8 tips for teaching library sessions online

We’ll all be teaching infolit online for the foreseeable future (I hope) and it is, as anyone who’s done much of it will tell you, a very different experience to being in a room with people.

I do a lot of training online already for overseas audiences, so I have some familiarity with this. For what it’s worth, here are some tips for retooling your sessions to work in a webinar type environment.

1. Plan your session so your audience switches frequently between listening and doing

   I don’t know how you currently do your workshops, obviously, but if for example you do a 20 minute intro, then give people 20 minutes to do a task or two, then 10 minutes summing up at the end, you may find it worthwhile to rejig this a bit.

   In the online environment where everyone is learning on screen, too much of anything for too long is a barrier to engagement. Long talky bits are really hard to pull off, and long activities don’t often work either. And indeed, long sessions overall - if you had a 2 hour class booked, make it 1.5 hours max for screen-learning.

   In my experience, relatively short bursts of talking interspersed with relatively short bursts of activity works best. So take a big exercise and split it into two; introduce part one, let them try it, introduce part two, let them try that. And so on. Short, sharp chunks. (Can you have sharp chunks? Shards, maybe.)

2. Mute participants (apart from specific times for questions)

   I always, always have participants muted as they enter the online space. If everyone’s mic is live, it quickly becomes a cacophony of noise that makes it impossible for anyone to really concentrate. (Honestly just one person having a chat with someone in the same room is enough to derail things.)

   I encourage questions at any time via the Chat (more on which below) rather than audio - however sometimes it can be beneficial for people to ask questions out loud rather than type them. If you want to do that, have a clearly designated time in the session when this will be possible, and signpost it ahead of time. “On 30 minutes we’ll pause, and anyone who wants to unmute and ask a question can do so then.” Then the conversation happens, everyone mutes again and you carry on from there.

   If you do this it’s important to wear headphones, otherwise the audience’s questions come out of your PC speakers, into your mic, and back out of the speakers again - this causes all sorts of problems and is definitely best avoided…

3. Consider using your webcam for the intro, then turning it off

   Assuming you have a webcam and video is an option, there’s a balance to be struck there too. Webcam-on for the whole session is, in my experience, not conducive to good teaching. You instinctively present to the camera, and this means you’re worrying about that side of things rather than your slides and the Chat. Especially if you’ve not done too much online teaching before, I’d keep things as simple as possible because there are so many more things to juggle than in an online session. You can choose to not use the webcam at all (that’s fine!), or use it for the intro and then say ‘now we’re moving into the session and using the slides, I’m going to turn off the webcam so you can see my screen better’.

   This is because part of each slide is blocked by your own face with the webcam. I have done a workshop where for specific reasons the whole thing was camera-on, and I found it useful to work out exactly how big the camera-window would be and create a Shape in PowerPoint that was the exact dimensions. I then put this on every slide and made sure no content was going in that part, so nothing would be obscured by the window later (which I positioned over the Shape).
   

4. The Chat function is absolutely key

   If you’re using webinar software then Chat will be a way your audience can ask you, and each other, questions. Confusingly there is also a Questions function in things like GoTo Meeting - and it’s really important to shepherd people toward Chat rather than Questions. Questions are only seen by you, but Chat is seen by all participants. Obviously if someone had a sensitive query, the DM-style Question is the way to go - but for everything else, you want to encourage active participation as much as possible. Often the difference between good online training and great online training is the Chat - the more people talk to each other and to you, the more than barriers of it being online fade away and the more useful the session becomes.

   Whether you’re using Hangouts style software or webinar software or Google Q&A, it goes without saying you need to keep the Chat where you can see it at all times. You can have particular periods of the session when you dip into it and respond to what has been asked, but seeing the questions as they come in is vital for engaging the audience. Obviously if you have a second screen this helps a lot, but if you don’t have that option it’s still worth making sure the Chat is visible to you always.

   I tell people about it at the start, and I remind them about two minutes later - I tell them about it again and again because sometimes people need encouragement to use it, but once they do everyone tends to join in. Teaching is so much richer when you respond to the audience’s specific needs, so it has to be a priority to make sure these needs are expressed…

5. Get used to not speaking

   What separates good online teaching from boring webinars is interactivity. The Chat is key to this as discussed, but so is getting people to DO things and - trust me on this - it feels really, really, weird to give people time to do activities and exercises while you sit there in silence. But it’s better to have a couple of 5 or 10 minute activities where your audience are genuinely given time to try things out and then report back in the Chat.

   I find this really tricky because you become hyper-aware of the dead air. You’re not wandering around checking what people are doing, you can’t see them working or hear them chatting to each other. You feel faintly absurd, sitting there in front of your PC and hoping people are using the time you’ve given them to do the thing you’ve asked them to do. But it’s essential - it stops it being a classic ‘boring webinar’, one-way traffic delivered as a lecture on screen which, even if you’re great at public speaking, is not enough to truly engage most audiences.

   I find the not-speaking part so hard that I set a stop-watch for it every time. If I’ve told the group they have 10 minutes, I’ll start a stop watch and not stop them until 10 minutes is up. If I don’t take this measure, I inevitably get angsty 6 minutes in and then move things on prematurely…

   I always mute my mic for these parts - no one wants to hear the click of your keyboard etc - but check in on the mic a couple of times during the period to say ‘don’t forget if you have any questions or something isn’t working as you’d expect, ask me in the chat’. When people ask a good question I’ll come back on the mic and pick it up with the whole group, just as I would with a face-to-face session.

6. You may wish to stand up…

   Teaching needs energy, and sometimes it’s hard to bring energy when you’re sitting down! If your mic and other equipment allows it and you’re comfortable doing so, standing up to deliver your session just as you would in a seminar room can really help. Without hand gestures and facial expressions it’s already hard to get your point across dynamically, so your delivery counts for a lot.

   Something solo radio DJs apparently do a lot is put something opposite them to stand-in for the audience - a cuddly toy or, in one studio I saw, a Policeman’s helmet - and they talk to THAT. Rather than talking just generally into the ether, addressing something specific (even something faintly ridiculous) will focus your delivery and make it more human. So grab some sort of mascot and stick it above your monitor…

7. If you can do online teaching in pairs, take that option

   Managing an online session is quite stressful - if anyone has technical problems you really can’t help them and teach at the same time. So pairing up, with one person teaching and another facilitating, is well worth doing if you can. The Facilitator can be on hand to help participants, both with the logistics of the online session and with the exercises themselves - they can also message the presenter to flag up a Chat question if they miss it. Working as a team in this way allows you to teach better because you’re not splitting your focus. 

8. Good slides matter more than ever

   If you’ve read this blog before you’ll know I think good slides are important. In online teaching they’re even more so, because they’re the only thing your audience can see. It’s not just that they can’t see you; they can’t even see each other. So something inspiring on the screen is really essential - especially if your online session is coming as part of many, many other sessions also online. Death by PowerPoint will not do.

   There’s plenty of guidance on this site about making good presentations. A couple of posts to start with would be the Alternatives to Bullet Points and the Sources of CC0 Images articles: but really anything with the presentations tag is potentially relevant.

   Unbelievably this general guide to slide-making is 6 years old now, but although some of the links to image sources are out of date, and, frankly, I’d make very different font choices nowadays, the basic principles are still important for producing effective presentation materials!

The 4 Most Important PowerPoint RULES for Successful Presentations from Ned Potter

Accessibility and online teaching

I don’t want to position myself as an expert on this but I do have advice on making your slides more accessible (thanks to Rachel fro the prompt!). The main thing is to use PowerPoint and turn on the subtitles function - if you’ve never used this you’ll be amazed at how well it works. PowerPoint provides subtitles of everything you say, as you say it. You can find the Settings for this in the Slideshow part of the menu:

Otherwise all the normal rules apply.

• Good contrast between font colour and background. It’s important to have plenty of contrast, for example black text on white background, so the text is easy to read. Purple on black for example doesn’t work. Related to this, don’t put text over a busy background.

• Minimum font size of 24. Anything less than 24 risks being hard to read on a small screen; if you need the font smaller than 24 there’s probably too much information for one slide.

• Use sans-serif fonts. Sans-serif fonts such as Calibri and Arial are better than Serif fonts such as Times New Roman or decorative / script fonts.

• Don’t use colour as the only indicator of key information. You will almost always have at least one colour-blind audience member. It’s important to avoid using colour as the sole way of conveying information. For example, to have something shown in red to say stop doing it and something else in green to say start doing that, is not sufficient. Use the text, or a tick and cross or other non-colour-based-visual indicator, to ensure people understand what you’re telling them.

• Repeat Chat questions back. This is good practice anyway: if someone asks a question in the chat, say it out loud for everyone to hear before answering it.

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There’s lots more aspects of teaching online that others will be able to go into in more depth, but the 8 things above are, to my mind, key as we #PivotToOnline (as they say on twitter…) Good luck everyone!

Any questions, tips, comments, suggestions, advice? I’d love to hear it in the Comments.

How to post to Instagram from a PC

Posting to Insta is officially mobile-only, and the desktop version doesn’t have the button to add media. But it’s relatively straightforward to trick your desktop into displaying a mobile view, and then you can post from it directly.

There’s a million articles online about using Instagram from a PC or laptop but they’re all ludicrously complicated or involve using third-party apps etc - none of that is necessary, if you follow the steps below. (The screenshots are from Google Chrome but you can do more or less the exact same thing in Firefox.)

1) Go to instagram.com on your PC, and log in

2) Right click anywhere. You’ll see Inspect listed at the bottom of the menu which appears: click that

Log-in to Insta, right-click, and choose Inspect from the menu

3) You’ll see the html on the right of the screen. At the top of that there’s an icon showing a phone and a tablet - if you hover over it you’ll see it’s called Toggle device toolbar. Click this: the rest of the screen will then display the website on a mobile view. At the top of the screen you’ll see a drop-down menu which allows you to choose what kind of device you want to simulate, so you can choose an iphone or whatever else you want

Choose a mobile device: Chrome will show Instagram as it would appear on that device

4) Now for the absolutely key bit (thank you to my colleagues Hannah and Antonio for getting me up to speed on this part!): refresh the browser using F5 or the Reload page button. You’ll then see the crucial button, missing until now, that you get on your phone: the + in a square which represents ‘Add picture / video’. Pressing it on your PC will open up the usual file explorer, allowing you to navigate to the media of your choice.

Refreshing the website brings up the Add Media button, highlighted in yellow here

5) Choose a Filter if you like, press Next, add your caption, location, tagged people (and in Advanced Settings you’ll find the option to add Alt Tags too) and click Share to post to Instagram.

Why would you want to use Instagram on your desktop in the first place?

This technique is useful for three main reasons in my experience.

The first and most important thing is, Instagram is such a key social media tool for organisations, but not everyone wants organisational accounts on their personal phone. I work with people who’d rather not mix those two worlds and I completely understand that - but I want them to be able to contribute to our Instagram account without having to compromise their principles! This method means everyone can get involved.

The second reason is, if you already have photography on your hard-drive or network drive, it saves having to get that onto your mobile device’s camera roll.

The third thing is, you can write the post at any time of day and it will stay there waiting for you to post it at the time of your choosing (unless, obviously, you close the window / tab / browser). So if you have 5 minutes to compose the perfect Insta post first thing, but don’t want it to go live till the peak time to post later in the day, you can do the work at 9am and actually post it at 3pm.

Okay that’s it. Happy posting!

Step by step: making videos with Videoscribe

From the Lib-Innovation Blog

In September I made a new video to introduce the Library in 60 seconds. It was designed to be played in short Induction talks, and to be embedded in various online guides. The whole thing took around 4 hours to do (albeit spread across a couple of days) and it turned out pretty well - before we go through the step-by-step process here's the video:


It was made using Videoscribe, and they just published their 'Favorite VideoScribe videos of 2019' which, it turns out not only has videos from the BBC but also from our Library! The video above being featured on their list has reminded me to complete this blog post, which has been in the Lib-Innovation drafts folder for a while...

Step 1: Script-writing 

Because we were also producing a longer virtual tour, I knew from the start this would be only one minute long. This was surprisingly non-limiting in the end: once you accept you can't go into detail on anything, it becomes quite easy to write a friendly voice-over that introduces a number of key points in quick succession. The purpose of the video was to provide an overview, help students understand the basics, and encourage them to ask for help. So a brief script was worked up with that in mind, and I shared it with a colleague for a second opinion, then with the narrators. 

I wanted Yorkshire voices for this introduction to a Yorkshire library, and I wanted people who were friendly and informal, and I wanted it to be a man and a women ideally. Happily my first choice voice-over artists (Sarah Peace from IT and Martin Philip from Academic Liaison) said yes when I asked them to do it! 

Step 2: Voice-over recording 

The hardest thing about recording narration is finding a suitable acoustic in which to record. Even small meeting rooms in our building seem to be echoey, and although the Linguistics Department does have an audio booth we can get access to, it wasn't available in our time frame. In the end we chose quite a big room that has enough in it to absorb any resonance, leaving us with an acceptable sound quality. 

I recorded my narrators on my own laptop using Audacity, a freely available audio-editing tool, and an entry-level Blue Snowball mic I use for webinars. It took 40 minutes to record both this script and the Virtual Tour script, and the main issue was making sure the narrators were close enough to the mic. 

Audacity is incredibly simple to use. You can zoom right in on the visual representation of the audio-waves and easily identify what talking and what is not - for example, in-breaths before a word. Breaths and pauses can be selected, highlighted, and deleted. For this reason, there was absolutely no need to aim for a perfect take of the narration. Each narrator took their time delivering their section, re-running any sentence they weren't happy with. It then took me perhaps 20 minutes to edit the audio into one seamless narration, and export it as an MP3 file to add to the video.

The audio for the voice-over, as displayed by Audacity

Step 3: Creating the video with Videoscribe 

The process of creating a video with this software is to add objects to the canvas (a little bit like you might with Prezi) and then decide how they are animated, and when. So for example you can just type text in and have a hand or pen 'write' the text at the speed of your choosing, or you can add photographs which can either be 'drawn' or pushed into frame by a hand, or just appear. You put all this together, add music and a voice over you if you wish, and you have a video.

I've tended to always build towards a final picture that includes everything the viewer has just seen - so you see each section as it's added, and then at the end you zoom out to see everything at once. But you don't have to use this approach - you can stay buried in the detail if that helps you tell your story.

The VideoScribe interface looks like this:

The main part of the screen displays everything that will appear in the video, but the boxes along the bottom are how you dictate when objects arrive, how they enter the video, and in which order.

Here's a closer shot of that:

All those icons - the phone, the thumbs up, the wifi symbol etc - are from VideoScribe itself. There's also some writing, and (in the middle) a screengrab of the library catalogue.

Absolutely key to a good VideoScribe video, in my experience, is the 'Set Camera to Current Position' button I've highlighted here:

This allows you to control what the camera sees, meaning you can have multiple objects in the frame at once. For example at the end of the video there's a big smiley face and the #UoYTips text added: by default the camera would zoom in so these filled the frame, meaning you could only really see them. But by setting the camera to the same position for the last three sections of the video, you get to see the entire library map, AND the smiley face / #UoYTips in the same shot.

The whole process of creating the video took around 2 hours: trust me, this is REALLY quick for making video content!

Step 4: Exporting to YouTube 

I exported two versions of the video: one directly to YouTube, and one as an MP4 file to embed directly into the Induction PowerPoint presentation me and my colleagues would be using throughout the first week of term. 

With the YouTube version there was probably around half an hour of faffing involved - writing the description, title, all the keywords, and so on, and editing the subtitles. YouTube's auto-generated subtitles are actually pretty good, but they contain no punctuation or capitalisation and sometimes get names or other words wrong - in screenshot below you can see it says 'you can get health and advice' which I had to edit to 'help and advice':

It's a relatively quick job and of course well worth doing to make sure your video is accessible. 

If you've watched the video above you'll have seen that the narration ends at least 10 seconds before the end - this is because I wanted space to link to another video (the more detailed virtual tour), a clickable thumbnail of which appears in the bottom left of the screen. This was achieved by inserting in YouTube itself, via the End Screens menu. As you can see below, the video itself is designed to receive the thumbnail in that exact position, with the arrow pointing to it. 

One final piece of admin was to create a custom Thumbnail for the Library Minute video itself. YouTube auto-generates three for you - normally none of them quite work as an encapsulation of the video, so you have to make your own (either from scratch or, more often in my case, just by taking a screenshot of the video at the best possible moment).

Step 5: Promotion

Even though the video is a piece of marketing, it still needed to be marketed... I saved a version for adding to Induction slides, and then created a slide in which it was embedded for everyone to add to their presentations.

We also tweeted it, put it on Instagram (where it did much less well than I expected, interestingly) and embedded it on key web pages such as our Info For New Students page.

And that's it! Videoscribe is a tool which we pay for on an annual basis - we don't often do this with so many great free tools available, but we feel it's worth it in this case. If you have any questions about the software or the video above, let us know in a comment... 

How to explain academic publishing to a five year old

Tweet

Last week I tweeted a cow-based academic publishing analogy in response to the prompt in the title, and the replies and quote-tweets extended the metaphor so gloriously, so creatively, so bleakly and hilariously at the same time, that I’ve pulled my favourites together below.

Here’s the original tweet:

Cows make milk. They milk themselves.

Other cows check the milk (for free).

Cows - get this - PAY THE FARMER to take the milk away.

Then the farmer (you won't believe this, honestly) sells the milk *back to the cows.* #academicpublishing https://t.co/mgYneu4Goi

— Ned Potter (@ned_potter) January 16, 2020

Before we get into the epic farm based explainer, take a look at this excellent, cake-based alternative:

It's like baking for the school fête. You bake the cake, you donate the cake, you buy the cake back

— Dr. Martin Stoermer (@MartinStoermer) January 13, 2020

(It’s worth clicking on @DevilleSy’s original tweet to read the other replies to it, which are excellent.)

So, to the farm.

Someone asked me to explain who is who in the metaphor, so briefly: the cows are the researchers, creating academic outputs, peer-reviewing them for free, and the farmer is the publisher. He’s not even milking the cows, they are self-milking. The weakest part of the analogy is ‘the cows paying the farmer to take away the milk’, which lots of people have picked me up on - I know it doesn’t happen a lot of the time, but there are often costs associated with publishing an article. You might need permissions to use an image (author pays), colour printing costs (rare now, but author pays) there are predatory pay-to-publish journals (author pays) or legit-but-still-charging-you-some-money journals with submission or membership fees (author pays) - and there are Article Processing Charges (author or their grant / institution pays, an average of over 1,400 Euros a time according to this 2018 article).

I am, of course, hugely in favour of Open Access. The cow is paying the farmer but at least the farmer isn’t then charging the cows a second time, and all cows (and even animals who don’t live on a farm at all) can get to the milk whenever they need it. But speaking as an academic librarian, I know that libraries are paying just as much or more for journal and database subscriptions as we ever were, AND Universities and authors are paying APCs as well. So we’re getting there - but the farmers sure are making a lot of cash in the meantime…

Talking of OA, let’s get back to some choice Dairy metaphor continuations with one of my absolute favourites:

Sometime the farmer let the cow drink a tiny bit of of its own milk.

The farmer calls it "longstanding commitment to Open Access." https://t.co/Iil6LkQ4y1

— Sariel Har-Peled (@sarielhp) January 18, 2020

Some people picked up on the role the cows themselves play as peer-reviewers - if indeed the milk even gets that far:

Sometimes a farmer, who has never tasted milk before, decides this particular milk isn’t novel enough for the other cows to even check!

— t763468854: (@tommyburd) January 18, 2020

And of course not any old cow is allowed to play, only the ones who have been through a gruelling and yet mysterious selection process leading go their appointment as special cows.

— Dr Robert O'Toole NTF (@robertotoole) January 18, 2020

Don't forget that the first cow that checks the milk will have no major issues but the second cow will wonder why their milk wasn't being used and will insist some of its milk is mixed in for good measure.#AcademicTwitter

— Tara Magdalinski (@DrTaraM) January 18, 2020

That last one! Amazing. Not to mention the fact that the peer-review process often leads to milk being poured away entirely, or kept for so long before being available that it goes off:

Farmers reject most of the milk even if it’s fresh and nutritious, and they make the cows wait for months while they decide.

— Rich Kramer (@RichKramerLab) January 17, 2020

Then we get to the fact that despite the best efforts of peer-review, academic publishing is a market, and quality is by no means the sole (or main) driver or which milk gets consumed.

Farmers don't sell the milk they think is best, but the milk that was tried by the greatest number of other cows, no matter if they thought it was good or not. Also sometimes one cow will put its name on a younger cows milk, because it can.

— Robert Heinze (@rob_heinze) January 18, 2020

At times the farmer adds his own fluids, forces some poor cows to check; and irrespective of the results, sells his fluids as flavoured milk

— Karthik Balajee L (@KarthikBalajeeL) January 18, 2020

Not all milk is treated equally.

Some farmers form some cows into exclusive milk cliques-they decide amongst themselves that their milk is superior to all other milk-they only buy & sell milk to each other and rate it A*-other cows produce more innovative milk but they rejected for being outside the clique

— Peter J. Dean (@PJD_WarStudies) January 18, 2020

Is there a vet in the house? Because some elitist cows just got burned.

What about that whole murkly business of recycling the milk into ‘new’ milk?

Many cows are not capable of producing new, nutritious milk, so they re-brand old, forgotten milk already sold by the farmers (who in turn are happy to re-sell it)
For example: the original "milk" becomes "opaque white fluid rich in fat and protein" https://t.co/dXL3I8qwsl

— Maurizio Bocca (@01MB10) January 18, 2020

There are some farmers who are very smart they are called predatory farmers. They take a milk from a donkey and also ask the donkey to pay lots of money. They then label it as high quality cows milk and sell it for free to other cows and donkeys.

— Venky (Venkatraman Radhakrishnan) (@venkymd) January 18, 2020

Fair warning, it gets especially bleak now… We turn to the subject of the cow who can’t produce enough high quality milk.

Funny thread on academic publishing. I would only add, if the cows ever stop making milk, they cease to be considered real cows by other cows (and certainly the farmer). https://t.co/sCiIYqUjYD

— John Gibbons 祝好运 (@jgibbons1974) January 18, 2020

& all cows live under a "make milk or perish mandate" whereby if they don't submit, they get kicked off the farm.

— frank doane (@frankdoane) January 18, 2020

If the cow doesn’t sell enough milk through the right Farmer, and many other cows don’t mix the cow’s milk into their own, then the cattle feed provider may not increase the cow’s feed quota and, sometimes, may even shoot the cow

— Sameer Antani (@SameerAntani) January 18, 2020

Ooof. On a happier note, one of my favourite tweets is this one from my colleague Anthony. I can’t believe how many Likes this got because it relies on a detailed understanding of obscure and rarely used subscription models based on the number of students on modules…

Sometime the farmer decides that the milk is super special secret milk. The farmer sells this back to the cow every year, with the price depending how many chickens live on the farm.

— Anthony Sinnott (@librarianth) January 18, 2020

There was a reminder to sign up for ALCS royalties (if you’re in the UK); I did this with my own book and would highly recommend it.

Also, I receive royalties whenever my work is borrowed, accessed and printed by signing up to ALS:https://t.co/QK8ivk7n60

— Dr William Proctor (@DrWilliamProct1) January 19, 2020

And there are loads more great replies and quote-tweets but quite honestly I’ve lost control of my Mentions for now! Some people University presses took offence at my tweet and I apologise to them; it’s a glib tweet designed for a five year old so it didn’t go into much nuance… Lots of publishers do great work. They’re not all like the ones we’re looking at through this ultra-cynical lens.

One tweeter suggested my analogy was a ‘wonderful pastiche’ of ‘every dumb hot take on publishing’. That tweet was from… a publisher.

Anyway, thanks to everyone who chipped in - there’s a certain gallows humour approach to dissecting this whole system, which we’re all complicit in, and I really enjoyed just how far the cows-and-farmer take on things could go.

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The cow pic in the Header is a CC0 image from Pexels.

The real C-word is Community

The old ‘customer’ debate reared it’s head again recently, with an article in Library Journal asking why academic librarians have such a problem with the word.

I tweeted about it, rather flippantly:

Glad you asked, Steve!

There are many reasons but foremost among them is, we don’t want our users to see *themselves* as customers.

A customer only needs the library to work for *them* but a community of users wants it work for all.

Happy to help.https://t.co/w1WE3TNW8y pic.twitter.com/q8eXyO2fIR

— Ned Potter (@ned_potter) July 26, 2019

… but then I decided what I should have done is write an actual rebuttal, a little less facetiously phrased, in Library Journal itself. Then maybe some of the people swayed by Steven Bell’s pro-customer stance might be re-swayed by my arguments against it.

I recently used all these arguments to change something at my place of work. I have a new part to my role, to co-lead the Customer Engagement programme at the Library and I argued, with some support from a couple of colleagues, that this programme should in fact be called Community Engagement instead. To my delight this worked and I am now the co-lead for the Community Engagement Programme. I was grateful that the relevant people were flexible enough to listen and make the change, and it reminded me that making even relatively small headway on important issues is always worth trying to do.

Anyway, I used to write a column for LJ so I looked up their staff list to see whether anyone I dealt with back then was still there, and one person was, so I pitched the article and got asked to write 800 words - which I did and which, I just remembered two months later, Library Journal have not published. I sent a chaser a while back and a reply was promised but I’ve not heard anything either way…

But still want it out there in the world. I believe very strongly in the arguments against using the word ‘customer’ so: here is what I wrote.

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I’ve been in librarianship for 13 years now and there’s never not been a time when we’ve been debating how to refer to the people who user our libraries. I hate getting bogged down in semantics, when there are so many more urgent problems to address than sobriquets. But this particular hill is worth dying on, because language matters so much. It shapes not just the way we see people, but the way they see themselves.

 In his July column Steven Bell asks us why academic librarians have such a problem with referring to its faculty and students as ‘customers’. I don’t buy his arguments that this stems from some sort of elitism, but I certainly used to share the view that customer is the right word to use. It was forward-thinking, I thought. It reflected our commitment to customer service, I thought. I was struck by Helene Blowers’ argument, 11 years ago now, that patrons support institutions whereas institutions support customers, which is the way round it should be in libraries. And I thought the warnings from the anti-customer brigade, that this was the thin end of the wedge of the monetisation of HE, were over the top.

Well, I was wrong.

There are more reasons not to call our users ‘customers’ than can I can fit into 800 words so let me start with what I think is the most important one. When we call people customers, they see themselves as customers – and if I’m your library’s customer I need your library to work for me. For me specifically. I want you to meet all of my requirements even if this creates inequalities with my peers because I, the customer, am right.

This is instantly at odds with the ethos we try and create in academic libraries, which is one of community. While a customer needs the library to work for them, an academic community of library users needs it to work for everyone. Indeed, they need to actively contribute to that process of successfully sharing community space, using community resources, and working towards community ideals. That alone is a good enough reason not to call our users customers.

Then there’s the fact that they don’t like it. Our students and faculty don’t want to be reduced to a transaction to be completed, and it’s important to note we can nevertheless be extremely attentive to their needs and offer an extremely high level of service. The ‘strong, customer-focused service model’ Steven calls for is still possible without actually casting our users as customers with the consumerist mind-set this implies.

The language we use helps frame Higher Education, and it is increasingly economic. The Vice-Chancellor of Cambridge University, no less, referred to this recently, saying: “Reducing students to mere consumers makes sense only if the value of universities is simply economic. That would be a fundamental error.” University is about so much more than the degree you get at the end of it, and yet with the marketization of HE more and more students see themselves as buying a product: it becomes all about the outcome at the expense of the experience. If we are to resist being swamped by consumerist ideology in our Universities, if we are to do our best to stop information becoming completely commodified (and much brighter minds than mine have written about this), then the language we use needs to be chosen carefully.

The obvious question at this point, then, is: so what DO we call the people using our libraries, then? Patrons, Members and Users all have their flaws as terms – personally I favour the latter, but it’s not ideal. The trouble is, there is no ideal term; I’ve heard ‘there’s no perfect word so why not just choose customer’ advanced as an argument, and I strongly disagree with this. Just because we can’t find the ideal solution, doesn’t mean we should sleep-walk towards the worst one. Recent political events in the US and the UK should have taught us that if nothing else.

The word ‘customer’ in higher education is insidious. The users themselves don’t like it. It helps frame education as a purely transactional experience. And it celebrates the cult of the individual: “Prioritising people’s individual demands risks intensifying inequalities in access to services, and in generating collectively undesirable outcomes,” as Catherine Needham puts it.

 So please can we ditch ‘customer’? The real C-word should Community; let’s focus on that.