Tom Roper's Weblog

Edward Dudley and subversion

Like so many in the profession, I was saddened to hear that Edward Dudley had died. We will be poorer without his intellect and wit.

Edward influenced me long before I met him. I went to what was then the Polytechnic of North London's School of Librarianship and Information Studies for the postgraduate course in 1983, at the Essex Road site. a curious place with its own culture. When we moved over the summer of that year, the postgraduate course following the calendar rather than the academic year, to Ladbroke Grove, we lost something.

Edward had left the Polytechnic, succeeded by Kevin McGarry as Head of School, but the course I followed showed the work Edward had put in to make PNL, as it was then, one of the best library schools in the country. I believe he followed the management principle, too often ignored, of appointing good people, giving them what they needed, and letting them get on with it. The result was eclectic and stimulating, and only Edward could have created a department that contained, in relative harmony, people such as, on the one hand,  Derek Langridge of the Cataloguing Research Group, evangelist for  Ranganathan and all thing faceted and, on the other, radical believers in the progressive role of the public library such as Jim Hennessy and Bob Barker. I held the position of student representative on the Academic board, and  had the privilege of seeing this disparate group debate the future direction of library education. No blows were exchanged. I was also grateful to Edward for his 1953 FLA thesis, which CILIP tell me is still available, and which I must re-read in his honour. Entitled Libraries in the USSR: some post-war developments it was a key resource for my dissertation on Krupskaya, libraries and literacy.

I also became aware of his journalism. At that time New Library World, whose editorship he took on  in the year I was at PNL, was a much more interesting read than the Library Association Record. His editorials, in particular, became required reading and when having finished library school, I found myself working in Hendon Reference Library, I would often be distracted from my task of checking in journals onto cards held in metal trays by the latest NLW. These were sent over to headquarters for the Borough Librarian, the Deputy Borough Librarian and the Principal Assistant Borough Librarian to read, but I took some satisfaction in knowing that I had read them first.

Yet at this time I had not met the man. I think we first met at a LIbrary Association AGM. Guy Daines and I, both then active in the infant Library Campaign, proposed a motion at the AGM (in itself unusual in those pre-democratic days) asking the LA to work with the Campaign and the trade union movement to oppose cuts and closures in library services. I am sure we owed a debt to Edward. In the run up to the AGM, the LA leadership, led at that time by George Cunningham, a former MP who had joined the SDP renegades from the Labour Party, lost his seat and so found himself a refuge as our Chief Executive , made fierce oppositional noises to the motion, claiming it would put us in breach of the Royal Charter. We expected a fierce debate at the meeting, and were not sure it was one we could win. When we turned up at the meeting, held I think at Glaziers' Hall, we found that the leadership, I'm sure as a result of Edward's expert string-pulling, had had a complete volte-face and were no longer going to oppose our motion.

After an AGM, Edward approached me. I don't recall the conversation exactly, but I told him of my historical interests, particularly  in the scientists who in the 1920s, 30s and 40s joined or were close to the Communist Party of Great Britain, people like J.B.S. Haldane, J.D. Bernal, whose post-war work on the information needs of scientific researchers bears re-reading sixty-five years later, Lancelot Hogden and Hyman Levy. Not only did Edward know these eminent figures, he had served many of them in the branch library he worked in, Belsize Park in what was then the borough of Hampstead and, I hope I recall correctly, was a member of the same Communist Party branch. Edward discovered my interest in the literature of that period and would often suggest books to me, generously asking if I had a copy of a particular Left Book Club edition of which he had a spare.

I also became a willing recruit to his campaign to bring a little democracy to the LA, and then CILIP.  Of an evening the telephone would ring. It would be Edward. Would I consider seconding a motion at the next AGM, proposing the dangerously radical notion that Presidents should be elected by the whole membership, not just council? Of course I would. And I was invited to attend, in what capacity I was never quite sure, meetings in his and Kate's Barbican flat to prepare the CILIP in London regional branch as the new organisation came into being. He remained a moving force in London affairs right up to his death.

I have further cause to be grateful to him. When I left health libraries for a time in 2006, I also stood down from the Editorial Board of Health Information and Libraries Journal. I missed it, because there is nothing like involvement in a journal to teach library and information people about how the material we organise and make available comes into being. Quite out of the blue, in 2008, I was invited to joint the Editorial Board of the Journal of Librarianship and Information Science, JOLIS, which Edward had been instrumental in founding, persuading the LA of the need for a theoretical journal,. Once more, I could enjoy his contributions to a debate, always fresh, never clichéd or formulaic.

He was always keen to understand new technologies. He read my blog, I know, and would sometimes refer to it in his column in Update. At the famous CILIP 2 open meeting of Council in 2009, addressed by Phil Bradley, who I heard yesterday won the election for Vice-President, he approached me afterwards. What was my assessment of this Web 2.0 carry-on? I wrote at the time that 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, in his memory.

Re-creating the past - digitising your collection and dealing with metadata

CILIP Sussex held an afternoon school, re-creating the past - digitising your collection and dealing with metadata; being of the leisured classes I thought I would attend. The absence of a wifi network made live tweeting impossible, but perhaps a retrospective blog post will do, and I have left it so long that Jill Duffin beat me to it: http://communities.cilip.org.uk/blogs/informationadvice/archive/2010/10/12/digitising-stuff.aspx. So I'll add a little here.

Martin Hayes, West Sussex Local Studies Library, spoke first, acknowledging he was no expert on the technical aspects of digitisation. Nevertheless, West Sussex had run a number of digitisation projects in the past six years, all Lottery funded:

• West Sussex Past Pictures
• Victorian West Sussex
• West Sussex Seaside Holidays
• The Walter Gardiner Photography Collection (part of West Sussex Past Pictures), more than 100,000 images from the1880s to the 1980s. A six week exhibition of pictures from the collection had just ended.
• Crawley Digital Heritage project (based on the Roger Bastable collection of c. 10,000 originals), the best being online on Flickr in Crawley library's photostream
• Edwardian Crawley, shown on a nine-screen video wall at the new library in Crawley, and local groups are also digitising material to be displayed on the screens.
• The Young Ones: education and childhood on the West Sussex coast, with five partner schools

Some of their collection can also be seen in the West Sussex Libraries Local Studies' photostream on Flickr.

Martin told us how local residents came forward with material to be digitised for the collections, and of collaborations with local businesses. Some of the uses made of digitised material may be unpredictable. Digitising has had some considerable advantages, especially for the preservation of delicate or rare materials. POstcard collectors seem to be a dishonest bunch, and prone to theft. West Sussex has archived all this on a shoestring: the budget for each library for digitising is around £1,000, and it only cost £8-9,000 to set up the in-house digitisation unit, based at Worthing, though for Crawley they set up a mobile unit, consisting of a laptop loaded with Photoshop Elements and a scanner. In the unit they have flatbed and overhead scanners, and a tripod camera. Martin mentioned robotic scanners. His experiences of microfilm scanners has not been good. To scan, they group like items together, use meaningful filenames, and de-screen printed images. Resolutions used vary from 300 dpi for 10" x 8" prints to 4000 dpi for 35 mm transparencies, They have made heavy use of the advice services offered by JISC Digital Media. Print materials digitised included newspapers, directories and sale catalogues. They save images as tiffs or RAW files, not jpegs. They use Silverfast  as well, and find Photoshop useful for batch conversion.

Elaine Sheppard, of Screen Archive South East, one of the twelve regional film archives, after outlining what metadata is, told us about their choices of metadata for the archive. There are at least five different standards for moving image metadata, and in 2005  Screen Archive South East decided to develop  their own schema, which, after some debate, is now being taken up by the other regional archives

Surfacing and synthesising issues on the roadmap

CILIP's big conversation starts next month: http://communities.cilip.org.uk/forums/t/11176.aspx

We're stuck with the name, clearly. I hope that I am not the only one in our profession whose hackles rise at some of the crimes against the English language here.

'The conversation will be open to anyone interested in the Knowledge and Information domain.' When did we become a domain? I suppose the author thinks it sounds much more impressive than saying libraries and information services. And why put the K and the I in upper-case?

 "The Conversation will surface and consider issues." How do you surface an issue, please?

 "CILIP Council will synthesise issues from the conversation, then verify with members and wider stakeholders. " Poor issues, having been surfaced, they're now to be synthesised and exposed to these wider stakeholders. How wide, I wonder? I have a vision of portly peasants, armed with stakes, besieging Dracula's castle.

" CILIP Council will develop a roadmap." Of course they will. Nothing these days can possibly happen without a roadmap [sic...I would say road map should appear as two words, or perhaps should be hyphenated]. I suppose I should be grateful it isn't an overarching road map.

This is what happens when we spend too long with consultants, local and national  politicians and their hangers-on and other riff-raff and not enough in the real world.

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]