Tom Roper's Weblog

Shane Godbolt on international development

Picture: Shane Godbolt, Director (l), and Emma Stanley, Senior Programmes Officer of PHI

The latest, and not, I hope, the last of CILIP in London's monthly meetings in the Sekforde Arms in Clerkenwell heard Shane Godbolt discuss what CILIP members could do to support international development.

After a genial welcome from the chair who had, he confessed, looked long upon the grape at a travel industry event earlier that day, a warning that there might not be a March meeting—check the website for details — and some publicity for an event at City of London libraries on 24 February at 11 am, where they will show off their back-room activities, he introduced Shane.

She became interested in international issues early in her career, when working at Charing Cross Hospital Medical School Library. Influenced by Lesley Morton and Fiona Mackay Picken, she was sent by the British Council to India. She was struck both by the level of deprivation in the country, but also by how much she had in common with Indian librarians. Through David Matthews, then at Aberystwyth, she made contacts in Sierra Leone, and began visiting Africa. She found both library and medical education lacking. She was involved in bringing African librarians to Britain through the Association of Commonwealth Universities fellowships.

In 1992 Michael Carmel founded Satelife, later to become PHI, Partnerships in Health Information, and Shane became Director in 2006. Though international development was low on government agendas, she felt that movements like Make Poverty History and events such as Nelson Mandela's release and the overthrow of apartheid had pushed politicians into action, such as formulating the millennium development goals. Increasingly, they had come to realise that reliable information was the basis of good health, which in turn was the key to the eradication of poverty. Controversially, if the incredulous noises around me in the audience were anything to go by, Shane suggested that Tony Blair and Gordon Brown had been helpful. The Crisp report, by the former NHS Chief Executive, was the result of a request from government for an analysis of what needed to be done.

She described partnership-based initiatives such as WHO's HINARI. She and Alison Weightman at Cardiff began to be asked to train African librarians in HINARI. Neither of them had the skills to do so, so they turned to contacts in the US and Africa, and so were able to send a lead trainer to Freetown. Shane was able to see at first hand the transforming effect of HINARI. Before, medical students had been trying to write dissertations without any access to the literature.

IFLA's Free Access to Information and Freedom of Expression (FAIFE) programme became involved, through a chance contact with Paul Sturges, to produce sound authoritative information librarians could use on AIDS. Shane also mentioned INASP, and their capacity-building work with libraries, and the Tropical Health Education Trust's information programme, based on institutional partnerships. Librarians should be involved, she said.

Health Care Information for All 2015 is another project PHI is heavily involved in, and they also work closely with CILIP, especially the International Library and Information Group and the Career Development Group.

Shane mentioned the shattering effect of the civil war in Sierra Leone on library services.

A typical day in her life might consist of emails form Kenya, Sierra Leone and Ethiopia, two meetings at THET and a Skype conversation with the AHILA President, calling from Nigeria

She urged us to get involved, and suggested some of us might want to attend the next AHILA conference.

In questions and answers, I asked if they were working with non-English speaking countries in Africa. The answer was no, though AHILA organises the whole continent. Someone else asked about method of communication; Shane replied that one to one e-mail works, though services such as Gmail, Yahoo and Hotmail tend to work better than institutional accounts; Skype and texting are also useful.

She also mentioned a new report from the ACU on issues for African universities by Jonathan Harle.

There were also questions about the HINARI training, and CDS/ISIS, developed by Alan Hopkinson at Middlesex University some are now using open source products like Evergreen

Further reading

Crisp, Nigel
Global Health Partnerships: The UK contribution to health in developing countries

Harle, Jonathan
Digital resources for research: a review of access and use in African universities
ACU, 2009

Can we achieve health information for all by 2015?
Godlee F, Pakenham-Walsh N, Ncayiyana D, Cohen B, Packer A.
Lancet. 2004 Jul 17-23;364(9430):295-300.

Interest declared: I worked for Shane, long ago, as Senior Internet Project Officer in the NHS's North Thames Regional Library Development Unit. That was when the Internet was a project.

Shane described this part of London as Dickensian. So it is, for when she and I worked together we were a little way away, in Millman Street at the British Postgraduate Medical Federation, a stone's throw from Dickens House in Doughty Street. I loved the atmosphere of this part of London, the just[position of the professions of medicine, law and journalism. In Shane's experience many of her projects have been built on chance encounters, and on personal contacts. That's how I remember the Unit offices. Barely a week went by without an international visitor from somewhere, in a bewildering whirl of projects and partnerships, all held together and made sense of by Shane's PA, the splendid Susan Fairlamb. That brief period was one of the most interesting periods of my career.

North doesn't matter

I have always walked in London, for reasons of poverty and speed when I first arrived, but also, perhaps more pretentiously, because I liked to think of myself as a Baudelairean flâneur. Though I no longer live in the capital, I still find it the most interesting and efficient way of getting around, in most cases, and I  feel an affinity with Iain Sinclair and Will Self as I walk from Tooting to Wandsworth, or around the centre of the city.

So I walked, of course, to the Sekforde Arms to attend CILIP in London's first meeting of 2010, on Legible London: A Wayfinding System for London. The speaker, Tim Fendley, of the Applied Information Group surprised us all by using a projector, something the faded grandeur of the upstairs room at the Sekforde Arms was not quite ready for, but he resourcefully improvised a screen from sheets of flip-chart paper.

The room was packed, though it was cold and snowy and the meeting came in the traditionally slow early part of January, and attracted a much broader spread of participants than usual. Stephen Cook introduced Tim, telling us that Ralph Adam, CILIP in London's usual master of ceremonies, having got lost on the way. He may have been joking.

Tim is Creative Director of the Applied Information Group and an information designer by profession; he asked if there were any others in the audience and one owned up. Tim has been an orienteer since childhood and is one of those at home with the symbolism of maps, but he said that most people can't read a conventional map. He showed us examples of the many imprecise ways people use to navigate around the capital, using the A-Z, asking for directions, which are difficult to give and to receive, or using simple trial and error. Not only do the millions of visitors to London need to find their way around, Londoners themselves may be unfamiliar with areas other than their normal places of work, leisure and home.

The Legible London project began in 2003 as an initial study working with the central London boroughs and business fora, aiming not just to improve signs, but to offer far better guidance for walkers. The project was to run a prototype, a measurable trial to prove the concept. They set about developing a taxonomy of walkers, but when they had discovered sixty different types and were still counting they gave up, and instead measured walking activity along two axes, the walkers' knowledge of the area and their speed, defined on a continuum from strolling to striding. Thus there can be knowledgeable striders, ignorant striders, knowledgeable strollers, ignorant strollers, and all point in between.

One of their key principles was that the system should be seamless, but information about places is controlled by many different organisations, and standards are not universally observed. Try finding a street number on a shop in Oxford Street. Even in the small space of the old congestion charge area Tim and his team found thirty-two different sign systems for pedestrians, including maps, diagrams and signs. Distances may be measured in walking time to a destination, or in metric or imperial units of length. There may be multiple signs showing the way to what is ostensibly the same place, but which send the walker in different directions, for example King's Cross. Yet all these signs conform to guidelines and are, in their own terms, accurate. In the picture Tim showed of signs to King's Cross, four organisations, each with its own system, had added a sign.

Signs can also be defaced, or can be inaccurately labelled with spelling mistakes. Street name plates in particular are a mess. Although there is a standard agreed by the London boroughs which stipulates, among other things, that there should be one on every street corner, it is a rule more honoured in the breach than the observance. The height of signs can vary, signs on road surfaces for cyclists and skateboarders can be inconsistent and confusing and direction indicators for exits can point in ambiguous or contradictory ways. Tim concluded this section with a picture of a plethora of signs at a splendidly anarchic Irish road junction.

The problem, he continued, is one of finding the right balance between information overload and information scarcity. In their work 44.5% of the people they spoke to used the tube map to navigate above ground! London is a confused environment, with few long views. One of the reasons why Oxford Street is a successful shopping street is precisely because it is long and straight. We do not have the grid pattern of New York, or Paris's long wide boulevards, designed, I was told in my youth, by Hausmann so as to ensure a clear line of fire for artillery when suppressing the future revolts that the Parisian bourgeoisie feared after they drowned the Commune of 1871 in blood.

Apart from the health benefits of encouraging more people to walk, many tube journeys in the central area would be faster on foot. Not only this, but many central London stations, Oxford Circus for example, are frequently over capacity, and rather than costly underground building projects, better way-finding above ground could help congestion. Transport for London;s journey planner gives journey times between stations but ignores the time it takes on stairs, in lifts or on escalators to reach the platform or the surface .

Tim told us that in China, Japan and Korea, where building numbers are allocated, if at all, chronologically, people will use mobiles to guide visitors or their taxi drivers to their destination. They studied a Korean student living in London: she used the underground for very short journeys, believing it to be safe and practical. There are many other such curious perceptions. Many think that Westminster Bridge, since it crosses the river, must run north-south, but in fact it runs east-west. We navigate by shops, by nodes or by visible landmarks such as the London Eye.

Drawing on neuroscience, he reminded us of the studies showing that black cab drivers have an enlarged hippocampus†. We are apparently good at perceiving structures, but poor at understanding angles, bends and distances

To the indignation and dismay of those of us taught to read maps and orientate ourselves properly, as soldiers are, he shocked us by saying north doesn't matter. Only 60% of the people in the study drew a mental map with north in right pace. We use latent addressing systems: areas, villages or neighbourhoods.

To implement the pilot in the Bond Street area he and his team used a SecondLife-like virtual environment to experiment with signs and hit on the idea of the 'mini-lith'. As an aside, Google maps, he suggested, are useless as walking maps. For example, Wigmore Street, carrying the course of the A5204, is shown as a much bigger thoroughfare than Oxford Street.

They had to choose the right number of landmarks to include, and orientated maps the way people are facing, to give people the confidence to find the way.

In the prototype, they put nineteen signs around Bond Street, the cue for another aside, in which Tim pointed out that in Bond Street underground station there is only one reference to Bond Street itself. This station of course debouches onto Oxford Street and New Bond Street is a small but significant way away, a fact that causes endless confusion to tourists, who believe that since the station is called Bond Street, they must be on Bond Street.

They found that 1.9 million people used them; people use a series of tools, maps, mobile, signs and audio information. They conducted 1300 before and after interviews, 300 behavioural observations and 50 before and after functional tests to how information was found and used.
In questions and answers I asked how they managed the difficulties of nomenclature of London areas, for example according to estate agents most of North London is ‘Hampstead borders’? Tim replied that they had debated with residents what areas should be called, citing the example of Fitzrovia, which some wish to rename Noho (as in NOrth SOho). 

The questions came thick and fast and my notes are incomplete. Here a few of the points raised:
Would it help if, at notoriously difficult underground stations exits, TfL used pictures of the scene above ground to help people orientate themselves?

Will they extends the project to all thirty two London boroughs?  At the moment the project has in principle support from every central London and they are running pilots in South Bank and Bankside, the Clear Zone Partnership area (Covent Garden and Bloomsbury) and Richmond and Twickenham. Might they include the Olympic boroughs (Greenwich, Hackney, Newham, Tower Hamlets and Waltham Forest? They’re talking to the Mayor's office and the London Development Agency

Are there any examples elsewhere in the world? No, not as far as Tim is aware. Hey started with a project in Bristol.  I see they have recently done some work in Brighton.

How did they decide how many signs were needed? It was based on a footfall analysis. On routes such as Oxford and Regent Street signs need to be provide on both sides of the road. Ideally they should be on every street corner, but if not, how far apart can they be, should they be only at key junctions? People have to trust the system, so it has to be consistent, unlike for example Transport for London’s real-time bus system which is not trusted.

The mini-liths have to be visible in crowded conditions.

How corruptible are you, someone asked? Are you open to bribes to send people to particular shops? Money doesn’t change hands when deciding what to put on a map, only the logic of way-finding. Tim pointed us to the example of Dubai, where the names of the metro stations have been sold to the highest corporate bidder leading to exceptionally unhelpful station names.

How do they update them? Much of the information is presented as digital print behind glass, so is easily changeable. The vitreous enamel plinths on the other hand, are made to be durable and so are less easy to amend.

One lesson in the way people look at information is the case of signs to say ‘you are here’ . Although they included these in many of the prototypes, people missed them and commented that a ‘you are here’ sign would be useful. They need to be unmissable.

† Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2000 Apr 11;97(8):4398-403.
Navigation-related structural change in the hippocampi of taxi drivers.
Maguire EA, Gadian DG, Johnsrude IS, Good CD, Ashburner J, Frackowiak RS, Frith CD.

See also accounts of the meeting by Richard Hawkins and Ham Life

CILIP's big conversation

Who remembers the 2003 Big Conversation? It was Blair's attempt to divert attention from his invasion of Iraq earlier that year and draw the public into a discussion of such weighty issues as whether councils should have greater power to ban workplace smoking or if rowdy city centre pubs and clubs should have to contribute towards policing costs. Seven years later, nothing remains of it except for an internet domain, now unoccupied.

Why, then, when looking for a name for a debate about the future of CILIP, as the organisation approaches its tenth anniversary in 2012 and the 120th anniversary of the Library Association's Royal Charter in 2017, should such an unpropitious name be chosen? Apart from its infamous history, the phrase fails in two ways:

Big: What meaning does the word big have? A debate in which each of CILIP 18,490 members participates? Or every one of the more nebulous group of 40,000 members of the 'CILIP community' of 'members, consumers, subscribers and stakeholders'? I draw both these figures from the 2008 Annual Report. I doubt it. I think that big is merely a piece of puffery.

Conversation: this too has become a meaningless vogue word, mostly used by politicians, advertisers, marketing people and other riff-raff.

It's a pity, for a debate about the future of CILIP is desperately needed. I think the first task of the Project Board, now being recruited (see the Expressions of Interest section at http://www.cilip.org.uk/about-us/people/president/pages/big-conversation.aspx ), should be to change the name.

Vote early, vote often

It's CILIP election time. There's an area in CILIP Communities for e-hustings, and the candidates' manifestos are available too. One candidate, @votenickpoole is making good use of Twitter, and another, Isabel Hood also tweets. But I would no more vote for a candidate just because they tweet than I would because they happen to use a Mac, or drink the same brand of gin as me.

So it could be an interesting election, but for one thing: in the six candidates' manifestos, the most important issue facing library and information services is barely mentioned✝. To read these is to enter a world where the Wirral campaign never took place, where the commitment of all major political parties to slash public expenditure doesn't exist.

The closest I can find is one candidate, who thinks cuts are inevitable and that we need to 'demonstrate our long term value'. Where's the campaigning? Where's the alliance with trade unions and local and national users groups? I am left with the impression that if these six had been Trustees over the past year, CILIP would not have intervened in the Wirral and helped force the council to climb down from its proposed closures of eleven libraries.

I'm asking this question in the e-hustings. I hope to hear some answers.

✝If I were given to cliché, I would say this is the 'heffalump in the room'. Dear reader, every word written here is a finely polished jewel, and I would sooner walk naked down Wandsworth High Street, scourging myself with a cat o'nine tails, than use anything so tired. Same goes for perfect storms. If you ever find a perfect storm in this blog, have me taken away for treatment.

CILIP AGM: how to use your proxy

Best of all, come to the meeting, and do go back and read why you should. But if you really can't, I now have advice from Daniel Sabel, Governance Manager at CILIP on how to nominate the chair of the meeting to cast your proxy. On the form, (downloads as a Word file) fill in 'the Chair of the meeting c/o 7 Ridgmount St' as your proxy.

The problem with proxies

There's been some discussion prompted by blog posts by Lord Llama and Katherine Widdows about CILIP's proposed subscription increases, and the debate has gathered a certain momentum on Twitter too. The proposals go to the AGM next month

For what it's worth, I don't think the proposals are outrageous and will support them at the AGM, unless I hear convincing arguments to the contrary. A number of participants in the online debate who live and work in the provinces feel disenfranchised and, unable to attend on 15 October, are voting by proxy. An interesting point has arisen here: there seems to be no provision in our rules for members to instruct the Chair of the meeting to act as their proxy, which would be normal in most organisations. I have asked Daniel Sabel of CILIP's governance unit to clarify this and he has promised to get back to me.

But I'm worried by the widespread use of proxies, because they'll be cast by people who have made up their minds without hearing the debate. For all that the AGM is attended by those who have reached that level in the profession where no one notices or cares if they aren't at work, there is something to be said for the opportunity to listen to the arguments, make one's own interventions: positions evolve, amendments come from the floor, the debate changes things.

I recognise the practical difficulties; though CILIP ought to function as  an Athenian democracy (with votes for the women and slaves too), it would be impossible to herd every one of our free adult members  into a hall for an ἐκκλεσία and have them thrash out every issue there is. What else could we do? Would a system of delegates work, sometimes mandated by branch or group members, sometimes free to hear debate and form an opinion, but accountable to those who elect them?

Training on Twitter

Andy Powell tweeted, tongue in cheek, when he discovered that CILIP were running a training course on Twitter for Librarians:

good grief... do #cilip really run a twitter course? - http://tinyurl.com/mxabo3 - speaks volumes methinks

If the course were to teach people how to Twitter, then I quite agree.  Twitter didn't grow to the size it is (whatever that is: they are curiously chary of publishing the number of accounts that exist) by being so hard to use that people needed to go on a course. But I think the trainer, @Philbradley will be discussing how libraries can use Twitter to talk to their readers and potential readers. Who know, he may even answer the yet more difficult question posed by Petertweeter, to wit the reverse traffic from users to libraries.

[I inadvertently deleted the content of this entry. Sorry if you came here looking for it from my tweet earlier on. It is now restored]

Catching up

A few days without posting leaves a backlog:

Royal Ascot: none of my selections for Friday won; I made no selections on Saturday, as I was sailing

Alan Gibbons and the Campaign for the Book are on the front page of the Library and Information Gazette, which is now freely available on the CILIP website, though in a clunky format.

The London and South East Circle of CoFHE, the CILIP group for further education college librarians, now has, thanks to our Marketing Co-ordinator, Helen Dean, a blog. I shall post there from time to time.

CILIP 2.0 and subversion

It seems superfluous to write a post about the CILIP 2.0 discussion at an open meeting of CILIP Council on Wednesday. There's such rich material out there already: Phil Bradley's and Brian Kelly's presentations, Caroline Moss-Gibbons' reflections, a live blog by Matthew Mezey of Update, and of course the twitter streams, aggregated here by Dave Pattern. And there's a follow up wiki: http://cilip2unofficial.wikispaces.com/

I twittered throughout: curiously TweetDeck and the CILIP wifi didn't like each other, but I managed very well with Twitterfall. I'm sorry I didn't reply to questions or points made to @tomroper. I was too busy trying to get the sense of the next remark being made in the debate to answer.

Some said there needed to be more research in to how the profession uses and could uses Web 2.0 tools. In fact research results are already finding the way into the literature, but there is not better way to promote further work than by providing the practice on which theory can be developed, which means doing exactly as Phil and Brian were advising us: use social software, try it out, develop what works, discard what doesn't. We can't wait for the grant proposals to be approved and the project officers to be appointed.

The deficiencies of existing tools: our monolithic website, the Byzantine authentication processes for CILIP communities and so on were well-rehearsed. I had spent that very morning trying to update the pages for CoFHE LASEC, which I have to do through a third party.

In the end, the point is not to use these things because they are fun or fashionable. It's because they offer the chance for the membership organisation whose concerns, perhaps more than any other in the the country, are intimately connected to the networked world, to build its organisation, to talk to and listen to members, and to reach new audiences in new ways.

I leave the last word to Edward Dudley, retired lay-about, former head of the library school at North London Polytechnic, once editor of New Library World and still a columnist in Update, who recently celebrated his ninetieth birthday. We spoke briefly at the end. He pointed me in the direction of Brian Vickery's memoirs on the web, of which more in another post, and then we started to talk about the meeting. What did I see in all this, he asked? I made some vague and semi-coherent noises about how I was interested in the aspects of Web 2.0 which seem to offer greater opportunity for democracy. He thought briefly. 'Yes,' he replied, 'and subversion'. I trust we will all be as subversive as we possibly can .

CILIP 2.0

This afternoon CILIP council holds a special open session on how we might exploit Web 2.0 to better serve the members and build the institute. Phil Bradley and Brian Kelly will both be speaking, and then there'll be an open discussion. Both speakers have already posted versions of their presentations: 
Phil's presentation
Brian's presentation
I'm one of the 'official' twitterers and you can follow the debate using the hashtag #CILIP2. A lot of people will be using Twitterfall. I have Tweetdeck installed, so will use that.