SM@LL Project Team – Gareth Johnson

Continuing the introductions of the project team.

I’m, well the name above really and currently I’m the Information Librarian for Physical & Biological Sciences and the LRAManager, and I’ve been at Leicester since Feb 08.  Prior to this I’ve been a Repository Development Officer working for JISC and SHERPA, a Research Innovation Officer and a plain old Subject Librarian too.  I’ve also been a pharmaceutical researcher, a kitchen assistant and an assistant sales manager.  Working for libraries is something I fell into, but it’s been kinda interesting over the years.  I’m a sought after conference speaker too, which is something I really relish doing.

As a trained biomedical technologist and part time computer geek I’m very keen to work on and with new software/hardware/systems; which is why this project is of particular interest to me.  As prospective Project Manager as well, it’ll be nice to focus my prior project running experiences in Open Access on the LIS sector more directly.  As well as overseeing the project, I’ll be very hands on involved in practically every aspect of it from week zero to 24, and beyond.

You can find me on various social media sites, but probably the most relevent one is twitter. A lot of the details of this project bid were thrashed out on twitter, and it continues to be the primary location for keeping the team connected.

SM@ll Project Team – Sarah Whittaker

 

Sarah Whittaker

Just to add to the introductions…

I’m Sarah Whittaker, since 2006 I’ve been the Information Librarian for Cardiovascular Sciences, Cell Physiology and Pharmacology, Physiotherapy, and one of a team that supports Leicester Medical School, based in the Clinical Sciences Library at Leicester University.  

In previous lives I originally did a degree and a masters in music and a variety of day jobs in between and after before settling in library land.  My first library qualified job was for PriceWaterhouseCoopers before coming to the University of Leicester to work on the (sadly no longer funded) Outreach Library Project for NHS staff in the community.

I’ve always preferred to be involved in the experimental side of things and in terms of web 2.0 I’ve recently been involved in an innovative project with Alan Cann in using web 2.0 to cultivate information literacy in a medical ethics course.  In the Medical School we’ve also been looking at ways to using wikis with our medical students during their information training with us.

During the SM@LL project I’m looking forward to finding out how we can customize ‘useful stuff’ (technical term) for our researchers, rather than providing lists of resources.  

You can find me online as Whittybus on Twitter and Delicious and I sometimes manage to blog on the UoL Libraryblog.

Thats enough for now.