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

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!

#cam23, Extra Thing 4: Libraries widget

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

1. 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).
2. Click on the type of search you'd like to add.
3. That's it!
4. You should now be able to choose the COPAC option from your browser search box.
5. 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'.
6. 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.

Cam23 2.0

'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.

Together We're Better: Libraries@Cambridge 2011

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.

Open Sesame

St John's College Library, one of 17 taking part.

Looking for something to do in Cambridge this weekend? Then why not visit some of the Departmental and Faculty libraries open to the public as part of Open Cambridge. 17 libraries are opening, completely free, for all or part of Friday 10th and Saturday September. Some are old, some new, some famous and some obscure. I can't pick my favourites to mention here - all are interesting and worth a visit!

This is the third Open Cambridge weekend to have been organised by the Community Affairs team in the University of Cambridge Office of External Affairs and Communications (what a mouthful!), and the second year to have an Open Libraries strand. Open Cambridge happens annually during National Heritage Open Days, and it's designed as an opportunity for local people to see inside University, College and city buildings to which access is usually closed.

Open Libraries is my baby.  It developed after I made an unsuccessful bid for 2009 Fund money from the University at the end of 2008.  The inspiration from the bid came from the success of opening St John's College library to the public for our first Hoyle Day in Autumn 2008, during which people asked 'so when are you open again?', and 'which other libraries are open?'. This brought about a light-bulb moment: why, I asked myself, aren't more of these fabulous places ever shown to the outside world.  So I consulted with some librarians, and made a bid for funding to publicise and run a day of public open-access (a 'Cambridge Open Libraries Trail') to some of Cambridge's 100 libraries, all of them interesting either for architecture or content or both, and supported it with statements of approval from a number of Cambridge librarians. 

That the bid wasn't successful was no bad thing. Making the bid brought the idea to the attention of the Community Affairs team who suggested that the idea could be incorporated Open Cambridge.  I took on the role of recruiting libraries to the event by contacting libraries directly via email lists, and not relying on the possibility that information sent to generic college or department contacts might filter through.  I felt that it might be useful to have a 'library' face encouraging participation (although I was very new on the scene and probably seen as an upstart with crazy new ideas), and so I also managed responses and gathered all the necessary information from participants to compile the Open Cambridge programme.  All the difficult work (taking tour bookings for those libraries who prefer to give tours instead of having open-access days, press and publicity, design and branding, and so on) was handled by the Community Affairs team.  This year I've taken my hands even further off the reins and my only input has been to advertise it firstly at librarians to encourage participants, and now to anyone who'll listen to encourage visitors.

The Libraries strand of Open Cambridge 2009 was a definite success.  Visitors commented on welcoming and friendly library staff, and that it was good to see inside libraries, that they enjoyed viewing special displays and exhibitions of library materials, and that they'd like to see more libraries in the future.  So we're trying to build on all of that this year.

Open Libraries is hopefully doing something to break out of the #echolib, both by showing the public that these libraries are all here, but also by gaining higher visibility and status within the University.  It might not look like much - 17 libraries opening for a few hours to the great unwashed - but in the context of the Cambridge library world, where change is too often measured over decades, I think it's no mean feat.  I hope that Open Libraries will continue in the years to come; maybe it will come to be seen as an integral part of the weekend, something that both the libraries and the public look forward to...

As this and other recent initiatives (cam23, camlibtm) have shown, just having a go and seeing what happens will often reap great rewards; there are people out there who are keen to try something new if they're given an outlet. TeachMeet co-conspirator Celine (@cjclib) said to me recently "am starting to realise you are the queen of "you may as well..." & making big success of it!".  Maybe she's right, I shouldn't like to say.  But I think maybe that "you may as well..." is likely to make a success of itself just as long as you give it a chance.

Open Libraries is happening only because of the work put in by staff at all the participating libraries, to whom I'd like to say a huge thank you. Thank you for taking a chance and doing something new. Thank you for putting in the extra work and time. May you have many visitors.

The post that wouldn't die, or Thoughts on communication in Cambridge

A post by Andy Priestner written to sum-up the Cam23 course stirred up quite some debate earlier this week and the ensuing discussion has been quite illuminating. Some of those who commented took exception to what they felt was the implication that everyone could get on OK by just working things out for themselves rather than expecting everything to be provided by the UL. Andy has made it clear that this was not what he was trying to say, and some UL staff have pointed out that of course they don't have life particularly easy. Indeed, many people in all sorts of libraries seem to feel that they're working flat-out, with little time for introducing extras, or consulting with others as much as they'd like to.

'Just do it yourself!'
I have no doubt that most people are doing the best that they can, wherever they're working, whether that's a small college or department library or the UL. But the thing is that 'the best that you can' is not a fixed amount. With a supportive environment a person or organisation will feel much more confident, and will be able to achieve much more than if they feel as though they are struggling along on their own, or against the tide. 'Support' can mean the provision of courses, or it can be softer: the provision of an environment in which new ideas are actively welcomed, and people have the time and freedom to try out new ideas. From what I've read across Cam23 posts, it sounds like the Judge Business School Library is a great place to work. People have reported how they've been able to try out new Web 2.0 ideas for improving the library service, and they've clearly had both the time and support necessary to do this. In an unsupportive or isolated environment, trying out the same new ideas might not actually be intrinsically any more difficult, but being, or feeling, isolated, especially in combination with the general malaise of too much work and not enough time, creates a sense of inertia which makes it hard to pursue professional development work or to take risks on new ideas.

'Communication' by elycefeliz on Flickr

'Can anybody hear me?'
The debate chez Andy has recognised that the sense of aggrievement is in many respects borne out of poor communication and ingrained perceptions of hierarchy and privilege across the Cambridge library system. Communication has been an ongoing theme across Cam23 - there are, I think, more than a few people who feel that it could be improved (and I'm certainly one of them). Of course, it's not entirely clear how this can best be achieved, although a good first step would be to acknowledge that however hard people feel that they're trying to communicate, if some in the libraries feel like messages aren't getting through then there's probably still a problem. This needn't be taken as an accusation against anyone; when people feel like they're running just to stay still, and are implementing fixes and features in a hurry in response to urgent demands, it's surely very difficult to stand back and take a clear view of the overall situation.

Poor communication, whether about particular issues such as service developments*, or more generally a sense of just not knowing what's going on, of course contributes to a sense of isolation and disconnection particularly for those who work in small libraries, are lower-down the library hierarchy, and/or are new: all groups of people who will have smaller available networks of other library staff from whom to learn what's what. Cam23 has been great for making connections, but it shouldn't take a CPD programme like this for people suddenly to feel like they're connected.

At this point, I'm sure that you might be thinking that there are already lots of ways for Cambridge library staff to get in touch with each other, and that adding some other way is only going to make matters more confusing. You're right - there are already the Cambridge College Libraries Forum (which has, for example, monthly networking lunches), the brown-bag discussion lunches (not sure who's in charge of organising those), the ucam-lib-discuss email list, CamTools groups for Cambridge_Librarians and the CCLF, and the annual conference. When we look outside the University there's also the Cambridge Library Group, the CILIP East of England branch, the CILIP Career Development Group East of England division, and probably much more that I've not heard of.

So why am I complaining? Well, for one, it's hard to find out about these - I've been in Cambridge libraries for 4 years now, and I only found out about ucam-lib-discuss in June (thanks Aidan!). And neither the email list, nor the nice Web 2.0 groups available (such as the CamTools sites mentioned above), nor CILIP East of England seem to be a hub of activity (this may only be an impression given by their web presences, of course).  The perception that there's not much going on causes people not to bother to using them - a vicious cycle indeed.

There's now talk over at Andy's post that a wiki, or, even better, a concerted effort to use, improve, and market the Cambridge_Librarians CamTools group might be a way to improve matters.  I really hope that this does happen; it will need a critical mass of users and use for CamToos to become a regular port of call for library staff, but I think that this is something that could be achieved.  If we manage that, then we'll only have to worry about Libby's very good point that communication isn't just telling people things, it's allowing for the different ways in which people will understand them.  Food for a different post there, I think.

ETA: Andy has posted about this on the main Cam23 blog, and has set up a Doodle poll to try and organise an open meeting to discuss this further.

Further ETA:  The meeting happened, and a wiki detailing communication channels has been compiled on the Cambridge_Librarians CamTools group. Membership of the group is open to anyone working in any Cambridge Library.

---------------
*which, until the advent of the Service Developments blog, were announced only via an email list serving only senior staff who are supposed, but often do not, the forward the messages to their junior staff.

TeachMeet

Inspired by Isla's post about TeachMeet some Cam23-ers are going to meet up to have a think about organising something TeachMeet-y for Cambridge librarians. If you're interested please say: you can sign up to the Doodle poll of meeting times, comment on Isla's post, tweet, email, or in some other way indicate your willingness to get involved!

P.S. There have been murmurs of having glasses of something to help get the creative (and planning) juices flowing!

P.P.S The date has been decided as Tuesday 27 July 2010, meeting at 8pm at CB2 Bistro, Norfolk Street, Cambridge. Google Calendar link for those who want it:

Cambridge Conversation (1)

This is the first part of my report about a discussion between health, academic, business and school librarians held in Cambridge on Tuesday 22 June as part of the CILIP Conversation. Part 1 is all about CILIP and part 2 is about the future of libraries.

Lots of the other participants have also reported: Anna, Anne, Isla, Niamh, Sheila, and Jenni.

What do we think about the Conversation?
CILIP asked us to say what we think will happen in 10 years time, but we really can’t do that; it’s a job for futurists. What we can do is to evaluate what has changed in the last few years, and how this might develop in the next 1, 3, or 5 years, and we could have been asked about this in more detail in the survey.

We really didn’t like the CILIP survey much ; it felt irrelevant and lacking in detail. Some of the questions just didn’t even make any sense at all, such as ‘do you think that expectations of your role are increasing’. We also wanted more detailed questions about what we want from CILIP.

What do we think about CILIP?
CILIP feels distant, remote and irrelevant to many - particularly those working in business, school and health libraries – it seems like Update and Gazette have little that reflects our working lives.

The principal of chartership is worthwhile, but there was opposition to having to remain a member of CILIP for life to retain it. Personally, I understand this objection, but I suspect that this is the case for most professional bodies and that it isn’t just a CILIP issue.

CILIP CPD courses are expensive. Many people were very impressed with the courses organised by special interest groups, at very reasonable prices, although it was noted that speakers for these courses are often only paid travel expenses. CILIP courses are much more expensive than those from other similar professional bodies such as the Museums Association, and they’re not reliably good enough for people to want to risk spending £400 to attend them.

CILIP’s building in London is very unpopular; issues regarding its costs and value have been addressed elsewhere.

We read Update and Gazette for the job advertisements, and some people (those training and chartering) try to read it all, but we don’t find much that is relevant or interesting to us. The job advertisements are sometimes for such poorly paid jobs that we wonder whether CILIP should be advertising them at all. It was also noted that it’s so expensive to advertise in Update and Gazette that many jobs are missing.

It was thought that there could just be one CILIP magazine, possibly delivered online only. (I have a lot of thoughts about the online magazines, and the CILIP website in general, but I’m saving them up for another post.) It was even suggested that the magazine format could be dispensed with in favour of personalised news bulletins. There is an e-bulletin feature already, but there’s not a lot of refinement to it.

So why do people continue to pay for membership? Some jobs do need chartered status, and for professionals without an LIS degree, chartered status is important evidence of competence. People couldn’t praise the special interest groups enough – they seem to make membership worthwhile.

We do want a professional body
We want it to advocate for us, and to have good PR abilities and a strong public and media profile. The Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors was mentioned; we’d all heard spokesmen from it on the TV and radio. We really want CILIP to have someone whose job it is to appear on Newsnight, instead of making excuses about how hard it is to face up to Jeremy Paxman.

We approved of Phil Bradley’s idea that it would good to see a proactive CILIP that gets things wrong sometimes, instead of seeming to sit back and let us get on with it.

The example of Micahel Rose advocating for children reading was made. Andrew Motion (chairman of the MLA) wrote in 2008 about libraries in a way that suggested he hadn’t been in many recently, but he has been speaking up for them in the last few weeks. His opinions may not be nuanced enough to capture all the issues that concern librarians and information professionals, but CILIP could benefit from having someone similar to make a public impact.

Cambridge Conversation (2)

This is the second part of my report about a discussion between health, academic, business and school librarians held in Cambridge on Tuesday 22 June as part of the CILIP Conversation. Part 1 was all about CILIP and part 2 is about the future of libraries.

Other peoples' reports are also available:  Anna, Anne, Isla, Niamh, Sheila, and Jenni.

What is ‘librarianship’?
There was some debate about whether libraries and librarians need to rebrand as ‘Learning Resource Providers’ or something similar, but this term seemed far too narrow. Maybe there’s something else we could call ourselves, or maybe we just need to be clearer about what librarians do.

One good summary of librarianship (or information professionalism, if you like) that we thrashed out was:

Librarianship is helping people to work what question they’re really asking.

The emphasis was very much on personal interaction and support. The organisation of data can happen from anywhere, but user support and training is best done face-to-face, and one-to-one. This 1947 promotional film emphasises personal interaction in the role of the librarian. Why are we having to work to re-emphasise this now, when it’s surely never stopped being true?

This level of personal interaction and help needs professional staff. There’s definite concern about the de-professionalization of public libraries, and in a similar way about also the closure of government libraries: what impact will this have in the long term?

We discussed some of the ACRL predictions for future of academic libraries, in particular the idea that in 2025 there will be ‘no need to search’ (link to pdf page 16, item number 17 ). This ‘no search’ environment (we wondered if it would be something like foursquare, about which I know nothing) will surely require a lot of unseen work in the background, and it will need common languages and standards across all sources and platforms, and not continual re-invention of standards as we see today (apparently the Europeana project isn’t using Dublin Core standards for metadata but inventing some different standards [I've been corrected in the comments - Europeana are tweaking Dublin Core instead of using it straight, which is clearly better but still not ideal]).  Librarians will have to keep interpreting what people say and want until the semantic web is very, very good indeed, and that won’t be soon! Users expect intuitive interfaces, and need to be shown that there are benefits to learning more complex search techniques.

In 5 years time...
We ended the discussion by trying to imagine the future of libraries and information services on a more manageable timescale than the 10 years asked about by CILIP. If you have thoughts about what your library or service will look like in 5 years (both best and worst case scenarios!), then please continue the discussion in the comments.

School Libraries
School librarians can be very isolated. They rely on local networks, feel distant from CILIP, and unrecognised by teachers. School budget cuts means that there may be no money at all for CPD.
School libraries will have to adapt to match evolving teaching methods and to provide tools to help students find what they need outside the physical library, as well as providing project collections of books for use in the classroom.
There are currently not enough computer resources, but this might change as increasing numbers have their own laptops. Even with their own computers they will need help to locate resources online, and in the physical library.

Academic/Faculty/Subject Libraries
Subject librarians will have to know their subject more so as to be able to provide tailored search and indexing services. They might not need to be the academic, or doctor, but will need to speak enough of their language not to sound stupid, but to sound reliable and useful instead.

Business Libraries
Publications need more detailed metadata, for example about the precise materials used in engineering. This has to be added somewhere in the process, but it will be a lot of work, and it’s unlikely that author or user tagging is the answer.

A Cambridge College Library

In five year’s time the physical library with books in it will still be here. Students are currently very clear that they want to have the physical space to work in, and not even all new academic books will be available as e-books by then, never mind the older texts that are still needed.

Special collections are being digitised, but this can’t replace the importance of the books and manuscripts themselves, and will often lead to increased reader numbers through improved publicity. Digitisation also isn’t futureproof.

What can we do to improve the situation?

• Collect evidence of what we do in order to prove our worth.
• Ask our readers and researchers what they want from libraries: this might include help with copyright, and with getting published, more detailed enquiry answering about specific items (see Greening the material text).

Interesting discussions elsewhere

A very quick post to mention that some interesting discussions are happening on some other Cam23 blogs.

At Blurtmetry we're discussing communication between librarians and library staff:

Communication amongst librarians

And N Page is encouraging people to get together to discuss the future of the profession and CILIP's place in it:

Conversation on the future of information services