Reclassify ALL the things?

When I started my job, I inherited a reclassification project in its very very nascent stages. Funny, they didn't mention it in the interview. It had been decided that the extant in-house scheme (in-house the chosen euphemism for the spectrum between idiosyncratic and downright wacky) should be swapped for that universal class scheme so beloved of librarians across the space-time continuum. Do we love Dewey? Dewey ever! As I took over, two of the eleventy subjects we stock had been finished: chemistry, and law. Though law had, for the sake of some unknown ulterior complexity, been classified into Moys. This is Cambridge, after all: it's not meant to be easy. Sarcasm klaxon going off there, just to be clear.

The project became my responsibility, and it's easy to see why. With approximately 22,000 books left, and me with almost ten minutes' worth of classification experience, this was a match made in heaven. Less the heaven of cosmology, Dante or Bryan Adams, more a nightclub in Basingstoke. Anyway, in the past few years, with occasional help, I've converted two-thirds of the remaining books to Dewey. And now exam term is upon us, now the students have descended on the library faster than well-respected actors would back away from offers to star in the 50 Shades film and are showing no signs of leaving without explicitly donut-centred bribery, the project is entering a ten-week cessation. Which makes this a good opportunity to reflect (*eye roll*) on how it's gone so far--or, in other words, to write down what I wish I'd known before I began.

Plan. But ensure the plan has a caveat allowing you to ignore the plan altogether. Wait, no, all except the caveat. Bit meta.

As far as I'm aware, any preparation for the project was limited to "Deweyfy the library, y'all", so playing it by ear has been a theme. With no time frame identifed, nor any decisions made about the order in which subjects would be tackled, the only unspoken rule was to minimise disruption to the students. And by heck have there been times when I wish there'd been A Plan to refer back to. So, for example, I've only recently decided the direction of the new sequence (should we put big numbers at the top or the bottom of the library?), and not only does that feel a bit belated but it's meant that my thought processes have regularly borne too many similarities to the numbers bit on Countdown for my liking.

For the most part, the lack of plan has been vaguely liberating and I don't think it's particularly hindered progress. To get all management-speaky for a sec, it's meant that the project is primarily tactical not strategic; decisions could be made based on what's happening right now rather than some unknown point in the past or future; timely, practical solutions to the unanticipated, unanticipatable, pass-me-the-gins problems I didn't know I'd face could be found and, more to the point, adapted (i.e. ignored or forgotten) when they ceased to be timely or practical. Like what to do with new books: straight to Dewey, or into the old scheme? Like what to do when reclassified books end up in sections that don't exist yet. (Or didn't exist. Honestly, the philosophical dilemmas I've faced.) Yet the more that's in Dewey, the less troublesome these problems, the less frequently they arise. Not having a plan sounds dangerous, but it didn't mean that logic and reason were chucked out the window (though admittedly they've been separated and put in different places). On the other hand, the plan I wish had existed would've allowed for common sense to take over when the tactics needed a shift. Best of all the worlds. See, with the philosophy.

Reclassification is only 10% of reclassification.

The few seconds that's actually reclassification are quite good fun. Relatively speaking. You figure out the new call number, and by figure out, I mean 'copy what another library did', because duplication of effort is bad, right? You can't really avoid occasionally looking at the books, which tends to mean you get to know the stock really well. And this means that, wearing Sensible Hat, you can identify gaps in the collection. Without Sensible Hat, you can pretend to the students that you're made of magic when they ask you questions.

The other 90% is made of Stuff That Will Annoy You. The catalogue record has to be altered which, inevitably, involves noticing how bad the catalogue record is. So you've got to change it/resist the urge to change it/resist the urge to complain on Twitter that the 008 is different from the 260 and they're both wrong. You've got to take off the old labels, which is a challenge in itself, because Past Librarians used glue from the planet Bloody Stubborn and then covered the books in clingfilm's genetically mutated evil cousin. Then there's new labels and all that processing stuff and even with my minions support staff doing this for me, it seemed more neverending than the Neverending Story, told twice, backwards, in German, by a non-German speaker.

I definitely hadn't anticipated all this extraneous palaver, nor had I considered how much it would restrict progress by dictating so flipping rigidly the order in which things had to be done. It would've been good, probably, to factor this in at the start. And of course there's the one last bit of the process. Only a minor thing, really. The books are now in the wrong order. Which brings me to my next point.

You'll need supplies.

I don't just mean a sneaky hipflask in your filing cabinet and an emergency emergency chocolate stash (though, to be clear, I mean this). But I also mean a map of the library, a calculator, and a tape measure. Oh, and a torch, hard hat, spirit level and a couple of rowers. Because reclassification means book moves. And because trying not to cause disruption means getting things back on shelves in their new order faster than you can say Blue Monday it means LOTS of book moves. Pretty much, in fact, all the time.

It's all kinds of book moves, too, from shifting 12,000 books up a bit to squeeze in two shelves of syntactical grammar books, moving 4,000 books down a floor for art and architecture, and edging ten shelves up a bit so the Spanish drama doesn't get out of sequence. I never particularly anticipated that I'd be dealing with the idiosyncrasies of two systems at the same time. So while we used to have a clearly defined Geography section, Dewey sneers in the face of Geography, like a sneery thing. Like Cyril Sneer. And now we don't. We used to put linguistics and languages together. Dewey divided, conquered, and sneered some more, and as a result I moved several thousand books up one floor and the music section got a new home.

It probably sounds worse than it is. But it isn't all negative. I now have a brilliant idea for a library-based exercise DVD (Shelversize, people? No? REALLY?) Less importantly, I learned not to neglect the library as a genuinely physical space, with dimensions and geometry and stuff. If that sounds daft, it's because it is. But I spent quite a while being consistently puzzled because the books kept taking up more or less room when they'd been moved, and was tentatively reaching the conclusion that THE BOOKS WERE REPRODUCING and wondering if I should leave vistafoil on the shelves as a precaution (note to self: stop anthropomorphising books). Picking up on the fact that some of our shelves were 68cm long, some 70cm and some 72cm (and this is why you need a tape measure) helped me to start to consider how the library was mapped out, how physically big collections are, in terms of surface area. I learned that book moves could be minimised by being clever about it, and thinking about where the books would eventually end up. I also learned that our rowers are really fit and you can bribe them with biscuits to move stuff.

Think about the users.

I'm hoping this goes without saying. But I've definitely learned something about how we think about our users and how we communicate changes in the library to them. We can obviously feel pretty sure the change to Dewey is in users' best interests--it's certainly not just for my own amusement--that we know best because we are profeshnuls, the truth is that it ISN'T. It's in the best interests of future students, because they'll have a library where the books on Riemann geometry (or Chaucer, or cell biology, or museum studies) are next to each other rather than all over the show. They'll have a library with a class scheme that's better for serendipitous finding of cool, relevant things, or more consistent with what they'll find elsewhere. To our current users, this is just a bit of a hassle. They don't give two hoots what scheme we use. Maybe it's that micro/macro thing. Being able to justify why we're doing what we're doing, then, is all pretty irrelevant.

Instead, the kind of communication I've found most effective is way more basic. It's the visible, not the philosophical. It's signs. "Yes, I know your geology books were here last week, and now this is economics, but geology is just behind you" (well, this, but pithier). It's being aware of how changes will affect them and being willing to go to the shelves with them and help them get their heads round it. It's about putting off the really disruptive stuff until they've all toddled off on their hols. It's talking to them about it, and listening to what they say.

I'm pretty certain that like, um, snowflakes(?), no two reclassification projects are the same, and it's difficult to assess its impact or advantages because, well, it's not finished yet, and I'm maybe feeling slightly defensive about it because hindsight's still an elusive dream. In the past few years I've got unreasonably cross with glue, and I've stabbed myself with a scalpel at least a dozen times, and I've been covered in dying book more times than I care to remember, and I've learned that Dewey's as far from perfect as Edinburgh is from tropical and balmy, and I've developed an inability to separate my appreciation for ebooks from the fact that they don't have labels. But I've also picked up some completely invaluable knowledge about the library and its collection and, yes, about classification as well. So while I might not be dead keen to do this again, it's not been all bad. And given that it's a reclassification project, that's probably the best you could expect.

My week with copyright: one librarian's intrepid quest to stay conscious

One of the things I included in my PPDP for Chartership was a promise to become more familiar with copyright law. I typed it regretting every single keystroke. I stared back at the letters squeezed uncomfortably into a badly formatted Word table, index finger hovering over the backspace button. There must, I thought, be simpler ways to overindulge in misery than this. I could defrost the freezer, or go to Asda, or watch Dancing on Ice. But I left it in there, albeit reluctantly. And recently, feeling a great sense of foreboding, I read four books* about copyright from cover to cover.

I won't go into the specifics of what I read. First, because I reckon you'd need a law degree before you could understand or write about it with any conviction (boom tish), and I'm as far from being a lawyer as a cauliflower is from being a shoe. Second, because I don't want to write anything about copyright law that I'm not absolutely certain is true. Don't want to get sued, natch. And third, because I'd be here all night.

Sleeping. Photo credit.

It took me about a week, on and off, to read the books, and I'd be lying if I said that I particularly enjoyed the experience. Copyright law is about as complex and messy as its reputation threatened. It's got more tentacles and loopholes than a coach load of squid crocheting scarves badly. It's also, in my opinion, unremittingly dull. As dry as an empty bottle of Prosecco in the desert. It's not boring in a necessarily unpleasant, garish way (cf. Dancing on Ice), but it does have a certain (i.e. a whacking great big) lullabic quality. I found myself not only wishing for the bough to break and the cradle to fall, but I was trying to position myself under the tree so it'd hit me on the head on the way down.

The sheer bulk of the material, combined with its lifeless mundanity, led me to two thoughts. First, that the celebrity embodiment of copyright law would, in fact, be Arnold Schwarzenegger. Second, and vaguely less disturbingly, it made me question the extent to which I needed to know this stuff. I developed a gnawing sense that I could probably get away without knowing much about it at all, that information my brain already held about copyright was more than sufficient to keep me going. I'm not talking in extremes here: I'm fully aware that I don't have to be intimate with the innermost crevices of, for example, the Patents Act 1977 or World Motor Sport Council vs McLaren in 2007. But there are bits of information--about licenses, DRM, Creative Commons, etc.--that are useful, and that I did learn more about. I've tried, subsequently, to hold onto these, even though there's only a limited amount of space in my already undersized noggin. [NB. If I discover that I've inadvertently sacrificed my ability to recite Billy Joel's We Didn't Start the Fire on demand for the sake of copyright law then there'll be trouble].

Still sleeping. Photo credit.

Back in the Middle Ages when I first began working in libraries I felt like I'd started listening in the middle of a conversation. Because, of course, I had. I'd regularly be confronted by things I knew precisely zero about. These days it happens a bit less, but by no means infrequently. I've since learned that there are a million conversations happening all at once within our profession, and there's such overlap between them that it's not so much a Venn diagram as a Venn Slinky in a light breeze. Of course you can't listen to all of them, unless you're [names redacted], and of course that inevitably means you're going to come across stuff you just don't know about. If we lived in an ideal world, this would constantly function as an incentive to find out more. We don't, so it's more than likely an incentive to practise smiling and nodding and laughing intelligently in the right places.

I've usually thought it was better to know about something than not to know about it. There are things that have challenged that, but they've tended to be unnecessary or frivolous or about One Direction. What I've read about copyright law is challenging it too, not because I don't appreciate the importance of it, but because, to me, it's so coma-inducingly, jaw-grindingly tedious. I'm sure some people find it fascinating and I doff my metaphorical hat in their general direction. And, as the ratings for Dancing on Ice prove so convincingly, opinions can vary. But at the end of my week with copyright, my questions are these. Can we, as professionals, wilfully and legitimately choose to try to 'get by' with something that's entirely relevant? Can we ever decide just to rely on tacit knowledge and an awareness of how to find out more if it's required? And can we make decisions like these solely on how boring the topic is? If not, come up with a better justification for me, thankyouplease.

Yet more sleeping. Photo credit.

*What I read
Armstrong, C. and Bebbington, L.W. (eds.) (2004). Staying legal: a guide to issues and practice affecting the library, information and publishing sectors, 2nd ed. London: Facet.
Patry, W. (2009). Moral panics and the copyright wars. Oxford: OUP.
Pedley, P. (2008). Copyright compliance: practical steps to stay within the law. London: Facet.
Pedley, P. (ed.) (2005). Managing digital rights: a practitioner's guide. London: Facet.

No imps were made to act in the writing of this blog post: the Libraries@Cambridge conference 2013 (#lac13)

Every year, in the second week of January, countless libraries in Cambridge are left unattended (in the hopes that they won't be removed without warning or their contents destroyed...which actually isn't a bad plot for a film) as their librarians trek along to what is surely the highlight of the Cambridge social calendar, the Libraries@Cambridge conference. (That is, highlight with the exclusion of SCONUL headcount days. Obviously. Goes without saying? Yup, thought so.)

And actually, now is as good a time as any to point out how MASSIVELY SPOILED we are that we get a conference like this. It's free. It's got enough places that a huge percentage of us can get to it. It's Cambridge-centric enough that it's directly relevant, but not so much that we can kid ourselves that we're the beating heart of the universe. It's a chance for us to swap stories about the various viruses we picked up over Christmas. IT'S GOT DANISH PASTRIES IN THE TEA BREAK.

The theme of this year's conference was 'Making an Impact'... and not 'Making an Imp Act', as I initially thought. The first keynote was given by Director of LIS at Teesside (and Twitter celebrity), Liz Jolly. She argued that we're good at measuring stuff in general (there speaks a woman who wasn't witness to me buying the wrong size of mattress for my bed: who knew 5ft and 6ft weren't interchangeable?). And we've got a lot of mechanisms for measuring stuff. We also have a lot of acronyms. Liz questioned, though, whether we're measuring the right stuff, or just what's measurable. Whether we're benchmarking what we measure in a meaningful way. Whether we're aligning what we measure to our institutional mission. We've got the measuring down, but what about the impact? And this led Liz to address the yin to the 'measuring impact' yang, the Cagney to its Lacey: making an impact. The tripartite approach she presented involved: one, considering students our partners in their learning; two, building relationships with students and the wider organisation; three, professional leadership and membership (yo CILIP, your ears burning?). I was totally on board with Liz till this last point. And I'd venture into why I disagree about any direct, immediate connection between 'professionalism' and 'professional membership' but these arguments have been regurgitated sixteen gazillion times and the debate's more tedious and unwelcome than McCartney.

"They're not going on about CILIP again, are they?"

Then Dave Pattern and Graham Stone from the University of Huddersfield rocked up to tell us about the Library Impact Data Project. They achieved the NEAR IMPOSSIBLE by making stats engaging (no, really), despite having All The Graphs and a giiiinormous amount of data. Dave and Graham did a smashing job of describing the project and providing commentary around the stats in a way that was really balanced and fair. Like, there was some correlation between library usage (or lack of) and not completing a degree, but instead of leaping to the dead easy and dramatic conclusion that not using libraries really is bad for your (academic) health, they showed how that correlation was nuanced, how the data was limited, how this was only one part of the picture. In fact, their presentation sort of vindicated what Liz had been saying: that we can measure stuff till the cows come home and make the dinner but we still need to bridge the gap between the stuff that we measure and how we use that to make it count.

And then it was time for the blessed BREAK FOR TEA, after which came the first of two 'break out' sessions. I went to a presentation on Open Access: a sort of past, present, future trilogy. Or at least, I think that's what it was about. I don't actually remember. And oi, no that isn't because I dozed off or skived off or went to the wrong room (you know me so well). It's that, for this session, I wore the beanie hat of 'live blogger' and I wrote this. And, for some reason, the fact that I listened really REALLY hard and in that hour was made of more concentration than a bottle of Sunny Delight meant that I didn't hear anything they said. Let alone take it in. Live blogging is a weird sport. It's not even live. It's not especially difficult--you just have to type really fast. The only tricksy bit is grappling with Blogger under time pressure and even that is less taxing than desperately soul-annihilating. By the end, though, I was knackered, so I was glad when the presentations ended and the ring was destroyed or something. Cue the queue for butties.

The afternoon kicked off with the second 'break out' (which is a phrase that really does evoke 'Twelve Monkeys', am I right?). I went to hear Stuart Hunt from the University of Warwick talk about the future of cataloguing. Hell yeah, don't tell me I don't know how to enjoy myself. Stuart did a jam-packed SWOT of cataloguing procedures and practices at a sort of macro level, talking about shared cataloguing, decentralised practices, quality of records, and so on. Then a panel of Cambridge folk brought what Stuart had said down to a more micro level, which was really useful, especially for an accidental cataloguer like me. Anyway, the things I took from the session were: one, cataloguing has a future; two, that future might have to involve a bit of rolling with the punch-tuation marks (see what I did there); three, library conferences should have bingo cards with words like 'metadata' and 'acronym' and 'semantics' because this stuff ALWAYS gets said and because even the most serious presentation would be improved by someone screeching 'HOUSE' in the middle of it. (Hugh Laurie association notwithstanding).

Hugh approves of this clever and fortuitous segue

The last bit of the day was a Pecha Kucha session. No, I hadn't heard of it either. According to that dastardly, talented genius, Ange Fitzpatrick, Pecha Kucha is Japanese for "unexpected slide". Anyway, this was another part of the day that I was coerced emotionally blackmailed persuaded to be involved in, and I gave a little presentation about some things. All the other speakers, though, were brilliant, showcasing some of the awesome stuff that's going on in the faculties and the UL and the colleges. Ostentatious lot. They were so good that I forgot that I had been expecting a short rendition of 'No Scrubs' from the presentation titled 'TLC'.

Day over, it was time for wine and gossip and heady intellectual discussions and wine. A big ta to the organisers and the speakers and everyone involved: t'was super.

An (this) idiot's survival guide to #aberils, part V

Last instalment, then! Hurray for Fridays. Today my topic is distance learning itself. (For more, see Part I, Part II, Part III and Part IV, and then, really, you might need to have a think about why you're punishing yourself in this way...).

There aren't that many disadvantages to distance learning, to be honest. The advantages far outweigh them. And of the disadvantages there are, most are administrative. Like having to organise access to resources. Like figuring out who to email if you want a new module. Like devising a password suitable for Moodle which, in a nutshell, shouldn't contain any letters or numbers which you've ever used before, in any context, in the whole of your life. Like remembering this password when you've come up with one. There are just two problems that aren't as easily overcome. First, there's the bit where you have to learn something. Because you don't get classroom experiences. No lectures, no lecturers. Not only do you have to motivate yourself, but you have to find your own answers, figure out your own path through the reading, organise your own time, your own work. And second, there's the bit where you're at a distance. Because you miss out on the socialising, the complaining about stuff down the pub, the scrapping over the same books in the library. Basically, the biggest hurdle to overcome is that distance learning probably isn't like any kind of studying you might've done before.

(C) Jessica Holland

The first bit, I promise you, you get over fast. Partly because you haven't any other choice in the matter. And partly because the module handbooks, for their faults, tend to be pretty well structured. The tricksiest bit is figuring out your own working methods: when, and where, you concentrate best, how much studying you can cope with, but a trial-and-error approach will get you there. Another problem is that the module handbooks are quite hefty. And if you try to read All The Things, chances are you'll have retired by the time you qualify. Sometimes the reading listed at the end of a unit just replicates the content of it. Sometimes it's a bit out of date. Sometimes the interwebs weren't invented when it was written. So while it might solidify your thoughts, it also might not. Don't get me wrong: I'm not encouraging you to slack off or insisting that you try to get away with doing the bare minimum, but a degree of educated selectivity will help you use your time more wisely. That and, of course, finding more relevant and recent reading yourself.

Then there's the dissertation. Because the modules are nice and structured, the dissertation can be about as shocking as that plot twist in Downton Abbey a few weeks back. I don't think the dissertation study school is quite as useful as it could (should?) be in preparing you for what is, ultimately, very different form the 'taught' part of the course. One important thing, then: you should definitely, definitely, think about your dissertation topic before the school, no matter how premature it feels. Not just vague ideas, either. Concrete ones, with research questions, a methodology, an idea of structure (oh, and if you're planning to diverge from the "traditional" social science structure, one hell of a justification for it). The better prepared you are for the dissertation school, the more you'll get out of it.

 Second, then, the social side of things. Thanks be for the interwebs! All right, it's not ever really going to replace the social element of full-time study but, then again, you're not studying full-time. So when you're at study schools, get email addresses, phone numbers, new Facebook friends. Get on the Twitters and get involved with the #aberils hashtag. If there are other students local to you, organise a meet-up. Keep in regular contact with them, find out about their progress, and get them to pester you about yours. Like I said right at the start of the week (a very very long time ago!), there's a commonality of experience, and Aber students, past and present, are generous with their time, willing to answer questions, ready to offer advice. If ever there were a benefit for the course changing at glacial pace, this is it.

So, anyway, that's it from me, I'm going back into semi-retirement from this blogging malarkey. But do feel free to get in touch with me on Twitter or in the comments, even if you just want to tell me that I was right about being the idiot. A HUGE thanks to everyone who has commented so far, and especially, especially, to the brilliant and talented Jessica Holland who doesn't seem to have minded at all that I've nicked all her photos (unless the bill's in the post). So toodle-pip, and happy studying!

(C) Jessica Holland

An (this) idiot's survival guide to #aberils, part IV

In today's little instalment, I'm going to talk about the actual assignments. Cue dramatic music. (See more ramblings here: Part I, Part II, Part III)

Now I don't want to get personal with the specifics of certain assignments 'cos I'll be here all night. But it seems to me that there are two separate but connected issues: what the assignment actually means, and then whether you're doing it correctly. As for the first, the errr... long-windedness of some of the assignment questions definitely caused me a problem or two. You have to put aside a few weeks just to get to the end of reading them through. Some of them consist of more words than they give us to complete them. Some of them are so long that I suspect they're products of the dullest #nanowrimo project ever. There's the one with the quotation which, on every reading, makes less sense--quite literally, too, there's a verb missing or something. There's the one which asks you to divide your answer into four parts, and the description of what the third part should be is practically identical to the second. There's the one which--now changed, I believe--couldn't decide whether or not it was a case-study. And lastly, there's the one which, if there was a league table for unappealing prospects, would fall somewhere between root canal and cleaning someone else's oven (all right, all right, the business plan).

When it comes to your interpretation of the assignment, geographic isolation can really become an issue. Chances are you're the only person you know working on that assignment at that time. And, sometimes, the assignment topics are pretty open to interpretation, and even if you do know someone, they might be working on an entirely different topic. So if you have questions, it's often to Moodle (that's the VLE, for non-Aber folk) that you turn, and while Moodle may have the answers, they're so well hidden that you're just as likely to find them in a tube of Smarties. And often--or maybe this was just me--you don't have a specific question. You have seventy-four specific questions. You're wondering if you're doing the whole blimmin' thing wrong.

The bluebell walk. (C) Jessica Holland.

This sense of unease seems to be fairly universal. My singular gripe about my Aber experience is that it isn't addressed or combated particularly effectively by the department. Partly it's symptomatic of being at a distance, and that they can do nothing about. But partly it's the fault of the assignments themselves: some seriously need updating, or sharpening, or simplifying, or focusing on one topic rather than fourteen. It doesn't help that you might have a long, long wait for feedback, that it's all a bit sporadic, and that the feedback is so (deliberately) impersonal. It doesn't help that the modules and assignments are kind of isolated from one another, so what one marker says isn't necessarily applicable to your next piece of work. And as far as confidence is concerned, it doesn't help that we're advised to do the modules in a way that's linear and rigid and which, in my opinion at least, could do with reordering*.

I do, however, believe that the department is doing the best that it can. And unfortunately, dwelling on what doesn't help equally doesn't help. Even more unfortunately, there isn't an easy answer to this particular problem, but I do have two tips. First, apart from all the stuff that you'll do anyway, like keeping in the word limit and giving good referencing and reading the assignment question, make sure that what you submit fulfils the marking criteria. I often found the marking criteria sheet to be the clearest indication of what you're actually expected to do, and it's generally easy enough to interpret. Also, employ the KISS principle liberally, and don't overcomplicate things.

Second, and this is an important one: nervousness about assignments is usually borne of a lack of confidence, of not knowing whether you're doing something right or not. So be confident. I know that's easy for me to say and tricky to achieve. But you have to trust your instincts and your experience. Ask a friend or colleague or classmate to look over your assignments if you want, and get on the tailwind of his or her instincts and experience. If it helps, I've proofread plenty of the assignments of my friends on the course and no one has EVER got it wrong. So, seriously, you're probably on the right track. In fact, you almost certainly are. Have a bit of faith in yourself, you smartypants, you.

Best castle ruins EVER. (C) Jessica Holland

*The second and third modules are BY FAR the toughest of the lot, which feels disheartening and challenging. I wonder if anyone in the department is monitoring how long it takes people to get past this bit in comparison with the rest of the degree. Personally, I'd put Collection Management third--it's far more palatable and digestible than some of the others and I think it'd increase everyone's confidence at the time in the course when it's most likely to begin to dip.

An (this) idiot's survival guide to #aberils, part III

Today's topic for discussion is deadlines or, more specifically, the lack of them. (Part I is here, for anyone who's wondering why I'm banging on about this, and for more of my ramblings, see Part II)

One of the very greatest things about Aber is that you set your own pace, you fix your own deadlines. Equally, one of the very worst things about Aber is that you set your own pace, you fix your own deadlines. Aber's rightly celebrated flexibility is also the planet's biggest double-edged sword. Even though the department provides "marking deadlines" about once every seven or eight weeks, they're optional. Voluntary. Fundamentally ignorable. Douglas Adams might've admitted his appreciation for deadlines on account of the whooshing sound they make as they fly by; with Aber, the deadlines don't so much fly by as fizzle out like a three-day old Alka Seltzer.

Perfectionists and tinkerers have it the worst. Even I found it tough to submit assignments knowing that I could continue working on them if I wanted, and it should be patently clear to any poor soul reading this that I'm neither a perfectionist nor a tinkerer. So if you are, here's the horrible truth: perfect assignments don't exist. Seriously. The inherent perfection of your assignment is just slightly less likely than Dame Maggie Smith announcing tomorrow that her favourite song is Teenage Dirtbag by Wheatus.

Of course every assignment should be the best that you can do. With this caveat. It should be the best that you can do WITHIN A SPECIFIC TIME FRAME. You have to cultivate the Babe Principle: reaching the point where "that'll do, pig". And if the department is going to insist on being a bit shy about enforcing that time frame, then you're going to have to do it yourself.

So set yourself deadlines. And more importantly, mean them. Stick to them. Write them down. Tell other people about them. Appoint a chivvier, someone to give you a "hard stare" if you're not meeting them. Try to make them coincide with the marking deadlines, so you don't have to wait ages for feedback. Try to make them coincide with the cut-off point for the next study school you want to attend. Not only will deadlines motivate you by invoking The Fear, which has long been a key factor in Getting Things Done, but they'll help you get past, and over, the most awful of assignments--because you'll reach the point where your time runs out and you can do no more. If you want to finish the course at a very fast pace, like me, make the deadlines tight and difficult, and you'll be surprised by what you can achieve (though 3 and a half months for a dissertation is probably pushing it a bit, at least in my experience).

Deadlines, written down, publicised, shared with friends, copied by friends, will keep the momentum going, because you have something tangible-ish to aim for. They'll keep that credit counter rising, more to the point. And once you have a deadline, think of it as a massive bar of Dairy Milk. You know, one of the big 1kg bars. In order to reach your goal of finishing the Dairy Milk, you have to break it down into little pieces, unless you have a gob the size of Jim Carrey, which you probably don't. So, say you want to be done with Planning for Delivery by next March. That becomes finishing the first assignment by Christmas, which means finishing the module booklet by the end of November, which means finishing the first unit by ... Thursday. Short-term targets will keep you on track with the long-term ones, and they'll show you how you're constantly achieving as you progress through the course.

By the way, if you're struggling to understand the Dairy Milk analogy, feel free to bring/post/fax me a 1kg bar of Dairy Milk and I'll gladly show you how it works. Ever the soul of generosity, me. See you tomorrow!

(C) Jessica Holland

An (this) idiot's survival guide to #aberils, part II

In the second part of this little series, I'm going to write about momentum, how to get it, and once you've got it, how to keep it going. (Part I is here, for anyone wondering what I'm going on about).

Tell me if this sounds familiar. You're at study school, just sitting there, watching someone carry in several crates full of battered copies of DDC21 and completely ignorant of how, in just a short hour's time, the prospect of writing an essay on classification schemes will be ... yeah, all right, more interesting than it was before. You're surrounded by clever, interesting wines, and delicious, free-flowing people, and you're currently more tempted to part with your money for some stationery with the Aber logo than you are for Apple's latest invention. And in spite of spending several hours on the smallest, busiest train in Wales, and a longer sojourn at Birmingham New Street than anyone deserves, you're feeling BUOYANT. Excited. Eager to get started. But then a few weeks pass. You're at home, just sitting there, with your module handbook open in front of you. It's winter, it's dark, you've been at work all day or all week, you're tired and fed up and hungry and seriously, Information Organisation and WHAT THE HELL DOES THIS MEAN?

Our experience of study school. (C) Jessica Holland

There's this disconnect between the experience of the study school and the experience of the studying. As you move from one to the other, something seems to falter, just briefly, and if you don't capture it again quickly, it vanishes faster than a double gin and tonic in front of a stressed librarian. I think we all believe that it's our motivation that does a runner, but I think we're wrong. It's momentum. And we can talk till the cows and the sheep and the chickens come home about ways to stay motivated, but what we really need is to find ways to sustain--or recover--that momentum, and then motivation will follow.

I only ever found one method of doing this, so if anyone else has suggestions, please share them. My way was simple in theory, but in practice, cor blimey, did it hurt. Basically you need to get things moving, which means ... doing some flipping work. Like, today. Right now. It doesn't even really matter what you do: as long as you do something, you're achieving something. If you're really finding it impossible, try a different setting, or work at a different time of day--don't underestimate popping a bit of novelty into your study patterns. Just getting something done is far and away the biggest battle, and it's a psychological, guilt-ridden one as much as anything else. You just need to get the ball rolling again. You'll also need a treat-based incentive/reward for when you've done. Cake, I recommend cake.

But then there's another related issue, and this one is particularly beastly. It's one of the only ways in which the course at Aber is like cleaning the fridge. The longer you leave it, the trickier it gets. It's Aber amnesia: you just forget what you were doing, or where you were up to, even if you're studying very regularly. So you don't study for a week, and it takes a painful hour just to get started. Two weeks, and it's two hours. When that fortnight turns into a month, you've forgotten what module you were doing. And god forbid it gets to two months, because you're going to have to relearn how to spell 'Aberystwyth' and your own name, along with everything else.

So here's what I recommend. First, you need to sustain the momentum created by the doing-something and cake-eating. You need to Keep Things Moving. I'd suggest that you aim for a little a lot, rather than a lot a little, especially if you're predominantly reading rather than writing. Fifteen minutes a day, or five pages every other day, keeps things creeping along much more than three hours' worth of intensive study every Sunday afternoon. Maybe this sounds like a chore, or maybe a luxury, but try to magic your studying into a habit. I found scheduling it in, all official like, was useful too--I even had a special calendar for it. This meant that I had no excuse to not study when it was scheduled, but also that I could legitimately not work when it wasn't. Which is also important.

Second, and I can hear my pre-Aber self making some very convincing retching sounds at what I'm about to write, but go with it: keep a study log, or diary, or journal. No, not for your heartfelt ruminations on Huczynski and Buchanan. Unless you really want to, you strange individual. But just to remind yourself where you're up to. Spend the last minute of every study session writing down the first thing you'll do when you next hit the books. The first article you'll read, the first paragraph you'll write. Jot down the second, third and more too, if you know them. What it does is eliminate that uncertainty about where you'll start, which makes getting going again much less painful. It means you might even be able to avoid procrastinating. And it means you pick up exactly where you left off.

(C) Jessica Holland, again.

Right, then, that's more than enough from me. See you tomorrow!