Tom Roper's Weblog

The CMS Inquiry into Library Closures

The Commons  Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee has published the written evidence submitted to its Inquiry into Library Closures, over 600 pages. Tomorrow the first oral evidence is heard, with Voices for the Library's Abigail Barker appearing before the committee, along with Miranda McKearney of The Reading Agency, Andrew Coburn of The Library Campaign and Sue Charteris, author of the Charteris Report [MSWord file].

The Committee proved they were no government poodles in their pursuit of  Rupert Murdoch and the phone-hackers; I hope they will call Ed Vaizey to account with equal vigour. I cannot claim to have read the evidence in full in the short time it has been available, but, on the basis of a speed read, it is astonishing how few of the respondents embrace the government line. Apart from a few councils with positions to defend, a smattering of consultants with income to protect, and the Local Government Association, the tone of the responses, from individuals, campaign groups, and professional and trade associations. is unanimously for public libraries, publicly funded, free at the point of use, offering the full range of services a 21st century service should, to every citizen.

National Libraries Day, tireless campaigning around the country, the efforts of Unison, CILIP, Voices for the Library and many others,  have brought us to this point. What next?

Friday, #libday8: the answer is Huddersfield

The day started with a phone call from a senior manager. He'd seen the Guardian report about higher mortality rates for people admitted to hospitals at weekends and wanted to see the original article. Easy! We have a subscription to the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine:

N Freemantle, M Richardson, J Wood, D Ray, S Khosla, D Shahian, WR Roche, I Stephens, B Keogh, and D Pagano
Weekend hospitalization and additional risk of death: An analysis of inpatient data
J R Soc Med jrsm.2012.120009; published ahead of print 2 February 2012, doi:10.1258/jrsm.2012.120009

See also Margaret McCartney's commentary on this: http://www.margaretmccartney.com/blog/?p=1307

As for the rest of the day:

• I ran some searches, in the course of which I came across something I feel I must keep secret, at least from the Burra Memsahib, the UCLA Hoarding Severity Scale–she'l'l have me tested before you can say knife.
• I ran some searches about the costs of wound care in the community
• I came across an online learning module on doctors and social networking:http://www.healthinfomatters.com/elearning/onlineprofessionalism/4c1.html
• I answered a question about the Brighton LibTeachMeet
• I helped with an urgent document supply request
• I ran a search on errors in paediatric prescribing

As the afternoon wore one, there was a gradual exodus of staff till, for the final hour, there were just two of us. In that last hour, news came in that our service has won commendations in two classes of the Sally Hernando awards. I can claim no credit for this, it was all work done long before I arrived. To round the day off, I answered a question on lis-medical about the link between library use and academic achievement: the answer was, as it always is, Huddersfield.

 

Wednesday and Thursday of #libday8: An uncommon case of hypersexual behaviour with frotteurism

Much of both these days has been taken up with the aftermath of the meeting I mentioned in Tuesday's post. As I didn't realise I had to take the minutes, I travelled light (the last time I took a laptop to one of these meetings, you would think I had brought a flask of the plague bacillus, Yersinia pestis). So most of Wednesday was spent trying to reconstruct the meeting from my notes, a test of my memory and palaeographic skills. I also instructed a psychiatrist in the mysteries of e-journals. It's dangerous, demonstrating things to psychiatrists: one never knows where the search will lead. The worst we found was an article entitled An uncommon case of hypersexual behaviour with frotteurism. It could be the life story of many of my fellow librarians.

And so to Thursday. I have a weakness for jobs where there's good food easily to hand. Here I have the postgraduate centre dining room. The chief moment of excitement was when they promised us cake in the afternoon. The chocolate and cherry cake we were promised was kidnapped en route; instead we had some lemon cake, which was just as lovely. Again I spent the morning writing up some terms of reference, reconstructing them from three different versions. I wrote a couple of posts for the blog, http://primarycareknowledge.wordpress.com/. In the afternoon, in between bouts of cake, I ran some searches. I think I should not share the subjects, but they were an interesting mixture of mainstream clinical ones, and the more nebulous management new.

Tuesday of #libday8: marketing with coffee, cats and Radio 3

I worked from home this morning, the best sort of work: good coffee, cats and Radio 3. I used it to run some searches, and arrange a visit to a team leaders' meeting later in the year, where I'll tell them about my services and find out what their concerns are.

In the afternoon I went to a meeting of the newly formed Marketing and Communications group for the region. By ill-luck, I found I was the minute-taker. It was a good meeting, though. A few weeks before, we had had a study day on marketing lead by Terry Kendrick, and we tried to take the ideas from the day forward. I am writing a marketing plan for my post.

Monday of libday8: cake decides everything

I was shadowed today by a colleague newly appointed to an outreach post in a neighbouring service. So we started off by presenting at an induction event for new staff at the community trust, with a colleague from another service, as, depending on their location, employees of this trust can use any one of three library and knowledge services. These take place in a marketplace format and not all of the inductees came to talk to us, some preferring to sit playing with their phones. However the interactions we had with those we spoke to were useful, including discussions with two non-executive directors. Then we went to one of my base hospitals for lunch, and a conversation with another colleague over a plate of chicken and mushroom casserole and cake, the latter a staple food for the peripatetic librarian. Then on to a meeting with one of the clinical facilitators, for a very rich discussion with someone who wants my support for a project she's working on. I came away with lots of ideas, and a lot of work to do. Returning to base, I dropped my shadow off and looked at e-mail. I have to collate some statistics from the three services to make a case to a new organisation. It needs more work. Then home for chili (Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's pinto bean version) and University Challenge.

In tomorrow's thrilling instalment, I will work from home and go to a marketing group.

Prolegomena to #libday8

Tomorrow #libday8 starts, a week long festival of the variety of modern librarianship. Started by Bobbi Newman, who blogs at  Librarian by Day, librarians from all over the world, and from every sector of the profession, describe a week in their working lives, for the amusement of the profession generally, and to instruct those outside in what it is that we really do. It may serve as encouragement, or an awful warning, to young people considering a career in this great calling of ours.

I thought I would set out some background the day before, so as to be able to plunge in medias res tomorrow. Most of my #libday8 activity will be by blog post. Twitter would suit the task very well, but is blocked at both of the hospitals where I hot-desk.

I am Primary Care Librarian for West Sussex Knowledge & Libraries. I serve around 90 GP practices, and many more NHS staff working for the Sussex Community NHS Trust. I've been in post since September of last year, and at the moment my contract expires in September of this year; a little unstable, therefore, but there's a great deal of that about in the British National Health Service at the moment. For the benefit of overseas readers, to whom the twists and turns of the passage of the Health and Social Care Bill will be as obscure as the detail of Republican primaries are to me, the coalition government has embarked on highly controversial changes (called reforms by their supporters) to the National Health Service. You can track the progress of the legislation here: http://services.parliament.uk/bills/2010-11/healthandsocialcare.html. For a good summary of the dangers in the bill, and in the European Union procurement legislation, which could be used to force through privatisation, see 38 Degrees' legal analysis of the Bill.

So it's an interesting time to be working in primary care. However any of this turns out, my job is to ensure that clinical and commissioning decisions made in primary care and the community are knowledge and evidence based. I do this by searching for, digesting and presenting evidence, by offering training to individuals and groups, and by providing consultancy to project teams, for example those developing guidelines for referral from primary to secondary care.

West Sussex lies on the English Channel coast, stretching from just west of Brighton in the east, to Chichester, the county town, in the west, with a population of just under 800,000. The principal health concerns are:

• a wide gap in life expectancy between different parts of the county
• increasing numbers of people living longer with disabilities, learning difficulties, and long-term conditions
• alcohol misuse among young people, and a high level of alcohol-related hospital admissions
• some groups and areas with high smoking rates
• high obesity rates, and low levels of physical activity
• increasing numbers of children living in low-income households
• the chief causes of premature mortality are breast cancer in women, and coronary heart disease in men (as is the case nationally). However, we have a higher-than-average numbers of deaths by accidents and suicides
• above all, an ageing population, and all that brings with it (e.g. increased numbers of unpaid carers, increasing numbers of people with long-term conditions and disabilities

For the next five days, I'll describe what, if I inspect my diary, looks like being a not atypical week.

Finally, if you want to see my previous entries in Library Days in the Life, here they are:

July 2011: unemployed
January 2011: Information Specialist at NHS Evidence: Eyes and Vision
July 2010 and July 2009: Head of Learning Resources at South Thames College

The Elysian Fields

As I drove from one training session to another through the coastal suburbs of West Sussex, I was startled to come upon some new houses being built, called the Elysian Fields. I wish I had taken a photograph, for no one will believe me. The houses themselves were in that nondescript modern idiom so widespread, walls in primary colours like a child's pairing of a house, flimsy, impermanent materials, sited thoughtlessly on a busy roundabout.

Apart from the vaingloriousness of the name, do the developers suppose that people will not remember that to inhabit the Elysian Fields, you had to be dead? Or, if they were to grasp the Parisian reference, might they not make unfavourable comparisons between a dirty road on the south coast of Sussex and the avenue down which the French armed forces parade on le quatorze juillet?

The second Brighton LibTeachMeet

There's to be a second Brighton LibTeachMeet! Melanie Davies and Joseph Norwood, aka @DreamingEntity, whose presentation at the first #btnlibtm is still talked about in the Sussex cafés and bars that the intelligensia of the profession frequent, have taken over the baton. CILIP Sussex has thrown its weight behind the venture.The TeachMeet will be on the theme of outreach, marketing and promotion, on Tuesday 20 March, at 5.30 p.m.

See the blog for more details, and sign up on Eventbrite.

Master of the Tweets

We learnt English in an unusual way at my school, the Perse. In a system devised by H. Caldwell Cook before the First World War, and described in his book, the Play Way, boys were divided into companies, such as the King's Men, for productions, at first of tableaux, for example, the assassination of Julius Caesar, and then of whole scenes from Shakespeare and other Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists.

In these companies all boys had something to do. The director was the Master of the Revels. Those without Thespian skills or ambitions could be in charge of lights, or music or costumes, each being known as Master of the Lights, of the Music or of the Tiring House. I tended to be Master of the Music, searching the extensive library of 78 r.p.m records something fitting to the action on stage, and trying to drop the needle onto the spinning disk at just the right moment.

I mention all this as, for the first time since I was twelve years old, I am once more Master of something. I am delighted to say that I have been asked by the Frogmore Press, publishers of the Frogmore Papers and the online poetry magazine, Morphrog, to be the Master of the Tweets, with assistance from Rachel Playforth, aka @archelina. Do follow us: https://twitter.com/#!/FrogmorePress/ and read the blog at http://frogmore-jp.blogspot.com/

 

Ascot and Haydock

52 days to Cheltenham.
Haydock 145: Celestial Halo
Ascot 205: Violin Davis
Ascot 235: Shoreacres
Ascot 310: Al Ferof
Haydock 330: Bold Ransom
Ascot 345: Hector's Choice