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Library inductions

Trainee Showcase 2025: Part 4

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This is the fourth and final post in our series on the 2025 Trainee Showcase. If you missed the previous three posts, you can find them directly below this one!

Jake Banyard – Improving user access: wayfinding and resource signposting at Teddy Hall

Written by Millie Krantz

Jake’s trainee project tackled a problem intimately familiar to many library staff: how can we make libraries as approachable and intuitive as possible for readers?

Teddy Hall has a beautiful but imposing college library – it’s housed in the converted medieval church of St Peter-in-the-East and retains many original features like fifteenth-century stained glass. When libraries are in historic buildings that were built to intimidate and impress, readers can understandably have apprehensions about using the space, which poses a problem when we as library professionals want to welcome students in and encourage them to use our resources. In addition, the fact that it isn’t purpose-built means that it can be a bit of a maze, even to users who are familiar with academic libraries. Since it tends to be difficult to knock down medieval buildings just to make them easier to navigate, Jake has had to settle on improving accessibility by reworking the map, improving signage, and ensuring that accurate and up-to-date information is circulated on the college website.

An image of a computer on a desk, accompanied by a keyboard and mouse, a map, a sign about searching the catalogue, and a small teddy bear
Jake’s new and improved map and book-finding guide alongside an important member of staff

Jake’s improved maps take a seemingly simplistic approach, but one that is impressively pulled off: stripping out excess information while retaining and adding things that are actually useful. Anyone who has spent hours trying to rework their library’s map in Canva will understand how hard it can be to include as much useful information as possible without everything becoming visually overwhelming, but Jake’s tactic of splitting up and naming the different sections makes navigation much easier. Jake’s use of icons to indicate amenities not only makes it easier for students to look up where their section might be in the library, but also provides a common language of locations so that giving directions becomes easier, and represents the amenities in a visually different way to reduce the amount of clutter on the map. Furthermore, the maps provide an idea of the building’s actual layout and structure in order to help students navigate their way to the books rather than getting stuck at dead-ends. Jake has made sure to display the map at points where students would need it, alongside other useful resources, like a basic guide to using SOLO. On top of this, his map is designed to function in tandem with improved signage that indicates where study and accessibility aids can be found, improving wayfinding in general.

Webpages and social media are also important ways of helping students use our services easily, especially in college libraries that remain open outside of staff hours. Jake’s useful updates to the Teddy Hall websites ensure that students have easy access to information about printing and accessibility aids, and that various different pages are better linked, enabling students to be more independent and confident in their library usage. Jake also made several posts on Teddy Hall Library’s Instagram explaining what the library has to offer; this direct social media outreach provides an invaluable counterpart to the wayfinding and signage improvements inside the library.

All in all, Jake has planned and executed a number of highly useful improvements to Teddy Hall’s reader provisions, ensuring that the library will better serve the needs of students and that they will get more out of everything the library can offer them.

Hannah Richmond – Data, displays and digital support: my year in review

Written by Ash Lammers

Hannah’s presentation took us through her three main projects this year, which are paradigmatic of the various ways in which we as trainees make lasting impacts on our libraries. 

Shortly after Michaelmas started, Hannah set out to collect and analyse data from the student induction tours that the Law Library runs for new (and returning) students. She aimed to make these tours more effective for staff and students in three key areas: engagement, satisfaction and workforce. For engagement recommendations, she reviewed keywords that appeared most often in positive feedback about the tours (helpful and informative, if you are wondering!), as well as collecting attendee numbers for each tour or induction session held by the library. By combining this data with the improvements suggested by attendees, she concluded that increasing the awareness of inductions among students would be useful to make sure that all who might benefit from an induction could attend, and to increase satisfaction among those already attending. For workforce recommendations, Hannah collated a spreadsheet which compared the number of staff members involved in giving the induction and tours, and came to the conclusion that a reduction in the number of tours/inductions given would be beneficial for both staff workload and student engagement. Naturally, this data came presented beautifully in highly readable pie charts, spreadsheets and diagrams – what’s not to love? 

A collection of books related to Green Action Week arranged into a book display

A second project that accompanied her all throughout the year was the setup of the themed book displays in the Law Library. By curating themed displays for events such as Black History Month and Disability History Month, Hannah was able to highlight the diversity of the law collection and specific intersections of marginalised identities with the law. If you are interested in Hannah’s process, our earlier Disability History Month blog post features some examples from not only the Law Library’s display, but also the Social Science Library and New College Library. While it is widely known that trainees’ hopes of books being taken off the display and read typically remain but a distant dream, Hannah noted significant interest in readers walking past, who would stop to browse. 

Her final project involved recording three bitesize videos on Panopto, in which she took students through the basic steps of how to access digital support materials to assist them in their studies while at Oxford. These videos are currently available online, and will hopefully help many more students in the years to come.

Lilly Wilcox – Fresco: managing web archiving in preparation for the move away from Oxford Mosaic

Written by Elena Brearley

Over the course of the year, Lilly has presented on a few occasions about her work as a Digital Archivist, and each time I have been so impressed by her knowledge and passion for the subject. On the day of the showcase, she explained to us that University IT services are currently transitioning from the web publishing platform Mosaic to the new platform, Fresco. Lilly told us how her work as a Graduate Trainee Digital Archivist working with the Bodleian Libraries Web Archive (BLWA) has been impacted by this change.

To begin with, Lilly confronted us with an intriguing question: ‘Why archive the Web?’. She argued that we should archive the web for the same reason we archive any other kind of material: web archives have legal and evidential value as well as cultural, social, and historical importance. They are a significant resource for research, including for use in data sets.

Lilly introduced us to some key tools and programmes that web archivists use to do their work. An important tool for web archiving is a ‘web crawler’, which is an automated bot that ‘crawls’ and browses through the internet, capturing and archiving websites as it goes. Crawlers are used in other contexts too: Google uses them to find and bring together resources relevant to a search, and AI companies use them to scrape information to feed to Large Language Models.

Another key term for those such as myself who are new to learning about web archiving is ‘Seed URL’. Seed URLs function as a starting point for web crawlers to begin their journey working through and collecting data from a website. Web archivists can schedule crawlers to visit seed URLs at different points in time, and each captured version of the site is then saved to a WARC (Web ARChive) file. This means that past iterations of the site can be compared to the live version.

A screenshot of the Bodleian's Archive-It page

Bodleian Libraries Web Archive, which Lilly works on, was started in 2011 and is primarily focused on archiving University of Oxford websites. Until recently, these websites had been supported by the content management system Mosaic, a system which has posed some challenges to web archivists, including content frequently missing from captures due to being pulled through Application Programming Interfaces (APIs).

With the transition from Mosaic to the new content management system Fresco, Lilly’s team had to quickly make some challenging decisions about which websites to document for the Bodleian Libraries Web Archive. With the limited time, resources and budget available to them before the migration took off, they appraised over 1000 sites and decided to begin archiving over 150 additional websites, mostly for lab groups, centres, institutes, and departments. As they were in this process, sites were already being removed, so they had to work quickly and ended up gathering an enormous amount of data.

Fresco is being rolled out to the university community slowly, so the BLWA team is still learning how archive-friendly Oxford Fresco will be. Lilly emphasised the importance of collaboration and communication with web archivists from the outset of projects such as this one and hoped that people might gain more awareness of web archiving when creating websites (including designing them to be crawler friendly).

Lilly closed with a profound message on the importance of digital archiving, especially in times of political change, pointing to the recent change in administration in the US earlier this year and the drastic changes to government websites that have ensued. A question from the audience prompted Lilly to talk further about the implications of AI crawlers and how some sites have banned crawlers altogether. Hopefully in the future site owners and web developers will be open to working with web archivists to allow permission for their crawlers to carry on their work of documenting the World Wide Web.

Lilly is an effective and persuasive advocate of Web Archiving. She has certainly given me new insight and perspective onto how impermanent and slippery the internet is, and how necessary it is to document its changes over time. I hope she continues to be a champion for this important work!

Gia Simmons – Working papers and a small ‘archive’

Written by Lilly Wilcox

Last but certainly not least, Gia Simmons gave us a look into some of the work that she has done this year on two unconventional collections at the Social Science Library: a small archive of papers from the former International Development Centre Library and a large donation of working papers from the University of Bradford. For her project, she helped the SSL make steps toward understanding the makeup of these collections, where they belong, and how to make them accessible in future.

A collection of books and archival boxes from the Queen Elizabeth House collection

The International Development Centre Library was originally based at Queen Elizabeth House, home to the Department of International Development. This collection of papers came into being from a precursor to the IDC called the Agricultural Economics Research Institute and was created between ca. 1900–1980s. The papers were eventually inherited in 2005 when the contents of the International Development Centre Library moved into the SSL. Because of the complicated chain of custody and time that passed between when the papers were created, acquired by the SSL, and when Gia began looking at them, it had become unclear what the collection comprised.

In this larger collection from the International Development Library, Gia discovered a series of papers from the House of Lords for which the SSL had no record of the contents. The four boxes of material comprise miscellaneous papers relating to the creation of the 20th Report of the select committee on the European community’s agriculture and the environment during parliamentary sessions from 1983–1984. These made their way into the archives through a former Oxford Lecturer in Agricultural Economics, Dr Rosemary Fennell, who served as an advisor to the committee and deposited the papers with Queen Elizabeth House. Gia documented the different archival material in the boxes, taking note of their titles, creators, publishers, and dates of creation, as well as the mysterious set of codes with which the documents were labelled. Equipped with a new understanding of what is in the collection, the SSL is now looking for an archive with which to deposit these papers so they can be made accessible for research.

The second collection was a donation of working papers relating to international development donated to the Bodleian by the University of Bradford, which is weeding their collections. To integrate this donated material with existing SSL collections, Gia researched the full institution names and series names behind the working papers (which weren’t always evident from existing records and the material) to determine whether that series and its papers were already held by the SSL. With this information she was able to either match the material up with an existing shelfmark and barcode them for physical processing, or work toward creating shelfmarks and records for materials that were completely new to the SSL collections.

Gia’s presentation was a fascinating look into the sometimes-unconventional ways that our libraries acquire new material and the massive amount of work that is required to understand and make available these acquisitions.

And Finally, Our Farewell

Sadly, with this post, our time as the 2024-2025 graduate trainees has come to an end. We want to thank all of you who supported us, read our blog posts, or simply put up with us as we tried to make sense of the wacky world of the University of Oxford libraries. Hopefully we will see you all again, but if not…

So long, and thanks for all the fish!

Visible and invisible marginalia

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October: there’s a new month to write on the bookplates. On one side of the library, the wildflower meadow has been mown for the winter, while on the other side squirrels chase each other around rings of crunchy leaves arranged by the gardens team.

Autumnal tree with arranged circles of fallen leaves, and red brick buildings in the background.
LMH’s grounds change with the seasons. (That’s the library in the background.)

I’m enjoying the increase of students that comes with the start of the academic year; that moment where you help a reader find the information they need is one of the most rewarding aspects of library work. Inductions have been delivered, and students are beginning to remember where the book returns box is and how to persuade the self-issue machine to scan their library cards. And when the staff can’t be around, hopefully our updated guidebooks are helping the students to navigate the library, as well as the re-designed signs giving (hopefully) helpful hints at the point of need.

Desk with pile of books, library stamp, and 'October 2018' handwritten on printed bookplates.
Books waiting for their bookplates.

But in those quiet weeks before the students returned, much of my time was spent digging through multiple sources of book donations. I never knew quite what to expect when I opened each slightly musty box. Some were simply labelled ‘Odds’.

Donated books, in contrast to books that have only ever belonged to the library, bear more of a trace of an individual reader’s life. They are depositories of nicknames, Christmas cards, and unofficial reviews in biro (‘not as awful as I expected’). I found newspaper clippings, postcards, and typewritten author correspondence about nuns.

New marks and notes are not encouraged in library books: we are trying to preserve our collection for future readers. Our books are full, though, of invisible notes. Library books are no less brought alive by readers; readers, in turn, are marked by the new information from the books. Whether an inspiring autobiography from Our Shared Shelf (more on that in a later post), a textbook that completes the final lines of a coding project, or a dictionary flicked open to a new favourite word – books are interwoven with readers’ lives. Book donors’ more apparent interactions with the physical items are a reminder of this.

Resin skeleton with fake cobwebs, plastic spiders, and a pile of DVDs.
Freddy with his pick of Halloween DVDs.

But anyway, that’s enough sitting around romanticising circulation. Libraries may be vessels of new ideas, old ideas, rediscovered ideas, and disproven ideas, but they are also full of day-to-day tasks. This week, as it’s nearly Halloween, I’ve been busy helping Freddy the library skeleton keep our display stocked with horror DVDs, Gothic tales and plastic spiders. Signs need laminating. Acquisitions need classifying. And I’m also meeting some exciting new ‘colleagues’ who I’ll hopefully be sharing photos of in the next blog…

Trainee to trainer?

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One of the unexpected aspects of the trainee year for me has been the opportunity for user education.  I hadn’t really considered that during my time here I would go from being the new guy who asks all of the questions to someone knowledgeable enough to give training to our users.  When the new academic intake arrives each October, the Bodleian runs a series of tours around the library to help orientate students and familiarise them with relevant collections for their fields of study.  It’s a big site and the tour takes around 45 minutes with plenty of time to explain things like Closed Stack material, just where exactly the Gladstone Link is and that yes, Harry Potter was filmed in Duke Humfrey’s Library.  I’m also starting to help run ‘Making The Most Of (the Bodleian)’ sessions which cover the practicalities of using the library, from exploring the catalogue to the differences between electronic subscription material and electronic legal deposit.

The Divinity School – User Education since the 1400s

This month, I assisted in a Research Skills workshop for humanities postgraduates at the University’s IT Services centre.  Run collaboratively between the Bodleian Libraries and IT Services, students were able to move between work stations (and rooms) with different tasks on each table and the chance to learn about subscription resources which could aid their research.  It was a fun environment with the idea to change learning tasks every ten minutes.  The students were able to cover a lot during the morning and the on the spot feedback was very positive.  My role was supportive; being on hand to answer questions and solve any issues that arose during the sessions.  The university is fortunate enough to be able to subscribe or have access to an enormous array of electronic resources and at times it’s difficult, even as a staff member, to have even heard of every database – let alone be familiar with using it.  Often it’s about having a broader awareness of how that sort of resource works and being able to explain with a logical approach.

As digital resources continue to proliferate, the role of a librarian will increasingly need to cover user education.  There are always opportunities to help readers in new ways and at the same time, to learn more yourself!

Inductions – a not-so-ordinary Day in the Life

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For those not in Oxford, this week has been our Freshers’ Week, which at the Law Library meant lots of lost undergraduates appearing and needing looking after. Every first-year undergraduate law student is supposed to come to a library induction on Wednesday, Thursday or Friday, organised by their college, which includes a tour, a quiz, and an introduction to the online resources that we pay for. So it’s been a busy few days for the staff, trying to shepherd them around, answer questions, get our ordinary work done, and help all the other readers as usual. Yesterday for me was a particularly unusual day, so I thought I’d blog a bit about it to give a bit of a flavour of induction week at Law.

After getting in at 8.45 to coax my computer into life and collect my notes, I went to run the first tour of the day at 9.15 with a colleague. We were expecting 15 students, but at 9.20 had only five, so I was dispatched at 9.25 to take them on a tour while she waited to see if any more turned up. Condensing a 20-minute tour into 10 meant a bit of extra pressure, but I was pleased when the group seemed to find the quiz fairly approachable by the end. It was only my second tour, and the first one I’d led had seemed a bit non-plussed about the layout of the library, but this group seemed to remember things quite well. The quiz required them to find four books from areas they will need to find a lot in their first year: Roman law, Halsbury’s Statutes, a Law Report, and a journal article. I even had a go at explaining why there was only one name in the Criminal Appeal case they were looking at – picking up bits of law here and there already! We got them, and another two who’d arrived eventually, safely delivered to the IT induction on time at 9.55, and I had time to get a well-deserved cup of tea.
When I got back to my desk, I found an exciting email waiting for me. I signed up last week to go to a talk by Marcus du Sautoy, Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science (which used to be held by Richard Dawkins), about how social media is useful to his job. It was part of the IT Services Engage Programme, which looks like it will have a whole bunch of other interesting things over the next few weeks. Unfortunately, when I signed up, the talk was sold out, but I found an email waiting for me to tell me that I could now go. At 12.30 that day! The talk turned out to be really interesting: Marcus du Sautoy was very engaging and enthusiastic, particularly about Twitter, but also about maths and science generally, which as someone who likes to call herself some kind of mathematician, was very refreshing after a while at Law, which doesn’t have much scope for that. Hopefully I’ll get to go along to some of the other Engage talks or workshops, for example there’s one on Crowd Sourcing collections, which sounds very interesting. They’re also running a 23 Things for Research self-study programme over the term, which sounds interesting, and which I’d quite like to do. I’m not sure how it ties in with cpd23, which is for Professional Development, and I know other library people have done.

Anyway, once I’d got back from the talk, grabbed some lunch from the Social Sciences Café next door and got back to my desk, it was time to get down to work in earnest. The Law Bod is part of the legal deposit for the Bodleian. I have to say that I’m not massively up to speed about how exactly legal deposit works, but here’s my attempt at an explanation: every book or pamphlet or magazine etc. that is published in the UK has to have a copy sent to the British Library in London. Any other legal deposit library in the UK (the Bodleian, Cambridge University Library, the National Library of Scotland, the National Library of Wales, or the library of Trinity College, Dublin) are allowed to request a free copy within a year of publication (paraphrased from Wikipedia, please don’t judge me). Now, within the Bodleian Libraries, various different libraries receive the legal deposit books that we request, depending on the subject. And Law, naturally, gets the law books. I haven’t been able to find a good list of Bodleian libraries which get legal deposit books, but the central Bodleian, the Social Science Library, the Radcliffe Science Library, the Vere Harmsworth Library, and Rhodes House Library all do, while the Philosophy and Theology Faculties Library doesn’t. But anyway, every week we get a delivery of books that our librarian has picked out from the larger list as being relevant to law (sometimes the subject librarians have to argue it out amongst themselves who gets it), and they come to my desk. I process them (stamping, recording, and security taping) before they get catalogued and classified. Soon I’ll be able to help with the cataloguing, but not until my permissions get sorted out yet again. So that took up the rest of my day really, until 5pm.

Which, sadly, was not the end of my work, because it was time for my fortnightly evening shift, until 7pm. I was working at the Reserve Collection, where we keep the most highly-used textbooks and lend them within the library to students. This is mostly to keep track of who has them, so that they can always be given out when people want them, and not get lost in some far corner of the library. I was also checking reading lists, since the Law Bod tries very hard to have a copy of all books on reading lists each year, and so every year every single one needs to be checked (63 this year, although we haven’t had them all yet) against the catalogue. Which is mostly fine, but unfortunately the one I was checking seemed to have been almost entirely rewritten, and there was quite a bit of material we didn’t have, and some which nowhere in Oxford had!

A couple of readers stood out in my mind from that shift. One girl wanted to know all about the various legal databases. I showed her OxLIP+, our way of searching for them, and then helped her to find Westlaw, a major legal database, so that she could find the case she needed to read online. This took a while, since her laptop keyboard and internet browser were both in French! But we got there in the end. Then a little while later, she came back, saying that she was having trouble downloading the case. She showed me what she was doing, and after a while the site gave her a message to click ‘open’ or ‘save’, but neither of these options appeared anywhere! Instead, a banner appeared at the top of the page, in French. Half-remembering seeing similar, English, banners myself, I managed to work out that her browser was blocking a popup that would ask her to save the document. Partly by my very rusty French, and partly just remembering the same process from previous occasions, I managed to show her how to unblock the popup, and she got the article! I felt very pleased with myself.

Another reader had a serious of complicated requests for my colleagues, which I had to help with by photocopying some of his papers, and finding him an envelope. He turned out to be a visiting student of some kind, and wanted to come back the following day to continue working, but only had a day pass for the library. Unfortunately, he waited until 7.05 to let us know about this, so with security hovering at our shoulders, and everyone ready to leave for the weekend, we had to try and sort out his permission to use the library, and explain what he should do after the weekend if he wanted to keep using it. After this, he asked for directions to another building, so we found him a map, and for another envelope, which we couldn’t get because the whole building was locked up for closing! I was impressed at how willing my colleagues were to continue to help him, even though it went well beyond our remit, and it was past closing time on a Friday evening. I only hope I could be that patient in the same situation.

At any rate, at 7.15 in the rain, I finally left the library, induction week over, and ready for a restful weekend. Thanks very much for reading my not-so-ordinary Day in the Life!

Trainee Project Showcase: Graduate Trainee Projects in the Science Libraries

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On Wednesday, we concluded our traineeship through the presentation of the projects that we had worked on throughout the year. It was a wonderful opportunity to see what everyone had been working on in their libraries.

I presented my project on the digitization of the Birthday Book of George Claridge Druce (1850-1932), chemist, Mayor of Oxford and one of the great botanists of the early 20th Century, which I worked on at the Sherardian Library in the Department of Plant Sciences. I greatly enjoyed working on this project, and learned a lot, not only about Druce (a most remarkable man), but about the practice of botany in Britain during the early 20th Century (shift from natural history as collecting to a circumscribed science, and the rise of the conservation movement to preserve rare specimens in the wild rather than just collecting them).

I also learned how to design and implement databases in Access and learned some basic XML coding. The next step will be uploading the Druce database to the UK Archives Hub, where it will be made available for research.

One of my other projects at the Radcliffe Science Library involved making a virtual tour of the library, which was used during the Science Open Days at the RSL when prospective undergraduates visit the library and science departments at Oxford. The virtual tour was done using Powerpoint and Adobe Captivate. You can view it at the following link:

Radcliffe Science Library Virtual Tour

Going beyond induction sessions: continuing to keep readers informed

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My trainee project is centred around the implementation of a new induction session, predominantly aimed at external readers at the Bodleian Library. As a reference only, legal deposit library, we welcome a large number of external readers, who are usually completely unfamiliar with the workings of the Bodleian. This of course, should not come as a surprise, the terminology, practices and organisation of the Bodleian Library is ‘unique’ to say the least! Inducting readers, many of whom are only staying in Oxford on a short term basis or who will be using the libraries infrequently but over a long period of time, is a tricky task. At the moment, it is a task which has become even more difficult because of the all encompassing changes affecting the New Bodleian. The intricacies and subtleties of these changes have come to the fore this week as I’ve started working in Special Collections, whose massive decant has been underway for some time. The logistics of moving around huge quantities of large, valuable, old material, between different libraries, while maintaining a ‘normal’ fetching service, are difficult to organise and involve so many different departments that it is difficult to keep everyone in the loop all of the time.

All this has got me thinking that however comprehensive induction programmes are, that is all they are.  It is imperative to keep readers informed about operational changes to the library and that got me thinking about blogging, twitter and facebook- Web 2.0 applications I was perhaps too hasty to dismiss, when exploring them as part of 23 Things.

I would be really interested to hear if anyone is planning to run (refresher) induction sessions at the start of Trinity term and to hear about ways libraries are keeping thier readers infomed of changes to services?

Library Inductions…(the law library experience!)

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Amy’s post about induction procedure and policy made me realise that I don’t really know how induction works in other libraries so I thought I’d share my experience of the Bodleian Law Library approach;

Apparently law students have a lot of serious essay writing to do before term even properly starts so a good library induction is essential.  I ended up being quite heavily involved in inductions at the law library, for both postgraduate induction week and undergraduate induction week, mainly because I volunteered myself as it sounded like lots of fun!  At the law library undergraduate inductions are a quite a big event. We  held induction sessions during 0th week for each college and these were followed by hands on classes and lectures in 1st week.  Not only was there a library tour during 0th week inductions but a quiz and class in our IT suite  intended to educate the students about using library resources and start their first essays.   The quiz required students to work in pairs, using the print resources in the library to answer the questions. So not only did it help the students to find the key areas of the library for their course but also introduced them to the different resources available. For the first question we gave them the task of finding the title and author of a book by looking for a shelfmark.  Another question involved using the law reports, we gave a citation and they had to find the party names.  Before induction week I tested the quiz to make sure it all worked, I was an obvious candidate as I had about the same level of knowledge of the library resources as a fresher! It was a brilliant task for me to do though as it helped me learn the basics of finding cases and statutes as well as textbooks and journals. I had to ask for help at one point when Halsbury’s Statutes seemed impossible to locate but apart from that I got all the answers right! It seems like a very effective way to make the new students actively learn about using the library from the very beginning of their time here.  A library tour is good but probably not as effective as getting them to go off and find things for themselves.  Of course the tour guides were on hand during the quiz to point people in the right direction and answer any questions, which of course there were many because the library resources can be quite confusing if you are new.  Finding books was a pretty straightforward and hassle free task because by the time you reach university most people have been to a library and looked for a book.  But a law reading list can look very scary once you reach citations for legislation and law reports, understandably this was the point students became stuck.

A citation can look like this: Pepper v Hart [1993] AC 593

Walk into a library with this on your reading list and trying to find it must be a very daunting task.  I can tell you that it is because it took me a while to figure out what all the numbers and letters mean.   So by including tasks like finding a case in a law report as an activity during the induction means that students are at least familiar with the basics of where to look and how to begin interpreting the citation when they start the course.  The skills needed to navigated law library resources are followed through with the Legal Research Skills Programme (LRSP), a compulsory part of first year for undergraduates, which aims to teach students how to find material on their reading list.

I like to think that the law library induction programme helped this years freshers make a start on those first week assignments and made the world of legal resources a little less intimidating! I haven’t had any queries about where to find cases cited on reading lists so I guess the quiz alongside the LRSP must have worked well.

Library Inductions…

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Last Friday morning, my supervisor arranged for me to attend the ‘Induction Working Party’ held at the SSL. After a slightly nippy and overcast walk from the Bodleian we arrived for the meeting and were greeted by Alice and Susan staffing the desk! It was so interesting to step into a library which is feels very modern and therefore worlds away from my usual working surroundings in the Bodleian…

Because of timetabling constraints I could not be that involved in the induction process at the Bod, so I was really pleased to have the opportunity to attend a working party designed to evaluate induction policies and more specifically to evaluate this year’s induction. The committee has representatives from several OULS libraries, the Admissions office and College libraries.  I am particularly interested in user education and it is an area of library work I am hoping to get involved in through my trainee project.

One of the main difficulties of a Working Party of this kind is that it covers all libraries in Oxford; colleges, faculties, big libraries, small libraries, each serving a different number of students, with different sorts of needs and interests. Much of the meeting was therefore inevitably taken up discussing the remit of such a group. Although I was encouraged by the progress made and enjoyed the session, the meeting also highlighted how difficult it is to make university wide decisions even on what seem fairly small matters.

One thing I definitely took away from the session was the need to keep talking about induction policy and practice in order to try and appreciate the variety of libraries in Oxford. So… I would be interested to know how many of us were involved in inductions and if you were, was there anything you thought worked particularly well or other things which perhaps needed improving? Also,  we spent a lot of time discussing the undergraduate user education database- if any of you have nay thoughts about it then it would be great to hear them!