Random Letters

Students at the Heart of the System

2011-11-21T17:18:00.001Z

I've been at The Publishers Association's Academic and Professional Division's 2011 conference on "Students at the Heart of the System" today.

The morning was kicked-off by a keynote from Ian Diamond (VC at University of Aberdeen) with a talk on "Some considerations in the future of HE". He discussed changes to the HE funding model, increases to the number and diversity of students, and outlined what he sees as some of the priorities for meeting these challenges. The keynote was very research focused - addressing concerns about the publication of research and the importance of Open Access in publishing academic research quickly whilst maintaining academic standards. Interesting stats on the UK being "top of the pops" for citations per researcher BUT our research outputs are not increasing - they have flatlined compared to emerging forces like China.

Ian asked the question as to whether we still need libraries and answered with a definite YES - placing the professional skills of librarians, as experts in their subject specialisms, managing data and digital media, at the center of liaison between academics and publishers.

The next part of the morning was extremely interesting - a student forum consisting of a panel of international and UK students who answered questions on their experiences and expectations of published information. The responses where fascinating (there's more detail in the twitter stream). The most interesting for me was when the panel were asked if they (as students) had ever been asked about which books they had used or found useful). The answer was almost unanimously "NO!"... It occurs that there is a role for the library here in evaluating students experience with reading materials and liaising with academics to improve reading lists.

Tools like Talis Aspire and possibly social media tools spring to mind here. The final point was that if students are paying more to be at University, they expect to be consulted on what materials are chosen and also expect them to be available in the library. My favourite bit of the day was hearing the students recognizing the library as a tool for evaluating the quality of information!

Next up was John Lanham (partnerships lead at UWE, Bristol) talking about partnership with Hewlett Packard. John described UWE as producing "professional" graduates (not vocational!). UWE have moved beyond having HP as their provider of technology to having a programme with placement etc. UWE bring the educational practice to take it beyond "training" but use HPs experience in online materials. There was an interesting question at the end about providing partners with access to the Uni's e-resources. The response was that HP staff are taken on as associate lecturers to grant access to the institution's resources.

This was followed by a case study on meducation.net an online community for medical students to share their resources. Meducation includes student's notes and teaching materials they have developed as part of their course as well as some content from publishers (they are looking to expand this "premium" content). The use of the social networking element to crowd-source content that includes MCQs and question banks as well as learning resources seems to have been successful and a large number of med students have signed up to the site. It was interesting (as a librarian interloping on a publishers conference) to hear concerns expressed in the questions about the quality of information on the site (how do you quality control crowd-sourced material?) and copyright concerns (what happens if someone posts publisher-owned content). The point was made that recommendations can act as a quality control mechanism - and also that there is a take down policy for owned content - the idea being that the risk of copyright being infringed shouldn't be a barrier to people adding the content that they have developed or own the rights to.

Next was a talk by Jonathon Crowe and Cathy Kennedy about BioscienceHorizons, an OA journal that publishes the research of UG students. The point was made that UG students often carry out a "real" research project that finds out something new and BioscienceHorizons gives an outlet for that. It was interesting to hear how they have been trying to raise the discoverability of the journal articles by talking to Web of Science about getting listed. Another point of interest was that to be (truely) peer reviewed, Bioscience Horizons should be reviewed by undergraduates. This would require some more pedagogy to be developed in order to train UG students to be reviewers.

Finally, Linden Harris presented on the development of The State Papers Online. This is an online archive of 16th and 17th century British and European papers - born from digital preservation and access issues. Interesting as it gets over the fragmentation of these physical documents (i.e. some in BL some at National Archives).

Finally, finally - Jane Powell did an impromptu presentation on research on how the White Paper is changing perceptions. You can access the research via Shift Learning's twitter stream.

For me the most valuable part of the day was the student forum. Some key points from the student responses were:

*Students want to be consulted on the content of their reading lists;
*If they are paying higher fees, students expect their institution to provide access to the materials (rather than buying their own copies);
*Financially, students will feel less able to buy their own copy whe they are going into debt to study;
*Students want content that they can download to mobile devices and readers;
*Students value the library and librarians as a quality control mechanism for evaluating information.

It seems that librarians are key to the future business of publishers. All of the indications from today are that publishers need to move from a model where they sell direct to students to institutions providing content to their students. Librarians can and should be the locus between students, academics and publishers to ensure that the institutional content is academically appropriate but learner centered...

Eastleigh Festival of Music 2011

2011-07-10T10:27:00.005+01:00

It's one of my favorite weekends of the year. We're really lucky that Eastleigh lays on a music festival. I know it's not Glastonbury or anything but it's nice to be able to hear live music within a few minutes walk from our home. It's been a bit different this year as the main acts have been indoors in The Point. The sound quality's been alot better but I must admit I miss the outdoor atmosphere (and the beer tent!). Sadly, the attendance hasn't been massive - I find it amazing that more people don't come out to support this - c'mon folks of Eastleigh! Live music! On your doorstep!

Here's a few of the bands we've seen this year:

Flight Brigade

First up on the Friday evening, Flight Brigade are a Hampshire band. If you look up the Facebook page, the second track in the player, "When The Water Whispers", was the one that really stood out for me with its haunting violin arpeggio.

Dry the River

Harder edge to this London band (although the bassist is from Southampton ... never mind). Apparently they were suffering a bit from an after party the night before with Plan B but they still delivered with plenty of energy. I thought I could hear alot of Editors in there, which is no bad thing.

Stornoway with The North Sea Radio Orchestra

This was a lovely set but also educational, with beautifully crafted indie-folk interspersed with anecdotes about bizarre extreme sports like chessboxing and zorbing. Really lucky to see this as it's one of only two gigs supported by The North Sea Radio Orchestra, which for me just took the music to another level. There's a wit and melancholy to the vocals which made me think of Belle and Sebastian.

Ellen and the Escapades

The Saturday night kicked off with local band Doyle and the Fourfathers (who included a song about the age of austerity that gave libraries a mention!). They were followed by Ellen and the Escapades who delivered an acoustic set as their drummer couldn't be with them. Amazing vocals - Ellen has a great country voice. We their EP at the end because we wanted to hear what they sound like with drums and have to say it was well worth it.

The Travelling Band

It must have felt a bit weird for The Travelling band. A few weeks ago playing to thousands of people at Glastonbury and this week playing to at The Point to about a hundred people. But they gave a good performance. Again, it's a real shame the numbers aren't better - especially when you consider all the work that goes into organizing it and that all of the bands give it their all. I had a bit of a moment during this set when they did an acoustic arrangement of the Roses' Waterfall - which they dedicated to the ghost of Ian Brown :-)

The Leisure Society

The last act of the Saturday were The Leisure Society. The guy next to me had come all the way from Bedfordshire to see them and I don't think he was disappointed. You can just about see a lovely hollow bodied Gretsch in this picture (complete with Bigsby vibrato). One of my favourite guitars and you could hear the clean, crisp sound coming through.

At the end of the set the band came into the audience to do an encore. Which was lovely and just goes to show what a good opportunity this festival is - yes it's small but it gives you a chance to get close to the music that you don't get anywhere else. It's tough times and I guess councils all over are going to be cutting arts and culture - I really hope Eastleigh survives!

Research evaluation - is it our business?

2011-07-02T08:50:00.002+01:00

On Wednesday I attended and event laid on by the JIBS user group (users of bibliographic software). Somewhat provocative title but the aim of the day was to look at librarians role in research evaluation. There were some interesting presentations, ranging from evaluation of using Google Scholar for bibliometric data to implementing research information systems like PURE or Symplectic.

The event was introduced by Fiona Bowtell (chair of JIBS) and the day was chaired by Kara Jones. Here's my notes on some of the presentations:

Andria McGrath - King's College London - Keynote

Andria made the point that research evaluation is a "brave new world" and I guess that this is an emerging specialism for librarians. In the past research support was likely to be done by subject librarians but it was interesting to see quite a high number of specialist Research Support Librarians at this event. Andria went on to discuss the decreased importance that the REF 2014(?) places on bibliometric data and that impact (in terms of the REF) is a more general concept. Demonstrating some societal change is (quite rightly in my opinion) more important than citations. But there are areas where bibliometrics will inform panels. Andria described some initiatives that should make getting at bibliometric data easier - in particular the CERIF data model, which is a European standard for CRIS (Common European Research Information Format). This is an xml-based model that goes beyond metadata - allowing deeper description of the information needed to manage research. A CERIF4REF schema has been produced for ePrints that will allow easy porting of data in repositories for REF submissions.

Andria was the first of many speakers to mention that librarians are not always involved by their institutions and that we need to push ourselves forwards. She mentioned a RIN report "Value of libraries for research and researchers" that looks useful.

So CRIS, CERIF, new ways of using bibliometric citation APIs, discovering other systems (like grants) and bibliometrics products and principles are all new areas for librarians. Some institutions have engaged with this and there was discussion in the room of an institution (Surrey?) that have employed a bibliometrician in the library staff. There is some evidence that academics are starting to get interested in bibliometrics (I've certainly seen some interest around generating H index numbers!) and that some are using advanced techniques like using Essential Science Indicators or InCites to normalize results.

Andria also listed some of the things people want from this area: they do want a Research Information System, they do want a dashboard or simple interface that has all the information they need for grant bids; they want to capture data easily (pulling in bid data from databases and only entering data ONCE!); and they want integrated bibliometrics. All of these are things that the library can help with!

Jeremy Upton - St Andrews - Librarians involvement with CRIS

Jeremy made it clear from the outset that his involvement with CRIS has been positive and that it may not match everyone's experience. One of his first slides was about how CRIS represents the convergence of a number of areas that libraries support: OA; Impact; Research profile; and digital communication. An important point (I think) was that although Jeremy is positive about these things, developments have been from genuine desire from the academic community (rather than evangelising: it is based on dialog and recognition of a need). St Andrews was one of the first institutions to use the publications database as the front end for getting data into the repository (talking to people over lunch and coffee this now seems to be what alot of folks are working towards). I think the main point Andrew was making though was that partnerships are very important. Previous involvement with the research community at St Andrews (e.g. on digital thesis) meant that they came to him when they realised that they needed support implementing a CRIS, and as a result of the work, library staff have been transferred to the research office to support the REF (as they realise that librarians have skills that are needed). Along these lines academic liaison staff are seen as an important part of the process of rolling out and supporting these systems with academics - one of the hooks for this is by showing the academics stats of how their material has been accessed via the system - the thought of increased citations is a powerful motivator.

There followed some brief demos:

Sue Cumberpatch - York - PURE

This is not quite live at York but has been released to academics, who are currently adding publications. Academic liaison librarians are currently supporting academics asked to put material on at very short notice. PURE includes publications, media outputs like radio programmes, students supervised, etc. It's been populated by the repository and web of science (they bought the InCites API to support this), and has also brought together many sources (e.g. academics records) as York didn't have publications database before this. Librarians are also supporting inputting data from reference manamgnent software (e.g. endnote). Sue had a slide showing the whole system and identifying the areas where librarians have contributed and supported. A very useful slide! Unfortunately there are not many databases that can populate PURE (just Arxive, WoS, and pubmed) and social sciences are not well covered by these. PURE can import RIS files although the import filters can be a bit tricksy.

Andria McGrath - InCites demo

Nadine demoed Thomson Reuters InCites product that extends what you can do with the citation data in WoS. You can create your own data sets within InCites. King's have set one up based on author affiliation in WoS but also a more bespoke one based on documents in their CRIS. This uses the UT number of the record in the CRIS to link to the citation data. They've found that the tool acts as a real incentive for people to get their work into the CRIS (because they can then instantly access the citation data). It's useful for the REF as you can create subject area schemes that provide data for specific UoAs for the REF but it's also useful in other ways. You can compare your outputs to other institutions for example, which can be useful in future bids.

Nadine Edwards - Greenwich - e-resources and repository manager - survey on librarians and research.

Nadine presented the results of a JIBS survey. There were no responses from repository managers - which indicates that this is often tacked on to other roles (e.g. subject librarian). Responses showed that librarians had been consulted in less than 50% of CRIS acquisitions.

Half of the librarians surveyed support bibliometrics. Most popular form is 1:1 support with academics. Majority of people don't have InCites. I later found this surprising as it emerged that InCites can be used to normalise bibliometric data. Without a product like InCites it is very difficult to do this and, as bibliometric data varies greatly between fields and even from year to year it is meaningless without putting it into context by normalizing.

Kate Bradbury - Cardiff - Research support

Kate listed some drivers for research evaluation: external ones like: REF2014; impact/ value for money; performance/ league tables; grant applications/ awards, and internal factors like: promotion/ pay progression; evaluating initiatives; departmental performance; funding allocations. (I'd also add recruitment to this list). Helping to find evidence of impact might involve searches for researchers; verifying outputs for the REF; liaison; training; and advocacy. As a skillset it helps to have: knowledge of the research landscape (e.g. keeping on top of the many HEFCE REF reports!). Kate made the point that it is hard to provide normalized bibliometrics without a product like InCites.

Afternoon session

Jenny Delasale - Warwick - Supporting bibliometrics

Jenny explained her organisational context and made an interesting point about how their support for the publications database had been communicated to academics i.e. that they were introducing a publications service to support academics with the university's publications database. Very clever marketing.

Jenny made the point that there are lots of routes to researchers and recommended Web of Knowledge bibliometrics sessions through Mimas to develop skills in this area. There was a useful slide on how librarians can support the publication process. The bit I found really valuable about this presentation was Jenny's explanation of the h index and in particular the assertation that context is everything! Basically, bibliometrics depend so much on context that you often can't provide a yes or no answer to academics questions. The example given was is it better to have 1 paper cited 100 times or 10 papers cited 10 times? All depends on context.

Isobel Stark and Michael Whitton - Southampton - Google Scholar: Can it be used for bibliometrics?

This was an interesting talk. First was a discussion on the pro's and cons of using Google for bibliometrics:

Pros:
Easy to use and free. Wide range of articles e.g. book chapters and conference proceedings so it's especially useful for law, humanities, social sciences. Metrics tend to be a higher number because more material is indexed but also there is some duplication.
Cons:
Data can be poor quality and it is not transparent where the data comes from; there's a lack of de-dupe; there are big gaps in subject coverage; the indexing (esp. subject indexing) is naff and this makes it difficult to narrow to a particular authors work; citation matching can be flaky (relies on algorithms to do this).

Isobel listed some services that are good with scholar: Quadsearch; Scholar H-index calculator (FF add-on); Scholarometer. Publisher or perish.

There was also some useful references to the literature on the subject:
Bar-Illan (2008) - Israeli highly cited researchers - differences between Wos and scopus.
Jasco (2008) - problems with the data, issues around transparency.
Franceshet (2009) - computer science metrics higher as computer scientists publish in conference proceedings.
Lee (2009) - neurosurgery - Google scholar and scopus very close.
Mingers (2010) - Business and management - google metrics higher.

Isobel made the point that you need to know the work well as Scholar doesn't deduplicate and doesn't have institutional affiliation.

Southampton bibliometrics guides are open access www.soton.ac.uk/library/research/bibliometrics - interestingly the Google Scholar guide has been accessed far more than others!

The discussion on whether to use Google Scholar was useful. I thought it was an interesting point that if someone asks for a H index without specifying where it's come from then they probably don't understand what they are asking for - is it then fair game to give them the highest figure?

As an interesting aside the Thompson Reuters rep in the room disclosed that they are releasing a book chapter citation database in November.

All in all an interesting day and I learned alot- but my brain was a bit frazzled by the end :-)

The 7 (new) Pillars of Information Literacy

2011-05-22T13:58:00.009+01:00

(SCONUL 2011)

I'm just taking a look at SCONUL's new model for The 7 Pillars of Information Literacy. The new model is clearly based on the original 7 pillars from 1999's "Information skills in higher education" briefing paper (SCONUL) but I wanted to have a look at how this has been brought up-to-date.

I need to show evidence based practice in response to my discipline for my PG Cert portfolio so I thought critiquing the new model and mapping it to areas of practice might be a good way to do this (and this explains why I'm spending my Sunday afternoon thinking about information literacy rather than any number of things I'd rather be doing!)...

Pillar: Identify - able to identify a personal need for information

Prob'ly being a bit librarianish and picky here but this is a bit different from the original pillar of "The ability to recognise a need for information". Small difference but I wonder what the addition of the word "personal" adds? I guess my point here is relating to my subject discipline (health and social care) in that our students sometimes need to identify information needs in others. I'm thinking here of patient information. I think it is fairly common that our students will need to recognise information needs in others and cater for that - especially in public health or health promotion roles. (I think we have a course on e-consultancy - this would be a prime example).

That aside, I think that the criteria (what students should understand and be able to do in this field) are fairly sound. I especially like that they are scalable - making the point that information changes and there is always more to learn. Getting students to think more explicitly about their information needs is not always easy. I think students are sometimes taken aback when I start lit. search sessions with a paper (or whiteboard) exercise to define key concepts and search terms. I think knowing what you need to find out about is fundamental though.

I think this pillar is fairly persistent in that most of the skills around knowing your information needs don't really change. It is interesting that being able to manage time effectively to complete a search is mentioned though. I guess this is more of an issue today than it was when the original pillars were published.

Pillar: Scope - can assess current knowledge and identify gaps

This pillar is around assessing what information is available and I guess it's about making judgement on different criteria. The updated pillar is a lot more explicit around issues like format (explicitly mentioning digital formats and how these might affect the information sources). Thinking about currency of information is an interesting one. Does our definition of current change in an age of Facebook and Twitter? Format can have a massive effect on this - really common now that articles are pre-published on the web before being available in print. Even between e-resources there can be a massive difference in currency - we often find that articles are available from publisher's links long before they make it into full text databases. For my students, accessibility is incredibly important and again it comes down to format: being able to use ebooks opens a whole new world to them when they are on a work placement with limited access to print collections.

Our students don't come to us with an understanding that some resources are in print, some in e and some in both so this is something we address in taught sessions. It's also deeply embedded in our resource discovery strategy. Putting all types and formats into a single discovery service means that, if our students use our discovery service, they will be exposed to all of the available information from day one and should develop skills in choosing the most appropriate information for their situation.

Pillar: Plan - can construct strategies for locating information and data

Again planning a search strategy is not something that comes naturally. I think maybe the awareness has changed since 1999 in that most people are now used to finding alot of the information they need in their lives really easily on Google. Does this make it more difficult to get across the message that when searching for academic information you need to be a bit more systematic and strategic?

It's good to see that an "understanding of the construction and generation of databases" is no longer a criteria for this pillar - I think that reflects how far the tools have moved on in terms of usability. It's right that the focus for this is on planing search techniques and tools. I also like that the criteria include understanding the need to "revise keywords and adapt search strategies". I constantly make this point to students - that they need to look for new search terms in their search results and feed these back into the search.

In my practice, what order you use the tools in has become important recently. I always advice our MSc. students to use our subject guides to make a list of the databases they want to search. Search the discovery service first and tick off all of the databases that it searches, only then is it necessary to go into individual databases that are not indexed in the discovery service.

A point for developing my practice here as the SCONUL criteria include understanding and using controlled vocabularies and taxonomies. I have to admit I really struggle to get these ideas across to my students! Maybe Google has brainwashed everyone into keyword searching but in my experience, the concept that people like librarians assign subject descriptors to information and that you can use those to search semantically seems to be completely alien!

Pillar: Gather - can locate and access the information and data they need

Again, digital information is made more explicit in the new model. I was particularly interested to see "how digital technologies are providing collaborative tools to create and share information". For me this only covers half the story i.e. using social media to find information and being aware of some of the problems that might be inherent in this, but I'll go back to that point later...

In the main this is about actually accessing the information. This is a massive part of what we do: from teaching students where they might find different sources (e.g. books, journals etc.) to supporting them through our authentication systems (it's interesting that one of the criteria is understanding "the difference between free and paid for resources").

The big one for my students seems to be the ability to access full text information. There is an expectation that everything is available in full text, online. Now we all know this is far from reality so part of the work is about adjusting this expectation, highlighting the difference between an abstract and full text, giving students the tools to filter information based on what is available and being able to navigate their way through our authentication systems. For a student in the NHS (with multiple athens accounts, firewalls, limited access to computers) this can be a nightmare!

Evaluate: Can review the research process and compare and evaluate information and data

Has this changed over the past 12 years? Well I think good evidence is good evidence whether its in print or online. There's nothing explicit in the criteria for this pillar that mentions evaluating online information, which seemed odd to me, but then it twigged - this is about thinking critically about the content - it's really got nothing to do with the medium. Or has it? The example that comes to mind here is advising students that if they can't identify an author or date of publication for a website then they should consider whether it is appropriate or not. I think I need to generalise my practice here a bit though. It's just occurred that just because something has been published as a book doesn't mean it's any good - especially with more and more vanity publishing...

So no, I don't think this aspect of information literacy has changed since the original pillars.

Pillar: Manage - Can organise information professionally and ethically

This is quite a biggie for my subject discipline. Some of the criteria (honesty in information handling, appropriate data handling, keeping systematic records, ethical storing and sharing of information) I think have a new emphasis. I'm thinking of issues around patient data, data protection and disclosure. I think maybe this (and the next pillar on dissemination) need to be made a bit more explicit around responsible use of social media. E.g. talking about patients or colleagues on Facebook is really not an information literate way to behave. I think partly this is around developing an understanding of the reach of social media (i.e. that it's a public space), the persistence of information created (i.e. that your drunken night out photos will be there in 5 years time for future employers to see) and potential risks and consequences of actions in this space. It's an emerging area but I think one that we have to develop support for...

Along more traditional terms it's interesting that the use of bibliographic management software is made explicit. It is qualified with "if appropriate" but I wonder if a less specific criteria might work better e.g. student is able to develop an appropriate strategy for managing bibliographic data. Just a thought. We do support endnote web use so this is an area of practice that we engage with but I guess I'm undecided on how far we should encourage students to use reference management software, especially if they have already developed their own way of managing references.

Pillar: Present - can apply the knowledge gained: presenting the results of their research, synthesising new and old information and data to create new knowledge and disseminating it in a variety of ways

It's interesting that new media such as blogs and wikis are explicitly mentioned here alongside traditional forms of publishing. There also seems to be a stronger emphasis on the importance of social networks/ communities of practice in disseminating information. Also the idea that you might present the same information in different ways for different communities. I think this pillar has come along quite a bit - especially if you look at the research lens (the pillars adapted for researchers) which include understanding the importance of open access to research.

I guess this makes sense as one of the areas that information has changed because of technology is that there are a far greater variety of tools and methods available for disseminating information. Publishing is an area of massive change - and I think with increasing open access the impact of this change is likely to accelerate over the next few years.

Definition of information literacy as an umbrella term

It's interesting to see information literacy used as an umbrella term for a range of literacies (digital, media, visual etc.). This is an area where I was unsure (for example if digital literacy is a different thing to information literacy) but I think I agree that information literacy covers all of these terms in a general way but that the more specific definitions of literacies are useful for defining different aspects of IL.

Lost a bit on embedding these in the curriculum from the original position paper

One thing that occurred, especially thinking about how difficult it can be to find opportunities to deliver learning in these areas, was that the original position paper mentioned the importance of embedding information literacy in curricula. Specifically it mentions embedding it in the subject that the student is learning. For me this would mean ensuring that subject units have information literacy outcomes built in to the assessment strategy. This is one area where I need to develop my practice - where possible to influence curriculum development to embed these important outcomes. I think this is particularly important as health and social care professions now place an increasing emphasis on evidence-based practice. For me, information literacy is a vital ingredient for developing evidence based practice.

Lenses useful for linking these to more specific disciplines - development of a health informatics lens?

I like the idea of having different lenses (discipline based adaptations of the pillars). The only one developed so far is the research lens. So, I'd like to pose a question to end this (rather mammoth) post. Does health information deserve its own lens? I think, given the distinct nature of health information, health professions and specific issues such as patient confidentiality (discussed above) that there would be some good arguments in favour of this.

References

SCONUL, 1999. Information skills in higher education. London: SCONUL. Available: http://www.sconul.ac.uk/groups/information_literacy/papers/Seven_pillars2.pdf [Accessed 22 May 2011].

Thoughts on creating a referencing video

2011-04-21T13:15:00.004+01:00

I've recently been working on a referencing video aimed at trying to make some of the support we give through small group workshops and tutorials more available to large groups of students (who are pressured for time) and for our distance and part-time learners.

It's the first time I've done this kind of thing so it's been a bit of a process! Here's a few thoughts on it by way of a (very informal) self-evaluation of the resource:

1) Weigh up the Cost 'vs Benefit - The thing I'm most referring to here is the time it's taken to create. Partly this is because of this being a new process to me. Learning the steps to go through. Setting ILOs, writing a script, sourcing images, capturing screencasts - not to mention all of the audio visual recording, editing and producing - all take time. All of the literature I've read and background to building this resource suggest that videos are a potentially useful learning aid in this situation, BUT in the absence of any student feedback (yet) there is a bit of a leap of faith involved.

Some ideas for saving time:

re-use wherever possible and save everything (clips, images, audio, sources) not only will this help to save time but it will give any future productions a consistent look and feel
engage others: this might just be talking to others about what you're doing. Others may have quicker ways to do things or even know of existing resources that you can use instead
learn the software: a bit of time spent looking at camtasia help files has saved alot of time and wasted effort

In short lessons learnt from this video will hopefully make the process quicker in the future but I think it's important to evaluate potential benefits before chucking loads of time and energy at this...

2) People are great! Response from academic and professional colleagues in terms of development support and feedback has been fab. I don't just mean in terms of positive comments and encouragement (although that helps), it's also been really useful to get suggestions for improvements - especially in light of the cost vs benefit thing above.

3) Be bold! I mean in terms of style. It's interesting that I've had conflicting feedback about some of the style elements of the video. The conclusion I've come to is that its important to have confidence in your own style. There is a balancing act here. Obviously it's important that the resource isn't offensive, but be cautious about removing all of the touches that make it yours. I guess the analogy here is with face-to-face teaching. We all bring something of ourselves to the classroom (or at least should do). A funny story or a personal experience here and there help to bring the subject alive and engage learners. I think if we try and strip all of this away from recorded media there is a real danger (just as in face-to-face teaching) that learners will disengage with the resource.

That's it for this post. As I said, it's the first time I've done anything like this so I'd love to hear if anyone has any hints, tips or experiences to share...

Social Media: re-conceptualising information literacy

2011-04-14T09:26:00.002+01:00

Notes from a seminar I attended on Monday...

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I'm just on my way back from a seminar at London Met University by Professor Helen Partridge (Queensland University of Technology - visiting fellow at Oxford Internet Institute). The title was Social Media: re-conceptualising information literacy.

It was an interesting evening. As Helen is in the middle of her research it was more a discussion than reporting on any findings. Helen's research interests are in the way that technology affects peoples lives and how this can be used to enhance education and her background is from public libraries before she became an academic.

Helen started by outlining her interest in how technology in general (and specifically social media) changes people's information worlds.

Some introductory stats on social media usage certainly suggest that this is the case (e.g. 35 hours of video uploaded to youtube every minute). At this stage Helen asked us to think about our Personal Practical Knowledge... i.e. what was the background of people in the room. The majority were academic librarians (academic liaison). The majority of people used social media at least once a day and said they "couldn't live without it". Hold that thought.

I've listed some things I wrote down during the session at the end of this post (can't remember where I was going with some of them but must have found them interesting enough to type down at some point). I had no signal to tweet so these were my way of remembering.

One thing that stood out for me was some of the discussion in the seminar. Maybe I misinterpreted this but there seemed to be some quite negative comments about the use of social media in education relating to it either commercialising people's emotions or contributing to a dumbing down of learning.

My personal opinion on this is that, in itself, social media doesn't do either of these things. Yes, it has the potential to be used as a commercial marketing tool (but then so do all other forms of media). Likewise, people can use social media to find information in the same way they can use google or books - does that lead to a more surface approach to learning in and of itself?

The point that stood out most for me was an example (actually a cartoon) illustrating how social media can be used to find information. The example was that somebody who wanted to find out about a French word went on Twitter and asked. As well as getting a translation they also got information about usage and pronunciation from links sent to them.

This provoked quite a discussion on whether this was true learning or not. Some felt that finding this information via Twitter lacked depth and didn't really represent information literacy (that's how I interpreted the discussion anyway). I think I disagree with this on two levels. The first - one that I'm starting to realise in relation to my own practice - is that not everything is a learning opportunity. In fact, if you try and make everything into a lesson, you end up with teaching that is not authentic - in that it doesn't relate to the world of the learner. I guess an analogy is that we wouldn't teach our students how to use a card catalogue to find books. The world just doesn't use them any more and teaching this would be what Dylan refers to as "useless and pointless knowledge". And I think it's the same with social media. I think, objecting to using social media as a source of information on the basis that it's somehow "too easy" fails to acknowledge how people (in the world outside education) choose to find information. My second objection is that by dismissing social media as somehow shallow or surface we then lose the opportunity to teach students how to use social media effectively. How to view the results critically, to question authority and accuracy etc. - all those good things that information literacy essentially is...

Wikipedia was mentioned quite a bit - mostly with regards to using it as a source of information. I think what interests me more is the idea of contributing to Wikipedia being a powerful learning tool. The knee jerk reaction is to say "not all of the people who contribute are qualified authorities - therefore we should not use it as a source". But not everyone who writes a journal article is "qualified". What we should be teaching is for people to question the authority of the author - of any piece of work... Outside of this I don't quite understand academic objections to wikipedia when, at it's heart there lies the idea of peer review- why is there not more academic engagement with this tool?

On a more positive note, I thought that Helen's research is very learner-centred. She often spoke about finding out about the information world of our users - rather than applying our own assumptions to the question above. Which I think is a good approach. We can't assume that users will have the same view of social media as us - in fact it would be weird if they did as we are information professionals... But by finding out about their experience of social media we can address how this changes information literacy and how we support that.

Long day, so that's about all I can remember on any deep level - here are the point's I wrote down during the session...

Political change in middle east - what it the role of social media?

Social media in pro anorexia sites (bad uses). Also information can be decontextualised.

So much information out there but how does social media decontextualise this?

What is information? (is a FB status "information"?)

Information used by companies - technology used to portray information. FB status change - e.g. single status.

Josua Underwood miLexicon

When does asking a queston on Twittter become not learning?

Brian Lamb - wikipedia article as an assignment.

Authority in social media - concerns are around a lack of authority and "depth".

Change - how does social media change how we do IL?

Public vs' private - this is now an aspect of IL.

Richer and more dynamic discourse.

LIS professionals should be leading in this space.

Those pesky laws! #libnews digest number 8

2011-03-20T08:48:00.005Z

I've been thinking of The Simpsons Amendment song this week. A sideways dig at American politics and how laws that could be considered to be against the bill of rights can still be passed by amending the bill.

The key story for me this week has been our government's review of statutory duties placed on local authorities. I first found out about this from a note posted by VfTL on Facebook and it's since got quite a few column inches in the book trade press and the popular press. Fears of the removal of the statutory duty on councils to provide a 'comprehensive and efficient' library service have been downplayed by the Government. The fact remains though that the duty is under review despite Ed Vaizey's promise that the act is safe.

Thinking a bit more broadly than the library situation for a minute, this review could have massive implications for all sorts of services. I guess my concern is not with the concept of reviewing statutory services but with the way it's being carried out. My impression of the review when I completed it was that the survey is a bit leading - it suggests that, rather than thinking about what services are important, we should all look to identify services that could be cut. I think the language of the survey puts this spin on it and even the URL for the review is suggestive of cuts (http://www.communities.gov.uk/localgovernment/decentralisation/tacklingburdens/reviewstatutoryduties/) - notice the "tacklingburdens" bit?

It's almost as if it's suddenly dawned on the government that these pesky laws, that have been laid down over decades, might actually do the job for which they were intended i.e. protecting vital public services. So the obvious answer is to scrap the laws. That might not go down to well politically so the answer is to get the public to identify the statutes to be amended.

The flaw with this way of thinking is that the duties don't apply to us all. Lets take an example - one of the statutory duties under review is that councils consult their tenants before selling their home to a private landlord. As I'm not a council tenant this duty doesn't apply to me and I could comment that I'd like to see it scrapped (I won't by the way!). For others, this duty is really important but this review gives me (someone who's not really affected by the duty) the power to comment on a service that is vitally important to others. And if there is a subtext to the review suggesting that we all think of things to cut... well it doesn't take too much forward thinking to see where all this could go.

I think this is one to watch and, as well as having our say in the review, I think we also need to keep a critical eye on how these processes are being carried out. You can comment on the review here.

BAN THIS SICK FILTH! #libnews digest number 7

2011-03-05T09:31:00.001Z

The most entertaining story of the week has been the press and political bunfighting generated by a Gloucestershire Libraries "Downfall Mashup". This first came though my feedreader in this article where leader of the local council, Mark Hawthorne, condemns the video as insulting the "the eleven million human beings that Adolf Hitler murdered and the four hundred thousand British servicemen and women who gave their lives to stop him".

Genuine question here (for once I'm not being facetious) but does it?

I was a bit outraged this week when I heard that a member of staff got called a Hitler for asking (politely I might add) that someone take their coffee out of the library. In this case someone was doing their job by enforcing a regulation put in place to protect all users of the library. That kind of personal abuse is just not on. But then thinking about it I've beeen just as guilty of this in the past. My innate reaction to traffic wardens is to mutter something similar under my breath. But they too are just "doing their job". I think it's interesting that the phrase "little Hitler" was brought into use by the generation that actually lived through the war.

Another quote from Mark Hawthorne actually made me laugh out loud: “I am always disgusted when idiots try to use Hitler, Nazism and the Holocaust to score political points." er, so you're not trying to score any points with your condemnation then? Irony anyone?

An opposition councillor, Booth, had a different opinion. Initially rating the mashup as "great stuff". Two little words I suspect he now regrets. Councillor Booth later withdrew his comment from YouTube and apologised, which I think is a shame. If he agrees with the sentiment of the video I'd expect an honest politician to argue his point rather than backing down and scurrying off with his tail between his legs.

Fortunately the creator of the spoof was more eloquent in his defence. Making the point that it symbolises extreme and ridiculous behaviour. I think the point I've reached on this, and the reason it's been occupying my mind this week is that there is a difference between calling someone a Hitler and using the story to make a political point. The former is just abusive and bullying and is absolutely wrong. The later is satirical. Yes there is humour in the association of Gloucestershire County Council with the Third Reich. But that humour leads the viewer to think of parallels and highlights the ridiculousness of both. For me it's along the same lines as Charlie Chaplin's The Great Dictator - which spoofed Hitler (although Chaplin later said that he didn't understand the full horror of the situation at the time, and couldn't have made it if he did). Humour is a very powerful way of us making sense of our demons. This is understood by children's literature, for example, part of Voldemort's power in Harry Potter comes from the fact that people dare not utter his name, yet Harry speaks his name and even jokes about him.

Spoof and satire allow us to make sense of our demons but also act as a cautionary tale. Hitler came to power by playing on national fears and misconceptions. At the time the German economy was dire, in part because of the reparation from the First World War. It wasn't too difficult for Hitler to manipulate this situation to his own end and once in power it's well established that his control of information was paramount to maintaining control over the German people.

I think one of the reasons librarians are so passionate in their defence of libraries against the cuts is that they are aware of the importance of information in a just and democratic society. Libraries provide free access to the information people need to be informed citizens - more importantly in the Internet age they help people to make sense of it.

I can see how people would find this Downfall mashup tasteless or offensive but it is important to remember what can happen when people seek to take away our freedom of information - and indeed freedom of expression.

Caught in the crossfire: #libnews digest number 6

2011-02-18T18:14:00.000Z

This week has seen quite a bit of discussion on what the "Big Society" really is and the idea that it is a euphemism for cuts has started to filter through the press. What's interesting about this piece in The Independent is the reaction of the third sector. As the idea hits the ground there's a definite notion that the resources needed for community involvement are not there. There's a bit of a subtext to this article reporting on the potential for public libraries to be run by a US private company - is the Big Society a smokescreen for the privatisation of our public services? This post from the Practical Ethics blog caught my eye as an entertaining (if radical) exploration of the ethics of the situation.

It's certainly a highly political situation. The Mail accuses Labour councillors of slashing services just to spite the Tories whilst protecting their own salaries (see BBC News article for a more objective view on the same theme). Standing on the outside it looks like services are getting caught in the party political crossfire.

In the meantime it seems nobody quite knows where to stand on library cuts. In Gloucestershire Lib Dem Councillors attempted to delay cuts and condemned their Tory partners in central government as "reckless". Hardly a marriage made in heaven.

In some areas councils have responded to public support for libraries by reversing decisions to make cuts. But sadly, in most places, there seems to be a distinct failure to listen. Gloucestershire council seem to be particularly cloth eared and it's a similar story in Somerset. Again there are very real fears that throwing public library services over to communities will lead to inconsistencies in the level of service in different areas and actually deprive the areas that most need libraries.

Whichever way you look at it - it's a bit of a mess.

Tommorow's chip paper: #libnews digest number 5

2011-02-10T22:01:00.001Z

So Saturday saw #savelibraries - a national day of action to show support for public libraries. Demonstrations ranged from borrowing maximum amounts to library occupations. You might ask what the effect has been? Any mass revelations in parliament? Well, I'm yet to see any evidence of that in the press but at the very least it has raised the profile of library cuts (and cuts in general). Unprecedented levels of press coverage with even the The Express and The Sun (sorry can't quite bring myself to link to The Sun). Among other things, the weekend was a weekend of library puns. Who said the art of journalism is dead?

Might just be my imagination but it seems there are some positive stories in the news this week about councils reconsidering library cuts in the face of public support. It looks like some Isle of Wight libraries may get a stay of execution (although it still looks like they'll be handed over to community groups after a year). There are other stories along this line though so I think #savelibraries day may have made a few folks sit up and listen.

A theme I've touched on before: confused, conflicted politicians are still making the headlines. Could this Vince Cable who joined library protesters be the same Vince Cable who defended the comprehensive spending review? And could David Cameron's own constituency agent really be sticking up for libraries? It's a weird world folks. As both the Guardian and the BBC reported there may be a fundamental flaw with the 'Big Society'. Aside from the fact that as our lives get tougher we (as individuals) may have less to give society, there's also the point that cuts will affect the ability to recruit and manage volunteers. D'oh!

Perhaps the thing that most annoys me about the Big Society concept is that it allows politicians to divulge their responsibility. Yes you can have public services, they say, but only if you can work out solutions to this massive financial mess.

Er, surely that's their job?

"Libraries are more than just a book lending service": #libnews digest number 4

2011-02-02T15:09:00.003Z

This week I'm changing focus slightly to look at a few political angles of the library cuts. One reason being that other aspects of library news are being very well covered in other forums and also I just find this stuff quite interesting...

Is this a political issue? Kate Mosse was quoted by the BBC as saying that the situation is not party political because Labour councils are also implementing harsh cuts to services. I admire Kate Mosse's support of libraries but I'm not sure I agree (I'll be interested to look at the data a bit closer and see if there are differences in the way that local authorities are handling library cuts). I'd argue that the situation is party political in that cuts at local level are as a result of the way that the Government has decided to address the current economic situation. And there is an issue here that goes to the heart of our democracy i.e. that nobody voted for this Government or the level of cuts to public services that are being implemented. This kind of post leads me to believe that this is a very political issue (resisting the urge to make rude comments about Telegraph readers at this point!).

The lack of understanding about "what libraries do" is sadly symptomatic of some quarters (see Keith Mitchell's letter). The argument that libraries are not as important as child protection or services for older people (what we could term "social care") is fairly prevalent. This article in The New Statesman cites Marx (Groucho rather than Karl) and argues that the "life of the mind" is important in its own right - but I'd say libraries are important for reasons way beyond this. I liked this article because it recognises that libraries are "more than just book-lending services".

Libraries provide a community hub where marginalised groups can build social capital. Library staff know their users. They look out for the older people that use the library and, increasingly libraries are places where all ages access local services. Children's librarians do amazing work with vulnerable groups to engage them with the library, providing alternatives to some of the outcomes they might otherwise face. When you consider this, Alan Bennett's statement that "closing libraries is child abuse" does not seem such an exaggeration. Arguing that libraries can be cut because they are not essential services, fails to understand what libraries do and the impact that their closure could have on social care and communities. Especially as some authorities are proposing to charge for services. I'm pretty sure the 1964 act intended a "comprehensive and efficient" library service for all - not just those lucky enough to be able to afford it. For this reason, another area of the data I want to look at further is indexes of deprivation in areas where cuts are proposed.

Along similar lines it seems that user needs are not playing much of a role in deciding which libraries get cut. This article for example, raises some clear concerns about the criteria that are being looked at in Cambridgeshire with regards to cutting branches. There are similar questions in Buckinghamshire about how rural branches are more likely to be cut. Dorset have stated that e-books can be used to plug the gap left by closing libraries in rural communities. I'm all for ebooks but I'm also a strong believer that you need to back up ebook collections with user support. I mean that both in terms of having people to show users how to use them and providing an environment where they can be used. I don't think that ebooks mean you can do without libraries as places or knowledgable library staff. Are the rural population of Dorset all online or is there a chance they may need to access ebooks via publicly accessible computers? I don't know, so another thing I'll be looking at over the next few weeks is measures of access to IT in areas where cuts are proposed.

Just one last point. If anyone is in any doubt about how important information is to a democratic and just society. Maybe have a think about how the Egyptian government reacted to protest?

Think on!

Library Day In The Life: #libday6

2011-01-27T20:59:00.003Z

Thursday morning is study morning as we have our PG Cert seminars. I started off with a strong coffee in the canteen while I finished the pre-reading for this morning's session. We were lucky to have some good speakers in today - including Jennifer Moon (who written some key texts on reflective learning and critical thinking amongst other things). This part of the session was a workshop on critical thinking where we looked at four different accounts of an incident on a walking trip and analysed how critical each one was and why.

Critical thinking is really tough to define or describe, but the session acknowledged this and got us instead to recognise different levels of critical thinking and assess what had made one account more critical than another. Quite a good way of getting us to think about what critical thinking is without worrying about the language involved...

Then it was back over to the other campus for a shift on the enquiry desk - followed by an EndNote Web tutorial. I really enjoy these - this one was a follow up for a student who couldn't make it to a workshop a couple of weeks ago... It's got its quirks but on the whole I think it's a really useful tool and I find it easier to use than the desktop version.

I finished the day by compiling some figures for an ebook provider. My colleague has been looking at reading lists to see which books are available from a new platform. I put this together with feedback from our academics on specific titles they've identified during a trial. Should be interesting to see where this one goes. Ebooks make alot of sense (especially for health students who spend long spells away from the institution on work placements) but one of the difficulties is that not many textbooks are available in e. Is this a sign that this is about to change?

Library Day In The Life: #libday6

2011-01-26T23:03:00.003Z

It was meetings, meetings meetings today!

This morning started with a quick scan of the inbox and finishing up a reading list. The first meeting of the day was to discuss reading material for a new programme. I was really pleasantly surprised to see that most of the units already have reading lists - this will give us a good head start on resourcing books - and having a bit of time on this one will make it easier to make sure that we make as much use of our electronic resources as possible...

I've been thinking quite a bit recently about how to encourage more use of our ereserves facility (scanned chapters). It's a great way to make literature easily accessible on our VLE but it does take a bit of work from academics to identify material to be scanned in (within copyright limits) and place the requests for material. I've been walking a couple of units through the process to try and get a better understanding of what might be involved for an academic interested in using it. I think sometimes it's good to try and see our services through the eyes of our users... One of the other problems is just finding time to do things like identifying reading. I'm wondering about setting up some staff development sessions over the summer to go through the technical process of requesting scanned chapters but also to set aside time for our academic colleagues to identify the material.

Next I had a brief chat with a colleague about a project we've been working on to identify and make available copyright cleared media resources that are available on the web. Every so often I get enquiries about using images or films in teaching materials or course marketing etc. The idea of this resource is to have subject specific lists of media resources that are cleared for use in education and to provide copyright guidance at the point of use.

Last meeting of the morning was a referencing tutorial - really common at this time of year. Alot of our first years have had feedback from their first assignments and want to improve their skills before handing in the next assignment. It's actually one of the bits of my job that I really enjoy - especially when students are motivated enough to arrange a tutorial and are genuinely interested in improving their skills.

Most of the afternoon was taken up with a school quality meeting. I don't have that much to contribute but it's quite interesting to get some insight into the mechanics of higher education - it's also a good source of info on any changes to programmes or frameworks that can guide how we provide learning resources and support.

Back at home I finished off with a bit of preparation for tomorrow. I'm studying for a PGCert in Educational Practice at the moment and we have our seminar in the morning. This evening I watched a lecture by Stephen Heppell on what education might look like in 2016. Interesting take. The main thing I got from it was his idea that the world in the 21st century is quite a different place and that education needs to change to meet the needs of 21st century learners. A lot of it made sense but I did wonder whether you can apply this thinking directly to your teaching - or if this sort of change has to come through strategy and curriculum development. The outcomes Heppell describes (things like creativity, collaboration, critical skills and communication) are very different to the traditional outcomes of education. Still have some reading to do for the seminar but I'll do that over a strong coffee first thing in the morning!

Library Day In The Life: #libday6

2011-01-25T23:49:00.003Z

Day two in the Big Brother house.

Not really. Just a short post as shattered...

Today's post is about a little project outside of work in learning to use open data in a Google spreadsheet to generate some information on UK public library closures.

I've been looking at using open sources of data to generate political and demographic data for libraries threatened with closure (there's a list at http://publiclibrariesnews.blogspot.com/).

The main challenge was getting postcodes for the libraries. I've spent a couple of days looking at reverse batch geocoding for this. Unfortunately none of the tools I found generated postcodes detailed enough to get data from the API's I've been looking at... so in the end it was a case of manually searching for postcodes :-(

Now that's done though these can be used to generate large amounts of data from API's. So far I've used the IMPORTXML function in Google Spreadsheets to generate this data *fairly* quickly (I found out how to do this from this blog post). It's a bit limited though in that Google Spreadsheets only allow 50 IMPORTXML functions per spreadsheet.

The data in this case came from the http://findyourmp.parliament.uk/ API but there are plenty of other sources out there that might give useful information on political patterns and demographics (e.g. the Office for National Statistics API gives info on deprivation etc.).

Anyway. Time for bed...

Library Day In The Life: #libday6

2011-01-24T17:33:00.002Z

I thought I'd have a go at this for the first time as I've followed it for a while but never had time to contribute. So here goes...

Day 1 (Monday) started with checking the inbox and dealing with some emails that had come in over the weekend. After a quick cup of coffee I was on the desk for the morning - which was a mixture of dealing with face to face enquiries and finishing up the student support emails that had come in over the weekend.

We've recently been supporting a new unit of study for a large number of students. It's an interesting one because the vast majority of the reading the students need to do is available electronically and linked to from the unit. Which is great but has led to a need to support some of the students who haven't used eresources before. Walking them through athens account setups and logins is made a bit trickier due to the students being taught at a different campus so most of the support is happening through email, online or over the phone.

After a busy morning on the enquiry desk I made it back to the office to spend a bit of time working on the reading list for another unit. This is another one where we're doing our best to make the materials available electronically, using ebooks, ejournals and our ereserves facility for any book chapters that aren't available electronically. This allows us to scan chapters (with CLA limits) to let students access them from the VLE. It's great to have engagement from the academic running the unit in this case - they've really put alot of effort into selecting reading material so I'm pulling out all of the stops to facilitate this one - once it's ready it'll be a great example of making learning resources accessible that we can maybe use to get engagement from other units...

Over lunch I take a phone call from one of our distance students who's been struggling with refrencing. To be fair they were trying to cite a picture in a newspaper at secondhand. Not the easiest thing to reference but we got there in the end.

Back on the enquiry desk for a bit in the afternoon, and later staffing our CHAT (virtual enquiry service) dealing with a whole range of enquiries from renewals to lit searching... One of the things I really like about this job is the variety. In the calendar this week is desk and CHAT sessions, school meetings, teaching, tutorials and a bit of studying and writing. Today's definitely been about student support but as a mixture of face-to-face, online and phone support.

Teflon Shoulderpad Politics, The Activism Bandwagon and Angry Birds: #libnews digest number 3

2011-01-20T21:50:00.003Z

This week's stories have led me to think a bit about politics and the nature of our democracy. I think mostly because of the variety of approaches that councils are taking to do with the cuts. As mentioned before, consultations are pretty popular but what constitutes a consultation seems to vary from place to place. Suffolk, for example seems to have grabbed the concept of the Big Society by the horns by making all of it's libraries 'up for grabs' by community groups. I guess that's easier than trying to decide which places deserve a professional library service and which can make do with volunteers... Dorset have taken a different approach by just announcing 20 proposed closures. There seems to be very little consultation and, from what I hear, the cuts appear to have been decided on pretty much on issue stats - with little consideration of the needs of different areas. I'm sad to see Hampshire proposing cuts to their mobile service - with stops closer than 2 miles being axed. If you can walk 2 miles you can read... if not, tough. What's sad is that those who most need them will lose services. Service users will be surveyed apparently but there's little transparency about how the survey will take place. The main publicity for this consultation seems to be web based. Skewed sample anyone?

But I guess what I'm really getting at in this post is confusion. Who's job is it to decide these things? Has politics moved beyond a stage where we can elect officials to represent our interests? There seems to be conflict between different levels of politics, with some elected officials driving cuts whilst others join the protesters. Whilst some MP's defend libraries, so called Government quango's stick the knife in (although I should point out that there is some debate about Roy Clare's actual comments - the link's ironic - The Mail later pulled the story after legal threats). One of my biggest beef's is this disconnect between different levels of politics and I think it partly comes from a lack of strong leadership. Whilst Eric Pickles says that library closures should be a last resort Ed Vaizey seems very reluctant to take any action to stop councils from cutting libraries disproportionately. Some say 'impotent'. I'm a cynic and a Bolshy git at heart so I say 'wilfully negligent'. While Vaizey fiddles the cuts get made... call me paranoid but I think that's all part of the plan. What really annoys me though is when I see headlines asking citizens to come up with ideas to save the day. This is the age of teflon shoulderpad politics where our politicians shirk their responsibilities - if there have to be cuts (and I think that is a big if) I want the decisions on how they are made to be taken by people who are elected to make those decisions because they have some knowledge and skill in the matter - not whoever shouts loudest at a meeting. Yes consult - but there is a difference between consulting and washing your hands of the whole affair.

The Activism Bandwagon

It was a genuine joy to see the #savelibraries tag take over Twitter on Sunday. I think mostly a tag doesn't trend worldwide on Twitter just because of tweeting librarians. OK so Voices for the Library gave it a helping hand but it truly shows that people the world over care about libraries - and from some of the tweets it shows that ordinary folk 'get' what libraries do much more than some of the folks who should know better...

I did chuckle a bit when The Bookseller launched their campaign to save libraries. I guess the folks at Voices for the Library can take the old adage that plagiarism is the sincerest form of flattery. But the Bookseller campaign is so similar in it's styling that in this case I'd say plagiarism is the sincerest form of cynical marketing strategy. You have to wonder at the timing as well - the day after such a public display of affection for libraries on Twitter. Just hope it doesn't dilute VftL's efforts.

Finally, for anyone doubting the value libraries add to society - check this one out :-)

Diversity, activism and Googlopoly... #libnews digest number 2

2011-01-13T23:31:00.001Z

This week stories on diversity in libraries, activism against cuts, and the British Library go mobile...

Diversity

I thought I'd take a look at some of the stories of diverse activities going on in libraries that have been in the press this week. It's a stark counterpoint to the doom and gloom to think about just how many groups are catered for. The first is about council information services being offered from libraries. Library staff are well used to helping people to use information - I like this story because it shows how libraries can actually save councils a bit of money whilst retaining services. This example from Worcester of information for working families demonstrates how libraries help the economy - providing the support for people to balance work and family life is especially important in these times! And libraries are not just diverse in terms of the services they offer but also in how they're delivered. The Ask A Librarian online enquiry service is a fantastic example of this, but I'm not sure public libraries get the credit they deserve for this kind of service. Why phone 118 or use that new text a question service when there's this for free? And speaking of "free", there's a great piece on Comment Is Free this week by John Harris about the range of stuff that goes on in libraries and how taking them away will affect communities. Encouraging creativity and expression are other ways that libraries offer something for everyone, for example songwriting clubs and encouraging writers of fiction. Maybe this explains why writers are so keen to help save libraries. Which leads me nicely on to...

Activism

There's some sterling activism being done to prevent cuts by groups like Voices For The Library and Friends of Gloucestershire Libraries (who have collected an amazing 10,000 signature petition!). Public Libraries News is gaining publicity with important work to map library closures. But also people from outside the library profession are getting involved. A number of authors have spoken out against cuts, for example Philip Pullman and Colin Dexter in Oxfordshire are raising arguments about the importance of reading in our society and the role that libraries play in that. North Yorkshire author Mike Pannett asks questions about councillors salaries with relation to where the cuts should be made. I think most telling stories for me though were about people like Julian Fellows and Peter Hitchens adding their voice in support of libraries. I personally cannot abide Peter Hitchens but I think it's very revealing when even tory peer's and Mail On Sunday authors can see that these cuts are wrong! And it's not just writers... even Coronation Street actors are getting in on the act. For every library cut there seems to be a library campaign. So perhaps this weeks news digest is a positive one? I'll close this bit with this campaign in Stony Stratford to clean the library out of books. I think this is a great way to show the depth of community support from real people for libraries.

Digitisation

Finally this week, a couple of very different digitisation stories caught my eye. Firstly, the British Library have gone mobile with their "Treasures" app for iPhone and Android. This make some of their digitisation projects (like Beowulf, Jane Austen or original Beatles lyrics) available on your mobile. I might even be tempted to shell out some cash to buy this app!

On the flip side, this story in the Guardian raises concerns about Google's seemingly growing monopoly on digitising our cultural heritage. "Can Europe afford to be inactive and wait, or leave it to one or more private players to digitise our common cultural heritage? Our answer is a resounding 'no',". Hmm. That's all for now.

The first ever #libnews Digest

2011-01-07T16:58:00.002Z

One of my New Year's Resolutions is to blog more so I thought I'd try a weekly digest of library stories in the press that have caught my attention. Here goes for the first edition!

Cuts

Sadly the bulk of the stories hitting the press are about library cuts. This piece in the Telegraph caught my eye, not because of library cuts specifically but because of Michael Gove's unfortunate reference to the Chinese cultural revolution. It seems bizzare as you wouldn't expect Michael Gove to aspire to Mau-like social policy. It got me wondering though - just exactly are we loosing and how will people look back on this period of, what seems to me, to amount to cultural barbarism.

In the local press there's a depressing number of articles on local library services every day. How are the decisions being made on which cuts to make? This article, disturbingly, makes the observation that libraries in more affluent areas seem to be doing better that those in poorer areas. I'd suggest this is counter-intuitive. Any socially-minded library service would surely fight hardest to keep libraries open in the areas where they're most needed wouldn't they? Would this not mean prioritising libraries in the poorest areas?

Public consultation seems to be very much in vogue at the moment for deciding what gets the chop. Surely asking the public is fair? I guess that depends on how the consultation is carried out. For example this unfortunately named article describes the "Somerset Library Closure Roadshow" where concerns are raised that four out of six consultation events are to be held in libraries that will stay open - in research terms this might somewhat "skew" the sample!

And what constitutes a "consultation". Barnet refuse to recognise a popular petition and will not allow it to be housed in their libraries. It seems councils are keen to consult but only through "official channels" (if I were cynically minded I'd also suggest only if the consultation gives them the answer they're looking for!).

Back in the West Country, there's nothing like a bit of notice for a public consultation - and this is nothing like a bit of notice! The ways these things are publicised to stakeholders is very important and a day's notice hardly cuts the mustard.

This article about community engagement with the 'Big Society' in The Guardian got me thinking of another problem with this type of consultation - basically that the areas that have the most social capital are likely to see the highest turn-outs, whereas the socially exculded won't necessarily be aware of consultations and may not have the social capital to have their voice heard. I'm afraid there is a real danger that libraries in middle class areas will survive while those in the areas where they're most needed will dissapear.

Perhaps an even more worrying approach is no consultation - or even recognition of what is happening. The formation of a friends of Peterborough libraries group seems like a lovely idea but if you read on, the purpose of the group is to "get involved with organising events such as author talks, raising funds, promoting the library and its events, and collecting and conveying local views on the library service and its future"... um, isn't that what librarians do. The word "cuts" is not mentioned in this article. A depressing angle to library news that I'm sure will rumble on and on...

Ebooks

In other news, a couple of stories on Ebooks caught my eye. The first was that Ebook loaning services seem to be gaining popularity in the public library sector. I wonder if there's a model here that could work in academic libraries for tailor made collections of downloadable ebooks - with the number of students that have smart phones, laptops or other mobile devices, the tech is certainly at critical mass...

I was quite amazed by this story about Amazon enabling loans between Kindle users. This has always seemed like a really proprietary platform (and right thinking people should avoid it!) but does this indicate that Amazon have recognised that people like to share books? Is there a role for libraries to loan Kindle books somewhere down the line?

Funny

I thought I'd finish on a funny. This fusion of sci-fi geekery and librarian pedantry made me chuckle.

Have a good weekend folks...

Our 2010 in pictures

2010-12-26T18:08:00.002Z

I've just been looking through a few pictures as a cure to the Boxing Day blues. It's easy to forget all the fun stuff when shut in over Xmas when it's cold and dark. Also, this time of year, when the days are short, it can feel like life is a constant cycle of work, eat sleep. Here's a few pictures showing some of the things we've been up to through the year...

January

2010 started as it meant to finish, with a bit of snow! This was taken on St. Catherine's Hill nr. Winchester. It looks pretty bleak but it was actually quite good fun as there were loads of people out walking dogs and sledging.

February

Was spent doing some preparation for growing some veg in the garden. We had an old, weed infested veggie patch with a concrete footpath that had to be dug up and, while we had the jackhammer tool it made sense to get rid of some other unwanted concrete. Seem to remember it was freezing cold that day, not ideal for hammering through tonnes of concrete!

March

At the end of March we took some time out to fix up our kitchen. Hard work but also quite good fun and we've been enjoying the results for the rest of the year.

April

After quite a bit of work on the house and garden and a busy time at work, April was quite tiring. This was taken at a Black Rebel Motorcycle Club gig at Southampton University. Lovely gig but I think I nearly fell asleep at one point!

May

We finished of the raised beds in the garden and got some planting done. Lovely to spend more time outdoors.

June

Camping season! One of the first trips of the year was to Brockenhurst where, among other things, you can get out on a bike ride. One of the best memories from this trip was waking up in the middle of the night to see a herd of deer walking between the tents through a slight mist. Surreal.

July

More camping in July, including a slightly longer trip down to Cornwall. Lovely, bike ride to Padstow along the Camel Trail (where this one was taken). Also trips to the Eden Project and Tintagel made this really memorable.

August

Holiday time. This was the first time we've been on a proper, 2 week holiday. We'll make more of an effort to do this from now on as it was great just to relax and recharge the batteries a bit...

September

We'd been getting veg out of the garden all summer. In early September the tomatoes and peppers ripened...

October

...and slightly later it was time to harvest the root veg.

November

The last of the veg were harvested and preserved. It's a difficult time of year for me work wise so it's fantastic to have the garden as a distraction at the weekends and also as a source of lovely fresh food!

December

Back to snow again. It's been a really harsh winter so far. Our travel plans for xmas were wrecked by the chaos at Heathrow but at least we didn't actually make it up there and get stuck in the queues and bedlam.

Looking back, there's been loads of other fun stuff that hasn't made it into photos. One of my new year's resolutions is to make a bit more time to enjoy the fun bits and not let work take over too much. Happy New Year everyone!

Ebooks, Publishers and 21st Century Enclosure

2010-10-24T12:19:00.001+01:00

It's funny how seemingly unconnected stuff you read about sometimes converges. I've been reading about enclosure recently (OK mostly on Wikipedia and in the poetry of John Clare but that still counts right?). The word enclosure (in this context) refers to a period of English history where common rights to use land for the purpose of grazing or mowing hay were revoked by the landowners by fencing off, or "enclosing" the land. This was driven by the will of the landowners to use the land as pasture for sheep as there was an international market for English wool. However, sheep farming does not require as much labour as arable farming so effectively, by fencing off the land into pasture for greater profit, the landowners took the rights of the common people to earn a living from the land. This was serious stuff - it meant that whole areas where depopulated as people could no longer afford to live in the area. Initially the government and the church brought in measures to kerb this "depopulating enclosure" but the wealthy landowners were able to use their influence to change legislation and have their way. The motive for profit for a wealthy and influential minority was allowed to overcome the greater good for the majority of the population.

So what on earth has this got to do with ebooks? This week the Publishers Association announced (at a CILIP conference no less) that it will seek to restrict the downloading of ebooks in public libraries (see the comments of Ian Clark and Phil Bradley for a balanced opinion). If this intention is realised it will mean that users of ebooks will have to travel to the library to download a copy of an ebook - basically the PA would seek to end remote downloads. Ostensibly this is a reaction to an authority making ebooks available to people who are not local residents. Overdrive, one of the main companies that provide a system for lending ebooks have been quick to address this concern. The Overdrive system is a "one book-one user" model. Which means that only one user can be reading a copy of an ebook at one time. After their loan period is up the book expires and is no longer readable on the users ebook reader.

So, libraries are not "giving away" something which the publishers make their living from selling, they are merely lending it. This model works in the same spirit as libraries have always lent print books. So what is the PA's beef? Libraries and publishers have managed to coexist for aeons. Libraries lend print books and people still buy them from bookshops. So why would the publishers association object to a system that allows the same to happen for ebooks? I'd like to suggest that perhaps the publishers aren't really worried about going out of business because of libraries lending ebooks, they just want an even bigger slice of pie.

Let's return to the print book world for a second. Let's pretend booksellers were in charge. What do you think the booksellers would decide if they were given the choice of libraries existing or not existing? Would they be tempted to abolish print libraries so that they could sell a few more copies of books to individuals or would they protect the rights of the public to access that information?

There's not much I'm proud of the UK for, but I am actually blown away by the fact that I live in a country where the public have a right, set down in legislation, to borrow information. The Public Lending Right is a rare gem in that it protects the rights of the public to access information from the commercial interests of those who profit from selling it. It means that regardless of your socioeconomic status, you have the right to walk into a library and access the information you need to be an informed and active member of society.

So what this is really about is the Publishers Association attempting to use it's commercial clout, and confusion about what ebooks are, the way they are borrowed, and what the Public Lending Right covers to prevent libraries from lending ebooks in the same way as print materials. As librarians, I believe that we need to speak up on this issue (blog, tweet, comment, talk!) to ensure that the profit margins of booksellers is not allowed to affect the rights of the population to access ebooks.

CILIP Training: Timely or Insensitive?

2010-10-09T10:04:00.001+01:00

I've been stewing on this ever since I opened a letter from CILIP yesterday advertising a training course called "Recruiting, managing and working with volunteers". I'm not into CILIP bashing for the sake of it - to be honest I sometimes feel that CILIP members have too high expectations of what a professional organisation can do - after all - they are not supposed to be a trade union. However, in a climate where a lot of professionals are now worried about losing their jobs and there is much talk of volunteers replacing paid, professional staff, this letter really got my goat.

Just for the record, I'm not completely against volunteers in libraries, there are certain tasks for which I think they provide really valuable input. There's great work in libraries that would not get done if it weren't for volunteers. My problem though, is with the idea that volunteers can replace paid library workers and I know I'm not the only one who has these concerns. In my opinion, training on the issues surrounding volunteers in libraries - and what professionals can do to ensure that their organisations recognise the value that their professional or paid staff add would be timely. However, looking at the itinerary, this training seems much more geared around recruiting and training volunteers.

I realise I've probably got the wrong end of the stick but with the training costing £220 for members, it just felt to me a bit like CILIP were capitalising on a situation that a lot of its members are very concerned about (apologies for some slightly "ranty" tweets yesterday!). From the opening sentence of the letter "With the use of volunteers increasing in library and information services it is vital to ensure you are managing and recruiting them correctly." you could argue that this training is timely, but as a librarian, receiving this letter felt a bit like my professional body has given up. I know they're not a trade union, but where there is a conflict of interest between policy/ strategy/ management and professionals, I would expect them to come down on the side of the professional - and for that to be reflected in their training offering.

Am I being too harsh on CILIP? I'd love to hear some discussion on this.

Comment to Good Library Guide

2010-09-26T18:23:00.001+01:00

In response to a post on the Good Library Guide about ebooks in public libraries, I got sucked in to posting a comment. Not that I'm cynical or anything but just in case it doesn't make it though moderation here it is:

**************

My (admittedly limited) understanding of the law is that the Digital Economies Bill seeks to extend the definition of book in the Public Lending Right Act (1979) to include:

"(a) a work recorded as a sound recording and consisting mainly of spoken words (an “audio-book”), and

(b) a work, other than an audio-book, recorded in electronic form and consisting mainly of (or of any combination of) written or spoken words or still pictures (an “e-book”)"

...and amends the The Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 so that:

"Copyright in a work of any description is not infringed by the following acts by a public library in relation to a book within the public lending right scheme—

(a)lending the book;

(b)in relation to an audio-book or e-book, copying or issuing a copy of the book as an act incidental to lending it."

Effectively allowing libraries to "loan" ebooks without infringing copyright. With respect to the previous comment about not being able to "lend" e-books - services such as Overdrive are able to create copies of e-books which expire after a period, so the "borrower" does not have a permanent copy of the book.

Despite the many failings of the Digital Economies Bill, the changes to legislation outlined above are consistent with the spirit of copyright law - which, since the Statute of Anne 1709, has existed not only to protect the interests of booksellers but also to protect the rights of the public to access published information. Which is why we have concepts such as fair dealing, exceptions for private research or study and legal deposit.

Throughout the history of copyright law, the interests of the public to freely access published information have always been at odds with the interests of booksellers, and booksellers have always sought to influence the law in their favour. I find it interesting that a "library campaigner" would so strongly support booksellers. As librarians we are taught to view information critically for example to determine if the source is biased or has an ulterior motive. In this case I'd suggest maybe Perkins should consider re branding as a "Bookseller Campaigner".

Marc Prensky Lecture

2010-09-13T19:16:00.003+01:00

I've just been very lucky to attend a lecture by Marc Prensky (who's visiting Bournemouth University for 3 weeks). Marc's best known for coining the phrases digital natives and digital immigrants. Whether you agree with the existence of these groups or not, what Marc had to say was very thought provoking and, I think forces anyone in education to at least consider the idea that education needs to adapt in order to remain effective in a rapidly changing world.

The key message I got from the lecture was that accelerating change is now the way of the world (I was expecting the key message to be about technological change but Marc argues that not only is the technology changing but also students (the student demographic in the UK has certainly changed very drastically) and pedagogy. I guess this is the main characteristic of the group Marc calls Digital Natives - they are used to constant change. Whereas constant change can be quite stressful for my generation and upwards. Younger generations are so used to constant, rapid change that, if teaching is not varied they can soon switch off to formal learning. A telling point was that, when asked how often teaching methods should be changed to hold their interest, students replied "every day".

I always try to approach new ideas with a fairly cynical head but I found Marc's ideas fairly compelling - I think because of his approach, which is to talk to students and find out what makes them tick. He hasn't just come up with these ideas they're based on talking to students and basing his teaching on what they need rather than his needs as a teacher or the needs of the institution. Another message was that students want learning to go beyond just being relevant to being "real". We call this a number of things (collaborative learning, learning by doing etc.) but they all boil down to the learning experience being real.

So, do we need to change our ways in light of this? As a librarian I found one of the examples particularly thought provoking (I need to find the ppt at http://www.marcprensky.com/to follow this up properly). Marc asked the audience how many people loved books (pretty much everyone). He then mentioned a sci-fi book where all of the worlds books could be made available digitally - but the cost was that the printed works had to be shredded to make this happen. When the audience were asked who would do this nobody raised a hand - and this is what Marc sees as the problem - that we are attached to our old ways of doing things and not prepared to sacrifice these. I think of myself as being immune to the whole librarian as book lover thing but I have to admit I wasn't prepared to put my hand up to agree that, if the only to digitise books was to shred them, that it should be done.

For teachers I think the lecture was a call to teach in a different way - by engaging with students to find out what they are passionate about and using that in the classroom so that learning happens on a more personal yet at the same time collaborative level. For librarians I think there was an added dimension. As well as challenging us to think about how we deliver the teaching we carry out, how to we provide resources that facilitate this kind of learning. Do we need to reassess our attachment to things like hard copy books and think more creatively about the types of resources that students are going to engage with?

You can find out more about Marc's work at: http://www.marcprensky.com/

Marc's latest book is called Teaching Digital Natives: Partnering for Real Learning.

HLG Conference Presentation

2010-07-20T17:03:00.003+01:00

A day of firsts for me today. First trip to Manchester (it rained!), first visit to the Health Libraries Group (HLG) conference (it was interesting - I wish I could have seen more) and also my first time presenting at a conference (it was scary!).

It was quite a full on day as travel to the conference involved: walk to Southampton Airport (luckily just down the road from us), flight to Manchester Airport, bus to station, train to Manchester Picadilly, tram to Salford Quays, then a short walk through the quay to The Lowry.

The venue was great - I managed to get there in time to catch the morning session on change management in NHS libraries - interesting few case studies on merging trust library services and something I'll need to be aware of for supporting our students whilst in the NHS...

Then it was lunch break and I had a look at a few vendor stands then took a stroll to gather my thoughts before presenting in the afternoon session. The presentation was about the need for information literacy - especially for health professionals - the challenges that we face in higher education in delivering this, and how our approach at Bournemouth (particularly our Using Information Community within the VLE) is meeting these challenges.

It was interesting to me from the other two presentations (from librarians in the NHS) how the same themes ran through what we're doing - despite working for very different types of library alot of our goals re: information literacy, and the challenges we face, are the same. The PILLARS VLE work is certainly something I'll be taking a closer look at.

I'd prepared two slide decks - one a standard powerpoint and one using http://prezi.com as a more visual presentation. Unfortunately the kit wasn't geared up towards prezi just yet so it was lucky I had the powerpoint as a backup.

It'd be a shame to waste the prezi so here it is...

The Using Information Community (and beyond!): Exploring the potential of online communities in delivering information literacy on Prezi

Eastleigh Music Festival - Folk night

2010-07-10T10:30:00.004+01:00

This is one of my favourite weekends of the year. We're really lucky to have a music festival just a short walk into town - and the line-up seems to get better every year. The Friday night is normally folk and the Saturday more indie/ rock/ pop.

The line up this year for the folk night started off with a local band - Bemis - here they are on MySpace http://www.myspace.com/bemisuk

Apparently the two guitarists met at a party in Portsmouth 3 years ago and the rest as they say is history. I know this because some random bloke next to us turned to me to inform me of this detail and others (like the professions of the band members). Why he did this, I have no idea. I guess even small local bands are entitled to fanboys.

Next up was Jim Moray http://www.myspace.com/jimmoray. More traditional music - and he obviously does alot of research into finding early recordings and the history of the music. Really interesting stuff and good that these things live on and the stories are still told.

Lau was my favourite act http://www.myspace.com/laumusic. There's more of an experimental edge to them - the sound varies from really frenetic to ambient (check out Lau – Horizontigo - a. Horizontigo. b. Alright in the Held apparently a song about a fear of the flat lands of the fens!). I was really impressed by the musicianship and the way that they use their instruments really creatively to get such a range of sounds. They didn't play it last night but I'm also a big fan of their cover of Dear Prudence Lau – Dear Prudence, ordinarily I don't like Beatles covers (as you don't mess with perfection) but this is a great cover of one of my favourite songs...

At the top of the bill was Cara Dillon - again great musicianship and a stunning voice. There was obviously a big following in the crowd and they didn't disappoint but the highlight for me was the originality of Lau. Can't wait to get back over there this afternoon for some local bands followed by Badly Drawn Boy, Field Music, Peggy Sue and Haunted Stereo tonight :-)

Some things I learnt today

2010-06-25T17:14:00.002+01:00

TinEye allows reverse image searching - it's a bit different to any other image search I've seen in that you enter an image and it will then find where the same image (or close edits, crops or photoshops of that image) appear on the web. It uses image mapping rather than metadata for the search comparison (each image is given a "fingerprint" based on the pixels it contains which is then compared to the fingerprint of every other image in the database). There's a quick video that explains it better than I can at: http://www.tineye.com/about. I think stock image firms might be interested in this technology for checking who's infringing their copyright - but also useful for the rest of us...
Beer traps for slug really do work (quickly as well within minutes of putting them in our veg patch we had 4 sozzled slugs!). They seem to quite go for Asda smart price lager at 97p for 4 cans (which leaves the Stella for me!).
There's a whole bunch of EndNote training resources (including free posters and promo stuff) available at http://www.endnote.com/training/. Scroll to the bottom for the trainning stuff.
If you're looking for adventure in book form you could do worse than Moonfleet by J. Meade Falkner.
@UKLibraryJobs is now on Facebook! http://www.facebook.com/pages/UKLibraryJobs/133478490013914

Some things I learnt today

2010-06-24T13:24:00.006+01:00

ResearchGate looks like an interesting source. I stumbled across it after (I'm ashamed to say) doing a Google search for a thesis from University of Utah. The result showed as a page in ResearchGate's database which includes info from: Pubmed, Arxiv, Pubmed Central, IEEE, RePEc, CiteSeer, NASA library and DOAJ. In this case it linked out to the full text in University of Utah's institutional repository - which was nice. Aside from the database it also allows researchers to network using social media features. They've got a tour here and registration is free.

Resourcing reading lists takes quite alot of time and money. You probably won't get much thanks for doing it but will probably get quite alot of complaints if it isn't done. Ho hum.

Sometimes the day just gets away with you. I've been meaning to have a look at the latest edition of Journal Citation Reports for ages but still didn't get around to it today.

This is a Click Beetle (I think). It's quite freaky when one flies down and hits you in the face!

Hootsuite just keeps on getting better with Hootsuite5 being released. Now with GeoSearch, drag and drop upload and enhanced FaceBook features among other things. Oh yeah - apparently Dolly Parton uses it too.

Some things I learnt today

2010-06-23T22:40:00.001+01:00

Big companies are starting to monitor their brands on Social Media. If you complain about a company on Twitter they may start to follow you and may even offer you some advice about accessing their services. Is this a way to by-pass those awful automated telephone helplines? Maybe, but I don't think for long... Answering questions takes time and when the number of people communicating with businesses on social media reaches the number of people contacting them using traditional methods the level of service will drop. The key to making this work long term is harvesting the network effect of giving advice (more on that later).
You can harvest potatoes at this time of year but they will vary in size.
It is impossible to avoid hearing the football score in the hope of watching the game later. Now that I know the score I can't motivate myself to watch the game.
Facebook pages are really worth looking at seriously. I've had issues with Facebook in the past (which stems from what I see on there in terms of my personal use and how "serious" I consider it to be) but pages seem to offer an alternative. Very interesting talk form Stuart Johnson today on use of Facebook by Student Development at University of Leicester. Also, interesting use of powerpoint to illustrate differences between broadcasting, personal communication and social media but in the context of what's been done at Leicester.
If you tailgate through the security barrier to the car park there
is a fairly good chance it will come down on the top of your car.
Fortunately this didn't quite happen but I know now to be careful. In
my defence I have a simple nature and need to be told these things
(rather than have them barked at me after the event).
You can find a URL for an individual tweet by hovering over the when and where link under the tweet.

Bridging the Skills Gap: Developing Innovative Library Support for Researchers

2010-06-08T19:29:00.001+01:00

Oh yeah. I just remembered this blog was supposed to be a record of professional development. This one's about the Developing Innovative Library Support for Researchers conference at Sussex Uni on Tuesday 8th June 2010. It's rough and ready but here's my record (largely taken from Tweets so apols for the grammar)...

Welcome
Bob Allison, Stephane Goldstein, Alison Mitchel

Bob kicked off with a reminiscence of Philip Larkin while he was an undergraduate at Hull and a tale about graffiti in the library - but on a more serious note he recognised the role that libraries and librarians play in research with a reflection on a conversation with a librarian after a successful RAE in 2001. The librarian felt part of the research process and was glad that the RAE was a success, something which stuck with Bob. There was also some mention of the fact that library buildings and spaces are changing to accommodate researchers and that libraries are one of the most rapidly changing areas of HE at the moment.

Stephane Goldstein, with the 1st keynote highlighted some of the work of RIN. RIN look at the interface between researchers and information - including looking at researchers behaviour - they've found that digital literacy is often inadequate. RIN's main study "mind the skills gap" http://ow.ly/1VwwY found that a gap between researchers perceived info skills and their actual skills. Researcher Development Framework is an opportunity to coordinate joined up approach to research support. A JISC call for proposals to promote data management training, funding 6 projects, was also mentioned.

Alison Mitchell delivered the 2nd keynote on researcher development. Expressed importance of researcher's information skills being transferable to jobs beyond HE. Vitae aims are about developing researchers skills rather than geared towards specific research. Roberts funding is now coming to an end - now it's up to institutions to decide how research is embedded in the organisation. There's a need to develop the marketability of researcher's skills in the employment market and info. skills are part of that skillset. On the Vitae website the "rugby team impact framework" (http://ow.ly/1VwWd) includes a tool for measuring the impact of training workshops. The good practice part of Vitae site will include examples of training materials. Alison mentioned a 100K "Innovate" fund for innovative ideas for researcher development projects.

Gearing up for e-thesis
Isobel Stark - I didn't go to this session.

MI512: Information support for researchers at LSE library
Rowena-Macrae-Gibson
Rowena Macrae-Gibson spoke about MI512: Information Literacy tools for researchers - (blogs of the breakouts are on the ning site). The MI512 researcher information literacy programme is non-credit bearing - researchers use their own research subjects so have useful outputs. The programme integrates skills e.g. the referencing and citation workshop is linked to endnote session and they help to make sense of each other. Referencing is one of the most active, and best attended sessions. NB: orcid (sp?) open source version of researcher id. LSE decided not to include their federated search tool in MI512 as they believe it isn't useful for phd level searches. MI512 was judged to be a success - good numbers of research students are booking onto programme - despite it being non-credit bearing. Good example of cross-departmental working (IPE element?). It is important to measure impact of training and good feedback from researchers helps to maintain management support for programme.

The Research Liaison Team at Sussex: an innovative model
Joanna Ball, Helen Webb

Waving and definitely not drowning!: Offering library support for academic research in a Google world
Annamarie McKie - i didn't go to this session.

Supporting the REF at the University of Brighton
Suzanne Tatham, Helen Woodward
Suzanne Tatham, Helen Woodward Spoke about supporting the REF at
Brighton (actually they changed the title from REF to Research in light
of recent news). They found that one of the biggest challenges is
getting message of what's available e.g. workshops/tutorials etc. over
to researchers.Their information skills workshops are administered by
the university wide workshop booking system and appear alongside IT,
numeracy and all other workshops - so researchers have one place to go
for all of their skills. Another benefit is that admin/ bookings are
done by the training admin team. All workshops are also available
online for those that can't make it in person. As part of their
researcher skills offering, Brighton run a bibliometrics workshop. It's
attended by staff, research students, RA's, librarians. One comment
from bibliometrics workshop was that some didn't know what a "citation"
was. Can't assume prior knowledge of basic researcher skills. Scemago
(sp?) was mentioned as an open access alternative to scopus - also
Ulrich's show's where journals are indexed if they are not in WoS.
Brighton's workshop booking system includes online form for session
feedback - can email form to all attendees. Brighton also do a Google
Scholar for citation analysis for subjects not well covered by WoS or
Scopus - they highlight the downsides but also that it covers books/
conference proceedings etc. There followed some interesting comparison
of different results for no's citations using WoS, Scopus and Google
Scholar. In the questions at the end, the common need to support researchers
with which journals to publish in and making sense of the REF for
researchers were identified as challenges.

Information skills training for researchers: the Surrey experience
Gill Downham, John Baxter
Gill Downham and John Baxter on "Information skills training for researchers: The Surrey perspective". The organisational structure at Surrey includes 2 teams - Researchers development team, Institutional repository team and Academic liaison team. The space is also important - Surrey cleared a floor of print journals to make flexible learning space for researchers and undergrads. Use tried and tested methods for developing researcher info skills: new student inductions, specific workshop sessions, 1-2-1's. Surrey's experience is that students arrive with a diverse range of skills. Their generic induction for research students - includes a recommendation that students make an appointment to see their AL librarian for a 1-2-1. Surrey include a presentation on using their repository for increasing citations in their "Getting Published" workshop - so that use of the repository is grounded & in the context of research support.

Kitty Inglis summed up... key message thatlibraries and librarians play central part in research - huge potential to collaborate & collaboration is essential in a climate of having to do the same or more with the same or less. The event evaluation was done using clickers - which was more fun than filling in a form.

Support or nationalism?

2010-06-02T17:43:00.004+01:00

This is half an idea for a series of posts on the effect of the world cup on nationalism - and how that's coming across in traditional and new media.

It's come from seeing a couple of posts on Facebook expressing outrage at alleged attempts to stop England fans wearing their footy shirts for fear of upsetting those who aren't England fans. The posts I saw were fairly similar - one was a group and the other one of those cut and paste status update jobs... but I find it interesting. I saw another example in traditional media (the local rag) about a man "in talks" with Southampton City Council after he covered every inch of his council house with England flags. There's a moral debate here. Is the council infringing the rights of its tenant by asking him to take some of the flags down or is the tenant infringing the rights of his neighbours not to live next to an eyesore. Is the tenant truly fanatical in his support or is it a deliberate attempt to inflame tension under the guise of Freedom of Speech?

Tricky questions that depend not on the actions people have taken but their reasons for taking them. If I have questions I find that blogging sometimes helps. Here in no particular order are some of initial questions - if I see further examples in social media/ media I'll post further...

What's the basis of these groups/ posts on Facebook? Is there really a ploy by the police to stop people from wearing England shirts or is it a myth? If it's a myth, what's behind it? How do we evaluate information on social media - are we happy to join a group without checking the facts? Where is the line between nationalism and racism? Why do we link our national identity so closely to football - fair enough it's our national sport but does it sometimes get blown out of context? Also, does social media sometimes show us a side of our friends and acquaintances that we'd rather not see? Is this a good thing or a bad thing?

I think what interests me most is how social media makes this phenomenon different to past world cups - without wishing to get too political I'll post any further examples I
find just as a log of how this pans out over the next few weeks.

Hootsuite revisited

2010-05-20T23:00:00.001+01:00

I wrote about Hootsuite as a 3rd party Twitter tool a while back. At the time it had some unique features like delayed posting, in-line url shortening, team Twittering and good stats on URL's posted.

I go through spells of not using it (or only using it to shorten links) but every now and then I have a click around and discover it's got some really good new features. It seems to be under constant development!

Some new stuff since the last time I tried it:

Facebook profile and groups posting.

You can post to your Facebook profile or to any pages you look
after. I don't use Facebook much (antisocial git that I am) but check
in every now and then. Having FB news feed in Hootsuite makes me less
likely to log into FB. It also makes me less likely to log in to
Twitter as I can do both from one place.

For anyone wanting multiple people to be able to post to a FB page - Hootsuite provides an alternative way to do that by letting you add users in your who can have their own log in to post.

Other Social Networks

Not only can you stay in touch with Facebook but also MySpace (remember that?), LinkedIn, PingFM, Wordpress, and FourSquare!

We all use different networks for different things but it's really nice to be able to access all of them form a single place. I think maybe Hootsuite have spotted a market in this.

Follower management

This is the big bonus for me. One of the things I dislike about Twitter is how difficult it is see who's following you and manage who you follow. Hootsuite now lets you look at your list of followers and choose to follow or unfollow them (unlike Twitter you don;t have to constantly page through to do this). It also gives you good info on who of your followers to follow back - like their follower to following ratio, Klout, number of tweets per day, and date joined. For follower management this is the tool for me!

I'll be trying to train my brain to make more use of this tool. I think it really cuts down on some of the weak points of Twitter and also allows you to access other networks from a single place. I'd love to know what you think of it or if there are other tools that you think are just as good?

Ian Brown - Godlike Sellout

2010-04-10T22:03:00.001+01:00

<rant>It seems the same artist who wrote Illegal Attacks in protest of the military-industrial complex in Iraq is not against advertising Adidas shoes - or suppressing the voice of those who think this is a bit of a sellout.

I was curious enough, on seeing a post on Ian Brown's "godlike genius" fanpage on Facebook of him with Noel Gallagher to watch the clip. It was 7+ minutes of Ian and Noel extolling the virtues of Adidas shoes and how they're closely linked with coolness and the whole Manchester thing. Really cheesy stuff.

Worse, was the string of comments e.g. "You boys are my idols. I'm an aspiring writer and when i make it i'm writing a film about our home city and life in the late 80s-early 90s. I'll be knocking on both your doors for bits of the soundtrack." er, O-big pause-K.

Worse still, was that after I posted my view on this to the thread (it was a one word post - "sell-outs") the post was deleted and it now seems that I'm not able to comment on posts any more (see - no comment link).

It seems not only is Ian Brown not as anti-capitalist as his lyrics make out he's also anti-free speech.

The music has died a little bit tonight.</rant>

Kitchen makeover: Day 10

2010-04-06T22:33:00.001+01:00

Yay! Job's a good'n!!!

Kitchen makeover: Day 9

2010-04-05T10:04:00.001+01:00

...well, unfortunately we didn't quite make it to the pub as - yet again - things took longer than we thought. We started the day with Radka finishing up the paintwork (coving) while I shaped the final piece of worktop to go on a small cupboard. Luckily, an offcut was just about the right size but both ends needed planing and finishing with the endstrips. The other day we finished the ends by glueing the endstrips into place, waiting for it to dry, then trimming it - which proved to be difficult. Cutting the endstrips to the exact size proved to be easier as it was just a case then of planning the edges very lightly to get the right finish.

With the final worktop in place I then tiled above it and finished some wall tiling around a socket on the other wall. The time consuming job of the day was the grouting. I removed excess spacers as far as possible while Radka did the real work of squeegeeing the grout into the gaps and finishing it neatly. The grouting is one of those fiddly jobs that I have no patience for, but Radka did a great job and it really finishes the look of the floor and also makes it more stable.

Last day today!! Just time to grout the wall tiles and do some finishing touches of woodwork - then it's back to the real world!

Kitchen makeover: Day 8

2010-04-04T10:12:00.000+01:00

Yesterday was all about the wall tiling. To start with there was some bare plaster that we're tiling over so we needed to prime the walls. I feel a bit bumped about this as the primer cost almost a tenner - when I read the back of the tile adhesive they actually recommend a bit of PVA glue and water to do the same job.

The primer took four hours to dry so we used the time to go off to a tiling place and get some 3mm spacers. The bloke in the tiling shop gave us some good advice about marking out from the centre of the wall so that you're not left with too small gaps to cut tiles for at the edges.

We also cut and trimmed the end strips that we'd glued to the wortops the previous day. Another job was to fix the upstands to the worktops using a bead of silicon gel to keep the water from getting underneath. The way we've used the upstands is a bit erm, *different*. As we haven't replaced the cupboards we're stuck with the way they'd arranged the old ones. They'd made them extra deep, which meant that the old worktops didn't overhang the cupboards at all (looked odd and not the easiest to clean!). We decided to have a bit of an overhang, which meant having a gap at the back, so we've laid the upstands flat to cover the gap.

After the upstands were in place it was time to tile over the top. I was slopping the adhesive on and sticky the tiles to the wall while Radka worked out the pattern - amazing how difficult it is to create a random pattern!

I was really impressed with the adhesive. I was expecting it to be quite difficult to get the tiles to stick to the wall but they actually went on very easily (it's the next morning now and they're still all in place!).

We tiled the gap behind the cooker so that hopefully it's easier to clean than the wallpaper that had been there. We've also put a 3 tile high border around the worktops.

So, we're nearly there. Grouting and little jobs like the skirting and painting the coving is left to do (plus I need to cut a 50cm bit of worktop and tile above a stand alone cupboard that we've been using to do all the tile cutting from). Then it's time for a well earned trip to the pub...

Kitchen makeover: Day 7

2010-04-03T09:44:00.001+01:00

This is really turning into a battle of wills - it's us against the kitchen! Everything seems to take a lot longer than planned and now our time off is running out. Will we make it in time? Ah, who cares, we've got the worst of it done.

Yesterday started with our daily trip to the DIY stores for some bits and pieces. While we were looking at the wall tile spacers a professional tiler stopped and advised us to use 3mm spacers for our wall tiles (the only size they didn't have!) so we've got another trip to a bigger DIY store today.

Back at home I worked on cutting the upstands and attaching the end finishing strips to finish the worktops while Radka worked on finishing touches to some of the paintwork and grouted under the washing machine and cooker areas. Later I got pack of waste pipe work and fitted it to the sink (I wasn't really happy with the pipework that was already there. I was a little bit overwhelmed by the amount of bits you get in the pack though. I wonder if it matters that there are a few bits left over?

After we'd got the washing machine and cooker back into place it was tea time. We decided to crack on after tea as we're a bit behind. Radka finished some grouting while I cut and laid the remainder of the floor tiles. This turned into a bit of a mission and it was midnight before we finished, but it's done now so hopefully we can take it a bit easier for the next few days!

Kitchen makeover: Day 6

2010-04-02T09:23:00.001+01:00

Day 6 was mostly about doing the joints in the worktops. We'd decided to cut them to shape rather than using the joining strips you can get. The old worktops used joining strips and, inevitably bits of food get under the strips. By cutting diagonally into the join and then straight across you can get a proper fit that works with the curved front edge of the surface.

Unfortunately I was using a jigsaw to cut the tops (if I were doing this again I might invest in a router). The jigsaw had a nasty habit of leaning of to one side as the cut was made. Whilst it's easy enough to keep it in line with the line that's marked, underneath the board the blade had flexed so that the cut edge was angled.

This mean a bit of a dodgy hack to cut off the excess of the underside. There were a few hairy moments and some cursing going on but eventually we had three boards that fit each other at right angles to form a U shape.

In terms of actually fitting them together, the worktops are fairly well supported by cupboards so we used mending plates to join them. Before screwing them into place we applied a bead of colorfill to the joined edge. This is a colour matched resin that hardens to produce a pretty seamless gap.

After the worktops were joined, we tiled under where the washing machine and cooker will go and also removed the old cooker hood.

This ugly green monstrosity was well stuck into place as the fixing screws has welded themselves into the wall. In the end I had to literally rip it from the wall (quite good therapy!)...

Today, we're planning to finish the worktops by applying endstrips and then finish the rest of the floor tiling and some other little jobs.

Kitchen makeover: Day 5

2010-04-01T09:48:00.000+01:00

The scariest day yet saw us dip a toe into the dark arts of plumbing. The day started by taking out the old worktops. I tried to do this with minimum damage but, unfortunately when I took the old upstands away part of the walls came with them. A bit of polyfilla Deep Gap soon sorted that.

After the first couple of worktops came out I needed to work out how to disconnect the taps to the old sink. This involved turning off both the hot and cold water supplies. First I looked for an isolation valve - sadly there were none so it was a case of turning off the mains for the cold water and draining the tank for the hot. When I started to drain the hot water tank I could hear it refilling again. This meant that it was fed from the cold tank in the loft. Fortunately, there's a tap to turn off the supply *to* the hot water tank to stop it from re-filling.

Once the tank was drained and the mains were off it was quite easy to disconnect the taps and get the last worktop out. At this stage I took out a section of the hot water pipe and installed an isolation valve. This meant that the tap to the hot water tank could be turned back on while we worked.

Next it was time to start cutting the new tops (another scary experience!). The first cut (no it wasn't the deepest!) was the easiest - just a strait cut. After that it was time to put in the worktop with the sink so we could get the new taps connected and turn the water back on. First we cut it to size and cut the join with the other surface, then cut out the insert for the sink. The sink went in with minimum fuss then it was time to reconnect the taps and waste pipes. compression joints with the taps made this really easy - the only problem was that the pipe work didn't quite fit and the joint with the external pipe is a bit poor. For now though everything's water tight.

One weird side effect is that the toilet cistern now overflows. Reading up on the valve that we have - it is prone to getting debris in and that can stop it from turning off the water when the cistern is full. I didn't feel like dealing with this at 23:00 last night so that is the first job for today!

Kitchen makeover: Day 4

2010-03-31T09:21:00.000+01:00

First job of the day was to fit the wine rack shelves that we built on Monday. Just a case of screwing some right angled brackets to the cupboard walls - the only difficulty was that it was quite difficult to work under the cupboards.

After that it was time to start on the tiling. The first thing was to set-out where the tiles would be. Everyone I've spoken to and everything I've read on tiling all say the same thing - setting-out is really important!.

We started off by dry laying a line of tiles between the internal door and the kitchen door.

We then did a line of tiles perpendicular to this and adjusted the first line so that none of the cut tiles by the walls and cupboards would be less than 2".

After this it was almost time to start laying. Some of the advice said to cut tiles as you go and some to lay all of the whole tiles then go back to do the cut tiles.

I decided to go with the first option, so before laying the first tile I cut the tiles I'd need for that part of the floor.

The cutting machine is a bit of a scary beast (and makes a hell of a noise) but it does the job and makes it easy to get an accurate cut.

Finally, it was time to lay the first tile. I started at one end of the room so that there was no need to step on freshly laid tiles. I was ultra-careful about getting this one square - as any mistake would be magnified as the other tiles were laid. Slight hitch with the first tile - as I got a bit over excited when levelling it with a rubber mallet and shattered it.

For the rest of the day it was a case of laying a few tiles then stopping to cut a few. The cutting was the time consuming bit and, as is the way of things, it took longer than I'd hoped. It's getting there though!

Today - we're going to switch our attention to the worktops so that we can cut them in the garden while it's not raining (hopefully!).

Kitchen makeover: Day 3

2010-03-29T18:13:00.001+01:00

Today was a bit of a washout - both in terms of weather, and what we got done. I started the day by reading up on floor tiling. The advice was not to lay ceramic tiles on top of vinyl tiles but if you had to to put a coat of PVA on the floor before laying. Although we took up a layer of floor tile yesterday there was another layer underneath. Even with a heat gun these suckers weren't shifting. Also, they look pretty old and the chances are they could contain asbestos - so on the whole, best to leave well enough alone.

So the first trip of the day was to get some PVA glue. I got the biggest pot I could find thinking it would easily be enough. In the end we were scraping the edges of the pot and the lid, but it just about covered the floor. Then we waited for it to dry... and we waited... and waited. It soon became clear that it's going to take a day for the stuff to dry so we've kind of been at a loose end ever since.

Ordinarily, I'd call it a day and go down the pub but the rain has been torrential so even that wasn't an option.

On the plus side we decided to go out and get our new tap and sink. We also got a bit of timber. Radka had a good idea of putting a wine rack in between the cupboard that we moved yesterday so we got some wood to build them and built the shelves (the wine bottle was to make sure we had the size right!). Unfortunately the decorating has taken over the house a bit and it was to wet to do the sawing outside, so we had a makeshift workshop on the upstairs landing, using the ironing board as a sawhorse. Needs must and all that!

So, no tiling done as yet but at least we got some other bits and pieces out of the way.

Kitchen makeover: Day 2

2010-03-28T21:21:00.001+01:00

It's beer time on day 2 and we've moved from bomb site to crime scene today as all the kitchen cupboards are now covered in plastic.

Today was the paint job. We were a bit late starting today and the hour change didn't help but once we got going we did alright.

After a breakfast of crumpets we got back to preparing the walls for painting. The more you look at them the more cracks and dents you find - after a while you just have to call it a day.

While I was waiting for the polyfilla to dry I decided to have a look at a cupboard that we're going to move. This actually went really well so that was a bonus little job done for the day. Another little side job was to have a go at turning the water off at the stopcock. We're putting in a new sink and tap in later in the week so I was a bit concerned that the stop-cock wouldn't work... but it's fine so that's another bonus!

The next job was to mask everything off and cover the cupboards with plastic. This actually took ages. So we didn't start painting until 15:00ish. Although the space is a bit pokey we decided to split the job so Radka did the ceilings and fiddly bits while I covered the bulk of the walls.

Decorating around the cupboards has been tricky and awkward but we've managed to get two coats on. We used Dulux Kitchen paint. This should be resistant to steam (which I think is why the old paint had been flaking off). It's also grease resistant and washable.

Kichen makeover: Day 1

2010-03-28T10:31:00.000+01:00

Things often get worse before they get better. Yesterday we turned our kitchen into a building site. When we first viewed our house, the impression that we were left with was of a nice, bright modern kitchen.

However, when we moved in we discovered that (as with the rest of the place) the decorating was either not very well done or hadn't been done for ages.

In the kitchen, there's a lot of paint flaking off and the vinyl floor tiles were worn and ugly. Also they'd used wallpaper around the cooker and sink - not the easiest thing to keep clean!

So, with the wallpaper already stripped Day One was all about preparing the walls for a paint job and getting up those floor tiles.

Luckily, I already had a heat gun so after a quick read of the safety instructions ("this tool should not be used as a hairdryer" - I kid you not!) it was time to crack on. Having a quick try of getting these up without the heatgun proved impossible, but after heating the corner and into the middle of the tile to loosen the glue (and soften the tile a bit) they came up pretty easily.

I found that gloves were essential - as the glue leaves a big sticky mess everywhere. Knee pads were also a bonus as well as having something sharp to get under the corners. After the tiles were up the floor was even stickier than some of the nightclubs I've been in so we needed to put down dustsheets to make it walkable on.

While I was working on this Radka was preparing the walls for painting by chipping away loose paint and sanding down. Then later, as Radka gave me a break from the floor tiles, I applied some fine filler to the edges of flaked off paint. Hopefully this will stop the old paint from rising and creating bobbles when we put wet paint over it. The fine filler I used was Polyfilla One Fill.

So, our kitchen now looks like a bomb has hit it. It's one-pot meals and takeaways for us for the next week while we sort it out. Next job: painting.

"Nurture the Belbin plant"

2010-03-25T21:52:00.001Z

This is a post on my personal blog about the CILIP in Hants and Wight AGM yesterday. Now that we have our own sub-branch blog I'll post a slightly different version on there also...

...but this one's about what I got out of it personally - so mostly it's about the excellent presentations from Linda Jones and Timothy Collinson.

The theme was the Darkside and the Brightside of the web, with Linda taking the former and Timothy the later. I liked that both presentations allowed audience to participate. Some quite dry topics (like copyright) were dealt with in an interesting and engaging way. As well as demonstrating an understanding of the topic, both presentations showed an understanding of how people learn.

Dark side

The first of the two presentations was about the dark side. The session kicked-off with newspaper clippings of cautionary tales of the Internet (all from last month) handed out to all . Seeing such a massive folder of clippings about how the internet or public disclosure had somehow gone wrong for folks made quite an impact.
The first topic chosen by the audience was copyright ("you can tell it's a room full of librarians!"). One example was a 10 minute movie on YouTube called "A Fair(y) Use Tale" - a mashup comprised of Disney clips that explains copyright (irony fans will love this).

Another topic was a Facebook T&C's activity (with sweets) - or perhaps more broadly, getting us to think about what we're signing up to on the web. Sometimes it does pay to read the T&C's! Other examples related to passwords - i.e. lists of commonly used passwords and public disclosure (Tony Blair itinerary being disclosed by his daughter on Facebook for e.g.).

Normally, I switch off to cautionary tales about using the Internet. In my early days as a librarian I heard lots of scaremongering born of fear of the unknown. I think the reason Linda's presentation was so good was she wasn't saying don't use the Internet, just that you should be a bit savvy when you do. One of the key messages was to use the Internet to evaluate the Internet - if something looks a bit iffey - Google it!

Bright side

Timothy's presentation was about really positive uses of the Internet. About getting user participation - particularly in a HE setting. An interesting concept was his use of Analog -> Digital twitter. This was a fantastic way to get people engaged with Twitter without having to have everybody logged into a computer. At the start of the session the audience were given slips of paper and encouraged to write short messages or thoughts (tweets to the initiated) which were collected and entered to a twitter account through the session. For anyone who's been itching to use Twitter for collaboration in the classroom but has been struggling for a way to do it without everyone: a) having an account and knowing how to use it; and b) having to be logged in to their own computer - here's an answer.

Timothy illustrated a number of positive uses of the internet - especially good examples of web 2.0 usage at UoP. Their Thing of the Day blog is definitely worth a look as it sneaks IL into posts among more esoteric entries such as Hats of Meat! The key message for me was that librarians need time to play and be creative! "Nurture the Belbin plant in your organisation" was Timothy's parting shot - definitely something to think on.

All in all, top notch. It's a day and several glasses of wine later, for somebody with a goldfish memory like mine to recall this much is testimony to the quality of the presentations.

Dropbox

2010-03-20T10:34:00.001Z

This is one of a series of posts about time management.

I thought I'd sneak this one in about Dropbox. I work across a number of computers that, may or may not be connected to the internet or other networks at different times. Here's a quick inventory - I don't think it's anything special - many of you will have a similar list:

Netbook - connected at home, mobile broadband sporadic on train.
My laptop - always connected to home broadband.
Office - always connected to work network. Includes my documents on networked drive.
Enquiry desk - (x2) regularly work on physical enquiry desk and our virtual enquiry service - connected to work network.
Hotdesks - one of any of about 4 desks when at our other campus for meetings etc. - connected to work network.

Until now, file syncing between these has been a nightmare. Even at home between netbook and laptop I've had "issues" - I've got a network drive but getting it to sync between different machines has proved impossible. From home I can access the work drives to download files but can't save any changes. From work I can't access files on my personal computers. Sod's Law states that no matter what computer I'm on, the most up-to-date version of the document I'm working on is on another machine.

Dropbox is solving alot of this grief. Basically, you register and download the client on to any computers that you use. It creates a folder (the default is within your My Documents folder). Any files that you save within that folder will be automatically updated on the other machines.

The beauty is that the local copies on each machine are updated. This means if I work on a document on my way to work on the netbook, as long as I get a blim of internet connection before I shut it down (which I normally do), I can log into my work computer and start working from the same doc. Without usb sticks, emailing files to myself, or any other shenanigans my files are synced.

Another nice feature is that previous versions are saved. If (and I say if because this hasn't happened yet) you accidentally revert to an old version you can still retrieve the correct version from the web.

In short, I'd recommend Dropbox to anyone working across more than one machine. It's free upto 2gig of files and it just makes life easier. Give it a go!

Reading: collaboration in Higher Education and its benefits for ICT

2010-03-12T17:43:00.001Z

This article is one of a special issue of Educause Quarterly on the future of Higher Education and describes how collaboration in Higher Education is driving benefits in the ICT community. Parallels are drawn between information sharing in the ICT community and Higher Education. This has been facilitated by advances like the Internet. Ideals like open-source, open standards and open access are common to both fields (Read 2010).

This article highlights the fact that research collaboration has stimulated developments like the World Wide Web, and high performance computing (although perhaps it should be added that military and commercial applications have also been strong drivers).

The article argues for the professionalisation of "research technologists" (and draws parallels to Learning Technologists) to further enable collaboration in research.

Cloud computing is explored as a way for research institutions to outsource ICT applications through the internet and the example of student email accounts is cited as one way that this is already happening. Web 2.0 tools such as YouTube and blogging for collaboration between research teams is also mentioned. Cloud computing is heralded as a way to harness tools on the internet without the institution having to invest in expensive hardware. The security and sustainability issues of using web services (that are ultimately beyond the control of the institution) are later highlighted. In circumstances where data is ethically sensitive, or where long term access needs to be guaranteed, cloud computing may not be appropriate (Read 2010) but the examples of using social media tools in the cloud to foster collaboration are useful.

Distributed computing is measured against shared services. It occurs at this point that tools like DropBox might be the sign that a third way is possible. DropBox uses cloud computing to sync files between different "distributed" computers. Copies of files are available "offline" because they are stored on the client (as well as client having the software to manage the file syncing), there is also a copy "in the cloud" on DropBox's servers. One of the benefits is that old copies of the file are also kept so it is possible to revert to earlier versions of works.

But I digress. In summary the article provides useful examples of opportunities to use cloud computing for high level collaboration and economies of scale in providing research tools.

References

Read, M., 2010. Collaboration in Higher Education and its benefits for ICT. Educause Quarterly, 33 (1). Available from: http://www.educause.edu/EDUCAUSE+Quarterly/EDUCAUSEQuarterlyMagazineVolum/CollaborationinHigherEducation/199373. [Accessed 11 March 2010].

Reading: Information lliteracy: a neglected core competency

2010-03-11T17:19:00.001Z

This is one of a number of interesting looking articles in the latest Educause Quarterly. It's a summary of what information literacy is and concludes a number of key findings:

1) That college students information literacy skills are underdeveloped.
2) Information literacy is essential for lifelong learning.
3) Students should be exposed to information literacy throughout education.
4) Collaboration by faculty, librarians, technology professionals can develop information literacy.

It's interesting that collaboration between these groups is highlighted rather than it being seen as the domain as a single group.

The article goes on to explain the deficiencies in college student's information literacy skills. The key findings (course readings and google are prime sources, reliance on professors for information rather than independent learning, google and wikipedia prevalent, and perhaps most worryingly, little interaction with libraries and librarians) will seem familiar to anyone working with first year undergraduates. The article points out that by "satisficing" (finding just enough information to complete the assignment) they are missing out on learning opportunities.

As well as defining "information literacy" as:

"...the umbrella term for emerging literacies such as technology literacy, media literacy, and health literacy." (Weiner 2010)

It also highlights Digital Media Literacy as "a critical challenge in education in the next five years" citing the 2010 Horizon Report from Educause as an important document in this field.

The paper then extols the virtue of introducing Information Literacy at elementary level - citing reports from employers that new employee skills are not good enough (although this finding is not referenced).

I think one of the important questions that this paper asks is how we can develop progressive development of information literacy throughout education - making the links between educational establishments may be the difficulty.

Useful and brief summary with some useful references to follow up.

References

New Media Consortium, 2010. 2010 Horizon Report. Texas: New Media Consortium. Available: http://wp.nmc.org/horizon2010/ [Accessed 11 March 2010].

Weiner, S., 2010. Information literacy: a neglected core competency. Educause quarterly, 33 (1). Available from: http://www.educause.edu/EDUCAUSE+Quarterly/EDUCAUSEQuarterlyMagazineVolum/InformationLiteracyANeglectedC/199382 Accessed [11 March 2010].

Grass roots CILIP

2010-03-04T21:18:00.001Z

This is the fourth of a series of posts to help me to think about CILIP in the year of the Big Conversation.

This is the one about local involvement. I think my interest in this stems from the commonly held belief about CILIP i.e. that it's all very London-centric. I'd have these conversations with librarians about how CILIP never did anything "local". Before I was qualified I used to accept this argument - if so many people said it then it must be true?

A bit later I got to the stage where I was chartering. At this stage you start to sign up to jiscmail lists and local mailing lists to look for any events that might ~~pad-out~~ erm, I mean "augment" your portfolio. At this stage in your career you're not normally earning too much, so with training and development - the freer, the better... And I was amazed. It turns out our local branch puts on a number of events every year. Including reflective writing for portfolios, a summer outing to visit a unique library and network with others and also more technical events (I attended a Web 2.0 talk from Karen Blakeman which gave me ideas for most of my objectives whilst chartering). This year it's putting on about 10 events - most of which are free to members.

So how could this be when the standard response when talking to anyone about CILIP was:

"Meh. CILIP. Waste of money."

In my experience, when I went looking for local benefits, they were there. So maybe (in our neck of the woods at least) it's not the number of events that's the problem - it's getting the message across? What can we do to engage better with members and change these perceptions? Here's a couple of ideas:

1) Advertise everywhere! It would be just lovely if there was an effective means to advertise events at sub-branch level. Unfortunately, CILIP as an organisation, is not able to provide mailing lists (post or email) of sub-branch members (apparently distribution lists only go down to branch level?). I believe this is something that CILIP needs to sort out. I'm pretty sure we (members) provide details of our sub-branch affiliation and email address when we register - why can this information not be made available to sub-branches to promote local events? Anyhoo, in the absence of mailing lists from central data, sub-branches need to make use of as many other means of communication as possible. Jiscmail lists (yes, do cross-post!), locally maintained email lists (for those who don't jiscmail), cilip website, blogs, twitter and facebook (as well as all those personal networks that we all use) are all important. <rant>I have to say on this point that CILIP are not making things easy for sub-branches (in my experience that is). I have an ongoing saga that is going on far too long to get a sub-branch blog onto CILIP communities. As our strategy is to drive our twitter stream and facebook from the blog this is really holding us up!</rant>

2) Broad representation. I think this is really, really important. Among our sub-branch committee we have experience of public, school, HE, FE, health and commercial libraries. So we're lucky. When we're thinking about events, there's some understanding of what will work or what won't work for different types of librarian. I realise that this is not always the case though. If you're flavour of librarianship is under-represented at sub-branch (or even national) level, why not get involved! Easy for me to say I suppose with a supportive employer and relatively few commitments but you can get involved on any level - without necessarily giving all of your time to CILIP. If your sub-branch make it difficult to get involved (e.g. the meetings are at the wrong time) - ask them to change. They probably just aren't aware that it's a problem.

In summary...

I guess this post reflects what I've been saying in my other posts but on a local rather than national level. Branches and sub-branches need to make an effort to communicate to members from across the sector. It cuts both ways though. The next time you hear someone moan about a lack of events locally, ask them why they've done to make this better!

Inbox Zero!

2010-03-02T20:33:00.001Z

This is one of a series of posts about time management.

If I achieve just one thing with these posts, I hope that it will be to get some control over my email inbox. I see this as a battle and since I started in this job, my inbox has consistently had the upper hand. In my defence, I think the organisational culture does lean towards heavy email use. Especially compared to other places that I've worked that have been more reliant on voice or instant messaging.

It's reached a point where tackling the inbox is a constant background activity - something that I think contributes to stress. If you're viewing every email as it comes in it becomes distracting to the point that you can't really concentrate on other things.

Somebody I met recently only checks their email once a day. They have the out-of-office on permanently with a message to the effect that they only check their email once a day (it also gives their phone number in case you need to contact them urgently). I did consider this as an alternative to having Outlook open in the background all day. However, this wouldn't work for me as I need to have my Outlook calendar open to tell me where I need to be (I really would be lost without this). Also many of the tasks that I do during the day require me to refer to information sent in emails.

So, long story short, here are a few rules I'm going to try for the week to see if I can cut down on the constant interruption of email.

1) I'm only going to try and only respond to email twice a day (morning and evening).
2) I'm going to turn off the "new email" alert to try and reduce the urge to read each email as it comes in.
3) During spells when I'm responding to emails, those that only require an easy response get done straight away then deleted.
4) Emails that require me to do some work get scheduled into my calendar and deleted from my inbox.
5) Emails for information get filed out of the inbox straight away.
6) Everything else gets deleted.

That's it for now. The aim is Inbox Zero by the end of the week I wonder if I'll get there?

Time management boot camp - Introduction

2010-03-01T17:45:00.003Z

This week I am mostly blogging about time management. I'm hoping that a few hours spent looking at this is going to pay-off in terms of getting more done, and hopefully with less stress!

I guess everyone goes through a period of adjustment when going into a new job. A lot of the time you're learning as you go so things take longer to do. I'm thinking that - after 10 months in post now - it's a good time to stand back and look at what I do on a daily basis. Is there a better way to go about things rather than "firefighting" from one deadline to the next?

There are a couple of things I'm going to work on:

1) Email - this is the biggie. If I can make any improvement in this area I'll be dead happy. Currently, I have days when I feel I'm ruled by my inbox so I'll be experimenting with a few ways of managing this form of communication.

2) Learning to say no. I'm always going to struggle with this - at the moment I try really hard to accommodate students or staff when they have a need for my time. Currently, I don't have fixed times when I'll see people for 1-2-1's (the school that I work in has alot of students who spent limited time actually at university, and also alot of staff who also work in practice, so I think it's important to be flexible. However, I do need to find a better way of managing this aspect of my job. Although, 1-2-1's are through appointment only, my door is always open. I think it's good to be open and accessible, but I also need times when I can get away from the interruptions to concentrate on the more difficult aspects of my job.

3) Getting things done. Being a slave to the email (and also having a door that's always open). Means that it is sometimes hard to get a good run at things that take a bit longer (e.g. there's a trolley of donations in my office that's now been there for 2 weeks waiting for me to sort it!). Trying to do things that take a bit of thought or concentration (like planning teaching) tend to get shoved aside for things that can be fit in between phone calls or meetings. Or sometimes get ditched for last minute tutorials. Starting today, I'm going to start putting aside time to do these tasks - and protecting that time. I think 20 minutes on a Monday morning planning what I want to achieve for the week ahead and when I'm going to do it will be time well spent.

4) Better team working. Having come from a solo-librarian role (where I did everything from acquisitions to shelving) it's sometimes difficult to delegate. I'll be looking at more effective ways to share what we do as a team - and also try to think of our capacity in terms of a team rather than just looking at what's in my calendar.

That's the intention anyway - I'll blog in more detail about some of these in a series tagged "time management".

Is CILIP Overpriced?

2010-02-25T21:52:00.001Z

This is the third of a series of posts to help me to think about CILIP in the year of the Big Conversation.

Yesterday I decided to shun the netbook in favour of some trashy TV (La Femme Nikita on CBS action in case your interested). So I was a bit gutted to check my Google Reader this morning and discover I'd missed a convo on this very topic on Twitter as well as an interesting post from @woodsiegirl which puts the price of CILIP membership in the context of similar organisations and also explores the (very flat in my opinion) pricing structure for CILIP membership - more on that later!. Ah well. You snooze, you loose as they say.

So, my addition to the debate is a quick and dirty survey of other professional bodies. The survey method is poor. Basically I looked on the Directory of UK Professional Bodies for chartered institutes and decided to list the first 5 that made their fees easy to find. The results were:

Chartered Institute of Arbitrators - £280
Chartered Institute of Builders - £228
Chartered Institute of Management Accountants - £216
CIPD - £181 (18 months, have hardship register)
Chartered Institute of Waste Management - £162

Average = £213.40

Where possible I took the price for a chartered member. Not always directly comparable but in this context, the £184 for CILIP membership maybe doesn't look so unreasonable?

Cost is a very basic measure though. Far more important, is value. What value do we get from our CILIP membership? Aside from the Professional development, Support for your career, Staying informed, Networking and community and Special deals listed as member benefits on the CILIP website - just what do we get for our subs? (irony intended! "Just what have the Romans ever done for us!") The majority of votes on @philbradley's twtpoll on member fees think that CILIP membership is worth less than the current rate for the majority of members. Even if CILIP membership is good value, this clearly isn't the perception of alot of members.

I think CILIP should address this. In terms of research, what I've done above is laughable BUT I believe that this issue is so important to CILIP's future that it needs to conduct some proper research. Find out how CILIP compares to other professional bodies in terms of cost and value and be open with the results. If this shows that membership is overpriced (in the context of member wages and the benefits that membership offers) - take it on the chin, work out where the inefficiencies are, and bring the cost down. If it compares well to other professional bodies - then SHOUT about it to members - let them know that, actually, they're not getting such a bad deal!

I think another piece of research that would help is putting a £ value on membership. Find out if members actually earn more than non-members. If not, we have some serious questions to ask about our profession. I'm pretty sure that builders who are chartered members of the Chartered Institute of Builders can use that credential to help their bottom line. Can we as individuals trade on our chartered status in the same way? If not, why not?

The last I'd like to say on this goes back to @woodiesgirl's post. The means adjustment for fees is flat, and getting flatter. In actuality those who most need a professional body to protect their interests (see the last post) can no longer afford to be members. Sorry to get political but this is a political issue. I always thought of librarianship as a pretty right-on profession. The ideal of freely sharing information is one of the last bastions of socialism (imho). Flattening the fees in this way is an easy way to balance the books, but is it consistent with our professional values?

Just a thought. That's all for now.

Are we professional?

2010-02-23T11:13:00.002Z

This is the second of a series of posts to help me to think about CILIP in the year of the Big Conversation.

Is CILIP is fulfilling its role as a professional body? To answer this I want to find out more about what professional bodies are... what is their purpose and does CILIP fulfil this?

Like the truly lazy librarian I am, I started off by looking at the wikipedia entry for Professional Association . The headline definition is:

"A professional association (also called a professional body, professional organization, or professional society) is a non-profit organization seeking to further a particular profession, the interests of individuals engaged in that profession, and the public interest."

So, very unscientific, but we have 3 roles commonly accepted as being the remit of a professional body. The three elements of CILIP's mission statement are roughly aligned with this (see below) but how well do they do in practice?

1) Further the profession

"set, maintain, monitor and promote standards of excellence in the
creation, management, exploitation and sharing of information and
knowledge resources" (CILIP 2009a)

A few examples have led me to the opinion that CILIP has a way to go in this arena. Firstly, CILIP has been fairly slow to move with the development of social media. It is starting to engage now with CILIP communities and @CILIPInfo (Twitter enquiry service) but remember those frustrated blog posts and comments from last year from members imploring CILIP to get involved in social media? CILIP should be leading the way in this space, not just reacting to protests from forward looking members. In terms of its own information management I have issues as well. Following the recent change of CMS for the CILIP website, I think communication about the changes could have been better. I've also found it frustrating trying to get a sub-branch blog on communities - maybe I'm asking the wrong questions or the wrong people, but I've been frustrated by how difficult it seems to be to create a tool to better share information with our local members. An organisation of information professionals should get this stuff right first time and lead by example.

2) Further the interests of individuals engaged in the profession

"enable its Members to achieve and maintain the highest professional
standards in all aspects of delivering an information service, both for
the professional and the public good" (CILIP 2009a)

I guess this is the one that I hear most about from other librarians. There is a definite perception that CILIP is not active enough in protecting the interests of its members. As I said before I'm not sure how far CILIP should go into arbitration with employers and how much that is the role of unions (although clearly this is an area where the boundary between professional body and trade union is blurred). I see CILIP's role more about setting professional standards (for example in the framework of qualifications) and promoting those professional standards to employers. In an era when we all have to justify ourselves to the bean-counters CILIP does provide support in this area. Quality People Equals Quality Service is one example - a set of resources that outline (for managers who aren't necessarily librarians) why it is important to employ information professionals. CILIP provides this benchmarking and guidance - I think it's up to us as members (or our unions) to take this forwards with employers.

Linked to this (and I'm treading on eggshells here!) I think we, as individuals, have a responsibility develop ourselves professionally. Controversial, but I'm actually in favour of compulsory revalidation. At present, it's quite possible to charter, then engage in zero professional development for the rest of your career and still call yourself a chartered librarian. If CILIP is to promote professionalism to employers it has to be sure that members are maintaining their knowledge and skills (especially in such a fast moving field). For me, revalidation is the only way CILIP has to maintain the value of its qualifications.

What's not so good is the way CILIP is bringing this about. By the time we heard of the recent CPD consultation on revalidation in our sub-branch, the consultation had already closed. If consultation is not communicated effectively people start to feel disenfranchised and negative towards any findings. Maybe I'm being too harsh. Was it communicated effectively? Try Googling it and make up your own mind :-)

3) Protect the public interest

"support the principle of equality of access to information, ideas and
works of the imagination which it affirms is fundamental to a thriving
economy, democracy, culture and civilisation" (CILIP 2009a)

I think this is pretty much what the ethical principles are all about (CILIP 2009b) but also CILIP is active in promoting these values. The recent open letter to the Prime Minister about the need for school libraries to be a statutory requirement are just one example - they also regularly consult on issues that affect the public interest.

So, in summary, I think CILIP does OK in setting professional values and protecting the public. Where I think it needs to improve is in communicating with members and in setting an example as far as its own information systems and management goes. I'd like it to lead the way with new technology and social media - which is why I believe it is falling down slightly on the first of it's mission statements.

This has turned into a monster post - if anyone's made it this far I'd be very surprised! But if you have, I'd love to hear comments on any of this...

References

CILIP, 2009a. CILIP charter, mission and goals. London: CILIP. Available from: http://www.cilip.org.uk/about-us/mission-goals/pages/default.aspx [Accessed 23 February 2010].

CILIP, 2009b. Ethical principles for library and information professionals. London: CILIP. Available from: http://www.cilip.org.uk/sitecollectiondocuments/PDFs/policyadvocacy/Ethicalprinciplesforlibraryandinformationprofessionals.pdf [Accessed 23 February 2010]

What is CILIP?

2010-02-21T17:40:00.003Z

It's easy to dismiss Twitter as inane but I find it often sparks an idea or gives you insight into other's points of view.

Anyone who follows librarians on Twitter will have seen a fair bit of CILIP-bashing. In fact I've been known to engage in the odd venting of spleen in CILIP's direction myself. Sometimes this has been borne of genuine frustration, sometimes misunderstanding or sometimes (I have to admit) just sheer grumpiness on my part.

My own views on CILIP have changed a bit over the last few years. As I was qualifying (in a public authority that was sacking professional librarians left, right and centre) I thought CILIP should engage more actively with employers to protect jobs and ensure that professional roles were properly rewarded. Looking back, I wonder if I was expecting them to fulfil the role of a trade union?

Later, as I was chartering, I was impressed by the number of (mostly free) events that my local sub-branch put on and my views on CILIP changed a bit. At branch (or SIG) level, the member benefits (like free events) happen because of people who give their time for free to organise these things. Which, I think is why it gets my back up a bit when people complain about there never being any local events. I tend to react to this in an evangelical way, which can come across as patronising - apologies to anyone who's experienced this ;-)

The irony is, I'm still frustrated by CILIP at national level. The cost, the bureaucracy, the length of time it takes to get a response from head office, the resistance to change, ineffective consultation with members (I could go on)... If local benefits are provided by individuals giving their time and there are so many frustrations at national level - just what are our subs paying for?

In the year of the Big Conversation, it seems like CILIP are trying to address the way their members feel about them. It's a good time to answer some of these questions in my own mind so in future posts on this I'll be looking at:

1) What is the role 0f a professional body, and is CILIP a good or bad example?
2) Is CILIP membership too expensive? How does it compare to other professional bodies and what value do we get from it?
3) How can branches engage better with librarians at a local level e.g. what do they need to do to make it easy for people to get involved? How can CILIP at national level facilitate this?
4) What should CILIP expect from it's members? Is paying the subs enough or do we all need to get a bit more, well, involved?

If anyone's made it to the end of this post, well done! ...and feel free to comment.

SeeSaw for TV on Demand

2010-02-17T20:13:00.001Z

I'm just taking a look at a new TV on demand service called See Saw. It includes BBC, Channel 4 and Five on demand content all in one place. It basically works the same as any of these services in that you can use it to catch up with programs that you've missed within a certain time (up to 30 days).

They've also bought some (only a small some so far from what I can see) content from the US and there's some archive materials from our UK channels (for instance I stumbled across 2 series of Bottom which I'll be catching up on - it's great for old BBC and Channel 4 comedy series!).

There are parental controls build in that you can set if you want. As far as privacy goes, they do collect a bit of information about you but no more than any other online service. The privacy policy is here. There is a bit of a disclaimer in the privacy policy and t's & c's about they are not responsible for data that 3rd party advertisers on the site may collect about you so that may be a bit of a concern. Other than that the t's & c's look pretty much what you'd expect.

Negative points are: the searching is very naff and I think they're missing a trick in that there's no social element to the site. Also, navigation around the site is a bit slow - I'm guessing it's getting a bit of a hammering on its launch day. Importantly, there are sites out there with far more content but I think what's interesting here is that the content is all licensed and above board (maybe as such it's doomed to failure!). What you see is what you get though and (as it's a UK service) you're not going to find any content that's "only available in the US" or a bit hokey.

In summary, interesting concept and easy to use, but needs more content, better search and some social or interactive features.

ePortfolios for the Professions

2010-02-16T08:26:00.001Z

It's taken a while to get round to posting about this one but as part of the point of this blog is to record professional development I thought I'd better make the effort. ePortfolios for the Professions was held at the Bristol Hotel on 21st January - jointly organised by JISC RSC SW and Bournemouth University.

The key questions that emerged for me were the issues of portability (between different ePortfolio systems - e.g. PebblePad) and also about the ability to access or maintain your ePortfolio after you've left the institution under which it was created.

Here's a summary of the presentations (in no particular order). Apologies to any that I've missed. All of these are available on the Ning site for the event.

eFolio: A Group Effort: Dr Alex Furr of Southampton University outlined their experience of developing an ePortfolio tool for use in their psychology programme. Works with existing systems (e.g. Eprints) wherever possible.

PDP and evidence of professional competence – an e-solution: Martin Leveridge of Teeside University spoke about implementing ePortfolios for assessment of a radigraphy unit in their school of health and social care.

A Servant to Two Masters: managing CPD through an e-portfolio to meet organisational and professional body requirements: Virginia Havergal spoke about having multiple ePortfolios for different aspects of her personal and professional development. Interesting for me as she mentioned piloting CILIP's adoption of ePortfolios for chartership.

Effective Practice with e-Portfolios: Supporting 21st Century Learning: Lisa Gray spoke about some of the work that JISC is carrying out. There's a useful slide in here on what ePortfolios can support which brings home the message about lifelong learning and the importance of being able to take your portfolio with you.

E-portfolios and Education for the Professions: by Cheri Logan reported a study into ePortfolio use in Art Design and Media. Interesting to hear positive attitudes of employers in these fields.

e-Portfolios at Yeovil College and the University Centre Yeovil: Geoff Rowland outlined the use of a number of open source ePortfolio tools at Yeovil College and UCY.

E-portfolios supporting employee development in Public Services Foundation Degrees: evidence based research outcomes: Dave Croot, Sue Atkinson & Julie Swain spoke on various aspects of the HE5P research project looking into the needs of employers and how that impacts what we do with ePortfolios in HE.

Good advice about choosing which journal to publish in

2010-02-15T20:58:00.001Z

Further to my last couple of posts, I've just come across some good advice on selecting which journals to submit articles for publication in an article from Pediatric Radiology (Griscom 1999). The main point of the article is to select realistic journals. The example given is the New England Journal of Medicine and JAMA. Both have extremely high standards, but also have generalised readerships. They are only likely to publish articles that are broadly applicable or transferable across the whole medical profession.

So, it may be more realistic to publish in journals that are more specific to the field of your research. I guess one question that's worth asking is, are you more likely to be cited by publishing in a journal that has a large generalist readership (where only a small set of those readers are interested in your subject) or in a journal with a smaller readership, but one that is closer to your research?

Griscom suggests authors ask a number of questions about a publication when shortlisting journals to publish in:

"Are there articles like yours in the journal you are considering?

Do you like the articles that you read there?

Are the editors and readers of these journals likely to be interested in your work?

Is this the audience you hope to reach?

If you answer "yes," turn to their instructions
for authors and read them carefully. Can you adapt
your material to fit those instructions (which you must
follow) without too much strain?" (Griscom 1999)

References:

Griscom, N.T., 1999. Your research: How to get it on paper
and in print. Pediatric radiology, 29, 81-86. Available from: http://www.springerlink.com/content/38cmdxn17l2a5y6e/fulltext.pdf

Sources for bibliometrics in the REF

2010-02-15T10:22:00.003Z

This is the second of a series of posts summarising what I'm reading about the use of bibliometrics in the Research Excellence Framework. The first post looked at how influential bibliometrics are likely to be in informing the REF in the health fields.

So, working on the assumption that citation analysis is going to at least influence expert review in the health field, what are the best sources to use to find journals to publish in? As part of the REF, a lot of research has been carried out to assess the pros and cons of the various citation databases on the market.

This document: Appraisal of Citation Data Sources: A report to HEFCE by the Centre for Science and Technology Studies concludes that Scopus is a serious alternative to WoS in the science fields. There are gaps though (for example Scopus does not index journals from cover-to-cover like WoS, so there are some articles and reviews that might be indexed in WoS but are not available in Scopus). Swings and roundabouts though as Scopus is judged to be more accurate in some areas. One example is that it preserves author affiliations for all co-authors, wheras WoS only lists the institution of the first author.

There is a subject element to this as well:

"The comparison of WoS and Scopus coverage of the ‘best’ publications submitted to the 2001 RAE showed that Scopus coverage is especially better in the Subject Group Subjects allied to Health, as well as to a lesser extent also in Engineering & Computer Science and Health Sciences." (Meod and Visser 2008)

So Scopus can't be ignored - especially in the subject areas mentioned above. But I think maybe it's best not to get too hung up on the bibliometrics side of things. The latest REF guide from HEFCE clearly states that citation analysis will only be used only in those subject areas for which citation data is considered to be a strong indicator of outputs and that other methods will also be used (HEFCE 2009). It's highly likely that other indicators will be taken into account in the health sciences fields.

References:

HEFCE, 2009. The Research Excellence Framework: A brief guide to the proposals. Bristol: HEFCE. Available from: http://www.hefce.ac.uk/research/ref/resources/REFguide.pdf [Accessed 15 February 2010].

Moed, H.F. and Visser, M.S., 2008. Appraisal of Citation Data Sources: A report to HEFCE by the Centre for Science and Technology Studies, Leiden University. Bristol: HEFCE. Available from: http://www.hefce.ac.uk/pubs/rdreports/2008/rd17_08/rd17_08.doc [Accessed 15 February 2010].

Publishing for the REF?

2010-02-12T16:30:00.005Z

I'm increasingly being asked to support our staff and PhD students in the field of publishing. I guess from two angles:

1) What sources can we use to determine good publications to target - especially in the context of the REF.
2) Are there any good sources of guidance on writing for publication.

For the first I'm going have to develop my knowledge of the REF a bit. It's all very well being aware of the sources that folks can use (e.g. JCR, Web of Knowledge, Scopus) but these things need to be taken in the context of what the REF is going to be assessing. Are measures such as impact factors the 'be all and end all', or will the REF take other factors into consideration?

To help me with this I'm taking a look at this document:

HEFCE, 2009. Report on the pilot exercise to develop bibliometric indicators for the Research Excellence Framework. http://www.hefce.ac.uk/pubs/hefce/2009/09_39/#exec [Accessed 12 February 2010].

It outlines the pilot study to 'develop the bibliometrics element of the Research Excellence Framework'. I think it's worth emphasising that bibliometrics is just one element of the REF and other factors may need to be taken into account when choosing where to publish. One of the key points of the study is the conclusion that bibliometrics are not robust enough to replace expert review... but citation analysis may inform the review. Another finding is that the effectiveness of bibliometrics varies depending on your subject area (i.e. bibliometrics are going to be more effective in those subject areas that rely most heavily on journals for dissemination).

So how do you know how important bibliometrics are going to be in in informing expert review in your subject area? Annex H. of the document above is a study on the availability of citation data in different subject areas and offers some analysis of how important citations might be. For my area (Health and Social Care) it's mixed news!

‘Health sciences’ is a mixed area. Many staff are professionally engaged and used
practitioner journals not well covered by commercial data. Others are in areas that
provide excellent bibliometrics. This is therefore an area in which bibliometrics may be
seen by some commentators to provide useful information but which in practice cannot
be assumed to provide sufficient information without support from peer review. (HEFCE 2009: 154)

This suggests to me that expert reviews in health sciences will not rely solely on citations (as they recognise that many practice based researchers will be disseminating research in professional journals). I think the holy grail as far as choosing where to publish goes, will be to find journals that do well in JCR and on Scopus but are also well read by practitioners.

References

HEFCE, 2009. Report on the pilot exercise to develop bibliometric indicators for the Research Excellence Framework. Bristol: HEFCE. Available from: http://www.hefce.ac.uk/pubs/hefce/2009/09_39/#exec [Accessed 12 February 2010].

Google Alerts for @ciliphw

2010-01-24T09:07:00.004Z

Yesterday I spent a happy afternoon creating some Google Alerts for a local library news feed (eventually this will go through @ciliphw). After playing about a bit with a few searches I decided on using Google Alerts because you can restrict your search to particular sources (e.g. Portsmouth News or Basingstoke Gazette). What I was finding if I tried a normal Google Search using keywords (like "hampshire) to restrict the search was that you just get a load of stuff that's not really relevant. I was really after news from local papers and Google Alerts indexes local papers and allows you to specify which papers you search.

The first step was to decide which papers to look for. The next step was to find out what Google Alerts calls them and create a search. For each newspaper I created an alert looking for articles containing any of the words "library" "libraries" "librarian" or "CILIP". For some papers I could see a few results and check that the articles were sort of relelvant. Others hadn't published anything on libraries recently so didn't display any results. In these cases I double checked that I had the source name right by taking out the key words. If the search then displayed other articles published in that paper I could be confident that I had the source name right and then put the keywords back in to create the alert.

Google Alerts allows you to output your alert either as an email or as a feed. I opted for feed but didn't change any of the other settings. This proved to be a mistake as, when I checked on the feeds this morning they'd picked up a load of (seemingly random) stuff. I think the answer is that Google Alerts can be restricted to certain media (e.g. Newspapers) or "Comprehensive". As I'd left the option set as comprehensive I think that (even though I'd restricted the search to a particular news source in each case) as well as picking up newspaper artciles the search was also picking up blogs and other sources. Now I've changed that setting to "News" so hopefully, when I check the feeds later they'll just contain published local news articles. Hopefully.

Once the feeds are looking right I can plug them into @ciliphw via TwitterFeed...

CILIPHW feeds: To do list

2010-01-21T20:43:00.007Z

I need to improve the feeds going in to our CILIP sub-branch twitter stream (@ciliphw). At the moment there's a feed from a basic Google News search going in. It's ripped via Dapp Factory then fed in via Twitter feed. Unfortunately the search isn't brilliant and it's picking up a lot of irrelevant stuff. I thought of rss'ing a normal Google search but it's hard to pick up genuine library stories without getting stuff that mentions libraries in other contexts.

Looking at search results, I think the best option is to identify the local newspapers sites then do Google site searches. So the to do list is as follows...

1) Identify all the local papers
2) Search local papers using Google and sort results by dates
3) Get feeds of the search results (either using Google alerts or Dapp Factory)
4) Aggregate the feeds into the twitter stream using the tag #news using twitter feed.

After that I think there are a couple of other sources that might be useful to add to the Twitter stream:
1) CILIPHW news. Hopefully we should have a blog on CILIP communities soon and can take a feed from this for our events etc. #events
2) Local library blogs. #blogs
3) Local library jobs. #jobs (similar to @UKlibraryjobs but for Hants and Wight)

Hopefully, if all goes well, it will also make a good example of a simple mashup for a talk that I'm giving at work in a few weeks.

Aggregating UK Library Job Feeds on Twitter

2009-04-30T18:58:00.005+01:00

Been meaning to do this for a while. It seemed like a fairly simple task - in fact I can't believe something doesn't already exist (maybe it does and I just can't find it?). The first job was to gather feeds. I already knew about the jinfo (jobs in information), jobs.ac.uk (academic vacancies) and lgjobs.com feeds. Being sure that there were more (and being unable to find a lisjobnet feed) I put the question to Twitter and got some good tips from @jimmy1712, @ekcragg, @libram, and @joeyanne - including a scraped feed from lisjobnet! (also thanks to @darrenmjones for pointing me towards Feedity, a tool for producing feeds from sites that don't already have them. Haven't tested it yet but looks promising!).

Next stage was to look at aggregating tools and create the Twitter account. @UKLibraryJobs was free so I decided to go for that. As I'm already using Hootsuite I decided to give that a try for aggregating the feeds - if it doesn't work out I look at other tools...

The initial list of feeds is...

lgjobs.gov - libraries category (need to check how comprehensive this one is and possibly find feeds for councils that are not listed?)
Jinfo - Latest Jobs Feed
lisjobnet (unofficial) - in the end I used the feed from @darrenmjones as the other one didn't report a timeline.
TFPL - latest jobs feed
Sue Hill Recruitment - although this looks like it mightbe the jinfo feed with a Sue Hill referral? Will need to look into this...
~~Jobs.ac.uk - Information Management category~~ - actually I couldn't add this one as it doesn't have a timeline either - I'll look at using Feedity to scrape this.

...I'm hoping that if anyone knows of any others they'll let me know or maybe we can open access to the Hootsuite profile to let others add feeds without having to go through me.

So, that'll do for now. Jobs to do are:
1) Tart up the Twitter account a bit.
2) Check that the feeds are working.
3) Look into the scope of the lgjobs and Sue Hill feeds.
4) Scrape a feed from jobs.ac.uk
5) The most Hootsuite will post is 5 posts an hour from each feed so need to check if this is a problem.

Sure there's other things but that's enough for now.

CILIP 2.0 Council Open Session

2009-04-29T22:33:00.006+01:00

cilip2_full by Dave and Bry, on Flickr

I've been thinking about the CILIP 2.0 Council Open Session yesterday. First off, it was fascinating for me to attend an event like this on Twitter. Although I've followed events from hashtags before, as a relatively new Twitterer, never anything on this scale. The tools that were recommended (Twitterfall and Tweetdeck) worked well for me, although at times there was a bit of lag from Twitterfall so I found myself reverting to Twitter Search occasionally.

I did get some sense of what was happening in the room and a number of Twitterers were very generous in describing what was going on (see @tomroper or @janeite for running commentaries or @daveyp's transcript of the #cilip2 tag for more info).

I've seen some criticism of the Twitter stream as being hard to follow and the thought's or ideas not being coherent, which is interesting in itself. Yes, it's a challenge to put complex ideas into 140 characters but I beleive there are coherent streams (or conversations) within the tag. Perhaps it has as much to do with the number of participants as anything. The more people you have in a group, the looser the conversations tend to get. At least Twitter allowed a large number of people to attend remotely and the stream is there to be analysed/ picked over now. I'm sure some interesting threads will emerge.

What did the day achieve though? Well, I didn't pick up on any hard action or proposals. I can't see that any actual decisions were made by the CILIP top brass. But then I'm not sure that was what the event was about. I get the sense that it was more about CILIP Council *listening* to it's members. This is something I've never heard of before and I really think CILIP Council deserve a big hats-off for hosting the event.

I'd like to see CILIP provide a strong lead in this space. Personally I think they've some catching up to do, but listening and finding out more with events like yesterday's is a very good start.

The event got me wondering: actually, what do I want from CILIP with regards to Web 2.0? Do I want them to leap on the latest hot Web2.0 app? Well, partly. I'd like to see them take more interest in the tools that members are using and, if there is significant demand, engage with their users on those tools. But I think using the latest/ coolest tools in the Web2.0 toybox is a bit misleading. Web2.0, for me, is not about the specific applications it's more a way of being. Being open, encouraging participation, encouraging user generated content, concepts like creative commons etc. The big question for me really is not whether or not CILIP have an "official" Twitter account (although that would be nice!) but whether they are prepared to use Web2.0 to be more open and to provide a place for librarians to openly share their ideas and information.

By extension that means that we - the information profession - have to be more open in sharing our information and content. We have to contribute and get involved. Can we make CILIP2.0 a reality?

The Potential Impact of Web 2.0 on the Delivery of Higher Education Library Services

2009-03-23T19:48:00.005Z

Here's my presentation for the job interview and Bournemouth University. The more I look at this the more it seems outdated and naive but, I worked hard on it so here it is...

Record your screencast online

I may never visit Twitter again! HootSuite does that for me.

2009-03-17T19:33:00.002Z

I've been trying out HootSuite as a Twitter tool for the last couple of days and I have to say I'm really impressed.

A great feature of HootSuite is that you can use it to manage multiple Twitter accounts from a single place. You can also configure it to allow multiple people to be able to Tweet from a single Twitter account. Great if you're managing a group Twitter stream! These are what got me interested in HootSuite but what's kept me there is some of the other features.

Here's a bit more detail:

Posting: In-line url shortening makes it much simpler to add links. Delayed posting is also useful. If you've got more that one Twitter account set up you can post the same tweet from multiple Twitter accounts - simply tick each account you want to post from.

Stats: If you use the in-line ow.ly shortening HootSuite can keep stats on how many people follow your links. The ui is really good, you can see a breakdown of clicks on all of your links...

...or click on the little graph icons in the "sent" view to get a breakdown of how many hits a particular link has had. Good for working out what your followers are interested in!

Searches: HootSuite saves each search you run as an icon in your "Searches" tab. Really handy if you want to keep track of some trending topics or particular people. Some of the search options are quite powerful too.

User Management: Really simple to give others editing rights. Just add a users email address and name and select whether you want their password to be sent to you or them. You can also delete editors with a single click.

Twitterfeed-like function: There is an option in "Account Settings" that enables you configure Tweets from RSS or ATOM feeds. It's not quite as fine grained as TwitterFeed but fine for most purposes.

I've really only skimmed the surface here. It does lack follower management and the grouping functionality of say Tweetdeck right now. Another thing to be wary of is that account confirmations seem to end up in your email spam folder! In short though, I'm really impressed. The site is fast and simple and provides a great user interface for becoming a more advanced Twitter user.

Useful Links Pages Using Social Bookmarking - Potential Banana Skins

2009-03-10T16:10:00.000Z

So the Useful Links page using Social Bookmarking was finally finished. Or so I thought. The idea was fairly simple: use a Social Bookmarking tool to allow users to tag web sites to add to the library's "Useful Links" page. The information flow basically happens like this:

1) User finds useful website.

2) User bookmarks web site in social bookmarking application using library tag.

3) Social bookmarking application adds bookmark to feed (in this case ATOM).

4) Magpie RSS aggregates feeds and parses them to html.

5) Library web site displays links on "Useful Resources" page.

In practice though, I came across a few problems so I thought now might be a good time to highlight some of the pitfalls and document my solution!

Pitfall #1 - The Accidental Tag

In my case, I came up with about 10 different tags to allow the Useful Resources to be sorted into categories (e.g. Databases, Libraries etc). Each category has its own distinctive tag (e.g. hurlibdat, hurliblib). The tags have to be fairly unique as otherwise you'd end up with a load of stuff you don't really want.

Say for example you used a generic tag like 'magazine'. It's not beyond the realms of imagination that sooner or later somebody would tag the Playboy website with 'magazine' and it would end up on your useful resources page. They probably weren't intending to introduce soft porn to your library users but the effect is the same.

Lesson #1 - Library link to Playboy Magazine = Grumpy users and complaints! Use tags that nobody is likely to accidentally tag items with!

But what if it's no accident? This brings me to...

Pitfall #2 - Intentional vandalism

Ok so it's not very 'Web2.0' what with extreme trust and all that, but if you're putting your name to a page you have to be able to ensure that the links on it are of a certain quality. So what can you do to stop people intentionally tagging inappropriate content? Well, nothing really. What you can do is set out guidance on what resources are appropriate and point out the fact that, in social bookmarking, everybody knows who's tagged what - if you vandalise there will be comeback!

Lesson #2 - Give users clear guidance on how to tag and which kinds of resources are appropriate.

I actually found a very similar site on our Intranet and revised the guidance for the library page.

Despite this it occurred to me that, if someone really wants to add inappropriate links, there is really very little I can do to stop them. Or is there? More on that later!

Pitfall #3 - How to fix broken links

This one only occurred to me after I finished the page and discovered, to my horror, that one of the linked sites had already vanished. So. I found a new link for the site and edited my bookmark in the social bookmarking tool to point to fix the link. Then it hit me. How can I fix broken links from users when I can't edit their bookmarks? ACK!

The Solution to ALL My Problems...

...is actually very simple. Moderation. Although I was initially against this I've come to the conclusion that, to avoid a page full of broken links six months down the line I need to own the bookmarks that feed the useful links page.

The mechanism to do this had me stumped for a while but the solution is actually fairly easy.

I need to create one tag for users to bookmark sites they think will be useful to the library. I monitor the feed for that tag and create my own bookmark (using a different tag) any time a user tags a new page. The Useful Resources page aggregates my tags rather than the users', allowing me to moderate and organise the content.

This actually improves all three problems.

For pitfall #1, the tags that I use can be so obscure that nobody could possibly add resources by accident. Also, just having one simple tag for library users is alot easier for them - they don't have to categorize the resource or remember 10 different, obscure tags for different categories.

For pitfall #2 - I'm now able to filter out any sites that aren't appropriate just by not bookmarking them!

For pitfall #3 - I own the bookmarks feeding the Useful Links page so I'll be able to edit or delete broken links. This should be really easy, just schedule in a review of the page every six months or so and edit the bookmarks of any broken links.

Shimple! If only I'd of thought of it sooner. Ah well, we live and learn and at least it shouldn't be too hard to fix.

The Times. Are They A Changing?

2009-02-26T14:08:00.000Z

Change is good and I think that we are starting to see some change in the way that publishers are thinking about eBooks. I've been thinking alot about O'Reilly's adoption of Bookworm and promotion of the ePub format. O'Reilly have also started to make eBooks available in a wider range of formats with their eBook bundles. This has led me to think that *possibly* some of the barriers to libraries offering their users eBooks may soon come down.

Price...

I saw a recent blog post from @ijclark on eBook pricing. Ian found that, for individuals at least, there was no real price benefit to getting an eBook. For libraries, this point is even more salient as you often have to pay platform or hosting fees on top of the cover price. An interesting aside here, contrary to eBooks in general O'Reilly eBook bundles are significantly cheaper than the print versions (try clicking on any with a green E logo from this page to compare). It seems that O'Reilly have recognized the price barrier and opted to pass production savings on to eBook readers.

The Dreaded DRM and proprietary standards...

DRM only really works on closed standards and O'Reilly have correctly (just my opinion) identified that closed standards are preventing eBook uptake. Amazon are particularly bad at this - using a proprietary file format for the Kindle which makes it difficult to read books that you have bought for the Kindle on any other device (and vice versa).

My library patrons use a number of different operating systems, mobile devices and eBook readers. Buying eBooks that all of my library users can read (regardless of their chosen platform) is very important to me. At the moment I don't have this ability. However, there are signs that more publishers and eBook manufacturers are getting behind the open ePub standard.

As a librarian I want to decide which books I buy...

Until recently, most of the best computing publishers (O'Reilly, Addison-Wesley, Pearson etc.) have offered their eBooks exclusively through a distributer - namely Safari Books.

Safari works on a subscription basis. Getting all of this content for $45 per month may seem like a bargain but actually, how many computer books can you read a month? When you look at this on an institutional level (for example providing library users with access) the pricing becomes prohibitively high - especially when you know that your users don't need alot of the content that you're paying for.

Whilst some distributors (such as Netlibrary) will let you pick and choose which titles you buy they are hamstrung in that they can't sell books that are exclusive to other distributors. To build the collection you'd like to as a library, you'd need to have deals with a number of distributors. This would really break the bank as well as confusing your library users. In practice it's Hobson's choice between paying through the nose for content that you don't need and offering more selective but lower quality books. The solution, for me, is for publishers to offer their content directly to users in a common format. Cut out the distributors.

Light at the end of the tunnel?

All this brings me back to Bookworm. When I first saw Bookworm I got very exited as it is a free platform that allows individual users to build bespoke collections that are hosted on the Internet. It's actually not far off being a platform that libraries could use to provide access to collections that aren't hampered by subscription/ exclusivity deals or limited content that we get with existing platforms.

Ironically, the lack of DRM is what makes this a no-no at the moment. Obviously, hosting a load of eBooks on Bookworm and giving users access is not an option. Everytime a user downloaded an eBook they'd be creating a copy which would be a massive infringement of copyright. Cleveland Public Libraries have overcome this problem using OverDrive's platform to host their ePub books (they are the only library that I can find who are loaning ePub books). The way this works is that when a user downloads the file it becomes unavailable to other library users. After a time the user's copy of the file expires. At the same time the copy on the library system becomes available to the masses again. However, OverDrive are a distributor so, although the ePub file format is open, you'd soon come up against the exclusivity/ limited content problem.

Soooo, it's not quite there yet. However there is hope. With publisher's like O'Reilly recognising that overpricing, proprietary file formats & DRM, and the limitations of distributors are hampering eBook uptake by individuals, hopefully it won't be long before some of these issues are resolved for libraries?

Well played HCC!!!

2009-02-25T18:03:00.000Z

I'm referring of course to Hampshire County Council's live Twittering of the Local Authorities Transforming Public Libraries conference. Regardless of the content of the conference I think we all have to stand up and give a round of applause to HCC for making it accessible to the broader community. As well as a Twitter stream there is also a conference website and slides from the speaker's presentations are available. Video clips of the presentations should be added by the end of the week.

Here are some things I liked about the Twitter coverage:

The Twitter account was set up in advance of the conference and by this morning had almost 50 followers. Posting about the purpose of the event gave folks enough info to follow it if they wanted. I probably wouldn't have ever heard of it if it wasn't on Twitter.
The stream now exists as a persistent record of the event - almost like minutes. The links to the speaker's presentations were neat as well and by looking up @libconf (and reply's to @libconf) we can reflect on the speakers, revisit the topics and add our own responses. I for one will be thinking hard about Tim Coates pitch (possibly another post on that later!).
Hampshire R&HIT web team (behind the Twittering) explained that it was experimental and a new venture. Which set the expectation. That said, they did very well in reporting what was going on and even managed to respond to some replies. There were about 100 tweets from libconf on the day - no mean feat I'm sure with everything else going on.

I really hope they do this for future events and that other organisations follow their lead (mentioning no names *cough*CILIP*cough*). It shows a willingness to engage with the broader profession and allowed about 50 information professionals to get the inside scoop on something which, otherwise, may have appearred to be a very top-down conference. Yes, it's a shame that the speakers didn't field questions from Twitter and also that the backchannel from delegates appeared to be pretty poor but it's definitely a step in the right direction.

Well done Hampshire!

Don't Ask Me To Censor Myself - It Makes Me Grumpy

2009-02-19T20:22:00.000Z

It's a couple of days now since I got a comment on my work blog asking if I could put "UK ONLY" in the title of all of my posts. My first reaction to this was bemusement but the more I thought about it the more angry it made me. In effect, the commenter was asking me to censor my own content. To restrict the group of people who are able to gain value from the content I post. I hope that I've thought about it enough now to put together a rational post rather than a rant but I apologise if I do end up venting spleen!

The Boring Bit

First, a bit of background. My work blog is very specific. It's a summary of every book and journal that I buy for the library. The entries are tagged with subject, format, and location tags as well as some unique tags that allow me to feed the entries back to the library web page. At first, I was dubious that the blog would get any hits but it did start to get readers. Soon, folks started to comment on the books and putting links to allow readers to request books and journal articles from the blog entries has led to a steady flow of requests - which at the end of the day is what it's all about.

The company that I work for is large. In excess of 300,000 people around the globe. My library serves the UK but, due to licensing for e-resources and practical considerations for hard copy, we can only supply info to the UK. In light of this, the request to restrict blog entries to the UK may seem reasonable. Or does it? Why did it irk me so? And why will I not be putting off people who can't borrow my resources from reading about them?

Let Consumers Decide What is Useful

Well, even if people aren't able to access my resources it can still be helpful for them to know about them. The blog has had many comments from people all over the world who have asked for more information about how to access the resources. In some cases I've been able to put them in touch with local libraries. In others cases they've bought copies from Amazon. Whilst the aim of the blog is to increase local use of resources putting it on a global forum allows others to reuse and benefit from the information.

Unfettered User-Generated Content Is What It's All About

In a broader sense I think it's important for Web 2.0 content producers not to second guess who might derive value from that content. User generated content, for me, is what Web 2.0 is all about. In a sense, there's no such thing as bad content because what Web 2.0 gives us as consumers of information is the ability to select the information that's relevant to us and ignore the rest. It's up to the content users rather than the content producers to censor the information. If content producers start to censor or restrict access to their information the amount of information in the system is restricted and Web 2.0 starts to fall over. By all means use tagging to target your user group and help users to filter out your info if they don't need it, but don't put people off of reading your content.

I can see that to anyone used to a traditional way of working asking someone to restrict their readership geographically may seem reasonable but it seems that Web 2.0 has changed the game - allowing content producers to benefit users that were previously out of reach and consumers fine control over the information that they are exposed to. I, for one, will not be censoring my own content.

RT @DarthVader "Come to the dark side - we have cake"

2009-02-09T22:00:00.001Z

Just how, you might ask, is the statement above of any use to an information professional? And you'd have a point. Personally, it made me laugh, so that is good in itself but I can see that to justify using Twitter in the work place a lot of folks will need more business justification than just getting a chuckle every now and then.

I've been using Twitter for a couple of weeks now and it's made quite an impression on me. This post is an attempt to clarify how I've found it so far and work out some of the pro's and con's as I see them.

Email, instant messaging, phone, visitors blog comments - why on earth would I want another distraction from my "job"?

So, how did I come to Twitter? Well, I'm finding that if you using one Web2.0 application tends to expose you to others. In my case I've been blogging about new resources inside the firewall at work for about 2 years now. Inevitably, I was exposed to other blogs and some I now read regularly (as well as browsing recently published posts every now and then). I feel I've received far, far more useful information than I've published but that's one of the benefits of Web2.0. When you get a group of active users adding content there is soon going to be a massive store of information that everyone has the potential to benefit from. Recently I've seen quite an increase in the number of blog posts about our internal version of Twitter, to the point where I decided to check it out, again as a means to publicise new library resources. Initially, I just wanted to scope out the scene so I posted a "hello world" and sat back to observe the etiquette and norms. Alot of the chat was very technical but every now and then someone would post a question that I was able to answer. This felt kind of good. One of my favourite bits about being a librarian is answering questions. Wheras my initial interest was about promoting new books through microblogging I soon found that it had the potential to be another channel for users to communicate with the library. To answer the question above: put simply, the distractions are my job.

Joining Twitter outside the firewall was sort of serendipitous. I'd posted a comment on librarything and one of the responses (from @jmgold) led to my first dipping my toe into Twitter. I still maintain that he'll be contacted by my lawyers re: the rehabilitation costs.

Effect on connecting with new users, good. Effect on workflow, stress levels and time management, v. bad!

This might just be me but I've found that opening any new channel of communication is very stressful and disruptive. I won't lie, the last couple of weeks have not been my most productive. BUT, I have stuck with it for a couple of reasons. Firstly, I went through exactly the same when I first tried Second Life at work, and when I first started blogging. With the blog, I've found that as you get more experienced with the medium you work out how to manage it. With Twitter there is a very strong compulsion to check for new messages every five minutes. This kind of wears off after a while and learning to manage who you follow and getting a good sidebar viewer helps alot. I've even found that posting a sentence about what I'm doing every now and then helps me to focus on the task. My second reason for sticking with it is that I have proof that it is generating new library users. At first it was hard to guage the effectiveness in promoting new resources until the other day, literally seconds after tweeting about a new ebook I got an IM requesting an ebooks login. They said they love the book tweets and often follow the links to the library blog. 1 new user seems like a small payoff but I've been in this game just long enough to know that if 1 library user contacts you, there are probably another 10 who are accessing your resources without making themselves known. Sure enough, when I checked ebook usage today, it's well above average. If you manage it correctly the overhead is low. Posting a 140 character message takes what? A minute?

Who cares what you had for breakfast?

Talking to users and other librarians, I've heard quite a few objections to using Twitter. One is the shear amount of rubbish information on there. And to be fair, this is true. However, the point is that it is very easy to filter the information. At work, the user base is low enough to follow comment on the tool. Outside the firewall, you don't really want noise from a population equivalent to a medium to large country. Particularly, if you are using it in a professional capacity, you soon learn to only follow Twitterers who give good value. Everyone posts the odd whimsical post but most of the Twitterers that I continue to follow also post useful links, provoke discussion or raise awareness of important issues (or just have a different take on things). As a solo librarian, I have to say one of the main benefits of Twitter is that I now feel just that little bit more connected to my profession.

Social Media - the clue is in the name!

Another, criticism that I've heard is that it's hard to get the right kind of people following your Twitters. This can happen - for example, I seem to have collected a moderate following of spammers and life coaches!?! I think there are some ways to minimise this though. Firstly, get over the concept of using the Internet as a broadcast medium. The social web is just that - "social". Think quiet chat down the pub rather than standing on a soapbox with a megaphone. In practical terms I think this means following the sort of people that you want to follow you. If you complain about getting the wrong "types" of followers but make no attempt to connect with your library users (or potential users) then I think you're kind of missing the point. If you find it hard to justify spending work time "friending" people on the net just think of it as customer research. The penny pinchers love terms like "customer research" and who knows, you might learn something new about your users!

The second thing is to tweet. If you tweet about your field (i.e. library stuff) you will find relevant followers. More accurately, they will find you as one of the techniques for finding people to follow is to search entries for keywords. If your tweets contain relevant keywords and hashtags then people interested in the #library will find you. I guess relating to this, use your existing network. People who already follow you are likely to have contacts who would also be interested in following you.

To summarise in 140 characters or less...

Well, to be honest I can't, but here (as briefly as I can) are my pro's and con's:

I love Twitter because of...
Reaching new library users;
Finding out more about library users interests/ needs;
Professional awareness/ networking;
Useful sources of information, links, etc.;
Promoting resources

Twitter sometimes does my head in because...

Checking in with it can become addictive;
It's another channel of communication to "learn";
The spammers and life-coaches are sometimes annoying

Can you think of any other pro's and con's? I'd love to hear them if you can.

p.s. I rarely eat breakfast as I'm not a morning person :-)

Celebrity Deathmatch Social Bookmarking vs Wiki for Useful Links Pages

2009-02-05T16:39:00.000Z

I'm hoping that putting this down in a blog entry will save me a bit of time in the long run. I'm working on the library web pages. The last page I need to produce content for is the Useful Links page. These are always a bit of a nightmare as the links inevitably go bad after a while and so they need a lot of maintenance. Also, it's really hard to build a comprehensive list - there are bound to be useful links that get missed off. Which is where Web 2.0 comes in. People expect to see a page of useful links on the library web page but wouldn't it be great to allow users to add their own links! Truly user generated content.

My first instinct was to create a wiki that folks could edit to add links or even maintain broken links if they came across them. I threw this idea onto our corporate version of Twitter and the suggestion came back to use our social bookmarking tool. So what are the pro's and con's of using one over the other. Here's a few off the top of my head.

How easy is it to set up?

I think social bookmarking wins on ease of setting up. The corporate tool available to me provides an rss feed (so it should be easy to adapt a bit of php to aggregate the bookmarks onto the library page) and there's also a firefox plugin for adding bookmarks and tagging them. Very simple. Setting up a wiki and setting user access and creating an interface for adding links will be a bit more time consuming (although maybe because I don't have any experience with the wiki engine). 1-0 to social bookmarking.

How easy is it to maintain?

I think the overhead here will be checking and fixing broken links and checking that content is appropriate. For both solutions the links will be rendered in straight html so should be able to be run through an automated checker. Checking for innapropriate links is a subjective thing so the process will be the same for both. I call a draw on this point.

How easy is it for users to add content?

The process for users to add a link using social bookmarking would just be to bookmark it in the tool with a predefined tag. My feeling is that alot of folks are happy with this concept already and, let's face it, it's not rocket science - should be able to provide instruction in a couple of lines. Editing a wiki may be a bit more difficult. I could make it easier by providing a form to edit the wiki (and this would help to ensure that the links and descriptions are in a standard format) but that'll add extra overhead to the implementation. The social bookmarking tool is also better integrated with other systems. Users could add links to the library page while adding them to thier own collection of bookmarks just by adding the library tag. 2-0 to social bookmarking.

How secure is it?

Both tools are inside the firewall and should therefore be secure. Score tied.

How much control will the library have over the content?

I think the wiki just about edges it on this one. With a wiki I can maintain the power to remove inappropriate links. Possibly a bit more flexible as well as it would be easy to allow users to make new categories for links (although I can always invite suggestions for categories (or tags) with the social bookmarking. Using tags to add content runs the risk that links people are not intending to go on the library page could end up there (unless the library tags are suitably obscure) BUT this is not necessarily a bad thing. I guess the risk of unintentional links is offset by serendipitous links that weren't intended for the library page but are useful anyway. Overall, the wiki wins this round but it's importance is debatable. 2-1

How much control will the library need?

Ha! Interesting question. I'm not sure that my library really does need the level of control offered by a wiki. I can see that the social bookmarking method would be prone to people maliciously tagging inappropriate sites BUT this is a corporate library. I like to think that the library users are mature and responsible. If not, it's still possible to see, who's tagged what - so if the worst came to the worst I could have a word with a malicious tagger and hopefully resolve any issues. I can see that this method probably wouldn't work in an academic or public library where there are different priorities for policing and protecting library users with regards to inappropriate content. I'd like to trust my users to tag me useful content - if they don't, well, chalk it up to experience.

Performance?

This is again specific to my setting. My gut feeling is that both tools have performance issues as they are still prototypes really. Social bookmarking edges this one because it should be possible for me to cache the rss feeds from the social bookmarking tool on my web server. That way, even if the tool goes down I'll have a cached version available. Using cached feeds will also be a more pleasant experience for the user as the page load should be pretty fast rather than waiting for the page to go and fetch the feed on every request. Page load times are a factor for the wiki tool as well as I have heard complaints that it can be slow. Overall I'll have more control over the performance of the social bookmarking method whereas if the wiki servers are being slow or go down then the page is scuppered. 3-1 to social bookmarking.

We have a winner. 3-1 to Social Bookmarking

So, it looks like we have a winner! It stikes me that these score is very specific to me, to my experience (or lack of it), and my setting. For others, who maybe need more control over content or have more experience with wikis, or access to a stable wiki engine it could have gone a very different way. Are there any other factors that need to be taken into account? Do you disagree on any of my arguments? Do you have experience of either of these methods? It'd be great to hear if you do.

And in the end...

2009-01-31T16:12:00.000Z

...the love you take is equal to the love you make. Is it? I hope so. The portfolio is printed in triplicate and waiting to get bound and posted next week along with the mentor completion form, so now's a good time to reflect on the process (the blog's kind of fallen by the wayside while I've bene writting the portfolio but, if any future candidates should stumble across this I'd really recommend using a blog to build relective evidence).

So, the theme of this entry, what I'm reflecting on now, is what a GREAT PROFESSION I'm entering (yes you heard me folks - this is about positivity!). I've been very fortunate to have had two amazing mentors. Both have spent time to review documents, have meetings etc. Both have given me great advice (not only about the chartership process but also about the professional issues that I've encountered over the past year) and encouragement. Most importantly, both have pushed me, originally to set meaningful objectives in the PPDP and more recently to see them through.

I guess what I'm really wondering is why? I've been thinking just how lucky I am to be in a profession where (very busy) people are prepared to give a bit of their time and experience to mentor somebody just starting out. I guess this goes beyond the whole chartership thing. While I was taking my MSc. folks always took the time to ask how I was getting on, helped with research and help me getting hold of literature. In the workplace, people have always been ready to share their experience. In my current role for example, the former incumbent happens to work in the same place in a different role. She took time to show me the ropes and still takes time to go for coffee every now and then. Sound things out and generally keep me (as a solo librarian) sane.

I hear a lot of critisism. Both of the profession in general and CILIP in particular. Some of this is starting to grate a bit now. I think my attitude to CILIP has changed over the past year. I felt a bit squeezed out of the public sector having qualified just as a (particularly nasty) restructure hit. At the time I wondered why CILIP didn't do more and weren't more vocal. Now I realise that is probably beyond their remit. They are a professional body not a trade union. What was sad at the time was the tactics that management used to divide professional and para-professional staff. With this division, the effectiveness of collective action was severely hampered and the hatchet fell on the professional side of the workforce. Was that CILIP's fault? On reflection probably not. The failure was primarily with senior management but also (despite my leftist leanings) I have to criticise the union for not protecting it's members against the divisive tactics of senior mangement and unifying the workforce (the are called Unison after all).

The other criticism I hear of CILIP is the cost-benefit thing. How many times have you heard winges about the cost of membership and "what do you get for it?". Well, I'm here to say, there is loads out there if you make the effort to find it. Here in Hampshire there are tons of events and they are often free (or if not they are very cheap). At Ridgemount Street there's stuff going on weekly. If you're prepared to make the effort there are SO MANY ways that CILIP can help you to develop within your profession.

So, is it all sunshine and roses? No, of course not. This is a difficult time but it's important to remember that it's a difficult time for EVERYONE. I honestly feel that in a profession full of people who just LOVE TO HELP others, we are better prepared than many to make it through the hard times.

What's my hope for the future? Well, pass or fail, my hope is that I can give back to the profession (by that I mean library people) as much as it has given me. If we can all Come Together then I've a feeling that the future is very bright. There's a bit from Bob Dylan's autobiography which as always stuck with me. It's about his grandma saying something like.
"Everyone you know is struggling. Try to be nice". Most of the library staff I know live that every day.

I fought the law and the law won

2008-06-02T22:50:00.000+01:00

I've been thinking alot about the law lately. Learning about copyright law was not really on the PDPP but it's become an issue, not only with the objective to improve access to the journals collection but also because I seem to be doing more and more document supply. I've never really understood copyright in libraries before. I was aware that I had to get declaration forms signed and the limits on copying but never really understood the "why".

Things are a bit different working for a corporate library than in the public sector because of the nature of requests for document supply. In a public library, the chances are that most users are requesting documents for non-commercial research or private study. Copyright declaration forms are signed as a formality so that libraries can prove in law that they have supplied non-copyright cleared articles in good faith. If the user then uses the information in a commercial way then the responsibility is theirs because the library have a record to show that they stated the document was for private use only. In a corporate library, you have to assume that most of the articles are being supplied for commercial purposes. Luckily, the British Library (my main document supplier) make it really easy to pay copyright. Anything I get from the British Library, I get copyright cleared as you have to assume that the information will be used in a commercial way. Ok, so somebody could be using it for private study but what if they then go on to use that intellectual capital in a product that gets patented? It's just easier to get everything cleared. In a way, this makes life really easy. If you've paid the copyright, just keep a record of the request and the user no need for getting copyright declaration forms signed as the copyright's been paid.

But what about copying from journals that the library takes or document supply from more local sources? I think working in a corporate library makes supplying copies from your own stock a bit more complicated. In a public library it is permissible to copy from your own stock within the limits of fair dealing and library privilege as long as you obtain a copyright declaration from the user. In a corporate library you have to assume that the use is going to be commercial - so you need a mechanism to pay copyright. This basically means that you need a copyright licensing agreement. These are dished out by the CLA and are normally negotiated by the company lawyers. The chances are most big companies don't consult their librarians when negotiating an agreement and they tend to be based on numbers of employees or types of job roles. It's then up to the CLA to share the wealth (the revenue from the fee for the License) with the publishers.

I have to say that I don't like this system. It works fine for organisations as a whole but libraries have specialised copying requirements that may fall outside of their company's CLA. If this is the case then the library has to refuse to copy on the grounds that they would be breaking the law. Users often find this hard to understand and may think that librarians are being unnecessarily over-cautious (or even wilfully obstructive). It would be great if there were a kind of pay-per-copy option available. In the States, some vendors are setting themselves up in this way as brokers between publishers, licensing agencies and information providers and using technology to make direct payments to publishers as items are copied. This is kind of getting there but it cuts library collections out of the loop - these vendors have access to huge collections and basically supply copyright cleared copy's (as well as putting their profit on top). What would be great, is if there was a mechanism for libraries to copy from their own collections but also pay copyright fees (outside of their company's CLA's). That way it would be possible to supply outside of "approved" lists, and, with modern technology this sort of system shouldn't be beyond the CLA.

So what have I learned from all of this? Well, where copyright is concerned I've learned that it's good to talk. For example, supplying British Standards from the local public library service should be a real no-no but talking to the user, it turned out that their use was for a private project and not for commercial gain. The user was really happy that I could supply the documents (after getting a signed declaration!) and (as there was no cost to the library) it was quite satisfying to be able to use my knowledge of local resources to help somebody out. Another example of talking was to a lawyer who uses the library. This was a kind of informal chat about whether my idea of blogging journal t.o.c.'s would be legal. His advice was to seek official guidance from the specialist who deals with the CLA. As it turned out this was really good advice as the service as I had envisaged it would have infringed copyright. Not all bad though as the copyright lawyer was able to explain the limits of the CLA so that the service can be adapted to be comply with it. The most important thing that I have learnt is that corporate librarians can't work with the same norms of copyright as public librarians. It's always best to check with your legal people before developing anything as basically, if you're a corporate librarian, you are going to be governed by your CLA (fair dealing and library privilage are concepts that apply only to non commercial or private research). As CLA's are negotiated on an individual basis you need to talk to someone who knows the nature of yours.

I guess this also represents a change of attitude. I've always been really pro-freedom of information but, thinking about it, copyright is there to protect the intellectual property of authors, artists, etc from theft. It's right that company's using intellectual property should recompense the owner, although I'm not sure I'd apply this to personal use (for example copying music). Despite the title I still can't bring myself to agree with the music industry's extreme definition of pirating or the way that they fight their corner...

Ambient Findability : What we find changes who we become (book review)

2008-06-02T16:52:00.000+01:00

This is a cross-posting of my review on librarything...

This is the book that has most influenced my thinking about my profession. Probably ever. I've sort of been coming to see books as boundary objects - as objects that connect people or concepts (like on this site) - for a while now and think that libraries need to make much more of the social networking power of books. This book gave me some vocabulary for these concepts but (although it's written by a librarian and I read it as a librarian) this is much more than a library book. It basically explains a number of concepts that are all converging to create a situation where objects (like books), people, anything, will be ambiently findable. The findability will be built in. A number of concepts are explained. Ubiquitous computing (the techie side of things); the long-tail (the economic forces that will drive these developments); spimes (objects that have precise history, that can be precisely tracked in time and space); and boundary objects (objects that sit on the boundary between two concepts). I'll be following up on some of the books referenced in this later to try and get a better understanding but I think this is the one that really pulls everything together. The author has a really good view of where these concepts are coming together and what the implications are. Brilliant.

Classification doom and gloom

2008-05-19T22:49:00.002+01:00

The more I look at this objective the more I rue the day I wrote it. Initially, I thought that it would just involve splitting up some of the larger groups into sub-groups to facilitate browsing but the more I look at the classification (and I think more importantly the more I understand about the subject) the more I realise that there are some fundamental errors with the system. The first is the choice of system - it's based on a "book data" classification which must have been published in the late 80's/ early 90's. It hasn't worn so well in my opinion as computing has moved in ways that could have never been predicted back then. As subjects have come and gone the classification has become fragmented in some areas (for example web development is now the best part of a bay away from web design).
I have the benefit of hindsight but it occurs to me that this classification never had the legs for the long haul. It names specific products for example. Some of which have long gone and are now taking up valuable space in the classification even though there are no books of the shelf. Maybe it's my science background coming back to haunt me but I think I'd prefer it if the classification moved from general to specific in a more graduated way - for example a number for Computing - Applications - Databases and then use the decimal part for specific products. Same for Computing - Programming - Programming Language Type (e.g. Scripting Languages) - Specific Language. This poses a number of questions:

1) Can it be done?
2) How can it be done with the least negative impact on users?
3) Should it be done? Would time be better spent on other things?

The first two are fairly easy to answer. Yes, of course it can be done. The current numbering system could be adapted fairly easily to move in a better way from general to specific so that similar topics are grouped together and are not fragmented. It's also possible to have groups specific enough so that they are not too big to browse using the current numbering BUT re-classifying on the scale that's needed will mean significant moving of stock. How to minimise the impact? I think it would be essential to do as much of the work without moving stock as possible - re-writing the classification, mapping stock to new numbers, and producing the new numbers can all be done without touching the stock. What would be needed then is to pick a really quiet time to reclassify the library - it would have to be Christmas. Then it would be a case of working through the catalogue shelf by shelf and re-stickering the books, editing the catalogue and putting messages on stock that's out to change the stickers on return.

Should it be done? Don't know. It's clear that some reclassification is needed but can I justify a complete reclassification?

Building Your Portfolio : The CILIP Guide by Margaret Watson

2008-05-19T22:49:00.001+01:00

This is a cross-posting of my review on librarything...

I thought this was a really well thought out and useful book (for anyone building a CILIP portfolio under the current regulations). One thing that struck me was the range of backgrounds (and career paths) of the contributors. The book's well written and easy to read but I think the best thing about it is the way that it is organised. Each chapter tackles a different aspect of building a portfolio and examples are given for Certification, Chartership and Fellowship. Because the chapters all follow the same format, it's really easy to filter out the bits that aren't relevant to your programme and just focus on the bits you need. I read it in an evening and I'm not a quick reader. Another reason this book is useful is that it outlines the assessment criteria really well and also emphasises the reflective style that the assessors are looking for. From the training I've attended recently I'd say that these are the two key aspects. Demonstrate development in the criteria areas in a reflective way and I'd say you'll be ticking most of the boxes. There's also some useful tools outlined - most importantly, the evidence vs assessment criteria matrix looks like a really good way of ensuring that all of the boxes are ticked. The book is quite pricey (as are all Facet titles) but this one is also good quality. If you can borrow a copy from the library then do so. I made notes and copied a small section (within copyright limits!) and feel I've got most of the info out of the book. On the whole it's really good practical advice and the examples are just there to furnish this. If you read one book on the CILIP chartership process make it this one.

Infinity and Beyond

2008-05-19T21:54:00.000+01:00

Ok - so the event was really called Chartership and Beyond but this way it's more fun. This was one of the CILIP run courses that are sort of mandatory if you want to charter. Overall I think it would have been more useful if I'd attended one sooner. There was an exercise on writting objectives and having an overview of the entire process before writting the objectives would have been useful. As it stands though I don't think any of my objectives are too unreasonable and one of the great things that I learnt is they are not set in stone. The course was pretty well organised. The venue is fairly easy to get to (it was interesting to see CILIP headquarters. It's just 5 mins from Goodge Street tube so I certainly won't write it off for other courses). The instructions sent out before the course were good and everything ran to time.

What was useful?

Well there was further explanation of the assessment criteria. This has been a really strong theme on both of the courses that I have attended. If I take one thing from them it's that I need to complete "The Matrix" before I do my evaluative statement and write up (guess what the picture's going to be for that post!).
Again reflective/ evaluative practice was emphasised. Submitting descriptive portfolios is consistently cited as the number one reason for failure.
The event was sort of useful for networking but I felt it could have been better - more on that later...
Some good examples of evaluative writting were given in the handout. I need to dig that out before I do my write up.

What was not so useful?

The learning style (like the other course that I attended) was again very passive. I would have liked more activities.
I think folks would have been more inclined to network if there had been a group activity or icebreaker early on. If this would have happened before the coffee break then I think making conversation in the break would have been easier. As it was the break was fine but I think maybe it was a missed opportunity as far as more lasting/ support type networking went.
Timing. As mentioned above I should have attended earlier in the process but that's nobody's fault but my own.

Positives from this were the speakers - who were all very good. One guy (who was sharing his experience of having recently chartered) really exceeded my expectations. I thought that section would be too individual and personal to be of use to anyone else but he actually shared some really pragmatic and useful advice and, perhaps more importantly, helped to put the process in perspective for some of the more intense members of the group. Overall, having attended this one I think the Reflective Writing course was a bit surplus to requirements. It was adequately explained in this course that the statement has to be reflective rather than descriptive and it's also well explained in the book I recently read (stay tuned for a rave review!). If folks don't grasp it after that then is another course going to help them? It's nice that CILIP has identified this common point of failure but this is a professional standard so I'm of the mind that there's perhaps only so much hand-holding that they should do. Maybe these sort of opinions will come back to bite me!

In summary, if I had to attend a course (and I did) it'd be this one.

Never give up

2008-05-19T21:19:00.000+01:00

What a fantastic weekend. Friday night was the Charlatans' gig at Southampton Guildhall. Early signs weren't promising as the venue was only about 2/3rds full. Weird that Ian Brown recently packed it out and yet, on Friday, there was plenty of standing room left and loads of the seating was empty. To the Charlatans credit though they never gave up and despite the low turn out I'd say the atmosphere was the best I've seen at Southampton. There was a good mix of songs going right back to tracks off of Some Friendly which helped to get the crowd going. Apart from that they were just tight. I've never been a big fan of the sound at the guildhall but they seemed to get the best out of it (it's a bit like a massive concrete shoe box shape so you normally get weird echos and reverberations). This is the third time I've seen the Charlatans and they just seem to get better and better. They've come full circle and are really keyboard driven again. "Weirdo" was great and (I'm guessing) not an easy song to pull off live BUT, that was the one that took me from having a really good time to the next level. I was still smiling today when I thought about it...

That and the football. Yep - probably the most important footballing moment in my life on Saturday when Pompey won the FA Cup. In fact, this was such a big one that I don't think it's really sunk in yet. Am I dissapointed that I didn't go to the game, or even the homecoming? Well no, not really. I'm over the moon and this was one of the few games that I've seen recently that had the power to give me butterflies before the game but football hasn't been that big a part of my life for years now - it's had to make way for other things as, to follow football properly takes a big investment of time. It would be hypocritical for me to jump on the bandwagon now but, that said, I can remember being crushed in 1992. That was when football really meant something to me. The hopes invested in that cup run and the belief that because we were the underdogs we had a divine right to victory were unbelievable. I can really feel for those Cardiff fans (and to be fair their team gave them alot to be proud of). Ok, so 2008 was our time just as 1992 it belonged to Liverpool so there's a certain justice to that but I doubt many Cardiff fans see it that way. What was really great was that this game made me feel like I did when I was 14 again, just for a bit. Being in the Premiership is great but in most of the games I don't see the sort of passion or commitment that I remember from when I was a kid... Maybe that's as much about growing up as it is about football getting more commercial. Because the FA Cup throws teams like Cardiff into the mix (you don't get many glory hunters turning up to support Cardiff) it's still got a sort of magically quality - like if you hope hard enough it'll happen. It did for us - just took 16 years. I guess the moral is never give up!

Doing less to do more with journals

2008-04-24T12:28:00.000+01:00

Ok, I give up. After a month of fully indexing the table of contents of all of the journals that the library takes I have come to the conclusion that it can be done. Sort of. It takes too much time to index every single journal but I think indexing about half of the titles will be achievable. The trick is to find the right vehicle for publishing the tables of contents. I'm pretty sure that blogging these would be ideal as it will constantly generate new potential users and provide an easy publishing platform... but, it's also becoming clear that many of the blog visitors aren't in my user group. The key is to use the easy publishing offered by the blog but also feed it back to the library front page to ensure that it's getting out to the right people. This is going to take a fair bit of development time so I've made the decision to stop doing any journal indexing and spend the time developing the new platform. The current system doesn't generate any requests so it will be interesting to see if anyone complains when I stop indexing (and hence the title doing less to do more).

The experience of indexing everything was interesting. It took probably 1-2 hours a day -too long (especially during heavy book cataloguing times) but it did have some side benefits. I've found my current awareness and general subject knowledge (which helps nicely with another of my objectives!) was much improved by retyping toc's. It also forced me to be focused in order to get all of the work in. Really tiring after a few weeks - not sure I could keep that up for ever but it would be good on a limited basis. The next step is to develop the publishing platform and web site then select a few titles to trial. If I find that it works I might be able to get some other librarian's on board so that we can share the indexing workload.

Nude

2008-04-02T22:16:00.000+01:00

Radiohead's latest attack on the music indistry is to provide the source files or "stems" to their latest single "nude". I love the way that Radiohead are on top of the Web 2.0 thing and are working with it rather than trying to bury their heads in the sand. If the music industry goes open source and, perhaps more importantly, relaxes a bit in their pointless battle for control in the form of DRM, then I think there is a real potential for Web 2.0 to allow people to engage with music on a new level. Not in a passive, supplier-consumer relationship but in a more interactive and creative way. From a marketing perspective Radiohead really seem to "get" it. In Rainbows got massive coverage because it was touted as a "free" download - you were able to pay £0 to download the album (which I have to admit I did). However - the marketing worked on me - even though, in the words of Robert Palmer: I like to think that I'm immune to the stuff. Where was I? And more importantly, why am I quoting Robert Palmer? This has to be a new low. Oh yeah, marketing. What the album download did was to create a mailing list which has now been used to promote this latest venture. So, I've just found myself signing up to iTunes and forking out for these source files. Anyone who wrote off In Rainbows as a crazy stunt may be right but I've got a feeling it will come to be recognized as sort of evolutionary. It's not revolutionary because at the end of the day they are still making money off it but it is being done in a different way.

Anyway - that's all very interesting but I'm actually less interested in Radiohead's marketing strategy and more interested in this as way back into music. I've struggled with music software in the past and never really cracked it but - having got over the initial hack to get these stems from iTunes into Audacity I think this is going to be a less painless way to learn a bit about the software...

ScribeFire rocks

2008-03-31T22:40:00.000+01:00

Just discovered ScribeFire which should make blogging a lot less hassle and a lot more fun. It's a plug-in for Firefox. Once it's installed you can fire it up from your browser, pick from any blogs you've configured and just start typing. You can also drag and drop pictures in from the browser pane above - so, in theory, if I want a picture of the ScribeFire logo I can wizz of to find one at say Flickr (this blog entry stays open in the bottom half of the screen).

Here goes...

Ok - didn't like the selection at Flickr so I'm off to the ScribeFire site instead...

...and Robert's your mother's brother.

It's also really easy to switch blog mid-post. If you've got more than one post and you decide mid-post that you want to switch the one you're posting to, you just click on the blogs tag and that changes the blog you're publishing to (this is also a good way to copy posts from one blog to another - by loading up a previous blog from one blog then switching blogs and hitting the publish button).

As far as editing goes it offers you three flavours of text editor - rich text, html and preview - although the preview doesn't actually show you how it will appear in your blog. My only criticism is that you can't easily see previous tags you've added to your blog when tagging an entry. There doesn't seem to be a typeahead or any way to list that blogs tags. As I've only been using it five minutes though I've probably missed something.

I'm hoping this will have applications I can use at work to make blogging new books and journals easier - this could well be one of the pieces of the jigsaw. Great tool - I've been using it five minutes and I thoughroughly recomend it.

How To Use Web 2.0 In Your Library (book review)

2008-03-26T15:59:00.000Z

This is a cross-posting from my review on librarything...

This one was ok but not really what I was expecting. The book's starts off with a definition of Web 2.0 (including the ubiquitous Tim O'Reilly definition) and then goes on to introduce different forms of social software. Each chapter is well furnished with links and examples and the book's well laid out but somehow it didn't quite hit the spot for me. I think I would have preferred less in the way of links and examples and more along the lines of how, conceptually you can use these tools in the library. Maybe more assessment of potential benefits to users etc. There was also very little mention of the ethics of librarianship - something that I think is really important if libraries are going to enter this space. I guess I didn't really take any idea on what web 2.0 is from this book - that it's alot more than just blogging or uploading photos. The concept of extreme trust was mentioned in the first chapter but aside from that there was very little focus on the social phenomena that define web 2.0. Ok for sparking ideas but think carefully about implementing the ideas. Is Web 2.0 consistent with your libraries data protection policies and your duty of care to your users? That's not to say don't do Web 2.0 - it's great - just think about the issues involved as well as the techie side.

James Brown 'vs the Good Library Guide

2008-03-04T21:05:00.000Z

...what the f*ck is going on with the good library guide? More importantly why does it bug me so much? Is it the advertising? Is it the commercial bias? Is it the warped view of what libraries are supposed to do or the strange world view in general that really bugs the hell out of me?

I think this kind of opinion actually damages the public libraries. They've got enough to deal with without bookseller's sticking their oar in. As far as I can make out (and I must admit I've not spent a great deal of time thinking this one through) the concept or model of public libraries that the web site is trying to promote is the same as in Tim Coates' report. Basically, one of libraries primarily as places of reading hardcopy books. The idea is that there hasn't actually been a decline in book reading (despite the fact that people now spend more time on the phone, computers, watching tv, shopping etc, etc.) - the only reason (again as far as I can make out) that people borrow less books from libraries now is that they aren't run like bookshops. The prescribed course of action is to stop major capital projects and spend the money on books (which libraries get from, um, bookshops...er!). The latest post that I saw was having a bash at Brighton library because of a perceived lack of stock after the new building (financed by pfi) opened. What I find damaging is that this viewpoint is blinkered to the fact that people find information in different ways now. Books still have a place in all of our hearts but we have to get over this book fetishism and accept that the world has moved on and libraries, if they are to survive, must move with it.

The Brighton connection is how I got onto this. This post was supposed to be a bit about a recent day out and some pics of street art - with a bit about the library thrown in. My perception of the stock was that it was very good. I guess it's hard for me to qualify this as I never went in the old Brighton Library BUT any library that can pull off putting traditional resources (like a complete set of DNB and a complete set of County Histories) alongside dedicated computing suites, conference rooms, cafe, and art installations is pretty cool in my book. The place was buzzing when we visited. Downstairs was full of people just chilling, browsing, etc. (it was kind of cool that the artist who installed the current exhibition was being interviewed by a student over a cuppa inside the installation itself - a life sized Carribean chattel house). Upstairs was chock full of people studying. Ok, so I don't agree with what is effectively selling a publicly owned building to private finance and then renting it back from them but this is the harsh reality in which public libraries exist. And really, to be honest the stock was ok. It's a big space to fill but I was impressed at how they'd kept old music stock (and the way the music was presented). I think it's easy to bash newly re-opened libraries for having no books but really it's inevitable. Over time libraries accumulate detritus. A big project (like Brighton) is an excuse to weed out all the dead wood so, yes, compaired to the old library I'm sure there are less books but I'm also willing to bet that the quality of the remaining stock is better. Libraries do need to spend more money on new books but they also have many other priorities and what Coates fails to acknowledge is the brilliant job that libraries do in making the best of what they have got.

I'd like to see just one positive story posted on the good library guide without some kind of political points scoring or "we told you so" spin attached. Prime example - why not mention the brilliant visitor and new borrower figures that Winchester has got since it reopened? Because it's easier to slag-off libraries for spending money on buildings rather than books. Interestingly there is a story about Hampshire libraries on the good library guide - about £350,000 being spent on bookstock. Even this is tinged with negativity. I find this weird and illogical. It was acknowledged that Hampshire's bookfund could not be cut any further during the recent culling of librarians. At the end of the day (for right or wrong) Hampshire chose bookfund over professional librarians - which is exactly what Coates recommended when he published his ~~doorstop~~ report. I'd have thought he'd be happy that he got his way but it seems that even this is not a cause for celebration.

Anyway, to take a dose of my own medicine, I'll end on a positive note. Thank-you, good library guide, for turning what was meant to be a nice post about a James Brown mural into a library rant. Here for your viewing pleasure is the godfather of soul. Get up, get on up.

Note to self: I really must get out more =)

Journal Usage Measurement - Why Bother?

2008-03-04T19:40:00.000Z

I found today's picture on a Google image search for "Why Bother" and it stuck. But what's it got to do with today's post? Nothing, that's what. And for that matter why the negative title? Surely measuring journals usage is a good thing to do? Well, no. I've always found it to be a bit pointless and especially so in my current role. There are three ways that I know of to conduct a journals usage survey. Measuring citations is fairly accurate and widely used in academic libraries (there's a good article on the background and use of this method at http://www.ala.org/ala/mgrps/divs/acrl/publications/crlnews/2007/may07/eigenfactor.cfm). Unfortunately, the users of my library (and most libraries outside of academia) don't write many research papers so measuring citations is out. I'm not convinced that this (on it's own at least) is a good measure even in Uni Libraries. From my own experience as a student I read stuff that added to my background knowledge but wasn't directly related to an assignment or worthy of a credit in a bibliography.

The second method is to withdraw journals and count the number of requests for them. This is the method that was used when I worked in public libraries. IMHO this method is not only innacurate (as most people can't be bothered to ask for a journal if it's not there) it also disrupts (what in my view) is the prime directive for libraries: connecting people with information. If you take journals away (even for the purpose of measuring their use) you are damaging the quality of the user experience. Why would I want to annoy the people who use my library for the sake of an innacurate measure? Good librarianship is about increasing access, not reducing it (or withdrawing it).

The third method is a kind of voluntary indication of usage - asking users to tick a sheet to say that they have read the journal. This method is better but still prone to inaccuracy. How many people forget to tick? Even worse is when someone ensures that their particular read is kept by adding extra ticks - it doesn't take a genius to work this one out now does it? Other variations of this are more qualitative, interviewing readers or sending out written surveys but they basically all boil down to asking the readers which journals they use - which is fundamentally prone to measurement bias.

Dispite the flipant title I do believe that journal usage surveys are an essential part of collection management. So, because of the measurement biases of the explicit methods described above I've decided to resort to unobtrusive methods. Does this mean I'll be spending my days hiding behind the journals shelving with a pair of binoculars doing a kind of warped Bill Odie impersonation? Tempting. If only I had the time. Luckily, the wonders of modern technology are available and I borrowed some RFID kit today which I'm hoping will allow me to count the number of times a journal is picked up from the shelf. I still need to work out sampling and get the technology working but fingers crossed! Even if it doesn't work it should be good fun trying.

*Note to self: If you think that journals usage surveys are fun then you really need to get out more...

Revised PPDP

2008-02-19T21:09:00.000Z

Ok - the PDPP is basically revised. Just need to compare it to an edition at work as I think there might be two versions hanging around... To avoid this happening in the future I've posted on Google base here: PPDP.

It's basically the same document but I made the web development objective a bit less specific - I'm still not convinced a formal user survey is the way to go on this one as I don't think I'll get much response and there's a paradox involved. The reason I'm redeveloping the website is to get more information to people's desktops and to give me a tool to promote resources that people don't know about. If they don't know about the resources how can they have an opinion on how they should be promoted in the website?

The other main change is in the Archiving objective - made less formal so that rather than reading I'll be doing research (or having a chat with my new found tame archivist!).

Handover meeting

2008-02-15T19:36:00.000Z

My last mentor meeting was a bit of a hand over as my current mentor is finishing work soon to go on maternity leave. It was great that she took me on as a mentee at such a busy time and I really appreciate it - considering that she didn't know me before we started the process, I think it shows a real dedication to developing the profession.

The handover meeting went well. It was quite reflective as it seemed like a good point to review where we've got to and what we have to do moving forwards. Basically, more forms (for someone who hates filling in forms I seem to attract them like iron filings to a magnet). I think my fear of forms (or any sort of admin) combined with a tendency to put off anything I don't like might be one of my biggest weaknesses so I'm going to make a big effort to tackle this and get myself organised...

I find blogging is a really good way to brainstorm and using a to-do tag helps me to take action rather than just record ideas - once the actions are complete the to-do tag can be removed...

Here's my list for the transfer process:

1) Send role profile, organisational chart and any other info about my setting to my new mentor.
2) Review my PDPP(PDDP? - ah, who cares!) and send it to my new mentor to sign and return.
3) Bundle the revised PDPP with the mentoring agreement and the completion form from my old mentor and whap it off to CILIP with a covering note.
4) Confirm that it has been received and understood at CILIP HQ (this last point is very important!).

Other actions that arose are to sort out a CDG course actually, why not do that now...

...ok, job's a good'n - there's a course in London on 13.05 so hopefully I'll get a place...