Laurence Morris

This report summarises a second University-wide Teaching Excellence Project investigating the academic skills needs of international students. Based upon the impact of previous interventions and input from staff and international students, it provides best practice recommendations and highlights key resources and services for 2024-25.

The digitalization of the Arctic is now an everyday phenomenon, but discussion of vulnerabilities embedded within this sociotechnical transformation remains limited and with little historic attention paid to local contexts. Since the early 2000s, the Arctic Council and the Arctic Economic Council have worked to address this situation, producing area-specific information alongside pan-Arctic perspectives on digital development. However, the security questions highlighted in this chapter have only been partially included in such discourse. Consequently, this chapter is an introduction to digital security as an everyday issue in the context of the Arctic based upon regional and national data from the five Arctic states of Finland, Sweden, Norway, Canada, and the United States. The chapter argues that digitalization generates uncertainty for individuals and communities and, therefore, requires greater attention. First, the chapter outlines the opportunities of digitalization for Arctic communities and offers a conceptual discussion of the relationships between information security, cybersecurity, and digital security. Secondly, the chapter examines Arctic digital security questions such as digital connectivity, accessibility of information and digital services, digital literacies and rights, and forms of digital abuse, while considering the role of libraries in particular detail.

This report summarises the outcomes of a University-wide Teaching Excellence Project investigating the academic skills support needs of international students. It highlights key findings, resultant new in-curriculum support options and general best practice.

An overview of the implications of Brexit for British libraries, written from an Academic Librarian's perspective, but outlining sector-wide issues such as budgetary pressures, research trends and access, international copyright arrangements, cultural trends and 'fake news'. This article was written as part of E-International Relations' 'Brexit: A European Perspective' blog series.

Library users too often ignore higher-end online resources and instructional materials, choosing instead to simply Google it. This short case study provides a practical response to this, discussing methods used by Academic Librarians of Leeds Beckett University to first engage students and then help them develop into effective independent learners.

This case study examines the introduction of a centrally managed booking system for academic skills appointments conducted by the Library Academic Support Team at Leeds Beckett University, showing how staff-student communication channels can scaffold effective student support. The new system was introduced in order to manage a large number of requests for skills appointments across all academic levels, to ensure an equitable experience for all learners, and to frame staff-student encounters more effectively at the formative stage. Further benefits included provision of more focused tuition, additional data on learner requirements, greater capacity to re-route appointment requests, and more efficient use of student and staff time, while retaining the option of human intervention in the system as required. This paper demonstrates a transferrable means of enhancing institutional processes whilst retaining the traditional strengths of one-to-one encounters in order to improve the overall student experience.

This presentation explores Leeds Beckett’s implementation of PTFS’s Rebus:list resource list management system, examining our organisation’s experiences in the context of more general professional themes and challenges. In particular, by exploring our institutional experience through the functionality of a specific resource list management system, we are able to focus on the evolving student experience of accessing and utilising resources; the development of pictographic approaches to digital literacy that appeal to an increasingly visually literate population; and how successful resource list management can inform content development and delivery. Playing on the name “rebus” (n. a puzzle) we look at how HE students and staff face a number of reiterable information-seeking and organisational challenges. Considered thus, research is a puzzle without visible rules. As information professionals, we examine the process of identifying, replicating and re-framing the research challenge through resource list software: an organising principle which can maintain the idea of a puzzle or game, whilst providing clearly established rules. This leads to a discussion of new conundrums, including but not limited to: Ownership and authorship – where do resource lists reside and how do we access them? Interpretation and organisation – what form should lists take to maximise content usage? Evidencing engagement– who are lists for and how are they used to inform content development and delivery? Our paper’s consideration of such issues, in turn, leads to reflection upon the potential role of resource lists beyond the Library, supporting both desirable graduate attributes and wider organisational goals.

A paper delivered to the 2016 annual conference of the Chartered Institute of Librarians and Information Professionals, outlining new projects and collaborations pertaining to employability and digital literacy and arising from a workshop run by Jennifer Wilson and Erin Nephin at last year’s Leeds Beckett DEAP conference. The paper also emphasised and explored how these projects and collaborations dovetailed with Libraries and Learning Innovation’s more general Academic Support work.

This presentation highlights innovative means of embedding information literacy support within Library service delivery, consequently leading to enhanced tuition, better connections with customers, and more effective Library advocacy. Background: In recent years, Academic, Liaison and Subject Librarians have been encouraged to embed themselves within course delivery at academic institutions (Kesselman & Watstein, 2009, O’Toole et al., 2016). The rationale behind this approach was to embed information literacy as an integral part of university tuition, rather than have library skills presented to students as an optional add-on. However, best practice in ‘embedding’ inevitably varies from subject to subject (Schulte, 2012), with even greater variation likely when the approach is applied at different institutions, and beyond the Higher Education sector. This paper addresses that challenge by providing distinctive examples and core principles of embedded information literacy tuition. Paper content: A case study of how two Academic Librarians of Leeds Beckett University became directly involved in course delivery, promoting embedded tuition through their actions rather than overt discussion of the concept. In particular, the paper outlines innovative examples of embedded support, such as: - Supporting an innovative Criminology module by delivering academic skills tuition within a High Security prison - Providing external training for local authority employees in support of the university’s local partnerships - Co-designing and co-delivering the first academic assignment of the year for new undergraduate Nursing students - Collaborative marketing and sharing of teaching practices with the local NHS Libraries Group - Supporting curriculum diversity by sourcing new resources in alignment with the ‘Why is my curriculum white?’ agenda - Further development of student publishing through Open Access journals The paper also considers the pedagogical and professional implications of these examples, as through Stone et al.’s work (2016) on publishing undergraduate research, and Lwoga and Questier’s research (2015) on developing open access behaviours. These reflections are intended to stimulate discussion of the potential to grow the role of librarians within their parent organisations, demonstrating how roles can be developed and harnessed for Library advocacy. Summary: The paper addresses the practicalities of arranging, delivering and maintaining distinctive forms of information literacy tuition in a variety of professional environments, with a particular emphasis placed upon how such work can act as ongoing promotion of a library within a wider institution.

Jennifer Wilson and Laurence Morris explain how a simple reminder about library resources at Leeds Beckett University developed into a service aimed at improving employability amongst students. Utilising existing resources and working in collaboration, the library has created a new way for students to discover and engage with employability skills and services.

Information Literacy Instruction & Teaching are among the increasing variety of roles librarians undertake (Vassilakaki & Moniarou-Papaconstantinou, 2015). However, many in the profession must learn and develop the necessary skills when in post as teaching development is a missing component in the majority of library courses (Levene & Frank, 1993; Alabi & Weare, 2014). This workshop explores Peer Observation (a learning technique many librarians are unfamiliar with (Alabi et al, 2012)) and considers how information professionals could potentially use it to improve their teaching practice to more effectively deliver Information Literacy Instruction & Support and develop and enhance students’ skills.

A presentation to a NoWAL (North West Academic Libraries) event on research support. NoWAL invited the authors to deliver a variant on their recent CILIP Conference presentation, exploring ideas of how to engage research staff with their university library.

The COVID-19 pandemic forced UK universities to move the majority or all of tuition online. The Library Academic Support Team at Leeds Beckett University used that shift as an opportunity to improve information literacy (IL) and academic skills tuition across the institution. Instruction and support were redesigned on a flipped basis to ensure that online delivery improved on face-to-face delivery rather than simply replicating it. This project report reviews that work with usage statistics, user feedback, practicalities of service provision and discussion of impact. The report extends existing literature with a model of significant institution-level changes to IL and academic skills instruction which could be applied elsewhere. It concludes that the shift to flipped online learning was a qualified success, with the revised approach proving notably more popular and inclusive, also providing other benefits such as more focused in-class discussion.