Tom Roper's Weblog

CoFHE/UC&R second plenary: the student voice

We should have heard three student voices, but had to make do with one. Neither Usman Ali, Vice President of NUS for higher education, nor the president of tExeter College students union, turned up. However Llywelyn 'Taffy" Morris, Education Officer for the Exeter Guild of Students (the SU) rose to the occasion. Introducing him Liz Jolly said that students are at the heart of what we do, but we make too many assumptions about them. Now librarians are, at last, listening to students.

When Taffy came to Exeter in 2006, Facebook was unknown, and Blair was Prime Minister. The 2010 intake on the other hand have never known unwired life. Now academics use Facebook, and YouTube is referenced in essays.

Taffy has an impressive network of 100 student course representatives and surveyed them. 71% didn't know who to contact if they had a complaint about the library. He felt that librarians too often make blind guesses about what students want. The Exeter university library has been plagued by power cuts, a source of some frustration to students with deadlines, but when Taffy raised it he was told that the library had only had two complaints [it occurred to me that if the library were to listen to what students were saying in social media, they might have picked up the problem-TR].

Following some of the remarks Steve Smith had made the previous day it was interesting to hear Taffy say that the library was the one tangible thing students felt they received for their tuition fees. His reps felt there were insufficient copies of textbooks, and the brighter students resorted to tactical use of the reservation system.

50% of his sample used a mixture of print and digital resources, but he drew attention to the staggering costs of printing, if he wanted a paper copy to annotate or highlight, Only 4% of his sample said they could find e-journals easily, describing it as a game of hide and seek which the journals always win. Who teaches library skills he asked? Lecturers, it seems, and that poorly. He achieved his degree without ever using an e-journal. Students also wanted more desk space and more computers.

This lead to a lively discussion. When asked what might be the best time for library skills to be taught, he suggested that librarians take over teaching time, invading classes in a guerrilla way.Asked if he bought core texts, he replied that it depended on the subject. He did a joint politics and economics degree, and bought texts in economics, but not in politics, where the sources he needed to use were more disparate.He thought libraries should use focus groups more. He thought the National Student Survey unhelpful, because it only reflects the views of final year undergraduates. He goes to the library often, partly for social reasons. He was shocked when he found out the amount of material sitting o the shelves that had not been borrowed in over ten years. He hadn't been very involved in planning the new library space. On when to survey students he thought mid-year was best. I asked him whether he could see any difference between postgraduate and undergraduate attitudes to the library; he replied that, like most student unions, they have some difficulty in organising postgrads.

Monday workshops

it's difficult to blog workshops. So much of the content is in the exchanges between the participants, hard to capture except in a video of the proceedings.

Ruth Curry of the Research Information Network presented on the theme, Library what library? Building on Steve Smith's remarks, she pointed to a future of prolonged significant cuts. It's too late for efficiency savings, which have already been made. There will be a much greater emphasis on shared services, including sharing with FE. Stock and staff will be hit hard, and it remains to be seen whether ring-fencing of STM (science, technology and medicine) will persist. Journals budgets have been growing at the expense of book budgets. Extra student places have been cut by half, Welsh universities are starting to share, we must expect significant losses.

There will also be, though neither Ruth nor Steve Smith referred to this, some institutional closures and take-overs, in both FE and HE. The weak will go to the wall.

In the new situation, libraries have to show how they add value to educational institutions. Among the services that could be shared are access, purchasing, management of digital resources, catalogues and cataloguing, the LMS, storage, disposal and training. How much use is made of other peoples libraries? [In FE, zero-TR]

We need to focus on academic priorities, on research and user needs. Ruth shared some work RIN had commissioned on researchers' behaviour. They value speed and convenience, use a narrow range of sources, and are put off by pay walls. They continue to need quiet space. Students show many of the same characteristics. They tend to pick and dip and use services in the early hours.

Then we worked in groups and were encouraged by Sally to think the unthinkable.

The second workshop, by Leo Appleton, on branding a super-converged service, is less easy to describe; I would have liked to have heard more about how he and his team had developed their service, and less about the general aspects of brands in the modern world, which was mostly devoted to multi-national monopoly capitalist organisations.

CoFHE/UC&R session 1

Oh calamity. I seem to have deleted, or not saved, my notes of the first session on Monday afternoon. From memory, Michele Shoebridge, who runs a super-coverged service called Academic Services, including libraries, IT and student services, welcomed us and talked us through the plans for new buildings on the campus. Then the V-C, Professor Steve Smith, spoke, giving his view of the current and future state of higher education funding. Many of his arguments can be found in his recent Observer article, but the main points I recall are

• We need not fear the budget too much; it is the autumn's Comprehensive Spending Review which we should fear more; he expects it to require cuts of 20-25% over four years
• He talked at some length about tuition fees, a misnomer, he was keen to point out, and what might happen after the Browne review reports. He sees us descending into a valley, whose depth we do not know, and eventually ascending on the other site, but to what altitude?

We ran out of time so, though I had my hand up, I couldn't ask him, as I intended, to ask him to describe how he saw the future of HE and FE partnerships.

That doesn't do justice to a rich and thoughtful analysis. But if my notes ever appear, I shall amplify it. I also commend to you Lex Rigby's account: http://www.lexrigby.com/2010/06/22/cofheucr-fifth-joint-conference-day-1/

Royal Ascot

Circumstances have prevented me from paying the necessary attention to Royal Ascot until today. I choose:
230: Jackaroo
305: Harbinger
350: High Standing
425: Medicean Man
500: Submariner
535: Swingheel

Blog posted here.

CoFHE and UC&R Joint Conference

I'm off to Exeter for the CoFHE and UC&R Joint Conference next week. I've created, as a service to conference-going humanity, an iCal calendar of the programme. To subscribe, go to webcal://ical.me.com/tomroper/UCRSCoFHE.ics; to view online, go to http://ical.me.com/tomroper/UCRSCoFHE

The twitter hashtag #exeter10 is already seeing a lot of traffic. But are we the only event in Exeter this year?

The Copious Text

The copiousness of the Copious Text symposium last month has defeated me. It’s taken me so long to take my fifteen pages of notes and turn them into something readable partly because the papers presented there were so rich, and partly because I am not up to date, if I ever was, in early modern studies. When one speaker began describing the changing reactions to and criticisms of E M W Tillyard’s The Elizabethan World Picture over the decades, it came as news to me that this book, which provided the background for my Shakespearean studies at A level so long ago, was not still considered the definitive work on Elizabethan cosmology. And I fear that, at a distance of a month, the meaning of some of my notes is obscure. If any of the speakers read this, I ask forgiveness from those whose contributions I have mangled and compressed.

Five speakers spoke about five texts, or, in the first case, an author: Professor Neil Rhodes from St Andrews on Shakespeare, Dr Angus Vine of Sussex on William Camden’s Britannia, Dr Kathryn Murphy on Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, Dr Kevin Killeen of York on Thomas Browne’s Pseudodoxia Epidemica and Dr Kate Bennett, once more from Oxford, on Audrey’s Brief Lives.

The copious text is a text written in the abundant style described by Erasmus in De Copia and what attracted me, and another librarian, Katherine Schopflin, who is researching the early history of encyclopaedias at UCL, was their description as early encyclopaedic texts.

Neil Rhodes spoke of the encyclopaedic texts available to Shakespeare. One, Batman upon Bartholomew, was a modernised edition of Bartolomaeus Anglicus's De Proprietatibus Rerum, originally translated into English 1398 and first printed by Wynkyn De Worde (? Caxton) in 1495. Organised hierarchically, it mingles fact with fiction. A more modern composition, Pierre de la Primaudaye's The French Academie was first translated in 1586 and went through several editions, expanding with each new version, until 1618. He also described some of the forerunners of the modern dictionary of quotations, The Dictes and Sayings of the Philosophers and Erasmus's Adagia, which hark back to a pre-literate society, designed as a rhetorical support system, providing the speaker with quotations to make an argument for or against any given proposition. Professor Rhodes pointed to a contradiction in encyclopaedic texts: that they present knowledge both as fixed, and as fluid. The places and head used in a commonplace book are by no means arbitrary but represent forms and things. Turning to the Shakespearean theatre, he said that it too has an encyclopaedic character, betrayed for example by he name of the Globe. The structure of the Elizabethan and Jacobean theatre building is microcosmic, a model in plaster and wood of medieval cosmology. Compare Hamlet's speech or the line in the Duchess of Malfi, 'look you, the stars shine still.'

Angus Vine showed how William Camden used collaborators to expand the Britannia from edition to edition, encouraging and acknowledging the contributions of readers and local antiquaries, so that he was sometimes more editor than author. Britannia went through six editions, in 1586, 1587, 1590, 1594, 1600 and 1607, starting as a dumpy quarto and ending as a folio, and translated into English in 1610. The work started as a collaboration, for Camden was recruited by a Dutchman, Abraham Oretelius, who was working on a dictionary of Roman place names; his two previous English correspondents had let him down. Dr Vine showed us correspondence between Camden and Nicholas Roscarrock about Cornish saints, and with a Robert Claxton in Northumbria, asking about the Picts' [that is to say, Hadrian's] Wall and Reginald Bainbrigg about standing stones at Salkeld. At Camden's death in 1623 he was buried in Westminster Abbey and Thomas Browne, of whom more anon, wrote a poem in his honour in a memorial volume, Camdeni insignia, published in 1624.

At lunchtime it was a great pleasure to be taken over to the Special Collections at the University Library, to admire some items chosen to reflect the concerns of the symposium.

Kathyrn Murphy spoke first in the afternoon, on Burton and polymathy and polypraxy, two variants of copiousness. Burton wrote an early anti-papist play in the aftermath of the Gunpowder Plot, Philosophaster, in which he contrasted the good polymath or polyhistor with the bad, Jesuitical, polypraxist or polypragmatist. The encyclopaedic can either be helpful, as in Aristotle, or a busy-body. Is the Anatomy of Melancholy encyclopaedic? The question is anachronistic, for the encyclopaedia for Burton was not a type of book but an abstract noun. There is always a danger that encyclopaedic knowledge can be but 'shallow smatterings'. Burton warns against this shallowness in scholarship.

Kevin Kileen discussed Theopaediae or Thomas Browne's Pseudodoxia Empidemica, of common and vulgar errors, a book that has fascinated me since, as a boy, I discovered a copy in the' attic of our house in Cambridge. Introducing this with the philosophers' puzzle of the Argo, whose planks were replaced one by one until it might, or might not, be a new vessel, This is an anti-encyclopaedia, in that it catalogues and exposes false ideas, rather than compile and collect correct ones. Dr Kileen discussed the different forms of organisation of such a work: alphabetical, hexameral or according to some systematisation of knowledge such as the Ramist one.

Finally, Kate Bennet, who is preparing an edition of Audrey's Brief Lives, took us through the challenges facing an editor of a copious author's texts, not least those of unravelling the erroneous editorial decisions taken by one's predecessors, and of striking a balance between presenting material as it is, and as it should be.

The Coates-Roper letters

I've removed the text of this post. Tim Coates didn't like it and, since he threatened me with litigation, and, with my job in jeopardy, I can ill afford to defend a law suit, it seemed prudent. Perhaps when we're both dead the world can know what he said. I stand by every word I said, if you read it before he made his threats.

Sandown and York

Anyone with any sense will be keeping their powder dry for Royal Ascot next week. Not me; I choose three at York and one at Sandown
240 York: Distant Memories
315 York: Victoire de Lyphar
330 Sandown: Reignier
350 York: Ejteyaaz

Fear not, there are some non-racing posts coming soon.

Blog posted here.

Derby Day

On a gorgeous Derby Day, I commend to you Henry Cecil's Bullet Train.
My selections in full, all at Epsom:
140: Dr Zhivago
240: Reggane
315: Oldjoesaid
400: Bullet Train

Haydock and Newmarket

200 Haydock: Inxile
215 Newmarket: Alrasm
230 Haydock: Bewitched
300 Haydock: Les Fazzani
320 Newmarket: Jack My Boy
330 Haydock: Lord Shanakill
355 Newmarket: Red Jazz