions in terms such as “let’s think about this another way” or “I’ve heard it is done differently elsewhere…what do you think?” instead of “now we’re going to do it my way.” When change is needed, make sure all the stakeholders are consulted and find ways to honor the past while forging ahead.

3. Learn to translate others’ productivity for supervisees and supervisors. Because each member of your team has a different function and area of expertise, communicating work accomplishments to each other can be difficult. Most people want to do their job well, but conflicts between staff can arise when one person’s idea of “well” is different from their coworkers' or your ideas. Because of this, you may need to explain a staff member’s output to their coworkers. If an employee really is not working up to par, translate what the employee is doing (or not doing) to your supervisor, and allow the underperforming staff member to supply their own perspective. You are not exempt from reporting, so find ways to communicate the work you are doing to your staff, also. For instance, I both produced and requested monthly reports. Finally, praise your staff in public and private for what they do well.

4. Run meetings efficiently. People want to feel that their opinions and concerns are heard, but they do not want their time wasted. Here are some strategies I used:

• Make an agenda, invite new agenda items well before the meeting, and during the meeting keep to the agenda as much as possible.
• Have someone (besides you) take notes and archive these notes in a shared drive
• Follow up on unfinished items from past meetings.
• Keep announcements brief and make as many as you can via email outside of the meeting.
• Keep the tone light and fun (by making on-topic but not demeaning jokes or acknowledging a situation’s humor), while still keeping the meeting brief.
• Make sure everyone understands what decisions have been made.
• Avoid doing creative things, such as writing or workflow analysis, in a meeting.
• Instead, use the meeting to gather opinions on writing or workflows that have been drafted already outside of the meeting.
• Everyone enjoys an early dismissal or even a cancelled meeting—but do not overuse these options.

5. Make connections with your staff. Keep relationships professional, but also find out what makes your staff tick. Sometimes you can use staff members’ hobbies or interests to enhance the library’s offerings or collections. Relying on staff members’ unique expertise helps them feel needed, too.

6. Keep good notes. When juggling management of many people doing many different tasks, it is easy to forget what happened even a few days ago. Keep a paper trail of meetings, conversations, and decisions. For instance, when you make an assignment orally, confirm the assignment in an email. You never know when you will need to review decisions again or remind someone of an assignment.

7. Be smart about delegating. My staff had a lot of experience doing their jobs, and I tried not to stop them from using that experience. Most of the time, they could perform their jobs skillfully without my intervention, so I kept out of their way. If someone had expertise in a certain area, I would assign tasks in that area to them instead of tackling them myself. However, when the staff looked for me for leadership, I prioritized learning about and dealing with the relevant issues.

 
8. Set boundaries for yourself. In almost any professional library position, there is more work than one person can possibly complete; this can be an even more acute problem for a first-time manager. Instead of working yourself to burnout, stick to a reasonable work schedule with only occasional extended hours. Include a dedicated lunch break in your schedule.


Peter Shirts is a little less stressed than he used to be, now working as the Music Librarian at Emory University. He shares occasional musical thoughts at www.signifyingsoundandfury.com and on Twitter @SignifyingSound.

Interview Post: Bryony Jane Ramsden

Biographical

Name?

Bryony Jane Ramsden

Current job?

Subject Librarian for Human and Health Sciences at the University of Huddersfield. I mostly look after students in nursing and allied health professions, but as the other health librarian and myself are both part time, we provide support according to what day somebody needs help! My role has changed this academic year though, as I’ve been given a user experience role (brand new to our library).

How long have you been in the field?

What feels like a LONG time! I have that common tale where I got a shelving job at the local public library when I was an undergrad, and liked working in the environment and the nature of the interactions so much I ended up working towards qualification. So, if you count when I started my shelving job, I’d say around 19-20 years. That IS a long time, then!

How Do You Work?

What is your office/workspace like?

We have an office for all the subject and academic librarians and all the subject assistants, around 20 of us altogether, with our own personal desks. My desk is like my house, a personalised, organised mess – I know EXACTLY where everything is, even if it doesn’t look like that! We used to live in separate subject-related offices, but they were gradually removed to be (rightly) dedicated to student use instead. I don’t always manage to work very well when it gets busy and noisy, but I love working with everyone here. We have a good team.

How do you organize your days?

Thinking about it, today is probably the first day I’ve had a chance to organise my day because I’ve been so busy this last term! They are generally split between meetings in the school for course committees and student panels, appointments with students or academics [Editor’s Note: I believe that translates to “faculty” for those of us in the US.], providing training for information skills (plus this last couple of months I’ve been running a number of internal UX methods training sessions), and staffing the help desk, although we do that from our office now instead of actually sitting at the desk. But as I wrote this I only had desk duty, and we were winding down for the holidays, I had a to do list of things to sort out before I went on leave.

To do lists are the best way for me to keep track and organised, as I can do all the calendar scheduling/planning I want for tasks but if the phone rings or I get an urgent email asking to advise on a tricky query, I could easily end up spending my scheduled time on that instead. We don’t provide a systematic review service for our academics, but academics and higher level students often ask for support on making sure their search strategy is working and is comprehensive/systematic enough. That can be challenging and time consuming, but is just fascinating!

What do you spend most of your time doing?

It depends on the time of year. In term one, mostly inductions and teaching, and then as it gets further in I have a lot of student appointments. In term two, I’ll have a few January-intake classes, but it’s a lot quieter than in September, so I spend more time on student appointments than classes. Once things are calmer in the new year, I willspend more time on revising my teaching content and looking at stock purchasing/editing before the next round of assignments are due in and the course committee meetings and student appointment requests increase again.

What is a typical day like for you?

It will start with me coming in and having breakfast because the bus service isn’t amazing, so it’s just easier for me to set off earlier and have a calm, relaxing start to the day. I’ll check my calendar for any meetings/teaching etc, go through all my emails, and check ‘TopDesk’ (an online enquiry management system we’ve adopted at the University) for anything that might have been designated to me to respond to. That can include students asking for help with referencing or requesting an appointment, or staff asking if we can buy a new journal or resource. If I’m on the rota for the desk first thing, I also go on to Twitter/Facebook and Questionpoint to see if anyone has sent us a question out of hours. Then I’ll write up a to do list of what I want to get done that day, which might be checking what has been added to the reading lists for any out of stock titles, or planning training sessions, or working on what will be in the next display.

What are you reading right now?

I just finished The Hate You Give by Angie Thomas, which was brilliant, and have moved on to re-reading The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood, as it’s a long time since I last read it, and I want a reminder before the new book comes out…

What's the best professional advice you've ever received?

Ask for forgiveness instead of permission ;-) This isn’t always appropriate, but it works very well a lot of the time, and even then you don’t have to ask for forgiveness that much!  

What have you found yourself doing at work that you never expected?

Crafting! This is an academic library, so most of my time is spent talking to people about research on wound care and that kind of thing, but we’ve been running regular sessions for anyone to attend where we make things, help people de-stress, and if they want to (they don’t have to) they can ask us library-related questions. All of which means I get to knit and paper craft as part of my job! Yay!

Inside the Library Studio

What is your favorite word?

Defenestration.

What is your least favorite word?

I have lots, changing depending on the day, all of which are normal words, but because of the job have grim meanings. Today’s will be crust…

What profession other than your own would you love to attempt?

I’d quite like to try working in a baking co-operative like the Handmade Bakery in Slaithwaite. I imagine it can be stressful like any service is, but the idea of making delicious bread and other baked goods in a co-operative environment is appealing.
 

What profession would you never want to attempt?

Working in a call centre: a thankless task where they get blamed and shouted at for things that aren’t their fault.

Everything Else

What superpower do you wish you had?

Incredible physical strength, kind of like Hulk but with a bit less anger.

What are you most proud of in your career?
I think it’s that my relationship with the students in the school is as strong as it is. Health students are generally encouraged to speak to library staff by their tutors, but they know there are no stupid questions with me.

 

If you're willing to share, tell about a mistake you made on the job.

Oh good grief, there will be plenty I’ve made! But there is one big one I’d share if I knew I was allowed to! Let’s just say it was many, many years ago, and involved money… In the end it was all fine, and there was nothing we couldn’t fix, and that’s the key thing to remember in a subject librarian role: if you make a mistake, it can almost always be fixed and sorted out.

When you aren't at work, what are you likely doing?

I love walking. I live in a beautiful town where the wilds of the moors and the Pennine hills are just on my doorstep. I can make it to work using public transport in 30 mins door to door on a good day, but I can also walk out of my door in the other direction and be in the countryside on foot in 15 minutes. I can’t imagine living anywhere else. I also love making things. Give me some yarn or fibre or some paper and ink/a pile of coloured pens and I’ll be really happy. Having said all that, I also love my PS4...

Who else would you like to see answer these questions?

Jessica Haigh

Bryony tweets at @librarygirlknit.

Less is Less, by Donna Lanclos

We can start with the end of this particular story first: There was a call for papers, it didn’t originally contain a critical spin, and now it is much closer:

link to original tweet

When I first saw the original call for papers, my immediate response was this: It is unhealthy for libraries, for anyone, to suggest that “more is less” should drive or organize your work. If we have less we have to do less. Budgets are political documents. When we lie to ourselves and others and suggest we can do even the same with less, who benefits? Not workers, not researchers, not teachers, not students.

My train of thought was sparked by one particular call for papers, but the fact is that public and academic libraries in the US and the UK hear this sort of thing all the time, and it’s just not sustainable. Many public libraries in the UK are being shut down; that is where “more with less” ultimately ends. I would like the profession, across all of its sectors, to find a way to have a conversation about how, when presented with budgets that make things impossible, we say so, and make sure that the people making budget decisions understand that they are, in essence, saying they are happy to not-fund particular kinds of work or resources. I want to support people in speaking truth to their local powers that be, to be able to say to decision makers, “Admit that you don't value this, and that is being reflected in the ‘less’ part of your budget. Say it out loud.”  Because rhetorics of “care” that are not backed up by resources are not sincere. Every budget proposal should be annotated with what will be lost if that piece is not funded. “You want a repository without staff? This is what it's gonna cost you in terms of effectiveness.”

What happens when we try to do more with less? We fail, just like the K-12 schools in the US are failing (or hey, like our entire damn country is failing without a funded and functioning federal government) and then the teachers get blamed when in fact they are being failed by people above them and budgets that do not support public schools or services. I am put in mind of the discussions around “resilience” and how that can be damaging to individuals in difficult institutional contexts. To what extent are we, through the “more with less” discussions, perpetuating the same harms, asking individuals to weather the pain of dysfunction and austerity, rather than collectively organizing to try to shift discussions and take action towards fixing structural problems?

I appreciate that professional organizations want to try to create space for people to share strategies to deal with this kind of austerity. It makes sense. But making-do in a larger context of budget cutting won’t stop the budget cuts. It is for this reason that I want these conversations to be much more heavily weighted towards voices critical of austerity measures that ensure that the "more with less" theme will persist.  If you are in a leadership role in a professional organization for libraries, what can you do as an organization to advocate for more resources for your members?

I would encourage anyone presented with a “practical strategies” conference call to stop and think about submitting a “critical approaches” paper, panel, or other contribution. In my experience, library conference presentations tend towards the “here’s what we did” content in the first place. But there are critical strands everywhere, to be found in conferences, on social media, in journals such as Library with a Lead Pipe, and in our face to face networks. Critique and critical inquiry come from a place of care, and engagement, and I wish they were more easily recognized as such.  

I would also encourage conferences who are interested in exploring issues of the impact of austerity on education and library institutions (and the people who work in and use them) to think about providing funding so that people without resources who are actually living this reality can attend. No point in having these conversations only among people who have enough resources to get to the conference in the first place, because while their budgets might well be cut, they at least have enough budget to be in the room without assistance. What resources can be used to widen participation in these public conversations? What digital places and tools, what money can be offered? It will require organization and action to shift what requires shifting. Professional organizations can constructively contribute, especially if they invite and facilitate critique, and lift voices that are not already heard.

Though she has inspired lots of posts, this is only the second time Donna Lanclos has written for LtaYL. The first time was an interview post. Donna tweets at @DonnaLanclos.