Tom Roper's Weblog

Hollywood Librarian: British première

The Sussex sub-branch of CILIP is holding the British première of the film the Hollywood Librarian, on Monday 25 February, at 7 pm in the Arts A2 lecture theatre, University of Sussex.

How to find the university

There's a trailer on YouTube

European première of Hollywood Librarian

I see that the European première of Hollywood Librarian is to take place in Athlone at the Irish Health Science Libraries Group conference. I believe a UK showing, organised by CILIP, is not far off.
See the trailer on YouTube

CILIP Sussex Christmas quiz

Cambridge may have beaten Oxford in yesterday's varsity match,  but my team in the CILIP Sussex Christmas Quiz fared less well. I was honoured to be allowed to compete with the University of Sussex team,  Adam, Chlöe, Ellie, Mell and Simon. We scored 100% in the first picture round, but were was less successful in a round which required knowledge of the price of everything and the value of nothing.  Knowing where  Neptune's Staircase is (a flight of locks on the Caledonian canal) would have done us no harm either.
Well done to the winners, the committee team, who triumphed after a tie break.

CILIP Communities

A bizarre thing has happened over at CILIP Communities. CILIP, my professional association, ran an online hustings area for this year's elections. Voting has closed and I found yesterday afternoon that forum has been deleted.
We take professional pride in our commitment to open access to information. It seems we cannot offer this to our own members.

Technorati Tags: transparency

Making Web 2.0 work for you and your library: further thoughts

I was sorry to miss, thanks to the train timetable, Mark Clowes' overview of web 2.0 technologies and Bernice Baker's presentation on blended learning. But I was there in time for an announcement by Ian Baird from Teeside University of the long overdue merger of the University Medical School Librarians Group and the University Health Sciences Librarians Group. In the afternoon, Heather Gardner and David Brunt demonstrated some practical library applications of web 2.0, in particular current awareness services, based on their experience of the Primary Care Current Awareness Service (PCCS) they run in the East Midlands. David moonlights for Intute, and I was interested in how Intute content can now be embedded in other websites. They also showed how the Royal College of Midwives has used Google Co-op to build a customised search engine and how they used Pbwiki for the nurses current awareness bulletin. On issue is that many NHS IT departments block wikis, which brought to mind the similar restrictions school students face in trying to use social software
Anne Welsh presented on Blogging for the bewildered, based on her experience of using Web 2.0 applications in the information service at DrugScope. I was struck by how they use a wiki for their acquisitions manual, but perturbed that the blogs they run don't allow comments. She showed some good uses of screencasts.

Making Web 2.0 work for you and your library

Tomorrow I'm speaking in Sheffield, at a Libraries for Nursing study day on Web 2.0, making Web 2.0 work for you and your library.
Here's the handout, as a pdf: download lfnsheffield.pdf and here's my presentation:

CILIP subscriptions

More than once, Tim Coates's Good Library Blog has claimed that large numbers of public library authorities pay CILIP subscriptions for their staff. He, and one or two commenters on his posts, claim that if this were not the case, libraries would have plenty of money for resources. Further, they imply that the underfunding of public library services  under the current and previous governments is a figment of the imagination, that public libraries are in fact well-resourced, but that the money is wasted on salaries and CILIP subscriptions for overpaid professional librarians.
There is  a good case to be made for employers  supporting their staff's professional memberships.  But Tim's claims are wrong.
I and others have asked Tim for evidence. I have worked in libraries for 29 years, in a variety of sectors of the profession, and have never had my CILIP, or before 2002, my Library Association or Institute of Information Scientists, subscription paid for me. It emerges he knows of "more than two" library authorities who pay CILIP subscriptions, but  he declines to identify them. Over at Michaels's 025.04 blog*  he has set up a poll. So far 231 people have voted, and only 4% have a CILIP subscription paid for them by a public library employer.

* The name, 025.04, is a librarian's joke, it being the Dewey Decimal classification class number for library operations.

Civil war horror in library profession?

Tim Coates is all of a quiver over a leaked copy of the minutes of CILIP's Policy Development Committee Meeting, which he claims shows "civil war" in the profession. Like most leaks, the reality is less exciting, merely consisting of some mild but justified criticisms of the MLA's Blueprint for Excellence document.  I can't help feeling that if we in CILIP had a more open policy towards publishing the minutes of Council and committee meetings on the website, the question of leaks, "secret notes" and other cloak-and-daggery would not arise.

Mass-observation at the CILIP Sussex AGM

Dorothy Sheridan, Head of Special Collections and Research Services at the University of Sussex, spoke at last night's CILIP Sussex AGM, in Lewes library, on her experience of dealing with the media.
There's been a lot of interest in the Mass-Observation archive recently. Only last Sunday, the Observer carried Alex Clark's  review of the latest book to be based on Mass-Observation material, Jenna Bailey's Can any mother help me? Dorothy also talked about articles in the New Statesman and New Yorker, and how to handle the broadcast media. Dorothy has appeared on Start the Week and Woman's Hour. On television, Victoria Wood based her recent Housewife, 49 on Nella's last war, published in 1981 by the archive from Nella Last's diaries.
Mass-Observation are holding an anniversary conference on 11 May and two other events, one involving Victoria Wood, part of the Brighton festival and the other at Komedia where Simon Garfield will talk about his work in the archive.

Librarian in the Guardian

The Guardian let Ian Snowley, CILIP's President-Elect, loose on Glen Berger's play Underneath the Lintel, showing at the Duchess Theatre. Ian writes in their Another View column; Lyn Gardner reviewed it for the paper proper, and started off with a wisecrack about the Dewey Decimal system.

The play's starting point is a librarian who finds a Baedeker returned, 113 years late. Ian seems to have enjoyed the play more than Lyn Gardner; "should be filed under G for guff", she says.

Links:
CILIP president elect's page
Ian's personal blog