Tom Roper's Weblog

A bumper press day for public libraries

The Independent runs an article and a leader:
Children's Laureate says libraries are guilty of letting down young readers
An enduring Victorian value
In the former, Jacqueline Wilson, once more the most-borrowed author in the Public Lending Right statistics, says,
"It just seems very sad that there isn't the tradition of having classic authors so that a browsing reader who doesn't know what they're doing can discover the great works of literature that I feel is the reason that libraries are there. When I was a child in the 1950s I went to the library as a matter of course because that was your only source of good reading matter."
From the latter: " So long as knowledge and stories are put into written form, the libraries will have a place. They're the last things that should be cut as the iron bonds of public expenditure are tightened."

And the Institute of Ideas have made the proposition,"books should remain the essence of public libraries" a topic in their Debating Matters competition they run jointly with Pfizer. There's a page full of resources for both sides at: http://www.debatingmatters.com/C2B/document_tree/ViewACategory.asp?CategoryID=173

Idox and TFPL

Idox, who bought TFPL recruitment a year ago, are to dispose of it, saying that it is, “just not a good fit", I read in Information World Review. The TFPL blog gives the official version.
When, exactly, did enlightenment strike in the Idox board room, I wonder? How did an information industry recruitment agency change from being an attractive proposition, to an unnecessary frippery? Surely the days of predatory asset stripping have not returned? I think this news will set off a shake up among recruitment agencies generally. They offer nothing to candidates, and precious little to employers. I have heard CILIP’s own agency INFOMatch defended on the grounds that it brings income into the organisation. So too would a chain of massage-parlours or betting-shops. However, CILIP’s recent financial difficulties were blamed, at least in part, on a downturn in the recruitment market and INFOMatch's consequent failure to bring in the expected money. Interest declared: I am a former, dissatisfied, client of TFPL, and other recruitment agencies.

PS. CILIP's Library and Information Gazette runs a front-page article on the library and information recruitment "industry", though the text is not online. Why ever not? It is symptomatic of my professional organisation's half-hearted approach to using the web. "Quality, experienced candidates are at a premium". says the spokesman for one agency, 'there are jobs available in fields such as executive search and professional services at junior level which we are struggling to fill".
The lesson of the past nine months is that I am clearly not a "quality experienced candidate". The article also suggests that jobs suitable for newly qualified staff are being outsourced to India, with a consequent effect on the supply of candidates for more senior posts.
The article fails to mention the sale of TFPL at all. I suppose it went to bed before the news was known.

Technorati Tags: idox, jobsearch, outsourcing, tfpl

Language networks

Jill Kempshall of UWE, having read my column in the CILIP gazette (not online, I'm afraid) contacted me to point out that there is a network of language specialists, the West European Language Studies Library and Information Network (WESLINE), an umbrella group for specialist language groups such as ACLAIIR (Advisory Council of Latin American and Iberian Information Resources), the French Studies Library Group, the German Studies Library Group and the Italian Studies Library Group.
Some of their websites are in need of updating, but there are some useful resources nevertheless.

If the Academic Library Ceased to Exist...

I found this via ACRLblog

Cochrane, Lynn Scott
If the Academic Library Ceased to Exist, Would We Have to Invent It?
EDUCAUSE Review, vol. 42, no. 1 (January/February 2007): 6
http://www.educause.edu/apps/er/erm07/erm0714.asp

Reflections on the recent period of unemployment

Now I'm back in a job, I think I can speak my mind on the experience of being unemployed, and more particularly on some of my more negative job hunting experiences. I name no names, but hope fervently that when I was on the other side of the interview table, I never behaved like this. Certainly if I ever find myself recruiting again, I shall be scrupulous in giving candidates a fair chance..
Here are my top seven tips for recruiters:
1. If you wish to give your mistress a sinecure, but tiresome HR procedures force you to mount a sham recruitment, be sure to give the game away by kissing her passionately, in full view of other candidates, as you escort her down to reception at the end of her "interview".
2. Don't pay candidates' travel expenses promptly, if at all; the longer you delay, the more likely they are to give up. It does the unemployed good to get out of the house and they should grateful.
3. Ensure staff who meet candidates are briefed to be at their most surly. Nothing prepares a candidate better for an interview than a discourteous reception.
4. Divide the sheep from the goats more effectively with an old buffer on the interview panel who falls asleep. If he (for it was a he in my experience) can do so during the candidate's presentation, even better for morale.
5. Ensure unsuccessful candidates find out their fate accidentally, rather than directly from you. The best way to do this is to ensure they see the post re-advertised as publicly as possible before you can be arsed to tell them anything; they may well telephone you in a state of distress, ensuring great fun all round.
6. Candidates enjoy having to juggle coats and bags while appearing in front of the panel, Make sure there is no opportunity to leave such impedimenta in safe keeping.
7. Interviewing in an open plan office is fun, and privacy is very overrated. Make sure the whole team have the chance to eavesdrop on a candidate's stuttering answers.
And agencies are useless.

Technorati Tags: employment, interview, jobsearch

Set the controls for the heart of the sun

On 3 January I start a new job, as Resources Co-ordinator at the Sussex Language Institute, running their Language Learning Centre while the permanent post-holder is on maternity leave. The Centre supports undergraduate teaching and learning in French, German, Italian and Spanish, as well as Open Learning courses in a variety of other languages, English for international students and postgraduate courses in English language teaching. The centre is not a library per se, but my background and skills will be useful in enquiry work and cataloguing. But I have worked in libraries for too long: I started in Child's Hill public library in the London Borough of Barnet in 1978, by accident, without any plan to make it my career, and, having devoted over twenty-eight years to it, I now want to do something different. This temporary job is an attempt to reach escape velocity, to leave the orbit of the library world. Rather than organise the knowledge generated by other intellects, I want to try creating something myself.
This is not the first time I have changed subject areas in my career. As well as working in a number of different sectors (public, national, special, leaned society, university) I have been a subject specialist in education, physical sciences, aeronautical engineering, as well as medicine and veterinary medicine. As I iron shirts and polish shoes for Wednesday, I reflect that one of the advantages of a librarian's 's training is that it teaches one to understand a new subject area quickly, through its bibliography. So my first attempt to master this new area was to have been based on Walford; unfortunately the volume I need, volume 3, Humanities and general reference is not yet published in the new Walford series, and only announced for 2008, so I shall have to rely on the 1991 edition (coincidentally the year I came into health librarianship). I remember from my public library days a fascinating hand-list of language dictionaries, grammars and textbooks, but I would be surprised if it were still current. The site of the Higher Education Academy's Subject Centre for Languages, Linguistics and Area Studies is useful, as is that of the National Centre for Languages. There's also supposed to be a portal, Research in Modern Languages in the UK, at http://www.languagesresearch.ac.uk/ but it seems to be unavailable at the moment. I have not yet found any bibliographic mapping of the literature of the literature, along the lines of the exercises that have been carried out in health, notably for some of the professions supplementary to medicine.
A search of LISA, at least that segment of the databases available online to CILIP members, found very little on the field. There is a professional network, the Association of University Language Centres. Outside higher education, apart from specialists serving ethnic minorities in some public libraries, and cataloguers of foreign language material, I have not come across many library and information professionals working in this field.
Language learning in British schools, which cannot but have implications for universities, is a matter for debate at the moment, as the Dearing Review of language teaching policy made an interim report in December, with a final report due in February.
Mu own background in this subject area is this: at school I like to think I was reasonably adept, studying French to A level and French, German and Latin to O level, as well as Russian and Italian, though these last were not examined. In later years I tried to learn Welsh and Spanish and am currently learning Classical Greek.

Technorati Tags: AULC, jobsearch, languagelearning, languages

E-petition on school libraries

"We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to make the provision of professionally staffed libraries within all schools, both secondary and primary, statutory". Support the petition here: http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/schoollibraries/
I support this for two reasons, because I'm a librarian and know the value of libraries generally, but also, and perhaps more importantly, because I'm a parent of two school-age children and know how a good school library can support their learning.

Technorati Tags: epetitions, schoollibraries

Thames Valley Health Libraries Network Christmas Event

Here's my presentation and resource list from this event. During questions, someone asked me to enumerate the social software applications I link to from the blog. Here they are:
Librarything (online catalogue of my and 95,000 others' book collections; includes the fabulous Unsuggester): http://www.librarything.com/catalog.php?view=tomroper
Flickr: photo sharing: http://www.flickr.com/photos/tomroper/ For the US children's library crazy hats day see here
Del.icio.us: bookmark sharing: http://del.icio.us/tomroper
Last.fm: takes the music I play in iTunes and on my iPod and matches it with other users: http://www.last.fm/user/tomroper/
Citeulike: online referencing tool, not quite a substitute for things like ReferenceManager or ProCite, but adds a collective dimension. http://www.citeulike.org/user/tomroper
Upcoming.org: shared calendars and events: http://upcoming.org/user/9711/

thamesvalleyreferences.doc

Technorati Tags: thamesvalley

Online: Libqual+

I went to Online at Olympia yesterday. The exhibition itself was the usual scrum, but there is nothing like wearing a badge saying Tom Roper, Unemployed, for protecting oneself against people trying to sell you things.
Much more interesting than the exhibition was the Health Libraries Group event, a presentation by Lucy McCaskie of Gloucestershire Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, entitled From radar to radiant users, a review of a pilot of the Libqual+ survey suite with English health libraries. Lucy's presentation is going up on the HLG website, so I shan't give a full account. But very topically, in the light of the RIN study on researchers and discovery services , which Lorcan Dempsey neatly summarises as "researchers [...]- want discovery services to be supported by effective delivery services. They want to be able to get what they find, " the key finding was that users thought library services bad at making electronic resources available to them from their offices or homes. More positively users had a high opinion of the courtesy and caring attitude of library staff, and their attention to individual users. But being courteous and caring will not get us very far if we don't have the resources our users need to do their jobs.
Lucy told us that Libqual+ was developed in the US by the Association of Research Libraries, covering three areas, affect of service, information control and the library as place. Administered through a webpage, the survey asks users to rate 22 core statements on three different scales, so is time-consuming. Ten libraries took part in the pilot, organised by the National Library of Health (NLH), nine NHS libraries, well-distributed geographically including libraries in acute trust, primary care and mental health services, as well as the Royal College of Nursing Library Services. The participating services e-mailed staff in their organisations to ask them to take part. Only 743 surveys were completed, and 25% of those who started a survey completed it, but 53% added comments to their submissions.
The survey data is offered in radar charts. NLH did not undertake a central analysis, so it was left to individual services to look at their data. In Gloucestershire Lucy and colleagues were able to implement some immediate changes, such as to stock, signs and desk cover, and incorporated other findings into their action plan, such as advertise services better, branding services more distinctively to distinguish them form others. They have also used the data in bargaining for better funding for the service and to manage users' insatiable appetite for resources. Lucy asked if the analysis work should be done by librarians, or by statisticians. Now they have baseline data, the survey need sot be repeated at regular intervals. however NLH seem to be thinking of devising their own customer satisfaction instrument. In discussion Lucy told us that Libqual+ took up approximately 60 staff hours. It is a complex survey, and the importance of using other methods such as focus groups was mentioned.

Technorati Tags: libqual , oi06, onlineinformation2006, RIN

My brilliant career

It's nearly nine months since I worked (apart from some minor consultancy, for which I have yet to be paid, for the National Library of Health, which ceased abruptly; compassionate leave is not a familiar concept in that organisation). I've been doing an analysis of the jobs I've applied for, a total of thirty over that period. Perhaps I should have applied for more, but bear in mind my mother's illness and death ate into the time available.
So here's the data:
Interview strike rate (interviews/applications submitted): 33.3%

Of individual employers, the prize must go to that prestigious national institution, the British Library, who have failed to shortlist me for anything although I have applied for four jobs with them since the summer, all jobs for which I thought I fitted the person specification rather well.

Sectors:

Civil service: 6.6%
Higher education: 33.3%
National organisations: 40%
Private sector: 16.6%

Subjects; not all posts can easily be described as subject specific, but of these:

Health: 35.7%
Law: 14.2%
Art: 7.1%
Development studies: 7.1%
Economics; 7.1%
Literature; 7.1%
Music: 7.1%
Science: 7.1%

46% were conventional library-based jobs. Only four (13%) came through the agencies I'm using, and of these three came from Sue Hill, but only one from InfoMatch.
I am not asking for anything outrageous as a salary. Most of the posts would have paid less than my last one, and the average salary is well below. I do not require any unusual perquisites, such as having my pay cheque delivered in an ocelot-lined envelope by beautiful veiled princesses.
I have more to say, particularly on the parasitic nature of employment agencies and I have some alarming examples of employers' bad practice to offer; they must wait for another post.

Addendum: I haven't mentioned the location of these posts. 63% were in London, 23% in Brighton or other parts of East Sussex and the remainder in the home counties.

Technorati Tags: britishlibrary, employment, jobsearch