Digitisation: practicalities, pleasures and pitfalls. #HistLib15

On 12 November last year I went to the Historic Libraries Forum annual conference, titled ‘Practicalities, pleasures and pitfalls: uncovering digitisation projects’. As ever, it was a really informative and useful day, and a great chance to catch up with people.

The theme of the day was digitisation: how to plan, run and maintain a successful project. As someone who'd been involved for the last 18 months as one of the partners in the UK Medical Heritage Library project, I could only wish that the conference had come round two years earlier: it would have been a great help! But no matter, the case studies and advice generously shared by the six speakers will certainly be of use as I plan projects in the future.


1. Calum Dow, Towsweb Archiving. ‘The importance of planning for digitisation’

Townsweb is a company that undertakes digitisation for individuals and institutions. Calum provided a very clear overview of what you need to consider when considering and planning a project.

Key points

• Start with formal goals: use SMART objectives. Consider your desired outcomes, and the purposes of the digitisation: is it for for preservation, for display, for searchability, for access, for revenue? Who are the core users of the digital collection? What are your ideal timescales and milestones?
• Communicate with your supplier! Make sure everyone understands your project goals, including the end purpose of the digitisation. Ensure your supplier is happy to keep you updated.
• What to digitise? You might choose the items in greatest use, or at greatest risk. Ideal concerns have to be balanced with the items’ suitability in terms of condition and format.
• Image outputs and resolutions: capture your master images in an open-source, non-proprietary format.
• Access: metadata is vital to both your internal archive or document management system and your external website.
• Practicalities: you’ll need to consider how and where digitisation will take place. Different formats and materials have different requirements. The better quality digitisation will usually be achieved offsite. Very rare or fragile items may have to be digitised on-site, but you need a room with controllable lighting, good power supplies, space, etc.

Resources

• Callum's slides
• Planning Digitisation Projects – Best Practice Tips
• Guide: Sources of Funding for heritage Digitisation projects

2. Damian Nicolaou, Wellcome Library. ‘Hand in hand: The ups and downs of partnerships in digitisation’

Damian presented several case studies of collaborative digitisation projects. There can often be encouragement or inducement to work collaboratively these days, either with commercial or non-commercial partners. The Wellcome Library works with lots of partners. There are commercial (eg ProQuest) and non-commercial (eg the Internet Archive) organisations doing the digitisation. And then there are the organisations that use the output (eg Zooniverse), funders (eg JISC), publishers, academic partners, software developers, licensing societies, and internal partners. Some of the projects are London’s Pulse, ProQuest Early European Books, and the UK Medical Heritage Library.

Various themes recurred throughout the case studies that Damian presented:

• The difficulties of balancing your priorities against your partner’s (or partners’) priorities.
• Are the people at the coal-face of the digitisation working directly for you or for someone else?
• How to communicate well in order to manage relationships and expectations. Be clear who has responsibility for what.
• When collaborating, you need to agree tight standards for images and metadata. Sometimes the standards are baggy and imprecise, and even though everyone is adhering to them, local practice variations still make interoperability difficult.
• That doesn’t only apply to metadata: agree everything to do with the project in writing and even then interpretation may differ
• Things will change over time, including the people and staff you’re working with in partner organisations, and the goals of those organisations can change, too.
• Can you live with the conditions imposed by (commercial) partners? Are you prepared to do things their way?
• Could you do it on your own?
• Even ‘free’ things have costs.

Aside from the points directly relevant to collaborative working, there were other points to consider for all projects.

• Consider use cases for the digitised material both for the present and future, before you sign: keep things open!
• Broaden your reach by hosting the digitised content in multiple places (eg Wellcome Library website and the Internet Archive)
• Don’t neglect your internal departments, eg the conservation team.

3. Abby Matthews, Sutton Archives. ‘From Cellar to Hard-Drive: The Challenges of Digitising Glass Plate Negatives’

On a much smaller scale than the Wellcome Library, Sutton Archives is digitising fragile glass-plate negatives. ‘The Past on Glass’ is a 2-year Heritage Lottery Fund project, working with negatives from a photography business that was abandoned in 1918. The collection of negatives is vast, and there were several issues to address.

• The time-frame of project was set in advance, at the point of applying for funding, with little idea whether it was realistic or not, so part of the project has been working out how to best prioritise the work.
• There is a large and unknown number of damaged plates, so they’ve prioritised those in good condition.
• The project relies on volunteers, who have varying skill sets, so the workflows need to be written very carefully, with different volunteer roles available.
• There are a limited amount of resources available, including space and equipment, so they have been inventive about how to make the most of the scanner.

Abby gave some really useful advice:

• Do as much research as possible before you start. Seek advice. Know your options.
• Think carefully about specific needs and long-term requirements.
• Be prepared to go your own way.
• Set strict project methodology and workflow, and make sure everyone follows it.

4. Jamie Robinson, John Rylands Library. ‘CHICC - Heritage Imaging at The John Rylands’

Jamie described the work of the The Centre for Heritage Imaging and Collection Care (CHICC), based at the University of Manchester Library. They work for the university and external organisations, too. With university items, they try to digitise the whole item when there’s an imaging request for one part of it, to save having to do further work again later on the same item. They are constantly updating their equipment, and make the most of new developments, for example working with a pigment specialist on how best to image gold used in printed books and manuscripts.

Key points

• Different specialist materials need specialist imaging: this developing all the time.
• New techniques, such as multi-spectral analysis, have a lot to offer, and are leading to new research avenues on the primary sources.

Key resources

• University of Manchester digital collections
• Bosch project at the Rijksmuseum: new ways of presenting paintings research
• Association of Historical and Fine Art Photography

5. Steven Archer, Parker Library, Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. ‘The legacy of Parker on the Web’

Parker on the Web was one of the first major manuscripts digitisation projects. It launched in 2009. Steven spoke about how digitisation is only the beginning with a project of this scale and scope. The project has a large maintenance demand: corrections and additions to images, references and bibliographies appear in semi-annual releases. In addition to this, the interface is now starting to show its age to some extent, so plans are underway to launch a new version in due course.

Steven also had some interesting reflections on the way digitised content has changed reading room culture. Remote access gives the librarian much less idea what people are working on, and thus fewer outlets to help them! They hope that the new version of Parker on the Web might have more facilities for interaction between scholars working on the manuscripts.

Some resources mentioned:

• Mirador: an open source image viewing platform that can display resources from systems supporting the International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF).
• DigiPal: a resource for the study of medieval handwriting
• T-PEN: a web-based tool for working with and transcribing images of manuscripts.

6. Naomi Korn, Naomi Korn Copyright Consultancy. ‘Copyright issues in digitisation’

You can't consider digitisation without considering copyright. And copyright is complicated. Works whose authors died before 1969 and whose works weren’t published by 1 August 1989 are still in copyright until 2039. Something that looks like it might be 'one' item, like a scrapbook or diary, might have multiple copyright holders. Naomi had some very practical advice for how to manage rights in (our rights (or lack thereof) to digitise and reproduce) and rights out (what rights we’ll grant other people to use the digitised images).

Key points:

1. Be aware what the digitisation contract says re: what’s expected and required. You need to exercise due diligence!
2. Be aware of layers of rights: for example, cuttings stuck into a diary. Resources are needed to check and clear rights.
3. Rights management is risk management.
4. Check what the terms are regarding the licences on the digital images. Heritage Lottery Fund projects are required to use a CC-BY-NC licence, so you need to ask rights holders for this level of permission. When asking for rights you can ask for equivalent rights, or ask for as much as possible (but latter has risk that rights holders will say no as asking too much.)

Tools for reverse image searches (to try to uncover image sources)

• Google
• TinEye
• Foto Forensics

Conclusion

So, to sum up… Knowledge is power when thinking about a digitisation project. The more detail and understanding you have about the materials you want to digitise, the easier the planning and implementation should be.

• Think before you act! Know your collections. (Really know your collections.) Know your audience(s).
• Think about the future: allow for possible new uses.
• Host it far and wide – the more places, the better.
• Have clear project plans and workflows.
• Talk to everyone as much as possible, and don’t forget your internal partners and collaborators.
• Plan for what happens after the project finishes: how do you maintain it?
• Factor in the time and money involved in copyright clearance from the start.

New space for old books: #rbscg14

At the end of August (Wednesday 27 to Firday 29), the CILIP rare books and special collections group met at the University of Aberdeen for its annual study conference, this year on the theme ‘New Space for Old Books: Building for the Future’. The full conference programme with details of all the speakers and paper titles should still be online (.docx link).

The conference took place in the new University Library building, a dramatic blue-ish cuboid that stands above the city on a hill, and which has probably the best views of any library anywhere:

View from #rbscg14 pic.twitter.com/OV7ZhTsjtQ
— Naomi Percival (@naomi_percival) August 27, 2014

There were 17 papers in total, and I don’t propose to write them up individually. I felt that three main themes emerged: project management, knowing your collections, and managing the environment.

Projects
Project management is hard. Everyone said this. Major building projects are incredibly complicated and you will need to set aside a lot of time to manage them. Architects, tendering for services, buildling, weather, finances … Try not to have everything happening at once, but do try to have a plan from beginning to end when you start. In particular, it’s very useful to have the utilities and air conditioning designed together, even if they’re implemented in separate phases.

Be prepared with ideas about what you’d like for your buildings. Decisions are sometimes made very quickly – particularly if money suddenly becomes available – and you’ll want to be able to put your case forward well. Don’t be afraid to be ambitious and imaginative when you do.

Unexpected difficulties will come up. You can try and prevent some of these – for example, by checking the financial health of your contractors – but some of them, like the weather, you can’t. And sometimes it may be that things don’t move forward because there just isn’t sufficient institutional interest.

Therefore you need to be pragmatic at all stages. You might be able to keep your service running as usual through most or all of a project, but you might not be. Communicate with your staff and readers about this – it’s not the end of the world to stop doing things if people know why, and for how long. It’s likely that staff roles will morph during the project, as different areas of expertise are needed. This might be uncomfortable for people who’re already adapting to the changed priorities and working conditions, so, again, being honest and upfront about what’s happening and why is important.

Two resources were mentioned as being useful:

• RIBA advice on working with an architect
• The Major Archives Project Learning Exchange

The stuff
We heard about the construction of several brand new buildings, all of which to some extent or other also involved the bringing together of previously separate collections and services from one or more institution, the creation of new services, and deliberate moves to engage with new audiences and communities.

The Keep in Brighton brings together the special collections from the University of Sussex, the East Sussex Record Office and Brighton’s Royal Pavilion & Museums Local History Collections. From the point of view of readers, there is no difference between the collections: everything can be searched in one place and there are no differences on access rules and regulations. However, behind the scenes the collections remain separately owned and managed. This meant that there was significant work to do in harmonising policies and procedures (such as fetching, handling, registration requirements for readers, reading room rules and so on) before opening the service.

The Hive, Worcester, is Europe's first joint university and public library. It combines the University of Worcester research collections, the collections of the Worcestershire Archive and Archaeology Service, the university research repository, the public library, the local government one-stop shop and more. It has admirable aims, even if its list of ten core values reads to me like something from 2012: inspiration, connection, aspiration, learning, integration, inclusivity, enduring values, well-being, sustainability, visibility. I was very pleased to hear about the efforts that had been put into staff training and customer service. Staff for the Hive were drawn in from all the different areas represented in the collections. They held staff workshops about how to answer customers’ queries: customers see all the staff as the same, whereas each person has a particular background and areas of expertise and non-expertise. They devised a very structured referrals process, so that people know what they should pass on (and how to do it) and what they can answer themselves. All this under the matra: ‘We welcome, we innovate, we respect [each other's specialisms]’.

Two members of staff from the Glasgow School of Art library spoke about the work they had been doing (pre-fire, of course) to encourage wider use by their students and others. This included bringing artists and writers in to use the collections to ‘inspire, challenge or expand their practice’ through a project called the hatchery. This has included using the library space for installations and tableaux vivants. They cited the Library as Incubator project as a useful resource and inspiration for this work. In a newly designed special collections area they’ve also been running workshops and sessions based on the collection both to draw out items to use as inspiration, but also to explain to students how special collections and archives work. Various pieces – such as a camel (!) - have been inspired by this.

Bringing lots of things together can obviously have its benefits. Aberdeen University Library special collections reported a huge increase in use once they were in the same building as the rest of the university library, instead of being hidden in the back of somewhere else behind 5 doors and several corridors... But I wonder whether collaboration sometimes isn’t just seen uncritically as a Good Thing by senior management, without consideration of the individual requirements of user groups and services.

The key, it seems to me, to making a collaborative project work, or to getting the most from your collections is to know really well what it is you have in the first place. You have to invest time and effort in understanding the potential of your collections and the interests and needs of your current and potential future readers. I think this is a moral I hear in a lot of conferences because I never feel like I spend enough time getting to know my own collections...

Environment
Environmental control can be really difficult whether you’re in a historic building or a new one.

Susie Bioletti spoke about the difficulties in managing the conditions in the Long Room at Trinity College Dublin. It’s Dublin’s second biggest tourist attraction, with something like 550,000 visitors annually. It gets loads of sunshine, there’s heaps of dust (that follows no known settling pattern), people bring in humidity and heat with them. Since 2004 they’ve been undertaking detailed surveys. They measure dust using a ‘loss of gloss’ technique in which glass microscope slides are placed in various locations and their reflectivity (or lack of it) is measured to give a value for the quantity of dust that has settled. They plot environmental recordings against a calendar in order to demonstrate trends and to pick out dates that are particularly bad because of particular events – a useful visual way to map this data.

You can expend a vast amount of time, energy and money trying to keep a very tight control on temperature and humidity, when it could be a lot more efficient to take a more relaxed attitude (especially considering that facilities management is rightly increasingly concerned with wider environmental impact, carbon usage and so on). NAME from ORGANISATION summarised the recommendations of PD 5454 (the replacement for the BS 5454 standard) as:

• know your collection and assess the risks that apply to it specifically
  
• recognise the difference between mixed traditional archive materials which can’t be split up easily, and those specialist materials that need particular conditions
  
• re-conceptualise environmental control as ‘allowing fluctuations within set parameters’ rather than ‘rigid control’
  
• Keep the RH up in reading rooms – it’s a shock for documents to move from 50% RH in the store to maybe only 25% in the reading room. Temperature is less of an issue. (Would that this will end the scourge of 16ºC reading rooms...)
  

These are all sensible and encouraging, and echo what was said at the late BL Preservation Advisory Centre ‘Knowing the Need’ conference last year.

Several people in the audience, however, raised a very important point: it’s all well and good to adopt a more relaxed approach to conditions in which PD 5454 is a guide not a rule when considering your own collections. However, the stipulations in PD 5454 are routinely used by institutions loaning objects and books as the guide for acceptable storage and display. If you want to be borrowing items for display and exhibition, then you need to trying to meet these conditions for many places to allow you to borrow. I’m not sure we’ve found a way to square these two approaches yet.

And last but not least

1. The recurring theme of the conference was having the Queen visit to open your building. It’s not compulsory but it does get all sorts of otherwise disinterested people to notice you.
2. Need a better name for your basement? Try ‘Garden Level’, a term used at – I think – St Andrews.
3. Aberdeen is gorgeous. I can’t wait to go back:

   by  Katie Birkwood 

Making the most of possibilities of digitisation: an #rbscg13 write-up

  by  Keith Marshall 

Rare Books and Special Collections Group Conference (programme (.docx)).  The theme this year was digitisation (last year was fundraising and advocacy).  The three recurring themes across all of the papers were audience, metadata, and the 'thinginess of things', with some very useful practical advice thrown in. I'm not going to give a blow-by-blow account of every paper, but rather to pick out the bits I've been chewing over since.

All three themes were addressed in Simon Tanner's keynote, which adeptly summed up the current situation as well as challenging us to think more imaginatively about the future and shaking us out of complacency about what we're doing now.

Tanner started by using the analogy of an ant mill to describe the fate of too many digitisation projects.  He emphasised that it's vital to plan properly and to seriously consider audience, opportunity costs (what aren't you doing if you are doing digitisation instead?), and to keep asking the 'so what' question to keep you focussed on why you're doing what you're doing. He also shared lots of useful resources:

• Inspiring research, inspiring scholarship: the value and benefits of digitised resources for learning, teaching, research and enjoyment. A report from a JISC-http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=5829453287508418737#editor/target=post;postID=8554323225911761063funded project.
• Measuring the impact of digital resources: the balanced value impact model. A report which examines impact in its widest senses, and suggests means to measure it.
• Why your cultural website is rubbish*. Report in the Guardian revealing that the UK's 40 biggest cultural venues get 0.04% of web traffic.
  

Sian Prosser presented a case study on cataloguing and digitising a comparatively small collection of  manuscript fragments. She emphasised that even though there weren't many fragments, a very high level of specialist knowledge was required to describe them well, and that any project of this type is likely to take more time than envisaged.

• TEI by example. Sian's project used TEI to mark up the descriptions. TEI by example is a set of free online tutorials.
• Ransom Center Fragments. This is a very useful Flickr site displaying images from a large collection of manuscript fragments at the Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin.

My favourite paper from the conference was  Rowena Willard-Wright on 'Transforming our data for the internet on a tight budget'.  Willard-Wright works for English Heritage and described their work on digitising and improving their catalogue, including photographing objects, improving old records, cataloguing from scratch, and create varied means of access to the records.  Her talk really exposed infuriating and frustrating the problems faced by all cataloguers are.  As she spoke I wrote:

Willard-Wright's description of migrating and updating catalogue data is very familiar: data has been lost and garbled in transfers over years. Cataloguing has been and still is viewed as archane, and a thing not worth funding, because catalogues were and are seen as not for general consumption. I.e. they are perceived as been the exact opposite of their whole point. This problem that has been seen with the English Heritage catalogue is *exactly* what is being exposed as libraries moves from traditional OPACs to resource discovery/next-generation systems. And, most infuriatingly, the things that cataloguers have known and have been saying forever (e.g. consistency matters, access points matter) is suddenly being "discovered" as if it's new.

Willard-Wright was talking from the perspective of a museum catalogue, which is in some ways very different to a library catalogue.  Museums don't have such a tradition of the publicly accessible comprehensive catalogue, and write much more descriptive and less codified entries for their objects.

The English Heritage cataloguing project used teams of volunteers with very well-defined tasks.  They write clear, concise, engaging, small chunks of description - i.e. entries that confirm to the principles of good writing for the web. The volunteers aren't necessarily experts on the objects, and they're writing for audiences who aren't necessarily experts either. However, there's a recognition that the audience may have additional knowledge or stories to share, and for this reason a 'tell the curators something about this' button is being built into the public catalogue.  I absolutely love this - it's baffled me for years that so few library catalogues have a 'tell us if there's a mistake' button. Copac is a notable exception.  I fear that many libraries don't have one because, if it was ever mentioned in a meeting, someone piped up and said "but think of all the extra work" which likely trumped "think of how handy that will be for our readers, and how useful for us to make use of their knowledge".

That lack of connection to the audience was hammered home for me in another way throughout Willard-Wright's talk.  The museum descriptions are being written for general audiences.  Rare books records contain descriptions that are, frankly, written for librarians.  Not even, really, for most researchers. Yes, we include all sorts of useful information, but we code it up in impenetrable ways, and there's all sorts of information we don't include accessibly.  This has maybe been less of an issue in the past, when catalogue records were only seen by those initiated into our arcane world. But now catalogue records go along with beautiful/intriguing/important digitised books that all sorts of people might want to see, and our gibberish means *nothing*, and doesn't explain any of the basics. (How many records for the first folio show clearly that this is a first folio? Or the Nuremberg Chronicle?)

During Willard-Wright's paper Jill Dye commented that "The only difference between an online catalogue and a digitisation project is adding a photo?", and I think that in one way she's right: it's completely wrong to think that a digitisation project stands apart from cataloguing. However, making materials accessible in any way, but especially if they're freely available online demands a new attitude to description. We really need to step up our game.

Melissa Terras is director of the UCL Centre for Digital Humanities, and she presented a wide-ranging paper highlighting some of the possibilities of high-end digital imaging. She works on these projects in collaboration with computer scientists and engineers, and they're often adapting techniques already used elsewhere (such as in medical imaging). As well as drawing our attention to current projects, Terras made some important points about the theory and practice. Digitisation means lots more sorts of metadata needed so that we can properly interpret the images. As Hannah Thomas put it, Terras' work is "not just about creating a surrogate but about using the image to discover new things, inspire new research". Terras made the point that digital images are *not* exact reproductions of originals. Terras asked us to talk to her if we know of collections or items that would benefit from advanced digitisation and imaging work; part of her role is to connect the various people involved.

• The one resource I'll share is this breathtaking (there were audible gasps in the room) video of the digital flattening of the great parchment book. Watch it. It's amazing.

Alixe Bovey spoke from the academic's perspective, and addressed some of the threats posed by digitisation. She was heavily involved in the campaign to try to prevent the sale of some of the Mendham Collection books last year. Bovey passionately explained that the digital is not the same as the physical, and we all need to communicate this better.  With the Mendham sale, the existence of digitised copies of the titles on databases such as EEBO and ECCO was used as justification for the sale, ignoring the copy specific details of the Mendham copies, as well as the failings of the scans themselves. Earlier digitisations have been particularly lacking. Never mind the poor black and white reproductions of scanned microfilm, they tended, for example, not to include any blank or apparently blank pages.in the source copy (see this post), and also ignored bindings, and made it difficult to determine the original size of the book. But we're not past such difficulties even with the best modern digitisations; they tend not to include scale rules, (see this post for difficulties of determining size), and give little indication of other factors such as weight, quality of materials used, or even smell.

Anne Welsh spoke very pragmatically from the point of view of libraries and library staff themselves.  She pointed out that we are continually needing to update and improve what we've done before: both content format and types of description.  She faced the fact that we can't do everything, and used the example of the University of Manchester Library Digitisation Strategy Group's 'Criteria for ensuring value to the Library for partnerships' (pdf link), which considers the value to the library of any potential projects.

Nicolas Pickwoad spoke about one element of early books which is too often overlooked in digitisations: book bindings. Most bookbinding digitisations (Pickwoad mentioned the Uppsala Probok project as an exception) show only beautiful, expensive, fancy and/or fine bindings, turning bookbinding digitisation has into "a decorative arts ghetto". This doesn't represent most early book bindings, which are less extravagant, but can tell us a very great deal about the book's history, and may often be the most interesting.

There's also a vicious circle at work: bindings aren't so often described in catalogue records, soscholars can't ask for them, so there's not so much research, so it's not seen as a priority... At least when books are viewed in person, the binding will be seen 'by accident' as it were.  If they're not included in digital surrogates they disappear altogether. Like many specialist aspects of digitisation, imaging bindings takes special requirements, including lighting, including to show structures accurately.

• I'm keen to keep an eye on Pickwoad's Ligatus project, which is working on guidelines and terms for describing bindings better. It's hoping to develop vocabulary and multilevel descriptions for bookbinding including the ability to record negatives (e.g. 'no clasps'). This is key, because otherwise you just can't tell whether a feature is absent or it's just a bad record.

  by  Xavier de Jauréguiberry

So all in all, my summary would be that we need to be using better, subtler and more flexible descriptive frameworks and presentational tools to make digitised materials accessible and available to the audiences who want to see them.  Digitisation can help with some, but not all, problems, and we need to advocate loudly for the intrinsic physical value of the things we want to digitise, to try to stem the tide of feeling that a copy is as good as, and entirely replaces, the original.

There was lots of tweeting throughout the conference:

• The rare books group storify of all of the conference tweets is here. 
• My archive of my #rbscg13 tweets is here.

Useful links from #rbscg12

Further to my reflections on the CILIP Rare Books and Special Collections Group annual conference, 'Speaking Truth to Power', here are some of the useful webpages, projects and articles that were mentioned during the conference.

Collections currently or recently under threat

• The Women's Library
• The TUC Library and Archive
• The Wedgwood Archive
• Ushaw College Library
• The Mendham Collection

Collaborative digitisation projects

• The Bodleian and the Vatican Library digitising Greek manuscripts, incunabula and Hebrew manuscripts and printed books.
• The John Johnson Collection of printed ephemera at the Bodleian
• Saving Oxford Medicine
• The British Library and the Qatar Foundation

Other projects and libraries

• Sir Fred Hoyle Project, St John's College Library, Cambridge
• Samuel Butler Project, St John's College Library, Cambridge
• Library at the Oxford Museum of the History of Science
• Manchester Central Library refurbishment
• Manchester Central Library special collections
• Treasure of Manchester Central Library on Flickr
• John Lewis MemoryStore
• Robert Sayle MemoryStore on Cambridgeshire Community Archives Network

New use(s) of library space

• Cafe Rylands at Manchester's John Rylands Library
• The Cotsen Children's Library in Princeton's Firestone Library
• New University Library at Aberdeen

 Reports

• RLUK Unique and Distinctive Collections Project (report to follow)
• OCLC and RLUK survey into UK special collections (report to follow)
• Taking Our Pulse: The OCLC Research Survey of Special Collections and Archives (OCLC report into USA and Canadian collections)
• St John's College Library Annual Reports

Blog post

• Bloggers of the World Unite: Rare Book Bloggers and the Links They Build (post mentioned by Alison Cullingford)

Tools and resources

• COPAC collections management tool: "Libraries are continually faced with difficult decisions about what materials to keep, what to remove and what to conserve. At the moment, identifying whether items are rare, or indeed unique, within the UK is a time-consuming and expensive manual process. Our goal is to look at how Copac can make a real difference for collections managers. By making Copac data work harder and building the prototype on top of its extensive database, the collections management tool can provide valuable information from the catalogues of the UK’s major research libraries alongside rare collections held in museums, scholarly societies and university special collections." 
• Information about the 2014 Research Excellence Framework (REF)

 Organisations, recognition and funding bodies

• Heritage Lottery Fund Your Heritage Grants 
• Arts Council (formerly MLA) Designation Scheme 
• National Archives Accreditation Scheme

 Articles

• Browar, Lisa and Samuel A. Streit. 'Mutually Assured Survival: Library Fund-Raising Strategies in a Changing Economy.' Library Trends 52:1 (2003), 69-86 
• Winston, Mark D. and Lisa Dunkley, 'Leadership Competencies for Academic Librarians: The Importance of Development and Fund-raising' College & Research Libraries 63:2 (2002), 171-82
• Steele, Victoria, 'Of Sherpas and Mountain Climbers: The Special Collections Librarian in the Library Development Process' Rare Books & Manuscripts Librarianship 9:2 (1994) 77-85
• Attar, Karen E., 'Modern special collections cataloguing: A University of London case study' Journal of Librarianship and Information Science (2012)

Speaking truth to power: Rare Books Group annual conference 2012 (#RBSCG12)

The annual Rare Books and Special Collections Group conference took place on 12-14 September at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford.  This was the first year I was able to attend the conference, and I have to thank the CILIP East of England branch for financial support via their small grants fund.  I also must thank the RBSCG committee for organising a superb conference, the speakers for being so interesting, the other attendees for being friendly, and the staff at LMH for excellent hospitality.

The title of the conference was ‘Speaking Truth to Power: Making Special Collections Work in Times of Recession’, so fundraising, advocacy and outreach were major topics of conversation.  I’ve written up a narrative account of the conference for the East of England branch newsletter, Sunrise, which should be available later in the Autumn. What follows here are my thoughts arranged under what I felt were the main themes to emerge from the conference.  I’ve compiled a separate list of useful webpages, projects, reports and articles.

It’s fair to point out that I’ve always traditionally been sceptical about what university development offices do: I’ve had my fair share of half-hearted begging letters from my old college, and feel pretty cynical about their attempts to wring money from me (they know I’m a librarian, so I really don’t know why they try...). Remarkable to relate, this conference really changed the way I feel how we can engage with fundraising, and so my reflections seemed to have turned out more like a manifesto.

Show Don’t Tell

Our collections are our best and most powerful advocates, not only for themselves and for the library, but for the whole institution. The collections are most effective when people see and touch them up close and personal.  The ‘thingyness’ of our things matters; a digital reproduction is nice, but it just isn’t the same as the real thing, and allowing people not only to see, but to touch, gives them a big thrill and makes them feel important and valued.  Christopher Parking described that the physicality of objects is an important part of contemporary museum education practice, where the focus is on  handling collections, kinasthetic learning, and enquiry-based learning. School groups no longer just follow clipboard trails around objects safely kept behind glass.

We should be getting the important people inside and outside our institutions into our libraries to see just what it is that makes us special.  It’s no use just writing an email or a report describing what we hold: people have to come and see it to really understand.  Obviously it’s not always feasible to let everyone handle our objects, but don’t discount the impact it can make when it is possible to allow that.

Know Your Collections

We, as librarians, are fundamental in making our collections work, as we’re the people who know most about them.  We should be prepared to market ourselves as the people who can interpret the collections. There's something in most special collections that will appeal to everyone and anyone, so librarians are vital because we know what that item will be. This can make a big difference when, for example, the development office are bringing round potential donors.  We’re also important because we’re the people who know best just what a difference extra funding could make.

Our knowledge as librarians is what can make a big difference to academics, too.  They need access to our holdings to support their teaching, and they need access to our knowledge to help further and inform their research. Central to getting our collections used in research is getting them all catalogued, not only locally but as part of national and international indexes, and making the catalogue data available in useful ways.

It’s no longer acceptable for institutions to have basements of unknown collections, often the legacy of indiscriminate and undocumented collecting in the past.  So we need to take the initiative in working out what we have.  This is something that Manchester Public Library have been doing during the current refurbishment: they’ve been assessing what was, and what should be, stored in their closed stacks, and working out how that can be used in the future.

Know Your Institution

It’s not always easy to do, but you need to work out who has the power in your institution, and be prepared for the fact that once you’ve identified who that is, they’ll probably keep changing.  Alison Cullingford noted that people can have positive power (they can make things happen) and negative power (they can stop things happening).

Mark Nicholls gave a very clear account of the ways in which we can gain power for ourselves and influence those others who hold the positive and negative power.  He notes that "The worst mistake of a college (or any) politician is to be absent": we should do what we can to get on as many committees as possible and to cultivate allies on the others.  It’s important, he noted, to realise that those in charge can and will make decisions quickly when the time is right.  We have to be good at working out what ideas are right for the moment.  This gets easier as time goes on: one successful project, and attendant praise for the institution, will prime the organisation (and its nay-sayers) for further success.

Neil MacInnes and Judy Faraday both described the ways in which they were using special collections to further the aims and agendas of their institutions.  Manchester Public Libraries special collections are being used to engage communities that the local authority holds as priorities, including black and ethnic minority communities, place-based communities, and young people.  The materials held by the John Lewis archives and the community archives centred around the locations of John Lewis stores helps to support the partnership’s business cycle.  It does this both by providing materials for business use, including publicity and design, but also by creating community support and interest.  I suppose that you could call this latter effect ‘soft advertising’ - in any case, it’s part of the partnership’s commitment to corporate responsibility.  It’s important to be explicit about how your activities are supporting the mission and goals of your organisation.  Don’t just do it, but make sure everyone knows you’re doing it.

 Walters Art Museum 

Know Your Audience(s)

We have lots of different audiences for our collections, activities and fundraising efforts.  Our traditional audience, academic readers, are still very important. Anne Welsh commented that their voices can be important in times of uncertainty, and that their support for services and collections can be vital.

There’s a general support for libraries and special collections amongst the general public.  Although there’s often a rather clichéd and unfair impression that we’re just old and dusty, this support is still something we can and should work with.  Richard Ovenden mentioned the one-day display of a copy of Magna Carta at the Bodleian: lots people will queue up to see something if you advertise it well, and this will generate positive publicity for your institution.

When considering external funders, Mark Nicholls advises that we can improve our image easily for example by producing a professional and attractive annual report.  Oliver Urquhart Ivine described British Library work creating partnerships such as that with the Qatar Foundation.  They took time and effort to research potential donors in depth, and to plan how they will approach and encourage potential donors.  This advice chimed with Mark Nicholls caution that we have to anticipate potential objections to our plans and be prepared to knock them away one by one.

When planning fundraising efforts, Sean Rainey commented that it’s important to realise that there’s a difference between funding priorities and fundraising priorities. We have to recognise what things donors will and won’t be prepared to donate towards.  We won’t have much success campaigning for retrospective conversion, small facilities improvements, and supplies and equipment purchases, so we need to look critically and objectively at our plans and decide what we can realistically achieve via which means.

Don't Be Complacent

In straightened times it’s important to keep ourselves front and centre in the minds of the people who make the decisions.  This might seem mercenary and drastic, but it can make all the difference.  There are plenty of collections and collecting areas that are sadly under risk.  As well as recent high-profile threatened libraries, Richard Ovenden and Alison Cullingford both identified twentieth-century collections that haven’t traditionally been regarded as ‘special collections’ as areas that may not be receiving the attention they need now to be preserved for the future.

Fundraising, I think, isn’t something that comes naturally or easily to librarians.  We like to think that the importance of our collections is not merely monetary, and that their cultural and intellectual value will ensure they receive adequate support without our having to bring out a begging bowl.  But that, sadly, isn’t the case.  We need to make the case for our collections, and to use the existing mechanisms for fundraising (development offices, funding bodies, donors, and so on) to attract support.  Sean Rainey ended his paper by enjoining us not to let fundraising slip down the to-do list, and I’ll echo what he said: start working on it now.

The Business of Social Media: #likeideas 2012

I was chuffed to bits to receive one of the Sue Hill Recruitment bursaries to attend Like Ideas 2012--the summer conference of LIKE, the London Information & Knowledge Exchange--last Friday, 29 June.

  by  JJay 

I've been aware of LIKE for a while, but this was the first event I'd been to.  I can report that it was good as the reputation suggested: friendly, well-organised, with a varied mix of speakers and attendees and good refreshments.  The theme of the conference, 'The Business of Social Media', looked at some aspects of using social media inside and outside organisations, both at a personal and institutional level.  Many of the speakers came from corporate library, law library and knowledge management backgrounds, very different to my own library background in HE and special collections.  This different perspective really helped me to think about the bigger picture of social media, as well as some of the specifics.


Using social media for external engagement
Bertie Bosrédon was a very engaging speaker, and his case study of using social media to promote the charity Breast Cancer Care (pdf link) helped me to think about a number issues to do with how you can embed and support social media promotion throughout an organisation.

• The formalisation of social media use by the charity began with a staff survey, to see was already using which tool (personally or professionally) and to recruit people with experience, or wanting to gain experience, to be 'social media champions'.  This applied across all departments, not only in the digital department of the organisation, which presumably helps social media not be ghettoised as 'something IT do'.
• A weekly email is sent out to the 'social media champions' highlighting what's going on in the charity, recent successes, and current campaigns.  This reinforces the value of what they're doing, and provides material for them to discuss online, without being too prescriptive about what everyone should say.
• They keep a record of both basic statistics--such as followers, retweets, comments, 'likes' on Facebookc--for quantitative analysis, but also record and share anecdotes and success stories to use as 'elevator pitches' and to show the practical and personal value of social media use.

My 'lightbulb moment' during this session was (the very obvious) point that the whole point of using social media for organisational promotion and marketing is to share stuff: so as much as having policies about how to use social media, we need to have policies about how we're going to keep producing high quality stuff (images, videos, etc.) that people will want to share.


Using social media to support research
Noeleen Schenk's talk (pdf) left me with more questions than answers, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. Some of the things I've been pondering since are:

•  To what extent can we usefully generalise about 'research', especially if we're considering research work done by information professionals for their users and academic research?  In particular, can we generalise that all research has at least some social aspects that map onto the characteristics of social media?
• How, if we feel that social media have benefits for researchers (e.g. widening and extending scholarly networks), can we better help them to embed these tools into their working lives?
• Is the perception that engagement with social media isn't valued, or is actively disliked, by senior academics a barrier to less senior academics using it?  If so, what can we do? If not, what are the barriers to adoption?

Social media technology
James Mullan discussed various social media tools that are, or could be, used within law firms to support engagement between staff (pdf).  These tools include Sharepoint, Confluence, Jive, Yammer and others, none of which I've seen in action.

The issue of how to market these tools to staff was a big feature of the talk, and many of the issues chimed with what I was thinking about academics using social media.  James identified several reasons why fee-earners (as they're known) might not want to use social media: they're time conscious, cost conscious, analytical, risk averse, they don't want to share everything they do because they're focussed on moving their careers forward not indiscriminately helping their colleagues, and happy to use email.  It's therefore very important to put yourself in their shoes and identify what will be useful to them, and to pick tools that have a low entry point: if people need training to use something they probably just won't use it.  :Lastly, sponsors within the organisation (at a more senior level) need to be seen to be actively using the tool, not just to be supporting it passively.


Panel discussion: building global teams
Virginia Henry, Hank Malik and Richard Hare discussed various issues connected to social media and knowledge management in large organisations.  Making social media relevant and useful was once again at the forefront.  Some pieces of advice that I found particularly useful:

• Social media isn't a thing in itself, it's a means to an end.
• Don't just give people what they ask for - find out what they really need it for, and supply something that does that.  Keep it simple - don't take a vendor solution with all the bells and whistles.
• You need pervasive content on social tools - make sure the content is very obvious, and that it's not only frivolous chatter that can be seen.  Although bear in mind that if you ban all the chatter, people probably won't use the tool at all.
• Start small - pick one tool in one area, make that work and then celebrate that success.  Don't make a big splash and set expectations too high.  You'll need to work hard to nurture a new tool early on, to make sure that it catches on.
• If something isn't working either turn it off or work hard to rejuvenate it. Don't let it die a slow death. Use failure as an opportunity to get feedback, not an excuse to blame people.
• Collect 5-minute case studies to show it works, even if you can't out a monetary figure on how much it's worth.  Then use these case studies to impress senior management. 

Risk and reputation using social media 
Andrew Solomon and Simon Halberstam from Kingsley Napley spoke really engagingly about a range of issues--defamation, social media policies, recruitment, and advertising.  It would be unwise of me to try and summarise their points, as I'm not a lawyer and the law is complicated and nuanced.  But I will say that the explanations of libel law were very useful, and some of the information about what vetting employers may do when recruiting was surprising.  The whole presentation (pdf) is here, and I recommend a read.


The future of the business of social media
Stephen Dale took us on a whistle stop tour of current and new tools.  I was particularly interested in (not that I've got round to looking at them yet) the section on curation/discovery/aggregation tools such as bottlenose, strawberryj.am, twylah, news.me.


Overall, the things I'm going to take away from the afternoon are:

• No tool is an end in itself. Always start by thinking about what you want to achieve, what you want to share, who you're trying to reach, and then act accordingly.
• Take into account institutional and personal dynamics when thinking about how to implement new tools.
• No tool is completely free and easy to use or to get your colleagues using. (Hat tip to @Schopflin for this thought.)

#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!

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

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

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 conference report 1: in summary

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 12: Putting the social into social media

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.