Not so easy come...

The following post is dredged up from February when, for some reason I forget, I forgot to publish it online. As you will see, this is the second time I've dredged it up. Let us hope for York's libraries that it again proves third time lucky...

Yesterday, for the second time in my life, I moved out of York. In spite of all its tedious flatness and tourist jam, York is very dear to me, and it is always sad to be leaving. 

A month ago Francis Maude gave York council some money to farm off their library services. I don't know where they are with these plans, or what will come of them (this site offers some background), but I do know that one must deal wisely with pawnbrokers. 

What follows is a post dredged up from the "abandoned" bag. It's a brief account of the struggle to create York's public library, and is cribbed heavily from a chapter in The Noble City of York (ed. Alberic Stacpoole, 1972). I present it now merely as a reminder not to casually destroy the hard efforts of others...

In 1850, the Public Libraries Act scraped into existence. Boroughs with a population in excess of 10,000 would be able to fund the building and staffing of a library for a halfpenny on the rates. This was extended to 1d in 1855 to include the costs of stock. Not everybody was keen on the public library idea, and this post takes a look at the struggle to create a public library in York. 

The York Herald were one of the leading campaigners for a library. Of the existing libraries in the city, it was the Herald's view that: 

• The Minster Library, Yorkshire Museum Library, and Subscription Libraries catered only for a small minority.
• The Railway Library was limited to company employees.
• The circulating libraries' stock was substandard and of "doubtful utility", with rates in considerable excess of the financial burden of a public library service.

But it wasn't until the 1880s that broader opinion began to shift, momentum being developed via a series of public addresses on the topic. In 1882 a poll was held to determine the appetite for a public library and the rates increase its creation would demand. 3,045 voted for a public library, 4,309 voted against. In a city that charged tolls on its bridges, many felt that a rate increase might be put to more practical use in the abolition of such charges. 

Five years later, the council saw the Queen's Jubilee as an opportunity to create a commemorative public library. It calculated that £12,000 would suffice for a library and gallery: £5,000 from public subscription, the rest from sale of other holdings and from loan. Another poll was held, and again the proposal was defeated (by a margin of 817 votes). 

It was central legislation that forced the matter, assisted by the acquisition of an existing library building. The Technical Instruction Act of 1889 would apparently only benefit councils that had a school board or public library. A new campaign was launched, and the York Institute offered their library building for £4,100. Another poll was held, and it was third time lucky by a majority of 2,961. The library was taken on in 1891 and formally opened in 1893 with a staff of Librarian (£170pa), Assistant Librarian (£70pa) and two boys (on 5s and 6s pw).

Forty years of campaigning, and the library was still only brought into being as a means to an end rather than as an end in itself. Things so often come into this world kicking and screaming and we must ensure they do not more gently slip away from us. The effort expended in creating our public library system may need to be matched if we are to prevent its demise.

Yesterday there were reports of job cuts. It's a long way short of problems elsewhere in the country, for now at any rate, but doubtless a call to vigilance.

Calling out the Fire Engines

Recently I acquired a Kindle Fire. Despite its name, a Kindle Fire is not an ebook reader (or a flint book). Rather it is a tablet device. Its operating system is a rebadged Android. It is the second time I've played with an Android tablet, and I have found both experiences somewhat bothersome. Part of this bother is, of course, the suspicion of the new, but there's something more fundamental at work, and this post is going to be me trying to put my finger on a trend in personal computing that I find genuinely concerning. 

I am of the Domesday Disc Generation: my childhood idols were Maggie Philbin and Fred Harris, and there was a home-computer in our home since I was three. I accept that my generation is not like other generations: those before us for whom computers were a confusing novelty, and those after us who have never typed "GOTO 10" with a sense of anarchic delight. We are special. We grew up with the computer. We played silly games together in our childhood, amazed by the simplest things. In our teens we got all surly and it all became about speed and whizzy graphics and sex and violence. Then we went to university together and got the internet and fell in love with its anarchic global community where all things were held in common, programs were shareware, and content was self-made. And now... now we're in our thirties and all the hippies are working in the banking sector...

(Any excuse to use this photo again)

The first thing that happens when you turn on your Kindle Fire is that it asks you for your name and credit card details. No messing about... it's straight in there with it. You don't have to tell it these things but it is very quiet regarding the alternatives. It's not the most welcoming of introductions. We'll leave the form-filling for now and get to the meat.

There's a handy email client (though you'll need to give Amazon some personal details before you're allowed to set it up), and a built in browser called Silk. Silk is an integral part of the machinery in much the same way that Microsoft would have Internet Explorer be an integral part of Windows. Microsoft keep getting fined for doing this sort of anti-competitive practice, but that's a PC and this is just a tablet. It's lower technology.

It is, too. I had presumed that tablets would be laptops without keyboards, and perhaps the iPad is (I don't know; I've never used one). But this is not a netbook with a broken spine; it's a large mobile 'phone without telephony. This is an important detail, because it means that the Kindle Fire lacks considerable functionality. Browsing the internet is browsing with blinkers on: we see it through mobile eyes. Even in "experimental mode" (effectively browsing by proxy) we are hamstrung by the odd missing bit or bob. 

Don't get me wrong, though. Having a slightly sawn-off internet on a mobile 'phone is amazing, it really is. I'm not knocking it at all. And having the same on a piece of technology the size of a thin paperback is also pretty nifty. I readily confess that the ability to pull out a little piece of internet less than a quarter of an inch thick is bloody brilliant and we are living in the future. But realistically, a bit thicker and you could have a netbook with proper laptop-level functionality, and a bit smaller you could have a mobile 'phone (which is also a 'phone, and which takes up less room in your bag). In that regard, a tablet seems a bit... compromised.

But I don't really have a problem with that, and there will be plenty of people who will find such a device brilliant. The problem is not that it is a glorified mobile 'phone.

Or rather, it is, but in a different way. In the 2G days, when mobile 'phones were telephones with a bit of very ropey internet sew on, 'phone companies (very much corporate entities) sought to capitalise on our bored commutes by offering applications for download, usually in the form of games and usually for a small fee. And because these were alien technologies on bespoke operating systems, and because we didn't have the right USB adaptors (or the inclination) to try hooking up to our PCs in search of online communities of hobbyists making things for fun, and because, also, the fees for these downloadable entertainments paled in comparison to our other network charges, and because we were bored and on the bus, we stumped up a quid for Pacman and amused ourselves.

This model developed, chiefly at the hands of Apple, a company with a cultishly insular approach to its product-range. Now people were buying gizmos for their 'phone as a matter of course. Some apps were works of genius, and very handy tools to have on a mobile device. Others were the sort of tat that's been available as freeware on Tucows for years.

While, as somebody from Yorkshire, I am saddened at this seemingly growing commercialisation of the app market, there are still free apps, and the shareware market was always well-populated by trialware and crippleware programs as an inducement for you to part with your pennies. I don't mind the odd app costing money, providing there is an open market and alternatives for tight people. My problem is that the market is not really open.

Apple take a particularly restrictive approach to app distribution, with users being forced to use the Apple app store unless they jailbreak their machine. Kindle (like Google before it), is not so evil. While Kindle emphatically steers its users towards the Amazon app store (use of which requires your name and address as part of an Amazon account), there are alternatives. This is perhaps as well, for the Amazon app store is not exactly bulging with goodies (though it is by no means bare).

Kindle Fire is a rebadged Android

I said before that Kindle Fire is a rebadged Android. This means that any app made for Android will likely work on a Kindle Fire too. Great! There's loads of apps that have been made for Android! Download all teh apps!

Unfortunately, the Android app store, Google Play, will only allow you to download something if you have a properly badged Android. The Kindle Fire cannot retrieve these goodies. This is somewhat frustrating.

There are other app stores, though it can be tricky to tell other app stores from dodgy app stores, especially when one doesn't have tooltips and right-click functions at ones disposal to help navigate the net. There's also the possibility that the app's creator hosts a copy for direct download. However, this is alarmingly rare, particularly with big corporate manufacturers. In the interests of storage-space, bandwidth and convenience, most app creators seem content to leave distribution to the central app store. If you're barred from that store, as the Kindle is from Google, you're cut off in an alarming way. Welcome to the cloud.

The app store curator will say that a directly accessible, centralized app store is not an instrument of anti-competitive practice so much as a tool of convenience and a means of ensuring security. The truth is that the centralized app store is all three. For a conventional Android user, with a well stocked warehouse and competing outlets, it's hard to find too much to moan about. But the Kindle Fire demonstrates the shortcomings of trusting in one central repository. Manufacturers of Android apps could also submit to Amazon, of course, and this would solve a good deal of the problem. Likewise, Google Play could raise some of its restrictions. While I have deeper misgivings about relying upon what are effectively geared up to be corporate monopolies, in the case of the Kindle Fire there are more pressing troubles.

Which brings us to ebooks.

There's a menu item called "Books". But it's only a book if you got it from Amazon. If you got it from somewhere else you'll have to find it in "Docs". And you won't necessarily find it in "Docs" either because that's your documents folder and not your downloads folder. To get to any downloads you've made you'll need to use the directory browser in Open Office. 

This presupposes that your Kindle let you download the book in the first place. It is loathe to do such things. For something that capitalizes on its ebook-reading abilities, it doesn't half put up a fight.

The reason I acquired this Kindle Fire was so that I could test the availability of my university's ebook provision. Out of ten different ebook providers we use, Kindle DRM foibles or provider site restrictions mean that half will not permit texts to be downloaded and read on the Kindle Fire via the Silk browser. Using the third-party Opera Mobile browser rather than Silk, one can access texts from two more, bringing coverage to a slightly more respectable 7/10, but Opera Mobile is not available in the Amazon app store (I found my copy via a back-door link posted by an Opera techy on their help forum) so that option isn't really an option for our students. To make matters worse, the five problematic providers include the three we rely upon for most of our titles. So any student who thought a Kindle Fire might be a useful investment for their studies is in for a bit of a frustrating time if they're hoping to fill it with ebook texts.

Oh... and one of the ones that doesn't work does work if you download a third-party PDF reader, but then that reader takes over your file associations and goes on to block some of the other providers, so that's not much help. Another provider is due to launch a Kindle app soon, my response to which is a cry of frustration.

I'm a bit worried about the whole app thing to be honest. For a start I see a lot of apps as a way of selling people something they already have. Why, for instance, would you use a Twitter app on a Kindle Fire when you can access Twitter (or even Tweetdeck) through your web-browser. The cynic in me sees it as an effort to fool paying customers into mistaking what constitutes online content and inadvertently racking up connection charges. That's not to say that some apps aren't genuinely useful programs that by far enhance anything you can do through a browser. But most aren't. When faced with the whole app shop thing, and things like the annoyance that is Windows 8 out of the box, my eye starts to get a bit twitchy. There is undoubtedly something useful about the app as bookmark, or the app as a simplified tool for a mobile device, but we must be alert to the fact that a simplification, while easier to use, may well be a less functional and more restrictive experience. We must be especially careful that we do not standardize the wrong way. The most alarming thing about Windows 8 is the loss of functionality, but that's a story for another time.

For all these problems, there's no denying that the Kindle Fire is quite a nifty little thing. I do love the way you can type by sliding your finger across they keyboard rather than hitting each letter in turn (probably a technology many of you are familiar with from other devices, but new to me), and as someone with a 2nd generation 'phone, it's nice to have a handbaggable device I can hook up to a pub's wi-fi. But if I want an ereader, I'd rather it have an Etch-a-Sketch screen and less restrictions on what I'm allowed to read or call a book (Kobo or Sony seem likely candidates) and if I want a baggable internet device I think I'd just go with a 3G mobile 'phone or (with a bigger bag) a laptop. That, as I say, is just a consequence of my personal needs. The restrictive nature of DRM and app culture are far more concerning, and represent the real turn-offs for me. For those reasons alone I would not recommend the Kindle Fire. In the evil stakes these are minor misdemeanours but better to put our foot down now before things get out of hand, eh?

Introducing SHELFRUNNER from the Laboratoire Saint Evelin

Do you suffer from problem book-bunching?

          Does the use of space in your library keep you awake at night? 

                    Are you concerned that your stock relocation isn't going to fit in the space you've allocated?

Well worry no more!

SHELFRUNNER is Saint Evelin's sensational new shelving plan generator. Simply enter in the details of your collection, and in an instant SHELFRUNNER will convert it into an attractive colour-coded shelving layout that will enliven any library, learning centre, information commons or personal study. 

Try it TODAY!

SHELFRUNNER is made from only the highest-grade, ethically sourced formulae, and comes with 1,000 ready-to-fill bays of virtual shelving absolutely FREE! Also included are 10 pre-programmed collections, with space for up to 100!

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(right click and save as)

How to use SHELFRUNNER:

Simply pop in your variables on the Dashboard, then add the details of your collections into the Collections page.  SHELFRUNNER can support up to 100 consecutive collections, but remember to expand columns C-L if you add more than 10.

On the Floorplan tab, just drag and drop the shelving bays to match your own library layout. 1,000 bays are provided for your entertainment. It's important to arrange your bays in the correct order if you want your library to function well (the spare bay in AA2 follows on from the bay in P2).

Use conditional formatting to choose the colours you want to use to represent your collections. For best results, select everything in the sheet before editing the formatting rules.

If you're lucky enough to have a total collection that is smaller than your shelving area, you can expand your books across all your bays using the Yes/No toggle on the Dashboard. If you're unlucky enough to have more books than space, the "Collection Size" indicator will turn red to warn you of a need to weed!

So what are you waiting for? Start creating your sensational shelving plan TODAY!

NOTE: Your library may be at risk if you do not put the right number in the "Average number of books per shelf" box. Saint Evelin is not available in the shops. Terms and semesters apply. We cannot accept liability for any mistrakesd or mis^pri_nts.

Library Camp Sheffield, 2nd February 2013

Profuse apologies, all. It's been quite a while since my last post, and also since the subject of this one. I've been busy settling into a new home, and working on some other bits and bobs, including, appropriately, a fantasy alternate Sheffield inwhich long-lost planning proposals were enacted: noodling with questions like how one might marry 1924's planned viaduct across the Sheaf valley with the cliff-straddling multi-storey monument of the Owen Building...

 

My rather simplistic solution.

It was in this very building (somewhat further down the cliffside, beneath the perforation of the non-existent bridge) that Library Camp Sheffield was convened on the 2nd of February this year. Naturally, I leapt at the opportunity to attend a Library Camp in my native city and hosted by an organization that employed me for seven rather pleasant years. [Ooh, I just saw my first bee of 2013 buzzing around the blossom in the tree outside; thought you'd like to know]. Here, over two months after the fact, owing to the aforetyped distractions, is my report of the day, tarnished as ever with my own opinions:

Session 1: Library School

[Note: Fantasy Sheffield library students will be pleased to learn that Portobello has survived unscathed, with Jessops (all three wings still erect) gaining a new park of my own devising] 

The first session I attended was an opportunity to vent the frustrations of library school. Is it just a hoop through which we pass en route to a rather expensive but helpful piece of paper, or should we actually be learning something in the process of what is an expensive and stressful period?

Those who had passed through the hoop (myself included) felt we didn't get all that much learning out of  the experience. Exceptional modules were Management and Cat/Class (the latter infuriatingly not treated with any seriousness during my own MA at Sheffield). 

Graduate Traineeships have been of far more benefit to those who have taken them. Unquestionably they provide real and valuable librarian-y experience: a requirement in the current job climate. At the time I left library school I had seven years' experience as an assistant, but none as a librarian proper, and so it was that those of my fellow coursemates who had done Grad Traineeships were getting jobs for which my experience was deemed inadmissibly lowly (cue furious scrabbling for work-shadowing opportunities on my part to make up the largely indifferent difference). Clearly, then, there is an essential need for the library school graduate to have relevant in-job experience of being a librarian (the old Catch-22) that could be catered for by the library school but which isn't. Even alliances with institutional libraries seem non-existent. If a library school is there to equip us for the profession it is failing in a crucial regard. If only we were offered placements as part of our learning...

There is a problem with that model. Voluntary work undermines our profession (back to the old Catch-22), and if every library student had a few months embedded into a library the reality would likely be one of job-losses in the very sector we're seeking to enter: if we're doing a job as part of our studies, it won't be there for us as part of our career. It needn't be this way, but in practice it almost-certainly would be.

There are other ways of delivering practical content within a course, of course. But here we reach something of a crux: the university is trying to provide an academic, not a vocational course, hence its academic bias. Clearly, though, such academic training, while addressing the institutional purpose, fails to address the needs of the student. Any change in this regard lies at CILIP's door. It's their accreditation that terraforms the library school landscape. If their degrees are to remain meaningful in an increasingly experience-demanding and competitive sector (and in a world where degrees become a second mortgage hanging around our financial necks), they need to pander to that sector. Otherwise that first item on the job spec will find itself slipping away down the Desirable column. There are already fine examples of Grad Trainees attaining a job sans-MA and distance-learning in the job. In a future of higher and higher student fees there is also a real chance that these bits of paper will price themselves irrelevant: not so much an investment as an imprudence. Money is a big big issue, and the student-as-customer model skews demand, changes expectations, and has the potential to induce genuine bitterness into the equation.

Where are the courses going right? Beyond the vacuum of experience there is some good to be had (for those lucky enough to be taught it! - not all courses are equal): stuff about rights, legality and photocopiers; group work and presentations (an essential ticked off in most applications these days); the pleasure of finding a dissertation topic that really interests you... And then there's the stuff that comes as a bonus: the student experience: getting stuck in, mixing with a wide range of people, forming a peer-group that will live with you as you collectively progress through your respective careers... It is these friends, and the time I spent (and occasionally continue to spend) in their company that I believe were the greatest outcome of my four-figure investment/imprudence. We look to our peers for help and reassurance as we take our first steps into the real world...

Session 2: Academic Libraries and Public Engagement

Academic libraries are teeming with wonderful stuff. I'm not an active member of any public library because I work in an academic library which caters pretty satisfactorily for my every whim. Some members of the public have also come to realise what wonders we hold, and this session was about how we engage with them. Should we charge fees for external borrowers? Should we seek to join up with other libraries to create a huge pool of public/academic resources?

Many academic libraries offer walk-in access for members of the public, offering resources beyond the capacity of the public library system: we don't have it, but they do over the road... This may be met by surprise: "am I allowed?" Thankfully the historical approach of the higher education system in this country has been one of social improvement for all. In such an atmosphere, cooperation between the two sectors has been good, to the point that joint ventures have been created, such as The Hive and the Hull History Centre. Sharing is good. 

Two complications have arisen in recent years. Firstly the development of the 24 hour university library: a central, easily securable hub where students can pull an academic all-nighter. 24 hour access raises questions of safety and security. All-night opening of university buildings is nothing new, and tramps have been finding their ways into student bathtubs since the dawn of academia, but now there's the added temptation of all that fabulous library stock. Security of the stock, and of the students themselves, ultimately demands secure access (usually in the form of a swipe-card). And while measures may be retained to allow external users during working hours, the barriers create an architecture of exclusion. Faced with no obvious means of entry, the potential visitor may wander off unenlightened.

The bigger umbrella in the spokes is the £9k problem. This stuff is no-longer paid for by the state. It's the result of a private subscription that will take a working lifetime to recoup. This new state of affairs gives the student no incentive to share. Without tuition fees it is conceivable that academic libraries would be working together with public libraries, creating online information literacy guidance, offering info skills sessions to the populace, generally widening participation and reaching out to the community. Now there's a paywall mentality emerging.

Perhaps we worry too much. The number of external readers is small. There isn't that much demand as things stand. In part that may because the public don't realise we're available to them, but it's not every member of the public who has an interest in academic materials. Dismantle the public library system, though, and things might change. How would we feel if more members of the public started knocking on our door?

Things have changed a great deal since Mark Firth opened his college that he might better educate his steelworkers or have decent doctors to tend to their injuries. The philanthropic spirit was always partially born of self-interest, but none-the-less incorporated a greater social duty. The university was an arm of the state: education for the benefit of all. Now universities are being forced to think of themselves as businesses rather than philanthropic exercises. They scout the world for lucrative markets, and one of these days one will completely relocate to Dubai. We need to take a long hard look at ourselves and sort out what we need to be; what our role is in society. Because while on the one hand we're being forced down a commercial road populated by pot-committed students keen to see the benefit of their destitution, on the other hand we're being encouraged towards open access: tax-payer funded research should be free for any tax payer to view. Both are Tory notions at heart, but the latter potentially offers the philanthropically minded of us a potential exit strategy: an excuse to pursue social engagement. And even the £9k problem can be turned to our advantage if we lay thick the alumni benefits: library rights in perpetuity: exciting perks and all the books you can eat! All part of the investment: a way to keep in touch with your subject and community of interest.

The academic library has finite stock and finite space. Any external demands upon its contents are to the potential detriment of the students. But even if we're to think in business-minded terms, the value of outreach as a means to connect with potential customers is immense, and academia's most immediate shop-window is its goodie-filled library. Come and have a free ride! Get them through the doors and all that...

The original design for Sheffield Hallam University's Adsetts Centre,

just across the road from the Central Library and my beneficent gaze.

Session 3: Research Data Management

The academic library's key resources are, traditionally, books and journal articles: research outcomes neatly parcelled up for our consumption. But behind every exciting research publication is a great mess of raw data, and, as anyone who's played with raw data will know, raw data can be used to tell us far more than half a dozen pages of A4. A bag of coloured balls yielding results for one study may also have uses for another, avoiding unnecessary duplication of effort and resources. And now we have the internet it seems silly not to propagate the stuff online for anyone else who might want a dip.

Should academic libraries be doing this? Well we are, after all, the resource hub of the whole university: the font of information from which the students and their lecturers draw. This is the library with its repository hat on. Some universities might have more appropriate sections for the job, but where we're hosting their articles and theses, why not host the spreadsheets, databases and tallytables too? If you're managing the output, why not also the input?

There are certain reasons why academics might not want such data made available, from selfishness, messiness or a fear of showing their working, to ethical considerations such as anonymization and confidentiality. But in those cases where such protectiveness were overcome (generally via a funding council mandate more than a realisation of the altmetric), and hurdles regarding old data and retroactive permissions were successfully leapt, there exists material which we might as well house.

The first problem is that we're not used to it. Our bookish librarian brains are not designed to parse raw data. We raise our tweed skirts and flee, shrieking (as quietly as we can -- this is a library). Citation searching is one thing, research data quite another. And we have enough troubles housing the output text, juggling different formats like .doc(x), .xml, .pdf. While some standardization in research data exists, we know what our academics are like; we've seen their desks. There's a Pandora's box sitting on it under a pile of unmarked essays, eight clock-cold mugs of gelatinous coffee and a Bakewell tart that's growing legs. But nonetheless, the dataset is a resource, and librarians manage resources. It's what we do. It's who we are. We live to manage resources, and drink stale coffee and eat evolved Bakewells. We have the power deep in our buns. Repositories should be everything... everything associated with the project.

We're being offered a new role: another string to attach to our rather fetching bow. I know what some of you are thinking: some of you are thinking "my bow already has far too many strings: it is impossible to fire an arrow without it getting tangled in them; it's more harp than bow now". There may be others wandering around, curating a Souness 'tache as they wander up Bernard Hill in search of something to do, but by and large we keep ourselves pretty busy. And isn't there a flaw in the "We hold the books; why don't we hold the stuff that goes in the books?" mentality? Isn't it the archive that holds the manuscripts, not us? There's another consideration... the idea of looking at the raw data is nothing new: previously if I wanted to find out more about the background of a study, I'd just ring up its author.

But all of this may be us trying to invent an axle for a wheel in the age of the hovercraft. While the current publishing model orbits the .pdf, it is hardly the steaming ramblings of a vox-futurologist section on Nationwide to imagine a hypertextual means of research publication whereby the research data is an embedded component of the published article. As the last print journals are sent to the remote store in the sky, it seems an inevitable development of online provision. Research data management as we're currently wittering about may be a very shortlived fad indeed.

Session 4: Open Access

So yes, the .pdf is just the stop-gap at the door of a brave new world of enriched, all-singing, all-dancing online research. Bibliometrics are sent to the dressing-up box with the cap and gown. Arise the altmetric; hail the citation score; email Paul Erdos to collaborate on a paper; set fire the Strand. There is a drive towards openness and openness is what libraries do best, especially academic libraries with their 24-hour policies and their walk-in access. With the latter we really already have open access, just not online from the comfort of our bedrooms, although publishers may get us to sign rights agreements restricting access rights. Publishers... they're sods aren't they? They create problems and we keep giving them money. We keep giving them money because academics still want to see their name in print in the pages of the best journals; because bibliometrics are not yet dead to them; because getting a lecturer to put something into a repository is contrary to stereotype. 

Not that it is necessarily a good idea to let the publishers go to the wall... they may theoretically be surplus to requirements, but bureaucracy keeps people in work at least. Many people, myself included, have written about the potential roles the publishers can play in the future of research distribution (not least peer-review and content management). Life would be so much easier were they just a little bit less sharp in their practices. But that's desperation for you, and the lesson of the music industry has not made it beyond pre-print. 

Quite what will happen with OA is constantly shifting tea-leaves, but in the long short-term, strapped cash will encourage the transition from cachet to cache: the prestige titles will price themselves out of the market as universities are forced to manage their research budgets in line with OA rules. In the short long term it might all become irrelevant because talking horses will have evolved and we will be their slaves, or because technology and academia will have both shifted towards yet another distribution concept. It's hard planning for tomorrows: too many variables.

It seems to be the way with Library Camps that a theme emerges. Here it was academia and its engagement with the public. But it was also about how we can implement that engagement without really having a very clear idea as to how it might work. We're trying to steer the tanker of academic publishing while simultaneously anticipating its potential transformation into a giant robot. On one side swims the Scylla with its many heads bearing the contrasting ideological motivations for a wholesale release of state-funded research materials. At the other, charybdian publishers pull us from an ideal course. All the while, merjournals fill our crew of academics with beguiling songs. And perhaps we're not even full of high-demand oil. Perhaps we've got a hold full of mini-discs or something. It's all a bit of a mess.

But messes have their benefits. Because while our tanker may be hard to steer, at least we're on the bridge and having a go at the steering. There are opportunities here to capture important ground, to further our own ideologies, to maximise our audience and propagate knowledge even further than in the past. If we're concerned that universities may become increasingly protective of that knowledge, now's the time to scupper such coracles; cast our tentacles into the wider society while we still can. And we need to cast them now, before the concrete of the agenda sets. The best way of getting our own way is to act first and set the agenda in a way that suits us: let's take control of open access and research data management; let's revolutionise the distribution of knowledge and research; let's reach out to the public and re-engage with the wider community (historically part of many a university's remit). 

The trouble is that it's difficult. Things are messy. The rules are in flux. The red tape is stuck in the machine. But as a basic concept; as an idea to be working with and to try to push whenever one gets the chance, we might as well have a go at taking a positive lead on this stuff while we still can.

This final session was hosted by your humble Saint; my first attempt at leading such a discussion. In hindsight I should perhaps have prepared a little better, or at least picked a subject people knew about. As it was we all sat in a circle and looked blankly at each other, wondering what this Open Access thing is and how we might be expected to deal with it. Part of the problem was that it was the last session of the day, another part was that we'd kind of discussed all the fun bits in the RDM session previously, a third was that we had an informative session on OA at the national Library Camp and so perhaps people had had their fill there. Still, I'm painting a bleaker picture than is due, and modesty prevents me from asserting too much protest on the matter lest I come over all Gertie. My thanks go to all of those who attended and helped it through the stilt and silence.

Thanks also to the organizers of another excellent Library Camp. We ended up in the Sheffield Tap, but spread over two groups so I didn't get to chat with everyone. I shall make amends for this come the next such event. I look forward to it.

[Interested in going to the next national Library Camp? Express your interest here.]

Stop all the clocks...

Inspired in part by this post of 16 Great Library Scenes in Film, I thought I'd write a little eulogy to a televisual library that continues to occupy a dear place in my heart: a library from a TV series that lasted seven amazing seasons; inwhich a stately English gentleman, ably assisted by a pair of friends, battles against the clock, searching the books for information that will advise the actions of a charismatic blonde-haired young woman of extraordinary athletic ability. I expect you know precisely what I'm talking about. Maybe you have taken some inspiration from it yourself. Perhaps you've even penned some fan-fiction. Here, then, is the library in question:

Xander, Willow, Giles and Cordelia ponder their map of Sunnydale:

"We think you need to fly to the Hellmouth, Buffy!"

It's not a big library: just five bays of four shelves when at the height of its powers. There's a Britannica, a pot pourri of dictionaries, and a few other choice reference books. And there's an awful lot of National Trust guidebooks, so there's no excuse if our heroine gets lost while exploring a castle. 

Giles pours over another ancient tome.

The stock may not be very thrilling, but its curator is able to make the most of it. Every great library needs its great librarian, and we have ours: a well-read and intelligent gent who can offer many an answer without necessary recourse to his collection. And it is as well he is there: even the simplest reference task can be difficult for some characters, and many's the time our heroine has been sent the wrong way by shoddy research, only for the librarian to come to the rescue with the real solution. 

Giles and Buffy in a pose from the library page of the Sunnydale High prospectus.

This is a programme in which library research plays an essential and central role. The answer lies somewhere on the shelves. Our heroine may have to do battle against any number of foes, but her means to victory is guided from the stacks. For all our other distractions, the library is the real heroine of the piece. Without it we wouldn't have a clue...

Twenty-six minutes left (one for each rugby player on the pitch).

Kingston Calypso

Acolytes, I've been neglecting you of late, and for that I must apologise. January has been a month of dashing about from one place to the next, and variously sorting out the next phase of my life. There are a few details left to settle, but I am pleased to announce that the next phase of my life begins in Hull on Monday when I don the mantle of Assistant Librarian at one of the three Great Universities. Understandably I am greatly chuffed at this turn of events. It will be my second professional job since I graduated this time last year, and its arrival was nicely timed, for which I am very thankful. I hope it will give me plenty of 'blog-fodder in the coming months. In the meantime, here's a picture of a K8 I stole from Google Maps:

 They still have them in the wild there. 

The Library Camp 2012 Memory Test

A couple of months ago I started a thrilling write-up of my experience at this year's Library Camp in Birmingham. But before I could finish it and stick it online, the demands of job applications got in the way, and so it was that it remained festering and unloved somewhere deep within the cloud. Today, quite a hopelessly long time after the fact, I complete my write-up, far after my memory of the day went stale. Let us hope my notes proved up to the job...

"I've sent the boys out to fetch more gin"

Twelve months ago [and the rest, now; ed.] something strange happened in Birmingham: quite unexpectedly, an event with the name "Library Camp" turned out to be really amazingly good. The library scene changed overnight, awoken by this Lesser Free Trade Hall style epiphany. Nothing would ever be the same again.

The event inspired numerous mini-camps across the land, and I have attended two of them. You may recall my accounts of derring do in Manchester and Leeds. All this wonder meant that the second national Library Camp would have a great deal to live up to.

What are Libraries really for?

@antlerboy of public sector consultancy firm Red Quadrant led this opening session and was met with a somewhat frosty reception. Consultants are viewed with suspicion at the best of times; when those consultants are linked to high-profile library closures the wariness is all the more extreme. Anyway, his perspective seems a profoundly Blairite "third-way" approach to public/private partnerships. Private finance has given us many libraries old and new, and philanthropy is always welcome, but PFI experiments in schools and hospitals may give us reason to express some caution. The New Labour thought-process was all too quick to leap to snap-conclusions about the role of the public sector based on private-sector metrics (not least the pound sign). As our consultant seemed to acknowledge, the effectiveness of a library is not so readily quantifiable and we should be wary of being measured by somebody else's stick. He seemed genuinely keen to discover a new metric by which libraries might demonstrate their worth. One might argue that these positions appear tautologous: that bowing to metrics of any kind is to dance to the accountant's tune. That is not to say that effectiveness should not be gauged: I type as an empiricist. But, the role of the public sector is broadly to mop up where the accountant has failed to see an economically compelling reason to get out the Flash, so to run the public sector along private lines is to destroy its fundamental purpose. As @liz_jolly was on hand to point out, there is therefore a need for the library to be a public institution run in the public interest, and perhaps the private sector might be asked to learn from the public sector now and again rather than the other way around.  


Whether it was simply the involvement of Red Quadrant, a more general feeling that a debate about public library provision had ended up on the rocky shores of economics, or a greater anxiety over the future in a world where the rot has long-since got out of hand, this opening session seemed to create a rather bitter atmosphere. Dark feelings churned. Doom reared its head and we didn't have the ammo to give it a proper gibbing. So it was that some of us turned to the hash...


#uklibchat LIVE at Library Camp

I could write about this session, but there's a Storify archive of it as part of #uklibchat's own post on the matter. The subject of the chat was "careers", so needless to say it didn't exactly lighten the mood any, but such is our profession at the moment...

Classification

@AnnaLGriffi led this somewhat cheerier session on the usefulness of classification. Who is class for? Does it just help us to put the books in a findable location or do our patrons actually make use of classification sequences? Perhaps the best classification is that which goes un-noticed: the user finds their book without even thinking about decimal numbers. As a Dewey-eyed sort, I rather value the uniformity of such a standard. Indeed, for all its shortcomings and inconsistencies, no-one would sensibly suggest a new class system given the dominance of Dewey and its Library of Congress alternative. Such would be the domain of the eccentric. Standards are useful (as anyone who's had need to borrow a mobile phone charger will know) and we tamper with them at our peril.  But classification is no pure science: associations are opinions rather than natural laws (does the creationist file her books under the 200s or the 500s?). Locations are not universally fixed, and some collections will need more decimals than others. Sub-collections will require us to rethink our approach (the specialist will necessarily abandon the generic classifications for a more appropriate system, as many a medical library will demonstrate; a spine full of numbers obfuscates the title, and the point of class is to make finding things easier, not harder) at the cost of standardization.

In a small library (a few shelves or so), we may classify by author. But classifying by author is not very helpful as a system of reference. When my sink starts backing up, the name of the editor of that book on DIY plumbing does not spring instantly to mind. Unless, of course, I had thought to catalogue my books by subject. In the drawer "P", on the index-card for "Plumbing" I find, in neat copperplate hand, the instruction "See under 'Buildings'". Alas, there are more subjects in the world than there are index cards in my collection, and by now the bottom shelves are getting a little water-damaged. To save us pouring through a thesaurus whenever we want to find something, the system is inverted: if we arrange the shelves by subject, we can create a spectrum of easily navigable interests; if we want a book by someone with the same surname as us, we we might find it in a catalogue drawer.  In the days before the difference engine, any secondary classification would require its own set of cards and so it was that we limited ourselves to a small number of dimensions, e.g. Author x Subject.

But now we have computers, we needn't be so limited. And indeed we aren't. An OPAC can potentially give us anything for which MARC's had the foresight to think up a field. Such is the power of the catalogue (and by extension the power of the cataloguer). We suddenly have a wealth of catalogue drawers upon which to pull. The order of the shelves becomes almost arbitrary. Indeed we could simply shelve by accession number if the catalogue were up to the job (save the benefit of the fact that a book mis-shelved within a subject range is, by virtue of residual relevance, marginally less lost than a book mis-shelved in an effectively random collection). As technology and data transmission speeds improve, the prospect of browsable virtual shelving, reorderable at the click of a button to whatever field we like, becomes real and enticing (and like all such advanced catalogue tools, will probably be woefully under-used if implemented). But the most relevant and useful order for the physical shelves (at least whilever they're the domain of humans rather than machines) would still seem to be by subject, be it to the tune of Dewey, Congress, or our own bespoke notions of how the world is best organized.

Books can still be lost or deliberately mis-filed in such a system, of course (perhaps the most useful use for RFID is finding such strays). Students have long since taken advantage of the haystack to hide their favourite books from their colleagues. Mis-filed numbers can stand out surprisingly well (no points for spotting the alien on this shelf: 300, 300, 300, 300, 300, 300, 725, 300, 300, 300, 300, 300, 300), which helps us in the war against such selfish gits. Except for the really clever ones. The ones who will go out and buy a Brother label-printer in order to forge convincing false spine labels. The ones who will go on to be librarians...

Knitting

I'll adapt the pattern to add a second arm-hole.

I took a break at this point to work on some knitting. Knitting is a fundamental component of librarianship, as I learnt at the first Library Camp. I'm currently trying to knit this. It's looking a bit like a string vest.

LGBTQ Library Workers and Customers

Another decade, another letter added to the acronym. At some point in my life I've corresponded to all five of them, which is quite an impressive feat really (though all it really means is that I'm B and T). @davidclover led the session, and an interesting one it was too. From a staff perspective, we considered the lack of any obvious professional network (there was an email list once, apparently, but it never really got going), but the majority of the session considered our engagement with library users. From a local history perspective there is a need to gather a historical record before generations of us die off; a need, therefore, to encourage an open dialogue with people who may never have been very forthcoming on the topic in the past. On the book front there is the matter of the "Gay Fiction" collection: Should it be obvious and prominent (a trumpeting of our right-on liberal ethos; normalisation by exhibition) or will that just put people off using it (not everyone is so out and proud)? Should the collection be hidden? Brown paper bag; top shelf; dark room? That would be rather discouraging to everyone involved, and a bit of a pain in the bum. Should it be integrated within the main collection? Here's where my personal sympathy lies. Factual materials have their place in the wider classification and I've never been a fan of sub-dividing fiction too heavily. And yet sub-division of this kind is unquestionably of use: if I want to read a western, I can lay my hand on one quite quickly if there's a westerns category; likewise if I want a (straight) romance. Is it not helpful, therefore, to have a gay section too?

Again, we're back to Classification. Again, the OPAC and digital collections offer virtual solutions to such problems. But not every library offers a catalogue terminal, and maybe we want to be in and out without too much hassle. Such, then, are the pros and cons of the LGBT section. Does it normalize or abnormalize this literature? Does it include or exclude? Did we answer these questions? Do we ever answer questions at Library Camp? Is that what it's for?

Open Access

By this point I was flagging, I must confess. It had been a long day, and the cake was starting to wear off. Since this session I've read an awful lot on the subject of Open Access, and I intend to do a full post on the issue soon. I will therefore outline the key notes I scribbled:

expectations [book] [switch] [open access lock] HIGHLIGHT REPOSITORIES!! [graph of escalating journal prices] feed the ego [branches] money / reputation ["Journal of Cool Academics" with "£1m" price-tag] [more branches] author pays [abstract doodles, including a sperm] PHYSICS-ARQIV [increasingly confused doodles] nesli [picture of the Milkybar Kid] I am starting to fall asleep - copac / sconul - lack of awareness of current open systems.

As I say, I will flesh these notes and doodles out a little more in a future post. For now, take note of the difficult balances we will have to strike between kudos and cost as we negotiate our way along the double-dipping gold path.

Cake

I made some parkin for Library Camp and it seems to have gone down well. Here's what went into it:

8oz oats, 4oz self-raising, 4oz soft brown sugar, 4oz syrup/treacle, 2oz butter; milk, egg, ginger, baking powder

1) Sift flour, baking powder & ground ginger, and mix in oats and sugar
2) Melt butter, syrup (or syrup & treacle to taste) & milk (a slosh of about 6 tbspns) and allow to cool
3) Beat egg and add everything together, beating well
4) Put into greased 9" tin at 160°C / mk3 until it rises a bit and comes in from edge. Cut, tin, and leave for a couple of days.
5) Enjoy...

And so to the pub... A livelier end to a subdued sort of day. Perhaps it couldn't live up to the highs of last year or the sunny park in Horsforth. Perhaps there's a sense that we LibCamp veterans have talked all there is to talk on the subjects that interest us, and should perhaps now be concentrating on the doing rather than the nattering about doing. Perhaps we were all just feeling doomed. One could easily exaggerate the extent to which the spark was not as sparky as on previous occasions. I think the simple truth is that after so many cosy mini-camps, the scale of a big national event was just a bit overwhelming, and some of us didn't adjust back to this as well as others. The sombreness has been overplayed. It was not the revelatory excitement of last year, nor the joyful cuddliness of the mini-camps, but it was a useful and welcome event in which librarians met, sororized and learnt from each other. And that remains a very good thing indeed. I hope to see you at the next one!