Libraries and Learning Links of the Week

The Art and Science of Speaking (into Microphones) at Conferences

John Dewees has a great post on a single topic that he helpfully explains in his blog title:

Look at this person talking into the microphone at a distance of 6 to 12 inches pointed directly at their mouth. 10 out of friggin 10, absolutely no notes, utterly nailing it.

That's about 20cm for those of us who don't walk around saying things like “I walked a few leagues to the drug store to buy a stick of milk and a quart of butter”. Anyway, this is a great post that stays on message and has a strong message for Bob who refuses to work out how to switch the mic on:

If you refuse to do the above, or worse yet, refuse to use a microphone at all while speaking to a group, you are creating an inaccessible environment where almost certainly some members of the audience won’t be able to hear what you are trying to impart. ...If you aren’t interested in making sure everyone in the room can hear you by leveraging basic principles of accessibility and universal design than I’ll just assume what you have to say isn’t that important.

Aus GLAMR

Ok this is kind of self-indulgent. I've rewritten by “Aus GLAM Blogs” app and now you can also register events, calls for papers, newsletters (like this one), and groups (elists, Discord groups etc), in addition to blogs.

Newsletters and blogs run on RSS in order to fetch the latest posts and editions, and there's also an RSS feed for each type (and combined) in addition to a Mastodon bot. Check it out!

Oh, also my apologies to those whose blogs weren't announced by the bot whilst I ironed out a few bugs. People like Emilia Bell...

Finding purpose & potential in library impact assessment

This piece from Emilia Bell is interesting on the perennial battle in libraries to actually assess what we're doing rather than simply collecting data hoping to prove that what we're doing is great:

Without a purpose for impact assessment, evidence collected on library services with a relational and connected quality (especially in teaching and learning) risks becoming transactional. The questions that drive the process of evidence-based practice start becoming more extractive, fixated on what evidence we can get (ahem, collect), rather than the community this evidence and impact benefits.

I have seen this dynamic everywhere I've ever worked. Often it seems to happen because the purpose of a program is assumed to be so obvious as to not require definition. Sometimes I've wondered whether it's because the librarians didn't really want to know whether their work was effective. And sometimes it seems to come from a genuine belief – as Emilia gestures to here – that there are aspects of our work that are simply intrinsically valuable to society and library users, and they can't be adequately captured in the form of measurable data.

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Libraries and Learning Links of the Week is published every week by Hugh Rundle.

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