Anna Martin's Medical Library Spiel

Code year at ALA Midwinter

2012-01-31T05:32:00.000-08:00

Cataloguers at the ALA Midwinter (Twitter code #alamw12 )conference have started a support group for those participating in the free Code Academy Their group has a pbworks wiki

and a twitter #libcatcode and #libcodeyear code and a connect group.

Not everybody agrees that CodeAcademy is entirely a good thing: some argue that it does not put the code in context so those who follow the course never actually learn to do anything. Each Codeacademy session takes 90 minutes to work through online and the good thing is that you work in a virtual environment in the cloud so you don't have to worry about installing any programs. You can log in using Facebook too which makes it easy to remember who you are.Incidentally I see that Jo Alcock skipped across the pond for the conference and wrote a reflective piece on how important it is to do this sort of thing. Jo, we are all dead jealous, well done!

Raspberry pi and Beagleboard

2012-01-26T03:41:00.000-08:00

The Raspberry Pi is a credit-card sized computer that plugs into your TV and a keyboard. It’s a capable little PC which can be used for many of the things your desktop PC does, like spreadsheets, word-processing and games. It also plays high-definition video. The charity who are developing it want to see it being used by kids all over the world to learn programming.It is due out on sale any day. It has no box so basically it just looks like a load of wires and such like [to the uninitiated] and it is designed to be cheap: the charity who are developing it aim to sell version A for 25 dollars (£16) or 35 dollars for version B. The board is the size of a credit card and one strand of development is experimenting with how this could be attached to a lego board grasped in the hands of (for instance.)It is powered by four AA batteries. A similar concept that is already on sale is the Beagleboard.TAccording to the Wikipedia on the Beagleboard, the Raspberry Pi is "Similar to BeagleBoard xM but more powerful GPU and featuring 1080p hardware accelerated video decoding of H.264" so now you know. The article mentions a few other such boards too.There are some instructions on how to use it here.Obviously, for beginners these things look quite scary (=exciting). Which brings us back to the old issue: we need humans to boldly go before and encourage us and teach us how to use these things. Am I going to be one of those humans, I ask myself?

Web 2.0 and Health Librararies

2012-01-18T06:15:00.000-08:00

Paula Younger identifies seven themes relating in her conclusion to the book "Using Web 2.0 for Health Information": (the following is a paraphrase)

1) The use of the web as a platform [i.e. cloud computing] - the rise of applications such as Flickr and Google docs where you can store files online; the rise of virtual environments such as Second life and the use of Haptics [simulated touch which can be applied to perform remote operations]

2) The trend towards collaborative learning - technology such as Wikis and Dropbox mean that teams can edit material together remotely in real time. Moreover the mysterious mathematics of crowdsourced information and working can be applied in a virtual working environment.

3) The use of mobile technology [yes those ipads and iphones that the medical students carry everywhere. The don't have time for laptops or desktops as they are continually on the move but oh, they love their mobiles. If we want to communicate with them mobile compatability is a big consideration] Mobile technology also means that the web can go anywhere- "web everywhere."

4) The rise of social networking as a disseminator of information. In 2010 Facebook had 500 million users.

5) The way education is delivered has changed so that education by extension using web technologies has become much more widespread. Users have access to a wide range of web based education resources which can be tapped into for CPD etc.

6) Information reaches the user as soon as it is published. Twitter means that information is spread even faster than before. RSS feeds mean that you can be sent information on your own specialist subject as soon as it is published.

7) Even an idiot can master the technology involved!

8) Flexibility of content [Anyone can write about anything, and then anyone else can [technically] take what they've done and use it for something else in a mashup.]

The proper version can be found in P. Younger and P. Morgan [ed.] Using Web 2.0 for Health Education, Facet publishing, 2011 p.153-4

Library design at Libraries@cambridge2012 conference

2012-01-17T01:57:00.000-08:00

The new library at Aberdeen University was amongst the stars described in Liz Waller's presentation, The Library Chameleon, given at the recent libraries@cambridge2012 conference. The talk, a "Homes of the Stars Magazine" excuse to show recent library refurbishments across the country, described "how library and learning spaces change in the face of emerging technologies" and displayed a stream of beautifully photographed brightly coloured rooms and articles of furniture from new libraries across the country who are clever enough to attract and manage the neccesary funding. A 2007 Powerpoint version of her talk is available online.

Flexibility and durability seems to be the new key word in Library design: she showed how much of the furniture at York University Library was on castors so that users could drag it around as their needs dictated (using nesting instincts). [The photo at the top of that page is actually a slideshow for the patient.] Librarians had watched which items of furniture got used first in the morning and discovered that the most popular were the bean bags and a sort of cushioned cat basket where girls like to curl up. Whole new vocabularies have to be invented for these areas and new types of furniture: we learned about secluded library tanks where all sorts of hanky panky was known to occur (see through ones are now the preferred option by librarians) and areas with plasma screens on the walls or even entire magnetic walls that were designed to act as whiteboards or posterboards.

Deborah Shorley, in her keynote speech, described how some libraries were meeting the study needs of the current electronic and sociable age by becoming bookless. The ANCIL presentation in the afternoon was the other great thing: I have tweeted about ANCIL on a former ocassion. You can see some other comments on Twitter: search for #lac12 see also the conference blog Unfortunately it is often some weeks after this sort of conference that the presentations are put online, but when they are I will add a link so the world can see what I am rabbiting on about.

Information Literacy ANCIL etc

2011-12-12T06:17:00.000-08:00

ANCIL (A new curriculum for Information Literacy) is a project examining issues of Information literacy for students (e.g. plagiarism and evaluating sources of literature as well as database searching, understanding the nature of the need. Issues of copyright and permissions management. The project involved Emma Coonan Jane Secker and Dr. Helen Webster –see and you can watch an eighty minute video of a talk they gave recently at LSEI have recently discovered that some flagship libraries providing have very comprehensive Information Literacy services: Leeds University have a large skills@library section of their website site which includes sections on improving academic skills, presentation skills and http://skills.library.leeds.ac.uk/online_tutorials.php ( see also http://skills.library.leeds.ac.uk/student_homepage.php )Mississippi University Library have an Instructional Media Centre that provide tutorials in these subjects too as well as help with using computer programs(I came across an excellent video of theirs on Youtube describing how to

use Adobe Indesign)

Students at the Heart of the System

2011-11-29T05:45:00.000-08:00

Just read an interesting blog in Dymnvue about publishers, including new initiative meduction. The Students at the Heart of the System conference discussed the government white paper of that name which concerns changes in academia. The conferences sounded important and I was sorry not to be able to go, but I am greatful for bloggers who keep us informed.

IT Training day in Cambridge /Apple and UCL

2011-11-22T06:09:00.000-08:00

I see that tomorrow (23rd Nov 2011) there is a really exciting IT day conference "Tomorrow's IT Today."
There is a Twitter hash key apparently #CITX

The most exciting bit seems to be UCL talking about their ongoing work with Apple.
Unfortunately I can't go but all is not lost: Jeremy Speller, who is giving the talk, has already uploaded a copy of a presentation of the same name so that everyone can access it: UCL's Media Adventure" and see what he's been up to.

From the presentation it seems that UCL, like Cambridge have been making podcasts of over 1.5,000 events and lending students ipods that have been used for a remarkable 77,000 viewings. There are 60 places at UCL from which a podcast can be recorded.
This is all part of their ongoing Mobile strategy apparently. All most impressive.

Blogging and Tweeting in Academic Research: LSE guide

2011-11-14T09:37:00.001-08:00

Thanks to Balfour and Newton Library blog for pointing out the LSE guides to using Twitter in University research, teaching and impact activities, and blog post on blogging, (if a blog post about blogging is not too circular a reference) both from the LSE Impact blog I will find these useful when working on my proposed poster about blogging for the forthcoming Libraries@Cambridge2012 day. Perhaps after that I can make a poster about how to organise posters at a conference....

Adobe Connect video conferencing

2011-10-09T16:55:00.001-07:00

A friend was telling me today that their institution was using the program Adobe Connect for teaching by extension. You can see a video about this program on Youtube.

Library Camp 2011: Use of Second Life in Library design

2011-10-09T14:30:00.000-07:00

Jen Bakewell demonstrates how it's done. The most jaw-dropping session at Library Camp in Birmingham was the virtual Second Life tour of the planned £193 million project to re-build a new public library for Birmingham, in conjunction with the Birmingham Repertory Theatre Company. There is a video of a Second Life walk through on Youtube which gives a taster of the Second Life walkthrough experience.

Architects had liaised with the company Daden Ltd, who then built a Second Life replica of the planned library (see an article about this). Users can walk around using a virtual tour or their avatar sit on a flying book as it swirls them across the floors. The new library looks excellent, incorporating an outdoor arena, a reconstructed victorian hall, a tower with a scenic lift and a blank wall for projecting changing light exhibitions, as well as a tower of books reminiscent of the way King George's library is displayed in the British Library, however, I have to say, I was so fascinated by the concept of the potential uses of Second Life architectural reproduction (suddenly I "got" the point of Second Life, even though I've been dabbling in it for ages,) that I found that concept much more interesting than the mere £193 million library itself. I want Second Life replicas of our University's libraries immediately, to play with, and I have at least half a mind to spend one day a week for a year building one myself/learning how (if not three quarters of a mind, even.)If you have one you can demonstrate alternative design scenarios to stakeholders, use it in library guides, virtual tour for wannabe students, etc. etc.

Everyone agrees that the most exciting new library in the UK is the Glasgow Saltire Centre built by architects BDP.

There are a lot of photos of Library Camp from the event on Flickr apparently:

Jo MacCausland had the idea and organised the day. She deserved a hug for being so brilliant (so I gave her one.)

Library Camp 2011: Learning from Retail

2011-10-09T13:18:00.000-07:00

Library Camp by c_l_b on Flickr
Jo Alcock, (who has published a good post about the day generally,) (see also Jennifer Yellin's post,) proposed a session on Learning from Retail based on the ideas of Paco Underhill. Since I had written a paper on the subject and implemented some of the ideas in Essex Libraries six years ago I was keen to get involved and, with Jo's permission, we agreed to present the session together.

I have been fascinated by Underhill's ideas for years. Working for a public library service we were often told that the library service was in competition with shops and could learn from them, and I had often heard that there were people who proclaimed which shelves attracted people most, how to use light to attract users and generally how people behaved on shops, but it was difficult to get any information about who these gurus were. After much research of subject headings and terminology I finally discovered that these people were originally trained as anthropologists and that Paco Underhill had developed the science of shopping with his firm Envirosell. His books are available in forty editions and twenty seven languages.

Underhill's team have spent thousands of hours trailing people in shops to see how they behave (often quite differently from how they say or even think they behave.)The study of human behaviour informs rationalised theories on best use of space and design. Retailers are acutely aware of how different sectors of their products are performing, and they manipulate the products and the product marketing in response.

Since there was another group who were interested in Libations in libraries, or rather using flexible zones in libraries to define separate areas where different users and activities can take place, we decided to merge the session with that group. As it turned out that session was planned by a company, Red Quadrant,(Ben Taylor) and librarian Emma who has implemented some of the flexible zoning areas in libraries. Rather than being phased about the merging, Ben and Emma were very gracious and positive. Fifty five people turned up to discuss the subject and shared lots of ideas and information about how retail related activities took place in their libraries: in some US libraries, the library is closed and the staff spend the day behaving as users, so that they experience any frustrations of using the services (SwissArmyLibrarian was mentioned in this context.) It was important to develop marketing to partner organisations (e.g. council for voluntary services) to reach members to their specialist contact lists. The importance of the head of service working on the frontline was emphasised. The work of Fiona Emberton, consultant at John Stanley, and formerly of Marks and Spencers, was praised.

Jo and I had agreed to bring along Paco Underhill books to share as visual resources: Ben bought one to add to the Red Quadrant library so I was very glad about that and now I will only have to return one to Amazon. (phew)

I attended a related session on Marketing later: 'Libraries should be marketed on TV.''British people despise free things' A marketing expert with an NHS background explained how marketing theory emphasises one particular product to one particular user group e.g. 'if you're going on holiday to a beach here's a reading list' or 'books for Dad's n' lads' etc. Seasonal advertising was always a good idea, she said.

The value of fines was challenged: fines income makes up only 1% of library income and 'amnesties' were advocated: where users were 'forgiven' all their fines if they enrolled a child in their family to the reading week: new users were of far more value to users than fines.

Library Camp 2011: the Philosophy of Libraries

2011-10-09T05:18:00.000-07:00

A discussion on the philosophy of libraries discussion was led by Sara Wingate Gray who had travelled around the world carrying more than her own bodyweight in books as a human librarian for her Philosophy PhD.

In an age when many people seem unable to distinguish a library service from a pile of paperbacks sitting in a disused telephone box, Sara posed the questions What is a library? books cited included Peter Brophy's The Academic Library, A. Broadfield's Philosophy of Librarianship and Michael Gorman's Our Enduring Values. Some think that libraries prepare people for citizenship, or develop them spiritualy. We discussed whether this might reflect some hidden agenda or coersion, and the current over-emphasis on the link between education and employability was cited. Sara replied that we needed to reclaim the concept of citizenship from that used by any parties which were currently in power, to reflect its original meaning of collectivism and community engagement rather than the individualism that is prevalent in society today, and to include an ongoing self-development, similar to the French concept of Education Permanent, providing points of access for life learning.

Some said that librarianship was like a project triangle (think fast, good or cheap: you can pick any two of the three but not all three) involving resources, people and spaces: Librarians facilitate the communications between these three, which could be virtual or physical; potentiality engines that provide a point of access for lifelong learning. Obviously, the stewardship and organisation of knowledge is a vital part of the librarian's role. We need to get away from the current idea that librarians equate to books and physical buildings called libraries.

Another issue that arose during this point but was also reflected at other points during the day, involved the democracy and the independence of librarians. Democracy is often cited as a key concept in defining what a library is (e.g. IFLA/UNESCO guidelines for development of public libraries), yet Libraries and their staff are not independant but reflect the government policy of the party in power. Most Library reports are commissioned by the government of the day, and are therefore not independent. Library schools do not teach much philosophy but concentrate only on the management skills that will help their students find work.

Staff are supposedly encouraged to be human and to show emotion, intellegence and to have opinions, but in many organisations they feel gagged because it is firmly ground into all staff that they must on no account ever mention the name of their employing institutions in any public medium, such as a blog, wiki, newspaper etc,, or presumably mention controversial political issues. This is difficult for them where their profession face cutbacks. There is a Marxist sense in which by being contracted to an emplyers, librarians are "accepting the Devil's shilling' or and selling their independence of thought or freedom of speech for a mess of potage. These stories sounded in sharp contrast to the University where I work, where staff are encouraged and trusted to use Blogger and Twitter to communicate professionally, and to reflect their personalities as people, although there has been some tightening of controls of staff lists.

Librarians from the public libraries sector said it was important for those of us who are freer and come from other sectors of the profession, to express ourselves through sites such as Voices for the library

Many librarians in England whinge endlessly about how unsupportive their employers are when it comes to sending their employees to library conferences (I often hear people say they never go for this reason) yet in the States at the SLA conference it is an absolute given that everyone pays for themselves to go because it is seen as such a vital part of one's own professional career development (nice to know I'm not the only one on the planet who does this then.)

At the 2007 IFLA conference in South Africa it had been astounding to see how the new South Africa has put large resources into funding state libraries in even the poorest townships, since libraries are seen as essential to the development of reading and to education in those places.

Library Camp 2011 (part 1 general)

2011-10-09T01:41:00.000-07:00

I see Paul Stainthorp was the first person to blog Library Camp 2011: (excellent title too, Paul: Let them Tweet Cake,)

He tells it like it is and my blog will complement his (no need to reinvent the wheel after all.)It's still worth repeating the best things though: the fact that this was the first event I have been to publicised entirely via Twitter: after one day the 120 free places on offer had all gone. A lot of the people said they had come to see what people they followed on Twitter looked like in person: indeed one person I spoke to said that I was one of the people she followed and had wanted to meet (fame at last.)

I came away with a warm buzz: this was the first profession related event I have been to where I actually got to meet librarians from across the country and hear what they thought about a range of issues: everyone was so affirming and it was very helpful to hear about the challenges, similar and different, facing those in other sectors. So, like Paul, I shall list the things I learned.

New vocabulary: "Librarygeist", "Putting the class into classification" "learning embedded from the getgo" "the echochamber" (well, I knew that one already actually but haven't mentioned it ever)"walkup computer users" (those who can access online resources on an institution's computer but not at home), "shambrarian" - a librarian who didn't go to Library School.

Ipads on loan in hospital libraries

2011-09-21T05:40:00.000-07:00

I was very interested to read an article in the Journal of Eahil this month (2 June 2011) about a project in a library in the Netherlands (specifically at the University medicla Center Groningen (UMCG)) to buy 8 ipads and loan them to library users.The Ipads on loan project was aimed at creating an larger awareness among staff and students on the possibilities of the iPad. Library staff pre-loaded the ipads with a wide selection of apps downloaded from itunes. Anyone wishing to loan an ipad had to meet with the head of the Library to receive their ipad and had to agree to meet the head of the Library again at the end of the project to give feedback, which must have given a good opportunity for librarians to learn more about their users needs and workflows and must have raised awareness of library services. The service was very popular and currently has a backlog of 80 interested staff members.

We already have an ipad in the Cambridge Medical library for library staff training purposes so that this technology can be taken into account in our library service delivery planning. By extension it is important that the rest of the hospital and University similarly take this technology into account, and perhaps our library (in conjunction with the Computer services or New Technologies departments?) should consider leading the way in enabling this to take place. Since the project has already selected a list of appropriate apps this could save us work at the apps selection stage.

A parallel project carried out research into the needs of users of mobile technology and created a medical library app. Guus also mentions a webpage that lists future new tablets.

Podcasting

2011-09-12T04:18:00.000-07:00

I have never felt the need to podcast, since, like my hero Dionysius Lardner, I think that visibility is so important in getting one's message across. Nevertheless I have often wondered how it was done so I was pleased to see a post on the CPD23 site describing how to do it. Podcatching software such as Itunes are your route to happiness here, it transpires. I recently read an interesting an article on the BBC Click site on how to improve the quality of my [non-existent] podcast too. (basically you chop it into bite size clips to prevent audience asphyxiation.) Now if ever I feel a burning desire to Podcast I will know how to do it!

How to organise a day trip

2011-09-10T00:38:00.000-07:00

In July I led a trip of the Saffron Walden Town Library Society to visit Lambeth palace library
Here are some things to remember when organising trips:

Plan the trip a year in advance so that you can include it in an annual list of events and get as much advance publicity as possible. Make sure there are at least two helpers in case anybody gets in trouble and needs accompanying to hospital etc. and you need to split the party.

Choosing a good venue is important: we start thinking about this at committee meetings over a year in advance. Our group likes to visit libraries: the Lambeth Palace library offers an annual exhibition and was not too far away.

The most tricky thing is finding an affordable coach company and estimating how many people will go and what they will be prepared to pay. Lambeth Palace charges £6 per visitor. We combined the trip with a trip to the Garden Museum next door, which only charges £2.50 per visitor if you do the trip by pre-arrangement and are also visiting Lambeth Palace library (this fact is not advertised and some of the staff did not know about it.) We used Viceroy of Saffron Walden who charged £350 for a 35 seater coach. We charged our members £20 each not including the cost of the Garden Museum which we made optional and collected the fees on the coach. We needed 25 people to break even. In the end 37 people went: two disabled people went in their own car.

I went to check the venues out beforehand: I checked to see where there loos were and what facilities they had for disabled people.

It is normal on organised trips to organise a talk at the venue: Lambeth Palace do not provide speakers, arguing that they do not have the manpower and that everything is clearly labelled. They only offered us the standard public access to the Great Hall where they had a current exhibition on the King James bible. This was rather a disappointment as we had heard that when the Bibliographical Society visited they were shown a behind the scenes glimpse of the library and I had explained that we were particularly interested in their civil war material. To compensate for this, I wrote a quiz based on the exhibits and offered a mars bar as a prize (no expenses spared.) The Garden Museum were much more helpful when it came to offering a speaker and Kay Coombs, former ambassador to Mongolia, really made the day for us with her eloquent and amusing guided tour.

Lunch venues were an important consideration: The two trip venues are seated on the South bank directly opposite the Houses of Parliament and there are cafes along the riverbank and many if one is prepared to walk along to the next bridge to the Festival Hall. The Garden museum have a small cafe which offers vegetarian food that you can eat in the garden and they put out extra tables if necessary, so I warned them that most of our party would choose to eat with them, which in fact proved true. Although there was a long queue for our 35 members, the food was quite reasonably priced and very healthy.

Booking tickets was vital: Lambeth Palace library have an online booking system and only let fifteen people visit at once so we had to do the whole day in two different sessions. We booked the Garden museum tickets by phone: the staff there were very helpful and we paid for them when we arrived. I booked twenty five tickets on my credit card before I advertised the trip: buying the final twelve was difficult as the time slot that I had been hoping for was partially booked up by the time I went so we had to split the party into four groups instead of two, which made everything more complicated. (we still only had two groups for the Garden museum talk though, and everything worked out well all the same.) Unfortunately deep pockets (or a credit card) are necessary for this, you may not get reimbursed for several months. Alternatively get your treasurer to do it. Booking online is quite complicated as you can only book so many at once before they think you are repeating yourself, and you have to ensure that you book the right thing. It is all quite hair-raising. If you make mistakes the ticket people may be merciful. (they were.)

Advertsising the trip Send out details to potential trippers a few months beforehand giving clear details of when and where the trip will be, where to return forms or ask queries etc. My colleage likes to not include details of where to meet the coach at this stage because he does not want surprise people turning up at the last moment. Say you will give further details two weeks before the trip to those who have booked . Give the booking deadline at least a month before the trip so that you have time to throw the trip open to non-members if not enough people book.

Keeping good records Make a table of replies as they arrive, showing names, addresses, email and phone numbers, what they've paid and if it was a cheque or cash.

Keeping track of numbersKeep an eye on numbers. A month before the trip if you have not yet filled your capacity advertise to members of partner societies through their secretaries or alert local papers or display posters etc. If the finances look really unfeasible you might want to consider cancelling the trip or coach at this stage. Your booking fees will probably be up the gum tree in that case, you could try cancelling them. If you need more tickets book them now, but beware that the venues may get booked up quite early (Several parties had booked Lambeth by then.)

Replying/reminding people to come. Do this two weeks beforehand. Include details of where to meet the coach, a map of the area and your mobile phone contact details for the day.

Tactful double checking a few days before with the coach company is a good idea too.

Thank you gifts are important. If we are given a speaker we often like to offer a small donation to a venue to thank them for having us. This needs to be calculated in advance, perhaps the week before, once the other finance details are all settled. We also decided to pass the hat around for the driver, an old fashioned custom these days but we are an old fashioned lot and our driver was very nice and entertained me with lots of stories about his jazz band.

Publicising a clear place and time to meet: Everyone had been told where to meet up in good time so when the bus arrived to collect us in Lambeth Palace road we could all get on very quickly and leave which helped the coach driver, as traffic restrictions make this difficult. Include a time to have group photographs taken.

On the day bring your chart with everybody's details. Get to the venue early. Tick people off as they arrive.

Recording the trip: I took a photograph of the party and issued a press release afterwards to raise the profile of our society. If you tell people what time to convene for a photo you can be sure that they are all included.

Working out the accounts Even though I had kept scrupulous records and receipts, working out who had paid what afterwards was surprisingly complicated, due to some people bringing their own car, having lifts, cancelling etc. The treasurer will need clear accounts of what has been received and spent and by whom and can then re-imburse you for what you spent on booking fees etc.

Organising a trip is, to summarise, quite hard work but, like banging your head against a brick wall, it feels so good when you stop. Everyone was most appreciative.

Cochrane Library Information Skills training videos

2011-08-09T01:22:00.000-07:00

I see that Wiley have produced some new material on searching and using the Cochrane Library These brainshark videos are short, simple and clearly presented (you have to register briefly before you use them though.)

There is a nice collection of links to training resources on a University of South Manchester MERG web page

3d printing

2011-08-01T05:34:00.000-07:00

A feature that I saw on the BBC program "Click" left me with my jaw hanging open. It described a 3d printer
that could replicate 3d things by scanning them and then printing them.

The implications of this are astounding. Products can be created on the spot by anyone who needs them, or they can print from computer files: instead of having to send a spare part across the world you can just send the blueprint. All you need to transport anywhere is the printing material.
Products can be reproduced either in paper or in a special type of plastic. Contrary to the impression given in this video, I see that the technology can even cope with moving parts printed together .
There is even a printer that can duplicate itself.

What is this printing powder made of, I ask myself: we must all buy shares in whatever it is (dream on.)

Name authority records

2011-07-27T05:46:00.000-07:00

Today I went to a talk about name authority records. If you don't have any idea what these are, Don't Panic (as the late great Douglas Adams would say.) and, I should add, Read No Further since they are only of relevence to cataloguers, who all know what they are. (Have a nice cup of tea instead, as the thankfully still alive Boy George might add.)

I watched my hand, entranced, as it transcribed three whole pages of notes on this obscure subject and I had to leave because my parking meter (I'd put a pound in) ran out after fifty minutes before the talk finished (It was given by one of Cambridge University Library's three name authority experts, Elizabeth Johnson).
'Backed by our supreme authority..': the creation of Name Authority records, Wednesday 27 July in Cambridge University Library.) The UL has one full time expert and two part time name authority experts. (Not that the rest of us are name authority amateurs, you understand.)
Elizabeth explained that the MARC name authority records that we all see on our systems are in a different format from that in which they are originally created: when she creates one she uses a system called Connexion which is an OCLC system linked to the Library of Congress. She showed us some examples of a record created in that format: the control fields looked completely alien to my (amateur?) eye but some of the fields were the same.
Elizabeth explained that all authority records, which are governed by the same rules as normal catalogue records, i.e. AACR2 using Library of Congress Rule Interpretations) had to include three elements: the authorised form of the name; the cross references to unauthorised forms or earlier or later forms and finally information about the sources that governed the choice of decision into these matters.

Hence a record might have the following fields:
110 2 _ Cats Protection League,
410 2_ CPL
410 2_ C.P.L.
510 2_ Cats Protection $w b
670 __A Passion for cats, 1987: $b t.p. (Cats Protection League) p.207(CPL)
670 __ Its website, 29 Mar. 2006$b(Cats Protection League changed to Cats Protection in 1998)

Elizabeth called the 510 and 670 fields 'false friends' (it's a long time since I heard that phrase used) since they looked like Marc fields but weren't.
A lot of the things she said about the need to class all the works of one author under the same name authority, and the need to establish one authorised name authority using rules, were basic Library School concepts, but the nuts of bolts of how this was done were interesting. Staff in participating libraries, such as ours, who encounter a book for which they are unable to find a match with a correct already established name authority, should put the book with a written request on a certain shelf, which is checked every day.

Sometimes the written request is just a scrawled note, and sometimes cataloguers erroneously submit the author's entire biographical details, as if mistaking Elizabeth for the writer of BBC obituaries described in Jon Ronson's latest book. What Elizabeth really likes to see, however, is the author's name, date of birth, (sometimes even to the month and day, which is useful in distinguishing people) place of education and place of current work. Usually when trying to distinguish between two people of similar names the first option is the date, and vernacular text descriptions are only used as a last resort. Most of this information is usually available somewhere on the book itself and unless there are two writers who are likely to be confused or the author is likely to ever write a book again (how can you predict this?) it is not worth trawling all over the place to find anything more. (What a pity. It is the trawling that we all signed up for when we decided we wanted to be information experts.)
Elizabeth creates a proposal record using the Connexion client. Some fields in a new record are populated with information retrieved from our Library management system, and she uses macros to save typing often repeated fields such as the names of certain authority sources. There is then a time lapse whilst the proposal records wait to be processed: Elizabeth can see which ones are waiting so she knows if she comes across one that someone else in another library has already proposed but which has not yet been adopted.
There are many libraries all over the world contribuiting to the process, which is called the Program for Co-operative Cataloguing Name Authority Co-operative Program (see http://www.loc.gov/catdir/pcc/naco/nacopara.html )
A good time was had by all, thank you Elizabeth, and I hope I did not miss anything too vital whilst retrieving my car.

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Personal branding

2011-07-04T05:08:00.000-07:00

Dave Fleet has written interesting article on personal branding presumably working on the lines that people are much more interested in learning what disasters to avoid than in just doing things well. There is much good advice in this article, I shall mull it over during my lunch break. I think I do most of these things - it's surprising really then that despite that fact I have not yet been appointed to either of my favourite jobs: editor of the Guardian or presenter of the Today programme.

Adding Twitter feeds to websites

2011-06-15T05:46:00.000-07:00

Did you know that you can now display all the twitter tags for one subject in a neat little running display on your website by using a Twitter Search widget(Here's one I made one but of course it only works if someone has tweeted recently about uk mental health linked to the hashtag #mhuk or #ukmh.)

23 Things for Professional Development

2011-06-15T05:39:00.000-07:00

I see there is a new free 23 Things course running: 23 Things for PD. It starts 20th June and you can sign up and will tweet and follow using the hashtag #cpd23. Anyone can join as far as I can see. I have registered and started on the first "Thing" which is: create a blog [no need, here's one I prepared earlier, like a true Blue Peter fan,] and investigate other blogs. I was just investigating Anne Maskell's excellent blog, which reminded me about the talk I'd been to on QR codes, when the list of other participates seemed to crash, presumably because the World and her Husband were all rushing pel mel to register. How exciting!

QR codes in libraries

2011-06-15T05:16:00.000-07:00

The recent 23 things meeting in Cambridge included a talk about how to use QR codes in libraries. A QR code is a sort of sticker that you can put on a poster or sign (see above) . Students scan it with their mobile technologies and can then read and keep the information that you have attached to the code, for example information.
You create them using QR code generator software, available on the internet, for example http://qrcode.kaywa.com/.

Print on demand machine in Blackwell's bookshop

2011-05-04T03:54:00.000-07:00

The arcadia@cambridge Project talk on 3rd May was Ed Chamberlain talking about print on Demand. In Blackwells Charing Cross bookshop there is a print on demand service. You can take in any out of print book or send a pdf and they turn it into a book for you using the Espresso Book Machine® (the "EBM") . The service costs about £15 per book.

I remembering David McKitterick explaining this technology ten years ago so it is interesting that it has taken ten years to filter onto our highstreets and even now it does not seem to be very cost effective for the bookseller: it was pointed out that Blackwells have not rolled the service out to any of their other stores, and that Charing Cross location is a unique one as the service appeals to publishers who often use it to print off twenty copies or so of a book. We all sat amazed as we watched a video showing how the EBM went through all the processes of creating a book. Ed's project discussed the implications of this for Libraries: the copyright, staffing and outset cost issues were much more constricting than the technical issues involved, and there were quality control issues involved too.

Presumably the podcast and 61 page report will soon appear on the arcadia@cambridge project website.
Several things struck me:

1) How clever and creative the Arcadia fellows are and what a valuable project this is.
2)All morning I was mulling over whether or not this was a feasible way for a University library in the future. The fact that I was mulling over it suggests that it probably is quite a feasible path to follow (even if Ed was quite conservative about it himself.) The cost of copies seems irrelevent considering the setup costs, which were probably not unlike the costs of running any other library department. Users will prefer this to having to sit in a rare books room or (if a network were set up) waiting a week or two while a physical copy crosses the country or indeed ocean. Possibly fewer physical items need be stored. I think this an important element of the way Libraries will work in future.

Using Word properly

2011-04-07T01:57:00.000-07:00

The best discovery of the month has definitely been the "don't add blank space between paragraphs of the same style" command in Word 2007. This is in a window of Word that I never knew existed. You get to it from the Home tab by clicking on the strange turned up corner icon next to the word "Paragraph." (see illustration) I use it at least five times a day.

I have recently had reason to investigate various ways of using Microsoft Word, specifically Word 2007 which has many delights. Apparently many of the autocorrect, spacing and text wrapping problems that people find in Word occur because we are not using Word as it was designed. As with modern HTML, one is advised not to embed formatting instructions in the text, such as "font: Times New Roman, Size 12" or whatever but instead one should mark a paragraph either "normal" "heading" "quote" or other from the choice in the drop down menu. Then once a document is complete one can decide what style to impose on the elements, and one can change them all at the flick of a switch as desired. This ensures uniformity and simplicity.

When trying to discover how to make a booklet for a church AGM I discovered that most authors actually recommend using Word. I like to learn by googling for videos. I made a good mock up booklet this way but in the end we plumped for an A4 format (see finished booklet)

I am now working on my book, incorporating all my files into a Master document
Although Word cannot normally cope with a large amount of text and pictures, it copes better if a long document is split into subdocuments which are linked together in a Master document. The Master document did not like my cover page very much and crashed once I incorporated it, and I have spent a day on a train wrestling with learning the program and incorporting my book. Then, imposing the same style commands on all the documents, one can select various style changes and manipulate it all into a pretty professional looking piece of literary history. This makes it (disconcertingly) easier to discover your total word count and to see how closely (or not, in my case) your current documents might resemble the desired sections of some final overarching document plan . C'est la vie. And yes, I know, I purists will say should really have used LaTex instead.

Finally I had to turn the church booklet into a PDF to put on the website. I did this by downloading Open Office, opening the file in Open Office and saving it as a PDF(i.e. it is a print option). This saved the hyperlinks but some of the style looked strange. The webmaster used a different program (must ask him what,) and managed to retain the style but sacrificed the hyperlinks. Word 2007 has an option for printing in XPS document which is some sort of pdfish open source format but I was not sure how accessible most people would find this. Those with Office2010 are in luck because you can easily create a pdf file in this program.

p.s. Having used my Master Document version for some time now I do not recommend editing in Master Document view. I thought I lost a lot of material using this but it was all in the sub-documents: it was the hyperlinks in the Master Document that got messed around. Also it is difficult to see where you are moving things to. I now edit the sub-documents and just use the Master Document for an overview, style or printing, which works well. When I have finished my work I will worry about finding someone with Word 2010 so I can turn it into one PDF. 30/05/2011

Karen Blakeman Search Engine list

2011-04-07T01:52:00.000-07:00

I see Karen Blakeman has blogged an interesting list of Search engines that are "Anything but Google". See also her slideshow "Search engine wars"

RDA in the wild

2011-04-05T09:39:00.000-07:00

I attended a training talk today on RDA given by Céline Carty. It was a talk for cataloguers: if you are not a cataloguer read no further.
RDA (see my earlier posts) is set to replace AACR2: the Cataloguers' bible, although a final decision on this will not be taken at the British library until this summer and other libraries will decide whether to follow suite after that. It sounds rather like an unstoppable steamroller and I would be astonished if any minor detail like expense and the need to retrain Britain's entire workforce of cataloguers prevented it. Things have to move on after all and there is no doubt that the current system is in need of a few tweaks to handle things like item level descriptions (not mentioned in the talk actually) and a few other things I'm sure. As with AACR2 it is envisaged that MARC will be used to create records but Celine explained that Dublin Core could possibly be used instead in future.
The RDA team do not apparently like latin abbreviations such as "s.l.", "i.e.", or even terms such as "heading" but prefer longer explanatory notes in English such as "authorised access point". A case in point is the word "[sic.]" after a misspelled word in a title field. Instead of this device, should a misspelling be spotted it is baldly left in, stranded, in the 245 field, and a 246 $i note added "title should read" ... etc. Should a book purport to be published in Stockholm but actually be published in Paris, Stockholm is left baldly as a lie in the 260 field and a note "Actually published in Paris" added in the 500 field. I found this deeply disturbing. If a book is published in Paris one should say so, instead of becoming accessory to the crime of pretending it is published in Stockholm. If someone happened to search in the publisher field for books published in Paris it will not arise. [Fortunately in the field of human endeavour past and future nobody ever searched or will search for a 260 field for books published in Paris so that is fine.]
Worse horrors were to follow. "Take what you see" "Accept what you get" and, worst of all, "Choices" on every hand, are the new innovations that we must get our heads around. Hence if subtitle is written entirely in capitals on the title page youshould "take what you see" and transcribe it in capitals making what looks to the cataloguer's eye as a shockingly messy record. (I'm sure the public would not even notice though.) However because of "choices" you can then decide not to write it in capitals at all after all. Your institution can "choose" to impose their own procedures. (Something tells me that our institution may well choose to follow AACR2 rules to the letter at this point.)
Even more horrible is the concept that these phenomena are already on the loose and out there to be spotted "in the wild." Librarians in Stamford and Chicago are already spawning thousands of these tiny creatures and unleashing them on the unsuspecting world as part of a pilot scheme, and publishers producing CIP records as part of the ONYX collaboration are also involved in the crime. Apparently people have been finding these Aliens and trying to adopt them into human society by adapting their most outlandish features. We were warned against this practice: RDA records should be identified by their 0800 $i field which will not state "AACR2" but will instead state "ISDB" or [confusingly] "Not ISDB" [of course!] They can also be spotted for their profusion of 300 fields describing content then media then carrier.
On the day of reckoning the powers that be will seamlessly convert all AACR2 records to RDA records in the twinkle of an eye, but those who have been corrupted will be left behind. [ed's comment: Celine in her comment below says I got the wrong end of the stick here] Hence if they are found we should have nothing to do with them but leave them as they are: a practice with which I am in full agreement. [for those with Cambridge University Library intranet the link to Céline's talk is here.] For any without: it's OK Céline admitted that she shamelessly cribbed her talk from the much longer following sources: ‘Changes from AACR2 to RDA: a comparison of examples’,
by Adam L. Schiff
‘RDA Essentials’, presentation by Judith A. Kuhagen, given
in November 2010
So anyway, well done to Céline for getting her head, and all our heads, around all that, quite an impressive feat really

TED and TEDXMaastricht

2011-04-04T04:33:00.000-07:00

I learned on Twitter that this conference was happening today and I have been listening to the live stream this morning http://www.tedxmaastricht.nl/live/ whilst cataloguing as an experiment. This raises the question "What is TED" in my mind. I discover it is an organisation that enables live talks on new ideas to be broadcast across the net and the world. The TED [according to Wikipedia it stands for Technology, Entertainment and Design] website holds a bank of previous talks by Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and many other leaders of their fields.
The TEDxMaastricht conference centres around Health innovation.

Frans Hiddeman, CEO of the Rotterdam Eye Hospital talked about reducing risk and reducing patient fear. It was discovered that planes often crashed because the teams were too hierarchical and pilots took off whilst their teams had safety doubts. As a result teams are now less higerarchical and more equal and there are fewer accidents. The hospital re-trained their own teams to work better together and safety was improved. They "seduced" the staff into CPD programs by offering them exercises in flight simulators to reproduce the sort of passenger takeover scenarios remembered from Air disaster movies.

Patients who are afraid take longer to get better and have more accidents: the hospital reduces fear by being completely open, insisting that patients are accompanied by a family member or friend at all consultations so that they can remember what is said, and finding means (giving them a plastic eyeball or taking a photo with the doctor) to allow the patient to talk about their experience.

Jan Gunnarsson spoke about an inspiring bus driver who welcomed each day and each customer as a unique opportunity for life. Jan has sought help from hundreds of self help books and conferences in his quest to welcome himself as a person which he sees as a person's first responsibility in life. This ties in with what the main speaker, Simon Sinek seems to have said, which was reportedly that we must never lose sight of the reason WHY we are doing our jobs, and that organisations "split" i.e. become moribund and institutionalised with beurocracy. He insisted that people should be authentic as individuals in order to perform and interrelate well.

Ragna Arnott Van-den Berg, a former social worker who recovered from an annurism, spoke about the importance of patient's feeling that they were the captains of their own ships: she had been advised to try anti-psychotic drugs to cope with her aversion to light and loud noises but had decided only to try this as a last resort at some future time. Patient empowerment was the watchword of the morning.

The most interesting speaker was Daniel Kraft, inventor of a better way to harvest bone marrow. He spoke about the process of getting new invention through the stringent regulatory routes. He talked about new mobile technology that Doctors can take anywhere which had the potential to access electronic patient records. Nanotechnology includes an ipill which you swallow which can then provide diagnostic information as well as the technology to convert skin cells to stem cells. Patients can carry around their own apps and record and monitor their own activities which reduces the need for hospitalisation in a trend called "the quantified self."
And whilst listening to all this I catalogued eight books, so it was a good experiment.

Cambridge hack day

2011-03-27T10:53:00.000-07:00

Attended a hack day for NHS patients today (the Internet informed Patient Hack day at Churchill College Cambridge, run by the Arcadia project.) See photos
It involved "computer hackers" (actually very respectable people mostly paid by health services) trying to find ways of helping patients. Issues arising:
1 There are lots of apps there for collecting data but can they speak to each other to share data?
2 Filling in monitoring forms is boring but vital for diabetes sufferers- you can make them into an iphone app using something like "Chorewars"
3 Using Google Trends you can predict what illnesses people are seeking information (e.g. flu) about two weeks before the NHS statistics reflect visitor peaks for this.
4.Existing apps containing data include: Daytum, and Quantified self
5. A good example of a mashup is Predict
6. There is an NHS divide: Doctors use specialised information and NHS data is confidential and can only be mined by the NHS itself, whereas ideally there would be "throwing information over the wall" to liberate it for the use of the Public.
7. Very little feedback is gathered on Cancer patients: it was originally assumed they would not survive long enough to measure quality of life, adaptations needed etc.
8. Web apps vary between those which collect data on symptoms and provide taylored information such as the symptom checker on NHS direct and those which tell you about illnesses or about statistics for services available in your area.
9. Sites like "Patients like me" and the CRUK chat room allow patients to help eachother. It often becomes clear that doctors have not communicated well with these patients and they need more help.
10. The NHS should be used to gather information about its users and feed this back into the system to improve itself like some huge living organism. (Those in the room, reflecting the government proposals, did not seem the least bit concerned to learn what previous researchers had already discovered but only how they could use statistics to do their own research.)
11. Recent experiments showed that people often trust Tescos more than the NHS.
12. Some factors are difficult to quanitify into algorithms. It is very hard to measure quality in service providers. How do you record that a surgeon has a wobbly hand? If an incident happens, and the team respond well and use feedback to adapt services is that service better or worse than a service where no incidents occurred?
13. I was interested to meet two other people working on mental health websites such as the one I help run (http://www.thinkingdisabilities.org ) and who were interested in collaborating. One of them wanted to run a wiki to dialogue between those with mental health problems and employers, a very similar idea to our own site. She emphasised that it would be helpful if employers were open to a spectrum of availabilities rather than demanding a certain number of hours each week.
14. The hackers said they might think of a way to make it easier to help community webmasters such as myself to learn how to feed data from elsewhere onto a web page.
15. I left my power cable there. Has anyone found it yet?

Collection shifts and the Collections shift

2011-03-18T06:53:00.000-07:00

"Collections shift" is a term that modern information specialists such as Lorcan Dempsey are using to describe the changing nature of library collections. I have been referring to this in my blog as "Future libraries" but it strikes me that the future is perhaps now here.
Lorcan's blog on the subject nicely describes some of the changes involved. Lorcan uses both the terms "collections shift" and "collection shifts" seemingly interchangeably, so it seems that one can allocate the 's' where one likes in the phrase. A problem for cataloguers?
A collections shift sounds somewhat like a continental drift- or a consonant drift in this case.

Cataloguers' champion emerges from Rhode Island

2011-03-15T05:49:00.000-07:00

Every morning for the last ten years I have been greeted when opening my email by the day’s list of posts from the Listserve cataloguers' list Autocat (or catalogers' list if you are American. It was my boss in Essex Libraries, Andrew Coburn, who first suggested that I should subscribe to the list. I think I have only posted on it once. It sits there comfortably in my inbox, linking me to the community of cataloguers all over the world (mostly eccentric Americans,) and letting me know of exciting jobs I could apply for in Ohio or Delaware. Often I scroll through it fast, and just as often, I confess, I just delete it without reading it. It is good to know what cataloguers are discussing but after a while you feel you can sort of predict what will appear. However I was delighted this morning to read a post there by Julie Swierczek, a cataloguer in McKillop Library, Newport, Rhode Island, on the value of employing a cataloguer, which cheered my heart. It was written in response to a member who wrote asking for help. Julie has given me permission to reproduce the post as follows:

"Date: Mon, 14 Mar 2011 10:10:03 -0400
Subject: Re: Help! "Elevator speech" for keeping a cataloger

Abby,
I often explain the importance of cataloging this way: If you don't have good quality cataloging, then you might as well take all the new materials the library receives, stick them in a giant bin, blindfold your patrons, and let them just grab random stuff from the bin and call it 'research'. This is basically what happens with a bad catalog. The patron just grabs what near at hand, and much of what is purchased is lost forever because there is no good metadata for finding it.

Now, some administrators might thinks that's fine, because they have this mental image: patrons browsing the shelves, like they are traipsing through the local big box bookstore on a Saturday afternoon, with overpriced caffeine beverage in hand. But that is not what a lot of patrons are doing in a library. Maybe one of them just found out her mother has cancer, and now she wants books on cancer. Every last one of them. She wants them RIGHT NOW. She can barely see through her tears. So some nice reference librarian sets her up at a corner table and starts bringing her armloads of stuff. That librarian, and that patron, need to be able to look up every single thing you've got on the subject. If you have substandard cataloging, a lot of that might slip through your fingers. And not all of it sits on the same place on the shelf, either, so you can't count on shelf browsing to find it all. You've got to use the catalog, too, to look at what's checked out, or at what you might be able to get from other libraries.

If you don't have a good catalog, you might as well use the new acquisitions for a bonfire. Burn the books; at least they'll provide heat, so you'll get some use out of them.

There are many reasons for having at least one well-trained, knowledgeable cataloger on staff:

1. Vendors don't catalog everything. You will have to catalog some things, including in particular those local items that are of interest to the local population, like self-published works or rare items. You can wait until the end of time, but you will never find copy for those items. You could pay an outside firm to handle those items, but that tends to be much more expensive than buying, say, shelf-ready books for commonly available items.

2. You will have rush requests for items that do not yet have copy available for them. You can either catalog them yourself, or make the patron wait - which is bad customer service.

3. You will need to do maintenance on the catalog records you already have. You can outsource some of that, but even knowing how to fill out the form to contract with an outside vendor requires lot of cataloging expertise. If you don't have anyone on your staff who knows how to do that, you will never know if you are getting the right service at the right price.

4. On a related note, how can you tell if a vendor or outsourcing cataloging agency is doing a good job for your institution, if no one at your institution has any expertise in cataloging? You could be getting substandard records, or bad authority loads, or could be having a serious catalog meltdown, and not even know it. I don't mean that this would happen because the vendor or agency was out to fleece you - you could have simply chosen the wrong options (like telling them you need MARC-8 data instead of Unicode). Does your boss know whether the catalog is in Unicode or MARC-8? Does your boss know how to construct a 9XX field in an OCLC record for export into your local database? Does your boss know how to then look up the item in the local database that was just exported, and verify that ALL of the fields were exported correctly? No? Then you need a cataloger.

5. Don't need a cataloger? Then you're sure you're sticking with your current ILS vendor, for life. And your current acquisitions system, for life. You won't have anyone on staff with enough expertise to work with a vendor through a migration. Your ILS vendor folds and moves you to a knew product and everything falls apart? Good luck fixing that without a cataloger.

6. Has your boss heard of RDA or FRBR? FRAD? FRSAD? If RDA is adopted, how are you going to make sure that the new RDA records and the older records all play nice together? Are you going to rely on your vendor for that? How much do you think is a fair price for your vendor to charge to help you change to the new rules? Have no idea? You need a cataloger. Even if RDA is not adopted, there are going to be changes to cataloging rules in the future. (The rules are not fixed in stone.)

7. Having a library without a cataloger is like having an accountant who doesn't know how to do taxes.

8. What has your cataloger done for you lately? Got any cataloging statistics? Any reports of interesting projects or problems that the cataloger has fixed? I do a lot of troubleshooting for other library staff, particularly when it comes to running reports in our ILS. I also lead training sessions for our staff, particularly as we move through testing phases of a new 'discovery interface'. I regularly inform them of new subject heading changes that are relevant because I know they are hot topics. We have several staff workshops a year, and I review catalog searching tips and tricks for them at those sessions. I read cataloging information from database providers and explain to the other staff how the new records will (or will not) play nice with the other records in our catalog. I explain why our government document records are a little different than our other records, since they're from an outside vendor. (I explain these things as often as they need explaining, since I am asked the same questions a few times a year. That's okay; my job is also an educational one.) I have been slowly adding tables of contents into anthology records, since our reference librarians have indicated that this is highly valuable to them. I maintain a blog about new materials at the library, since we don't have an RSS feed of new materials. I move things from one location to another in the library collections, and re-label them accordingly. I rush catalog materials to make our patrons happy - often within minutes, if the patron is in the building. I work with colleagues in our consortium to help maintain cataloging standards in our shared catalog. I maintain a wiki of cataloging documentation, so that if I am suddenly abducted by a UFO, the next cataloger will know what I was doing and why. I process the authority control report that is sent by the consortium's central office. These are just some of the cataloging jobs I do. (I am also a subject selector and liaison, the manager of the print serials collection, and I wear about 20 other hats, too.) But if you don't need anyone to do all those things - as well as the cataloging itself! - then go ahead and fire your cataloger. But if you want people to be able to find things, and if you want to have a decent catalog and a decent library, then you need a cataloger.

Having said all that, I have to admit that I am a paraprofessional cataloger, currently working on my MSLIS. So, I think it is possible to find a paraprofessional who can do professional level work. However, how is your institution going to know that is hiring a decent paraprofessional cataloger, if you don't have a cataloger on staff to judge his/her abilities and wok product? (In my case, authority control is done by our consortium's central office, so if I were wreaking havoc on the catalog, someone would have been able to figure that out quickly, and could have argued that I should be fired.) You are much better off hiring a professional cataloger with some experience. Also, this profession should stop shooting itself in the foot. There are appropriate roles for paraprofessionals in a library organization, but directors should top acting as though all positions can be filled by paraprofessionals. (If the director needs to save money, then s/he can take a pay cut and move to paraprofessional status. Cataloging should be left to professionals.)"

Thank you, Julie, what wise words. If only the world knew this instead of only the echochamber.

The 'evils' of the Digital Economy Act: A warning

2011-03-10T01:18:00.000-08:00

Image: renjith krishnan / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

I went to an Arcadia fellowship talk last week by Internet Guru Professor John Naughton with the title "What do people really know about the Internet?". John's argument was that there was an "informed bewilderment" factor at work and most people knew very little about how the Internet actually works, and care even less. This is a problem, because the Internet is important to us. Our clickstream can reveal a lot about us and our innermost secrets. Encryption software invented long ago has meant that it is quite easy to keep your personal data secure, however a recent law, Lord Mandelson's brainchild 'Regulation of Inventory Powers Act', (2010) gives a person nominated by the government the right to demand that you hand over your encryption key. If you refuse you can be put in prison for two years. John argued that this was a serious infringement of civil liberties and most people did not know or care. [Recent newspaper articles have also highlighted the fact that a governement nominee can switch off the London Internet exchange, which handles 70% of Britain's internet traffic.]
John told us seven things we ought to know, (apparently people can only ever remember between five and nine things) which were encapsulated in the reading list that he provided. The seven things were:
1) We need to take the long term view. When cars were invented it was years before the driving licence, road tax and driving tests followed. Regulation may yet arrive and we are in the early days.
2)The Digital Economy Act (2010)-[see above and the BBC News article of 9th April 2010]
3) The debate about 'net neutrality' (proof that I am one of those who can only remember five things)
4) The net is not the Web: the internet was designed to be a very simple device for sending data packages from one end to another end. It was designed so that more complicated devices could be attached to it that had not yet been invented. Noughton said that it was "built for surprises": For the net disruption is a feature not a bug. He talked about the academics who had worked on it in the early days, some of whom were in the audience. He talked about the foresight of those who had devised and funded the project.
4)Ecology is more relevent than economics: many features are free but some resources are scarce. (?)
5) Complexity is the new reality
6) The network is now the computer (see my posts on the cloud)
7) The web is evolving and not static. He threw in two extra for free:
8)Orwell vs Huxley (a surveillance state or a sedated nation: the internet provides both)
9) Our present intellectual properly regime makes no sense in the long run.

Excellent health libraries librarian's site

2011-03-01T01:11:00.000-08:00

I have been looking at the site http://www.uhl-library.nhs.uk/clinicallibrarian.html which seems an excellent site for health librarians. It is connected to Leicester Hospitals. I was investigating the International Clinical Librarians health conference which sounds very tempting.

Managing Digital Data

2011-02-24T04:05:00.000-08:00

Recently I went to an interesting day conference in Cambridge on "Managing your Digital Data" . I was inspired to go because at the recent Libraries@Cambridge conference it became very evident that data management is a hugely important issue in information management, and I wanted to learn more about the nuts and bolts involved. The slides for the presentations are available from that webpage.

-I learned that different research funding bodies have different requirements for open access and long term preservation of data: DCC provide a guide to funders' data policies in table form.

-I learned that often digital resources are created in a different format from that used by the digital repository: A protocol called SOAP is used to improve interoperability.

-A digital resource manager's post involves keeping senior managers aware of the funding restriction guidelines so that they become aware that funding opportunities may be lost if the institution does not meet the digital repository requirements.

-A digital resource manager needs a good grasp of IPR Different publishers have different copyright restriction guidelines in their contracts: the SHERPA RoMEO project keeps a record of publisher’s copyright policies.

-It is important to store data from research projects, not just the results.

-A digital resources manager needs to define procedures so that each article has a record. They must decide what the record should include. Repository staff who are experts in metadata markup language, usually that defined through the Dublin Core metadata initiative, manipulate data and records. Users can be encouraged to use Dublin Core metadata in the creation of their data and records.

-DSpace@Cambridge and the Incremental project have provided support resources on data management

Discussions included the issues of size restrictions and the fact that repositories are not for working copies but only for storing final versions. Many of the people on the course were support staff like myself but there were a few genuine researchers to practice on. The slides contain links to a lot of valuable resources.
I felt the day was very worthwhile and I met some interesting people there.

Google chrome zoom problems

2011-01-20T04:37:00.001-08:00

Google Chrome users such as myself) have experienced issues when inadvertently touching the touchpad with several fingers at once. This changes the zoom, so the font seems huge. Apparently you can change the zoom to normal for each tab by clicking ctrl and + at the same time twice for as many times as you need to. I found my display was too big and I had to press ctrl and - twice. Annoying. The good thing about Chrome is, of course, that it is so fast because it is efficient and doesn't use too much computer memory.

CILIP responds to Government consultation paper

2011-01-19T01:20:00.000-08:00

I was very glad to read CILIP's recent sensible response to the Government's consultation paper 'Liberating the NHS: An Information Revolution.’ It raised the point that bothered me: that the paper only addresses how the NHS organises its own information, not how it informs staff and patients about published knowledge. Of course, NHS Choices and NHS evidence does a good job in this area, but the paper should reinforce this. Staff Trainers and training is needed to ensure that people are aware of these resources and can use them. I was glad to see that CILIP picked up on this point. Incidentally, I was glad that Phil Bradley has been elected Vice-President of CILIP (congratulations, Phil, I know you are omnipresent and read all things.) Phil Bradley is a person with his head screwed on the right way and maybe good times are just around the corner.

Microsoft Research support for researchers

2011-01-06T07:00:00.000-08:00

At the libraries@Cambridge2011 conference this morning Alex D. Wade, Director of Scholarly communication at Microsoft Research, a branch of Microsoft with offices in the Cambridge West site, spoke on the research his company are doing to support scholars through new free services and open source resources that scholars can work with. They aim to encourage digital libraries similar to Pubmed Central but for other subjects; they are developing new tools (such as the Article Authoring add in for Word and Academic Search which enables disambiguation of authors and such as the development of authorised standards for tagging so that not only papers but data can be accurately ascribed to all the people involved in its creation and their roles shown.) They are also researching new publication models, and encouraging the development of data libraries.
The ethos of the company is very much inspired by the ideas of the late John Gray, who heralded a new paradigm for scientific research (the first three paradigms were, in turn, experimental science, theoretical science, computational science: the new one is in danger of becoming an exaflood of unorganised data. Microsoft have produced a festschrift in memory of Grey, which can be downloaded free. The work they are doing is very much in line with Tim Berners-Lee's concept of a semantic web: for instance the Worldwide Telescope project allows users to add integrate data to a walkthrough map of the universe, which should co-ordinate data on a subject where disparate astronomers publish research concerning a tiny segment of space.
I was astonished to learn that the parent Microsoft Company employ a global staff of 100,000, and that they are working on such projects in collaboration with universities. Librarians discussing the matter over tea muttered that the authoring add in was similar to Scopus. Many researchers these days do not use Word, would they be interested in the add in? Microsoft seem to be doing the work that one would expect scientific organisations to undertake: will the scientists commit to these Microsoft led services or prefer to develop their own structures which can be controlled by their organisations? Apparently Microsoft have sometimes developed similar services and pulled the plug on them after a few years. They seem to be investing a huge amount of staff into risky blue sky research that may not be taken up- but isn't that good business practice after all?

Controversial Hoax in BMJ

2010-12-27T15:32:00.000-08:00

BMJ readers have been very excited to learn of a recent hoax in which an embryologist submitted a dubious abstract to an integrative medicine conference and was offered a speaking slot to discuss his paper on a homunculus in the buttocks. Professor John C. Mcloughlan submitted the paper to the Jerusalem International Convention on Integrative Medicine because he was unhappy that the term "complementary and alternative medicine," which has received criticism from writers such as Ben Goldacre for not using evidence based criteria, is now being replaced by the term "integrative medicine" and is being supported by NHS funding. Despite the fact that the abstract that he submitted was blatent nonesense the scientific committee accepted the paper. The professor argued that he was making an important point and implied that alternative practices that ignore the peer review process are open to abuse and misinformation. BMJ readers are arguing about whether the professor was right to lie about the paper to the conference administrators or cowardly to fail to face them, and one of the conference organisers, Avaham Fried, has written a very credible come back letter arguing that the professor had a respected post at a highly rated institution and claimed to have done research on the subject but had lied: the lie would soon have become evident had the process reached any further so the Professor had pulled out and the Professor should be discredited for having abused his status in this way. This is all very true, but it raises another controversial issue of whether it is right that the peer review process is biased in favour of those from highly rated institutions. Anyway, it all makes for jolly Christmas reading.

Visit to Betty and Gordon Moore Science Library Cambridge

2010-12-22T06:04:00.001-08:00

Picture used by permission of the library.

A party from our library visted the Betty and Gordon Moore library today. The library is part of the University's Cambridge University's Centre for Mathematical Studies site.

The following interesting issues were highlighted:
Digital archiving - The first thing most Mathematicians all over the world do when they wake up is to read the latest articles posted that day in ArXiv, an online depository universally accepted as the main place to post your research before it is processed by publishers. This means that anyone can have free access in a single resource to all mathematical research published anywhere. Mathematicians reportedly do not read much else, thus potentially saving thousands of pounds of journal subscriptions.Is this the voice of the future for all subjects? I asked myself.

Open access internet computers- I have never visited a library where users could just sit in front of a computer and use the internet without logging in. If they can do it here why isn't it possible everywhere? The barriers placed (often by necessity) between users and the internet in many libraries often makes me think that Ranganathan would be turning in his grave (fourth law, save the time of the reader- as explained to me fifteen years ago by Alan Stevens.)

Public access rolling stacks- only the second place I have ever seen these. Why do most library designers only keep rolling stacks in closed access areas? (If they deemed safe then they are surely safe for all.)

Issues involved in downgrading and upgrading posts. We learned how a post was recently downgraded in this library.

Collection policy We learned how the allocation of copywrite books between dependent libraries and the decision of where to store theses is often a grey area. Staff availability to process the material is often a factor to be considered.

Colours - the colours of the library are taken from a Bridget Riley painting, Cantus Firmus. The colour of the carpet (see this flickr photo) is that used to paint the walls of primary schools in Scandinavia where it is thought to be beneficial to learning.

Evidence based medicine vs information skills

2010-11-15T03:31:00.000-08:00

An interesting blog 'Should we teach evidence based medicine?' from the Health Informationist argues that using some Evidence Based medicine techniques may be inappropriate in practice at some levels and it may be more important to teach information skills for finding information about existing evidence and best practice.
(Isn't this a bit obvious? I ask myself. However it raises the issues involved in the recent NHS discussion document Liberating the NHS: an Information revolution, where the emphasis seems to be on using nhs statistics to produce new evidence rather than on learning to access existing research and best practice documents

Computer simulations in research

2010-11-01T15:28:00.000-07:00

Image: GABA receptor copyright PL Chau used by permission.

Dr Pak Lee Chau of the Pasteur Institute gave a lecture at the AGM of the Cambridge Society for the Application of Research this evening (1st Nov.) In his CSAR lecture Dr. Chau first described the history of anaesthetics research culminating in the effects of pressure on anaesthesia. After that he described his theories relating to the structure of the cell membrane and the chemical mechanisms of Anaesthesia as drugs permete the cell membrane and ions filter through the GABA receptors.

Not much is known about the mechanics of general anaesthesia, which are quite different from those of local anaesthesia. Even Dr. Chau admitted that he had no explanation for what happens when someone gets knocked unconscious.

An interesting aspect of Dr. Chau's research is the use of very complex computer simulations. Whereas scientists often use computers to simulate bonds between molecules, Dr. Chau's programmes are very complex involving many molecules and many variables and their reactions when affected by Newtons laws and time. A computer can run for many months to simulate one nano second of real time. As one scientist explained to me: computers can predict the future but by the time they do the future has already happened.

Dr Chau has co-ordinated a team of scientists across the globe to investigate anaesthesia at cell membrane level using various techniques, conventional and unconventional to test and cross test varying theories.

Although he spoke fast and quietly at first he soon grew more confident and soon had the listeners chuckling at his self deprecating Cambridge humour. Dr. Chau accompanied his talk with beautiful models and bright online graphics and used analagies so perspicuous that even those uninitiated in the complexities of molecular research could follow his lucid arguments.

There were many questions after the talk ranging from topics such as the mysterious anaesthetic properties of the Noble gases, the potential of as yet undiscovered anaesthetics, possible other uses for complex computer simulations, the possibility of anaesthetics working on receptors other than Dr. Chau's preferred suspect, the GABA receptor and, finally, the anaesthetic properties of alcohol.

CSAR are seeking to recruit new members and if this evening's friendly atmosphere of scholarly enquiry is typical of their evenings the organisation is well worth joining.

Commercialisation of Libraries

2010-10-28T03:29:00.000-07:00

I am grateful to Edmund at the Arcadia Project Blog for pointing out an excellent article by Daniel Goldstein challenging the commercialisation of libraries: see
Goldstein argues that libraries charge for more services than they used to and that this affects their relationship with their users. The article concerns the use of third party journals providers who sell bulk packages of journals without allowing librarians to select the titles within the package. Although it is at times hard to follow his logic, Goldstein argues that this is leading to a loss of specialist knowledge amongst staff and fewer subject librarians. This article raises many of the themes covered in Martyn Everett's talk on copyright given at the Association of Independent Librarians' conference last week.

As a wannabe author facing issues of selecting illustrations for biography of Dionysius Lardner I will have to grapple with these issues soon. If Michael Popham was surprised that Google books subsidiaries could charge copyright fees on republished works when they had done little more than photocopy them I would contend that it is equally surprising that Libraries charge authors large digital rights fees to obtain images from copies of books of which those libraries are only the custodians, and have forced users to use their expensive digital services departments to take images when effectively any photocopier might do the job perfectly adequately in many instances.

Netvibes blog post

2010-10-26T09:58:00.000-07:00

The Wikiman has an interesting blog post explaining what Netvibes is and why one would ever want to use it. Put that way it sounds rather tempting and if Phil Bradley uses it it must be the creme de la creme after all.
Apparently if you have a website, a blog, something or other else, and videos online you can have a sort of homepage that directs people to all these things. Sounds like a normal home page to me... must investigate further.

CILIP responds to the Government White Paper

2010-10-26T03:02:00.000-07:00

CILIP is just one of the organizations to write a response to the Government White Paper Equity and Excellence: Liberating the NHS. Other responses include the Kings Fund.Cilip are working with the HLG in a response to the consultation "Liberating the NHS: an Information Revolution".

The ramifications of the white paper are very unclear. Librarians such as Biddy Fisher are campaigning to ensure that the proposed 'information revolution' will be performed by librarians, but I suspect that any new roles concerning teaching or selecting evidence based materials and constructing portals and databases may well be channelled to trained researchers in research departments. Many scientists do not connect librarians with databasees and indeed whilst librarians have been involved in the selection and provision of databases it is questionable whether they are involved in their creation or commissioning to any extent so it is possible that many future developments in the provision of databases and teaching information skills will bypass physical libraries altogether.

I agree a hundred percent with those who argue that users need support and training in information skills and that more personell are needed in this area. I am just not convinced that those support persons will or even should be be those employed today as librarians.

The publishing industry today

2010-10-26T01:19:00.000-07:00

The Independent Libraries Association conference last week included a talk by John Thompson of Jesus College, Cambridge, on the current state of the publishing industry, which he described as the "logic of the field" (why use a term everyone knows when one can impress everyone by using an obscure one after all.) Thompson is very easy to listen to and the talk was excellent. Thompson related how the range of publishers has diminished to leave only very large publishers who can make economies of scale, or very small publishers, publishers who have known each other for years and co-operate to give each other discounts. He described the rise of the independent agent who auctions texts: apparently in other European countries there are very few literary agents but in the UK and America no serious writer could get published without one.

Thompson described how some books are perceived as more valuable than others before they are even published: how the auction is a place to test a book's perceived value; how publishers use Neilson bookdata to see how many copies an author's previous books sold, and how some publishing brands such as Harper Collins' Fourth Estate can be run at a loss to add to the publisher's prestige, an important part of the firm's value. The talk seems to relate to Thompson's book "Books in the Digital age."

As a wannabe author I was glad to hear that during the autumn publishers are often desperate to find books that they can publish fast, even if they are not very good books (hooray!)

where do new ideas come from?

2010-10-20T01:18:00.000-07:00

Steven Johnson's new book 'Where good ideas come from' argues against the conventional idea of a sole genius having a sudden brainwave and creating a new invention. Rather, he says, at a certain time when most components and factors are ripe, people get together to take technology forward to the next step, often several people having the same idea in several places ('multiples') Pretty obvious stuff really when you come to think about it. It is interesting to look at the examples he gives though of each case: air conditiioning, natural selection etc.

He argues that the best way to encourage new ideas is therefore "to expand the range of your possible next moves – the perimeter of your potential – by exposing yourself to as much serendipity, as much argument and conversation, as many rival and related ideas as possible; to borrow, to repurpose, to recombine."

Oxford-Google Book Digitization Programme

2010-10-18T09:33:00.000-07:00

Last Thursday (14th October 2010) I heard Michael Popham, Head of Oxford Digital Library, speak about Oxford's participation in the Google Books Digitization Project (see also Wikipedia article ) as part of the "Libraries in a Digital Age," this year's Association of Independent Libraries conference, held at the Royal Astronomical Society in Burlington House, Picadilly (mmmm).

Michael explained that the aims of the project had been to improve access to the library's collection of nineteenth century books, in the spirit of Thomas Bodley's concept of a "Republic of Letters".

Google's project had been in contrast with the library's other work which aimed at providing digital conservation by creating high quality copies that would save wear and tear on the original fragile documents. He spoke about the criteria used to select books (nineteenth century only: those that were too fragile were rejected) how they were checked against the digitised holdings of another library in the project to see how many of them had not already been digitised. One specification was that they had to be available to any user at any time so they had to be digitised within a few miles of the library and very good records were kept of where each book was at any time.

Lawyers drew up the contract carefully to ensure that Oxford kept within British Copyright law: only books that were copyright free were digitised from Oxford. Oxford were given a copy of the raw data to use as they wished and Google typed up their data and cleaned it up and guaranteed to make it freely available for the next twenty years, (considered a long time for any company to pledge.) Several unforseen issues arose.

The digitisation process incurred a lot of criticism,mainly because of the quality of the metadata records added afterwards. The library faced some unexpected costs out of having to provide copies to users of texts that had not been suitable for digitisation and there was increased user demand for digitization of texts that fell outside the original remit. A subsidiary of Google later produced commercial printed copies of these texts which carried a copyright notice.
Personally I think the Google Books Digitization project is one of the wonders of the modern world and I am very grateful to Google and Oxford for providing this service.

Can you name the seven parts of a computer?

2010-10-13T05:47:00.000-07:00

Watched a great video "Computer tour" that explained in three minutes what are the 7 major parts of a computer ie:

1) The motherboard –the heart of the computer -everything sits on this
2) The CPU – central processing unit (the brain)
3) The RAM – Random Access Memory sits on motherboard. You can add extra ram to speed up your machine.
4) The Videocard- connects to Motherboard with videocard slot. You can have 2 or even 4.
5) The Power supply
6) The Hard Disc – like a bookshelf that holds all your data
7) The Optical drive- reads CD’s or DVD’s

Hard drives and how a PC works

2010-10-13T01:59:00.001-07:00

I went to a good talk on computers last night at my local computer club. I've often noticed that there are two types of computer people (at least!) Those interested in programs and those interested in hardware. I was interested to learn more about the latter. The talk covered how to install a new hard drive on your PC- quite old technology now that most of us have laptops, but I needed to catch up on what has been under the bonnet of my computer all these years.
I learned that hard disc drives (all modern ones are known as IDE's - integrated development areas- to those in the know) are developed from an IBM design: that a computer has a processor, an operator and a hard disc drive, that hard drives used to be attached with a cable (these ones were retrospectively termed PATAs) and now they have serial interfaces (SATAs)or the very modern and expensive solid state drive (SSD).
The website Howstuffworks has a good article on how a PC works.

Kindle and Sony ebook readers

2010-10-13T01:15:00.000-07:00

My colleague at the next desk brought in a Kindle today: the first I've seen. Hers came in a pink leather cover with a light. We have a Sony Reader in our household. The Kindle comes with a keyboard and online facility so you can order books from Amazon: on my colleague's version you have to connect to the Internet through a wifi or modem but you can buy versions that connect anywhere in the world through 3G technology.
Strangely enough the Kindle 3 keyboard has no numbers or obvious instructions of how to type in numbers: we did an Internet search to find out the solution. They are expensive but I think we'll all be using them as second nature within the next ten years and as librarians it's technology we all need to be familiar with, and we need to ensure that our services can be used in this way.

Plagiarism website

2010-10-12T07:45:00.000-07:00

I've just heard about Plagiarism.org a website being promoted by our Reader Services librarians to encourage awareness of issues of plagiarism.

Climategate and the preservation of raw data

2010-10-12T01:06:00.000-07:00

An interesting article in the Information World Review Sept/Oct 2010 p.19 "Data without doubts" by Archana Venkatraman reviews the implications of the recent scandal at East Anglia's Climate Research Unit (CRU) when computer hackers broke into the Unit's system and posted more than 1,000 confidential emails on the Internet. It transpired that CRU no longer had the raw data on which it had based its global warming predictions: the hackers accused the scientists of illegally destroying embarrassing information, manipulating research results and suppressing evidence. Three separate enquiries cleared the scientists but public confidence in the global warming theories was shaken.

At least something good has come out of the affair: the need to preserve raw data and allow open access to it has now been identified as a pressing concern and the JISC's efforts, such as the managing research data programme, to enable Academics to make data openly available now have added credibility. The UEA is one of eight university departments around the country (Bath, Cambridge, Mancheseter, Oxford, Southampton and Kings College London) which will be working towards models of better data management.

Religious beliefs affect a doctor's decisions

2010-10-05T01:55:00.000-07:00

Doctors who described themselves as very religious were about four times less likely than their non-religious or mildly religious colleagues to have discussed the possibility of a legal course of treatment intended or expected to hasten the death of a mentally competent patient with a terminal illness according to results from 3733 doctors who replied to a postal survey in the UK in 2007-8. (see the Lancet editorial in Sept. 4-10 2010 p.743) Doctors who are atheist or agnostic are four times more likely to take decisions that are expected to shorten the lives of patients with terminal illnesses.

A doctor's religion (or lack of it) is not supposed to affect his clinical decision making process so these results, whichever way you look at them, are quite worrying.

Japanese Business Methods

2010-10-04T06:07:00.001-07:00

Kaizen and Six Sigma are two Japanese concepts adapted into Business theory that are aimed at helping companies to continually improve. I learned about them on my colleague's blog Thing blogging
They both sound rather like the dreaded Neurolinguistic programming to me: you analyse processes very carefully and make tiny adjustments to improve performance.
Isn't that what a good manager should do anyway? Apparently there are various analytical techniques involved. I am quite keen to learn more.

Teachmeets

2010-10-04T05:17:00.000-07:00

A teachmeet is an informal unconference (yes apparently that is a word too these days.) Teachmeet is a good idea but the talks were so fast (two minutes or seven minutes) that you had to really pay attention.

Some colleagues organised the Cambridge Librarian Teachmeet the other day and I gave a talk entitled Prezi in seven minutes. Other subjects included the Cephalonian method of Library induction, banner design, induction sessions and the use of Adobe Captivate video screencapture program to create video tutorials.

Videoconferencing with Flashmeeting

2010-09-28T06:05:00.000-07:00

Yesterday about fifty Cambridge librarians went to the Cambridge Librarians Teachmeet event where we heard very short talks on aspects of information skills and technology. One of the most interesting talks was on the subject of Flashmeeting free videoconferencing software.
When using the software everyone looks at their computer screen where there is a large pane containing the speaker surrounded by smaller panes with pictures of the other attendants and then everyone types their comments as the speaker speaks.

The speaker eloquently announced "You have to use a good webcam or else it's rubbish."
I can't wait to find an excuse to try it out.

TinEye: A program that can "Google" from an image

2010-09-28T05:52:00.000-07:00

OK I know you are supposed to say "do a web search" not "Google". TinEye is an amazing program where you can upload an image to the TinEye site and find any other sites on the W.W.W. where a version of that image is used. It does not even have to be that close to the original: a search for an image of Mona Lisa might return the Mr. Bean version for instance.

The legal implications of this are quite wide: now people will be able to spot if you are using their images illegally on a website for instance. Unfortunately nobody has developed a verb "to Tin-eye" otherwise I would be able to say: "off you go, start Tin-eyeing fast!"

ebooks

2010-08-31T02:49:00.000-07:00

The ebooks@cambridge project started in 2005 and since then many books have been added to the Cambridge University Library catalogues. When first batch of ebooks were negotiated the accompanying catalogue records provided by the publisher were for hard copies of the books and it was this very blogger who converted all the records to relate to the electronic format, and typed in all the links. Now Cambridge students have access to over a thousand texts by various publishers, including the Oxford Textbook of Medicine and access to Cambridge University Press's 'Cambridge Collections' and the Oxford University Press 'Oxford Reference Collection', and a selection of books by Routledge/Taylor Francis amongst many others. The team measure usage each year and found that the books on economics and education were read most: the ebooks@cambridge ebooks were accessed over 56,000 times last year, a staggering amount.
The first ebook I ever read was the Cambridge Companion to Bacon
The NHS have collections of ebooks too, marketed as myilibrary and accessed through an NHS Athens password. This seems to be quite an eclectic collection that includes books on arts and humanities as well as medicine and science. I spot a book on autism, some OUP titles and Foucault's classic 'History of Madness" amongst others.
Ebooks are very popular as people can read them without leaving home.

Project to list every BBC show ever

2010-08-30T05:55:00.000-07:00

I see a link on Martyn Everett's Booksurfer Blog to a story on Digital Spy that the BBC are going to digitize 80 years worth of Radio Times' with the aim of producing a guide to every programme ever aired on their airways. Does this mean we are one step closer to my ultimate fantasy: being to download any show ever made?
I know many have probably been lost but it does seem such a pity that there are great shows out there that were only aired once or twice, (I am hoping for the return of the very obscure Men of Iron, a show about Brunel and steam, myself.)
Incidentally, friends tells me that Digital Spy is seriously addictive.... I shall give it a whirl.

QIPP

2010-08-04T05:29:00.000-07:00

QIPP stands for 'quality, innovation, productivity and prevention' (the acronym was coined by the Department of Health last year). The NHS Evidence website is soon to include a "QIPP Collection" - "a selection of evidence-based examples showing where you can iimprove and maintain quality of care and improve productivity at the same time" according to Dr Gillian Leng of NICE, writing in an article in CILIP's Library and Information Update for August (see 'NHS Evidence- What are the Next Steps' p. 14)

So now you know.

More on Clinical Audit

2010-08-03T05:41:00.000-07:00

Following Stephen Ayres's online presentation at HLG concerning Clinical Audit, which I mentioned on this blog on 28th June, I have now read an interesting article on the subject in the hard copy of the BMJ for 24th July 2010. The article gives an example of an area where NHS staff are failing to correctly assimilate and use existing knowledge and procedures and where it is argued Clinical audit could help bring practice up to the standard of current knowledge and, in short, save lives. The article, Clinical Audit: Why it Mattters, by Alan Fayaz, highlights reports of 11 deaths aond one case of severe harm as a result of misplaced feeding tubes during the period 2003-5. To reduce this harm, the National Reporting and Learning Service issued an alert in 2005 with guidelines directed at NHS acute trusts, but instead of the situation improving there have been a further 79 cases of misplaced nasogastric tubes since the alert, of which 21 were thought to have directly contributed to a death. The guidelines existed but had not been followed.

A formal clinical audit cycle, where standards are identified and current practice is compared against those standards, examining the reasons for shortfalls and planning and agreeing action to bring about improvements, should practicioners change their behaviour in accordance with new guidelines, yet although audit is now obligatory for junior doctors in training, the Chief Medical Officer pointed out in 2006 that the term "national clinical audit" is a misnomer since few organisations formally follow this cycle.
The article provides proof that NHS staff need help in following clinical audits. This may be help that libraries can provide.

Criteria for selecting journals

2010-08-03T01:02:00.000-07:00

Photo from Flickr.

The issue of how to select new journals titles and journal titles for cancellation is a difficult one and it helps to have some written policy documents so you can explain your decisions when challenged.

Criteria for judging new titles would probably include: Scope and content; Quality of the content- e.g. impact factors (impact factors are not, of course, available for new publications); International standing; Editorial board; Production quality (layout/accessibility); Cost; Need, Balance across collections; Support of teaching or research; Format of subscription; Academic input and Online subscriptions issues.

Criteria for selecting material for cancellation might include: Support for teaching and research; Balance across the collection; Changes in scope/quality of content/editorial board; Online availability: Availability of interlibrary loans; Usage; the Journal's academic importance (yes, its those impact factors again, mixed with a dose of academic input); Availability of content via other means such as aggregator sites or databases; Cost and/or cost per download, the Publisher's reputation and history of price increases and Location of the last print copy (if duplicate).

It has always annoyed me that librarians and scientists use the terms 'journals', 'serials' and 'periodicals' interchangeably when discussing this format: I tend to use the term "journals" but when tagging this post the disadvantage of not using an authorised form of language becomes clear.

Issues with Journals

2010-08-02T07:16:00.000-07:00

Ever since I was in Library school one of the biggest issues facing librarians has been the rise in the price of journals and the proliferation of titles. Today as part of our continuous professional development our Deputy Librarian explained how she manages the Journals collection. I see Wikipedia even has an article entitled "serials crisis" (so it must be true.) The rise in the number of periodicals and the arrival of online versions has put budgets under increasing pressure. How can it possibly be that I have never blogged about this before? Presumably the answer lies in not feeling the need to state the obvious.

The Open Access movement is one response to the pressure: scientists argue that since the state already pays for the research it seems unjust that researchers should have to pay again to access that information. Another aspect is the tendency for universitites to get discounts when they become locked into long term deals. This can be dangerous as money is locked into existing journals, leaving little flexibility to drop titles as they become less popular or to switch to new journals. Oxford university was recently penalized £400,000 for dropping out of one such big deal- fortunately Cambridge, who have a journals co-ordination scheme, have not had the same problem. Instead the departments co-operate, evaluating journals according to a standard list of criteria and awarding each points according to how urgently it is needed, and buying or cancelling titles accordingly.

With so many new titles appearing not only cost but space is at a premium and duplicates are being weeded out in many libraries, particularly if electronic copies are available. Another approach involves relying more upon acquiring articles on a just-in-time basis via inter-library loans.

Managing the collection is a time consuming and stressful task for our gallant librarian.

Visit to St Johns College library, Cambridge

2010-07-28T08:44:00.001-07:00

picture: St. Johns College Old Library from Flickr
This afternoorn the staff from the Medical Library were taken around St John's library by Katie, one of their 12 full time equivalent members of staff, who is cataloguing the Fred Hoyle archvies. St John's College are one of the richest colleges in Cambridge and have wisely decided to ensure that their library is a state of the art institution. This showed in a million ways: perhaps most obviously in the gorgeous "new" library (opened 1994) with six floors of crafted wood and steel allowing space for their cutting edge collection of books on all subjects, ample space for displays of new books and exhibitions.

- In addition to buying the latest books on all subjects, the library had a good selection of leisure books and audiovisual material: the library can afford to buy each of the books nominated for various book awards and the time to create displays. Members often donate good quality modern material including cd's and DVD's.

Another noticable sign of the library's funding and status was the way they employed staff for cleaning and bookbinding, a biographical librarian (users are charged nothing for her services,) and a gentleman to hoover books (using his archival vacuum cleaner of course.) With Kings College London library I would reckon this one of my favourite modern libraries with a lovely mixture of old and new architecture.

- I had visited before but learned this time that the upper (old) library is not Medieval, as I had thought before, but was built in Jacobean times in a "retro" medieval style.

- I learned that many of the Cambridge University computers are wired to the same system, PWF, (Public Workstation Facility) provided by the Central computing service. This provides access from any PWF computer in Cambridge to a central filestore where work can be stored. Apparently the service charges quite high fees and our Clinical school has just opted out of it to save costs. With the rise of memory sticks a central filestore becomes less necessary, although the aim of conformity of desktops and access is a good concept.

- discussing it afterwards some of us expressed surprise when we realised that there was little mention of user training in information skills, database searching, etc, which is increasing in most academic libraries these days.

- a fun time was had by all and we were very grateful that the staff had allowed us to visit and had taken so much trouble to show us around.

HLG conference 2010 presentations online

2010-07-28T02:05:00.000-07:00

Since I sadly did not make the 2010 HLG conference I was glad to see that a lot of the presentations are now online. So far, investigating, I learned about a new corporate blog the health informationist, learned that some comparatively small libraries are sparing manpower for library support for clinical audit and learned about the Centre for Reviews and Dissemination at York and their CRD database, which offers abstracts, nhs evaluations and health technology assessments.

"Equity and Excellence" new NHS white paper

2010-07-26T09:21:00.000-07:00

The British government (can one still call them "the new British Government" and when will we feel at home with them, if ever?) have produced a white paper on the future of the NHS: "Equity and Excellence: Liberating the NHS." You can see lots of links concerning it from our Cambridge Medical library blog on the subject. Themes include patient consultation in all decision making concerning them, choice of providers, evidence based standards, etc.
Aims at achieving £20 billion of efficiency savings (see 7.v) and reducing NHS management costs by more than 45% over the next four years (see 7.W) will be astronomically difficult but abolishing quangos(7.x) will certainly help in that direction. A Kings Fund article describes the difficulties that will be faced in implementing the paper: it raises "Ten challenging questions about the white paper" which basically boil down to the old fable of "belling the cat": we may well agree that patients should be informed but who is going to advise them? Who will take the decisions to close hospitals etc.?

BMJ group podcast on suicide.

2010-07-26T08:48:00.000-07:00

The BMJ have taken to issuing podcasts to give added value to articles in their journals. One example is the podcast The Bridge. This week the print BMJ has a cluster of articles on suicide – one of which talks about the efficacy of physical barriers to prevent suicide from bridges. In the podcast, The Bridge we hear from Kevin Hines the survivor of such an attempt, and Alys Cole-King, a psychiatrist who wants to break down the stigma of suicide. This podcast gives a review of the journal with snippets rather in the style of "Woman's hour" (and what a great style that is.) I was surprised that in fact the podcast goes on for 25 minutes (like a mini "woman's hour") and you don't get to the bit on Suicide for ages (apparently- and who has time to listen to all that when they are at work?) There is much to be said for recieving the hard copy and flicking though the pages after all, but if one was in the car with some variety of device that could access a podcast, (?) it would be good to listen as you chugged along (but please don't crash.)

Collection management systems

2010-07-26T02:44:00.000-07:00

Read an interesting article in this month's Gazette about a collection management tool called CollectionHQ, (previously Smartism) which is used in 30% of UK public libraries. it is claimed that this "Evidence Based Stock Management system" can save up to three person years in resources. It has long struck me that stock selection in libraries could be a lot more rational (see my earlier post on this subject) . Most systems provide similar facilities anyway through the use of customisable statistical categories for books and users and the use of customisable reports. These have been underused in the past: now it looks as if public libraries are investing thousands in paying a private company to do the maths for them. Librarians ought to use statistics to help them select stock (and understand how to do this), but surely the final decisions on what stock to order and circulate have to be made by humans, and surely this should be one of the librarians' key skills and hence not be outsourced. I would be very interested to learn more about how CollectionHQ works. I suspect in our university library, if we wanted a program to do this sort of thing we would just ask our systems boffins to write one themselves.

Online Map applications

2010-07-21T01:02:00.000-07:00

We are all being trained this week in how to use online maps (in case we didn't know before.) Microsoft now have Bing Maps, a rival to Google Maps, which presented me with a rather sweetly old fashioned map reminiscent of the ones in the old AA handbooks, with little 3d flags to mark you your destination (I feel as if I am in a classic cars rally.)I see I live 13.9 miles from work and it should take me 25 minutes to get there (a slight over estimation of time if anything.) I tried using the zoom in facility but this radical move seemed to perplex the poor program. After refreshing and trying again the city map worked and then the street map. This was all very well and efficient but not half as exciting as Google Street View, where you can see a photo of your street (if you live in a reasonably built up area that they have got around to photographing.)
OS Open Data gave a much more modern looking clear map that fills a wide screen with no bumph at the side. This is most pleasing, also we learned that our office sits on top of a Roman road, which was a surprise. You can use your mouse wheel to zoom in and out to get different views. OS Open Data is not designed to give directions, but on the other hand you can create your own map using their developer tools (adding your own markers, drawing on rectangles (eg. for surveyors) and order copies. You can do many of these things with Google Maps too. Bing Maps has a more limited similar facility called "My Places" where you can add push pins and trails to map and email copies to friends. Next I tried MapQuestUK Scrolling with the wheel takes you up and down on this one, not in and out. There were more levels to zoom to. Mapquest told me I lived 14.3 miles from work. They took me by my usual route and the journey would take me 24 minutes. They seemed to be the same as Streetmap as far as I could see and did nothing more or less exciting than maps and directions (and display lots of adverts.)Finally I turned to Ye olde tried and trusted Streetmap. I see Streetmap now also gives you options to display Lettings, homes, hotels, jobs and businesses, similar to Google Maps but I couldn't see that it gives directions. Google Maps offered me three routes to work, the quickest they suggested would take 28 minutes and 14.4 miles. They had lots of views including satellite views and street view.
If I wanted a map to see the lie of the land I would use OS Open Data. If I wanted directions I use the AA route planner ("32 minutes 13.8 miles") as normal. If I want to get the feel of a place or snoop on where my friends live I use Google street view. If I want a map I usually go to streetmap. Old habits die hard, and in business its often more important to be the first than to be the best.

Digital Economy Act 2010 explained in eight minutes

2010-07-20T08:09:00.000-07:00

In a JISC podcast Nicola Yeeles from JISC spoke to Kirsty McLaughlin, legal information specialist at JISC Legal, to find out what this new Act could mean for those who work and learn in universities and colleges.
If you listen to it you will hear Kirsty explain that nobody is very sure what is going to happen but the Ofcom are going to publish a code to define how institutions should behave. JISC is advising all institutions to consult the Ofcom codes by 31 July 2010 and to start preparing now to understand the implications of the law. Kirsty has written a guidance paper which will be accessible on the JISC legal section of their website.

YoutubeEdu

2010-07-20T07:35:00.000-07:00

Today I explored Youtube Edu, the section of Youtube devoted to learning. Cambridge University has several videos posted there. see this example .
Oxford University as such are not listed in Youtube Edu (are there any other universities?) however Said Business School have a section under Normal Youtube and, even more relevent for a Medical Librarian, the Oxford Centre for Evidence Based Medicine also have a Youtube channel

Photocopier hell

2010-07-19T10:15:00.000-07:00

Today I decided to write an instruction manual on how to do double sided photocopying and reduce and enlarge originals. The machine (a Kyocera KM-5035) would not give my card back so I turned it off and on again (first rule of machines.) This wiped my first card. First rule of photocopiers: The photocopier is not a machine as you know it it is a demon. Never turn it off.
I worked on the drafts of the instruction document. Each time I followed my own instructions something different happened, depending on what I had done immediately before. I discovered the second rule of photocopying, always press "clear" before starting a new task.
I wrote "Select A4 paper" only to discover that there were two A4 buttons, one was A4 portrait and one was A4 landscape. The machine would not give my card back again. I opened the box and fed it out using the wheel, as I have often done for readers. I discovered when putting it back in that this had wiped my second card. (arrgh.)
Third rule of photocopiers: if your card gets stuck wait three minutes and the machine will spit it out of its own accord. In fact, the machine spat my card out every few minutes whenever I stopped to read or re-write my instructions. ARRRRRGGGGGH. I tried enlarging, fine, but when reducing the machine kept looking for A5 paper, as the button for "reduce from A3 to A4" also included the "reduce from A4 to A5" button. . The secret here is to tell the photocopier in no uncertain terms what paper you intend to use (i.e. A4 landscape) before pressing the "70%" button.
Now I can imagine how our readers feel. Just as well I now have an excellent set of instructions telling you how to avoid all pitfalls.

Using wireless in the library

2010-07-05T02:49:00.000-07:00

For our 23 things course we are trying out services from the library user's point of view and this morning I am here with our Experience student using the wireless laptop.
We found the login process very straightforward but it took us ages to login. I think this is because our library laptop was running java updates; usually readers find it works quite fast. It is a good service: you can do all the things that you can do from a pc.

The Chatham House Rule

2010-07-01T03:39:00.000-07:00

An editorial in the Lancet of 19-25 July 2010 p.2132 queries use of the Chatham House rule. This rule is used at meetings (often in the Health and Science fields) where the speakers want to be able to speak freely without being quoted, and the rule states that: "When a meeting, or part thereof, is held under the Chatham House Rule, participants are free to use the information received, but neither the identity nor the affiliation of the speaker(s), nor that of any other participant, may be revealed."

Richard Horton argues in the editorial that this rule can lead to elitism and is open to abuse.

Digital Economy Act

2010-06-30T05:53:00.000-07:00

In case you missed it, the Digital Economy Act was one of those rushed through at the end of the last parliament. It was designed with the Digital Britain report in mind but seems to have been rather a botched job where important clauses such as the provisions for the preservation of orphan works were dropped in favour of reaching a compromise position. Some issues were left unclarified and those wishing to know the law may be faced with the risk of committing the 'crime' first and then find out through case law whether or not their actions fall within the law.

More mobile technologies: the iPodtouch

2010-06-30T03:13:00.000-07:00

Our far sighted Reader Services Librarian has bought an iPodtouch so that we can all be trained to understand the issues involved in communicating with readers using phone and touch operating systems. Touch screen interfaces are very popular and more and more computers (notepads and ipads) are using this type of operating system so it is important to keep up with our users (or preferably one step ahead of them.)When you turn the ipod on you see a display of icons. If you swipe your finger across the page from right to left the page moves across with it to reveal a second page of icons. Each icon represents a gadget that has been downloaded, and as the ads tell us, there are thousands of apps to choose from. I accidentally tripped onto one already loaded on to our ipod which listed British birds and played you their songs if you clicked on their picture. How could I shut it down? I had to rush off to find the person the Reader Services Librarian trained yesterday (trickle down learning effect.) This kind soul showed me that if you click the button in the middle of the ipod you get instantly taken back to the menu icons screen. She showed me that the Safari icon was the Internet interface (I was not expecting Safari: it was all so confusing ;-) What fun though! Soon our library wireless login screen appeared. help! The writing was very very tiny! My colleague gently explained how to tap on the input boxes on the web pages to make a keyboard pop up on the screen. Then she showed me how to make the screen wider or smaller using hand gestures that are sort of the opposite of a pinch. (Yes I know they always do all these things on the adverts but being confronted with a real one wipes your brain clean.) I found the keyboard a bit difficult to use but nothing like as difficult as the first time I used a touchpad instead of a mouse, (technology that we use all the time these days without even thinking about it) so I guess I will get the hang of it. I was also most surprised when I happened to turn the thing on its side and the screen automatically remained upright and turned into a sort of landscape widescreen format. My colleague apparently uses this to download t.v. from BBC iplayer etc. although she says you would'nt want to use Word etc. on it as the screen would be too small for serious word processing.
I logged into our library homepage and looked up a book in the catalogue. So now users can wander around the library with the library catalogue on their phones looking for the book they want at the same time (cool!) And yes, as I said yesterday, it is every cataloguer's dream to be able to do this with the Cataloguing client (one day perhaps....) I was also shown how to use the 'app' Epocrates which helps you identify any pill. Another helps you do a simple search of Pubmed.
Since the younger generation are so emotionally attached to their phones and phone technology I think this is definitely the way computer operating systems will go in future and librarians need to ensure that their services can be viewed well in this way and evaluate whether they need to develop apps to enable users to access their services in new ways from mobile technology.

Mobile technology, Arcadia report

2010-06-28T08:14:00.000-07:00

I see there is an Arcadia report on the use of mobile technologies in libraries: M-Libraries: Information use on the move by Keren Mills of the Open University's Digilab project. Keren points out that at the moment phone users prefer using their phones to text with using SMS rather than to browse the web using the Internet but thinks this may change. She thinks libraries should consider:

Piloting text alerting services - giving users the opportunity to choose whether they want notifications by text message, email or both are likely to be taken up by at least
a third of library users. These alerts would include the notifications automatically
generated by the Library Management System (LMS).
• Piloting a text reference service – if the library receives a high volume of enquiries that require brief responses, such as dictionary definitions, facts or service information from the library.
• Providing a mobile OPAC interface – perhaps using a service such as AirPac or WorldCat Mobile, or working with their LMS supplier to develop a mobile version of their OPAC.
• Ensuring that the library website is accessible and will resize to smaller screens – in order to be ready for increasing numbers of netbook users and mobile internet users in the next few years.
• Providing audio tours of the library - to help visitors or new users orient themselves and learn more about the service.
• Allowing mobile phone use in the library - as long as they are set to silent or to flight mode (meaning they are not receiving a signal).
Text messages are a good idea, and all librarians especially cataloguers would love to be able to walk around with their LMS in their hand, (it would save all those trips carrying journals to and from shelves and we would see different scenery for a change if we could catalogue from anywhere in the library) but why would the user want this?
I definitely agree that library web pages should be able to be resized and I've an idea that it helps if they are written in XML too.

Mobile technonolgy, ipads and penfriends.

2010-06-28T05:52:00.001-07:00

I have just been reading the 2010 Summer issue of Mobile Learning News published by MoleNET which investigates Mobile Learning.

According to MoleNET, the hottest release that everyone seems to be talking about is the Apple ipad, a sort of mix between a laptop and a phone, which uses a touch-screen interface and an operating system that phone users will be familiar with: iPhone OS. I see they cost about £429 each.

One article explains how a lot of cutting edge mobile technology has developed from disability solutions technology. One example is the Penfriend, a device like a pen that creates microdot identified labels that can link to audio files. You can stick a label on something and record what you want to say about it using a microphone on the penfriend. Then any time the label is scanned using the same penfriend device (which has an oid reader on the opposite end to the microphone,) it will play back the audiofile. This could be useful for making audio labels for displays, or so that students could each record written reports relating to particular objects. Each penfriend apparently costs £65 and is available from the RNIB shop

Mobile technology is one of the things we are investigating at work for our 23 things programme: more to follow on mobile technology, thing 11 and thing 12 next post!

The 'Big Conversation' in Cambridge

2010-06-22T15:11:00.000-07:00

Nine librarians from the Cambridge area took place in a discussion about CILIP's 'Big Conversation' on the future of CILIP and of Libraries this evening in the garden at the CB2 cafe in Norfolk Street.Five were from the Medical Library, one from Arch and Anth, one school Librarian and , a librarian from St. John's college and a database information worker from a chemical research company so it was an excellent mix.
An artist's impression of issues and reactions follows:

Do Librarians have to be Futurists? Yes. No.
Why did the CILIP survey ask such closed questions? The survey was huge and cumbersome and it was nearly impossible to answer the loaded irrelevent questions. it should have asked "what changes have you seen over last 5 years and what do you forsee in next 3?"

Can anyone really guess more than 3 years ahead with any meaningfulness?
Why is everything at CILIP so expensive? Why are courses so expensive? Who can pay more than £60 for a course? (recent East of England event at Swaffham was wonderful and cheap) Are any of us going to stay in/join CILIP? Yes: we do want a professional organisation who can be an advocate for the profession.

CILIP's buildings are an albatross around their necks- they should ditch the building and get out of London and make everything affordable. The courses seem to be aimed at making money rather than at helping [impoverished] members. The branches are good, many of us are isolated and it is a breath of fresh air to meet other professionals, chartership events are good too but expensive and the central organisation is beaurocratic and the publications expensive and irrelevent. It costs a fortune to put an add in the Gazette: nobody can afford to do so and so few jobs are advertised there. An online only would serve needs and save money to produce. No need for a Gazette, Update only suffices.

Why won't the central organisation let branches and groups use email to keep in touch with users? -users are sometimes unaware that events are happening. The CILIP website is badly organised- the only way you can find anything on chartership is to trawl through the ten stages of chartership pages in linear order. Even those with rights have problems accessing the ejournals. The library is good but seemingly 'only of use to the few retired folk who mostly run CILIP'.

The recent failure to put anyone up for Newsnight [Question time?] was a farce: surely there should be a professionally trained press advocate and/or someone of the stature of Michel Rosen or Andrew Motion to hand as an advocate for such occasions and unpaid figureheads [i.e. the President] could still be trained and appear. Andrew Motion's dismissive MLA throw away line on Libraries in some past speech still remembered with bitterness. Phil Bradley was right in his twitter: CILIP should be more daring and should know things before he does. We should make more of a fuss about good new libraries: CILIP should Market libraries to outside world not just in the Update to Librarians.

Should librarians change their name to 'resource managers' and should CILIP be called the 'Institute of Resource management?' No. people know the word 'Libraries'.Why do librarians have such an old fashioned image? Empolyers don't realise that courses include management and website management elements. They prefer to advertise for 'information specialists' etc.

Will there still be physical libraries in 2013? yes. The database worker would be important because it was no use having lots of information on the Internet unless it had useful metadata: libraries could thus reach people remotely and librarians could work far away from their users but on the other hand the Reader Services librarian would also always be needed on hand because you need to train each user in a one to one relationship to show them how to meet their personal information skills needs. Libby Tilley's tweets on value of Face to Face contact were much appreciated.

Responses to ACRL Futures Thinking for Academic Librarians: Would researchers become more specialised or more generalist? Would enhanced reality (e.g.where all books were created with metadata) spread? Will everyone walk around with handheld devices looking things up all day?

How far will special collections be digitised? [not much: items which have lasted for 1,000 years will last a few more, increased publicity leads to increased visits,] but visits from schools to be encouraged to develope town/gown relationships and improve University relations and uptake. Security issues vs use issues for special collections.

School librarianship isolating, opportunities for skills teaching but sometimes staffing priorities of teachers and librarians conflict. Need for a suite of computers in each classroom? Predict that all pupils will have a laptop. Information on Internet mostly less than fifteen years old and free content only unless you pay, few recent quality books until copyright issues dealt with.

Arch and Anth Library: no Bliss classification for this subject so Librarians have to spend much time devising classification: in future librarians will need to be subject specialists in their area before becoming librarians.

Will Medical Librarians need to be doctors? no but need to know vocabulary and not be afraid to ask to find out more.

The Semantic web will probably never be good enough to use without significant human interpreters to help people but Google has raised very high expectations. True semantic web effects need intensive input of metadata. Recent survey showed that users expect surprising things from librarians e.g. they wanted them to help find publishers, help with copyright issues and provide training in writing metadata.

A good time was had by all and we were all most impressed with Niamh for bringing the meeting about.

Answer to Library Cake question

2010-06-22T04:27:00.000-07:00

Answer to Library cake question
Sources

MLA
http://www.mla.gov.uk/about/corporate/~/media/Files/pdf/2010/corporate/MLA%20Final%20accts%2008-09.ashx
MLA total income £76,066,000

The MLA spent £4,418,000 on staff (see p.22) ie 0.5% of total spending

DCMS

UK government spending

DCMS spend £120,000,000 a year on libraries

Public Libraries

There are CIPFA statistics but you have to pay for them.

The old LISU Public Libraries materials fund and budget survey seem to have been discontinued: the last ones available are for 2007-9

159 of 208 public libraries responded (i.e. 74%)

Table 2 p.4 Total library spending for 2007-9 £882,092,000 (Figure 1: Works out at about £15-25 per capita)

Total UK expenditure on books 2007/8 75,965,000
Audiovisual 21,628,000

The old LISU Public Libraries materials fund and budget survey seem to have been discontinued:

The British Library
http://www.bl.uk/aboutus/stratpolprog/increasingvalue/measuring.pdf

£83m public funding p.a.
Each year the British Library generates value
around 4.4 times the level of its public funding

NHS

(2004-5)

217 out of 222 NHS hospitals covering 348 libraries

Table 2.1 p.4 Total expenditure 29,568,884

Total spent on staff 17,380,308
Total staff 1029.6 of whom 48% were professional
Total professional staff average cost per staff £20,749

Academic

LISU Library Statistics 2005
see also

Table 3.2 number of libraries p.125 170 institutions 851 libraries

Institutional expenditure Table 3.3 p128 500 million on Libraries 1257.5 on academic services, 16618 on all institutional spending
Sconul Annual Library statistics cost £80 hard copy

School Libraries

I am informed by the Schools Libraries Association that there are no up to date statistics on budgets for School Libraries although CILIP Schools Libraries group have done a survey due out at the end of June 2010

Prison Libraries
The Prison Library Association hold no up to date statistics on Prison Libraries [22/10/2010]

Conclusions

- Check out the websites and see if you agree with how these organisations are spending their money.
- Would it be possible to abolish the MLA and give the money it costs/spends straight to libraries? Do the MLA and DCMS duplicate eachother's roles to some extent? I must investigate their functions.

- Why, in an age of Open Government, are up to date statistics not freely available online any more?LISU ones were so handy and clear. Why should the public have to pay twice for statistics?
I would be very pleased to get some response to these questions as blog comments please.

The Library cake

2010-06-21T17:24:00.000-07:00

There has been much talk of cake in our library. For The Big Conversation I decided to investigate Library funding in the UK. Here is a chart: can you guess which sector gets which share of the Library cake?

It was worryingly hard to find accurate statistics to compare so it is only a rough approximation but you can judge whether or not you think it is a fair allocation of funds, but you can look here for the answers.
ps Academic Libraries seems to have got chopped off.

CILIP Conversation on Net Vibes

2010-06-21T09:56:00.000-07:00

The first thing I note about the CILIP Big Conversation is that after some discussion somebody has kindly gathered many different strands so they can be accessed in one place on Netvibes. This is my first experience of this resource, no doubt a THING to be encountered later in our training at work. Indeed, no sooner had I practiced using THING 11 Google Docs, when Niemh introduced me to a real live species of that very THING (see picture). Now...excuse me, must read more about the Conversation. It occurs to me that I had better do a lot of homework indeed to be able to enter meaningfully into the eight points raised in Niemh's version of the Big Conversation before tomorrow!

CILIP's Big Conversation

2010-06-21T09:43:00.001-07:00

My Colleague Niemh has invited several co-workers to take part in CILIP's Big Conversation, a forum to discuss the future of the Library and Information profession and CILIP. I have studiously avoided this so far, since there never seems to be anything new in what librarians discuss and I find it far more fruitful to look to the outside world for news that will affect the profession. However I can see that it is a valuable goal so I am prepared to wade through the literature and arguments for a bit.
The first thing I noticed was a link to this article: DCMS announce the suspension of the Libraries Modernisation Programme. The program had been intended to include free internet access in all libraries and to promote library membership as an entitlement from birth. It also included extending the Public Lending Right to non-print format books, estimated at £300,000 – this has been suspended and will be considered as part of spending review in the Autumn.
If I had had an inkling that the DCMS ever intended to spend any money modernising Libraries I'm sure I would have found this news deeply distressing.

Web design tips

2010-06-21T04:35:00.001-07:00

I was pleased to read these six web redesign tips from the Eduserve newsletter. Often it's easy to forget such basic concepts, and they advocate having a regular site audit routine using these criteria.
There is also a case study on how Hammersmith and Fulham redesigned their website, which looks very impressive.

Google docs revisited

2010-06-21T01:51:00.000-07:00

AS part of our 23 things training at work we had to create a new item in Google docs and email it to someone. I found I already had lots of documents loaded up from last time I experimented (usually I use Skydocs these days because I want to be able to export the items as Word.) I wrote a short piece on the , London Magazine (the first thing that popped into my head.)
When you've finished writing and save it you are offered a 'share' option, and I duly emailed my learned tutor on the subject, but then noticed I had not allowed her editing writes. I found it hard to edit rights, control of rights in google docs is different from the way it works in Skydrive. In Google docs you change the rights to each document as you email people, so you have to go to 'share' in a document. Skydrive allows different rights by folder. I guess you can add people to a whole account in Google Docs. Anyway, nuff said. Google Docs is definitely the way forward, and if I could overcome my Word fetish I would use it all the time.

JG Ballard archive acquired for nation

2010-06-15T09:30:00.000-07:00

I was interested to watch this video which shows how Ballard's original manuscript for 'Empire of the Sun'. I have to confess I have not read the book but the Spielberg film is one of my top ten.

NHS MyLibrary links

2010-06-15T05:56:00.000-07:00

Thing 9 of our 23 things course was actually quite exciting and new to me. The NHS MyLibrary site seems to be rather like an iGoogle page for health workers. You can add your own links (I experimented by adding a link to Thinkingdisabilities a site that I built last year for a friend.
I experimented by deleting the link for the Department of Health to see if there was an easy way to put it back once you'd deleted it (there wasn't.) I had to look it up on the web and add it again as a new link. Now it looks as good as new. It wasn't as hard work as all that! Now my mentor will breathe a great sigh of relief to see that I am completely up to date on THINGS. But who will win the prized cake this week???? I shall aspire to write an astoundingly interesting post next week and throw myself into the contest whole-heartedly.

Browser based bookmarks

2010-06-15T05:49:00.000-07:00

Thing 8 on our 23 things course is a browser based bookmarks. I was as suprised as my readers will be when I looked to see what browser based bookmarks I had attached to my browser at some stage over the past three years (when? I ask myself.)
The attached photograph will chronicle my choices for eternity, and save me from ever having to ponder the enigma again.

Follow that book!

2010-06-15T05:40:00.000-07:00

As if 23 things weren't enough excitement for one millenia, we are interspersing this course in our library with another entitled "Follow That!" The course that goes under this witty subriquet consists of following the progress of an errant book, reader or periodical as they work out their own salvation amongst the throes of busy library life. We started off several weeks ago with "Follow that book" in which one colleague explained how a book was ordered, I explained how it was catalogued, and a third member of staff explained how it was processed. Of course there were horses for courses- half the fun is remembering what sort of process you have to inflict on what sort of book.
My gracious teacher will be pleased to learn that I found the process very interesting and was astounded at the complicated processes involved in ordering and processing the payment for a book, which was not far removed from brain surgery as far as I could make out. I ended the day extremely pleased that I did not have to grapple with the innards of the CIPFA or Acquisitions systems. I enjoyed explaining my work to my colleagues. An educational time was had by all.

Browser based RSS feeds

2010-06-15T05:33:00.000-07:00

Task 5 of our our 23 things course at work is to show that you know what a browser based rss reader is. I never use a browser based RSS feeder because they are only specific to one machine and I prefer to use my igoogle reader which follows me everywhere (not like an obedient puppy- no puppys would be silly enough to follow me) like my cat who wants some food (usually at 4.00am). But for the delight and edification of my gracious teacher I will dutifully upload a picture of a browser-based rss feed. I hope she finds the sight warming to the heart.

Frustrated and bemused by blogger

2010-06-15T02:02:00.000-07:00

Isn't it annoying when you think you know everything and then discover you don't know half as much as you thought you did. Here I have been happily blogging away for several years now and after the '23 things' course I realised that there were lots of new and exciting gadgets that you can add to your blogger page that I had not got around to investigating. Moreover navigating around and working out how to add them seemed to be quite hard. New design templates seemed to get in the way and you couldn't do anything else until you told them to go away, even though, confusingly, it looked as though you could do things. (My vocabulary is getting less and less technical by the moment as my temper rises.) Then I realised that my colleague Emma had a lovely blog which displayed all the people she was following, which my blog did not. Looking on the internet to see how you can find how to do this I see that Blogger officially tell you there is no such gadget, which is very annoying indeed. Moreover I discovered that my reading list (which appears in my dashboard and nowhere else) is managed by Google FriendsConnect (what is this? Oh it is all so, so confusing.......) p.s. 14.26 Emma explained to me how she did it. The gadget Blog list does actually add things automatically from your reader once you add one it adds the rest. HOORAY THANK YOU EMMA! Also I forgot to mention I changed the template to this nice sky blue.

Survey software

2010-06-14T02:43:00.000-07:00

I have tried using Survey Monkey and CILIP kindly used their own software to write a CILIP survey when surveyed Londoners some time ago, but now I learn that Cambridge University subscribe to the software for the Bristol Online Survey tool. Cambridge also use vtsurvey

News just in: apparently Limesurvey is a good site too and gives you the option of emailing a link to users so that each person can only respond once.

Librarians do Gaga

2010-06-13T00:42:00.000-07:00

This Lady Gaga style video from Washington University librarians is a breath of fresh air

Delicious : searching URL's and exploring tags

2010-06-07T02:33:00.000-07:00

As part of our Library's '23 Things' staff training course I had to trawl up access to the Delicious account that I set up about five years ago. Some things you try and they stick and others you try and instantly forget about. I'm afraid Delicious was not one of those things that stuck, but it is interesting to see the things I tagged then: my husband's blog (now long expired: blogs were obviously one of those things that did not stick for him,) and various keen looking (but quite boring) librarian sites. It seems I never used Delicious to search for articles on Dionysius Lardner, my personal non work related research area, which is much more exciting.

I used "exploring tags" to see who else had linked to Lardner: several people but their articles were most often about Ring Lardner, author of Mash (it is always a delight to trip over the excellent Ring, or the American journalist Richard Lardner whenever I am searching for Dionysius.) I was confused by not being able to link two words "Dionysius" and "lardner" : the software handled these as separate links. I expect there are ways to do this.

It was easier just to put "Dionysius Lardner" in the general search box and that brought up one user who had linked to his Wikipedia biog: he could be a useful contact I expect.

I discovered you could also look up a URL and see who else had linked to this so I looked to see if any Delicious users had linked to my Lardner site but sadly no. I checked to see if anyone had linked to this blog and I was glad to see that one user called Hugh has a link (hello Hugh!) I looked to see what else Hugh was interested in and could see he liked Wordle and other things. I conclude this could be useful for finding collaborators and following their links. I saw that an impressive 93 users had linked to my friend, Internet guru Andrew Odlyzko's site. when I looked at the tag names that people had invented for the link most of them were totally useless to anyone else: they included "research" "data" and "technology" which make me realise the advantages of using authorised language for subject classification.

I tried bookmarking a site myself. I chose my own Lardner site of course, http://annaarmstrongmartin.books.officelive.com/default.aspx. and tagged it 'Lardner'.

I filled in my profile info so that people could see who I am if they want to contact me about Lardner (or anything else.)(I go by the catchy handle of AnnaMartin if anyone wants to look me up on Delicious.)

When working on my book I do organise links to many sites but I use Zotero because I have Zotero open all the time anyway so that I can reference citations. I don't think you can share links with other Zotero users the way you can with Delicious and Mendeley so from that point of view Delicious is quite good. I am not that interested in networking anyway: I have my address on various internet sites and people can contact me there if they want to collaborate, similarly I just contact specialists if I am interested in their articles: it is not hard to find collaborators.

Queen's Speech mentions Health Bill

2010-05-25T05:52:00.000-07:00

The result of the elections in Britain surprised most of those who had thought of several neat scenarios of what would happen to Libraries in the event of any of the party manifestos being put into practice. Now that we have a co-alition government it is difficult to know what will be around the corner, but the Queen's speech mentioned that a Health Bill will be part of the coming parliamentary programme.
The health bill will "seek to give health professionals and patients more say over NHS decision-making. Will cut health service quangos and some central targets and increase focus on "health inequalities". more details.

Free Self publishing program Lulu

2010-05-18T02:54:00.000-07:00

Today I catalogued a book that had been published with the self publishing software Lulu. The book was called "MRCPsyc CASC Notes" by Arpan Dutta and Nishan M. Bhandary. In this particular example the book had no pictures but the quality was otherwise quite impressive for a self published book and had an ISBN. You can usually tell self published books though because authors do not realise the need to leave blank sheets for library stickers at the beginning and seldom put a proper title page with details of the publishers' address. This is particularly important if readers want to buy another copy of the book: they will not know where to buy one from.

Google Blog search

2010-05-17T03:40:00.000-07:00

This post is one of my contributions to the "23 Things" program that some Cambridge Librarians are following: we at the Medical Library have our own version as shown. One of the tasks involves going to Google and clicking on "more" and searching Blogs. Whilst trying this I found the interesting blog site "Cambridge Student" that concerned Cambridge University Students.

British Elections (continued)

2010-05-03T16:03:00.000-07:00

Like all good citizens I have taken the trouble to watch the leaders debates on the Internet. As an Internet junkie I watched it online.

The Labour party offer "Legally binding guarantees for patients including the
right to cancer test results within one week of referral,
and a maximum 18 weeks’ wait for treatment or the
offer of going private." They mention Mental health but their only solution is to pay for 8,000 new therapists and guarantee psychological therapy for all who need it: a controversial approach to an area where drugs and medical staff have a better proven record of success than psychological therapists.

The Conservative manifesto section "Back the NHS" p,45 guarantees "We will increase health spending every year" (Gordon Brown in the first debate similarly implied that he would not cut spending in the area of Health.)They promise to "allow welfare to work providers and employers to purchase the service of Mental health organisations" p.49 (are the employers being prohibited from purchasing their services currently? This seems unlikely.)They too promise to improve access to "talking therapies." Despite what the BMJ implied, the Conservative manifesto makes no mention of improving patient information, so I am greatly relieved that I will not feel under any moral pressure to vote Conservative after all (although I shall be sorry if patients are to be less well informed.)

The Liberal Democrats mantras seems to be change, fairness and being specific about spending. Their three page section p.41 "protecting and improving our NHS" promises to cut the Department of Health by half, abolish quangos and freeze managers pay "so that none are paid more than the Prime Minister," (a very modest salary I'm sure.)They want to improve patient choice and give more decision making power to front line staff. They claim that the Labour plans to increase National Insurance would impose a hidden strain on the NHS.

Both Labour and the Lib-Dems propose methods to support carers.They all make it sound as if the NHS will be in very safe hands in their tender care.

British Elections

2010-05-03T05:11:00.000-07:00

The elections in Britain will take place on Thursday 6th May. A health librarian might consider several factors in deciding which party to support (leaving personalities aside of course!)
With the economic recession money will be very tight and Bank of England Governor Mervyn King has said that whichever party wins the elections will have to make so many unpopular austerity cuts that they will be unelectable for a generation following their term.
Nigel Hawkes in the BMJ of 24th April examines the manifestos of the parties to see what they promise for health.
Cancer:Labour and the Conservatives have promised improvements for cancer patients but the Lib-Dem's have not mentioned cancer.
Cuts: Labour will cut the IT system and the Conservatives will cut administration costs and cap pay. The Lib dem's will halve the size of the Department of Health and cut spending on health quangos and cap executive pay.
Reorganisation: Labour will make every hospital a foundation trust with the right to expand into primary and community care and patients will have the right to choose to be treated by any provider who meets NHS standards. The Lib Dem's want to abolish SHA's and establish elected health boards.
Conservatives will set up an independent NHS board with local authorities being allocated funds targeted at areas where improvements are needed.

Information; The Conservatives want to replace targets with greater patient information Other factors: Conservatives would spend £10,000,000 a year on children's hospices and improve funding for palliative care.See BMJ 2010; 340:c2058

CILIP have issued a Library and Information manifesto
CILIP says the government must:

1. Make school libraries statutory
2. Promote and protect the rights of users within copyright law
3. Build a successful knowledge economy
4. Preserve the UK's digital cultural heritage
5. Fund and enable the effective co-ordination of health information
6. Develop a set of library entitlements for public library users

Their website does not yet show any comments from the parties but I do remember reading that some parties had responded.
A few of my own thoughts in response: it seems bizarre to read that it is an aspiration of a socialist government that has been in power for two terms that "no worker earns more than 20 times the lowest paid." Is a ratio of 20:1 supposed to represent equality or restraint? Also I am rather shocked that the only party to mention improvements in health information (a main point of the Darzi report) seems to be the Conservatives according to the BMJ. Does this mean I will vote for them? I ask myself rhetorically.

Making buttons for websites

2010-04-09T04:02:00.000-07:00

Gimp is a free program that allows you to create graphic designs. I decided it was time I learned how to use it to make nice shiny buttons. There are many video tutorials on the subject (you can't beat a good video tutorial I think, since when people write instructions they often assume knowledge or explain something incorrectly but if you can watch people doing things you can see exactly what they are up to.) Many tutorials on Youtube are more sophisticated but I found a very simple one for beginners by Youtube user Nanotech223 which allowed me to produce this button (exhibit A.) It is good to know how to do these things because it is always best if you can produce your own graphics exactly how you want them.