Tom Roper's Weblog

David Nicholas on the Google generation

David Nicholas, whose career does not seem to have suffered in spite of having to teach me subject bibliography at the Polytechnic of North London on the postgraduate course in 1983, talked to a full house at CILIP in London's AGM on his research into the Google generation. I and others tweeted throughout, and you can see the archive at http://twapperkeeper.com/index.php#ggcilip. Those tweeting, apart from me, were @brunellalongo, @metalibrarian, @plasticspam and @woodsiegirl. Update, December 2014, Brunella tells me that Twitter account was hacked and she may now be found at @Brunella_Longo

David's work has had considerable exposure, not least through his appearance in the recent BBC television programme, the Virtual Revolution, but for this audience David concentrated, for the first time in public, on the lessons for librarians. Libraries and librarians are in danger of become decoupled from those they serve. Everyone has a choice and can be their own librarian. We are no longer the gatekeepers.

He cited the iPad launch in Britain at the end of the month and government interest in e-health and e-government as proof that these are unstoppable forces. Access is ubiquitous. It's telling that, though Google has transformed the information landscape, CILIP has never given it an award.

David said that in the print environment, it was possible to see what users are doing, but hard to assess the use they make of information; by contrast, online, we can decipher millions of footprints.

The impetus for the project was the need for adults to understand children's behaviour online. What happens when these children reach the job market? But in truth we are all the Google generation, the children are those who have never known anything else. So David recounted a meeting of doctors he had addressed who were scathing about junior doctors recourse to Google, but they themselves used it.

The virtual scholar: there is a huge and growing demand for scholarly information online, a demand fed by incresing availability. [Here I disagree to an extent: yes, an institution such as UCL will have the resources to subscribe to a lot, though not all, of the content that its scholars need; this is not the case for smaller, less wealthy institutions and the trend is for more and more content to disappear behind paywalls-TR]. Libraries ought to be part of this growth in the information market, but we aren't.

He quoted work they had done with the House of Commons. 90% of the hits on the House of Commons intranet were from robots [this is not unusual: I'm not sure why he thought it was-TR]. Do we allow robots into the library? Users are promiscuous: 40% never return to a site, Horizontal has replaced vertical: users skitter from site to site, skimming the surfaces. They will construct search statements of two or three words, and only look at the first page of results. Viewing is replacing reading; most users prefer abstracts to full text [this was true of doctors use of Medline a long time ago-TR] so Oxford University Press is to start charging for abstract but delivers full text free [I should like to know more about this. Where? TR] . Users believe that, through digital osmosis, the intellectual content can be absorbed simply by viewing a screen. We're all foxes now: the hedgehogs have been squashed.

He told an anecdote about his daughter channel-hopping; when he remonstrated with her to ask which channel she was really watching she replied, 'Dad I'm watching it all'. Is that bad or good behaviour, he asked? [ It seems to me futile to turn this into a moral question-TR]. He also quoted students at UCL who ask which of the books on the reading list is the one they should read, and do they have to read it all. Only librarians ask for and use advanced searching functions

Brand and authority are now considerably more complicated in the digital world. He cited the case of an NHS patient health information system set up in a branch of Tesco. Users presumed the information was provided by Tesco, not the NHS ,and were disappointed to discover the truth. Users don't look at the branding of information and don't evaluate it. Young people are the biggest multi-takers, but not necessarily the best. Lots of users will use friends as information sources, rather than authoritative sources. He cited a (rather old) article by John Naughton, Thanks, Gutenberg - but we're too pressed for time to read.

Librarians don't bang our drum enough: as information and its retrieval becomes more and more complex, we can help, if we can show how we can help people and organisations achieve the outcomes they want; in a university this might be showing how we can help students achieve better grades or researchers gain higher impact for their work. We cannot count on loyalty anymore.

Our services need to have modern interfaces, rather than looking like Dialog in the 1960s. Information literacy programmes are misnamed, and must abandon the preconception that their aim is to cure the user of bad information habits.

As an illustration of the power of user recommendation, he referred to his experience as a young library assistant in Mare Street library, then the central library of the London Borough of Hackney. On a Saturday his job was to shelve the returned books, but he never got further than a few yards with his trolley, as readers would fall on the returned books; if someone else borrowed it, it must be good,

Three hour written examinations don't work anymore. Students can't write for three hours [I'm not sure quite what relevance this had-TR].

If we want to secure the future, we need to get into bed with publishers, who have money, brand and content. Are we wasting an opportunity to make everyone a scholar?

And with that, David was gone. It's a great pity there was no opportunity to question and debate, for much of what he said rang true, but much was controversial, in particular his assumptions about libraries and librarians, and the old and the young. Moreover, we wasted time at the start on a shambolically-conducted AGM. But still more regrettably some of the audience demonstrated that they hadn't grasped David's message by upbraiding people in the audience who were live-tweeting the event. See WoodsieGirl's experience and that of Librarytwopointzero

Though I was not tweeting in those days, I remember my first experience of the old Library Association's London and Home Counties Branch, nearly thirty years ago, was as equally inhospitable to young professionals. It seemed to be a club for sending chief public librarians on foreign jaunts. I'm pleased to say that CILIP in London's admirable Sekforde Arms meetings are not nearly as cliquey and unfriendly.   

For the detailed work of the project see http://www.ucl.ac.uk/infostudies/research/ciber/downloads/

On set theory

I still follow the discussions on the health librarians' Jiscmail list lis-medical. I do this largely for nostalgic reasons, though I would not rule out a return to health librarianship at some point in the future, despite the fact that document supply requests for articles from the Armenian Journal of Proctology have little relevance to the bread and butter of life in a further education college.

However, a recent discussion on creative methods of teaching the basic concepts of Boolean logic caught my eye. Participants leant towards using food and drink to illustrate concepts: fruit salads, gins and tonic, fish and chips, and others even more inventive.

And yet....I do wonder, and did when I practiced it, quite what some of the brightest young minds in the country, who choose to make a career in medicine or nursing, would make of such kindergarten paedagogy. I encountered set theory at school: for some reason we were exposed to what was known, in 1965 or 66, as the 'new maths', including set theory, before reverting to the old sort in the run up to O level. I next encountered it years later on my postgraduate librarianship course when learning how to search a database.

Leaving aside theories about falling or rising educational standards, I find it hard to believe that well-educated doctors, nurses or physiotherapists have never heard of Boolean logic until presented with it by a health librarian in a stuffy library training room on a warm afternoon. I think it may be time for an approach to information literacy that credits the user with some intelligence.

National Trust libraries

I gained new insights into the collections of the National Trust and rare books cataloguing as it is practised today, as well as a hint of a way to pass my retirement,when I heard Stephen Massil speak at a seminar organised jointly by the Institute of Historical Research and CILIP's Library and Information History Group about his experience of cataloguing collections at Trust houses, under the title Libraries of the National Trust: some houses in Kent and Sussex —Shakespeare, landscape and the in-laws. I have taken the liberty of re-ordering some of his material to make for the purposes of this blog post. Of the 150 libraries the Trust owns, there remain 60 to be catalogued. Will there be any left for me when I retire, in ten years time at the earliest?

Stephen has worked at ten houses altogether, during a period when the National Trust holdings, more than 150,00 records, have been uploaded to COPAC. By comparison with other libraries on COPAC, the Trust entries are considerably more detailed, giving fuller descriptions including provenance. It is possible to limit searches to the Trust collections, using the limit options at the bottom of the COPAC search screen.

The Trust is not used to handling readers, so there are not the rare books reading rooms with security and supervision, that we might expect to find in a university. Policy is based on the belief that there should be no need for the public to see books in Trust houses, as there are copies available elsewhere. Most Trust collections have fixed shelf arrangements, which can cause difficulties. It is not unusual for some titles to be in the possession of family members, and when they are returned to the house it may be difficult to accommodate them.

The cataloguer often performs his task in view of visitors, roped off with the furniture and works of art. When Stephen arrives at a house, he uses the genealogies included in the Trust's official brochures as a guide to the history of the family, and hence the growth of the collection, but the evidence of inscriptions and marginalia in the book themselves quickly allow him to build up his own picture of the family tree. Collections are often built by marriage, brides bringing their family's books with them, along with their trousseau.

Cataloguers are issued with a CD of the catalogue, updated monthly. Migration to a new system, advertised as taking six to eight weeks, in fact took six to eight months. Asked what cataloguing system the Trust use, the consensus in the room was that it sounded very like MIMSY XG. In many cases, while parts of the house may have network connections, the areas where the cataloguers work is not networked, precluding live cataloguing. Stephen emphasised the importance of cataloguing the books as objects, of recording and preserving enclosures such as pressed flowers.

He discussed the relationships between owners and local booksellers, printers, publishers and binders. The libraries often offer rich information on these local print economies, for owners would have used the services of tradesmen nearby, for example in Cirencester, Kettering or Evesham. Visitors sometimes ask why all the books 'look the same', as at Stourhead. Usually the owner of the house would order books from publishers and booksellers and send them for binding, according to a bespoke template.

Visitors do not see the considerable annotations inside. While the Trust has a policy of sending archival material to local record offices, ephemera are retained. Thus at Canons Ashby, there is a fine collection of piscatorial material by Izaak Walton, and later angling writers; one late edition of Walton contains a playbill, the only surviving one for a production of a nineteenth century play based on Walton's life work, an unlikely choice of subject; at the Husseys' Scotney Castle, the copy of one of their books by William Sawrey Gilpin's books has the correspondence between Gilpin and the owner discussing how to plan the garden.

As for Shakespeare he told us how Canons Ashby, the Dryden's house, had a First Folio in the nineteenth century, that same one sold in 2001 by Christie's, the sale promoted by reading from the text at The Globe. In the 1860s it had been used for the first attempt at a facsimile edition, and the library there still has two copies of the facsimile.

At Ightham Mote they hold the Trust's earliest book, Ptolemy's atlas of 1477 by Bononi (originally thought to be from 1462). In a few cases the Trust has acquire houses without any collections and has had to stock them from elsewhere, such as at Mompesson House. At Nostell Priory Stephen had discovered a rich collection of Swiss Huguenot material, better than the collection in the Swiss national library. At Owletts, the house of the architect Sir Herbert Baker, the indigenous collection, in a house managed by tenants, is rich in African material, including a title published in Zanzibar.

The 1839 edition of the Voyage of the Beagle at Stourhead, in which Darwin is given as secretary of the Geological Society makes it clear that this is an earlier edition than those published later in that year when he appears as FRS. Darwin was elected FRS in February of that year.

At Wimpole Hall, Elsie Bembridge, Kipling's daughter, brought with her many books from Bateman's, her childhood home, including books she must have read, or had read to her by her father, in the nursery. Is the proper place for these Wimpole or Bateman's? The Kipling Society have strong views on the matter.

There a number of items with important associations, for example at Sissinghurst review copies sent to Vita Sackville-West. The trust has recently acquired Agatha Christie's house, Greenway, which has a rich collection of crime.

Stephen mentioned a confusion in the Senate House library catalogue of the Goldsmiths' collection between James Stanier Clarke, chaplain to the Prince Regent and librarian at Carlton House, the man who acted as go-between when George IV expressed the wish that Jane Austen should dedicate a novel to him, and Thomas Brooke Clarke, chaplain to the Duke of Cumberland and tutor to the duke's illegitimate son George Fitzernest. He also had some criticisms to make of the way that COPAC and the English Short Title Catalogue present books.

I was a little surprised that the Trust's emphasis on treating books as artefacts, and its implications for cataloguing, seemed new to many in the room. It's certainly the approach I used when managing the retrospective cataloguing of the RCVS Historical Collection, and would be second nature to anyone who has worked in the antiquarian book trade. And I would have enjoyed seeing some illustrations of the catalogue records, and the books themselves.

The seminar programme continues with a visit to Dulwich College and a meeting on 1 June to discuss women librarians in the latter part of the nineteenth century.

For more on books considered as objects, see:
Pearson, David
Books as History
London: British Library, 2008

NB links to people in this post go to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography; most public and academic libraries have a subscription, so readers should be able to see them, though you may need to log in first.

  

Conference going

Henry Green's remarkable trilogy of novels, Living, Loving and Party Going, could have been followed by a fourth on conferences. This thought was prompted by a post on the excellent American team blog, In the Library with the Lead Pipe, on the matter of library conferences. They discuss the various conferences American librarians attend; I wonder if we should not record the British experience too.

My conference going hey-day was in the late years of the last centruty and the early years of this. It was a heroic era. Tony McSéan, then Librarian at the British Medical Association, even proposed a journal, the Journal of Airport Librarianship, for those who spent more time in airports than in the libraries they were supposed to run. The joke was told of Derek Law, then at Kings College London,
Q: what's the difference between Derek Law and God?
A: God is everywhere; Derek Law is everywhere but Kings

See also Joeyanne Libraryanne's post, Conference Advice

“They order,” said I, “this matter better in France"

While British librarians confine themselves to spats on lis-link about retrospective cataloguing, the French, as one might expect, do things on a grander scale. In an article entitled Numérisation des livres : Google or not Google ? Le Monde des Livres reports on the disagreement between Jean-Noel Jeanneny and Bruno Racine about Google. This is a curiously public disagreement which in this country would be conducted behind closed doors, for Racine succeeded Jeanneney as president of the Bibliothèque nationale de France in 2007. It is as if Brian Lang and Lynne Brindley were to fall out on Newsnight, or in the pages of the London Review of Books or the Times Literary Supplement.

Both men are former ministers. Jeanneny has issued a revised version of his pamphlet Quand Google défie l'Europe while Racine has produced Google et le nouveau monde. The former argues that the Europeana project is the way to go, the latter is much more friendly to Google and is reported to be negotiating with them, following in the Italian government's footsteps.

How will this develop? Europeana has yet to deliver much, if anything, while the monopolistic pretensions of Google are often denounced whenever librarians gather together. A realistic British position might be to say a plague on both your houses; one wonders that the French do not do the same.

No lottery funding, no comment

Those who watch the pages of the dailies for public library stories with the zeal of an owl in search of voles, seem to have missed Saturday's Financial Times (one article can be viewed free without registration, ten a month if you've registered)  which runs a story on the future of lottery funding. Though one could argue that there is something fitting about public libraries, gateways to knowledge, being funded out of a tax on stupidity, there has always been a danger that lottery funding could be seized on by councils as an easy way out of avoiding their responsibilities to fund a comprehensive service. The Big Lottery Fund has clear guidelines about what they will and will not fund. But as public expenditure decreases, so the boundaries will blur.

There is a further danger: if the population at large were to become statistically literate, then the lottery income would fall yet further.

'He was an energetic perfectionist with a relentless interest in detail'

The title is the description of Charles Wilfred Black from the New Munford, the wiki-based version of Munford's Who was Who in British Librarianship developed by John Bowman, formerly of UCL library school. It could apply to many I have met in my time in this great profession of ours. John spoke earlier this year at a CILIP in London meeting about Robert Proctor.

Introduced by Edward Dudley, who cited a recent definition of a wiki heard on Radio 4 , John started by warning us that dead librarians might not be everyone's cup of tea. Munford's original work was published in print by the Library Association, in a cloth binding of the sort that one could not now imagine Facet producing. Munford tried to cover chief librarians and their deputies, though he was sometimes inconsistent. As well as public libraries, his coverage of the British Museum Library and government libraries was good, though he was weaker on university and college librarians

John first conceived of a digital version of Munford some years ago. To create this version he had Munford's text scanned and checked by a UCL student. Local authority boundaries, names and responsibilities have changed considerably, both in the period covered by Munford , and since.

John explored various possibilities. To build a database would have been an expensive solution and then he hit on the idea of a wiki. Equipped with a copy of Wikis for dummies, he set out to create the wiki, hosted on wikipages, deciding on a page per person. He was nervous about depending on a site which could disappear, or hold him to ransom, so he makes frequent back-ups.

From each page, back links allows the user to see related pages: thus, from a place-name or library authority page, one can find everyone who has been associated with that place or authority. John has added to Munford's information in several ways: where possible he has added to library authority pages the date of adoption of the library acts, taken from Kelly, and has also incorporated information from Greenwood's Library Yearbook and from the British Library Yearbook. He has made links out to Oxford DNB entries, and to the BL catalogue for those who were authors. In the case of modern public library authorities he has links out to their websites, when possible.

Tasks awaiting attention include tidying up the names of library authorities and university libraries, adding links to university histories where these exist, and incorporating some of the local government changes since 1974, such as unitary authorities, including information not in Kelly, such as Robin Alston's database, adding information from Library Association obituaries, and, at the suggestion of Kate Wood in the audience, adding information from LA membership records, now kept in the UCL archives.

John showed an interesting use of the wiki. In James Duff Brown's famous article, Where do we get our librarians? in Library World 3 1900/01, Duff Brown analysed the patterns of training and influence in the public library world of the time, but without naming names. Using the wiki, it is possible, by searching for combinations of authority names, to find out which individuals Duff Brown meant.

John is keen for more volunteers to join the wiki, but made a plea for people to accompany their request to join with some explanatory material. He has had a lot of spam requests.

DCMS review of public libraries: Empower, Inform, Enrich

Margaret Hodge made a speech at an unnamed Southwark public library this morning announcing Empower, Inform, Enrich, the DCMS review of public libraries. The press release is on the DCMS website but, the document is nowhere to be found, a poor omen for the consultation, which closes on 26 January 2010.

Reduced to searching for it, I came across the telling coincidence that the same slogan, though with the words in a slightly different order, is the name of an annual conference held by the Equifax credit reference agency. Or it was. This year, the website says, 'given the current economic pressures that are broadly curtailing travel and conference budgets ...we have decided to cancel the conference for this year'. 

Auspicious.

Update: the consultation document is now available on the DCMS website as a 2.8 MB pdf

The Wirral

The report of the inquiry into Wirral council's plan to close eleven public libraries is out, and is a precise and scathing analysis. It lists a series of failures by the politicians in charge, failures to take account of the library needs of those who elected them, to devise a strategy for library services, and to attend to the needs of groups of adults and of all children in the borough.

Wirral caved in before the results were published, withdrawing the proposals.

I'm not sure it's possible to overstate how significant this is. This victory won by a local and national campaign, including CILIP, will make every town hall philistine think twice before cutting libraries.

For more, see Laura Swaffield and Bob McKee

JISC Collections AGM

I've recorded most of today's JISC Collections AGM on twitter: see the tweets at the hashtag #jcagm for my and others versions of the event. However, for some of the day the wifi let me down, and I also wanted to add some thoughts on one of the presentations.

Digital Images for Education is a project funded by a VAT windfall JISC enjoyed to provide recent, that is from the past twenty-five years, digital content for schools and further and higher education. Michael Upshall took us through the project, which will provide 500 hours of video, around 30 terabytes of data, as well as 56,000 still images. His part of the project does not include delivery: the images are to be made available in the summer of 2010, The central problems they had to face are those of duplication, variations in metadata and the amount of time necessary to evaluate images

Michael then showed us pictures of Eric Clapton, the late Queen Mother, Jerry Hall and Giles Brandreth and asked if the audience would accept them for the project. We said no.

I enjoyed James Clay's passionate statement of the case for technology in education, though I found it hard to recognise the further education college I work in, with guns, gangs and knives, in the picture he painted of the sector. I wondered, too, as he spoke of the transforming power of technology with failing courses if that was really the whole of the story. Giving a bad teacher or unmotivated learner an iPod Touch does not of itself change that situation. Heaven knows my own institution needs considerable investment in computing, in the infrastructure and in people with the skills necessary to run college computing in the 21st century and to change the learner experience into something modern. But there's more to it than that.