This year’s Graduate Trainee Showcase was held at the Ashmolean’s Headley Lecture Theatre. In previous years, it’s been held in the training rooms at Osney, but the Ashmolean benefitted from being a space specifically designed for conferences, as well as being in a central location, which probably upped the attendance.

Full disclosure, I was one of this year’s organisers, and I’m trying very hard to steer away from being too self-congratulatory, but as far as I’m aware, everything went pretty well on the day, and everyone seemed happy (although that may have been down to the Ashmolean’s excellent catering). We won’t talk about the 15 minutes of pure panic where it looked like the presentation remote I’d brought wasn’t going to connect to the computer. Or the bit where trying to change between presentations caused the entire computer to freeze up for five minutes.

Read more Graduate Trainee Showcase – Lee Colwill ›

The Trainee Showcase gives trainees the opportunity to deliver a presentation on a project they have undertaken or a particular aspect of work enjoyed during the year.

This year Becca (from the SSL) and Hannah (from the HFL) were the hosts. We were joined by colleagues as well as ex-trainees who came to talk to the group about their experiences after the traineeship.

We’d like to thank everyone who came to support us or impart their knowledge and wisdom of what happens next!

It’s fair to say that the majority of us were quite nervous about going up to present but everyone did a great job and the mix of people in attendance created a great atmosphere!

Here’s a run down of the day:

9.30-9.40 – Welcome!

9.40-9.50 – Emily Chen, Workshop with History and English department students about discovering the authors of anonymous travel diaries through contextual clues
9.50-10.00 – Hannah Hickman, Finding books, surveying students
10.00-10.10 – Jamie Stokes, The Oxford Futures Library – Creating the Art Kleiner Archive Catalogue
10.10-10.20 –Rebecca Wray, Social Science Social Media
10.20-10.30 – Andi Glover, Blues and 852s – Organising and Barcoding a Series of Police Reports

10.30-10.50 – Coffee break!

10.50-11.00 – Ceri Ashwell, ORLiMS: Designing the logo
11.00-11.10 – Yannis Choupas, Creating an online Shelfmark Locator for a labyrinthine library: the work so far

11.10-11.30 – Guest Speaker: Verity Westgate, Bodleian Libraries
11.30-11.50 – Guest Speaker: Charlie Lythgoe, Oxford Brookes
11.50-12.10 – Guest Speaker: Niall Sheekey, Harris Manchester College Library
12.10-13.00 – Lunch!

13.00-13.10 – Sam Hughes, General Year in Review
13.10-13.20 – Duncan Jones, Redesigning/rebranding the Bodleian notices and signs
13.20-13.30 – Bethan Watkins, Preventing book damage
13.30-13.40 – Harriet Costelloe, Cataloguing the papers of the Tilling Society

13.40-14.10 – Break out!

14.10-14.20 – Micha Cooke, #digital: a survey of manuscript viewers in the digital humanities
14.20-14.30 – Tom Cullimore, Leaving Out: Curating livres d’artiste in St John’s College Library
14.30-14.40 – Lydia Wright, A Collection in Review: Bringing the Sackler’s Eastern Art Periodical Collection Up-to-Date

14.40-14.50 – Thanks!

Finally…a little picture collage. Including (maybe) the first Graduate Trainee Showcase selfie! Yes!

Anja has already covered the getting started process in her blog post, so I’ll cover what tasks I tackled and my experience of the day!

What did I do?

1. Finding Guest Speakers

I took responsibility for finding guest speakers from the world of library and information management in Oxford for the showcase. Anja and I decided that we wanted to have speakers that had previously been trainees, as they would be able to give us good advice on what to do once we had finished our year here. To find some suitable people I looked through the graduate trainee blog and also LinkedIn.

We were very lucky to have three guest speakers at the event – Alice Nelson, the librarian at Hertford College, Helen Matthews, the assistant librarian at Nuffield College and Laura Cracknell, the librarian at Pembroke College. They decided amongst themselves to cover in turn; what the traineeship was like, what postgraduate study involves and then career advice for after the traineeship and the course.

2. Blog posts

Unfortunately, not all of the trainees were able to attend the showcase. In order that there was still a record of what they achieved visible at the event, I emailed non-attending trainees to request that they write a blog post about their project and their year at Oxford. At the event, we displayed these blog posts on some of the computers, so that the showcase guests could see the wide variety of projects we had this year. You can see their posts below.

3. Collecting the presentations

In order to make the day run as smoothly as possible I collated all of the trainees’ presentations beforehand, so that they could be accessed on the same USB stick. This avoided needing to plug in 13 different sticks/access 13 different email accounts on the day. I just had to be careful to not forget the USB stick in the morning!

4. Planning in the immediate run-up to the event

Anja and I got together shortly before the showcase to plan the practicalities of the day itself. Luckily, we had some volunteers to help us on the day – Eóin Davies, Diana Hackett and Emma Jones! We worked out when we needed to arrive to set up, go down to collect the tea and coffee urns, and then the lunch, how many people we needed to send to carry these things and how we would clear away for the next event. I also planned what we would say to start the day, introduce the guest speakers, and close the day. Thanks to our planning, the day itself went surprisingly smoothly!

 

Key Skills

Before the showcase, I didn’t have much experience of presenting information in front of strangers, so this was a challenge. I knew that I needed to try to make what I was presenting interesting and relevant, so I thought a lot about my audience when writing my speech. I practiced a lot so that I didn’t need to check my cue cards too much as well. As I was presenting on something close to me, it was easy to be enthusiastic! The showcase has introduced me to making formal presentations on my work, which I’m sure will be handy further down the line.

Like Anja, I also feel that organising the showcase has also given me some new skills. It’s been great to work so closely in a team, corresponding through email and on the phone as our libraries are in opposite sides of town. We’ve had to plan ahead, divide tasks, manage our time well and liaise with lots of different people – all this has given us a taste of what organising an event can involve.

 

How do I think it went?

Pretty well, I think! I really enjoyed seeing all of the presentations, hearing what the guest speakers had to say and meeting lots of new people over coffee and lunch. It was interesting to hear about what everyone had achieved this year, after hearing snippets about people’s projects at training sessions.

Overall, I’ve had a really great year in Oxford, and I feel that I’ve learnt a lot in my library! This Autumn I am going on to study for an MA in Library and Information Studies at UCL, which I’m excited about. It’s been a pleasure to meet all the other trainees, a few of whom I will be seeing at UCL 

Each year the traineeship at Oxford ends with a Showcase where all of the trainees have the opportunity to speak about their experience as a trainee at their library. This can be about a particular project they have been involved in or more generally about what they have learnt and enjoyed about the year.

This year I organised the Showcase along with Emily Delahaye from the Sainsbury Library. I must admit to having been a little nervous when I heard I would be expected to present in front of an audience as I’m sure were many of my peers. This is why when an email was circulated asking for volunteers to organise the event I decided to get involved.  Not only would it be a good chance to gain experience of organising an event (which is something I had never done before), but I figured that by being involved in the planning stages I would feel more confident on the day. I am pleased to say that I think my theory worked. I still felt a bit nervous when I stepped up to present, but I came away from the day feeling really proud of myself and I know that when I need to present in front of a large group again in the future, it will seem less intimidating.

Getting Started

I could talk for much longer about my experience of presenting, but I really want to talk to you about my experience of organising the Trainee Showcase. Knowing where to begin when we first started organising the event was quite daunting. We were lucky, however, to have the assistance of Tamsyn from the Staff Development department who explained how the Showcase has worked in previous years and helped us get a sense of the different tasks we would be responsible for organising.

Once we had a general impression about what the Showcase entailed, we started out by agreeing upon a few key things:

–          What we needed to do

–          Who would do what

–          When things needed to be completed

Making these decisions straight away made the rest of the process run very smoothly. By dividing up responsibilities we were able to share the workload so that the Showcase didn’t take too much time away from our normal jobs. We also made sure to start things off as early as possible so that we wouldn’t be rushing to get everything ready at the last minute. This also had the added bonus that if something unexpected happened (such as Emily or I became ill) we would still have time to get everything ready.

What did I do?

1. Contacting Trainees

We started off by emailing all of the trainees to give them a basic idea of what the Showcase would be like. Once we had given everyone a chance to think about what they would like to present about, we then contacted the trainees again to ask them for the following information:

–          Whether they would be able to attend the Showcase

–          What they planned to present about

–          A short biography of themselves

–          Any dietary requirements for the buffet lunch

The main reason we needed this information was to help us produce a programme of the day that could be sent out to everyone we planned to invite. Knowing how many trainees would be speaking would help us divide up the day evenly and we wanted to add as much detail as possible about each trainee and what they would be speaking about to help our invitees decide which part of the day to come along for if they were unable to attend the entire event.

I created a spreadsheet to record attendance and dietary information and I saved each trainees biographies and presentation information in a folder. This made the information easily accessible when it was needed.

2. Sending Invitations

When we had received everything we needed from the trainees, we could start creating the programme to be sent out with our invitations. It was quite easy to put the programme together, but it was more difficult to decide on timings. There were a few keys parts of the day that couldn’t be too massively altered such as lunchtime (no one wants lunch at 11.15am), but we were also restricted by the start time as well as the number of trainees we had presenting. After some work, we managed to timetable the day quite well.

Next was to send out invitations. The trainees’ Supervisors were all invited as well as everyone who had spoken to us or trained us over the year. Due to the fantastic and varied training programme offered as part of the Oxford traineeship this was a very large list of people! As with receiving details from the trainees, we needed a central location to record responses. To make this easier, I asked all those invited to contact me, and I created a spreadsheet to record who would be attending and whether they had any dietary requirements.

3. Organising Catering

We decided to offer a buffet lunch which would allow everyone in attendance to get a chance to circulate and chat with each other. We were conscious that this could be a good opportunity to people to ask questions and share feedback about the presentations we had seen so far.

Using the spreadsheets I created for recording attendance made organising the catering very straightforward. I could easily calculate how many people would require lunch as well as pass on dietary information.

This information had to be passed on to the caterers at least a week before the event which was made easy by the fact that we had contacted the trainees and sent out invitations quite a long time in advance.

 Key Skills

Obviously, the main skill needed for running the Showcase was organisation. Emily and I spent time at the start planning what exactly needed to be done and we were able to reach our objectives through good time management.

Looking back at the organisation Emily and I did for the Showcase has made me realise that it was not just all about planning, but communication was also actually a big element. We needed to be able to communicate with each other so that we didn’t become confused or disorganised. We also needed to communicate with our fellow trainees, with those who were invited to the Showcase and with many other people. In these instances, we always tried our best to be friendly and approachable as well as to make our messages clear and informative so that everyone knew what was happening.

Another common theme was being able to record information accurately and efficiently. It would have been a real challenge to plan the timings of presentations or know how many chairs to place out in the room if we hadn’t recorded people’s replies clearly.

How do I think it went?

I really enjoyed organising the Trainee Showcase because it taught me a lot about how to plan an event and it has shown me that I am very good at managing my time and strategizing. I also thoroughly enjoyed getting to work closely with Emily which wouldn’t have been possible otherwise because we work in different libraries.

The day itself was a little nerve-wracking, but thanks to the positive audience and our careful preparation before the day, everything ran smoothly and I can even say I enjoyed myself! The trainees all did a fantastic job at presenting. Everyone had clearly taken time to plan a professional presentation and it was a pleasure to discover how varied each of our experiences and projects have been.

Overall, I’m really grateful to have had the opportunity to organise the Trainee Showcase. It has taught a lot about event management as well as about my own strengths and weaknesses. If you are ever offered the chance to challenge yourself, as I was in this case, I highly recommend you take it…

Anja Badock, Graduate Trainee, Bodleian Social Science Library

On Wednesday the trainees had the opportunity to present our trainee projects to our supervisors and fellow trainees.

My project was called ‘The Oxford Traineeship: Past, Present and Future’. It was initially meant to be a history of the traineeship, but I encountered some problems finding information (not encouraging for a prospective librarian!) so it has turned into a report on the traineeship as it is now with some reflection on the past and the future.

I started out by finding an article called ‘Evolution: The Oxford Traineeship’ (SCONUL Focus Number 83 Summer/Autumn 2006) which showed how the traineeship worked 5 years ago. I then spent some time at Osney looking through files and finally sent out a questionnaire asking the other trainees what they do on a day-to-day basis.

The following is a section from my presentation which I found interesting:

“I haven’t been able to find out the exact date that the traineeship as we know it began – I am aware of trainees from as long as 20 years ago. However, in the 1880s, Bodley’s Librarian, Edward Williams Byron Nicholson began to employ boys as a cheap form of labour with the incentive that they could have the opportunity to gain an Oxford degree. He paid them “10 shillings a week until they qualified for matriculation in the University, when they were put up to the higher wage of £60 a year” – these employees were known as the Bodley Boys. In 1948, the first ‘Bodley Girl’ was employed and was able to gain a pass degree at St Anne’s while working in the Library. Although this scheme differs greatly to the current set-up – it was more of a chance for people to gain a degree, than to gain library experience, I feel that it can be seen as an early manifestation of the traineeship. It also shows that the Bodleian, specifically, has been dedicated to the education and training of eager individuals for hundreds of years.”

See more trainee presentations here.