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.
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