Girl in the Moon

#lac12, or The Libraries@Cambridge conference 2012: a special collections view.

2012-01-12T18:53:00.001Z

Today was the sixth annual Libraries@Cambridge conference. It was a full and interesting day, with a lot of tweets on the #lac12 hashtag, some live blogging by some intrepid volunteers, lots of discussion, and plenty of cake.

I won't do a full write-up here: some of my writing (although without many opinions) is already available on the conference blog, and I imagine that others will write up some aspects of the day better than I could manage. I'm going to focus on the elements of the day that were of particular interest to me as a special collections librarian.

Righty-ho. Special collections (or Unique and Distinctive Collections, as RLUK terms them) got a mention in the first session as promoting them is one of the 5 strands of the RLUK strategic plan. (This is, of course, being explored further in the RLUK Unique and Distinctive Collections Project.) Deborah Shorley, Director of Library Services at Imperial College London--keynote speaker--was adamant that we need to do all we can to open access to our collections to all people, whether they come from our institution or not. Most of the places I know are doing this: it's very rare for scholarly access to special collections to be completely restricted, so I suppose that if a Director of Library Services doesn't see this we need to be promoting more loudly. (Incidentally, even the Imperial College Library, which in its modern collections aspires to be [physical] bookless, does have special collections, too.)

The second plenary session saw Liz Waller, Deputy Director of Information (Information Services), University of York speak about changing library spaces. In amongst lots of lovely pictures of beautiful new and refurbished libraries we got a brief glimpse of the special collections reading room at the University of Edinburgh. To be fair, it wasn't the most inspiring picture in the presentation: some tables and chairs, a few readers, no obvious reference book collection (essential for a lot of special collections readers). Emily Dourish asked on Twitter if the flexible working spaces being discussed for elsewhere in the libraries would work for special collections. That's an interesting question. We could certainly benefit from having space available for teaching sessions: though those would need to be soundproofed, and I'm not sure if flexible and soundproofed go together? Group work with special collections might well be popular and useful: we've all been in the situation where four people gather round trying to untangle a difficult inscription or hand. But fully flexible space? It seems an unlikely fit:

moving furniture about probably isn't best with fragile items around;
we need to be able to supervise and invigilate all our users, and the less open plan the room the harder it is to have clear lines of sight to all books and readers;
a lot of our readers will want quiet, traditional, reading room environments.

Still, it's really interesting to think about how we could extend the traditional special collections room with new types of library space.

The special collections parallel session was about digital libraries, and I've written it up for the conference blog. I particularly liked the Wellcome's pragmatic attitude to copyright issues, and their sensible approach to identifying and removing sensitive material and to allowing different access to different material.

'Rainbow' (a collaborative effort) by Jake Rome on Flickr

In the afternoon we heard from a range of library users from Cambridge and elsewhere about what they want from libraries and librarians. The most interesting speaker for me was Dr Jason Scott Warren, lecturer at the Faculty of English and Director of the Centre for Material Texts. Jason works on early-modern English literature, the history of the book, the materiality of texts, and is a regular in the Rare Books Room at the UL. Jason covered a lot of ground in his short talk. Here is some of it:

he 'suffers' from both digital greediness--wanting more and bigger and faster--but also digital anxiety--how do I know if I've found everything that's out there.
he recognises that libraries face a challenge in letting users know about all the available resources
he would like more standardisation across digitised material: he noted that, for example Early European Books photograph bindings, foredges, and everything else, but that other platforms do less, many are only black and white, some have poor quality images.
he'd also like better usability from the digital platforms: pages that fit a laptop screen, easy ways of browsing, etc. Many of the current tools are rather clunky and slow to use.
access to special collections is mediated through cataloguing. Jason would like to see more high-quality cataloguing of rare books that takes into account copy-specific information such as provenance and binding, such as that seen in the UL Incunabula Project, and in the rare books records from St John's College Old Library
Jason sees special collections as ripe for collaborative research projects. Librarians and academics need to share their knowledge of the collections to get the most out of those collections.
In the discussion after Jason's talk the issue of undergraduate use of primary sources (i.e. special collections) was raised: is it happening much here? could it happen more? Jason thought that there's scope for college special collections to be used more for this.

I had several thoughts in response to this...

Cataloguing

it's hugely heartening to hear that cataloguing is appreciated by academics.
to achieve the level of cataloguing that academics desire, we need more cataloguer time (of course), but also better cataloguing structures. Copy-specific information is surely better represented in a hierarchical (FRBR?) way, rather than mixing copy-specific and bibliographic information in bibliographic records (current practise in Cambridge, for example).
and a great deal of manuscripts cataloguing isn't available at all online. Yet.

Collaboration

I'm hugely keen to develop relations between academics, researchers, teaching groups, undergraduates, Uncle Tom Cobbly and all, and special collections librarians.
It strikes me that the teaching sessions that currently take place generally grow out of existing relationships between librarians and academics: people know a librarian and go to them for advice/help/access. If they don't know any librarians they don't ask, and they don't ask librarians or libraries that they don't already know.
To increase collaboration (a recurring theme in the afternoon) we need to network more. I know a few of the Centre for Material Texts folk by going to their seminars. As a rare books librarian, I ought to be interested in history of the book issues anyway: what better way than by going to seminars... Granted, they're sometimes a bit over my head, but the people there are friendly, and sometimes even ask me for a librarianly opinion. I don't think I've ever seen another librarian there: we're possibly missing a trick. And there are definitely other places we could be going to make connections.
I'd love to know more about what other special collections departments are doing towards academic outreach, and also to know where this sort of thing is being discussed. Anyone have any tips for conferences, blogs, mailing lists?
If there isn't much out there already should we be creating them? Could there be a session at LILAC on this? Or somewhere else? Or a special collections TeachMeet or LibraryCamp? Ideas please!

That's it for now. I'm really keen to hear other thoughts on any and all of the things above. Do you agree? Are you doing this already? Have any tips? Do you disagree? Let us know!

New year, new skill

2012-01-10T18:35:00.000Z

Happy New Year, dear readers! Hope you had a good Christmas break and are attacking 2012 with renewed enthusiasm.

Some of the most interesting bits of my new year aren't (yet) bloggable, but I can say that renewed attention to by chartership portfolio is on the cards, as is my participation in Code Year.

Code Year is a course that teaches you to program in JavaScript, a programming language particularly used for web-based things. I've done the first week's lesson, which brought flooding back a few basic programming functions (calling variables, if/else, for loops, while loops) that I once vaguely knew about as taught by my dear dad. How I wish that eight-year-old me had pursued that further!

More and more of my professional conversations in the last year have been about coding and mashups in libraries, particularly for re-using bibliographic data in helpful and interesting ways. So Code Year couldn't have come at a better time: programming is something I've also suspected I might end up doing, and I'll never get round to learning much without some external force encouraging me. We'll see how it goes: even if I don't complete it, hopefully it'll at least have de-mystified some things for me.

If you're interested in taking part, you might like to know that on Twitter there's the hashtag #codeyear for the general programme, #libcodeyear for library folk taking part, and #catcode for cataloguers (there are a lot of them) taking part. There's also the catcode wiki which is collecting together useful resources.

In other news, I haven't completely forgotten cpd23, and will be looking at the remaining things soon. And before that, you'll find me guest blogging on the Libraries@Cambridge 2012 conference blog on Thursday, where I'll be writing up parallel session B: The Digital Library.

#cpd23 Thing 17: Slideshare and prezi

2011-11-23T11:00:00.003Z

Slideshare is useful but not perfect. A few things I've learnt the hard way that might be of use:

Make the text on your title slide good and big. That way people will be able to read it more clearly on when it's shown as a thumbnail on your homepage and elsewhere.
Slideshare proclaims to upload your speaker notes with your slides. In my experience, this only works for .pptx files (i.e. 2007 and later versions of Powerpoint), and only the first time you upload. If you make changes and upload your presentation again, the notes won't be updated, and if you've added extra slides your notes will end up out of alignment.
Slideshare doesn't reproduced animation effects in your presentations, so if you have one slide on which various things appear one-by-one, they'll be there together in one go on Slideshare. I get round this by making individual slides for each new appearing thing.
EDITED 23/11/11. Lastly, Slideshare only has a fairly limited repertoire of fonts that it supports automatically. Embedding your fonts in a presentation seems to get round this OK if you save your file as a .pptx file (that's the newer version of Powerpoint, from 2007 onwards). Normally I'd recommend that you save your files as .ppt, as the newer .pptx format cannot be read by people who have the older software (or who are running open source software), but for the purposes of Slideshare it seems that .pptx is the way to go (see also speaker notes, above). If you don't have access to newer Powerpoint, your best bet is to check in advance whether your fonts will work: here are some slides that show a few fonts that do and don't work out of the box, or try uploading a test slide when you're planning your slides.
EDITED 23/11/11 I forget to say in the original post that you should never put important, or clickable (yes - add clickable links in your Slideshare slides, that's where they're useful, not in the slides you show in person) links near the edge of your slides. You never know what will be cut off if the projection is bad, and clicking at the edge of slides on Slideshare makes them advance or go backwards. So links near the edges are no use.

So, to be honest, I think Slideshare could be better. But it is better than nothing, I suppose. If I'm giving a talk that I think will be of interest to people who didn't hear it in person, I make two versions of the file: one for use on the day (less text, fewer slides in total) and one to upload to Slideshare (added text, more slides in total). Trying to make one version that suits both purposes is beyond my skill!

As for Prezi, well, I made a quick Prezi about that:

Some thoughts on Prezi on Prezi

#cpd23 Thing 16: Advocacy, activism, getting published

2011-11-22T15:23:00.000Z

I've had some success with publications, as you can see from my Google Scholar Citations page. You'll note that there's a serious (if not very good) academic article, a couple of papers about professional practice, and a Guardian piece advocating for libraries by highlighting the varied things that librarians do. I also regularly compile a bibliography for the journal Library & Information History and am writing a chapter for a forthcoming review book, and I've had a piece in Update (april edition) about the Fred Hoyle Project.

Did someone say advocaat?

Mostly these have come about through chance and luck, and not through serious planning. I think, from a cpd point of view, I ought to work harder perhaps on writing about my main professional area of interest: rare books, special collections, and outreach. I worry that my publication record so far is somewhat nebulous and disperesed, and perhaps doesn't give a focussed impression of what I'm interested in, or what I'm good at.

I've not been hugely active as an advocate for libraries, although I do try to do as much as I can (I realise, that if I prioritised differently then this would be a lot more. I shall write about guilt another time, I think). As well as the Guardian piece with Emma Cragg, I got involved with the public libraries day last February, and I made a (small) noise about the threatened (and now closed) Paul Hamlyn library at the British Museum.

I can see that advocacy and activism, as well as having positive benefits for society, can be useful cpd tools, as they give an opportunity to develop skills and experience in areas that you might not cover much in your working day. Stealth advocacy is also an important tool: I talk to a lot of post-grad students one way or another, and I'm always trying to explain to them just how much the library can and does offer ('"do you know who pays for all those online journals..."). When I'm at orchestra rehearsals, and people ask me what it is librarians do anyway these days I make sure to tell them, not just to laugh of their annoying comments about Google. Every little helps. I hope.

#cpd23 Thing 15: attending, presenting at, at organising events

2011-11-22T13:06:00.000Z

I may as well just come out at admit it: I love speaking to an audience. I know that for many people it's daunting: pitfalls and potential embarrassments abound. But for me, even though I've my fair share of hang-ups and shynesses, it always seems much more of an opportunity than a threat.

Granted, I've never played to a crowd like this.

Who knows why that is. Maybe it's because, having been musical since childhood I'm just well-used to being on stage. But maybe not - I can still get tremblingly nervous before a concert. Maybe it's more subtle than that - if you make a mistake on the cello it sounds *horrible*, but it you misspeak you can easily say "sorry, that's not what I meant to say..." and continue.

Or maybe, just maybe, I'm an irredeemable show-off.

I wrote the main post for this Thing, and a lot of my thoughts are already condensed into that post. Most of my good advice is over there, but one thing I haven't said before is that a sure-fire way to feel better about presenting is to know your subject matter well. If you're talking about something you've done, then it's hard to be tripped up: you were there, you know what happened, you know what the reasoning was. Maybe that's why I prefer professional presenting to academic presenting...

I've been lucky enough to have the opportunity to speak at quite a few events in the last year. Some of those were conferences and events I'd applied to speak at, and a couple have been invitations from organisers. Being involved in a number of different projects and groups means I've had quite a few things to say!

As for attending conferences, I've enjoyed that a whole lot more since I've started to get to know more people via Twitter and other social media. I wrote about that recently here.

Lastly - organising. Organising events is hard work. That's really all I have to say right now ;)

HLF conference report 3: getting what we want

2011-11-21T14:29:00.001Z

This is the third, and last, part of my write-up of the HLF conference on 15 November 2011.

Persuasion

Phil Sykes of the University of Liverpool, obviously a Jane Austen fan, gave the first talk of the day, under the heading 'Persuasian with Sense and Sensbility'. I must confess that I hadn't been certain quite what this talk was going to be about, but as it transpired, it was a very useful and straightforward exlanation of some of the techniques of persuasion that Phil has developed.

Phil believes that persuasion is built of two components: the logical part (sense) and the emotional part (sensibility).

He started with sense, which he divided into six aspects:

1) Get into the minds of the people you're trying to persuade, and imagine how the world looks to them. Phil gave the example of a library continually facing budget cuts and appealing for money by saing 'we're doing all this good stuff with the little you give us, so please give us more'. The people with the money will probably hear this as 'we're doing really well with hardly any money - why give us any more?'.

2) Once you've considered your audience, you can begin to pick off their likely objections in advance. Phrases like 'it might seem like... but...' are useful in this.

3) Consider how much time people will actually devote to what you're writing. Phil illustrated this with a story about a speech given in Parliament. There might only be 10 people listening to the speech, and 50 people in the bar. If you're going to be successful, you need the 10 who were there to tell the 50 in the bar what you said. Therefore make your point clear, don't waffle, and don't say so much that they can't easily summarise it.

4) What you say about what you've writtten is at least as important as what you write. If you're submitting a paper to a committee meeting, the chances are that at least some (if not most) of the people at the committee won't actually have read the paper in depth. So know in advance what you'll say when you're invited to comment on the paper at the meeting. (Also try and get your item high up the agenda so that it isn't guillotined if time runs short!0

5) Write clearly! Start by working out what it is you want your reader to know, and then write that in a way that they'll understand. You can make a big imapct by using 'humane' language. Say 'we'll be friendly' rather than 'our innovative new service model will deliver excellence going forward with a robust strategic emphasis'.

6) Adapt your arguments to suit the audience. The people who hold the purse strings will be movedby financial arguments, the media might be moved by 'public good' arguments, and academics can be hard to please.

The emotional side of persuasion is harder to quantify and often needs a long-term committment to come to fruition. Three things were suggested:

a) Build up your credit in the 'favour bank' - help other peple out and then they'll be more willing to help you out in the future.

b) Work your audience. If you're presenting something to a committee, sound out some of the members in advance. This doesn't have to be a hard sell, but ask them what they think of your propsal and whether they're willing to support it,

c) Don't necessarily puff yourself up or be over confident. Phil cited the rheotical technique of diminutio: using phrases like, 'Im no expert, but it seems to me...'. It was pointed out afterwards that this isn't always the best technique - sometimes you do just have to sell yourself and your library as loudly as possible.

I really enjoyed this talk - even though mine came immediately afterwards and I was prompted to refine what I was going to say to be a little more persuasive...

Writing an Heritage Lotter Fund grant bid

Jonathan Harrison, of Senate House Library, rounded off the day with a case study about Heritage Lottery FUnd bids at St John's College, Cambridge.

St John's College Library has made successful bids for 'Your Heritage' grants for cataloguing and outreach projects based on the papers of Sir Fred Hoyle (1915-2001), and Samuel Butler (1835-1902). Jonathan suggested that the St John's bids were successful because both Hoyle and Butler are interesting and controversial figures (don't be afraid to 'embrace the embarrassing' people that you might have in your collections), because of team working within the library (two pairs of eyes to read the appication), because of the College's willingness to open up to the outside world, and because those involved conveyed belief and enthusiasm.

Your Heritage grants:

are aimed at first-time applicants
offer between £3,000 and £50,000
are for projects that will last up to three years
have the priorities learning, taking part and preserving
will fund up to 95% of the cost of the project
have no deadline - you can apply any time
have a single-round application process
make a decision within 10 weeks of receiving the application
are hands-off once the project gets going
have a high percentage of successful applications

Jonathan's tips for making a successful bid :

Before you start, survey your collection: find out what you've got, and what needs doing (in terms of cataloguing and conservation)
Set out clear aims
Have a realistic project timetable
Explain who will benefit and how
Include evidence of consultation
Show how the project outcomes will be sustained after the end of the project
Set out your costs clearly
Include good visuals
Amass letters of support - from famous or important people, and/or from the 'everyday' people who will benefit
Make use of the HLF offer to look over your application before you submit it!

HLF confernece report 2: using what we have

2011-11-21T13:32:00.000Z

I'm grouping my write-ups from the HLF conference loosely according to topic, not in the order appeared. This is the second post of three.

Collections in a Cold Climate

Alison Cullingford, of @speccollbrad, 100 Objects Bradford, RLUKUDC and other fame, gave the third talk of the day. She spoke about 'Collections in a Cold Climate: Caring for and Sharing Special Collections in difficult times'.

Alison offered 5 arguments in favour of special collections, and 10 things for us to think about and do. (She apologised that this doesn't add up to 23.)

Selling points:

1) Special collections are a treasure trove. Their uniqueness is not merely pretty frippery: it can have hard financial benefits.

2) We're about much more than text: it doesn't matter if Google Books has the text, your particular book is still important because of its story.

3) The power of the real: things being online isn't the same - people still want to see the real physical object.

4) Learning, teaching and research. The style of teaching (across school and university, I think), is increasingly geared towards engagement with primary material. We're the people that can make that happen.

5) Sharing via Amazing! New! Technology! is now easier that every before. There are fewer gatekeepers to the outside world: we can talk about our own collections, rather than going through intermediaries.

The things we should think about in caring for and sharing our collections are:

1) Proclaiming our value. Don't hide light under a bushel, don't be afraid to use robust language and to speak in the jargon that the people with the money respond to.

2) FInd partners and use them. Work out who's speaking on your behalf in your organisation and make use of them. Identify the people with soft power, too.

3) Be 'lazy' - don't try and do everything yourself, but try and find people who'll do it for you, e.g. collaborating with museums on schools work.

4) Explore new tech. Know what's out there, but you don't have to use it all.

5) Think about mission and strategy, i.e. work out how everything fits together, and which things you don't have to do.

6) Make the best use of your, or your staff's time. Staff time may be the only resource you have, so value it.

7) Dare to think creatively. You can't do more of the same with less of the same, but you can do something different instead. In Alison's case this means exhibiting online, not in a physical space.

8) Skills matter. Use the Rare Books and Special Collections Group framework (or the ALA equivalent) to campaign for training. Market yourself as someone with specialist skills and knoweledge.

9) Know what's going on - what the agendas are, and how you can use them to your advantage.

10) Share your own number 10. Mine is to use the enthusiasms of the people that you have - Alison added that if you do that you have to account for what'll happen if they leave!

If you want to know more, Alison has a book coming out soon.

The RLUK Unique and Distinctive Collections Project will be producing a report about special collections of all kinds and not just in RLUK libraries next September.

Using volunteers at Bishopgate's Institute

Edward Weech spoke about how the Library of the Bishopsgate Institute using volunteers to enhance what they can do and offer. He was clear that they do not use volunteers to replace paid staff, but use them to work on specific projects that couldn't otherwise be undertaken.

Volunteers are used in the library to help with a retrospective cataloguing project. There are a number of rules governing the volunteers' work: each volunteer comes in for half a day per week, and there is a miniumum commitment of three months. Their travel expenses are paid, are their work is also recognised with twice-termly tea and cakes, a newsletter, a volunteering certificate, and (for those who have volutneered for 40 hours or more) a reference. It was noted that not all the volunteers want to have tea, cakes, newsletters etc. - some just want to get on and catalogue!

Volunteers are generally recruited from retired librarians, library school students, and people currently working in libraries who would like to gain cataloguing experience. Volunteers are expected already to have computing skills, and ideally to have knowledge of library work, library management systems, and possibly cataloguing. There are around 6 volunteers at any given time. The longest-serving has now been there four years, but some, especially those who have negotiated time away from work to participate, will only stay the minimum three months.

All of the volunteers' work is checked by staff before it is unsuppressed on the OPAC. This means that, along with training and supervision, there is quite a lot of staff time invested in the volunteering programme. Since the retrospective cataloguing project started in 2005, 50,000 records have been added to the catalogue in total, of which 8,600 were added by volunteers (that's about 17%).

The benefits of the volunteer invovlement is not therefore that they're a cheap way of creating lots of catalogue records. The benefits, as described by Edward are that the staff learn from the volunteers (whether they're students with new ideas, or more experienced librarians who have worked in other libraries), and that the Library and Institute are promoted by the volunteers and advocated for when they go elsewhere.

Friends Organisations

Karen Attar spoke about the Friends of Senate House Library. The Friends were founded in 1988, and in 2009 had a relatively modest membership of 140. Karen noted that the library's posistion within London, and within the University of London meant that it doesn't necessarily have a distincitve attraction for the general public. However, the Friends have contributed to the Library, particularly through funds raised from bequests. They have bought books and other materials, paid for conservation work and materials, paid for cataloguing, and have developed a 'Befriend a Book' programme.

The Friends of Senate House Library organise a variety of events including talks, visits, book club meetings and a newsletter. Interestingly, special exhibition viewings don't need to be 'private' - the addition of a curator talk and some refreshments makes it a good draw for members.

HLF conference report 1: in summary

2011-11-16T17:01:00.000Z

I'm just back from the Historic Libraries Forum annual meeting, held at the Royal Asiatic Scociety in London.

First of all, a few words about the HLF.
The HLF is great - it's free to be a member, they offer advice about libraries under threat, how to run a historic library and so on, they have great training courses, a newsletter, a mentoring scheme, and both of their conferences that I've been to have been interesting and friendly. Do spread the word!

They have a Facebook page (if that's your thing) and are thinking about getting onto Twitter.

And now down to business
My talk was about cpd23, and particularly about its usefulness for small libraries in hard times.

23 things for professional development, training and networking in hard times / Katie Birkwood

View more presentations from Katie Birkwood

I was pleased to see that quite a few of the audience had already heard about cpd23 (although only two of them were active participants), and that a lot of them were keen to hear more about how social media could be relevant to them.

A few interesting points were raised in the questions afterwards.

One person commented that this was the 'sort of thing that CILIP should be doing'. Which is maybe true (though it's worth noting that 'CILIP HQ' did help us with publicity, and that local groups held cpd23 meet-ups), but I think the beauty and success of ideas like cpd23 is that they're spontaneously (and somewhat anarchically) organised by otherwise unconnected groups of keen people. It was also pointed out that 'CILIP is all of us'.

A question was asked about real-life examples of how the cpd23 Things are useful, particularly in a historic libraries context, or in my own extra-professional interest in library history. On the first, widening access via social media (blogs, Flickr, etc.) is a big draw (and this is something that was discussed later), as well as using productivity tools to make your working life more efficient. On the second, what would I do without Zotero?

The issue of time was raised: how do I time to get this all done? Personally, it's by having a wonky work-life balance, but participants could and did do the course in work time (as it's professional training after all), or in their own time. It isn't necessarily a huge commitment of time. This tied into a correction of my assertion that cpd23 and similar courses are 'free'. It was rightly pointed out that they don't cost anything in monetary terms, but that they do cost time (for participants and, especially, for organisers). But on the other hand, that time is often still cheaper than attending traditional courses. Especially for freelance people, or those without solid institutional backing, for whom professional development can often be costly, or ignored.

I'd like to thank everyone there for being so welcoming to the cpd23 idea - I hope that, if people try it out, they find something useful!

Plugs and things
The Hurd Library, an episcopal library housed in Hartlebury Castle, former Bishops' Palace for the Diocese of Worcester has a blog. The Hurd Library has had a tough time in the last few years, but a really superb group of people are fighting hard to keep it in its rightful place, to care for the collections, and to enable access.

Omeka is open source, freely-available, online exhibition software.

Alison Cullingford is working on the RLUK Unique and Distinctive Collections project and is happy, nay *keen* to go and speak about the project. Invite her to your conferences!

Notes on the other (fab) speakers to follow.

#cpd23 Thing 14: Zotero, Mendeley, citeulike

2011-11-10T22:21:00.001Z

Regular readers may recall that last summer, during 23 Things Cambridge, I auditioned Zotero and Mendely for my regular bibliography-compiling, reference management needs.

a treat

Over the last year I've come to favour Zotero. I like the Firefox add-on - it means that the reference organising happens, in the main, right where I'm finding articles: online. I've found recently that you can now also add Zotero library items online, which is a real boon! The synching works a treat, and so does having nested folders to keep my library tidy.

That really is all I have to say about it, I think. It works, it's dead handy, it makes life easier.

P.S. If anyone's interested, you can find my bibliographies in the journal Library & information history.

#cpd23 Thing 13: Google Docs, Wikis, Dropbox

2011-11-10T22:12:00.000Z

Google Docs is ace. It makes organising things like cpd23 and TeachMeet, where the people in charge don't all work in one place, a whole lot simpler than it would otherwise be. But it isn't perfect, so here's my quick list of pros and cons:

pros	cons
You can edit your documents from any location with web access, and don't need to carry them around on memory sticks/email them to yourself. It can also act as additional backup.	The editing can be quite slow, especially on older machines or slower internet connections.
Lots of different people can work on a document together without needing to keep emailing between each other. Changes made by individuals are logged (i.e. there's version control) and can be viewed later.	You can't trust Google to hold things forever, or in the same format. It's better as a temporary/pro-tem tool, than as a long-term storage solution.
There's an in built chat window, so you can discuss with collaborators as you type. (The cpd23 organising crew used this to hold remote meetings)	While there are word processing, spreadsheet and presentation tools, and the option to import and export MS Office formats, the formatting won't carry over precisely between the Google and MS versions.
The spreadsheet tool also works as a form/survey tool, which sends its results into a Google spreadsheet. That's really useful for sign-up forms, evaluation surveys, etc.

drop

Wikis have their uses. Wikipedia is obviously a huge success - the idea being that the iterative action of thousands of editors will move the encyclopedia towards ever greater comprehensiveness and accuracy. The evidence, for Wikipedia, suggests that this works. But we can't all make our own Wikipedias, so what else are they good for?

They're used for registering participants in several events/programmes, such as Library Day in the Life and the Library Routes/Roots project. This lets participants sign themselves up, and visibly, thus saving the time and energy of the organisers. The by product is that the time and energy of the organisers can be diverted into cleaning up the wiki when there have been accidental formatting errors and deletions. I don't think that wikis, as currently used, are necessarily the best tool for this sort of use, but they are at least quick and easy.

box

One recent use of wikis that caught my eye was as a thinking place and recording place for unconferences. This happened with Library Camp - a record of write-ups and notes is available here, and also (in REAL TIME!) as a record of Curate Camp (in the USA, and for people who curate things and data, not for new priests).

And here's a thing: using a wiki to organise your Chartership work.

Lastly, Dropbox. I have an account (maedchenimmond at gmail if anyone has anything to share). I know it's there. I haven't actually *used* it yet, but I'm sure that will change.

#cpd23 Thing 12: Putting the social into social media

2011-11-06T13:05:00.003Z

Using social media has pretty much transformed my professional outlook from prematurely bitter whinger to, well, determinedly enthusiastic and thoroughly overworked busy bee.

Nothing to do with the topic.

Eighteen months ago, or so, I started trying out social media/web 2.0 tools as part of the 23 Things Cambridge programme. I only really did it because I was starting Chartership and thought it would look good in the portfolio. At the time I was, and had been since I finished my MA, feeling pretty detached from the profession. Sure, I knew quite a few librarians and library staff, and I'd cast my eye over Update most months, but none of it seemed to connect to what I was doing or how I was working.

It turns out, of course, that what was wrong was my connection to the wider world, and not the wider world's connection to me. By getting involved in (or just eavesdropping on) conversations on blogs and, above all, on Twitter, I began to see that there all sorts of amazing people out there doing exciting and interesting things, and, more remarkably, that they're happy to talk to little old me!

Wandering up to someone Big and Important at a conference is scary. Answering if they ask a question or start a discussion on Twitter is less scary. That for me, is the magic of social media in the professional context: you can type out your little thought, have a look at it, see if it makes any kind of sense, edit it, and then contribute. Much easier than wandering up to someone, blurting out something embarassing, and scuttling off to hide behind a tea urn.

And why does it matter that the talking to people thing is easier online? Well, you find out about all sorts of cool stuff that's happening and that's been written, and about cool people who want to collaborate with you, or borrow your ideas, or just meet up. And then, when you do meet them, there's so much less hiding behind urns and so much more useful networking.

Lastly, social media doesn't mind if you're having on off day, or week, or month. You can disappear off into the shadows for a bit if you need some time to yourself, and that's fine. When you come back things are still going on and people are still happy to see you. Magic!

Edited 1 February 2012: This post has been published in the CILIP East of England branch magazine Sunrise as part of a special issue on social media.

#cpd23 Thing 11: Mentoring

2011-10-29T13:58:00.000+01:00

So, I haven't written a cpd23 post in about three millennia. Thing 11 has been a real stumbling block for me (even worse than Thing 10, which was quite an effort, and for the very same reasons). Formal mentoring is a part of the CILIP Chartership process, and I've been feeling very bad about how I've neither worked on my portfolio or contacted my mentor in months and months.

Good news folks! Before starting this post, I emailed my mentor. Hopefully this will get me back on track with Chartership. And with that weight off my back, I feel a little more able to voice my thoughts about mentoring more generally.

Mentoring is, I reckon, a Good Thing. But the practicalities can be difficult. Take Chartership, for example. There's a big list of mentors, arranged by region, and with a few details of where they work or what they're interested in. When you start Chartership you pick one of these, meet up with them, and you both decide if you want to keep each other. Sounds OK in principle, but in practice, I think there's a lot of picking at random(ish) (you might decide for a different sector, or an interesting workplace, but you very little about the person really), and when you meet someone for the first time it's rare to take such a dislike to them straight away that you'd do the socially awkward thing of telling them you don't think it'll work.

Nebulous

This isn't to say that I don't like my mentor. But I do wonder if whether, had I been active on social media at the very start of the Charterhsip process, I might have found someone there with whom I really clicked. And being mentored by someone you're already in contact with probably means you'll be better at riding through, or getting help in, the times when you're not getting anything done...

The crux of mentoring issue for me is probably that the informal mentoring that develops all of its own accord when you're not looking is certainly easier to maintain, and possibly more useful. I suppose that formal mentoring is handy when there's a specific need or goal to address. And Chartership, for me, feels so damn nebulous that the formal mentoring can feel a bit directionless: is it aimed at career progression/training and development, or is the mentor there to help you through the writing up, or what?

So all in all, I'm a bit confused. But I've always been a difficult person to please in the realm of teacher-pupil/mentor-mentee relationships (just speak to some of my previous cello teachers!). When it works, it *really* works, but much of the time it leaves me flat. I should work out how to work on that...

Visit to Ipswich: three libraries

2011-10-29T13:37:00.000+01:00

On Monday 22 August 2011 Abby Barker organised a visit to three Ipswich libraries for the CILIP East of England Branch. I went along because I'd never been to Ipswich before, and because the libraries in question sounded pretty interesting and were from sectors I know little about : a private institute, a large FE college, and a new university.

These notes have been languishing, half-written, for months. They're clearly never going to get written up in full, so I'm publishing this post in note form.

An entrance to a hidden world

Ipswich Institute

What?

Founded in the nineteenth century for the purpose of educating mechanics.
Today it offers members a lending library, a coffee shop, space in the centre of town to sit down and read, and educational courses and talks.
It inhabits two historic buildings in centre of town. One has been its home for a long time, the other was acquired recently.

So what?

As with any organisation using historic buildings, the facilities aren't ideal. There currently isn't access to the first floors of the buildings (where many of the talks take place) for those who can't manage stairs, for example.
As a member organisation, everything they do has to be approved of by the membership. This means that innovation can be hard - things like using some coffee shop space for part of the library can cause upset.
The Institute seems to function as a public library for some of its members. Obviously it's a tricky issue to wonder whether this library 'takes people away' the public libraries: they've paid for something, so why not enjoy it? But given the trouble facing public libraries this did just make me a little uneasy.
Several of the people on the visit were fairly local to Ipswich, and said that they'd seen the Institute doorway in the middle of town, and never really known what it was. I wonder how many other 'hidden gems' there are out there - and how much public libraries (or others) are like this for many people. To be fair, the Institute said that it's numbers were healthy and that they weren't particularly marketing themselves to get more.

Now what?

Investigate independent libraries. Read up on the Association of Independent Libraries.

The swirly Suffolk New College logo

Suffolk New College (Learning Curve)

What?

This is the library for an FE college

So what?

Crowd control: the librarian said this was better than it could be, but she still had to work to get people not to eat, to behave appropriately, etc.
Getting the students to make the most of the resources

The librarian has brought material for particular courses together on the shelf, rather than sticking rigidly to Dewey. All sizes are also together - no oversize shelves.
Trying to make stuff appeal
Success with some subjects in getting librarians into induction sessions - trying to spread this through subjects

Getting stuff back - only very few books at a time - many go missing
Wider responsibilities are being given to the library as part of the development/reorganisation of the College (it seems as though continual change is part of the furniture):

study skills/support
careers advice

Uncertainty about funding/future - this year's intake only known at enrolment at the start of September

Now what?

Think about how HE institutions (or public libraries) can and should be helping students come from an FE background like this: the library was well-run, but small. How can we mitigate the overwhelmingness of the libraries they'll face later on?

The Waterfront Building

University Campus Suffolk
(The library's web presence is almost entirely via a VLE, with no outward-facing webpage, so sorry - no handy link!)

What?

UCS is very new. It offers HE courses validated by other local universities.
Most of the campus is housed in brand new buildings (such as the Waterfront Building, right).
The library is in an old ('60s) building that has been refurbished.
The Library is in a separate building to the rest of facilities, across a road from the rest of the campus

So what?

As the institution's so new, there's no 'average' student yet - changing student profile(s) mean that the services required keep changing.
A new institution undergoes constant change: for example, initially there was a Learning Resource Centre (i.e. computer room) in the Waterfront Building, which was very popular with students. This has now been removed to make way for a tiered lecture theatre (requested by the student body).

Another new innovation for the new academic year is the inclusion of the library in the 'infozone' in the lobby of the Waterfront Building: hope it will help people find out about the library and how to use it.

Students come from a lot of different backgrounds, often not 'typical' HE backgrounds, so there's a heavy emphasis in the library on the accessibility of resources

DVDs are interfiled with books, not kept separately
The journals archive is colour-coded according to broad subject areas, so encourage people to use it by browsing
There's an emphasis on making more time and space for learning support and info literacy teaching
The library offers taster study-skills sessions before courses start - these are popular with new students and they find them useful.
Students can book time with a subject librarian

Now what?

What can an 'elitist' institution like Cambridge learn from libraries like UCS? They go all out on making access as easy as possible: what's the best way for us to do similarly? What are the barriers to us doing this?

Shameless publicity for Cambridge Library Group

2011-10-27T17:43:00.000+01:00

I suspect that there are few locals reading this who don't already know about the group, but I like to be thorough with publicity so here goes...

Cambridge Library Group is a Cambridge-based independent society for anyone interesting in libraries, books and/or information. The Group has roughly monthly meetings throughout the year that are usually some combination of talk, tour, visit or discussion. Every meeting starts with drinks and nibbles and a chance to natter (you might also call that networking time). We think that we're the only such group in the country (pitch in if you know otherwise!)

Membership is open to anyone who's interested - you don't have to work for any particular institution or type of library (or indeed a library at all), belong to any particular organisation, or hold any particular rank. Membership is £10 for the year (£8 for retired members) and that gets you free entry to all our regular meetings, exclusive entry to occasional members-only meetings (including a chance at some peaceful Christmas browsing in Heffers on 8 December, and the Twelfth Night party at the CUP bookshop), and a reduced price for the garden party in July.

If you don't want to commit to a year's membership then regular meetings are £3 each.

Either way, you can find this year's programme here, and details about how to become a member here.

Our next meeting is on Thursday 10 November: a tour of the Scott Polar Research Institute with Heather Lane, Librarian and Keeper of Collections, starting at 5.30pm for a prompt 6pm. Most events are 'turn up on the day', but owing to the venue and the nature of the tour, numbers are restricted at SPRI. Places are going fast - please comment here pronto if you want a place!

Digital humanities, music and the Material Text

2011-10-14T18:58:00.000+01:00

Yesterday's Seminar in the History of Material Texts was given by Professor John Rink under the title 'The virtual Chopin'. I often go to the seminars, but rarely write them up here. This time I will, because I'm on a blogging roll, and because I do after all have a degree in music and therefore actually understood the ins-and-outs of the talk and discussion.

from Wikimedia Commons

What's the issue?
Editing the works of Chopin is a tricky business. Each work is likely to exist in multiple sources, and these sources generally don't agree with each other. Types of source include:

preliminary sketches
reject public manuscripts
Stichvorlagen (copies from which music engravers created the plates to print from)
proof copies
1st editions

These were usually simultaneously produced in England, Germany, and France, for copyright reasons.

Getting exemplars to three separate publishers happened in different ways through Chopin's life: sometimes proof sheets from one were sent to the other two, sometimes copies of one autograph MS would be made by an emanuensis, and at the end of Chopin's life he would make three copies of the MS himself.

They were printed in very small numbers at a time (25-100 copies), and corrections could be made after each run, so there are very many varying impressions of each edition.

Other autograph sources, such as music written in visiting books or given as gifts to patrons
Other non-autograph sources, such as pupils' annotations on printed copies.

Why does that matter?
The result of this multiplicity of sources are that it's not easy for editors and performers to determine what is the 'right' version. If the French and English first editions have different notes in them, how do you choose which to print and which to play?

Rink identified a few places where copying or engraving errors have serious aural and structural implications for the music, most notably, the mistaken placement of a repeat sign in the first movement of the B-flat minor sonata. The standard reading has the repeat marked as starting from bar 5, but Chopin's MS shows only a double bar here (no repeat dots) - the repeat should start from the very beginning of the movement, which makes a lot more harmonic sense.

A way through the thicket
It will be little surprise to hear that there is no 'right' answer to the question. Particularly in the case of Chopin, whose compositional methods and style are heavily influenced by performance and improvisation, a single definitive version of a work simply can't be pinned down. But there are ways of helping to decide what you should do:

no source should be considered in isolation
don't take the contents of the source at face value: interpret them in context
the 'law of averages' is likely to be inappropriate: just because 7 sources have one thing and 1 has something else, that lonely 1 might be more 'valid' than the others.
multiple interpretations may be valid, even though you can only perform one at a time.

Editors vs performers
The solutions will be different for editors and performers. Performers can only play one version of any given bar (or beat, or chord) at a time. They *have* to choose--and they generally don't like to, wanting to be able to play the 'right version--but are also at liberty, if they can justify it on musical and historical grounds, to choose as they please (and perhaps even different version at different parts of a work). Editors, however, have a responsibility to give the full picture, as far as is feasible. In the case of the multiple variants of Chopin, it's pretty hard to show them all on a printed score.

The digital bit
Digital technology obviously ways of presenting all the variants that cannot be allowed for in print publications. Rink leads two research projects with online outputs:

The second allows the side-by-side comparison of individual bars from manuscripts and first editions.

It's amazing, and somewhat overwhelming, for the lay (or lay-ish) person to be able to compare all these different versions. But it's certainly a good thing. Without being overly flashy, or getting caught up in theory or grand claims, this is a very useful thing.

And that's pretty much all I have to say.

Screenshot of opening of Ballade no. 3 in A-flat, Op. 47. Note that the first printed bar (1st impression of French 1st edition) has a missing flat in front the the second D, which is corrected in the next image, the 2nd French impression.

#libcampuk11 session 4: using wikimedia to improve access

2011-10-13T21:50:00.003+01:00

(Library Camp UK 2011 home | my other posts about it)

In this session Andy Mabbett introduced us to ways of using wikimedia (the parent organisation (owned by the Wikimedia Foundation) to Wikipedia, Wiktionary, Wikimedia commons, etc.). Andy is a real evangelist for making the most of wiki* to benefit your own organisations or products.

GLAM (Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums)
Wikimedia is actively seeking to encourage collaboration from heritage organisations, as you can see from the GLAM outreach wiki. Andy described a 'backstage pass event' he'd been to at Derby Museum and Art Gallery. Wikipedia editors had been invited along to a day's event, to have talks and tours about and around the museum, and a cup of tea and a biscuit, all with the aim in getting more coverage of the museum and its holdings. Andy pointed out that by doing a little to make people special, they will do lots in return: 1,200 new articles (and translations) were created as a result of this one-day event (including this one about a racing pigeon).

There are all sorts of potential events that you can run to engage the local community, or the community of wikipedia editors, that will benefit your organisation in terms of improved visibility.

Putting stuff on wiki*
There are two criteria for including an article on Wikipedia:

it must be about a notable thing - i.e. something that's written about elsewhere
you have to cite what you say - you can't include original research or unsupported statements.

This leaves a lot of scope for GLAMs to include articles about themselves, their collections and their notable holdings. You can't have an article (or links to) every single hand axe in the country, but if you're is significant, or you have a copy of book that exists in very low numbers, than that's worthy of inclusion.

You can also release images, video, audio and animations on Wikimedia Commons. It's good to release material with a licence allowing reuse with attribution - and then your pictures can be used anywhere, and will link back to your organisation.

If you have a large volume of images, Wikimedia can help with batch imports, and they maintain their servers so that the images are preserved. In addition, the pictures are now available to all sorts of people who'll be able to help identify them and items in them.

QRpedia (intro | intro on GLAM wiki | actual site)
QRpedia is a doohickey that makes QR codes to link to Wikipedia pages. When someone scans the code, QRpedia return the wikipedia page in the phone's language where possible (interesting discussion of 'difficult' languages here). Why is this cool? It means that visitors can get information about things in your exhibition in their own language without you having to make three hundred different signs. Obviously, if you link to a very specific page there will be fewer language options that a very general one, but translations are increasing all the time...

Homework
We were encouraged to sign up for an account and to start editing Wikipedia pages, for example by correcting punctuation or by translating an article (e.g. into Simple English) (Andy suggested hitting the 'random article' button until you found something that needed tidying up). I've set up my account, and have done my first editing (a very undramatic addition of a link at the end of an article).

Thoughts
I found this session really useful. Wikipedia is out there, and the very thing that means that some people view it as shady and disreputable is the thing that makes it powerful for us: we can edit it. I think it's a great idea that organisations use Wikipedia to improve their online presence: people will be looking us up there, so why not give them good information, and decent links to our own sites?

However, I can imagine that selling the use of wikipedia (e.g. via qrpedia as a help to visitors) might be difficult to sell to the organisation... or it might be seen as lazy. Do other people think it's something they could get agreement to do?

And finally...
For those interested in that sort of thing, there's also a linked-data-y DBpedia: "a community effort to extract structured information from Wikipedia and to make this information available on the Web"

#libcampuk11 session 3: Enabling reuse of library/catalogue data

2011-10-12T21:11:00.001+01:00

(Library Camp UK 2011 home | my other posts about it)

This session was facilitated by Owen Stephens, who does lots of digital library stuff, is involved in mashedlib events, and is lovely. (He could probably write a better bio than that, though.) I'm really keen to learn more about the techy side of librarianing, so I was really pleased to see him offer this session. It was very interesting - and I've come away with an idea for something that would made catalogues more useful for some rare books users, and lots of places to start finding out more. My notes are a bit sketchy - a lot of links and a few ideas. Sorry about that.

The issues Owen said he hope to discuss in the session were "How do places with data interact with people who want to use it?" and "How do we make data available?".

Why do organisations publish data?

Accountability: by releasing data people can see what's been done and for how much money. Etc.
To increase the available services.

People 'out there' will be able to do things that you don't have the resources to do yourself.
They'll also think of better things to do with your data, and by combining your data with data from other places.
An example that covers both of these is the public toilet map.

NB, the government is currently consulting on what data Local Government should release: Making Open Data Real

What does this have to do with libraries?
Library catalogues have imposed on them librarian- or supplier-made decisions about what can/can't be searched and in what way. Some of these decisions are limited by current cataloguing rules, but not all; often the data is recorded, but not in a usable way, or is there but isn't tapped by the intereface. For example, in most catalogues you can limit by publication type to newspapers, but you can't limit by frequency of the issues. Releasing data means that people can start to use it in the way they want to.

Releasing data: issues
Different uses will require different kinds of data release. To work on the newspapers query above, a dump of all the MARC (i.e. cataloguing) information would be OK. But for an app using circulation data you'd need to use a live API.
Data protection is obviously a big issue for some kinds of data. But it's not a deal-breaker. You can base locations on postcode zone, not individual postcodes for example, or for course-based datasets (in a uni context), just not include data from very small courses.

Useful links

Where to get data:

data.gov.uk

the London Datastore

the Data Hub (CKAN)

getthedata.org

Other info:

The Cambridge University Library api (also of interest: Cambridge Open MetaData (COMET) project)
5-stars of open linked data (basic principle: start by getting your data out there in whatever format you have it, then work towards putting it in the most usable form)
JISC Open Bibliographic Data Guide

Tools

VuFind (open source next-gen OPAC type thing)
Project Blacklight ("Blacklight is a free and open source Ruby on Rails based discovery interface (a.k.a. “next-generation catalog”) especially optimized for heterogeneous collections. You can use it as a library catalog, as a front end for a digital repository, or as a single-search interface to aggregate digital content that would otherwise be siloed.")

An example of something, presumably crowd-sourced useful things:

http://errata.wikidot.com/

#libcampuk session 2: special collections

2011-10-10T20:11:00.001+01:00

(Library Camp UK 2011 home | my other posts about it)

In my best spirit of 'things will just work themselves out', I pitched a session for special collections librarians and anyone else interested at which we would (and I quote) "talk about stuff". Aim low, I say, and you can't fail! We had a session. We talked. I got some ideas. I hope other people did to - thanks to those who came for making it good. In retrospect (and based on experience in later sessions in the day) I reckon I could have probably been more of a proactive 'session leader', maybe by asking a starter question to get discussion going, or by starting off my describing my experience and ideas. I really didn't want to come across as hogging the limelight, or as though I was just telling people what I thought - I'm no expert, and I wanted to hear from everyone else.

Anyway, here's my write-up... This is a combination of my notes from the day and my later reflections.

The session attendees fell roughly into three types:

People with responsibility for special collections, but not as their main work, who are trying to work out what to do with them.
People whose job is special collections who're looking for ways to make the most of what they've got.
People who want to know more about special collections/special collections work.

We started off with a quick, impromptu, round-up of Laura's MA dissertation research into exhibitions in libraries (the full dissertation will be online in due course). Laura looked at the ways in which different institutions create exhibitions, and the feelings of those responsible for them about what training and support they needed in their roles.

Outreach: some issues
Special collections have been for too long treated as 'private libraries' and that's just not right. Very very few collections are of purely local interest - they are all relevant to wider research, history, stories, culture, etc. Special collections might even be one way of helping libraries in this time of peril - they are by their definition unique. They're a way of demonstrating the value of libraries, or a unique selling point for individual institutions. (Whilst this is true to some extent, I'm wary of using special collections as a rallying point, as it might be seen to imply that all the other work that libraries do is obsolete, which I don't believe for one second.)

But getting started with widening access can be hard: time, money, co-operation from the organisation, hidden-ness of some libraries or special collections departments (it's hard to increase access if visitors have to be individually signed in and given a badge!) are all problems.

Which is better: physical exhibition or online?
If you have limited resources, which should you do? Is it better to draw out the stories behind objects, or to allow people access to the magic of the real thing? Both are good. Either are good. Any kind of improvement to access is good. Andy Mabbett plugged his afternoon session about using Wikipedia (and Creative Commons licences allowing re-use) to increase access. Other image/digitisation projects mentioned were Culture Grid, People's Collection Wales, and Europeana.

What if we become popular?
In small institutions it's easy to get scared that if you start to promote your collections, perhaps online via digital reproductions/blogs/etc., you'll suddenly be inundated with real-life visitors wanting to see the originals. It's true that if you have information about your collections available online then the number of people enquiring about them will increase. But this really shouldn't stop you showing off a bit: there are various ways to cope with the threat of popularity:

you can state outright that you have an online exhibition for the reason that you don't (currently) have facilities for physical exhibitions, and have no visitor facilities.
you can formulate a policy about what sort of visitors/readers can be admitted (e.g. 'academic research' only), and either publicise it or use it in response to queries.
if you do receive increased in-person interest in your collection(s) its a good way to demonstrate your collection's value to senior management, and possibly to gain extra resources.

Anne from Ulster cited the example of The Ireland Collection, developed by JSTOR in association with Queen's University Belfast, which has raised the profile of the university across the world, but has also raised the profile of special collections within the university.

What are 'special collections'?
A good question! And one that it's important to keep answering. Those 'in the know' might realise the breadth of the field, but those with small collections of 'special' things might not realise that they fall under the umbrella - they might think that 'special collections' might just mean the 'jewel in the crown' items like medieval manuscripts. Some ideas as to what counts:

old, rare, fragile, valuable
coherent - items from a person/place/institution/time/purpose
significant - local, has a story, belonged to a person...
archival material (I'm editing out the long discussion of the overlap and interplay between spec colls and archives. I can't face trying to construct the necessary Venn diagram...)

Special collections aren't just 'piles of books'. It was interesting to hear tales of items being rescued from skips (things that others didn't value but that libraries do) vs donations that we wish we could put in skips - even a donation of books previously weeded from the same library!

Hidden special collections - some possibilities
The part of the session that I found most interesting was a discussion spurred on by a librarian who works in a private company library - not your traditional special collections hunting ground. But it turned out that they have a small-ish collection of company archival material, including auction records, house plans, and other lovely things. They get about one reader for it a year - which to my mind isn't bad for something so hidden away (there's a brief listing on their main library catalogue, which is a good start, cataloguing wise). But it sounded like a collection that has huge potential - for research, for public engagement, and to enhance the prestige of a long-established company.

Some of the problems I saw for institutions holding collections of this type were:

people don't know what their stuff counts as - special collections? archives? local history? none of the above?
they don't know what the audience for it is
they don't know how best to store it
they don't know how to promote it
they don't know who can help them with it

And so it languishes in a store room, costing money in storage costs...

What to do? The one sentence answer (to my mind) is: find a partner institution, to help with storage/care/cataloguing but also access/promotion/development. Many libraries and archives will accept donations or deposits (the terms of deposits vary individually, but there are ways of entrusting a collection and the care of said collection to an institution whilst retaining ownership by the origination company) from outside bodies, according to their existing specialist areas, collection strengths, and collection development policies. The same, or other, institutions might be able to help with getting the collection used - with research projects, with community projects, with all sorts of things. If I were a better librarian I'd add links here. Comment if you have good examples!

And finally...
Not mentioned in the session but probably useful:

The forthcoming special collections handbook, written by Alison Cullingford, brains behind 100 Objects Bradford (great example of online outreach) and now also working on the RLUK Unique and Distinctive Collections Project.
Heritage Open Days: if you have a historic or otherwise interesting building, a great way to do one-day-a-year outreach (tours or open house).
Rarely Sited: a blog by a friend of mine who wrote her MA dissertation about library outreach in Cambridge college libraries.
A paper Naomi Herbert and I gave about widening access at St John's College Cambridge: text and slides.

#libcampuk11 session 1: cataloguing and classification (#hvcats)

2011-10-09T17:37:00.002+01:00

(Library Camp UK 2011 home | my other posts about it)

I suggested this session in advance on the wiki. Adrienne stood up to pitch for it on the day - thank you! The session pretty much ran itself - after intros (some 'expert' cataloguers, some who 'only catalogue to in house rules', some who 'will have to start cataloguing soon and haven't much experience yet', some systems folk and some just interested) various ideas and problems were discussed by the group. Here are my notes (I've removed identities to protect the innocent...):

We started with a comment inspired by the introductions: "Lots of people say that they 'don't follow a proper standard'. So what is the point of major international standards? Maybe it's only the national libraries that need/want to follow such standards. Perhaps RDA moves some way, with the idea of 'cataloguer's choice', towards allowing greater freedom for individual organisations to creat their own scheme."

"Maybe the most important thing is to get the data in in some form or other - 'mark it and park it'. We need to ask what the motivation is for creating 'beautiful' records using loads of different obscure fields and all the right punctuation."

"Some places aren't doing that now. [E.g. libraries in private companies] But there is value in big institutions 'doing it properly'."

"But what is 'doing it properly'? Different users have different needs [example given of a researcher wanting to look at e.g. female authors of poetry in a given century, but we don't currently record genders of authors.] MARC is difficult to use - it's hard to meet the users' needs with it."

"It's hard to meet user needs because cataloguers don't get much feedback about how their cataloguing is used. [Example: not having it explained that the date in the leader is what's used for date-limited searches, so it's really important that it's there... There are lots more examples like this]"

"Do we have feedback buttons on OPACs so that users can report mistakes in records? Are we keeping our user data and actually examining it meaningfully?"

"So how to standards fit into this? Do we want standards or not?"

"We want good standards. Web-friendly standards, e.g. URLs for authors (i.e. linked data). That's a different issue to on-the-ground cataloguing issues which are about how to identify which author a given work has, for e.g. (matching to authorities)."

"How good/useful is Dublin Core in this context?"

"There are lots of things available (Dublin Core, SXML, JSON...?) - stuff that helps cataloguers. But some people (e.g. rare books) nee more fields/more granularity than available in DC."

"Dublin Core, or whatever, won't be the solution if we just use it in the old way - with a reliance on punctuation, not separating components of an author's name, etc."

"What about classfication? [Insert institution name here] has a frightful mess."

"[Company library] has a bad classification system because it's not fine-grained enough. There are lots anf lots of not very similar books all at one number."

"What the point of classification? Why not just label the shelves?"

"If it's done well, classification marked in the catalogue can be used to subject retrieval."

"Does anyone actually do that?"

"Perhaps it could be done retrospectively for closed access material - classify, and then extract textual subject information from the class no. and display that on catalogue. Then shelve by running nos, etc. as is more efficient."

"[A library] use complicated UDC but isn't browsed much - a mis-match of effort vs use."

"OCLC are using DDC for book recommendations. But what is the point of DDC?"

"A legacy of the physical library. Class at the shelf is useful in a physical library for browsing. The OPAC/online world hasn't yet replicated this yet, and that's a big issue."

"Also an issue for e-books."

"[A question from a systems librarian:] Do we enjoy cataloguing?"

"Yes!"

"We need to see more of the systems people so that we can collaborate and explain our side of the story."

"Cataloguers make good systems people - if you can write an all-singing, all-dancing MARC record, you can probably code just fine!"

"So how do we get a systems job?"

"Go to a mashlib event!"

"Learn and practice in your own time. Try building something! Fashionable programming languages are: python, php, perl [and one that I wrote so poorly I really can't decipher it... sorry.] [ETA Adrienne has identified it as ruby]"

END.

Conclusions: we need to re-evaluate what we're doing and how in collaboration with the people who have the data about what people are doing and trying to do with our catalogues, and can build the systems we want.

Resources (plugged at the end of the session):

High visibility cataloguing blog
On Twitter: #hvcats, HVCats

#libcampuk11: an unconference to remember

2011-10-09T16:40:00.001+01:00

I'm just back from the UK's first Library Camp: an unconference for librarians held in Birmingham and organised by a team of wonderful, hard-working people. People were *really* looking forward to it - it seemed like all of Twitter was going to be there - so I was a little concerned in advance that it might not live up to the hype. I needn't have worried: it was superb. Even getting up at 4.15am (and not getting home again until 11pm) and two visits to New St station didn't put a damper on it.

I took part in the following sessions, and will write about those separately soon:

Cataloguing & Classification
Special Collections
Enabling the re-use of library data
Wikipedia and Wikicommons

My opinions and thoughts on the event as a whole:

Everyone was very friendly. At the intros at the start lots of people said they were there to meet people, so that shouldn't have been a surprise, but it was really very, very nice.
I think there was a good balance between organisation and chaos.

Having people pitch their session ideas ended up with a wide range of different sessions, which seemed to fall into a few vague 'streams' of related topics.
The timings were pretty good, everyone seemed to respect the balance between enjoying the current activity and getting on to the next. Unlike a 'proper' conference there was no slow by steady creep of everything getting later and later as people keep on talking to their slides past their allotted time...
Not only was there cake, there was plenty of tea and coffee and a nice coffee area to sit and talk/eat/rest.
I was a bit dubious about giving everyone there a chance to introduce themselves (with name, where they're from and why they've come), but think it was a good idea. It did take a while to do, and there's no way you can remember everyone there, but it's a nice way to identify a few people you'd like to speak to later, and to break the ice.

I only went to 4 of 5 possible sessions - decided to bunk off the last (nothing in particular attracted my attention, and I was pretty tired) and sat around with other crafters having #knitcamp instead. All lovely people, and no feeling of guilt that I wasn't 'getting the most' from the event.
Sorry to people I didn't say hello to, or whom I only said hello and nothing more to. Would have loved to have time to talk to more of you!

Can you help? British library history 2006-2010

2011-10-01T11:39:00.000+01:00

I've been invited to write the chapter on 'library history' for the forthcoming British librarianship and information work 2006-2010, edited by John Bowman.

Obviously, I'm be scouring the literature myself to determine trends, significant publications, events of note, and suchlike. But I would like to hear from others, too. I am particularly keen to hear about:

conferences whose proceedings have not (yet) been published, and that I might otherwise miss
online projects, resources and databases that might not be mentioned in the traditional literature
any particular trends that you have noticed in recent years and think are worthy of note (ideally with supporting evidence!)

The scope of the book is work in the UK from 2005 to 2010. You need not mention the Cambridge History - that will be getting a section all of its own.

Please pass this message on to anyone you know who may have an opinion to share. Thank you!

Give your (#libcampuk11) cake a QR code

2011-09-29T12:03:00.000+01:00

I break my blogging drought with a quick post fleshing out an idea I had yesterday evening.

You may have heard of Library Camp - an 'un-conference'-style event happening a week Saturday in Birmingham. The good people organising it have invited attendees to bring along a cake (we all know that librarians like cake).

Some people have been talking about making their own name badges, and including QR codes on them so that people with smartphones can find out more about the person in front of them. Well, that's all well and good, but what about those of us who are more interested in new cake recipes than other people?

And lo! The idea of QR codes for cake was born. Thus far in life, I've been a bit QR-code ambivalent. But being able to get to the recipe for a cake you're currently eating - sounds perfect to me. Carrying on reading if you want a step-by-step guide...

First of all, you need to decide what you want to link to with the QR code. I'm going to be making a beetroot cake, so I'll be linking to this bit.ly bundle all about the cake: http://bitly.com/bundles/maedchenimmond/1.

To get a QR code from a link, I use bit.ly again, although there are lost of other services that will do it. To get your code, go to the bit.ly homepage, paste the URL of the page you want to link to into the box, and click on 'shorten'. You'll see a shortened link appear below - click on the 'info page' link next to it. That'll take you to another page with stats and information. On the right will be a QR code - click on that to get a bigger verison, then right-click to copy or save the image. Now you can paste or insert that image into any document you like.

Et voila! People can now use their magic phones to find out all about your cake.

#cpd23, Thing 10: Routes into librarianship

2011-08-30T18:54:00.000+01:00

Well, I really enjoyed the elephants in the last post. 'Graduate traineeships, Masters Degrees, Chartership, Accreditation' is rather hard to illustrate with animals, though. But maybe there's something I can do with it. It's all about our 'journey' (cue slushy music) as librarians, isn't it? And when I think of journeys, I think of nothing so much as the majestic bison wending its way across the plains (cue David Attenborough)...

"Here, in the Hayden valley, Wyoming..."

Now, I've talked about my route into librarianship fairly recently, so if you want to know all the ins and outs I'll point you over here, and those that have already read the tale won't end up like this fellow:

What do bison dream about?

In this instalment of the story, I really ought to talk about Chartership, and my progress (or lack thereof) towards it. Having completed my part-time LIS MA in September 2008, by early 2010 I had pretty much got used to my not having essays to write in every spare moment, and thought I was ready for a new challenge. I also new that the job hunt would be looming in a year's time. These two factors combined to convince me to register for Chartership. I'd been engaging in a fair amount of professional development since graduation (the nature of my job demanded it), so I felt that I had the material for a good portfolio. I found a mentor, went to some Chartership course, and got involved in things to add to the portfolio evidence. I set myself an ambitious deadline for completion. So far, so good. But things have a habit of not turning out how you think they will.

Did you know that you can turn bison into knitting?

The trouble is, that I got so involved with so many great things, that Chartership has fallen by the wayside. I made six months' decent progress: drawing up necessary development plan, meeting my mentor, writing up some of my experiences, and creating a beautiful portfolio template that just requires me to fill in all the blanks. Around about Christmas and shortly afterwards the job situation resolved itself (at least temporarily), my extra-curricular involvement stepped itself up another notch or too and Chartership really hasn't had a look in since. Dear mentor, if you are reading this, sorry.

It's time I faced facts: I need to sort myself and get on and finish this.

A face you can't ignore. (I should point out that my mentor looks nothing like this. This is mor a representation of my inner annoyance at letting Chartership drag on.)

Probably the first step should be to contact my mentor. I've been putting that off and off and off not least because I feel I should have done some work first. So maybe I should do some work - draw up a plan, at least - and then get in touch.

Hopefully this public self-shaming will encourage me into doing something, anything. All encouragement gratefully received. Is anyone else in a similar position? Want to team up, and motivate each other together?

Yours, abjectly,

Katie.

#cpd23, Thing 9; Evernote

2011-08-16T18:36:00.001+01:00

...or Excuses for Elephants. Every good course needs elephants, I say.

The premise of Evernote sounds amazing. A way of tying together all those notes of cool things, to-do lists for different parts of life, documents, webpages and so on; and of accessing them from all possible platforms and devices. I should be leaning towards this like, well, like this elephant:

I ought to embrace Evernote

But the problem is, as I may have mentioned before, that I don't (yet) have a gadget with me at all times. Web-based solutions are great, as I use several different computers, but I don't have a smartphone, or even my own laptop, so a lot of my remembering still has to happen the low-tech way (pace my iGoogle to-do list). I imagine that eventually I'll follow the herd (see below) into the technological present and I'll be able to embrace this more fully.

Following the herd

So what can I do with this Evernote thingy?

What, indeed?

Well, I can write little notes, all formatty like a word-processor and tag them. And I can clip webpages, not just the URL but the whole thing if I want, and tag them up too. A quick search suggests that there are ways of getting Delicious bookmarks into Evernote if I wanted to transfer them across, but it doesn't seem that they would be so easily available to other people? There's a 'share notebook' function, so I could set up different notebooks and share some of them but not others. But is it possible to make individual notes private or shared? Sociability is much harder than these guys make it seem:

Why isn't more of life like this?

The point. Geddit?

So, what's the point of this post? Apart from liking elephants a lot, I think the point is that I see that Evernote's something useful--I'm sure it could turn me into the productive, organised, efficient person I'm sure I really am--but I need to use to more to work out how it works. And I probably won't use it more in the very near future because of a lack of tech.

#cpd23, Thing 8: Google Calendar

2011-08-05T12:30:00.005+01:00

I have so very little to say on this subject. Very little indeed. So I've included a lovely picture of a medieval manuscript, courtesy of the Walters Art Museum's Flickr stream. Hold your mouse over the picture for more information.

Walters Art Museum, MS W.78, fol. 6v

I do have a Google calendar, in which I post a few occasional reminders (has the Council Tax money transferred itself? Don't forget that cool ehxibition ends next week). I have a couple of shared calendars (cpd23, TeachMeet), I'm aware of the book due dates sidget doo-dah from our Library (instructions here) - I see the use of all this, I really do. But I don't have sufficient tech upon my person that an online calendar is more useful than a small diary I carry around with me.

That being said, there's no doubting that for an organisation, Google Calendar is a good way to share events, or for a group of people organising something - once the date/time/place are agreed, only one person needs to input the info and it will synch automatically to everyone's diary. That ought to stamp out 'oh, I thought we said Tuesday...' and its ilk.

#cpd23, Thing 7: 'Real-life' organisations and networks

2011-08-04T13:00:00.002+01:00

On the subject of CILIP, and of belonging to organisations more generally, I can say nothing that hasn't already been covered most adeptly in the following three posts and their comments:

My personal attitude is to try and get involved for the greater good of all concerned. I'm a bit naive and idealistic sometimes. But anyway, here are some more practical thoughts that may be of use:

Getting the most from CILIP

Did you know that your CILIP local branch and special interest group(s) can only communicate with you by email if you have registered on the CILIP site? Each group/branch can send a monthly email, though sadly I can't promise that they all do. No registration = no email = wondering what CILIP's doing for you. Here's how to register and check your settings (click on the images to enlarge them):

Go to http://www.cilip.org.uk/ and click on 'Register on this website'

After you've completed the registration process, check the 'Membership details' tab to see which branch and group(s) you're a member of. Use the 'eBulletins' tab to sign up for CILIP central's various eBulletins.

If your branch or group isn't emailing you - get in touch with them (there should be contact information on their page on the CILIP site) and harrass them into communicating (or offer to help out!).

Useful organisations for the special collections librarian

Aside from the CILIP Rare Books and Special Collections Group (and you'll notice above that I'm not currently a member - I switched allegiances for bursary-application reasons), what's useful for rare/special folk?

The Historic Libraries Forum is FREE to join. They have a newsletter, an annual conference (last year's was very good), run training courses, they campaign on behalf of libraries under threat, and they've got a new mentoring scheme just starting. Go and register.
AMARC is the Association for Manuscripts and Archives in Research Collections. Alison Cullingford recommends it, and membership is only £10.00. They have two or three yearly meetings and a newsletter.
IFLA, the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions, has a Rare Books and Manuscripts Section. I haven't managed to work out what's what regarding IFLA membership: I've heard more than once in the last year that CILIP membership gets you some sort of IFLA membership, too, and will post again when I untangle the mystery. Anyway, the forthcoming Mid-Term Meeting, 'Ambassadors of the Book. Competences for heritage librarians', looks very interesting indeed, and is in Antwerp Where The Plantin Museum Is.
I understand that it's possible to be an overseas member of the American Library Association (ALA), which has a Rare Books and Manuscripts bit (RBMS). On its homepage it describes itself as a "Section [...] of the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL), a division of the American Library Association (ALA)", and maybe that helps you understand why I haven't summoned up the wherewithal to find out more, and whether I can benefit from it at all. (The ALA website hurts my brain even more than the CILIP one.) I hear that other bits of ALA have all sorts of online training and events, but I don't see heaps of evidence of that on the RBMS pages. Maybe I'm looking in the wrong way. [4/08/11 Edited to add: a helpful tweeter points out that ARCL, the parent group does do e-learning things.]
There's the Archives and Records Association (ARA) for those for whom 'special' spills right over into archives. It's a recent amalgamation of the Society of Archivists and the British Records Association.
In a slightly different specialist field is IAML, the International Association of Music Libraries. As a librarian with a music degree, though no actual music librarianship experience, it has been suggested (you know who you are) that I should join to help keep my options open. International membership is 37 Euro, but I can't find the cost of UK & Ireland branch membership (it seems to get you less, so is possibly cheaper).
Finally, returning to the online networking business, here are a couple of Twitter lists of rare books/special collections/archives people:

Any useful groups I've missed?

#cpd23, Thing 6: Online networks

2011-08-03T20:19:00.000+01:00

Cooee, there are a lot of online networks aren't there? At the last count, I'm a member of at least all of the following, grouped according to my problems with them:

Stuff is going on but I don't keep up with it:

LIS New Professionals Network
LinkedIn (my mebership is brand new for this thing, spurred a little by Suzanne Wheatley's prompting at the New Professionals Conference)

Some stuff is going on, though possibly not enough to warrant much attention, and that makes me even worse at keeping up with it:

'tangle' by Jenning Downing on Flickr

Other:

Facebook (strictly personal use)
Academia.edu (mentioned positively over on Dark side of the catalogue, but I've not investigated it yet. Anyone else have opinions?)

As you may have guessed, I'm not very good at making the most of these sites. My action point at the end of this Thing is to set up RSS feeds for forums and site activity so that I have more idea what's happening where. At the moment I'm relying on Twitter to draw my attention to interesting things, but I don't really think this is necessarily the responsible action to take.

Not responsible? I think not. Relying on other people to bring me news of these communities is a bit lazy, and it also acts against the best interests of the communities themselves. If they're worth having, then they're worth using in their native location. I'm not, to be quite honest, perfectly sure that all of them do bring much to professional networking or anything else (I'm thinking particularly of event-centred communities), but I feel I ought to do more to helping the viable ones be viable, by contributing to a critical mass of users.

The CILIP fora, for example, were a good place to to have hustings for the councillor and VP elections last year - I feel like they ought to be a useful and successful space, but at the moment they're clearly underused. I would have thought that there's a need for a place for discussion that is less 'blink-and-you'll-miss-it' than Twitter, but maybe people prefer do interact that way in blog comments instead?

In conclusion: online networking = good idea, but having so many places to do it means that it's somehow harder than it should be. And I haven't even done anything (save put up a profile pic and check my privacy settings) with Google+ yet.
Sigh.

A Week in My Library Life #libday7

2011-07-31T16:35:00.000+01:00

I'm a 'Rare Books Specialist' at Cambridge University Library. As part of Round 7 of the Library Day in the Life Project, here's a summary of the sort of things I've been up to this week.

Looking after the readers

Reader service isn't my primary function, but the whole point of having a library is so that readers can use it, so that's where I'll start this overview. Our library has a Rare Books Reading Room that could, technically, seat up to 60 people, although they'd be frightfully squashed. And average day would generally see up to 20 readers in at one time. The 'Rare Books' net is cast fairly wide: it covers all printed material produced pre-1900, and selected printed material produced post-1900. Manuscripts are produced in a separate room. The department has a team of book fetchers (who fetch around 1,000 items a week) and room supervisors who manage the day-to-day production of material and supervision of the room. I do occasional stints on the reading room desk to cover lunchtimes, break times, evenings, Saturdays and absences for sickness or holiday. I'm also one of the people asked to help out with non-standard enquiries. This week a couple of people were on holiday, so my share of desk duty was higher than normal. Summer is also a busy time for the room, as lots of scholars make trips to research libraries at this time of year, making the most of a break from teaching responsibilities to get on with their own research. Visiting researchers often want to see a lot of books in a fairly short time, they're less familiar with our policies, practices and services than our regulars, and as they're likely to be off to the next library very soon, they'll want their photocopying done as quickly as possible!

To be fair, our till doesn't look like this at all.

On the whole, I really enjoy working on the reading room desk. Although much of the work is very routine--checking requests, checking fetched material out to readers and back in again when they're done, keeping an eye on how the material is treated, checking requests for photocopying and digital imaging, and authorising requests for self-service photography--it's a good way to get to know what sort of books people are interested in, and how they use our catalogues and other resources. And I get to use the till when people buy pencils or pay for their photocopies. Bing! It is sometimes frustrating working on a front-line desk when the things I want to get done demand periods of focussed attention, but that just means I have to balance what I do when, so that the intensive stuff is left for when I can sit in the office (relatively) undisturbed.

Looking after the books

We're very fortunate to have a certain budget in the department for new acquisitions of rare material. We generally purchase in order to supplement existing collection strengths, rather than to try and be 'completist' about our holdings. As I've only been in post for a few months, I'm still getting to know the collections (have a look at our collection summaries here and you'll start to understand why!), so I don't have much of a role in choosing new purchases. But I do do some of the background checking before we buy: double checking catalogues (both electronic and paper) to see if we, or other Cambridge libraries, already hold a copy, for example.

Once we've decided to get a book, it has to be checked on arrival to make sure we've got what we were expecting - all pages and plates are counted and checked, the condition is examined, etc. etc. And then it goes onto the cataloguing shelf.

I love cataloguing rare books, but it's fair to say that there's a knack to doing it efficiently that I haven't yet grasped. One can go to almost infinite lengths checking previous owners (we record as a matter of course any kinds of provenance marks in or on the books), deciding on binding materials and dates, and looking up references to the book in question.

Here are a couple of recent examples: a bibliography of the works of a geologist, acquired with a collection of his papers (this book was transferred to us from the manuscripts department) and a book of seventeenth-century German concrete poetry, lavishly embellished with extra plates relating to the city of Nuremberg by an early owner.

Exhibitions

I'm very fortunate that I'm responsible for the Library's internal exhibition cases, located on our main corridor on the way to the Tea Room. The exhibition programme sees a new display every two to three months. These are curated generally by members of Library staff, and cover a range of topics which enable us to showcase holdings or themes that wouldn't necessarily be included in the main public exhibition area. Recent topics have been Ernest Hemingway, and twentieth-century Dutch book bindings. The next exhibition will be set out this week; I've been advising the curators throughout about suitability of material for display, case sizes, caption conventions, and so on.

Project work

Our department currently has a major cataloguing project in train. The Incunabula Project, funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, will see the Library's holdings of pre-1501 books (known as 'incunabula'), which number over 4,500, catalogued to the fullest current standards. The cataloguing work falls mainly to the project's Research Associate and others of my colleagues, but I am working to support the project by producing on online guide to the history of the incunable collection. With the permission of the publishers, CUP, we are producing a web version of the introduction to the collection written by J.C.T. Oates, the author of the 1950s short-title catalogue of the collection (the only catalogue currently available). Oates' introduction is a masterful example of academic librarianly writing of its period, but to modern eyes it's somewhat wordy. I'm doing what I can to make it useful to the modern reader by dividing it into meaningful sections, and illustrating as many of these as possible with images of our books.

These images will focus particularly, where possible, on marks of provenance and other copy-specific details, so I am taking a lot of images myself specifically for this project. This past week I've done a lot of work taking images to slot into the webpages that I have already pretty much finished writing. Soon I hope to be able to hand the whole lot over to colleagues for proofreading.

Misc.

From time-to-time I'm obviously also involved in other things, such as supervising TV film crews who wish to use our materials, or helping with Library open days for prospective students or University Alumni. The nature of the holdings in our department means, however that even a 'standard' day usually holds lots of interest.

On the back of similar posts in the past I've had a few emails from new professionals interested in special collections work. I'm always happy to answer any questions you might have, either in the comments here, or in email, but I'm fairly new to this myself and certainly don't proclaim myself any sort of expert!

Doing it wrong

2011-07-31T11:04:00.000+01:00

'How academic libraries annoy academics' is a recent post by one of the blogging team at Social Justice Librarian (tip o' the cursor to Kristine Chapman for bringing it to my attention).

The post itself is worth a read (although I'll summarise it here, too) but it's the comments that are really, um, enlightening. So go and read them. It'll give much-needed context to what follows here.

Firstly, the post. Greyson went to the library to get a book previously found on the catalogue. The visit was unsuccessful. Put very simply, a book marked as available on the catalogue couldn't be found in the library, and after using the 'report a problem' button on the record Greyson was told that that sort of problem had to be reported in person at the circulation desk of the library in question.

As horror stories go, it's not a classic. But it does reveal at least a couple of problems in the library system: no easy catalogue access in the book stacks, and unclear reporting mechanisms. If 'report a problem' means 'only report certain kinds of problem' then it ought to say so, and it ought to say what to do for the others.

But the details in this case really aren't the point here. Greyson points out that a wasted half-hour like this is precisely what will make academics advocate less forcefully or frequently for the library:

"I want my faculty colleagues to be advocates for our university library. So I do what I can to give them warm fuzzies about it, pointing out new acquisitions in their areas, noting that online access to the Journal of Important Stuff is brought to their desktop by the library, etc. But some days the library doesn’t make this easy for me. Some days I’m afraid to tell them too much about the library, in case they actually try to use it and have an experience like the one above.

I absolutely know there are budget constraints, time constraints, people-power constraints and bureaucratic time-suck constraints on academic libraries. I can explain why any given problem with the library systems might exist. But I can’t make archaic systems less frustrating and more worthwhile for people who have the option to avoid contact with the library most of the time. And those are the same people I really want out there speaking for the importance of the library. What a conundrum."

In short: we're alienating the very people who could help us the most. Ouch.

This is a hard message, and an important one to hear, understand, and act on. But what do some of the comments say? They say "Greyson, you're doing it wrong".

Example 1: "I kept waiting for the line where you went to the staff and asked for help locating the book instead of schlepping back to your office."

Example 2: "Don’t blame the library! We are here to help. Any faculty member that has contacted me directly gets my priority response, as nurturing that rapport with them is at the top of my list, since it “trickles down” to students too and helps them in the long run as well."

Example 3: "I think you should have asked the reference librarian before leaving the library. Computers are excellent starting points for information seeking, but nothing can replace good old fashioned face to face contact. Others have mentioned the following as well: just because it’s not on the reshelving cart or lying on study table doesn’t mean it’s not in the library. As a cataloger, when adding a book to the collection, the book is typically in the OPAC for about a day and a half before it actually physically becomes part of the collection. Why? Simple. After tagging the book in OCLC, and entering the holdings information for Voyager, I still have to take each book and write the call number on the inside cover, print the spine label, cut the spine label, apply the spine label, apply the protective sticker, and use a boning tool to make sure all those stickers stay stuck. Thus, new acquisitions are on the cart in my office for a day or two after they begin to show up in the OPAC, depending on how many books I have to process."

(To be fair, many of the comments are fair, balanced and constructive.)

"You're doing it wrong". Is that the best we can come up with? I was really surprised and disappointed to see such a hostile and unhelpful reaction to a post written with the explicit attention of drawing to librarians' attention a perceived problem.

If the reasonable reader (which I would say, in this instance, Greyson is) finds something difficult, then maybe the problem is with the system and not the reader. And it's our job to find the ways in which it's broken and to fix it. That's not always easy: it's hard, once you're inside a system, to view it as an outsider does, and to see what's illogical and what could be improved. And even if you can see problems, it's hard if you're at a junior level to instigate change. That's why it's great if and when readers point out what's not working for them. (I would, of course, advise Greyson to send a link to the post to a librarian at the library in question - they ought to want to know about reader experiences.)

Yes, sure, it'd be nice if people always asked us when they're stuck, and told us when things don't work right, but people on the whole don't like doing that. Honestly now, how many times in Sainsbury's do you actually ask where they've moved the mustard to, and how many times do you just wander about cursing under your breath hoping it will leap off the shelf into your basket?

Back to libraries... Not only were people annoyed that someone who did something in an unexpected way dared to complain, a few of the commenters seemed personally offended at an apparent attack on their work. This misses the point. There's no point trying to defend a broken system by pointing out how hard you and/or your colleagues are working, or how much you yearn to help people with their queries. (Indeed, maybe if the system worked better you'd feel less like everyday at work is an uphill struggle.) The broken system isn't (necessarily) reflecting badly on your work ethic, but it is still broken.

Frankly, I think we need to get a grip and stop blaming the readers. Whether it's broken because it's more-or-less the same system you've had for the last 30 years, or because it's something new that just isn't working, or whatever, if you find yourself saying to readers, "that's not how we do it" or, "oh no, blah doesn't mean blah it actually means thingummy" or, "you have to go and tell so-and-so that" then really, who's doing it wrong?

lolcat added to try and lighten the mood.

A day at umbrella (#ub11)

2011-07-30T18:12:00.002+01:00

A couple of weeks ago I went down to Hatfield for CILIP's major conference, Umbrella. It was my first time at Umbrella, and it was the biggest conference I've been too so far in my career. I had two reasons for going: 1) to find out more about the library profession outside academia/special collections; 2) to present a poster about Library TeachMeets.

Reactions

'Stormy Weather' by JD Hancock on Flickr

I must confess that I wasn't sure whether I'd enjoy it or not. I didn't have a lot of time available to prepare myself in advance: I wasn't sure which sessions I'd go to, I didn't know who the keynote speaker was, I wasn't really sure who else I knew was going. I wasn't really looking forward to spending time in a place with hundreds of other people, feeling bewildered...

But the thing is, I had a really brilliant time there. There are various reasons for that:

Plentiful coffee supplies, starting with coffee at registration. I am just a nicer person when properly caffeinated.
With just three sessions of papers/panels in the day it felt like there was more time to breathe than at some other conferences I've been to. It felt like there was space to keep talking to people from the previous session, and to meet someone in the break, and then to move onto the next thing without feeling unduly harried. Mentally, too, three main themes in a day left time to think and reflect.
The sessions I attended were all brilliant (see below). The speakers were articulate and interesting, the topics were covered well, I learnt new things and started to think about things I already knew in new ways.
Everyone I met there was really friendly. This went for people I already knew either in person or online, and people I met for the very first time. I really noticed that having a few online contacts already made me much more willing and able to strike up conversation with people I'd never met before, which was an unexpected but very welcome discovery!
My poster was well received, I thought, and the 23 Things Professional Development poster (presented by Claire Sewell, designed by me) was very well received, and won the judges' first prize and attendee vote runner-up prize (for which thank you!).

So, how can I replicate this great conference experience elsewhere? That bit's hard to answer. Maybe the key is to just accept the event for whatever it is - not to try and wring out everything possible from it, and not to wish I was chatting with the 'right' people, but just to interact with who's there and see what I learn.

Sessions

I went to two sessions in the Big Society stream, and one in the Technologies and Access stream. Inspired by Joseph Norwood, I tried drawing a few pictures to sum up ideas and themes from the sessions. My drawing skills are no match for his, but looking back at my notes after a couple of weeks, I find that they're rather handy as short-hand ways of recollecting what I was thinking.

Big Society, Big Opportunity: the response of government information professionals to the Coalition's agenda for the public sector - a panel discussion

This was a panel discussion between three government librarians, working in the Departments for Work and Pensions, Communities and Local Government, and Education. The three speakers all asserted that they don't really know what the Big Society actually is, but they also agreed, which is no surprise, that it means change. For government departments it means both the devolution of powers and responsibilities--as quangos and other bodies are disbanded and more work is done locally/by communities--but also having to take on more responsibilities as intermediary layers of bureaucracy are removed (some quango business will be taken over higher up the hierarchy, and, for example, 'independent' community ventures such as Free Schools don't report locally but straight to the top). So the first primary challenge they face is that roles and responsibilities across departments are changing, and information services need to prove their worth in straightened times. As in many other fields, they can do this by moving into non-traditional, but library-allied, roles, such as the linked tasks of records and knowledge management and managing Freedom of Information requests (and other related compliance issues).

The second area of particular interest that was discussed several times was the Transparency Agenda: the government desire to make information and data freely available to the public, via data.gov.uk and similar means. It was pointed out that civil servants aren't traditionally keen on letting go of information, but also, and more significantly, that maybe just letting a lot of poorly ordered and managed data out into the public domain isn't really useful for anyone. The problem is - are there the resources to sort it out?

Gilding the Lily: Images and objects need useful metadata!

This session presented three case-studies of non-printed-book cataloguing. Two were image collections in single institutions (the George Washington Wilson collection at the University of Aberdeen and the photographic collections of Frank Ludlow and George Sheriff at the Natural History Museum), one a mixed bag of archives and museum objects from a variety of institutions (Suffolk Heritage Direct). The overriding message from the three was that whatever you, as the first cataloguer, put into the system will definitely not be the last word on the form that the data will take in years to come, either because systems will change over time, or because your one-institution-dataset will ultimately be brought together with data from other places. In the absence of a perfect world, it's probably therefore more important to get something into a system, than to worry and fret over every last word and comma and not get so much done. As someone managing a cataloguing project - consider in your decisions what will make the data flexible in the future.

Librarians as Citizen Reporters

I had no real idea what to expect from this session. It turned out to be about local community websites and journalism endeavours, and that part(s) that libraries can play in these. Some of the example sites mentioned were:

These sites enable people to help each other out locally - by sharing information, answering questions, raising issues. They positive impacts on' real life' community--people coming out onto the streets to help clear snow, for example--and can improve community opinions of institutions such as the police or the council, when such institutions engage with them in a sensible and helpful way.

The implications for libraries of this are twofold:

Libraries can support the necessary training and technology requirements for people to be involved in these endeavours. Providing space, equipment and training is a way of showing that libraries are needed, useful, relevant, etc. As a non-core activity, it's also something that could potentially use volunteers, without that volunteer involvement threatening current professional roles. Perhaps.
Librarians could get involved with these communities, in the manner that some councillors have done, to offer information to people who need it. Either on a formal basis (an 'ask the librarian' thread) or informally - quietly lurking in the community and speaking up when they think can help. Either of these models strike me as being similar to the 'embedded librarian' which is growing in prominence in the academic/subject librarian world. This would, again, prove the usefulness of librarians, and hopefully raise the profile of the library and its services.

There's information about research done into these communities on the Networked Neighbourhoods site.

Conclusions/Action Points/What Next?

I have few definite conclusions to draw from the conference, except perhaps 'just get on and act on your ideas'. Times are hard, but sitting around whinging won't make them any better. Everyone can do something to improve attitudes or services. So get on with it.

#cam23, Extra Thing 4: Libraries widget

2011-07-26T14:01:00.000+01:00

I tried out the Cambridge Libraries Widget last summer, and the RSS feed and Calendar feeds when they were launched. I can see that they'll be really useful to some people, but somehow they just don't do it for me.

So I'm going to tell you about something that I do use a lot, and is applicable to readers outside the Cambridge bubble. Did you know that you can customize the search box in your browser? And did you know that Copac (the UK National, Academic, and Specialist Library Catalogue) is one of the things you can add?

How to add the COPAC search to your browser

Go to http://copac.ac.uk/, click on 'Interfaces' on the right hand side, and then 'Search Copac from your Web browser search bar using 'plugins' (or follow this link to go there directly).
Click on the type of search you'd like to add.
That's it!
You should now be able to choose the COPAC option from your browser search box.
You can edit you search box and add/remove search providers. In Internet Explorer go to Tools>Internet Options>'Settings' next to 'Change search defaults'. In Firefox, click on the drop-down arrow in the search box and then on 'Manage Search Engines'.
If there are other sites you search frequently, it's worth having a look around to see if they have a browser search option. As well as Wikipedia and Amazon, I have a German dictionary and the OED, in my search box and and Oxford Dictionary of National Biography search that runs from the bookmarks toolbar.

I'd love to hear of any favourite search box/bookmarks toolbar tools that you use.

#cpd23, Thing 5: reflective practice

2011-07-17T11:31:00.000+01:00

A while ago I overcame my somewhat sneery attitude to 'reflective practice' when I realised that underneath the (to me) management-speak-ish name it really just means 'thinking about what you've done and are doing'. Now, I may have my limitations in many fields but thinking about stuff is something I can definitely do. Indeed, I can think about things so much that I end up having no idea what I think about them, or how I'd write that down in concise and comprehensible English. So what's my approach to reflective practice?

Reflections in Oxford

Why?
My reasons for reflective writing are three-fold:

To remember what I've done, and what I thought about it. Having some sort of written record, even if it's not a blow-by-blow account of an event, really helps things to stick in my mind. It's useful, too, just to have a findable list of what you've been up to.
To sort the wheat from the chaff. Taking some time to reflect and write-up helps to work out what are the important things I should remember/act on/do differently next time.
To build up a body of evidence for my Chartership portfolio.

What?
I find that having a framework to use when reflecting is really useful in the battle against woolly (both unfocussed and tangled) thinking. The 'what - so what - now what' model mentioned in Emma's post is a good place to start. For more intractable reflections I make notes under the following headings, which are my adaptation from a Chartership course I went to last summer. If you think they'd be useful for you, then by all means use them!

What was the event/visit/other (what were the circumstances, history or overview, facts)
My involvement - what did I do (actions taken i.e. what and how)
Feelings about my role/about the event or visit or whatever (reactions/emotions)
Why is this event important to me?/Why did I go?/Why was it important to those organising it?
Were there any significant problems that you/the organisers had to overcome?
In what ways have your skills, knowledge and understanding developed as a result?/What did the organisers learn?
What might I or the organisers do differently next time

How have you applied/will you apply your learning in the workplace?
What would I do the same next time?

I particularly like that very last point: what would you keep the same?. It's important when evaluating things that you've done to recognise, and build on, the good stuff as well as improving what didn't go so well!

Gratuitous dog picture to illustrate woolly thinking

What now?
The one thing that would really improve by professional reflection would be to revisit my thoughts and plans a few months after events take place. I need to find a way of building that in to what I do. Maybe quarterly reviews on the blog? That's not such a bad idea, in fact - I'd need to pick a memorable date, though, so that the months don't slip by unanounced too often. In the spirit of keeping alive old cultural references how about the Quarter Days, so long as no-one minds if the December one is late!

Any umberellas? (#ub11)

2011-07-12T09:00:00.008+01:00

'Chinatown' by Thomas Hawk on Flickr

Today I'm at Umbrella 2011, CILIP's great big two-yearly (I think?) conference. I'm presenting a poster about Library TeachMeets - you can see the poster and find out more about TeachMeet over on the Cambridge Librarian TeachMeet site.

If we met at the conference and you've tracked me down then do leave a comment to say hello, and have a look at some of my other posts via the archive and tags on the right hand side.

#cam23, Things 5 and 6: screenshots and -casting

2011-07-09T17:46:00.001+01:00

Thing 5
When I'm making screenshots I usually use the tried-and-tested method of hitting 'printscreen' and then editing the image in whatever image software I have handy. But LightShot certainly looks useful, and I've bookmarked it for further reference.

Thing 6
'Learn more about screencasting' has been on my to-do list since before Christmas, so many thanks to cam23 for giving me the impetus to get on with it. I found screencast-o-matic very easy to use, and it didn't have any hilarious but alarming consequences such as the Wallace-and-Gromit-style name might imply! My only complaint would be that it made the computer a little slow to run, but that's probably an old PC issue as much as anything.

In order to get a little practice, I've ticked another thing off my to-do list, one that I added around the time of the first Cambridge Library TeachMeet, in September last year. That evening someone asked me how I'd made the camlibtm logo, and suggested I blog about it. I never got round to it, but here, at long last, is a tutorial on how to create that sort of logo. The tutorial uses GIMP; the original logo was actually created in Photoshop, but the principles are the same.

I didn't script this in advance - I just had a practice run-though in GIMP to check I knew what I wanted to do, and a brief trial with screencast-o-matic to check it worked the way I expected. So please forgive the rough edges!

#cam23, Extra Thing 2: Twitter Extras

2011-07-09T15:07:00.000+01:00

I've been meaning to set up something like HootSuite for ages and ages. Lots of people say that the columns format makes it much easier to manage Twitter and make it work for you. Recently I've laso learnt that you can use it to manage multiple Twitter accounts - I tweet on behalf of @camlibtm, @cpd23 and @CamLibGroup on occasion, and it would make things a lot simpler if I didn't have to sign out and in again all the time.

So I've signed up. What do I think after ten minutes' use?

It looks different. Wierdly, this really phases me. I'm used to my own Twitter design, and I'm not a great fan of the three available HootSuite themes.
It's not possible for me to tweet via there for cpd23, because another member of the team has already added that account to their HootSuite account, and would have to have a paid account and add me as a 'team member' to make it possible. Rats!
It's rather slow on my antiquated old PC, but then most things are.

'sparrer' by Jenny Downing on Flickr

Verdict? I can see why people love it, but I'm not certain whether it's for me or not. I guess I could sign into that for my tweets, and into Twitter itself for the other account I want to use, and that would save so much logging out-and-in when I want to tweet things from both accounts. But the format doesn't revolutionise my world - I've found other ways of managing Twitter (which may or may not involve having lots of Firefox tabs open).

Of the other things mentioned in this Extra Thing, I'm pleased to say that I already use bit.ly (increasingly redundant as Twitter now automatically shortens links, but still handy for looking at stats. Add a plus sign ('+') to the end of a link, and see how many people have clicked, and when. If you sign up for an account you can also access all the links you've previously shortened and get browser widgets, etc.), twitterfeed autotweets my blog posts, and I've consulted Twapperkeeper and Archivist too in the past.

#cpd23, Thing 4: current awareness

2011-07-09T13:32:00.001+01:00

I was introduced to Twitter, to RSS feeds and to Google Reader last year during Cam23. I'm a regular and committed user of them all.

Re-reading last year's posts, I see that I was particularly perceptive early on about the benefits of Twitter:

...if you have a wide circle of followers and followees, Twitter seems to good for spreading information and ideas quickly. And it seems that, unlike with RSS feeds, it's information that you might not know you want to go looking for...

The use of hashtags seems to make it possible to create a community of people interested in the same thing, and to widen knowledge about that thing and get a buzz going around it...

I wasn't, however, completely sold then, I wasn't sure if I'd stick at it. That was a feeling that persisted for quite a while - I wondered if I'd go back to it after weeks away for holidays, Christmas, etc. But I do go back. It's important to remember that you can't keep up with everything, and just to let it waft by when you're too busy to pay attention. But it's an invaluable way to meet people, share ideas, get answers and make things happen. I'm feeling chuffed with myself this month for having introduced to each other some of the people who've gone on to organise #uklibchat.

'Yesterday News' by Zarko Drincic on Flickr

RSS is great for bringing the news to you - I use it for comics I follow, knitting blogs I follow, podcasts I like, institutional news, and a whole slew of library/librarians blogs. The key, for me, is to remember that you don't have to read it all. Some of the stuff I subscribe to is stuff I always look at when it comes in. The rest, and this is by far and away the majority I either glance at and deicide to read later (or not), or is just there in case I want to fill some time with reading. But mostly, I don't read a lot of it. Some of it I hear about via Twitter, some of it I just 'mark as read'. There's no shame in not keeping up with everything - but RSS gives you a fighting chance if you're really keen to try!

A Google Reader feature I've recently started using is the 'shared items' feature. You can follow other people and see what they've chosen to share, and people who follow you can see what you share. You can leave notes and comments on shared items, too. It's a nice way to pick up on things outside feeds you follow. To follow someone, the easiest way that I've found is to search for their Google profile (here's me - you can use the search box from the top of that page - and here are the things I've shared) and look for links to their shared items. Otherwise use the shared items option in reader and search for people there.

Now, as for Pushnote, the word on Twitter and other blogs is that it's not great. And so I'm just not looking at it. Sorry.

As for other things useful to current awareness, I wonder sometimes if I ought to use Delicious as a stuff-discovery tool. But you'd have to have very specific tags in mind for that to be very useful - event/theme hashtags, maybe? It's not something I've really explored.

#cpd23, Thing 3: does my brand look big in this?

2011-07-09T13:00:00.000+01:00

It's taken me a long time to get round to writing this post. Unlike many others, I'm not too uncomfortable with having a 'personal brand' that I take into account when presenting myself online. But I am fairly uncertain of quite what my brand is, what is should be, and how I should best be communicating that.

What do you think about the Girl in the Moon?

Name
I've written before about my changing opinions regarding my own anonymity (or otherwise) online. When I started this blog and first signed up to Twitter, I was only using a pseudonym. I'd vaguely thought of having 'The Man in the Moon' as a stand-by pseudonym for a while - based on an in-joke from years ago - but when it came down to it, I thought I ought to at least have something that reflected by actual gender. Thus Girl in the Moon. I don't know what I'll do if I ever decide I want to sound more grown up than a girl... And I really have no idea what sort of image that the name projects. Whimsical? Astronomical? Probably, I fear, astrological, even though I don't hold with that bunkum at all. It doesn't overtly link to libraries, but I don't know if that matters. I've tried for consistently across platforms, but girlinthemoon is fairly popular as a username, so often I've used maedchenimmond (German for Girl in the Moon) with the English as a display name. I like to hope that isn't confusing - I do try to use other means to unify all my presences.

Photograph
I'm a bit squeamish about using a photograph of me, even though I well recognise the benefits of being identifiable. It's not because I'm particularly concerned about privacy, I think I honestly think a picture of something else is probably more aesthetically pleasing and distinctive. If you really want to know what I look like, most of the first image results for my name are pictures of me (except the ones that are my avatar!). As I've changed the design of various profiles and of this blog over time, I've retained the same avatar so that there is some consistency. I worry (probably unduly) about changing things too much and people being confused. Equally, I am starting to wonder whether I shouldn't more often include an actual photograph of me so that finding people at conferences would be easier.

Profersonal identity
I don't worry unduly about this. I do tend to think before I tweet - generally I don't talk about personal stuff, anniversaries, domestic disasters, what I'm having for dinner. But I do talk about hobbies - music and knitting - not least because a lot of the library folk I interact with professionally online also share these interests. I'm comfortable with that, and I think my general rule is that I don't talk about online things that I wouldn't talk about to general colleagues (not friends) in the office at work.

Visual brand
I'm definitely someone who's interested in design, although you could be forgiven for thinking otherwise when considering the various iterations of this blog. I do try to maintain a consistent, though not slavishly identical, design (colours, images) across various platforms. I wonder if my avatar image is a wise choice - it's a book (what a stereotype!), it's brown-ish (pretty dull), it's not very striking. But ultimately I am a slightly dull lass, who is interested in physical books, so maybe it's OK?

The Google/Bing/search engine of choice Challenge
I opened a difference browser (yes, yes, it's IE, I only use it for emergencies!) and checked I was logged out from everything. Here are some results pages:

Firstly, Google. This is all pretty good. I have a very distinctive name, so there's little question of it not being about me. It's just about which bits of me turn up. Google does well: Twitter and this blog are the first two, then references to various things I've presented at and written about professionally and recently. A profile page from an online network, and my Guardian article. Hurrah!

Bing is a little less satisfactory. The first two results are fine: my Ignite London talk and this blog. But then lots of minutes from committees I was on as a student. Oh dear. I wonder how to make this better? It's not as if my names isn't all over the place for library things these days. And I can't imagine that College Music Society minutes are frequently linked to.

Overall, there's nothing too alarming there. Phew. But I'm not sure that any of the above actually comes together to form a cohesive image. I worry that I rely on design because I haven't got anything more substantial to fall back on - I don't talk either mainly or knowledgeably about any particular topics, I'm not sure I have a distinctive writing style... These I things I notice about other people's brands, but fear they may be lacking from how I present myself? Tom Roper has indeed already commented that he thinks my brand is design-based, though I don't know that he meant that as a criticism (and he did say some other nice things, phew).

A second opinion
If, dear reader, you aren't exhausted from doing this for all the other CPD23 participants already, I'd like to hear your views.

What does 'Girl in the Moon' say to you?
Do you think I have a 'brand'? If yes, what does it say about me? If no, what am I doing wrong?
Should I be using a photograph of myself instead of an anonymous avatar?
Am I all style and no substance? Should I be focussing my efforts more narrowly (in terms of topic)?
Any other thoughts?

I've a thick skin, so don't hold back if there's something you've been dying to point out...

P.S. Multicolor Search Lab is a really cool search tool that lets you find Creative Commons images of Flickr based on their colour(s). That's where I found the lovely purple moon (above) for this post.

#cam23: iGoogle tip

2011-06-30T21:12:00.000+01:00

Did you know you can restore backed-up versions of your iGoogle page? A few weeks ago the Google servers had the hiccups and appeared to have wiped everything off my iGoogle page. But I discovered that you can restore automatically-saved backups very simply. I thought it might be useful to share what I learnt.

Here's what to do:

1) Go to the tab editing page by clicking next to the little arrow next to the tab name, and then 'edit this tab'

2) Scroll to the bottom of the page, select the backup date and time you'd like to restore, and click on 'restore now'. Bingo: crisis averted.

#cpd23, Thing 2: meeting people

2011-06-26T22:15:00.001+01:00

There sure a lot of neighbours in this cpd23 business - very nearly 600 at the last count. So in picking people to investigate I've stayed quite close to home in a certain way - I've checked out the rarebooks/specialcollections, archives and (because I have interests in the 'heritage' sector more widely) museumlibrary tags in Delicious. One of my cpd23 goals is to meet more online librarian types with similar professional interests to me. While there's nothing wrong with the people I've met online over the last year, not many of them actually work in similar jobs to me!

by Joe Shlabotnik on Flickr

So, the people I've found are:

Rare/special/archives:

Dusty Old Bookshelf
Headstrong Ways
mininglibrarian (who hasn't posted about cpd23, but is already an active blogger)
Notes from the Basement (who turns out to be someone I follow on Twitter but haven't really said hello to before)

Museum libraries:

Most of these had already had quite a few comments - I think because there aren't many tagged like that and they're fields perceived as interesting and exciting. I feel a a bit like I ought to branch out in case there are other blogs not getting so much attention...

Aside from those above, I'm also keeping an eye on #cpd23 tweets and following links to a few blogs that way (aside from people I already know, this has led me to Information Overload and Life in the Fair-Middling Lane). And, as one of the Delicious updaters for the cpd23 team, I've happened across a couple of blogs that I'm going to follow: Shannon Robalino because she knits, Gemma because her first post sounded nervous and I want to be supportive, and Sarah's cpd because she was concerned that she's not 'eligible' to take part (she is). Hopefully in the next few days I'll have a chance to check out some of the overseas blogs, too.

#cpd23, Thing 1: introduction and blogging

2011-06-26T15:25:00.000+01:00

It's very odd to write a post in response to instructions I wrote myself... Having, as it were, written the book on it, I won't comment further on what it's like setting up a blog. I'll just note that I've decided to stick to the blog I already have (set up last year for 23 Things Cambridge) rather than trying something new. I like the idea of keeping everything in one place, rather than having several different outlets that I'd feel the need to link to each other clearly for the sake of clarity.

By jakeandlindsay on Flickr

I'm part of the cpd23 organising team. I leapt at the chance to get involved because it seemed like such a great idea - the 23 Things, self-paced format worked really well in Cambridge last year, so I thought we could definitely do something great in changing the focus to professional development and opening it up worldwide. I'm astonished by the number of people who've signed up, and rather alarmed, too as it makes a lot of work for the team in administering it all. Hopefully I'll still have some time left to take part!

I'm a rare books librarian working in a major university and research library. I've been very lucky (or very determined) in my career so far. Having entered librarianship because of a desire to work with rare books and manuscripts, since completing my MA LIS at UCL I've worked on a personal papers cataloguing and outreach project and now I've working in rare books cataloguing/customer service/collection promotion. I'm hoping that cpd23 might kickstart my languishing CILIP Chartership efforts and that it will help me work towards the goal of achieving a permanent post somewhere in the special collections world. I'll also looking forward to spreading my network wider.

#cam23, Extra Thing1: beautification

2011-06-26T14:45:00.000+01:00

Having completed all of last year's 23 Things Cambridge programme, this year I'm just going to do each week's 'extra' Thing except for the odd Things that is new to the programme (and to me) this year. There might also be some overlap with Things from the 23 Things for Professional Development programme, too.

A favourite colour combination

The first Extra Thing is making your blog beautiful. As I commented (probably more than once) last summer, I am an inveterate tinkerer with things, and the very first things I did when I set up this blog was to start tinkering with the CSS of the template to try and get it to look how I wanted. To be honest, I never really succeeded, so spurred on by #cam23, I've changed to a Blogger template customized with some purple and yellow.

Gadgets-wise, I've had quite a few for quite a while, but I've swapped things about a bit to include a subscribe by email option and an RSS feed of recent #cpd23 posts. My favourite Blogger gadget is the 'html/java' box, because it let's you do almost anything you want to - the 'Recently registered' box over on the #cpd23 blog is created using that Gadget with some code from Delicious (to create a 'linkroll') pasted in.

Another good way to customize your blog is to make use of the 'pages' option to add a fixed pages. I've got two: one for the basics, and one to show some some things I've proud of having done.

#npc2011: Teaching old books new tricks

2011-06-20T16:30:00.002+01:00

Round about the time this post goes live, I'll be speaking along with Naomi Herbert at the CILIP CDG New Professionals Conference up in Manchester. You can see our slides below, and if you click through to Slideshare, you can also see the text of our paper in the 'Speaker notes' box below each slide. I'll be writing up my thoughts about the conference in due course!

Teaching old books new tricks: how special collections outreach can help you, your career, and your library

View more presentations from Katie Birkwood

Edited on 21/06/2011 to add: A huge thanks to the conference attendees for voting this the day's best paper, to the Career Development Group and Sue Hill recruitment for the prize money and champagne, to Biddy Fisher for awarding them to us, and above all to Naomi for being such a brilliant co-presenter and inspiring colleague.

Cam23 2.0

2011-06-09T13:30:00.001+01:00

'23' by Leo Reynolds on Flickr

A very brief announcement (and a test of the 'schedule post' option on Blogger).

In case any Uni of Cam librarians and library staff haven't already heard, 23 Things Cambridge makes a welcome return this summer. Cam23 2.0 starts on 20 June, with a LAUNCH PARTY on Friday 17 June from 5pm in the UL Morison Room.

23 Things for Professional Development

2011-06-03T11:46:00.001+01:00

I'm involved in running a free, open-to-all, professional development course for librarians and information professionals this summer. 23 Things for Professional Development, as the name suggests, is '23-Things'-style self-directed course with a focus on ways to help your CPD by using social media and web 2.0 and by being professionally active in more traditional ways.

On the cpd23 blog you can find a list of the Things and the course timetable, a registration form (if you already have a blog ready and raring to go), and a bit of background information.

The idea of the course is to introduce you to new (or old) tools, and encourage you to try them out and think about how you can incorporate them into your career development. People at any stage in their careers and from an sector can take part, and we're hoping that as well and individual learning there will be lots of opportunities for sharing ideas, meeting new people and developing your network. (Ugh, there's that word again). If you're interested, I'd strongly encourage you to check out the blog, and to tell other people about it (publicity info is here).

The programme starts on Monday 20th June, with the posting of Things 1 and 2 on the blog. Looking forward to seeing you there!

The results are in

2011-05-24T18:03:00.000+01:00

You may remember that back in March I set loose on the world a knitting pattern, designed by my own fair hand, for library-inspired fingerless gloves. This was an entry in the LIS New Professionals Network library advocacy competition, but it was also a good excuse for me to devote some time to knitting.

The results of the competition have now been announced, and I'm really chuffed to receive an honourable mention from the judging panel: it's seems unfair to be commended for something I had such fun doing! The winning entries thoroughly deserve their success. First place has been awarded to Jacqueline Barlow's That's Not Online project, and second place to Annie Johnson's Putting the Pieces Together advocacy-through-jigsaws scheme.

Threat of library closure at the British Museum

2011-05-16T21:58:00.001+01:00

Oh dear. Very worrying news has trickled out from the British Museum. It seems that the Museum is considering closing its Paul Hamlyn Library.

British Museum Great Court

This library is open to the public, to all visitors to the Museum. It brings together resources relating to all of the cultures present in the Museum, to support both visitors' and curators' understanding of Museum artefacts. The Library has a significant outreach role: it provides a children's library, school sessions, and lends out resource packs for families. It also houses unique special collections and archival material: Museum guidebooks dating back to 1762, copies of Museum publications and exhibition ephemera, and a poster archive.

The Paul Hamlyn library moved into the famous round Reading Room in the centre of the Museum's main court after the British Library opened in the 1990s. For the last few years it's been moved elsewhere as the Reading Room has been turned over to blockbuster exhibitions. New exhibition space is due to open fairly soon, and it had been planned for the Paul Hamlyn Library to move back in when the exhibitions moved out. With no Library to live in it, one worries about what might happen to the Reading Room in the long term.

There is little concrete information available about this threat. There has been no public statement from the Museum, despite the apparent existence of a 90-day consultation period. Everything I know about this I've heard from the Historic Libraries Forum (who are a great organisation, by the way, and you can be a member for free!). Worryingly, it seems as though the Museum is trying to slip through this closure without many people noticing. No-one seems to know, for example, when the 90-day consultation period actually started!

The HLF is trying to raise awareness of this threat as widely as posisble, and is asking you to write to the Director and Deputy Director of the Museum to express your concern about the loss of the library. Closing the Paul Hamlyn Library would mean: the loss of services to the public, families and schools; the possible break up of a unique collection relating to the Museum and the collection it holds (including unique material), the loss of staff expertise; and an uncertain future for the iconic British Museum Reading Room.

Neil MacGregor, OM, FSA
Director of the British Museum
Great Russell Street
LONDON
WC1B 3DG

Dr Andrew Burnett
Deputy Director of the British Museum
Great Russell Street
LONDON
WC1B 3DG

Serious Concerns

2011-04-22T22:53:00.001+01:00

You may have heard that the British Library has just bought the papers of poet Wendy Cope, and that this collection is notable for being the Library's biggest digital accession in a literary archive to date as it includes thousands of Cope's emails.

This story made the culture slot in Thursday's Today programme on Radio 4, aired right in the middle of my breakfast-eating time. John Humphreys interviewed John Sutherland, Emeritus Professor of Eng Lit at University College London, and Richard Ovenden, Keeper of Special Collections at the Bodleian and chair of the Digital Preservation Coalition. You can listen to the whole piece until next Thursday (28 April) here.

I've chosen to blog about it because of the infuriating way the story was presented.

Humphreys was trying quite hard to make the general tone of the piece 'Emails? In an archive?! What is the world coming to?!!', and it's to Ovenden's huge credit that he managed to present a nuanced, forward-looking and optimistic case despite this attitude.

It was really interesting to see the way in which opinions about what is reasonable behaviour differ when considering a digital, not physical, archive. It's not news that in debates of this kind the physical object attracts an almost fetishistic level of interest. In this piece that was the case - Humphreys and Sutherland discussed a letter of Keats that sold for thousands, and the way that the manuscripts of George Orwell are poured over to see the exact minutiae of his writing processes. They decried the inability to extract similar information from digital material, but then when Ovenden suggests that this level of 'forensic' investigation is possible in the digital world too, the tide suddenly turned and this was viewed as intrusive and creepy. Humphreys even suggested it is reminiscent of the Stasi. (For more thoughts about what level of investigation into personal papers is and isn't expected and/or acceptable today and historically, read this interesting post on the Darwin and Gender blog.)

The topic of the interview then drifted on towards the difficulties brought by the high volume of digital material available. I've transcribed the closing section, which I think gives a decent impression of the uphill battle faced by Ovenden.

Ovenden: There are very useful techniques like text mining and data mining which enable you to use algorithmic analysis [incredulous laughter from Humphreys] on huge bodies of information. These are the tools of the scholar of the future. But also there are very traditional techniques that archivists have used called appraisal: we've been weeding collections of unwanted information for centuries to keep archives in manageable form and I think that we need archivists and librarians more than we ever have had because of this issue of digital abundance as it's been called.

Humphreys: We'll have to end it there because John Sutherland wants to rush off and learn his algorithms.

Digital preservation and access is a hugely difficult issue for archivists and special collections librarians, so I was really pleased to hear any even slightly productive discussion of it in the media. When people learn I'm a librarian who's worked with archival collections they very often start a pessimistic spiel about how 'we'll have nothing left' in the future because we do so much electronically today, which inevitably also reveals this unhelpful attachment to physical objects as relics of people and ideas. If this pessimistic attitude prevails then we we certainly won't have anything left, because no-one will have dared to deal with it. Fortunately, some people are daring to try and sort it out, so hurrah for the BL promoting that side of this acquisition.

The casual listener to Today will probably only have picked up the anti-digital main thrust of the piece, and not Ovenden's more considered, not to mention expert, view. Still, at least some people will have been listening more closely and will have heard the detail of what he said.

It's a shame that this interesting, and not actually entirely intellectually baffling, issue couldn't be addressed with some seriousness on what purports to be a serious news programme on a serious speech radio station. The Today programme's editorial (or maybe just Humphrey's personal) stance on topics like this is enough to make me scream.

---
Serious Concerns is the title of a collection of Cope's poems first published by Faber and Faber in 1992. You should read it.

LILAC 2011: Day 1, Monday 18 March

2011-04-19T21:03:00.000+01:00

Yesterday I went to the first day of the 5th Librarians' Information Literacy Annual Conference, LILAC, organised by the CILIP Information Literacy Group, a sub-group of the Community Services Group. I took copious notes throughout the day, and here's a sort-of digest of what I thought of it all.

Low-tech note taking

I must confess that information literacy (IL) isn't one of my main areas of interest or expertise: the impetus to go to LILAC came from Niamh and I having our proposal for a paper about Librarian TeachMeets accepted. That isn't to say that I don't think that IL is important, or that I didn't find the conference useful, but it's fair to say that I hadn't done all the background reading that some other delegates might have done...

Workshop sessions
The day started with three rounds of pre-conference workshops. I went to Andy Jackson's '22nd-century librarians and the death of information skills', which wasn't really about either the 22nd century or the death of information skills, but invited us to explore the way our teaching practice will have to develop in order to encompass 'graduate attributes' as well as the 'graduate skills' that our 'learners' (his term) are expected to develop. The attributes are professional qualities such as 'intellectual curiosity', 'ethical behaviour' or 'global environmental responsibility', which are hard to teach and hard to measure, but ultimately (apparently) make people employable. This session was a good start to the day because we were asked to think about some of the learning and technology challenges that we, and our learners/readers/users currently face, although I found it a little frustrating that the title wasn't really addressed in the content.

Next I attended Emma Finney and Deborah Harrop's Effective approaches to thinking like a researcher. The aim of this session was to demonstrate some of the tools they've used in the series of sessions they run for bioscience students. The four aspects of research that they cover are exploration, analysis, evaluation and interpretation. I was impressed with the practical nature of the tasks used, I like to learn by having an example to work from or framework to start from, and this is the method they use. For exploring a new topic they provided a series of headings (basic ideas, key concepts and theories, numbers and facts... I didn't write them all down) under which to gather preliminary thoughts about a subject area. This is good for two reasons: it helps to show that you do know something about a new topic, even though you might not have realised it, and it give a basis for research - what are the key terms, what areas do and don't you know about. The evaluation task had us examining a piece of scientific writing and finding the errors in it - this was a way of modelling good writing for the students. Again, I think it could be an effective way of encouraging them to also evaluate the quality of their own writing.

The third workshop was given by Jo Ashley. 'Learning literacies through collaborative enquiry; collaborative enquiry through learning literacies' looked at the reasoning behind a collaborative IL project undertaken by music first-years at the University of Liverpool. The students, as part of a first-year compulsory study skills course, were divided into groups to work on wikis intended to provide next year's first years with information about the course, the department and study skills. I thought this was a lovely idea that could have been taken further than they did - instead of dividing the students into groups, I'd have been really interested to see how a single wiki edited by all might develop, and it was a shame to hear that most of the finished wikis haven't actually been made available to the new cohort.

Keynote: 'The digital transition, information behaviour and information literacy' by Dave Nicholas, of UCL
There's no denying that Dave Nicholas is a lively and engaging speaker. Certainly many tweeting delegates seemed impressed with the way he delivered his talk. That aside, though, I'm afraid that I remain unconvinced. Not because I don't agree with his powerfully stated assertion that there's a lot of information out there, that people are probably, on the whole, 'skittering' through it bouncing from thing to thing to thing (rather than digging down into the detail of a single item or idea), and that we could find out a lot about that by looking at 'deep log' records of what's going on. But his points for action at the end of the speech were essentially as follows:

Realise that we're in the future and everything is different
Understand what's going on and what people are doing
Then do something about the fact that people 'lack a mental map, have no sense of collection, and a poor idea of what is good/relevant'
Think about whether having all this information is good, and how we're going to deal with it.

I realise that keynotes are supposed to be broad-brush, inspiring, not nitty-gritty, but this was a bit too vague for me.

Our paper: 'LibTeachMeet: Librarians learning from each other'
I've already blogged about that over on the camlibtm website... I'm pretty pleased with the way the presentation went. It certainly fulfilled our main objectives of letting people know about TeachMeets, and encouraging them to try it ourselves. I think we could have included more detail - what people talked about, how we publicised it and recruited speakers, more about our web presence, etc. Much of this was covered in the questions, but if the audience had been less keen to ask, then they would have missed out.

Other parallel sessions
Lucy Keating's paper Taking up the RIN challenge: supporting researchers’ use of web 2.0 was the highlight of the day for me. Lucy presented her paper really well, and had lovely slides, and her project could easily be adapted for other locations and purposes. Lucy is responsible for arts and humanities subject liaison at Newcastle University. In response to her local impressions of researcher use (or rather, non-use) of social media for research purposes, and also in response to the Research Information Network report 'If you build it, will they come?' she decided to develop a resource to encourage greater use of social media.

The resource she developed is currently focussed on this netvibes page, although Lucy is clear that the content is key, not the carrier. Her aim was to develop something simple, non-patronising, objective and not evangelical, with free access and highlighting free resources, with real subject examples, that would be easy for her to maintain. Total costs so far have been £37, and she's put it together herself in and around her regular work.

The key to this is that it's a 'why to' guide not a 'how to guide'. It's brilliant.

The last session I went to was Advancing information literacy: ensuring accountability via assessment by Leslin Charles, the coordinator of a team of teaching librarians at Berkeley College. In brief (Leslin gave an excellently detailed talk) she and her team have developed procedures to document all of their teaching and its outcomes, so that they are continually improving what they do, and are able to demonstrate their value to faculty members. They are in the fortunate position that information skills are recognised as a core part of assessment by their accrediting body, but even for those who can only dream of that level of recognition this presented a good way to manage your work, and a means to demonstrate value and gain increased recognition.

Meeting people
I also had the chance throughout the day, and the evening networking session, to meet people, mainly those I already new from Twitter and LISNPN things. It was particularly lovely to meet Lynne, ldnlibtm mastermind, in person for the first time. It feels a bit like cheating to mainly network with people I already 'know', if only online, but I suppose it counts as cementing existing networks.

I am very grateful to the CILIP University, College and Research Group for awarding me some funding from the Alison Northover Bursary to cover the cost of travelling to, and attending the conference.

Off to a conference...

2011-04-15T11:33:00.001+01:00

This year's LILAC, the Librarians’ Information Literacy Annual Conference, is happening next Monday to Wednesday at the British Library and LSE in London. I'm excited to say that I'm going to be there - the first time I've been to a major conference.

'Lilac in the sun' by**Aina** on Flickr

Niamh Tumelty and I will be giving a paper about Library TeachMeets, as part of the conference's 'New to Teaching' strand. If you can't make it to the conference, or want to refresh your memory after the fact, then our slides are available via Slideshare.

I have been lucky enough to win some money from the Alison Northover Bursary run by CILIP's University, College & Research Group, to cover the costs of attending. Sadly, as the bursary was only announced this week, I'm only able to get to the Monday, when Niamh and I are speaking. The UC&R have, however, generously suggested that the remaining money might be used for other CPD, and I'm now thinking of suggesting that it go towards a day at Umbrella in July. So an enormous thank you to them, and to those who helped me with my application for the bursary.

I'll be writing up my experiences of LILAC next week - in the meantime, I need to get prepared.

Read all about it!

2011-04-14T16:37:00.000+01:00

Untitled photograph by Hamed Saber on Flickr

There's a feature article in this month's CILIP Update magazine all about the outreach work of the Hoyle Project at St John's College Cambridge. It was written to let people know about some of the things the Project achieved, and also includes some hints and tips for organising your own events. I don't think anything in it is rocket science, but I hope that it inspires more libraries and special collections to try some work with the public and see what happens!

The article is on pp. 40-42 of the April issue of Update. Logged-in CILIP members can access that online, and it'll also be delivered in hard copy.

Quickly, quickly...

2011-03-27T19:01:00.001+01:00

A quick and dirty news round-up of things I'm never going to get round to blogging in full.

Me, me, me

Having finished the Hoyle Project last weekend, I've just started a new job as a 'Rare Books Specialist' at the University Library. It seems to be fun, and hard work, and I'm definitely going to learn a lot, which is very exciting.
As part of the Hoyle festivities, I was interviewed for March's Naked Astronomy podcast (my bit starts about 16 minutes in).
I've unveiled my LISNPN competition entry, and yes, it really is a knitting pattern.

Things that are happening

This year's CILIP CDG New Professionals Conference will be on Monday 20th June in Manchester, and the call for papers is now open (deadline Friday 15 April). The theme is 'Professionalism and Activism in a Time of Downturn'.
Cataloguers are doing a lot of talking, via #catbkchat discussions of the book Conversations with cataloguers in the 21st century on Twitter (time and section info here) and the new CIG e-forum.
The second Cambridge Librarians TeachMeet is happening on Tuesday, and there are lots of other library TeachMeets popping up all over the place. If you want have a TeachMeet, Niamh's written a beginner's guide.

Things that have happened

On Friday 4 February I went to the first Museums TeachMeet, held at the British Museum. It was really interesting to hear about some of the techie things that museum educators are using - it rather puts libraries in the shade. I particularly liked the speaker who had made a 5-minute screencast of things he wanted to talk about - a really good way of sticking to the time slot! I really wanted to write this up in full, but it's starting to look like that won't happen, so I'll just put up the list I made of things to investigate futher:
- Learn how to make and edit videos
- Animoto
- Edusim
- Google Warehouse
- QRator project at UCL
- Qik
- Streetmuseum
- Today's front pages at Newseum
- 50+ web 2.0 ways to tell a story
The Personalised Library Symposium (#pls11) happened last Monday. I didn't manage to follow much of it on Twitter, but the idea that students like to 'womb' in libraries did come up. I think that's a rather unpleasant way of saying they like to make themselves nests

Cool stuff

Two delightful ways of increasing engagement with reading:

Reading out loud groups (I heard about this in an interview with Frank Cottrell on 'The Verb' on Radio 3 back on Friday 12 November 2010): a way for people with low reading ability to take part in discussions about texts and to enjoy literature. They sound like good fun even for those who are confident solo readers.
Dogs who visit a school so that the children can read to a non-judgemental audience.

And finally...

Long-standing readers may remember that last year I posted about how I don't like the format of Update Digital. Update Digital now has a new, slightly re-jigged format, and I don't honestly think it's much better, but I'm not going to write a full-blown post on that unless you rise up in the comments and demand it.

Knit one, purl one: advocating for libraries the knitterly way

2011-03-27T17:12:00.000+01:00

Hopefully you've already heard that the LIS New Professionals Network (LISNPN) is running a library advocacy competition. New professionals are invited to create library advocacy of any and all kinds: "an article in a newspaper, or on a website, or [...] an event, or an art-work, or anything at all. The only criteria are that it should raise awareness about libraries or librarians, and try to reach new audiences".

The competition was announced very shortly after I'd had a double-echo-chamber-escape few weeks, with an article in the Guardian and a talk at Ignite London 4. Fun as those both were, they were quite hard work, and I thought that for my competition entry I'd do something a bit more like recreation, and a good deal more off the wall...

...Introducing 'Classmark mittens', a librarian's answer to cold working environments and a compulsion to knit.

Why on earth write a knitting pattern?

Firstly, it's fun. Secondly, it's a way of connecting with lots of new people. There's a social network for knitters (and crocheters, spinners, designers and so on), Ravelry, with over 1,000,000 members in lots of countries. It's a brilliant resource - with hundreds of active fora on specialist and general topics, an enormous (and gorgeously organised) patterns database, yarn databases, space for members to record their projects and yarn and what patterns they own and the like, and space for designers to publish their own patterns.

So, for my LISNPN competition entry I've designed a library-inspired knitting pattern, popped a wee smidgen of library advocacy into its introductory text, and set it loose.

You can get the pdf here without needing to be a member of Ravelry.

Ravelry's pattern database contains over 200,000 patterns: these are all catalogued with relevant metadata including the sort of yarn they use, the type of garment, size/age/fit/gender, amount of yarn needed, pattern source and availability, needle size needed, and so on. That's one way that I hope people will find the pattern - by browsing for a pattern that meets their specific requirements.

I've also publicised the pattern by using a pattern testers group to find volunteer test-knitters who've ironed out lots of typos and unclear bits in the pattern as well as created their own project pages for it, including difficulty and pattern quality ratings. I'm also posting to various relevant groups that have threads for designers to show off their new patterns. I'm not expecting this pattern to become a blockbuster like some (Ravelry's most popular pattern, 'Fetching' by Cheryl Niamath, has 17,640 registered projects), but it might reach a few people, and that's not bad for something I really enjoyed putting together.

Anatomy of a Mitten

About the mitten

The pattern is for a fingerless mitten with a thumb gusset (not an afterthought thumb) and a mid-length buttoned cuff in a mistake-rib pattern. The cuff is knitted flat and the knitting is then joined in the round for the hand and thumb. The hand and thumb are knitted in stocking stitch and finished with a mistake-rib and garter-stitch edging.

The pattern on the cuff is inspired by the appearance of bookshelves. After extensive swatching, I decided I just couldn't work out how to represent 'information services' in knitting, and opted for the easy (and stereotyped) option!

I'm not really sure if a knitting pattern, of all things, help to dispel the grumpy-grey-haired-bun-wearing-cardigan-toting-librarian stereotype, but probably everything that keeps libraries in people's minds is a good thing.

Ignite, redux

2011-03-21T10:33:00.001Z

In February I spoke at Ignite London 4 about 'Why Libraries are Great'. Richard Johnson (@chichard41) has been working on the videos from the event, and has just released the video of my talk, hurrah! So here it is:

Why Libraries Are Great - by Katie Birkwood from chichard41 on Vimeo.

And for those who haven't already seen them, here are the stand-alone versions of my slides:

Just a Room Full of Stuff? Why Libraries are Great / Katie Birkwood

View more presentations from Katie Birkwood

Some other talks I enjoyed were Charlotte Young on Art Bollocks, Andrew Betts on Standards, Maxwell J. Roberts on Tube Maps, and Paul Clarke on the Pythagorean Comma.

Blowing my own trumpet

2011-03-20T11:33:00.000Z

Yesterday did go with a bang. 460+ people came to the Old Library exhibition, and the three talks had splendid audiences, both in numbers and in enthusiasm. Before I packed up and left last night I went through the evaluation forms that visitors submitted, and I can't resist sharing this comment about my Hoyle talk and exhibition with the world:

The talk was beautifully structured and professionally & enthusiastically delivered. The 10 objects were inspirational. Thanks for all the painstaking effort and passion.

Owing to a few technical difficulties, the recording of my talk is sadly currently unavailable, but you can see the ten objects in this online exhibition.

Going out with a bang

2011-03-18T12:20:00.000Z

Bang!

For the last three years (almost to the day) I've been working on the Fred Hoyle Project at St John's College Library, Cambridge.

Tomorrow, Saturday, the project ends with, hopefully, a 'big bang'*. I've organised a day of events in College: three specialist talks (to be available later as podcasts), an exhibition of Hoyle papers (with accompanying online exhibition) and hands-on astrolabe building (with an online kit for those who didn't manage to book a place).**

This post was my first professional library job, and it hasn't really been your 'typical' library job (whatever one of those is). The remit of the post was twofold: 1) catalogue an enormous archival collection and 2) do 'outreach' with it, hopefully according to the plan that had been submitted as part of the funding bid.

Weirdly, I managed to get the post despite having only a little experience with (but a great interest in) special collections, no archival cataloguing experience, and no public (let alone youth or schools) outreach experience to speak of. But what I apparently showed was enthusiasm and a can-do attitude. The can-do attitude was luck, really: lots of my friends do really cool science outreach, so I wasn't too phased, in principle, by the idea of talking to children about astronomy.

It's hard to work out what I've learnt from the project (aside form things like what colour ink Fred Hoyle wrote in during different decades, or what's best to eat in the College Buttery). One main lesson is 'don't ask, don't get' - it's really worth getting to know people (networking again) and just asking what they might be able to do to help. Another is 'build it and they will come'. Ideas that might seem daft or unachievable at first often come to fruition, and in ways better than you'd imagined (Open Libraries, anyone?). I've also learnt that if you're going to have to fill in an enormous form of all your expenditure at the end of the Project, it would be worthwhile and probably easy to keep your lovely records in that form, and not just beautifully ordered but somewhere else, in a different shape.

I've learnt things about putting up exhibitions: there will never be enough space for all the items you'd like to include, you wouldn't believe how little you can fit into a caption once it's printed at a legible size, taking time over the design really pays dividends in how people respond to it. I've learnt that you can never have too many direction signs when people are trying to find their way round a college.

More than anything else, I've learnt that you don't have to do every last thing that was planned, so long as the things you do do are good, and have learnt from experience, and meet your overall goals. Perfectionism is useful in the details, but not always in the bigger picture.

Hoyle's been fun, but I couldn't work on him forever, much as I'm sad to be leaving. Onto new, and more bookish things now.

---
*Among his many other achievements, Fred Hoyle is known for being the person who coined the phrase 'big bang', despite not having actually supported the theory himself.

**It might be quite a big bang, as there's been coverage in the Cambridge News, on the BBC News website, and on BBC Look East.

A letter to my MP

2011-03-13T16:51:00.002Z

Further to my previous post about the government's review of the statutory duties
placed on local authorities by central government, here's my letter to my local MP, Julian Huppert. Do use it for inspiration for your own letter to your MP if you so desire.

Dear Dr Huppert,

I was very pleased to see that you support the campaign to save
libraries, and to see that you went to the read-in at Arbury Court
Library on 5 February 2011.

I'm writing to you today because I've recently learnt of the Department
for Communities and Local Government's review of the statutory duties
placed on local authorities by central government
(http://www.communities.gov.uk/localgovernment/decentralisation/tacklingburdens/reviewstatutoryduties/).

I note that three of the duties under review (DCMS_026, DCMS_027 and
DCMS_028) are duties created by the Public Libraries and Museums Act
1964, which requires local authorities to provide a 'comprehensive and
efficient' library service. I am very concerned that these duties might
be rescinded, as this would allow councils to impose drastic cuts to
library services with no recourse for this to be challenged in law. I
am also concerned that such changes to local authorities' duties could
be made with little parliamentary or public scrutiny.

I urge you to voice an opinion in favour of retaining these legal
obligations, and to speak to Mr Greg Clark MP, Minister of State for
Decentralisation, to express your concerns about this serious threat to
public libraries.

Yours sincerely,

Katie Birkwood

Protect the legal duty to provide public libraries

2011-03-13T16:32:00.003Z

This is a two-part post. We start off with a new, and important, way that you can help defend public libraries, and then we move on to a rant. I recommend that you read, and act on, the first bit, and read the second bit at your own peril.

Practical Action You Can Should Take

Last week, on 7 March, Greg Clark MP, Minister of State for Decentralisation (seriously) announced that the Government is carrying out a review of statutory duties placed on local authorities by central government. It wasn't a very loud announcement, I don't think - it had certainly slipped under my radar until yesterday, when Voices for the Library, Alan Gibbons, Katy Wrathwall (one of the CILIP Trustees), Public Libraries News, and others drew attention to it. ETA: a CILIP press release about this was issued on Monday 14 March.

The Dept for Communities and Local Government has drawn up a list of 1,200+ statutory duties that central government currently places on local authorities, the majority of which, they say, arise from primary legislation. They are asking us, the general public, to comment on these or other statutory duties, and to say which should be kept, and which should be lost.

Three of the 1,200+ duties relate directly to public libraries. Local authorities are currently required by law (the Public Libraries and Museums Act 1964) to provide a 'comprehensive and efficient' library service. Three duties imposed by this legislation are included in this review. Removing the legal obligation to provide decent library services could have really serious consequences given the pressure that libraries are facing now when council could, and are, being held to account through legal challenges to their plans.

You can comment on this review via this form. Information about the review, including spreadsheets of all the identified duties (libraries are mentioned in the Excel second file), is available on this DCLG page. These are the three duties affecting libraries are DCMS:

DCMS_026: Public Libraries and Museums Act 1964 Section 1(2)

Duty: To provide information and facilities for the inspection of library premises, stocks, records, as the Secretary of State requires.

Function: Necessary for Secretary of State to fulfil (requirement) to superintend library service (see s1 of PLAMA 1964)

DCMS_027: Public Libraries and Museums Act 1964 Section 7

Duty: To provide a comprehensive and efficient library service. In fulfilling this duty, must have particular regard to the matters in s7(2)

Function: Secure provision of local library services

DCMS_028: Public Libraries and Museums Act 1964 Section 11

Duty: Supplemental provisions as to transfers of officers, assets and liabilities

Function: Provisions provide, for example, continuity of employment for transferring employees. This secures consistency across library transfers etc and in line with other local authority employment legislation

(This summary copied from the Voices for the Library post

Once you've filled in the form, you can also write to your local MP (find him or her here) (ETA: here's my letter) to voice your opinion on the subject.

The rant

The questionnaire is framed almost entirely in terms of 'burdens' (this review, is in fact part of a 'Tackling burdens: Reducing burdens on local government' initiative). The use of this term sums up for me everything that I think is wrong with this whole Big Society business. It's clear that by 'burden' we're supposed to think of something that we (or, in this case) local councils would be better without. When I'm asked if a particular duty is a burden, an answer in the affirmative will be taken to mean that I think that duty can be dispensed with.

But the way I see it, we have government and councils precisely so that we can lumber them with 'burdens'. Healthcare, schooling, social care, policing, libraries, museums, the fire service are all difficult and expensive to provide: in stark terms, they're burdens to those entrusted with providing them. But just because they're difficult to do it doesn't mean that government (local or national) shouldn't have to do them. Because they are by their nature burdensome, handing them over to the masses is surely unlikely end well. The masses are unlikely to rush round to do them instead (either commercially (commerce might want to cherry pick the profitable bits, but is unlikely to want to have to so *all* of it) or as volunteers), and even if they did, they'd be unlikely to be able to do them very well. I want my local authority to be emburdened with the duty to do the stuff that makes us civilised.

/rant

As it's International Women's Day...

2011-03-08T15:19:00.021Z

...I thought I'd write a quick post about the book I'm currently reading, seeing as it was written by a woman, 'n' all.

Janet Flanner was a New York journalist, acquainted with such luminaries as Dorothy Parker. In the early 1920s she settled in Paris with New York Tribune drama writer Solita Solano on, as the American National Biography Online puts it, 'the Left Bank of Paris near other American expatriates and lesbians'. From 1925 until 1975 she wrote a bi-weekly 'Letter from Paris' column above the pseudonym 'Genêt' in the New Yorker magazine.

I hadn't heard of Flanner until late last year, when I was browsing through the Smithsonian National PortraitGallery's exhibition 'Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture' (Flanner appears in the section on modernism).

I ordered up the book from the local library, and have been not getting round to reading it for a couple of months now. That's rather a shame - the writing is *wonderful*, and I know very little about the history of post-war France (its recovery from occupation and collaboration) so it's a good education, too. Sadly it's due back at the Library on Friday, and I still have 400+ pages to go.

A reply from the PM

2011-03-07T20:01:00.000Z

At Prime Minister's Question Time on 9th Feb, David Cameron answered a question from Ed Miliband by saying:

We all know a truth about libraries, which is that those which will succeed are those that wake up to the world of new technology, the internet and everything else, and investment goes in. That is what needs to happen. Should councils look at community solutions for other libraries? I believe that they should. Instead of sniping and jumping on every bandwagon, the right hon. Gentleman should get behind the big society.

(Hansard, 9 Feb. 2011, around Column 293)

I thought this was a pretty silly thing to have said, and so I wrote to him to say so (the Contact Number 10 webpage suggests that a posted letter is more likely to receive a response than an email). I listed a few of the ways in which public libraries have been embracing technological changes - reforming the way they operate, educating their readers, making the internet available to all - and even suggested that I'd be happy to show Mr Cameron one of my local libraries so that he could see what's already going on.

Today I had a reply from the Prime Minister's office. Needless to say, my offer of a library tour has not been accepted. In fact, given the response, it's hard to determine whether my letter was actually read at all:

From the Direct Communications Unit

I am writing on behalf of the Prime Minister to thank you for your letter of 11 February.

Mr Cameron appreciates all the feedback he receives, so it is good of you to have taken the time and trouble to get in touch and to let him have your thoughts.

Once again, thank you for writing to the Prime Minister.

I suppose that this is the nature of campaigning about something. Most of the time, efforts look like they might be in vain - it's easy to feel like you're shouting into a gale, and that no-one will hear what you're saying. When out on the street on Save Libraries Day (5th Feb) I got to thinking more or less the same thing: 'how many people can I possibly be influencing?'

But equally, when out on the street I did have conversations with a good few people who really were interested to know what was under threat and how they could help. And all the others who scurried by trying to ignore us will still probably have heard the word 'library' a few times; if drip-drip marketing is good enough for commercial products, then it's good enough for my library campaigning. At the very least, people have been reminded of the existence of libraries, and Mr Cameron (or someone on his staff, at least) has been shown that there's one more person who's watching what he says and does.

I know that some other library folk also wrote to the PM around that time. Has anyone else heard anything back?

CILIP Branch and Group discussions

2011-03-03T17:43:00.002Z

Is it too twee to suggest that this could be a
new spring for member involvement in CILIP?

The future of CILIP branches and groups is very much up in the air at the moment. CILIP can't afford to keep running the branches and groups in the way that they are run at present, and has recently started a consultative process to try and work out the way forward.

Emma has written a very informative post about the meeting for branch and group representatives that took place on 16 February, and I recommend that you read that for further information about the meeting and about the process in general.

In summary, CILIP can't afford to keep all the branches (12) and groups (27) that currently exist. It's hoped that through increased cooperation and collaboration, and a reoganisation of the structures, a more streamlined (and cost-efficient) system can be worked out. It is, depending on how you look at it, either a very scary or a very exciting time. Things are definitely going to change, but CILIP seem keen to get members' imput into how they'll change.

The level of input that you have already had will depend on how proactive your branch and groups have been in soliciting your ideas. If you've not heard much about this already, fear not, as there should be opportunities very soon to voice your ideas: watch this space. In the meantime, get your thinking caps on and consider what you want or need from local or specialist CILIP groups (and share your ideas in the comments if you like).

Here are my ideas:

Branches/groups to provide a way of getting to meet local(ish) people from different sectors, and people from across the country from my sector and/or with my special interest(s)
Branches/groups should be communicative and friendly - putting a personal, if not local, face to the organisation

That's pretty much it. I'm not sure how concerned I am about the specific specialist areas covered by each group, so long as overall there's a home for everyone, and that each of the sub-interests in a group gets events that are relevant to them (as well as wider networking opportunities).

Curious collections: what do we keep, and why?

2011-02-25T09:44:00.000Z

Last night I spoke at the Seminar in the History of Material Texts in Cambridge as part of a session looking at 'curious' library collections and how we manage them.

The first half of the session was a chance to see the Radzinowicz Library's collection of 'banned' books: books that had either been banned under the Obscene Publications Act, or that had been submitted by members of the public who wished that they be banned. The contents of the collection (in brief, a lot of books about flagellation and sodomy; a few with raunchy pictures of women; and a fair number about marriage, reproductive health and birth control) are more or less as you'd expect. What really interested me about them was their provenance, or rather, how quickly information about provenance can be lost.

The books were donated to the Radzinowicz after the break-up of the old Home Office library at the time of the creation of the Ministry of Justice in the late 2000s. The collection that came to the Radzinowicz is not the complete (there's a thought that the 'best' books had already been whisked away, perhaps by staff), and there's apparently little documentation about the collection itself - no indication, for example, about which books were banned and which were submitted by the public, or when any book was accessioned. It's the contextual information of this kind that often really brings special and archival collections to life, and visiting the 'banned' books was a good lesson in the necessity of documenting institutional memory and knowledge about collections.

My talk took an overview of the challenges of managing a modern archival collection in a library context. The discussion afterwards centred particularly on the issue of retention - academics are horrified to hear that we might not like to keep every last scrap of paper, because of the potential that it might be useful or interesting *one day*. These slides don't really address that - but I'd be interested to hear thoughts about whether you think it's getting easier to 'keep everything' or whether the enormous volumes of electronic data now produced will need a more, and not less, ruthless attitude to appraisal and disposal in the future?

Managing a curious collection: a brief overview of the challenges of the Fred Hoyle papers / Katie Birkwood

View more presentations from Katie Birkwood

Curiouser and curiouser

2011-02-21T10:12:00.000Z

Curiosity killed the cat?

On Thursday this week (24 February) I'm speaking at the Seminar in the History of Material Texts at the English Faculty. It promises to be a really interesting seminar: it's a double bill on the theme of 'curious collections' starting with the chance to see the Radzinowicz (Institute of Criminology) Library's collection of banned books, followed by my thoughts on the challenges of managing the Hoyle collection.

All are welcome to the seminar, whether researchers or librarians or anyone else with an interest in the subject matter. Proceedings start at 5.30pm at the Radzinowicz Library and then move over the the English Faculty for my paper.

Visual metaphors for libraries/librarians/information professionals

2011-02-11T10:51:00.000Z

After the agonies of choosing images to use for my Ignite talk, and with a fairly whacky idea forming for an entry into the LISNPN library advocacy competition, I've had visual metaphors on my mind these last few days.

What can replace pictures of books?

What images can we use to illustrate and promote the work of the modern-day library and information world? Time was that a picture of a shelf of books, a card catalogue, or a set of library steps, would suffice to create in the viewer an impression of library-ness. But if we want to convey something of the multi-faceted nature of library work, of the focus on information evaluation and organization, of the myriad formats and sources used, how can that be done? Is there a single visual image that conveys the idea 'information'?

I'd be very interested to hear people's ideas. Do you think that we need something more than books? Can you do better than the Guardian's brain? A few people have commented on the aptness of the yarn slides (10 and 11) in my 'Why Libraries are Great' slidedeck; is there a way to express that idea more succinctly?

Out of the echolib and into the fire

2011-02-10T12:07:00.000Z

On Tuesday evening I spoke at Ignite London 4 about 'Why Libraries are Great'. The Ignite motto is 'enlighten us, but make it quick'; all speakers have to use the Ignite format of 20 slides or 15 seconds each, making presentations that are exactly 5 minutes long. So that they make sense without a speaker, I've added some extra slides and text to these:

Just a Room Full of Stuff? Why Libraries are Great / Katie Birkwood

View more presentations from Katie Birkwood.

There was a live audience of 300+ people, most of whom weren't (to my knowledge) librarians, and plenty of whom seemed to enjoy and understand what I was saying:

Since I uploaded my slides yesterday lunchtime they've been viewed 700+ times, and are currently featured on Slideshare's Education page. Video of the speakers will be added to the Ignite website soon, and should reach a few more people. So all in all, I think this counts as an echo chamber escape!

Ignite was a real blast. A big thank you to the organisers for choosing me as one of the speakers, and for their hard work in making it run so smoothly. Probably my two favourite presentations were Andrew Betts' 'How standards changed the world' (from Roman swords to time zones to aircraft to the magic of A4 paper) and Paul Clarke's 'Music is mostly about cheating' (the Pythagorean Comma lucidly explained in 5 minutes - magic!). A special mention also to Maxwell Roberts' beautiful tube and metro maps.

Save Libraries: Cambridge Action

2011-02-04T10:23:00.004Z

Two Save Libraries events are happening in Cambridge tomorrow:

Read-aloud flashmob, in and around Grand Arcade/Lion Yard, 11am. Please sing up for it on Facebook and invite your friends. Bring your favourite book (or borrow it from the library) and read a bit out to entertain the general public and show that you care about the library service.
Read-in at Arbury Court Library, 2pm. Turn up, borrow a book, read it.

Both events are family-friendly ways of showing that we value libraries. The flashmob is the brainchild of Emma Coonan, who's put together a list of resources, general and specific.

If you can't make it to either of those, remember that you can still show you support for libraries by:

Going to your local library. If you're not already a member take some ID with your name and address on it so that you can join up. Borrow some books or CDs or DVDs, or read the newspapers and magazines, or use the PCs and/or wifi there.
Visiting your library webpages and use the online resources - you can look things up in the OED, for example.

ETA: Here are two write-ups of the Cambridge event, by Andy Priestner and Annie Johnson.

News roundup, including savelibraries

2011-02-02T20:56:00.004Z

Savelibraries

Campaigns to defend public libraries across the country against cuts are gathering strength, and this Saturday, 5th February, will see a day of action to show our support. John Kirriemuir has written up a summary of what's what, including links to resources, so I won't repeat all of that here. What you need to know is the following:

Check this list to see if a library near you is having an event. If is is, go to it.
If there's no event near you, go to your library anyway. If you're not already a member take some ID with your name and address on it so that you can join up. Borrow some books or CDs or DVDs, or read the newspapers and magazines, or use the PCs and/or wifi there.
If you can't get to your library, visit its webpages and use the online resources - you can look things up in the OED, for example.
If you're a Facebook user, show that you're taking part by RSVPing to this event. Then invite all your friends.
If you're on Twitter, tweet a reason why libraries are important, using the #savelibraries hashtag.
Pass this message on, using some of these posters to help you.

Echo-chamber breakout

Back last June, during Library Day in the Life 5, a post by Emma Cragg inspired me to think that the Library Day in the Life Project (which was started and is maintained by Bobbi L. Newman) could be used to advocate for libraries outside of the 'echo chamber'. Emma and I teamed up, and wrote a pitch about 'what librarians really do' that we sent to The Guardian and to Radio 4. Some time later, we heard back from The Guardian, who were interested in using the idea in their 'Behind the Job Title' series. We wrote up an article about the various roles of, and skills needed by, a modern librarian, sent it off, and heard nothing for a while longer. But lo, after Christmas we were asked for some revisions, which we supplied, and the article was published on Monday in GuardianCareers:

'Beyond books: what it takes to be a 21st-century librarian'

There was a little excitement in the comments and on Twitter in response to the decision to swap the picture of a brain for a picture of some stereotypically dressed female librarians carrying books on their heads and with their fingers on their lips in the international gesture for 'shh!'. Comments from some upstanding librarians have now set that to rights, which is very pleasing indeed.

At this point I have to say an enormous thank you to Emma. She did all the hard work with the article, including writing all the best bits, thinking up whom to use for case studies, and corresponding with the paper. She's been a pleasure to work with, and is clearly pretty busy as she has another article out this week in the ORG (Open Rights Group) Zine also out this week!

Also a thank you to Ned Potter for being so loudly pleased about the article. He's chuffed to be mentioned in a Guardian article, and I'm chuffed that he liked it. Smiles all round.

And finally...

This isn't about libraries, but it is about making the world a better place. A friend of my has written a truly brilliant blog post. I've tried to summarise it, but I can't manage it. Just read it and be inspired to be a better person. Or something.

Library Day in the Life: Round 6, Day 3

2011-01-26T18:42:00.001Z

[The sixth round of Library Day in the Life is running from Monday 24 to Friday 28 January. You can find the other participants, and sign up yourself, on the project wiki, and watch the #libday6 hashtag on Twitter. This is the second time I've taken part. You can find my Round 5 posts tagged with libday5, including my introduction to what I do for a living.]

Today in bulleted lists...

Ego boosts

The brilliant Cambridge photographer, Sir Cam (@camdiary) has posted a gorgeous photograph of me, taken at Open Cambridge 2009, to his Flickr account to mark the Library Day in the Life week.
My post on Library/Info Pro job titles was included in the CILIP weekly news bulletin.

Accounting

Tomorrow is pay day, so our pay slips came round today and I added this months pay expenses to my spreadsheet of project expenses, and photocopied the slip as evidence for the funding body.
While I had the spreadsheet open I also added other recent expenditure, including the cost of having publicity flyers printed and the price of an advertisement in an amateur astronomy magazine. Then I had a look over all the numbers, to work out how extravagant, or otherwise, I can be in preparing for the final events in the project.

Everyday Library Life

Just the one reader, today, one of the manuscripts cataloguers working on the multi-volume catalogue of illuminated manuscripts at the Fitzwilliam Museum and the Cambridge Colleges.
A man came in to check over our security alarms, and someone noticed that a small piece of wall in the Old Library might need some new plaster.
Cataloguing continued, highlights including a talk given by Fred Hoyle to a European Summit in Davos on the subject of microbes in space.

Extra-curricular

A lunchtime talk about social networking tools for academic libraries, and further work on a bursary application to attend, and present at, LILAC 2011.

Library Day in the Life: Round 6, Day 2...

2011-01-26T10:29:00.003Z

...or, The clueless reader: what should we do?

I work in a rare books reading room. Standard reader interaction goes something along the lines of 'Can I see MS K.31, please?' 'Yes, certainly, fill in this form, take a seat, and I'll fetch it for you'. Or perhaps, 'Can you tell me where Glover's papers are catalogued?' 'Yes, they're available on Janus'. Every now and again someone comes in and asks broad, open ended questions like 'Can I see what you have about slavery', or 'Can I see some medieval manuscripts', which we, frankly, find difficult to answer.

The difficulty arises not because the questions aren't 'valid': it's certainly reasonable to want to look for material on slavery in our library because we hold papers connected with the abolitionists Wilberforce and Clarkson, and we have 300+ medieval manuscripts, so that's also something you can easily find here. The difficult in these reader interactions arises because we're used to our readers having done plenty of research in advance of their visit. Being a special collections reader is quite a specialised business--in terms of handling material, reading room etiquette and 'resource discovery'--and most of our readers are already fairly well 'trained'. Indeed, most readers are so 'good' that we, as library staff, are quite out of practice at helping the ones that aren't.

There's sometimes the feeling that it's 'not our job' to teach new/inexperienced/clueless readers how to read up on the topic first, research their particular interest, and search catalogues and listings for relevant items. We might feel that this is the job of their supervisor or course tutor, and that our role is just to produce the material once they know more-or-less exactly what it is they want to see. When readers come to us very early in their research, it's easy to feel like they're looking for us to do their research for them.

I don't generally find it very easy to turn these interactions round from something slightly antangonistic ('what are they doing here when they don't know what they're doing?') to something positive ('here's an opportunity to show somebody what we do and what we can offer them'). Partly this is because it's hard to tell someone that actually they need to put in more time and effort to what they're doing, and partly it's because this sort of work isn't really accounted for explicitly in procedures and policies. Although we have information online about the special collections and the reading room, none of it is written from the 'new to special collections?' perspective. We have no 'script' for how to induct the new reader.

The obvious answer to all this is that we, as specialist librarians, need to recognise, value and assert our expertise: instead of grudgingly acquiescing to the poorly-thought-out research requests of the new reader, we should step in and educate them. And to do this well, we'll need to develop planned ways of doing this, rather than relying on adhoc introductions, the quality of which will vary tremendously from day to day.

Library Day in the Life: Round 6, Day 1

2011-01-24T17:16:00.000Z

'Exclamation' by Ian Boyd on Flickr

Today has been quite exciting - I think the theme might be 'advertising' (Incidentally, there was a lovely exhibition of 19th and 20th advertisements in the University Library recently. Well done the Tower Project people who put it together.)

The major excitement was the launch of booking for the second Cambridge Librarian Teachment being held on 29 March 2011.This kept me busy throughout the day, doing such things as:

Checking the drafts of the event page and blog post, updating all their links, and publishing them.
Setting up POP access in Gmail to the camlibtm email address (info at camlibtm dot info if you want to get in touch).
Emailing my designated email list to advertise the event and tweeting cheerfully about it.
Watching the bookings roll in. At the time of writing we're pretty much full, but we're working on getting the waiting list working properly, so do sign up to that.

I've also been working on the advertising for the grand finale of the Hoyle Project, which is happening on Saturday 19 March.

Having been issued with the official Science Festival logo for this year I managed to track down the high-res versions of the College's quincentenary logo.
With the logos in hand, I spent a very long time trying to incorporate them into the flyer design that I'd already drafted out.
Once settled on a design I added a bleed area to the edge of the flyer, resized it down to A5 and printed it to pdf, ready to...
...place an order for professionally printed flyers.

I've also been writing draft notes on various aspects of the day, mainly advice notes for the volunteers who'll be running the 'Build Your Own Astrolabe' sessions, but for the exhibition and talk. I'm going to be speaking about Hoyle's life, his collection of papers and artefacts, and my work in cataloguing them. That's a bit of a tough ask to squeeze into 1 hour, so I've decided to structure it along the lines of 'A History of Fred Hoyle in 10 objects' (inspired by the obvious and also '100 Objects Bradford'. Trying to choose only 10 objects to use as jumping-off points is really tricky because I need to choose a range that will cover most aspects of Hoyle's life, but I also want them to be visually interesting and not to have been exhibited much or published extensively (and that includes in my online exhibition) previously.

All sorts of other things happened throughout the day, too:

A blown fuse in the Old Library.
A request for a short school visit on Thursday as part of a languages day organised by the people in College who work trying to widen access to the College and to university in general. (I've written a bit before about access visits.)
Lots and lots of email.

Now I'm heading off, to work on my Ignite talk and to start writing a bursary application to attend the LILAC conferece to talk about TeachMeet.

What's your name? Now in pictures

2011-01-21T10:26:00.002Z

In a comment to my previous post about non-librarian job titles, Nicola Franklin suggested I put the titles into Wordle to see what sort of cloud it made. Ever one to please my readers, that's just what I've done.

You can see in the cloud to the left that, to no-one's surprise, 'information' is by far and away the most common word to occur. So common, in fact, that few of the other words are legible. I took information out of the mix in the second cloud to the right, and you can see that 'learning' and 'knowledge' both rate quite highly, as do 'specialist', 'resource' and 'advisor'. I think it's quite a nice summary of some of the things librarians/info-pros do.

What's your name?

2011-01-19T22:20:00.004Z

As part of preparations for my Ignite talk next month, I wanted to check out some of the diversity of job titles that librarians and information professionals have. (I'm going to point out that 'librarians' are more widespread than you might think based on the number of people who work as 'librarians'.)

I asked Twitter 'Are you an info pro whose job title doesn't include 'librarian'? Could you tell me what you are known as?', and Twitter responded, by golly! There was a lot of 'information', and good showing from 'knowledge', 'learning' and 'research'. My personal favourite is 'Transformation Officer' ('I'm a member of the strategic Libraries Management Team and my job is to improve the service. Lots of projects and funding bids.'). Thank you, tweeting info pros!

If you have or have had a non-librarian job title that you'd like to share, then please leave a comment.

ETA: I've made a couple of Wordle clouds of the job-titles, too.

What people said

Asssistant Information Adviser
Authority Control & Cataloguing Specialist
Cataloguer & Administrator for the Centre for Heritage Imaging & Collection Care
Community and Information Officer
Consultant Trainer
Content Development Officer
Cyberskills & Learning Services Officer
Development Officer
Director of Library Services
E-Services/Offsite Services Co-ordinator (but I'm an archivist rather than a librarian anyway...)
Head of Information Literacy
Head of Knowledge and Information Management
Head of Science Information Services
Hybrid Collections Coordinator
Information & Library Services Manager
Information Advisor (x3)
Information and Promotion Officer
Information Consultant
Information Executive
Information Manager
Information Ninjas (unofficial!)
Information Officer (x3)
Information Resources Development Co-ordinator
Information Scientist
Information Services Adviser
Information Specialist
Knowledge Management Systems Manager
Knowledge Engineers
Knowledge Manager
Knowledge Strategist
Learning Resource Centre Manager (x3)
Library and Information Assistant
Library and Information Services Administrator
Library Information Services Manager
Library Officer: Young People and Adults
Music Information Officer
National Information Services Manager
Neighbourhood Learning Centre Assist
Online Services Coordinator
Principal Project Leader/Weldasearch manager
Project Manager of ebooksatcambridge
Research Advisor
Research Specialist
Senior Information Advisor
Senior Information Officer (x3)
Senior Library Systems Officer
Senior Officer ICT & Learning
Senior Officer Library Services
Transformation Officer
Virtual Support & eServices Developer

'We have ignition...'

2011-01-16T14:11:00.000Z

...or, rather, I'll be speaking at Ignite London 4 on Tuesday 8 February, at 93 Feet East, E1 6QL.

'Ignite the moment' by viamoi on Flickr

'So what's Ignite?', I hear you say. I'll let them explain:

Ignite was started in Seattle in 2006 by Brady Forrest of O’Reilly Radar and Bre Pettis of Make. Since then hundreds of five minute talks have been given across the world. Besides Seattle, there are thriving Ignite communities in Portland, Sydney, NYC and a lot more.The idea is simple: presenters are required to stick to a rigid format of 20 slides, each of which changes automatically after 15 seconds, ensuring that each presentation is exactly 5 minutes long. The format forces presenters to think long and hard about every slide.
Presentation topics are diverse, and range from technology, travel, personal hobbies and passions and the arts. The only rule is that speakers cannot promote their own business ventures.

I was inspired to submit a talk proposal after @meimaiggio and Emma (@el399) both suggested on Twitter that it would be a great echo chamber escape if someone were to speak about libraries at the next Ignite London (Ignite events are recorded and webcast so that people who aren't there on the night can see the talks, too). I nearly didn't bother, thinking that somebody else would probably step up and offer something better than I could manage, but after hearing Ned Potter ('get out of the echo chamber') and Celine ('just do it') at the Libraries@Cambridge conference last week I decided that if I thought it should be done I ought to get on and do it myself.

So I submitted, and had accepted, a talk under the title 'Just a room full of stuff? Why libraries are great' in which I'll try to explain the fundamental power of libraries (the organisation of knowledge/information/stuff), and their great value as places. I'm not, frankly, sure how I'm going to pack it into 20 slides in 5 minutes, but I'll do my very best!

Together We're Better: Libraries@Cambridge 2011

2011-01-06T22:55:00.007Z

Today was the Libraries@Cambridge annual conference (#lac11 and on Twapper Keeper) for University of Cambridge library staff, which this year had a record 240-or-so attendees and a general theme of 'Working Together'. I haven't managed to come up with any coherently unified thoughts about the day yet, but there are a few ideas and suggestions from various sessions that made a particular impact.

We started off we the keynote paper from Alex Wade, Director for Scholarly Communication in Microsoft's External Research division. Alex had a lot to say about, seemingly, all the new products and services the MS External Research division are developing, and I confess that I didn't keep up with it all. His main point was, however, that there's a lot of data out there; researchers produce not only publications, but datasets, workfolws, source code, lectures, algorithms, 3D models which all need managing, organising and preserving, both for current and future research. He pointed out that the problem for modern libraries is not that there are no opportunities, but there are too many opportunities. It's hard to know how and where to start in the management of all that information.

Flocking to the library

The highlight of the day was Ned Potter and Laura Woods' (sadly Laura couldn't be there because of ill health) presentation 'Escaping the Echo Chamber: Libraries, marketing and advocacy' (also see Ned's Netvibes page for more echolib information and resources). Ned is a really great speaker - engaging, motivating, persuasive - so even though I'd read various iterations of the presentation before, it was well worth hearing it in person. The one phrase I'm going to bear in mind from it: 'If libraries were invented tomorrow, people would FLOCK to them'.

In the 'From our sponsors' slot, I was surprised to hear that more than 10% of traffic to Cambridge Journals Online comes from smartphones, and delighted to learn that ProQuest are developing Early European Books, a sister database to the much-loved Early English Books Online.

In the parallel session 'From the Beagle to the Bulldog: Working together to promote Cambridge's special collection' the reminders of the intricacies of copyright, both to everyday work, and when undertaking major digitisation projects like the forthcoming digitisation of the Churchill Papers, was most welcome. I was particularly struck though, by Alison Pearn's paper about the Darwin Correspondence Project, and the radical ways in which they've had to change the way they provide interpretation of the letters for their changing audiences. This was particularly interesting in the case of this project, as the transcription and publication of Darwin's letters started in 1974, and they've had to move from paper publication for the benefit of advanced scholars, to web-based publication for a range of curriculum areas in schools and colleges.

Working together

The afternoon session of the conference was a 'celebration' of working together in Cambridge. In an homage to TeachMeet-style events, each speaker had but 8, or 3 minutes to say a bit about a project or event.

Libby Tilley talked about her efforts to improve learning within the English Faculty (Library) by applying ideas of 'co-agency'. She said that we (librarians, fellows, students) are all learners, and we can all be teachers too, and she's trying to integrate herself into Faculty teaching, and Faculty and students into Library training.

Celine Carty summed up 23 Things Cambridge wonderfully well: 'cam23 put the social into social media' and enjoined us all to 'just do it', whatever we think needs doing.

I was amazed to learn that the Janus archival catalogue has cost just £18,000 over 10 years of existence. It's astonishing what you can do with enthusiasm, goodwill and a shoestring.

The loose-knit team that organised the Libraries@Cambridge presence at this year's Freshers' Fair extolled the benefits of two ways of keeping organising something simple: have just one objective (theirs was 'to be at the fair and to hand stuff out') and stay 'always in beta' (that way it doesn't matter if it's not perfect!).

What else? Ah yes! I gabbled through a brief intro to Open Libraries in Open Cambridge, and Isla gave a rundown on Cambridge Librarians TeachMeet, and (most excitingly) announced that camlibtm2 will happen on 29 March 2011, at the Schlumberger Research Centre in West Cambridge. There's also a new website: www.camlibtm.info, and we're @camlibtm on Twitter, and camlibtm2 will be even bigger and better than the first one.

It was an exhausting day, and this has been an exhausting post.

ETA: other people have written about the day in rather more interesting and thought-provoking ways.

Da boomting

2010-12-18T19:49:00.000Z

The College in which I work runs a school liaison programme designed to promote participation in higher and further education. The Schools Liaison Officer spends a lot of his time visiting schools all over the country to talk to the students about their post-16 and post-18 choices, and sometimes school groups (generally from schools within fairly easy reach of Cambridge) come to the College to see what Cambridge is really like.

When school groups come to the College they often come to the Old Library for a tour and a quick peek at some of our most interesting books. These school groups are generally completely different to the groups we usually see in the Library. Although we have plenty of school visits, both primary and secondary, these are usually from nearby schools, and, by definition, they come from schools that are actively seeking ways to enhance the classroom teaching with outside visits.

The schools liaison visits are generally from inner city schools that might not be doing too well. The groups are far more ethnically diverse than those we usually see in Cambridge, and the students often have had very little previous exposure to historical buildings and artefacts, or to the sort of cultural offer that we take for granted in Cambridge.

This disparity certainly makes the schools liaison visits a challenge for me. I only see each group for a short period of time (usually 30-45minutes), so there's not much scope for getting to know the group, or to investigate different ways in which they might interpret or relate to the Old Library. I'm always strongly aware that the (National-Trust-guide-style) spiel about the Library's age, origins, highlights, etc. would probably be utterly meaningless to them, so I try to spin out each session according to what they respond to.

Fortunately, I've never yet had a group that aren't interested in anything about the Library. There's always something (or, usually, several things) that catches their attention, and so we talk about using the Library, or the use of Latin, or how books are made, or telescopes, or whatever else for the length of the session. There has, I think, never been a visitor to the Library who wasn't impressed by our largest and smallest books, so we usually take a look at those, but the rest of the session is pretty form.

Free-form sessions are quite hard work, it's true. You have to have a lot of information at your fingertips, and be prepared to explain it in new ways according to the base knowledge of whoever's asking. But once you have mastered the information (and it's taken me a while to feel confident that I have), then it's great fun to be able to explore objects with which you're familiar in unexpected ways. I really must find out roughly how many sheep it would have taken to make the parchment for our biggest book, for example!

The tour was cool. The big one [book] was great,
though the small one [book] was amazing.

Anyway, this is a rather rambly post that basically says that outreach to a group that you might initially think would be really hard work can actually be the most rewarding and enjoyable outreach that you do. A group of north London teenagers whose slang seems quite incomprehensible to this Cambridge grad might seem intimidating, but when they leave a comment like this, it's impossible not to feel that it was very much worthwhile.

-----
Thanks to various people on Twitter for their help interpreting slang that was, frankly, well beyond my area of expertise.

Festive24Things

2010-12-07T16:03:00.000Z

Christmas Biscuits (c) Katie Birkwood

Calling all Cam23-ers (or others) reading who haven't already heard: banish your Thing withdrawal symptoms and mark the season of Advent with the brilliant Festive 24 Things devised and run by Damyanti and Jo.

It's a whistlestop tour, and not too demanding. So far we've looked at blogs, Twitter, Twtpoll (vote for your favourite Christmas food/drink), Delicious (share your festive links), Flickr (share your festive photos) and Prezi.

You can follow the 24 Things via @festive24things on Twitter, or by subscribing to the blog.