Cultural Heritage

About this Guest Post

Lisa Anderson is a Subject Advisor (Law, Archaeology and Antiquity) in the Library Services at the University of Birmingham. She can be contacted at l.anderson@bham.ac.uk

New Technologies Blog

At the University of Birmingham the library has a New Technologies Group (NewT), and over the years we have looked at and shared information amongst ourselves about new technology applications and tried to work out if we can use them for teaching, research or to create work efficiencies. The group consists of subject librarians, library services managers, a member of IT Services staff and a member of the University’s eLearning team.

We work with other members of Library Services on projects that involve new technologies for example I recently worked on a project with another member of library staff which investigated how portable devices worked with our resources and how our students currently used them. Two NewT members are working with a staff member from Library Customer Support on how we could use QR codes and we are also investigating how we can make our services more mobile friendly. When a subject librarian said that she still didn’t feel certain about how to use all of these new Web 2.0 tools we worked with her and put together a short course that any member of our library staff could attend.

I would recommend all libraries to set up their own NewT groups. There is so much happening and at such speed that it is difficult for one lone individual to be able to keep up with all of these developments. In NewT we all have different skills and interests and this helps us to remain on top of things. Most of us are not technical types, and having a group of people helps us to help each other to work out how these new technologies work, and gives us someone to test them on. We can’t shy away from these new technologies just because we don’t understand them to begin with as libraries and technologies are now interlinked. We need to have room to experiment and to gain ideas from how other people use them.

We have decided that some of our information may be of interest to a wider audience and so have created a New Technologies blog which you can find at: http://newtbham.wordpress.com/ . We are aiming to add at least one or two new items to the blog each week. If you are like me and prefer to follow tweets to blogs, then I will be tweeting about each new blog entry via my @Subjectadvisor http://twitter.com/subjectadvisor twitter account.