Serious Concerns

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. 

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

Five thousand un-findable objects (a librarian's whinge)

The BBC/British Museum series 'A History of the World in 100 Objects' (AHOW) came to an end recently. A significant part of the project was the public submission to the series website of objects with personal historical significance. Some of the these objects were showcased in short 'audience stories' features on the radio in the final weeks of the series. One of these features described a family story very similar to my own family story - a story that I've rarely, if ever, before heard mentioned in the media. It was surprisingly affecting to hear this tale one morning in the middle of the Today Programme, and I was moved to go an investigate the AHOW website to find out more about the object at the centre of the story.

There are lots of excellent features on the website - it was very easy to locate the page for the object in question as it was one of the week's featured items, and alongside a picture and some text was the recording that I'd heard on the radio. Website users can also log in and leave comments on each object, and some seem to be doing so.

So far, so good. I found the object, and found out a bit about it. Then I got adventurous and thought I might look for other objects with similar stories. The 'Explore' section of the website comes in two flavours: a flash-powered spiralling timeline version, and a list version. I'll be linking to the basic list version because I'm not sure if everyone will be able to view the flash, and the lists are easier to work with anyway.

There are several things I don't like about these 'Explore' pages, and I like to think that this reaction is born from annoyance that a good website isn't more useful, and not just some boring librarianly desire for catalogues to be complex. My complaints are as follows:

• there is a range filters (for location, theme, culture, size, colour, material, time period, contributor type, and BBC area), but you can only refine the results by only one filter (plus a time period) at a time.   You can look for purple things from 1925-1950, or cloth things from 1925-1950, but not purple cloth things from 1925-1950.
• the time periods are also fixed, so you can't narrow down a search to a known date or range of dates, you can only find everything from 600 to 200 BC, or 1600 to 1700 AD, but not items from 1325-1425, or 1966 only, or whatever.
• the geographic categories are rather broad: UK, Europe, East Asia, Africa, Middle East, Pacific and Australia, North America, South Asia, Central and South America, South East Asia, America, and Central Asia.
• there's no free-text search, so you can't search for a specific place (or name, or object): you can only browse using the broad filters described above.

These restrictions make it difficult to retrieve an object that you know is there, and they also make it very difficult to search for objects of a specific type (to see if there are any more from country x, for example). If you're interested in a single country, town, or region, you have to wade through tens or hundreds of results to find what you're looking for. There seem to be over 5,000 objects on the site (100+ pages in this list, each with 50 results on them), and that's quite a lot of wading.  This makes me sad. There's a treasure trove in there, but I just can't work out how anyone could investigate it well.

Thing 21: "I pray thee, gentle mortal, sing again"

With a Radio 4 habit like mine, and even without an mp3 player, you bet that I can do podcasts! Life would be unthinkable without being able to listen (again) to The Now Show, Test Match Special summaries (not to be missed just for Aggers and Boycott laying into each other), or last year's superlative Life Stories by David Attenborough (podcasts sadly no longer available, though you can buy the CD or book).

Venturing outside the Radio 4 enclave, I recently discovered the University's Streaming Media Service, after a College Fellow mentioned to the Librarian that Prof. Schaffer had mentioned our Library (favorably) in this year's Tarner Lectures, and I was tasked with checking this out.  The SMS hosts audio and video from Departments and Colleges, and you can register for an account online if you think you'll want to upload some content of your own.  I have plans to use this service to make publicly available talks given in the future as part of outreach events here at St John's, subject to the agreement of the speakers and to obtaining decent recordings.

Stepping even further afield, there are podcasts available to suit all tastes.  No-one's day, I feel, can be remain uncheered when it contains a snippet from The Naked* Scientists**.  They produce a podcast of their weekly radio show, as well as videos to illustrate their Kitchen Science (try at home) experiments, and also have a YouTube channel featuring (I kid you not) Science from the Sporran.



Coming to YouTube, I'm sure that we've all searched it for TV programmes we half-remember from our childhoods, haven't we?  Today's miscellany of disturbing mid-80s cartoon and live-action is brought to you by Jimbo, King Rollo, Fingermouse and Pob.

But none of this yet directly impinges on libraries.  Never fear, there's a viral video for every occasion, and today's occasion is Masters of Library Science Croquet (via almost everyone on Twitter).

Still not what I'm supposed to be doing?  OK.  *stomps off to find headphones and time*

I've now had a listen to a few of the Cam23 suggested podcasts.  I started at the British Library, first browsing by type and finding a public lecture about the future of taxonomy and then browsing by exhibition, and finding a short information piece by curator Vrej Nersessian on the Awag Vank' Gospels and the history of Christianity in Armenia.When I took off snuffling round the BL website to find the online version of the Sacred exhibition in order to see a picture of these gospels (BL Or. MS 13654), I was very pleased to find that the podcast in available there too, and with a transcription, to boot.  This level of integration is what really makes for a good website visit.  The taxonomy lecture was also interesting (in a Radio 4 sort of way), and although it did lack something for not having the presenter's slides visible, I think it was still worthwhile for the BL to have made it available.  I have plans to upload a podcast of a forthcoming library event, hopefully with accompanying gallery of pictures, and these two examples have been useful in directing my thinking about that.

Next up I had a look at the CILIP and JISC podcast pages.  I must confess to not having listened to anything from either of them, and I'm blaming that on them.  With the CILIP page I'm just not sure what I'm getting - it looks disordered, and there's also not much to choose from.  JISC has much more choice, but no summaries.  The topics aren't really my favourites, and with no extra information (date, length, or content) on the main page, I don't feel tempted to click through.

User-education wise I looked at the Goldsmiths Library tour podcasts.  I kinda like the idea of a tour round the library, though I'm not sure how many people would actually use the audio tour in situ.  But I could imagine myself printing off the scripts as a guide to the building, so there's definitely some merit there.

Overall I'm ambivalent about library podcasts.  The thing is that I like listening to things for pleasure, but for work I'd rather read.  If I had a commute to work (and an ipod) maybe it would be different then I'd probably would listen to JISC-style professional interest podcasts as well as the best of Radio 4.  And if there's a video of how to do something, then I will watch that if I can't find written instructions, although I'll almost always watch with the sound off, so it had better have on-screen text! But otherwise, I'm likely only to watch or listen for fun.

But because I'm me, I leave you with this little link to the BBC Archive.  It's a series of six ten-minute programmes in which genius of twentieth-century physics Richard Feynman sits in a old blue armchair and talks to camera about science.  If you know nothing about atoms or quantum mechanics you'll love it.  If you have a PhD in physics and now work at CERN you'll probably love it.

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*No nudity actually involved.

**Conflict of interest disclaimer: one of my housemates is a Naked Scientist, and pretty much all of the house, its contents, and inhabitants have featured in Naked Scientist content one way or another. Yes, that is my cello, our tea set, our garden and our very own gherkinator. If we ever invite you to a party do come, because there is likely to be fire.

Thing 11: "I am aweary of this moon"

Oh dear, oh dear, I've really been procrastinating over getting round to doing Thing 11, and all because I really don't feel like watching a bunch of random slideshows.  If I could remember any interesting presentations I've seen at conferences I'd have a search for them, but nothing much springs to mind right now.  But here I am, knuckling down, and leaning heavily on the Cam23-supplied prompts:

What are your thoughts about the tool?
I somehow don't like how it looks, and I'm not sure why.  The advanced search could be easier to find, and I'd like to be able to search for users via their user names but also by searching their user information.  Something has made the BBC live radio player hang a couple of times, and I suspect it might be Slideshare, so it's not very popular with me right now.  But it certainly fills a niche, and I can't see any glaring problems with the way it delivers slides.

It's worth noting that writing a slideshow for independent use is different to writing it to be talked to in real time, so some of the show work better than others.

What particular benefits to your Library are there from using Slideshare?
I think having induction/information presentations online for readers to use could be useful - it's one more way of reaching people, and it's often easier to explain how to use a service in bit-sized picture heavy formats than in a wall of text.  Screen recording tools (like those discussed by Phil Bradley here)  also seem useful for this.

Did you find any interesting presentations that you would like to share?
This isn't the prettiest presentation ever (and a couple of words drop off the bottom of the screen), but it's a good basic introduction and works well without the original speaker .

Using the Social Web to Promote and Provide Access to Special Collections

View more presentations from Colleen Greene.

Did you find any other users from a Cambridge University or College library?
No, but I didn't look very hard (Bad Girl! No biscuit!).

Will you use Slideshare in the future?
Yes, I'll certainly use Slideshare or something similar in the future to make available presentations that I give in the Library, at conferences, for public events etc.

Thing 7: "So quick bright things come to confusion"

Twitter was discussed on the Radio 4 comedy show 'Heresy' this week. David Mitchell, David Schneider and Matthew Norman were invited to argue against the proposition that 'Twitter is an act of massive collective narcissism'. They sort-of agreed that it isn't, although I'm not sure that David Schneider's enjoyment of the collision of grieving fans and joke-sharers at the time of Michael Jackson's death is an argument for Twitter that will necessarily draw in librarians.  And have I been drawn in?  Well, yes, sort of...

My first response to signing up for any new service or gadget appears to be to customise its appearance to suit my tastes (or to match my personal brand).  So I fiddled around with my profile page until it looked like my blog, and then, because that didn't work too well with the twitter logo, I fiddled around with my blog design until a happy middle ground was found.
 

Brand image consolidated, I spent quite a while looking at the other #cam23 tweeple*, as well as the #cilipfuture and #cilip1 discussions before actually diving in and tweeting myself.  I've signed up to follow quite a few of the Cam23-ers, especially those whose blogs I've been enjoying, as well as a feed from CILIP, Phil Bradley, some librarians who have been making noise with the #cilipfuture tag, and (as recommended by Josh H) ArchiveAtBBC. I took a look at the British Library feed, but decided not to sign up because I'm not sure I'm interested in reading all the BL responses to followers.  It's good that they're engaging in that way, but it doesn't draw me in particularly, and I'll stick to their press release RSS feed instead. Should you be interested, you can have a look at the full list of people I'm following.  Or take a look at this nifty gadget recommended by Evaluna.

Life moves very quickly on Twitter, and I wqnder if I'll find that quite difficult to take in the longer-term, when the novelty has worn off.  I particularly liked evans_above's description of this feeling: "Like everyone is talking [to me] at once, and I'm spinning around wondering what? what? what?".  I also wonder if there are ways of saving or bookmarking a tweet you want to come back to later? Maybe this is something that programmes like JournoTwit (as recommended by NPage) can do - I haven't tried it yet. 

Several people (e.g. nildesperandum) have been wondering what they're going to say on Twitter.  I can't say that this has troubled me too much, though I'm not sure if that's because I like the sound of my own voice, or just because I'm quite happy to be a quiet lurker in the corner.  Advice from several quarters has been to be to listen to other people and speak up when you hear something you want to share.  At the moment, there is quite a tight circle of cam23-ers following each other, so it probably only takes one of us to say something and the whole group has heard it, but I'm noticing that other people and institutions (even the big, famous ones) that I start to follow seem to follow me back as a matter of course, and I suppose that they do this because having a wide network is the way that interesting information spreads most quickly.

So, 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.  This week I have, for example, been reminded about the joys of McSweeneys, and discovered the Awful Library Books Blog.  (As I think about it, both from @angefitzpatrick.  I loved the typeface flow chart link from her blog last week, too, and #histonroadtoptrumps is a classic - I fear I may be developing a bit of an internet crush...) (Oh, and if you like the Awful Library Books, you might also like the Oddest Book Title of the Year prize.)

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'm not sure how often this is something that libraries want or need to do, although I'm thinking of trying to push an #opencambridge tag to boast interest across the summer and up to the open days in September.  Sharing general news and info (e.g. opening times, new accessions, new discoveries (for special collections/cataloguing projects)) is certainly possible, and will reach a different audience on Twitter than with just a blog/RSS feeds.  Although it seems that many of the people following library feeds are other librarians, and not library users, any library with a feed like this will have to be prepared to devote time and enegry to responding to followers.  The BL seems to be doing this, but as Whispers in the Wildnerness notes, it might not be possible for all libraries.

I've been on Twitter for a few days now, and certainly haven't hated it.  But I'm not sure that I'm completely hooked, either.  Can I really be the exception to the Marmite paradigm used all over Cam23 land this week to describe Twitter experiences?  I'm reading some fun and interesting articles that people are tweeting about, and I'm learning a bit about what other librarians are thinking.  But you have to work at it to get the most out of it, and I'm not sure I have the time.

*One of the unfortunate things about Twitter is the vocabulary that comes along with it.  Tweeple? Twub? Twapper? Twit? I'm quite nervous of trying to say one of the these infelicitous neologisms out loud because I'm quite likely to say by accident a word I wouldn't dream of writing in a blog that shares its 1st, 2nd and 4th letters with twit and quite probably appears in Chaucer.  How unfortunate.

Q: How is a library like a charity shop?

A: Both can easily be run by volunteers!

Or so said Alan Downey, one of the authors of the KPMG report 'Payment for Success - How to shift power from Whitehall to public service customers', on this morning's Today Programme.

Now, I'm not a public librarian, and I haven't the time or the intellectual capabilities to write the cutting analysis this deserves, but I would like to make few points in a slightly ranty fashion:

1. Mr Downey makes running a charity shop sound like a piece of cake.  I doubt that it actually is.

2. People aren't falling over themselves to run charity shops as he suggests - several in the neighbourhood in which I live (not the classiest end of Cambridge) have recently closed, or are open only restricted hours.

3. Even given that running a charity shop isn't simple, running a successful library, especially in the areas where they are currently undervalued, is probably significantly more difficult.

4. If libraries (and other currently public-sector services) are going to be run in volunteers in the future, where are the skilled volunteers going to come from once the current crop of probably retired trained former-librarians has run out?

So, what to do? Many people are tweeting about this, which I suppose engenders a feeling of collective dismay (much better than being miserable alone). I suppose I'd like someone (CILIP? the MLA?) to make a hard-hitting statement about the value of libraries and the importance of professional librarians, but I'm not so hopeful.  Maybe I'll contribute to the CILIP Conversation ('Defining our professional future') on this topic once I'm feeling a bit more coherent.

Edited to add: Better rants have been written by Elspeth Hyams and Bethan - go and check them out.

Further addition: There's a post and discussion about this on the CILIP Information and Advice Blog and at Optimus Librarian.