Materials from Information literacy workshop at UEM - October 2019

In October, Anna Stockman from Blekinge Institute of Technology facilitated two workshops for library staff. The participants from UEM came to the first workshop which was a follow up of the 2018 information literacy workshop.

The second workshop, "Introduction to information literacy" was organized for participants from libraries outside UEM.

The presentations used during the workshops have been combined into one single PDF-document.

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"Participants are expected to spend on average six to eight hours per week on lessons and activities, such as contributing to discussion forums and webinars."

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Study visits

For three days I was given the opportunity to visit libraries at universities and institutions in Maputo, Matola and Chibotu. I would like to thank all the people who made this possible! It has been some very interesting and important days.

Here are just a few photos from the visits.

Two workshops on information literacy

Last week, a follow up workshop on information literacy for UEM library staff took place in the computer lab of the library. The participants were coming from several UEM libraries in Maputo.

It was a follow up of a workshop held in 2018 and it included different aspects of information literacy. An important part of the training is to learn how librarians can help library users to get to a higher level of information literacy in an academic context.

Examples from the content are: information retrieval, search techniques (like Boolean searches), evaluation of results, scientific articles, references, citations and diagnostic tests.

Materials from the workshop will be posted soon in this blog.

Participants from the UEM Library

October 28th-29th a workshop was organized for librarians from other institutions of higher education as well as government agencies. The content was similar to the content of the workshop for UEM librarians, but with more focus on the databases made available in Mozambique. Which are they, what do they include and how do you search those databases in an efficient way?

In addition to this, Dr Horacio Zimba gave a presentation of the research library consortium of Mozambique.

Some of the librarians from other universities and institutes.

Annual Planning Meeting

The partners within the Sida supported cooperation between Universidade Eduardo Mondale and the Swedish universities meet up for administrative meetings twice a year. This week, Principal Investigator Dr. Horacio Zimba from the Central Library and Deupy Team Leader Anna Stockman from the Blekinge Institute of Technology Library share the plans for the next year with the UEM management, Sida, the Swedish Embassy, the coordinators from ISP (the International Science Programme at Uppsala University) and all partners at UEM and Swedish universities.

Our plans for next year, when it comes to capacity building where Swedish partners are involved, are to: continue the training programme consisting of workshops and short courses in the areas of customer service/users (step 2), information literacy, academic writing and e-resources; to continue supporting the six masters's students to the defence of their thesis; and to start the process of selecting a candidate for PhD studies in library and information science at the Swedish School of Library and Information Science, University of Borås.

Deputy Team Leader Anna Stockman and Principal Investigator Horacio Zimba.
Picture taken by Therese Rantakokko, ISP

We have planned for a long list of other activities as well, that we will inform you about shortly.

Anna holds workshops with librarians from Maputo and from around the country this month as well.  Next month, the focus will be on the Master's students, when professor Elena Maceviciute and lecturer Fershta Westin will be in the country.

Referencing guides

As a librarian supporting the research process, or the learning processes of the students, good academic writing and anti plagiarism guides are very useful. Both BTH and the University of Borås have open guides in English that may be of use for you, if you want to refresh your own knowledge and if you want to share with students discussing these issues.
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) provides an online Handbook on academic integrity including different aspects of academic writing.

Click on the pictures to come to the respective gudes. 

University of Borås Anti-Plagiarism Guide

Blekinge Institute of Technology Writing Guide

The above guides have been developed together with university partners: Jönköping University, Umeå University, Linnaeus University and Kristianstad University.

Research4Life Newsletter

Research4Life in Portuguese

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New resources in Research4Life

SPIE - optics and photonics

Since the first quarter of 2019 the SPIE Digital Library has been included with content like journals, books and conference proceedings from the SPIE Digital Library, covering applied research in optics and photonics.

CAB Abstracts - agriculture

The CAB Abstracts database, an important resource for agriculture and the applied life sciences.

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Customer Service, workshop - Day 2

After a summary of Day 1 we continued with a session about the user. What characterizes the ideal user and how does that differ from the reality, the user who really shows up in the library. Is he/she always nice, thankful and happy, can express his/her needs, used to handle technology and understands our library rules, or…?

We talked about the value of the user. Even if they sometimes can be difficult to handle and does not follow our rules “without the users the librarian’s don’t have to be there”.

What qualifications and tools does the librarian need to help, serve and tackle the everyday variety of users with different needs and different experience of using a library.  What can we do to strengthen the librarians role, and profession? How can we perform a reference interview in a good way so that the user will get the best possible help? To know the value of the profession – “know why we are better than Google”. These were questions we constantly lifted during the day(s).

We also experienced how important it is to listen. That you can be a good or bad listener. What difference it makes for the one who tries to explain or ask something.

Sidra Nhacudime tries to tell Alda Cossa something but she was a very bad listener 😉

The presentation from Day 2

Customer Service, workshop – Day 1

Tove Lekselius and Malin Utter

We, Tove Lekselius (University Library) and Malin Utter (School of Library and Information Science) from the University of Borås in Sweden, held a workshop with focus on Customer Service and UX (user experience) in libraries for around 30 librarians from UEM. Three days with a lot of discussions, exchange of experience and practial exercises - and a lot of smiles and laughter. 

Here is a short summary of what we did in Maputo 23-25 April

We started by getting to know each other with a short presentation round, where we also talked about where we come from, and why we were invited to hold this workshop.  This was followed by discussions of where a meeting between a user and the library takes place. It’s not just face to face but also in the library room, on the web, by phone and email. Next came discussions of what a good and poor treatment of users could be. A device that we used constantly was “Good treatment can weigh up poor knowledge, but poor treatment barely weighs up anything”. 

The day ended with a session about the use of common guidelines and what such guidelines could content. Guidelines is to be used to make the work at the reference desk easier and more quality controlled. 

The presentation from Day 1

Customer Service, workshop - Day 3

This day was a practical day, where we talked about and tried the joy of UX. "User Experience or UX, as it is defined in the library context, is a suite of techniques based around first understanding and then improving the experiences people have when using the library services"

First we tried an evaluating tool called Love/Brake up Letter, where you write a letter to something that you either love or don't want to have anything to do with anymore. Some examples from the participants that was read aloud with a lot of smiles and laughter:

Love - The Book, The Trainers 😊
Break up - The Salary, A Papaya Tree, The Bus

Next on the agenda was Observations in the library room. The participants went out in the library looking for things that could be improved, took photos and the discussed what they do to to make it better for the users and the library staff.

A mix of things that could be improved, part of which can be explained by ongoing work.
Some easy to fix and some maybe a bit more complicated.

We also tried Cognitive Mapping, where you ask a user to draw a picture of what he/she e.g. like to do when coming to the library - no words just pictures. This could be used as a basis for a deep interview with the user for a deeper understanding of how the library really is used.

The final exercise was Guerilla Testing, where you ask users what they think about the library in general or a specific topic. The entire group went out and talked to the students that was in the library at the time and came back with many interesting thoughts and ideas.

Thank you all - participants, Democrito, Bruno, Horacio and the rest of the library staff at UEM for an amazing week. We hope you enjoyed it as much as we did.

Tove & Malin

The presentation from Day 3