Tom Roper's Weblog

More than noise and food: public libraries in the Times

A superficial third leader, and a news report in this morning's Times manage to muddle some serious issues about public libraries, such as the closure of forty branches last year, the fall in money spent on books, and the loss of qualified librarians' posts, with trivial issues like noise and food, and some untruths: 'early libraries were associated with the church', for example. There were few churches in Babylon, or in the first Ptolemy's Alexandria.

By contrast, through Lorcan Dempsey's blog, I find the US Council on Library and Information Resources No Brief Candle: Reconceiving Research Libraries for the 21st Century, which, though discussing a different sector, is a much more serious treatment.

Update: can you spot the deliberate mistake? Maninder Kaur did (see comments)

DCMS review of public libraries

The news from the Bookseller that the Department of Culture Media and Sport plan a new review of public libraries has sent some commentators into a lather.

I'm less excited. It seems unlikely that this government will survive much beyond the announcement of the review, rumoured to be at the Public Library Authorities Conference in October, still less last long enough to bring it to any conclusion.

Neither DCMS's website, nor that of the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council, have any further information, but they are both noticeably light on real content.
[From theBookseller.com]

Unacknowledged legislator at the MLA

I can find remarkably little comment on the news that Andrew Motion has been appointed chair of the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council (MLA). I imagine that he will be paid in ready money, rather than in the hogsheads of Canary wine reputed to be his reward for the day job as Poet Laureate.

One would hope that the appointment of a poet to the MLA is good news, particularly for libraries, though how someone with an ear for language will cope with their highly obscure dialect of officialese will be interesting.

I wonder which past laureate would have made the best Chair of MLA. I would quite like to have seen Ted Hughes in the job, or perhaps Colley Cibber.

Machines for reading in

In his post Bibbly-O-Tek, on his splendid blog, Nasty Brutalist and Short, sometimes known as Sit down man, you're a bloody tragedy, Owen Hatherley discusses library architecture, including Senate House and the British Library, in a way that I wish one could read in the voluminous discussions on library planning and design in our professional literature. That literature makes a virtue of philistinism, our tendency to dismiss aesthetic theory and concentrate instead on floors' load-bearing capacity. Many of us though will recognise his characterisation of building a new library as including 'lengthy gestation, controversy, changes in design, and most of all squabbles over money'.In thirty years of library work, I have rarely been lucky enough to work in interesting buildings. The public libraries of my early career seemed to have been designed to a universal template, whose guiding principle was to be as inoffensive as possible.NHS libraries were generally dire, though my predecessor at Edgware General Hospital was immensely proud of the hand-basin in her office, apparently been included in the design at her express request.
The honourable exception to all this is Basil Spence's library at the University of Sussex, where I worked, though not for long enough.

Federated access resources

Masha Garibyan has kindly given permission for me to post her list of resources from her presentation at Tuesday's CoFHE LSEC meeting on federated access:

JISC Federated Access pages http://www.jisc.ac.uk/federation

UK Federation website http://www.ukfederation.org.uk/

JISC Institutional Business Case Toolkit http://www.jisc.ac.uk/media/documents/themes/accessmanagement/cc297d001-1.0%20business%20case%20toolkit.pdf

JISC federation support pages for library staff http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/themes/access_management/federation/federation_libraries.aspx

JISC ‘Federated Access Management: Guide for Academic Libraries’ Briefing Paper http://www.jisc.ac.uk/publications/publications/pub_accessmanagementbps/accessmanagementlibrariansMar2008v1.aspx

Training

Janet http://www.ja.net/services/training/

Netskills http://www.netskills.ac.uk/content/products/workshops/range/accman.htm

Third party providers of FAM solutions briefing paper http://www.jisc.ac.uk/publications/publications/identityprovidersbpv1.aspx

Service provider information

List of live services available via the UK federation http://www.ukfederation.org.uk/content/Documents/AvailableServices

List of Service Providers JISC is currently negotiating with and their current federation status http://access.jiscinvolve.org/federated-access-and-publishers/

Article in May CILIP Update: http://www.cilip.org.uk/publications/updatemagazine/archive/archive2008/may/GaribyanUpdateMay08.htm

Podcast: http://www.jisc.ac.uk/news/stories/2008/05/podcast42mashagaribyan.aspx

Mailing lists

[email protected] – library-specific announcements & discussion

[email protected] – (mostly) technical announcements & discussion

[email protected] - monthly newsletter

Federated access

To CILIP in Ridgmount Street, to hear Masha Garibyan of JISC and the LSE talk about federated access to the London and South East Circle of CILIP's Colleges of Further and Higher Education Group, CoFHE, LASEC to its intimates.

Masha gave a clear exposition of federated access and the different ways institutions can implement it for identity management. She pointed us to lots of useful resources, including JISC's model business case which, she warned, runs to over a hundred pages.

Automated library systems in 2008

The debate on JISC's Library Management Systems Horizon Scan continues, with Tim Buckley-Owen reporting on the front page of CILIP's Library & Information Gazette on vendors' reactions. Disappointingly, their answers, somewhat defensive in tone, don't tackle the problems the report drew attention to, to wit the tendency to monopoly in the market, with four vendors controlling more than 90% of the higher education market and the ownership of two of those vendors, ExLibris and SirsiDynix who control over half the market, now in the hands of private equity. One could not hope for a better textbook example of the tendency to the concentration of capital in modern economies. Many of the systems we now use started their lives as altruistic co-operatives, such as SWALCAP and BLCMP, whose member libraries owned and managed the products collectively. There is a thesis waiting to be written on how the co-operatives were changed, willy-nilly, into conventional capitalist organisations.

I could overlook this, if vendors were able to use this way of running their businesses to pay for innovation. But, for all the Library 2.0 rhetoric, it is hard to see where the innovation is. The successful Library 2.0 initiatives that leap to mind mostly come from the ingenuity of library-based systems developers. When I came to my new job at South Thames College in March, I looked at our LMS (OLIB, since you ask). In its functionality, I cannot see anything in it that is different from another system which I installed over ten years ago in my time at the Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons; and that most important part of the systems, the interface for our students and teachers, has not advanced one bit.

It would not hurt to start asking questions about the organisation and ownership of the vendors with whom we spend such considerable sums of money. £13.1 million for higher education alone.

Hove library in the Times

Christopher Hawtree writes on Hove library's centenary: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/court_and_social/article3957954.ece

Hollywood Librarian in London

There's a London showing of the Hollywood Librarian, organised by Cilip in London and SLA Europe: http://www.cilip.org.uk/branches/byregion/london/events/Hollywood_Librarian.htm

These metropolitan sophisticates have to be coaxed to the showing by the offer of a champagne draw. We needed no such inducements for the Sussex première in February.

The death of the telephone enquiry

Today's Times Higher Education carries a report of a telephone survey of twenty university libraries' enquiry services. Repeating a survey carried out by the Polytechnic of North London in 1987, journalists rang up and asked four questions. Alarmingly, only two of the twenty could give the correct boiling point of ethanol, 78.32°C, the others using Wikipedia which at the time of the survey gave a wrong figure. But even worse, several libraries, six in the case of the ethanol question, refused to answer the enquiry at all.