Thing 16

Advocacy

I have had a look at some of the links relating to FE - I chose the shortened list and found it was still quite long! I haven't had a chance to look at many of the links in detail but would like to come back to the document at some other point as I think it looks like there will be some useful articles on there to read. I noticed links to the ToolKit - our College has run through the Toolkit twice. We found it really useful as it highlighted areas where we could improve our services and gave us a structure to work with. The second time we ran through it we could see where we had made improvements over the past 12 months and again came up with more improvements to make. We have made use of completing the Toolkit in our Service Review and have involved other members of staff from within the college to help to give us feedback regarding the Toolkit therefore helping to raise our profile. We try to raise our profile within college in various ways, we started a student focus group a few years ago which has been successful in helping to gain feedback from our users and also helps to raise awareness of resources that we have for them which they may not know about. We are now part of something called "Skills for Success" which all students must complete as part of their course. In their booklet is says that they have to complete the Library induction which is on our VLE, Moodle. We offer teaching staff the opportunity to book a session with a member of staff to complete this part of the Skills for Success booklet. We have have run  nearly 200 sessions since the end of September 2012 which has helped to promote the Library to students but also to staff members who may not have know about all the things we have to offer.

The Love Libraries campaign for public libaries is a good way of advocacy, I do use my public library quite a lot, it helps that I used to work there! Now I have a young son I do tend to visit perhaps more frequently than when I did not have any children as there are so many great events for babies/toddlers that they run.