Tom Roper's Weblog

Time travel with the Google generation at the British Library

Whatever is going on at the BL? I came upon a post from Stephen Arnold who has discovered through the BL's website a notice that on Friday 16th January 2009 the BL will be publishing the Google generation report, or, as it should be known,Information behaviour of the researcher of the future. In fact the report celebrates the first anniversary of its publication on Friday. See my post at the time: http://www.roper.org.uk/tr/2008/01/information-beh.html

Arnold is not very impressed, suggesting that libraries have been left behind. I'm not so pessimistic.

Lord Levy

Many things our dear British Library does puzzle its readers and the library profession, but the decision to appoint Lord Levy to the British Library Development Board must be the strangest yet. The story was in yesterday's Observer, and there is nothing yet on the BL website, though it is perhaps not the sort of news one would want widely known.

Though once Alvin Stardust's manager, Levy is chiefly famous nowadays for having helped the police with their enquiries during the cash for honours scandal of the Blair years. When my reader's ticket is due for renewal, will I be offered an OM in exchange for a donation?

Buggers, pansies and pedants

A new exhibition, The Golden Generation, British Theatre 1945-1968, on theatre censorship opened at the British Library on Wednesday, and was previewed in the Guardian on Tuesday, though, apart from a press release, is curiously absent from the BL's website, though there is a good blog. A memo from the Lord Chamberlain, who exercised censorship over the theatre until 1968, instructs his staff that ,'we will allow the word 'pansy', but not the word 'bugger'.
Though the exhibition sounds fascinating, the effect is spoilt by the failure of the BL's press officer to do basic research. Even a look at Wikipedia, never mind the numerous reference works to hand in a national library, could have told them that there is no such person as a 'retired RAF colonel', as they had Jamie Andrews, head of modern manuscripts, say. The rank of colonel is used only in the British army. Retired officers from all three services will be writing to point this out.

Managing digital lives

I filled in a survey as part of the Digital Lives project, which is trying to shed light on the under-investigated subject of how we manage personal collections of information. I look forward to seeing the results. Take the survey here: there's a draw for £200 of British Library shop vouchers. How many do you need for a dame or knighthood, I wonder?

There's a project blog too: http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/digital_lives/

St Pancras

I'm afraid I can't summon up much sympathy for Antonia Fraser and others who are complaining about undergraduates being let into the British Library reading rooms. I use the BL from time to time, but have never failed to find a seat. And some of the criticisms about frappuccinos in the reading rooms are incorrect: coffee is emphatically not allowed in the reading rooms, though anyone can use the cafés. Odd though, that the BL website makes no reference to the debate. I fear they don't understand the 21st century world

I think there is a fundamental principle here: should publicly-funded libraries exclude any citizens? It might help if applicants for readers passes were interviewed and referred elsewhere if the materials they needed to consult were easily available in public or university libraries.

Free wireless at the British Library

The British Library, thanks to the efforts of the British Library Readers Forum, is to offer free wireless for a trial period of six months, starting in October. The BL was persuaded by the Forum's arguments that a free system was actually the easiest to operate and most in line with the Library's purpose of open access for all.
See this for the bad old days: http://tomroper.typepad.com/tr/2004/09/british_library.html

PS: on Saturday the Guardian ran a profile of Heather Brooke, without whom ( and her Your Right to Know blog) none of this would have happened:

wifi

British Library in the Observer

The threat to the British Library of budget cuts after the spending review is mentioned both in a news article and a comment piece by the BL's Chief Executive, Lynne Brindley. The effect is spoiled a little by a typo in the headline of the latter piece, 'we cannot allow the British Library's peerless collection to be put at risk by potential funding [sic —I think they missed out a word–TR]'), and also by Brindley's appeal to 'UKplc' and 'competitive advantage'.  I recognise that one may have sometimes, when stating a case, to use the enemy's language; but to invoke the outdated  Thatcher- Blair concept that capitalist companies like Northern Rock are models of efficiency we all should follow seems to me to be sabotaging ones argument before one has even started.

Brindley also says that she would  'wager that everyone with an interest, however esoteric, would find something in our collections that would bowl them over'.  That's very true, but the BL is negotiating arrangements under which national collections which should be available to all will be restricted to certain classes of reader. Through the Newspapers Digitisation Project: they are digitising over two million pages from British nineteenth century national,  regional and local newspapers, but, though a resource of tremendous value to local and family historians, the digitised pages will only be available to users in higher and further education.    Someone will probably argue that, because the project has been funded by JISC, it is not unreasonable for them to restrict access to their users. But JISC, like the BL, is playing with taxpayers' money. If, as I have heard it suggested, they were to allow ordinary researchers access to the full-text for a fee, it will create two tiers of British Library reader, not a principle Panizzi would have endorsed.

Turning the pages, for Vista users only

"Turning the Pages 2.0™ runs with Internet Explorer on Windows Vista or Windows XP SP2 with .NET Framework version 3, on a broadband connection. We have detected that you do not have the necessary software. You may also need to check that your hardware meets the 'Vista Premium Ready' specification": that was the friendly error message I got when I tried to access the new version of the British Library's Turning the Pages service, which allows one to look at digital versions of some of the BL's greatest treasures.
Is this a result of the BL's cosy relationship with Microsoft, the Bl being used for the British lanch of Vista? What next? Will users with laptops that don't run Mr Gates' latest operating system be banned from the reading rooms?

English Short Title Catalogue

Hooray. The English Short Title Catalogue, which covers pre-1800 holdings from the BL and a number of other libraries, is online and free at http://estc.bl.uk/.
I ran a search for Thomas Browne's Religio Medici. Here are some screen shots (click on the thumbnails to enlarge them):

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British Library and undergraduates

In the Guardian, Lynne Brindley defends the British Library against charges that undergraduates are swamping the reading areas. The exchange sounds a little like a library suggestions book, with its interplay of reader and librarian. Tristram Hunt's central criticism is wrong: it should be the duty of the national library to be open to any citizen who cannot find what they need elsewhere, and undergraduates may well do research projects which require them to use materials only held at the BL. I know of no evidence that undergraduate library users are any worse-behaved than other type of user. Hunt claims "The studied calm of the reading room has given way to a hum of mobile phone ringtones, chit-chat and pubescent histrionics". My own visits to the BL have been disturbed by mobile phone noises from some very venerable users, who don't know how to set them to silent. And as for pubescent histrionics, that old literary journalist's standby, the article on sexual liaisons in the reading rooms, has been published and re-published for many years before wider access to the collections by undergraduates was granted. See Reading for Pleasure by Olivia Stewart-Liberty in the Spectator of 4 July 2005 for an example of the genre.
Hunt's original article is Scholarly Squeeze, there are some comments here, including a suggestion that may well do wonders for Senate House Library's statistics; and there's more in Mortarboard.
It's a good week for librarians in the Guardian: there are some wonderfully pithy and accurate comments on qualified librarians by a library assistant in Notes and Queries, which doesn't seem to have reached the web version yet. responding to a school librarian who worries about the absence of positive images of the profession (a sign of a profession in trouble, if you ask me) she says that the words "mean, sad, peculiar and petty-minded" certainly apply. She adds some more: "misanthropic, hierarchical, dictatorial, uncommunicative, unsociable, indecisive and pedantic".... "I'd add short and shuffly, but I fear I'm being personal". I too, after nearly thirty years in library staff rooms, recognise many of the traits she sees in (some) former colleagues.