Alice Cann

@alicecann

Uni business librarian, Mum, Researcher. #SystematicReview, searching. Books & reading, esp. scifi (& on tv). Hashtag obsessive. Blogger: #AliceWrites Past focuses: left wing politics, aphantasia, gentle parenting

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Website Bluesky

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Alice Cann@alicecann· Jul 7

Today I realised that I could make use of my grannie’s knitting bag, which has been packed away taking up space for years since I broke one of the handles. Breaking the other handle has meant I can fold it up in a drawer and use it as a dry wash bag when going away #JulyJourney #Day7

A big flowery bag, with beige lining, and one brown handle.

Alice Cann@alicecann· Jul 5

This evening my daughter cut up fruit for this lovely Pimms and lemonade (for me). It’s been a nice evening #JulyJourney #Day5

A class containing amber liquid, lots of fruit, and melting ice

Alice Cann@alicecann· Jul 3

Brilliant marketing from Mintel! #bla26 conference swag - getting me to actually read the ‘leaflet’ (in the form of a chocolate bar) that I put in my bag, along with lots of others!

The back of a yellow Mintel chocolate bar, with database description in the form of Ingredients.

Alice Cann@alicecann· Jul 3

Pros and cons, and differences, to these different roles #bla26

Slide: Differences between roles: librarian and lecturer

Alice Cann@alicecann· Jul 3

#bla26 Having to do lots of different things. I identify with this!

Alice Cann@alicecann· Jul 3

Students are often time poor, because they have full time jobs #bla26

Slide. Widening participation students. Time poor, Digital poverty, Lacking confidence, Reduced campus hours.

Alice Cann@alicecann· Jul 3

A potential issue for me is that additional things are developed, without recognition of the additional work for the library. We want to be involved, but don’t always have the capacity (this applies in so many areas) #bla26

Slide: Process, four boxes, where library is (or should be) and isn’t involved.

Alice Cann@alicecann· Jul 2

Feedback (100%) You can see the topics at the bottom #bla26

Graph. How confident do you feel in using/accessing the following resources

Alice Cann@alicecann· Jul 2

An example of one of the activities #bla26

Alice Cann@alicecann· Jul 2

A good explanation of the Race across the library scheme #bla26

Race across the library slide. Explanation. Including cash prize

Alice Cann@alicecann· Jul 2

Now at #bla26 we are hearing from one of the Silver Sponsors, Statista. Nataly asked us about obstacles to positioning the Library as a strategic partner

Polling website. Word cloud. Common answer (among others) is Time.

Alice Cann@alicecann· Jul 2

Nice analogy. We keep doing what we do, without thinking about the issues and alternatives #bla26

Slide with quote from Winnie the Pooh. Christopher Robin coming down the stairs. And image.

Alice Cann@alicecann· Jul 2

Challenges, and how they responded at Coventry #bla26

Slide listing The challenges with the move to Open textbooks, and how Coventry responded.

Alice Cann@alicecann· Jul 1

This sounds great! I love it whenever I go into our Financial Resources Suite to see students doing certifications. And whenever students in my classes say they’re already doing them. #bla26

Unexpected outcomes
Increased attendance in open sessions
Student societies requesting bespoke sessions
Exploring other certifications
Cultural shift - essential part of the AMBS experience.

Alice Cann@alicecann· Jul 1

Explaining barriers to completion of the BMC. #bla26 I recognise many of these.

barriers to completion of the BMC. Awareness
Optional/self-directed,
Not tied to assessment
Other priorities
Introduced too late
Limited access to terminals

Alice Cann@alicecann· Jul 1

#bla26

Slide. Final message. The library is not a destination. The library is a partnership-built on collaboration, shared expertise and common purpose.

Alice Cann@alicecann· Jul 1

#bla26

Slide:
What have we learned?
Librarians are educators
Embedded support works
Human support matters

Alice Cann@alicecann· Jun 14

I came back to being an avid book reader about 8 years ago maybe. After being distracted with things online (& admittedly preoccupied with young children) it was so good to come back to it. What helped me was finding a new author I was gripped by, which lead to others. Then I’ve prioritised reading.

It is a crisis and those of us who are over 22 can’t help if we are also succumbing to the not-reading epidemic. Genuinely almost everyone I know, including very serious novelists and intellectuals, have experienced this problem at least a bit in the past few years. All of us have had to do some work reminding ourselves that ‘oh yes I do like reading’.

Alice Cann@alicecann· Jun 4

I initially screenshotted this paragraph loving the analogy generally. Now as I’ve read it out loud to my son, me being me, I’m thinking about it in relation to the importance of sharing your processes in systematic reviews!

What would it take to convince me that a computer program is actually conscious and using language the way that people use language? Let me offer an analogy. If tomorrow someone showed me a video of an astronaut in a spaceship orbiting Alpha Centauri, a star that’s 4.3 light-years from Earth, what would I have to see in that video to convince me that it was real? My answer to that is, there is nothing in the video itself that would convince me. No matter how high the video resolution is or how realistic the scenery is, I would feel confident in saying that the video is fake.

I won’t pay attention to any video of an astronaut orbiting Alpha Centauri unless I have previously seen good evidence that astronauts have landed on Mars, that astronauts have reached the moons of Jupiter, that astronauts have reached the moons of Saturn, and that astronauts have crossed the orbit of Pluto. Before anyone can credibly claim that they’ve solved an extraordinarily difficult engineering problem, I need to be confident that they have previously solved the many much simpler problems that precede the difficult problem.

Alice Cann@alicecann· May 27

Cleaning raw data helps trainees to gain a sense of the data’s diversity and quality; searching, reading and summarizing the scientific literature builds a sense of which research areas are highly populated versus sparse, and what kinds of finding are common versus rare. Senior scientists today are in the unique position of having trained before AI tools were widely available, and thereby benefit from decades of practical experience that current trainees might never get to develop

Alice Cann@alicecann· Apr 21

The Business Librarians Association @blalib.org conference programme is out! And look what's at the bottom of it. This is what I love to see-it's my dream for all conference programmes to include a hashtag & to promote it in advance #BLA26 (Says she, constantly avoiding volunteering to organise...)

Please share your impressions during the conference on social media:
Bluesky and Linkedln with the hashtag #BLA26 BlueSky and LinkedIn logos.

Alice Cann@alicecann· Apr 19

Camouflage!

A snail with a brown shell moving its way up a brown tree trunk, with bark coming away. They are similar in colour and pattern.

Alice Cann@alicecann· Apr 11

Very interesting post.

Finally, if we think of popular histories as syntheses, that can be very useful, but you can't have that without something to synthesize! In less glib terms, popular histories almost by definition must depend on specialized scholarship. At least good popular histories are informed by numerous specialized studies that are the building blocks for our understanding of the past. Without the academic background to sustain it, popular histories will remain locked into relying on outdated and bad scholarship, if they have anything to access at all. In fact, all scholarship is essentially an act of synthesis, academic or not.

Alice Cann@alicecann· Apr 7

My daughter says it’s more like going round an ampersand rather than a treble clef .

On lined paper, 2 symbols, on the left an ampersand on the right a treble clef. Both drawn in red ink and very accurate.

Alice Cann@alicecann· Apr 5

Today I went for a run on an actual running track. This was a good experience. My daughter is planning on coming with me tomorrow and making me run a whole 5k - which I know will end up being a lot longer than the 28-30 minute runs I’ve built up to! #AbleApril #Day5

A red / orange racing track. Three lanes, with grass visible to the right.

Alice Cann@alicecann· Apr 4

It’s a lovely time of year!

Two clumps of spring flowers, purple and pink, growing at the bottom of a grey step.

Alice Cann@alicecann· Apr 4

Another bit that stood out to me.

But the real threat isn't either of those things. It's quieter, and more boring, and therefore more dangerous. The real threat is a slow, comfortable drift toward not understanding what you're doing. Not a dramatic collapse. Not Skynet. Just a generation of researchers who can produce results but can't produce understanding. Who know what buttons to press but not why those buttons exist. Who can get a paper through peer review but can't sit in a room with a colleague and explain, from the ground up, why the third term in their expansion has the sign that it does.

Alice Cann@alicecann· Apr 4

A great post! So many things I’d like to quote.

The experiment succeeded because the human supervisor had done the grunt work, years ago, that the machine is now supposedly liberating us from. If Schwartz had been Bob instead of Schwartz, the paper would have been wrong, and neither of them would have known.

Alice Cann@alicecann· Mar 28

What a wonderful day to be in Cambridge! #TrollopeConf

A brick building on the right, grass on the left, a brick wall with doorway straight ahead, and a big tree against against a clear blue sky. All in bright sunlight.

Alice Cann@alicecann· Mar 22

I think my instinct (if seeing results of generative AI) is to immediately start critiquing. But I’m aware this is tinkering around the edges, the sources, the confidence. Not always the whole direction. It was interesting in my lecture recently, students picking up on different critiques from me.