The article states:

BVCL is planning to introduce three levels of membership to the library.

- Reader’s Ticket – Free membership and free loans of stock, with some limits to the numbers of items which can be borrowed. Due dates and fines will apply.

- Library Member – A £24 annual fee will see people join as full members of the wider charity. Benefits will include being able to borrow a higher number of books, keeping books for an unlimited time, a free period of use on the public computers, discounts in the cafe and priority booking for events.

- Gold Membership – Customers can join as a ‘patron’ for a £75 annual subscription. Members would be making a donation to the running costs of the library and attracting additional funds to the charity through Gift Aid. BVCL will reinvest income earned through membership in new library stock. 

In it, Richard comments on the fact that he predicted the extinction of public libraries some time ago, “because, in an age of e-books and Google who needs them.” and since this prediction he has changed his mind.

“I got it totally wrong. Probably.

Whether or not we will want libraries in the future I cannot say, but I can categorically state we will need them, because libraries aren’t just about the books they contain. Moreover, it is a big mistake, in my view, to confuse the future of books or publishing with the future of public libraries. They are not the same thing.”

His blog post highlights why he believes public libraries will still be relevant in the future.

He emphasises the public library (and public library services) as…

• A place that is “more than mere facts, information or ‘content’”
• A social hub
• An information resource that is accessible to all
• An ideas hub where…
  • existing ideas are valued,  stored and made freely available to all
  • new ideas are created and developed
  • the right setting is provided to nurture ideas
  • librarians act as a catalyst in helping develop these ideas. They are “sifters, guides and co-creators of human connection.”
• An information resource where personal/human interaction is an important part of the service
• An influential method of delivering information – library services are still regarded as trustworthy information sources.

This quote about lack of use by younger generations really appealed to me:

“…admittedly many younger people still see no need to visit a library… But this could be because they still see libraries as spaces full of old books rather than places full of new ideas.”

And in summing up, Richard’s quote makes a clear point.

“There is a considerable amount of discussion at the moment about obesity. The idea that we should watch what we eat or we will end up prematurely dead. But where is the debate about the quality of what and where we read or write? Surely what we put inside our heads – where we create or consume information – is just as important as what we put inside our mouths.”

Scores of friends of libraries and campaign groups have formed all over the country, taking on Ed Vaizey and Jeremy Hunt’s roles as superintendents of their own local library services – standing up and saying “No!”, whilst Mr Hunt and Mr Vaizey (who both have some kind of Government responsibility for libraries) do very little.

Ed Vaizey's Unused Sheriff Badge (c) ggstopflat/Flickr

People are fighting the cuts in so many ways…

• As part of an organised campaign or friends group.
• By signing the Women’s Institute libraries petition. (15,798 online signatures so far. Come on, we need more signatures than this!)
• By signing local petitions.
• Writing newspaper articles or blog posts to highlight what’s going on.
• Commenting upon newspaper articles or blog posts about the cuts.
• Responding to library consultations.
• Local Councillors voting against decisions to cut in their areas.
• Anyone who has spoken to friends, families or strangers to highlight what’s going on.
• Anyone whose taken note of someone who’s spoken to them about UK public library cuts.
• Sharing a web link or a news article about the cuts.
• Running library events as a way to highlight the message.
• New and existing library users who have found out that libraries are of more use to them than they realised and are making use of them in new ways.

Any of these actions make me realise that I (and other library service colleagues around the country) are valued. It’s a thought that gives me a smile, despite having to watch the battle between those who want hack away at library services and those who want to save them.

This post was triggered by a thought I had after reading the Friends of Gloucestershire Libraries open letter addressed to Ed Vaizey. This letter  highlighted concerns about his inaction over the past year regarding public library cuts and asked for people to support and sign the letter too.

I looked at that letter yesterday to see who had signed it and, as a public librarian, I was genuinely touched by the number and wide range of people who had signed it and left comments in support of public libraries and their staff.

After reading that letter I realised that as a public librarian I hadn’t said thank you for a long time for the support people are giving public libraries during this tough time. I know some people are putting so much effort in that it’s basically like having a second job!

So… thank you to everyone and anyone, wherever you are, who has said “No” to public library cuts over the past year or so. It’s the nicest Christmas present you could have given me. You really don’t know how much I appreciate it.

22 11 11 whodunnit indeed (c) Kikishua/Flickr

My first great find is Dapper. I imagine this is old hat to some people, as it’s been around for a few years. It’s actually owned by Yahoo too. As the site itself says…

Dapper is a tool that enables users to create update feeds for their favorite sites and website owners to optimize and distribute their content in new ways.

It doesn’t do the same thing as Yahoo pipes, but is extremely handy for pulling out data from web pages where a feed doesn’t exist, and it provides the output in the following formats (if it’s relevant to the data on the page) – XML, RSS, HTML, Google Gadget, Google Map, Image Loop, iCalendar, ATOM, CSV, JSON, XSL, YAML. I’m not going to pretend that I know what all of the feeds are, but they seem like a fairly handy group of feeds to be able to use.

I thought I’d see if I could create an RSS feed for our library catalogue. I’ve always wanted an RSS for it (so we can feed stock information through to different places easily) and I’ve also wanted a way to produce alerts for new titles (so users can be informed about any new stock they may be interested in), but our library catalogue neither. But now, using Dapper, I can do both easily.

To achieve this Dapper asks you to:

1. Provide URL’s of web pages your data appears in. You just need to provide sample pages here. I gave it URLs of catalogue search results pages.
2. Highlight samples of the data on these pages that you want in your feed. I highlighted fields containing Title, Author, Format (eg Hardback, DVD, etc), Book cover, Number of copies and then told Dapper what to call these fields.
3. Group together data fields – this effectively puts related data together in a single record. If you don’t do this you end up with a list of unrelated data items in your RSS feed, rather than a list of ready formed records.
4. Identify any portion of the url that can be changed by the user to create a brand new search using that resource. For example, in my url I changed “_TitleResults.aspx?page=1&searchTerm=cake&searchType=99&searchTerm2=&media=&br” to “_TitleResults.aspx?page=1&searchTerm={Query}&searchType=99&searchTerm2=&media=&br”, so I could easily create a new feed for a search for any other keyword without having to go through the whole process again.
5. Choose the output format of the feed eg RSS, ATOM, HTML, iCalendar, etc (as mentioned earlier). You can also say which fields you want to appear in the output feed.

In response to this Dapper gives you a unique URL for your feed.

From this stage you can also:

1. Change the query text, as mentioned in (4) and get its own unique URL for this new feed.
2. Set up a service using the feed you created. Here you can make it public and allow others to create their own searches by changing the query text. This is the service I created. I also created a Google Gadget and added it to my iGoogle page.
3. Set up an email alert for your feed. So, if a new item is added to the feed (eg a new book comes in stock matching your search query) it will send you an email notification.

I’ve only been tinkering with it for a few hours, but it looks like it’s going to come in handy for pulling out and re-using data in web pages that has in the past been difficult for me to get at.

Yesterday I found out via a friend on Twitter that Hootsuite had acquired Twapper keeper in September.

If you don’t know, Twapper keeper is a service that allows you to archive tweets. I use this service quite a bit and paid for the upgrade, so that I could archive more than the free account would allow me to. It’s a great service and I’m pleased that Hootsuite has realised how useful it is too – it’s just a shame that the first time I’d heard that it had been bought was yesterday – there’s been no announcement on the Twapper keeper blog about this. The site does now include a message though…

“Dec 8th, 2011: Transition update

Twapper Keeper’s archiving is now available in HootSuite! As a result, we will be shutting down Twapper Keeper. Existing archives will be kept running until Jan 6, 2012, after which you will not be able to access your archives anymore.

Thanks for using TwapperKeeper – we look forward to seeing you at HootSuite.”

“Oh good! It’s available in Hootsuite,” I thought, but I also saw the “you will not be able to access your archives anymore.” bit too.

Panic stations! What will happen to my archives? Will they be deleted? Maybe they’ll be available in Hootsuite?

In an attempt to find out, I left a comment on the Hootsuite blog yesterday.

Comment on Hootsuite blog post “HootSuite Announces 3 Million in Financing, Strategic Acquisition and Executive Team Appointments”

As a frequent user of Twapperkeeper can you tell me:
1) How will this integration happen?
2) Will it be available for the free Hootsuite accounts?
3) What will happen to the archives I have created on the Twapperkeeper site? I don’t want to lose any of them. If I do lose them it would have been a total waste of time me setting them up, especially as I paid to do so.

The response pointed me to their feedback site asking for suggestions about integrating Twapper keeper with Hootsuite, so I left these 2 suggestions – one regarding access to existing Twapper keeper archives and another suggesting ideas for development on the service, as I really feel Hootsuite could do something with Twapper keeper’s original idea.
Maintain access to existing archives that have been created on Twapperkeeper.

Twapperkeeper is often used to archive tweets for conferences and events – the tweets are used to document the event/conference and are accessed not only around that time, but also at later dates.

Due to changes in Twitter’s terms of service, users have not been able to download these archives for some time and therefore the only way these archives can can be accessed and manipulated is via the Twapperkeeper sites RSS & HTML archive links.

Can Hootsuite provide access to these existing archives in some form, so that they can be read and shared with other non Hootsuite users?

Ideas for Twapper keeper integration.

1) Allow Twapper keeper archives to be made public or private.

2) Allow the sharing of Twapper keeper archives to a broad range of external services. eg Twitter; Facebook; G+; Delicious; Tumblr…

3) Provide each archive with an RSS/XML output feed containing details of individual tweets eg status text, twitter name, status id, date stamp, etc.

4) Update archives regularly ie once an hour – or allow users to define how often the archive should be updated.

5) Allow archives to be created from any search functionality that Twitter currently provides, including lists.

6) Make Twapper keeper archive functionality available for free Hootsuite accounts as well as paid.

7) Allow filtering of tweets in archive using similar criteria as existing filters in Twapper keeper’s “Search” function.

8) Expand archiving function to other services available in Hootsuite eg Facebook, Linkedin, Tumblr, WordPress, etc.

9) Re. 8 – allow archives from different services to be combined into a single archive if desired.

10) Provide capability to mark and share favourite tweets (or posts if option 8 exists) in an archive.

11) Add tags (hashtags?) to archive upon creation and allow them to be subsequently amended.

12) Add description of archive and allow it to be subesequently amended

13) Ability to cross reference archives, for example (a) if you click on a person whose tweet has been archived, display all of the other archives they are linked to ie anywhere their tweets have been archived – this might be useful to highlight expertise or interests of individual users. (b) If any of the tweets appears in any other archive too.

14) Allow capability to bundle together archives in themes.

That made me feel better…

but I’ve just seen this tweet – sent today from the Twapper keeper account.

TwapperKeeper fans: archiving services are now migrated to HootSuite.com and available to #HootSuite Pro customers c/@hootsuite_help

• “What the F is going on?”
• “What am I doing?”
• “I’m tired and I want to go back to bed.”

I’d like to contribute to the “Keeping your library mojo intact” debate…

My words of wisdom are…

Do it before you get to the age where you are:

• Making those funny sighing noises when you bend over.
• Struggling to get out of the bath.
• Snoozing on the sofa a little bit more than you used to.

I’m not saying anyone at that age is not going to have any mojo, but at the moment I don’t and I’m guilty of all 3 points above. So, in the true spirit of making the evidence fit the conclusion, this is why I believe my library mojo has been drained awaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay.

Or maybe I’m just:

• Disheartened by a lack of support for libraries
• Sick of the shit going on around public libraries
• Sick of the lack of leadership in all quarters
• Sick of toss-pots who think they know about libraries when they haven’t used one for years
• Sick of having to fight for libraries as one of the little people, when the people who have much more power do…

“F’ ALL!”

At the moment all this frustration is making me want to take an Incredible Hulk stance

“HULK SMASH!”

(c) Kiwanja / Flickr

And if anyone posts a comment here giving the usual crap about how:

• You can buy books cheaply from Amazon
• Everyone has the internet at home
• You can just Google it
• You can get it all on e-books
• Why do you need librarians?
• etc, etc, etc

They will be told to…

“PISS OFF!”

An unprofessional attitude, I know, but I can’t really see many other people higher up actually fighting for professional staff anyway! I can hear them talking about it, but that’s about it!

Yours grumpily….

NB: This is probably just a blip in my library mojo.

• Mick Fortune talking about what happened in the past year around RFID
• ISO 28560 standard finally published in 2011
• UK data model published; BLCF published (UK); SIP3.0 due at end of 2011
• More interest globally in library RFID
• Suppliers – Bibliotecha/ITG/Intellident merged; New self-service suppliers; new suppliers using RFID/NFC in smart phones
• Moving on from RFID solely for self-service circulation and into discovery tools.
• Tags are being seen more than just labels – they hold data and new applications are being built on this idea
• HF frequency is still dominant over UHF
• What lies ahead? RFID transform from dumb label; Use of standards will become vital; US market will lead on RFID lib. market
• RFID suppliers may become next LMS suppliers

• Mark Hughes from Swansea up now.
• Mark Hughes was one of authors of ORILS specification document
• Mark Hughes talking about BIC NAG specification for RFID
• Need to make sure your RFID system is future proof; be realistic; take note of the suppliers expertise
• NAG BIC standards are supposed to evolve. The situation is constantly changing and the specification needs to move with this.
• People need to ensure they don’t underestimate the time it takes to tag stock.
• SIP2 is sometimes interpreted slightly differently by suppliers and you may need to iron out niggles!

• Peter Kilborn talking about LMS/RFID communication.
• What’s wrong with SIP2? … Not much; it’s free to use; but it’s getting quite old; there’s now more to RFID than self-service
• RT @mickfortune: Slides from my presentation at #RFID11 now available at http://t.co/7Y87va4x
• Communication. What does BLCF do that SIP2 doesn’t?… Built for extensibility; built to cope with web services; open; free
• BLCF designed by RFID experts. Was commissioned by BIC. Info here http://t.co/jzlimPvC
• BLCF is currently in draft stage.
• Alternative standards – SIP3, but does little more than update SIP2; & NCIP

• Viv Bradshaw (Intellident/Bibliotecha) – BLCF: Why did Intellident get involved?
• BLCF: web services; better support for non-LMS sys; secure http; uses world wide standards eg XML; handle multi process at same time
• BLCF: can go beyond library services – eg council wide services; one card systems
• BLCF – backwards compatible with SIP2; use modern web based standards; RFID/LMS vendors can offer more; will be controlled by BIC
• RT @mickfortune: Gap analysis between BLCF and SIP 3.0 reveals the circulation orientation of the latter – Viv at #RFID11
• Should libraries be going for BLCF & ignore SIP3.0? Possibly available within 6 months, but need library service to pilot it
• Library services need to ask their vendors to support BLCF.
• RT @robmajor: BLCF is the new acronym on the block #RFID11

• Paul Chartier talking about ISO conformance and interoperability.
• There’s never been an authority for mandating certification of ISO This will change. Compliance testing will be available
• Study undertaken by UCLA ininteroperability of RFID tags; readers; etc.
• RT @Mark_H_Swansea: #rfid11 in effect standards compliance prevents you as purchaser from getting ‘locked in’ to proprietary technology …
• ISO will open up the market; new vendors; will help with new technology developments
• European Commission recently received response re. RFID privacy- all libs will be expected to undertake privacy impact assessment!
• Don’t know if last tweet was just suggestion or fact!!!

• John Cunningham. Extending RFID self-service
• Talking about budget cuts creating pressures on services.
• Talking about John Laing & Hounslow library services.
• Shared services and integrated council services approach – RFID can assist in this.
• Using skills of library staff to deliver extended services.
• Intellident myCommunity self-service beyond libraries – eg council payments
• Sandra Bruce-Gordon (John Laing) – using myCommunity at Hounslow. 
• Hounslow say 1 aim of introducing RFID self-service was to expand/improve library staff customer service skills
• Hounslow efficiency savings – 6 FTE staff through “natural wastage”.
• Hounslow “will not be closing any of our libraries.” That doesn’t necessarily mean no cuts. See http://t.co/En7p2TrG
• myCommunity service looks interesting.

• Chris Millican: Taking stock – innovative approaches to stock management through use of RFID
• Stock taking time can be reduced. “Revolutionising the stock management process.”
• Wondering if anyone has successful RFID solution for assessing use of reference stock? #RFID11
• Uni of Central Lancs. Lib. faced with budget reduction, but will still be expected to provide great service to fee paying students.
• RFID gadgets look great. I sometimes wonder how many designers think “Hmm! I’ll design this like a photon stun-gun, just cos I can”?
• Handy that students don’t always put books back on shelves – can be put through sorter to assess use of material that’s not issued
• Issue laptop with RFID tags at Uni of Lancs.
• Why can’t we use our own mobile phones to issue books?

• Mickfortune talks ISO standard & how suppliers intend to get us to the stage where we are all RFID standardised
• Paul Dalton – Intellident. Talking about migrating to new data model.
• UK RFID vendors are already interoperable, but based on legacy/proprietary data models.
• Mike Chambers – 2CQR & the RFID Alliance. Doesn’t feel proprietary data models aimed to lock-in services, but to provide a service.
• Surprisingly few people in conference said they wanted to move to standard! :-/ Or did I dream that!!!!
• @mickfortune points out suppliers highlight fact they are interoperable with other systems, but what if a new RFID supplier pops up?
• @mickfortune was also surprised that very few library services are looking towards moving to standards!!!

• University of Central Lancashire win the “RFID in Libraries Innovation Award. (also involved Capita and 3M)

• Nicky Kaye talking about Bracknell Forest Council RFID Smartcards. One card for many services.
• Smart Card Networking Forum is useful place to discuss issues.
• Smart cards – enrol once and it enrols you on other services. Transaction data can be passed back from individual services
• Provides a lot of detailed management information back to Council’s, so they can develop their services.

• Stephen Mossop: Managing laptop loans. Laptop, lockers, key control was problem with Uni of Exeter laptop loans.
• Laptop lockers were a long way away from were you could use them ie not in a study area or library.
• Laptops were bought by University – thin client, so not likely to be stolen and sold in the pub! They needed to manage themselves.
• RT @Mark_H_Swansea: #rfid11 involvement of mobido to solve the problem of how to integrate existing RFID with laptop loan lockers with n …
• Jennifer from Mobido http://t.co/PoBwebiG sounds as if she started in the same way as @juliancheal with RFID. Tagging at home

RFID circuit board (adapted from cgommel)

• Richard Stewart: Smartphones in the library.
• I expected more people at the conference to be smart phone owners!!!
• NFC – near field communication. Can buy smart tickets with phone.
• Huddersfield University gets a mention re. e-payment kiosks
• Could my phone be used for payment? As money? Saves carrying cards etc. Yes they can.
• Handling cash costs money – libraries could save money through users using NFC and ‘wallet’ software. Maybe use phone as lib card.
• NFC use in libraries – user authentication; secure fine payments; age restricted stock use; peer-to-peer comms; book issues
• Access digital content from the item you’re looking at.
• Pay for services via e-voucher. Idea: Get e-voucher downloaded automatically to phone as soon as you walk into library. Get 3 e-vouchers and get free DVD!

• Eric Grosshans
• By George! An American chappie just took to the stage and quoted Shakespeare at us. *Applause* Encore.
• The Library phone: Focus on business, function, increased accessibility.
• Mobile phone use inside library – checkout; notification of reserved items; events
• Phone use outside library – capture market share (scan barcode in shop & see if it’s in library); lib info eg location/times; events
• The Library Phone: virtual library card; online cat; paperless receipts; notifications; ; qr-code
• Library phone: The users provide the technology – library services don’t have to provide it for them.
• Smart connect card system only allows individual systems within the whole system to see personal info they are only entitled to see

• Paul Chartier highlights that once smart phones using NFC technology move from rfid emulator/reader to rfid writer you have to be careful with security. (To clarify, the services discussed by Eric Grosshans are not services that use NFC technology and as such do not present a security risk)

• Nicholas Lewis: Reducing total cost of ownership.
• Do you continue to benchmark your services against other services? Look at workflow processes.
• What technical functionality is missing? Listen to your users to find out what processes work.
• Innovation comes from all the suppliers, so why would we want to be lumbered with a single suppliers system.
• Users need to get involved in the discussion around RFID development. These are services we pay for & have a say in what happens.

• Martin Palmer concluding the event. You can use systems in ways they weren’t intended for; Make use of mobile technology; Standards!
• Is self-service about providing better customer service or now just a way to provide ANY service in a time of cuts? #savelibraries

Visa sticks NFC into a microSD card (c) Tom Purves/Flickr

Below them, I’ve also included some thoughts on the event itself.

How the Future Internet will Shape Libraries (Klaus Tochtermann, Leibniz Information Centre for Economics, University of Kiel and Professor of Computer Media)

• Future internet. (3) Internet of things. Any item with an internet connection/IP address.
• Future internet. (4) Internet of services.
• Internet of services. Your services available wherever you have a presence – not just pull people back to your website to use them.
• Put the book anywhere in Hamburg & geolocate them! Users find it via phone & share idea about book. What a crazy idea. I love it
• Linked open data won’t replace marc. Catalogues are available immediately, but need to sync catalogues & L.O.D. service.

Visibility and Collaboration in Digital Domains (Linda Vidlund / Cecilia Petersson, Uppsala University Library)

• Uppsala uni. – used qr codes around campus with temptation of free gifts from library. Also small digi screens on shelves with info
• Qr-codes used to put references at end of physical books.

Visibility and Collaboration in Digital Domains (David McMenemy, University of Strathclyde)

• Now listening to @D_McMenemy talking about collaboration in the digital domain. #ili2011
• Digital libraries are moving on from content based – now greater interactivity.
• Looking at processes in public libraries to see where collaboration could be put into place.
• 98% UK public libraries don’t have a digital strategy.
• If uk public libraries go down the fragmented volunteer route who will collaborate to provide coherent services?
• Why are so many local authorities duplicating the same content?

New Ways of Analysing to Prove Value (Frank Cervone, Purdue University Calumet)

• In session talking about how social networks work. How connections work.
• How are nodes connected in social networks?
• Measure of ties based on strength (frequency; duration; direction). Important because strong ties affect people & weak ties link…
• http://t.co/kgIQDOQt is good for analysing social networks. Twendz is good. Twapperkeeper/summarizr is good for analysing…

New Ways of Analysing to Prove Value (Penny Bailey, Bailey Solutions)

• RT @bethanar: PB: knowledge should not live in your email inbox #ili2011
• Need to measure value of services where possible.

Innovations in Usage Analysis (Dave Pattern, University of Huddersfield / Bryony Ramsden, University of Huddersfield)

• #lidp Huddersfield project – looked at library usage inc non-usage.
• #lidp How does library borrowing affect user grades?
• #lidp Needed to be aware of data protection and legal issues.
• #lidp Found relationship between use of library resources and degree attainment, but not necessarily between visits and attainment.
• #lidp More info about project at http://t.co/s2scvsOy

Innovations in Usage Analysis (Lisa Charnock, Intute / Andy Land, University of Manchester)

• SALT project at Mimas. Library circ. data activity could help promote underused but relevant stock.
• How do people select books they use? Serendipity; Anxiety; Trust concerns; Cynical about ratings & reviews
• Mimas SALT. User evaluation of service to see whether recommender service would work. Amended thresholds to get accurate recomends
• Will be testing SALT at John Rylands Uni. to see how it works across subjects.
• John Rylands want to go live with SALT locally or nationally & also make it available in Primo.
• MIMAS looking at how this can be developed – inc. aggregate more data; how could this help collection development?
• Look at http://t.co/EPBBdx9n & http://t.co/wrm9HLFv for more info about SALT project.

Cutting-Edge Technology Projects (Terence Huwe, Institute for Research on Labor and Employment, University of California – Berkeley)

• Meaning Based Computing: How do you modify your beliefs based on new facts available?
• Bayesian analysis uses inc. breaking the Enigma code; handwriting and speech recognition; military uses…
• Market success must take into account unstructured data as well as structured data. Social media interaction is unstructured data.
• Many Fortune 500 organisations recognise they need new tools for managing structured & unstructured data. 15:23:04
• Autonomy’s Meaning Based Computing tools http://t.co/tuo6zid8
• New York Times article talking about how cheap software might replace lawyers. http://t.co/JxeFEmkq #savelawyers
• Meaning Based Computing & Taxonomy based search might co-exist in future.

• Samarcande – union catalogue of French speaking libraries in Belgium
• Political issues slowed down development of Samarcande catalogue.
• RT @ostephens: Depressing and almost unbelievable refusal by libraries and/or their political masters to share bibliographic metadata in Belgian #ili2011
• RT @bethanar: Catalogue: http://t.co/RMacayzD. Comes frm union cats of provinces, harvested by OAI. Also supports SRU & z39.50 #ili2011
• Tools for librarians for Samarcande – Getting bib. descriptions – z39.50; SRU;OAI / MoCCAM for ILL’s / Getting stats
• Not a real-time catalogue – need to develop availability functions
• Samarcande – FRBR; Web2.0; Users contribute with Web2.0 functions; Sharing/monitoring tools. Want to develop social media presence.
• Bring in external data to Samarcande.
• W3Line http://t.co/dxhbCh3Y were responsible for technical development of the Samarcande union catalogue.

Simply I love you (c) Wasfi Akab (Painting) / Flickr

Library Users in Turbulent Times (Kayo Chang, Bahrain Polytechnic)

• Talking about Bahrain demonstrations and effect on Bahrain polytechnic
• Effected library service. Facebook and Twitter use was banned because this was seen as part of reason why disturbances started.
• Commenting or liking picture taken at demonstration could lead to suspension of student.
• Had to make more use of library blog than Twitter and Facebook after social media was banned.

Library Users in Turbulent Times (Feda Kulenovic, Peace Support Operations Training Centre BiH and Reading for Ubuntu (www.citanje.org) )

• Potential roles of libraries in post-conflict societies: Bosnia & Herzegovina
• Libraries can transform. The mission of librarians is to improve society through facilitating knowledge creation and information.
• Librarians need to be the person people go to for reliable information in times of conflict were misinformation is prevalent.
• Created a library wherever he could – embedded librarian. Beyond the walls of the library.
• “Alone we can do so little; together we can do so much” (Helen Keller)
• RT @kulinba: #ili2011 My latest SlideShare upload : Potential Role of Libraries in post-conflict… http://t.co/bAulqRBn

• Maria talking about African Prisons project (mainly in Uganda)
• Literacy is a big problem in the prisons.
• Moderator highlighting similarities and differences between the situations of 3 speakers situations.
• Most important role in social change is providing information. Librarians have the power to progress social change. #savelibraries

• Now on stage talking about health information content.
• Old model is that health information is pushed out to users/patients, but can’t push information back in.
• How do you manage the finding, collection, sharing of health content that is relevant to you?
• Librarians will be very important as chaperones/stewards for helping others to curate their own health collections.

Innovative Services to Engage Users (András Kardos, library.me.uk)

• Project http://t.co/o1UFoWBh developed in Hungary. Central portal for all libraries – contains all info. for all libraries.
• Want to develop it for UK libraries too.
• Contains info re. library services; catalogue; news for libraries in Hungary
• Similar projects in UK. http://t.co/crLAhtb8; http://t.co/QU8DgtXJ

• I’m a lefty librarian and proud of it.
• “People first, Content second” is a new social model.
• Areas of opportunity – marketing; widening communication; user feedback; 2 way communication
• RT @calire: #ili2011 Social design – Services designed around people. #b202
• LSE Library use social media to be part of the conversation and engage with users.
• 4square is a great marketing opportunity – people saying publicly that they’ve used the library to their friends.
• Flickr – people are tagging photos; parts of photos
• People will interact with social media accounts if they think it’s a real person they’re talking to.

Developing ourselves (Julio dos Anjos, INCITE: Associação Portuguesa para a Gestão da Informação)

• 23 Things is now being run in Portugal.

Developing ourselves (Jo Alcock, Birmingham City University)

• Heeeeeeeeres @joeyanne talking about productivity #ili2011 & #cpd23
• Get things done: Record ideas so it’s not clogging up your head space; prioritise & do it; create trusted storage space…
• Inbox flowchart for organisation. I wonder if this can be translated into automated actions using http://t.co/TJGca8wN
• Some really interesting productivity tools coming from @joeyanne
• Huzzah. Ifttt gets a mention by @Joeyanne

• Looking at search tools beyond Google, inc. specialist search.
• Google is launching its “standout” tag which will allow publishers to highlight a number of their articles to improve their ranking
• Login to your Google dashboard and see what info they know about you.
• Yeeeeeeeees. @Karenblakeman mentions mild beer.
• Google sometimes thinks it knows what you really want when you search, rather than what you actually want.
• What are Yahoo playing at? Seems as if they just can’t be arsed developing anything any more!
• Search tools: Duckduckgo; Blekko (also shows who else has linked to site);Wolfram alpha (I still don’t get it!); Zanran (charts)
• Silobreaker for news searches.
• Specialist searches: chemspider; biznar; techextra; philpapers; mednar; scirus; pubmed; healthmash; offstats; guardian data store
• Social media search: topsy; socialmention; blogpulse / Create search engine – blekko / zuula

• Ulla de Stricker says expand definitions of what we do in a time-scarce economy.
• @Chibbie Talking about how TEDx would be great for inspiration.
• Michael Stephens: Libraries have the potential to be anywhere and everywhere.
• @chibbie Says if you look for roles to take on don’t look for the word ‘librarian’ in description. Our skills go beyond the name.
• Surprisingly even though conference is technology based, there has been a great focus on people interaction.

I really enjoyed the whole event, including meeting friends/people I know on Twitter and plenty of other library/information based people from so many different countries.

Even though they weren’t always of direct relevance to my current role, most of the presentations I sat-in on were of interest to me. They helped me put my job and library service into the wider context of library and information services in general. It’s useful to attend an event like this to remind yourself where your place might be in the grand scheme of things and how librarians and information specialist throughout the world are working towards common goals.

The key themes that came across during the conference were:

• Library and information services and our information skills don’t have to be constrained by the walls of the library or the title “librarian”.
• We need to share resources and knowledge with each other – by either collaborating with others to share the load or by pulling together isolated silos of information.
• Libraries are key to developing social change and improving society – they open up access to reliable and relevant sources of information to everyone, and we are the chaperones of that information and those who want to access it.
• We can help improve ourselves and our services by making sure we use the most appropriate tools available.
• We are in an age where people are just as much content creators as information consumers and we need to understand how this impacts on the provision and management of information services

Even though it was a technology based conference, there was just as much emphasis on the human side of things, which appealed to me. Maybe within this area there’s a suggestion here that technology in information and library work will still need a reasonable amount of human input and not just steam along like a Google search engine, without anyone there to say “Hold up! Are you sure this information is correct?”

As I say, I really enjoyed the conference, and hopefully I’ll get the chance to attend again some time in the future.

The following is an outline of the presentation I gave about Voices For The Library’s use of social media and online tools to develop campaigning methods at “Internet Librarian International 2011” last week.

Slide 1

We are a national campaign group highlighting the value of UK public libraries

Talking about how social media and online tools formed the group and how we have used them in our campaign

Slide 2

We have 3 main online presences – website; Twitter; Facebook

Slide 3

Why did we form?

In Mid 2010 there was an increased threat of library funding cuts leading to library closures and reductions in service. (Currently 430+ public libraries are under threat – out of a total network of 4600+)

People were questioning the relevance of libraries and librarians – common misconceptions included… you can find everything on Google; books can bought cheaply from Amazon; everyone has the internet; all books are available as e-books

Slide 4

Many people in the profession were talking about the situation on library discussion lists and Twitter

This included a group of us (about 7of us) on Twitter, who decided we wanted to do something pro-active, rather than just talk about it.

Slide 5

We did it very quickly – from intending to do something to setting up site/blog with content; Twitter & Facebook accounts took us 2 weeks.

We didn’t have to meet in real life to do this – it all happened online.

Most of us in the group hadn’t met in real life before and many of us didn’t meet in real life for a good few months after the campaign had been running.

Slide 6

Online presence wasn’t the only important thing, but it was the quickest way to organise and had the widest reach

Wanted to support local campaigners

Wanted to ensure we talked to others offline ie library users/campaigners; media

Slide 7

We are doing this voluntarily outside our day jobs and need to do it as cheaply (free) as possible and within limits of time outside work.

Lots of the online tools we use are free and easy to use

Slide 8

Social media tools we use for informing others – our site/blog; Twitter; Facebook; Tumblr; paper.li; Flickr; Foursquare

Provide guidance for campaigners

Comment on national situation

Positive library user stories

Links to news articles, other campaigners sites, retweet other campaigners tweets

Slide 9

Social media tools we use to find out what is happening – Google and Yahoo news; other peoples blogs; Government sites; Facebook; delicious; Twitter; email

Slide 10

Tools we use to discuss the situation – our website/blog; Facebook; Twitter; email; comment on other peoples blogs & news articles; forums

Talk to anyone with a part to play in the situation – library users; campaigners; journalists; politicians; library detractors

Slide 11

Social media tools for behind the scenes – Twapperkeeper; Twitterfeed; Packrati.us; delicious; Google maps (Ian Anstice/Public libraries news); If This Then That; Yahoo pipes; Pbworks wiki; chatzy

Use to discuss, meet, store, share, re-use information

Slide 12

In summer 2010 started archiving tweets containing keywords around saving libraries eg. #save libraries, #love libraries, ’I love libraries’ –  as a way to give a positive morale boost – can retweet them.

In January 2011 @mardixon tweeted the tweet on this slide and responses to it caused the #save libraries hash tag to trend worldwide. We got involved by promoting the tweet and retweeting responses  by others.

It helped promote the value of libraries and highlight library cuts in the UK.

Most of the quotes on the slides in this presentation are taken from Twitter in response to this tweet sent out by @mardixon

#savelibraries archive now contains 53,000+ tweets.

Slide 13

Not just VFTL campaign using social media – other local campaigns do too.

They also have blogs/sites; Twitter; Facebook accounts

Not just about online presence, but they too recognise online presence has wide reach and can get your message across the world

Slide 14

We use a wide range of tools to pull together info from many places and pass on information to others

We experiment to see what works well and what doesn’t

Slide 15

We thought about how the information flows and interconnects – where possible we try to automate and re-use information eg. Feed blog posts to Twitter and Facebook; Facebook to Twitter; Flickr to Twitter/Facebook; Twitter to paper.li; etc

Slide 16

Not sure how much of a difference our activities have made, but I like to think it’s made some difference

Maybe it’s made people more aware of the situation – library users; journalists; politicians

Maybe it’s inspired people to campaign in their area

Maybe it’s helped to stop some closures/cuts

Maybe it’s made people realise the value of public libraries

Slide 17

What next?

Last week we jointly ran a conference with The Library Campaign with the aim of bringing campaigners from across the UK together to discuss a way forward

Clear that campaigners want to work more closely together with other campaigners in the UK

Plans for rally in the near future

We’ll continue trying to save libraries in the UK!

(1) Where I upload a photo or image to, based on who I want to share it with – Flickr, Facebook, Twitpic, my personal blog.

(2) Which of my photos/images from these various places should be stored together.

So, I decided that Flickr is the place I’m going to store all my images and any images posted on the other sites will automatically be uploaded to my Flickr account.

I’ll still need to go in and tweak some of the information in Flickr once an item has been uploaded to it from these other places (eg tags; which sets they appear in), but it will still save me a lot of time to do it this way and I’ll have at least one place now where my photos and images can be found together.

Rainy Walk (c) moionet/ Flickr

So, as an experiment, I set up a few ifttt tasks that would automatically send out a tweet from my personal account suggesting using library services based on the weather. For example:

Chilly tomorrow! 8C. Not staying in, but don’t fancy staying out all day. Anything on in the library? http://ow.ly/6OzL6

Clear tomorrow! Think I’ll spend the afternoon in the park with a relaxing book. http://www.worldcat.org/genres/

Snow tomorrow! :-O I’m stocking up with tea, chocolate, a good book & staying in. http://www.worldcat.org/genres/

Oh no! Rain tomorrow. Get a decent book from your library tonight & stay indoors tomorrow. http://www.worldcat.org/genres/

I’ve set these up already and the triggers work, so it’s looking promising already. I just need to come up with a few more creative and sensible reasons for using the library that ties in with the weather. Or maybe you can? All ideas welcome. Thanks.

I’m busy exploring a useful way of feeding information from one application to another at the moment. It’s called “If This Then That” (ifttt) , is based on a simple idea and is really straightforward to use.

You set up a trigger from one web application (eg A Google News search for “libraries”), so that it triggers an action in another web application any time this happens (eg Creates a blog post from any newspaper articles it finds and links to the full news article). Each trigger/action you set up is called a task.

Put into “If This Then That” terminology the above would be…

“IF A Google News search finds any news articles containing the word “libraries”

“THEN create a blog post in Posterous using details of that news article.”

Visually this would be set up like this.

1.) Shows the full “task” indicating that the “If” part is pulling in an RSS feed and the “Then” part is creating the blog post.

2.) A plain English description of the task. If you add a hashtag keyword to a description you can also search on this. eg. #LibraryNews #Productivity

3.) Shows how I set up the “If” task – I just pasted in an RSS feed.

4.) Shows how I created the “Then” action. The text in {{ }} brackets indicates that these are fields in the RSS feed containing data. I can tell ifttt which part of the blog post this data should be put into eg Title, Description, Tags.

The screen shot below shows how it appears in the blog post.

{{Entry Title}} = “Uncertainty over library funding – Croydon Advertiser.

{{EntryPublished}} = October 04, 2011 at 08:44AM.

{{EntryContent}} = Title again and summary of article.

{{EntryURL}} = Link to full article on the Croydon Advertiser website.

In some cases you can indicate which piece of information triggers the response and you can indicate which information is passed to the response eg. If you were pulling through Twitter information and posting it to Evernote, you could say that you only want to see the Twitter user name & tweet, but you don’t need to see the date the tweet was sent.

There are a number of resources you can use as a trigger and/or a response to that trigger: RSS feeds; Twitter; Tumblr; Youtube; Evernote; Google calendar; Posterous; Tumblr; Clock; Weather monitor; Flickr and others too.

I’ve been playing around with it for a couple of weeks now and I’m finding it really useful for when I’m:

(1) Performing the same/similar tasks in a variety of locations

(2) Performing the same tasks in the same place on a regular basis

(3) Wanting to re-use information in different places, without the need to do it manually.

Once created, the tasks can be edited and deleted. They can also be turned on/off depending if you want them to run all the time or only when you decide to run them.

So how have I been using it?

• Keeping a record of what I need to do, by:
  • Feeding information from emails containing the words “To Do” or “Blog This” in the subject heading into a specific folder in Evernote.
  • Feeding bookmarks in delicious.com with the tag “readlater” into the same folder in Evernote. I use this tag for large reports/articles I can’t whizz through in 30 minutes.
• Keeping a record of what I’ve done, by:
  • Feeding bookmarks in delicious.com with the tag “finishedreading” into Google calendar. These tend to be the same bookmarks as above, once I’ve read them.
  • Feeding details of blog posts I’ve written from any of my blogs into the same Google calendar.

I’m doing this (1) as a way of pulling together reminders of the things I’m supposed to be doing and (2) sometimes I feel as if I’ve not done much, so I want somewhere I can go to that will give me a positive boost and show me that I have actually achieved things.

I’m also using it for:

• Collating library news quickly, by setting up searches on a number of sites and feeding the search results into the same blog. The purpose of this is to avoid having to do the same search over and over again in the same places, generally so I can find and Tweet news articles/blog posts for Voices For The Library more easily.

• Feeding “likes” on various resources eg Youtube; last.fm to a blog post on my Tumblr blog. I use this blog as a place to post upbeat and creative things I like.

I know some services, such as WordPress, allow you to feed information directly to other services without using ifttt, but the good thing about ifttt, is that you can do this all in one place for a wide range of popular services, using the same method.

I’ve found it really useful so far, but as it’s still in its infancy I’ve also been thinking about how ifttt could be developed too. Here are some ideas about how I think it could be developed to help me achieve more productivity:

(1) Being able to make a copy of a task. I’m setting up a series of tasks that are only slightly different, but I have to create each one from scratch. It would be great if I could copy a task and then edit the parts that need changing.

(2) Being able to create an RSS output  for the “That” part of a task?

(3) Being able to create an Evernote input for the “This” part of a task?

(4) It would be great if I could take one input specified in “This” and feed it/branch off to multiple outputs via “That”, rather than having to set up a number of separate tasks.

(5) The ability to combine a chain of ifttt tasks in future, so that a single input can trigger a series of actions and can possibly branch off as mentioned in (4) above.

(6) A channel input/output to Google docs, specifically spreadsheets. I’m thinking that a data feed in/out of a spreadsheet would be really useful.

Even if they aren’t able to implement any of the above ideas I know ifttt is going to prove useful for me just as it is, expanding on the ideas I’ve already put into practice. It really is a useful tool and so simple to use too.

• 10 libraries to be provided via Community partnership and to be run by volunteers. 9 more libraries may be run in a similar manner if the 1st 10 are regarded as successful when they are reviewed after April 2013.

• Molesey Library is no longer to be run in Community partnership, but will remain as part of the main Surrey Libraries network.

• The 10 libraries won’t be staffed by Surrey County Council in 2012/2013. If any of them haven’t progressed towards community partnership by December their future will be re-considered.

• Services to replace the mobile libraries will be endorsed. NB: The mobile libraries ran for the last time in Surrey last week.

Further details of these recommendations can be found here.

During the meeting, a number of questions were raised by library users/campaigners regarding the changes to the library service.

The recommendations were passed by Cabinet.

Campaigners outside Woking Library (c) ggstopflat/Flickr

Following this, on Saturday morning library campaigners held a number of events at libraries in Surrey that would be affected by the decisions. In the afternoon, a rally was held outside Woking Library. The aim being to highlight and challenge the changes being made to Surrey Libraries. Campaigners also collected petition signatures, for both the local campaign & the W.I. national campaign. A number of people spoke at the rally: Alan Gibbons sent a message of support, UNISON spoke about the cuts, campaigners talked about Surrey’s plans and their concerns and, as a representative for Voices For The Library, I highlighted the value of public libraries by reading out quotes/comments from library users throughout the country.

Campaigners are trying to raise £1,000,000 to secure the long-term future of their community library.

When I read this article in The London Evening Standard my mouth just dropped open in disbelief.

It’s wrong that Camden Council have forced campaigners into this situation, just so they can use a service they should automatically be receiving from the local council in their area. I know Camden haven’t said to them, “Go out and raise £1m and we’ll give you the library,” but if campaigners feel they have to raise this sort of money to keep it running, then they have basically been forced into it.

Is it even possible to raise that amount of money in a local appeal, even if you live in a wealthy area?

…and just imagine if every volunteer run library throughout the country had to raise that amount of money to provide a long-term local library service in their area? How many millions of pounds would that be?

It’s seems particularly ironic that local Council’s are saying they have to save money on library services because they aren’t allowed to increase Council Tax by a significant amount, and yet, some local communities may end up paying more by contributing to this sort of fundraising appeal.

Summary

• Annie Mauger presenting honorary fellowship to John Lake.
• RT @Minimorticia: If you are not here with us you can follow the AGM via the live link http://t.co/fBfJ4JMX #CILIPAGM11
• AGM 2010 meeting minutes agreed.
• Issues were raised from last years minutes – questions about subscription charges for retired & overseas members.
• Auditors appointed – Kingston Smith LLP.
• Trustees report and annual accounts being presented by Judy Broady-Preston (Honorary Treasurer).
• Accounts in context: Global financial crisis; Political changes; Changes facing CILIP & LIS sector.
• Impact in CILIP: Dramatic drop in income £825,000; Had to streamline CILIP (5 redundancies)
• Remodelled itself based on Defining our Professional Future Report.
• Expenditure reduced by £0.8mill; Income reduced by £0.9mill from reserves of £767k
• 2011 actions: Restructure; Increased advocacy emphasis; Reduced costs; New business model
• CILIP What next?: Sustained CILIP recruitment & retain members; 5 year financial strategy.
• Finances this year “looking better than last year”.
• Question from the floor. What are net figures of funds held by branches and groups? Answer: CILIP will get figures & put on site.
• Discussion around CILIP finances raised by questions from the floor.
• Membership recruitment and retention is very important in CILIP’s strategy.
• Presentation by Annie Mauger on impact “Defining our Professional Future” report has had on CILIP #cilipfuture
• Defining our professional future has guided CILIP over the past year.
• Want to provide sound leadership; advocacy; long term financial sustainability
• Advocacy – Engaged with media; government; delivered new advocacy resources; awards
• Devpt. activities – more online resources; new models of branches & groups; Toolshed support for groups/branches
• Back to the floor days for CILIP staff.
• Subscription strategies and proposals. CILIP need to do more with less.
• Keep CILIP membership accessible. Fund activities members want from their prof. body. Allow ideas in DOPF to take root & grow.
• Subscription proposals: Reductions at lower levels & no more than increase of £5 for any individual at higher level.
• Amendment suggested to allow Overseas Members access to reduced UK subs. to acknowledge where overseas income may be very low.
• RT @Speranda: wants to know how institution membership of #cilip might mesh with individual chartered membership #cilipagm11
• RT @llordllama: Those outside London get less than a 1/3 of the member benefits too – can we have a decrease? #cilipagm11
• Me too MT @bethanar Wish they had a band above £17.5k – I’d gladly pay more in amore band, to allow lower to pay less #cilipagm11
• Vote on amendment to subscriptions taking place. Amendment not passed. (I sat on the fence!)
• Items raised: text of CILIP Disciplinary Regulations. Changes suggested around bias; expelling members.
• RT @RMGCat: Hoping for online voting in addition to streaming & proxy votes next year #cilipagm11. Really wanted to vote but on the day …
• RT @CILIPinfo: #CILIPAGM11 Agenda item submitted for consideration by the AGM. No motions have been submitted

However, it did get me thinking about what a mobile enabled library site for my library service, Surrey County Council Libraries, might contain and how I might want to achieve that. So I came up with my own criteria for a prototype site, taking on board some of Ned’s points.

• Quick to set up (max 1 hour).
• Easy to set up.
• Free to set up.
• Accessible to as many mobile internet users as possible.
• Ability to display RSS feeds (eg Library news; Library Twitter).
• Ability to display static web page information (eg Library location; services).
• Capability of searching the library catalogue.
• Capability of creating a mobile site with a reasonable number of web pages.
• QR code access.

With this in mind, I went looking for sites that either allowed you to convert your website into a mobile site, or allowed you to create one. I didn’t think an app was the best way to go, as this automatically limits it to the type of phone that can access the website.

I found 16 sites that looked promising at first, but none of them gave me anything vaguely near what I wanted to create, quickly and easily. A handful (including Winksite; Mobisitegalore;  Onbile; Mippin) allowed me to create sites that had some of the features I needed, but none gave me the full package.

However, I also decided to see how easy it would be to use Weebly, a free website creator service, which isn’t a dedicated mobile site creator, but might do the job just as well.

Well, it did the job much better than any of the other services available and within an hour I’d built from scratch a mobile site prototype that included all the functionality I wanted.

It had:

• Embedded RSS Twitter and news feeds
• A range of pages about services provided by Surrey Libraries, including the stub of a page indicating where libraries are located (information cut, pasted and tailored from the main library website)
• A way to search the catalogue (Weebly allows HTML code to be pasted easily into the site)
• QR code access
• It displays reasonably on a range of phones

It isn’t perfect (it is a prototype after all) and some of the links go to the main library site, but given another couple of hours it could be tidied up, so that it was a more or less self-contained mobile site. I know this means it would take longer than setting up the Bloapp site, but in terms of the extras library users could get from this, I think it’s worth spending a little extra time.

The main problem I have is the catalogue search going to the main site once the search has been run, but in a way I have overcome the biggest problem with searching the catalogue, which was the lack of clarity/cleanness of the initial catalogue search function when displayed on some mobile phones. Once I get to the search results my initial frustration has been overcome, so I suppose I have achieved what I want, but it isn’t perfect.

The site can be found at http://scclibtest.weebly.com/index.html .

I’d be interested to know what people think about it and if it displays okay on your phone too.

Thanks.

Surrey County Council is working with FutureGov to design and deliver Future Surrey: a programme that combines service design and social technology to bring about organisational change.

It’s based on the principles of open government, open leadership and service design with and for users. Together we’re focusing on core services, like highways and adult social services to develop new ways of delivering services, with the help of technology.  We’re also working across the council and with partners to help highlight where innovation and user-led  service design are already happening, and help the adoption of these principles more widely in Surrey.

As part of this, I attended “SurreyCamp” – an event that connected Surrey County Council, local businesses, innovators and residents in an attempt to develop Surrey within a digital context.

During the event I tweeted a lot – summarising what was going on and things that were being said. The bullet points below are basically the tweets I sent out.

• At #surreycamp Part of Digital Surrey week.
• Andrew Povey introduced the day, indicating that Surrey residents are already online and the County Council need to ensure we are experts there too.
• David McNulty says we need to engage as many people as possible in Surrey to get involved in developing the county.
• We need to harness the passion and skills of the people of Surrey to develop it.
• Build our networks of partners in Surrey
• Surrey’s Big Vision – SCC we want to be leading edge & ensure we will be effective in rs time.
• Be open & ready to react quickly as new possibilities emerge.
• Currently trying to upgrade systems in Surrey County Council.
• Will be publishing ideas generated from the event today.
• Dominic Campbell from FutureGov speaking about the event. This event is part of a bigger piece of work – “Future Surrey” & “Digital Surrey Week”
• What can web do to help us in our work? Want new structures; challenging; new processes; new ways of thinking; innovation
• Want performance improvement and efficiency.Get citizens involved. Surreywide programme. Not just SCC
• Surrey social services currently trialling apps
• Need to move away from introverted design and move to working with users and partners.
• Spectrum of project is from staff collaboration to social innovation.
• Need to get more people involved. Need the enthusiasm to make it work.
• Mary Baker. Founder of DropBy. Social networking site for over 60s to connect people who feel isolated.
• Provides: interaction; video chat between family members; online games room (keep the brain cells going)
• Just decided that she was going to do something herself, rather than waiting for others to do it.
• Louise Bircher. Customer Services & communications Mole Valley District Council.
• Redesigned website. Easier to use; accessible. Site ranking improved and have been shortlisted for award.
• Use Youtube, Twitter, Flickr, QR codes, Facebook (in a targetted manner)
• Alana Blair. Campaign Communications Officer, SCC. ion Facebook, 5.5mill visits from Surrey postcodes
• Surrey Matters magazine. Has been introduced as digital format early in 2011
• Social media offers residents the chance to interact with Surrey County Council.
• Sign up for Surrey Matters e-newsletter at surreymatters@surreycc.gov.uk
• Nigel Biggs. Software developer background.
• Runs social enterprise. Connect people to co-create ideas & implement something new.
• It’s okay to talk about ideas, but you also need to act on it too.
• Need to create a new vision. Communilab – forum that includes local councils, Universities, businesses.
• Public sector has a fear of failure.

There were 2 speakers – Emma Harrison (Assistant Librarian, University of Mid Glamorgan) and Mark Taylor (CILIP Director of External Relations).

Emma Harrison

Emma’s focus was on day-to-day advocacy and how it had helped her ensure the value of her job was recognised by her organisation.

During her time at UMG her department was subject to HERA (Higher Education Role Analysis) job evaluation scheme. From this, grades were assigned to roles based on a National Framework Agreement. The roles written up in the HERA document didn’t match the work that Emma and her colleagues actually did – excluding specialist librarian skills and qualifications from the requirements. After re-writing the HERA document the value of Emma and her colleagues jobs were recognised.

As part of her advocacy  in this situation Emma persuaded colleagues who may have otherwise been reluctant that it was worth challenging the HERA decision, and she also made use of the CILIP campaigning toolkit to advocate the value of her role to managers and Human Resources.

During the discussion following her presentation it was highlighted that HERA can work for advocacy too if you are able to write your own forms/role/job description, as you have the power to tell others what you do.

Mark Taylor

Mark talked about what he thought advocacy was – influencing other people, winning support, bringing about change. eg. Responding to library reports, support other campaigns, questioning politicians, advocating your own value. He acknowledged that it’s often mixed up with activism and marketing. He felt that the most effective advocacy is that which clearly identifies the target – messages should be tailored to the issues of decision makers, to show how you can help them. You need to set out your agenda clearly and make the message concise. Contact with the media is important, so comment on the media and get them to come to you as first port of call. If you’re involved in a promotional campaign, reporting back on the success/effectiveness of the campaign after it’s completed is important.

Mark saw CILIP’s advocacy role as advocating for the profession, CILIP & developing advocacy policy; providing thought leadership; enabling networking & communications.

He discussed CILIP’s vision & mission, based on the CILIP Future consultation of membership in 2010. Since this consultation CILIP have created new posts to focus on advocacy. CILIP also wants to encourage CILIP members to become involved in advocacy.

Tree of Knowledge (c) PWBaker / Flickr

Highlights of CILIP’s advocacy in the past year included:

• 200+ press mentions
• Briefings for Lords & MPs
• Lobbying politicians – hoping to launch a Cross Party Library Group in November
• Supported Save Our Libraries day & are involved in organising 2012 event
• Annie Mauger spoke at the Women’s Institute AGM
• Awarded Alan Gibbons Honorary Fellowship (1st time advocated outside profession in this way)
• Responded to various Government reports
• Carnegie & Greenaway awards – want to develop it as advocacy tool (get it more into media that it’s librarians choosing books)
• Libraries change lives award
• Using social media more effectively

CILIP’s plans for the future include:

• Continued lobbying/engagement with parliamentarians.
• Campaigns – “Shout for school libraries“ (Oct 2011) / National libraries day (2012)
• CILIP staff to go back to the floor – including a wide variety of environments
• Future areas of policy work – information literacy; digital inclusion; Want to deliver 2 high profile campaigns a year

Question time

Following this, the audience had their chance to raise questions and comment on what they had heard. This included:

• What are CILIP doing to stop councils from cutting services and handing over to volunteers?
• I mentioned Twitter advocacy/activism conversations and that the difference between the 2 is misunderstood by some people.
• National libraries day is seen as more positive than Save our libraries day. It was felt that this positive angle would encourage more people to advocate in this way.
• We need to build a network of advocates from our users in all sectors – decision makers are more likely to listen to the users!
• Politicians want to see what we are doing to help them to achieve their goals. How can we demonstrate value in a way (in all sectors) that means something to politicians?
• We could partner with other related organisations eg National Literacy Trust & make use of their research.
• Comments were made about the impact local libraries closures have on school libraries & literacy.
• It was felt that CILIP needs to defend professional staff & qualifications. CILIP will be looking at continuing professional development and performing a qualifications review.
• It was seen that organisations/library advocates in some ways (library campaigners and friends groups) are less restrained than CILIP in voicing their opinions.

It was an interesting event and helped highlight the wide range of advocacy that is necessary and can be achieved by the profession, whether you are an individual like Emma, or a larger organisation, such as CILIP.

The author talks about recently finding a copy of “The White Stag” (published in 1937) in the book sale section of his local library, which leads onto this train of thought…

• When the author was younger “you could find books that old and much older, plenty of them, in small town public libraries all over the country.”
• Nowadays, you are more likely to get “movie, toy, and video game tie-ins“. These are “all part of the feedback loop that endlessly recycles the clichés of current popular culture into minds that, in many cases, have never encountered anything else.“
• As a result of this “the threads of our collective memory are coming silently apart.“
• “Without a sense of the past and its meaning, without narratives that weave the events of our daily lives into patterns that touch the principles that matter, we lack the essential raw materials of thought, and so our collective reasoning processes, such as they are, spit out the same rehashed nonsolutions over and over again.“
• “… the awareness that the lessons of the past have something to teach the present—requires a kind of awareness that’s become very uncommon” and current ineffective solutions are based on “the feedback loop” and this leads to “a mental monoculture“.
• “The result is like taking a loaf of Wonder Bread and spreading something different on every slice, starting with Marmite and ending with motor oil; there are plenty of surface variations, but underneath it’s always the same bland paste.“
• To resolve the situation the author suggests people should “go looking among things that are older than you“. Even if it’s “the pablum of a different time, and will clash with mental habits tuned to the pablum of this time, with useful results.“

“The public library in Seattle, to my horror, once put up splashy ads asking, “What if everyone in Seattle read the same book?” Why, then we’d have even more of a mental monoculture than we’ve got already.“

The full blog post is definitely worth taking the time to read.

“When people are ghettoized and marginalised, when education is cut back, when public libraries are shut down, you take away people’s sense of self-worth.  When society decides that some sectors are more worthy of attention than others, people’s sense of self-worth is taken away.  When people are denied the right by under-staffing in schools and local services to better themselves, they see no hope of a better life.  ”

(BigAlphy’s Blog, London Calling)

I spotted this in a blog post discussing the role “phoney capitalism” played in causing the London riots. I’m not going to comment on the theory, but just wanted to highlight the recognition of libraries as a means of education and self-improvement for all.

Here are a few things to consider about the Bill in relation to the provision of local services, including public libraries.

1.) The plain English version states that central government currently imposes too much bureaucracy in the form of centralised decisions, targets and inspections, which “leaves people feeling ‘done to’ and imposed upon.”

“The Library Day in the Life Project is a semi-annual event coordinated by Bobbi Newman of Librarian by Day. Twice a year librarians, library staff and library students from all over the globe share a day (or week) in their life through blog posts, photos, video and Twitter updates.”

In my day job I’m a Technical Librarian for a public library service in the UK. This mainly involves looking after the catalogue (I don’t tend to do much cataloguing these days, as that’s the responsibility of my assistant) and investigating possible uses of Web2.0 and Library2.0 services. I also wear another hat, as I’m a member of the Voices For The Library (VFTL) national campaign group, which was formed almost a year ago to address concerns about severe cuts local council’s were making to library services.

The Gorillaz coffee mug that contains the coffee that keeps me going in work!

25 July

I had the morning off, so during this time I responded to a few emails from fellow campaigners in Voices For The Library team. Following this I did a bit of tweeting for the Voices twitter account (@ukpling). Generally I do this a couple of times a day. I use Google News UK to identify relevant articles for tweeting and I also look for items to retweet from other library campaigners.

Got to work and checked my emails.

Then I read through some configuration/styling notes for new public catalogue we will be using from the end of 2011. (We’ll go through them during a meeting tomorrow.)

Briefly discussed forthcoming meeting with cataloguer about the use of Interest Categories on our stock. Surrey has used Interest Categories in conjunction with Dewey classification over the past 20+ years and we are looking at how we can improve on them. The meeting will also involve members of the stock team.

I also caught up with emails about our e-book service and the area in general. I was part of the original project group that helped set the e-book service up, from the cataloguing perspective. My initial involvement was limited, but it looks like I’ll be having more involvement in this project in the future.

I subscribe to a number of email lists for libraries and had a quick scan through the emails they generate. One discussion thread relevant to my role was the “Digital Economy Act”.

Had a quick look at the new version of Whichbook.net,  to investigate if we can make use of it in some way. Maybe its ability to share with Facebook would be useful in some way? I really like the way you search using this catalogue. Always gives me something new to read when I’ve tried it in the past.

Caught up on some Voices For The Library discussions when I got home.

26 July 2011

Another morning off again. Sent out a few news tweets for Voices For The Library/@ukpling.

Picked up copy of “Surrey Downs” magazine on the way out of the flat. It included an article about plans for Surrey Library Service.

Went to lobby outside County Hall about changes to library services. About 80 campaigners were in attendance. Unfortunately I could only stay for about 40 minutes.

Library campaigners lobby outside County Hall

Went to meeting about the styling/configuration of our new public catalogue.
Following this I went to the local library to finish typing up minutes for a meeting I’d attended on the previous Friday with colleagues who manage the stock and coordinate events and promotions.

Signed up for the Librarycamp event, which is being held in Birmingham in October. Really looking forward to going, especially as I will get to meet so many people there that I’ve only ever spoken to on Twitter.

Got home and wrote an update for my blog about the situation in Surrey Libraries. I also caught up with a few VFTL discussions.

27 July 2011

I worked on creating a paper.li newspaper for my public library service. Paper.li is a link aggregator that produces a page of related items either daily or weekly.  I’ve created paper.li’s for other topics eg. Save libraries and charities. I just find it a useful way of presenting articles, blog posts, photos, videos etc that have been tweeted around a specific theme. It saves people trawling back through a lot of people’s tweets to catch up on the news. I’ll also be running a workshop at some point with my team covering paper.li.

I also investigated the intricacies of Google+; why it’s important and how it can be used for current awareness, discussion and work, etc. I’ll also be running a workshop on this with the team. I like Google+, but I’m not sure how it will affect my use of other social network sites.

Did a bit of tweeting for VFTL.

28 July

Mostly checked emails and responded.

We currently use Internet Explorer 7 in work, which isn’t compatible with some of the newer whizzier websites. This means I have to download Google Chrome instead to use them. So, I downloaded Google Chrome and took a look at Storify.com. Storify allows you to combine Flickr, Twitter, links, videos, text into a narrative format. My library service ran a Children’s Book Festival earlier this year and I tried to put something together to cover this.

Watched a webcast of the Cabinet meeting held on Tuesday, which contained a discussion about the library service.

More VFTL tweets and discussions when I get home.

29 July

Sat in the park on a lovely sunny morning and put together a VFTL blog post about the new Portsmouth library on my laptop.

Blogging in the sun

Checked emails in work and responded to a list discussion from a librarian in another local authority about Library apps.

I took the time to read (some of it anyway) and discuss the Localism Bill. I feel I need to play a part in these discussions, not only to know what is going on, but to hopefully influence it in some small way and so I can be prepared for the future and the effects this may have on library services.

I booked myself onto CILIP library advocacy event in September.

Stumbled across an article about e-libraries on the Conservative Home site and commented on it, highlighting the fact that public library services need to be seen as a whole and physical libraries shouldn’t suffer because e-libraries services are being developed.

Had my monthly 1-to-1 with my line manager. In this we discussed how my work was progressing; priorities; plans; projects.

Went home and umm…. caught up on a couple of VFTL discussions.

30-31 July

The only library related work I’ll probably do over the weekend is a few VFTL tweets and emails… unless anything major happens – which is always a possibility.

I’ll also be preparing for a local campaign meeting on Tuesday night. Possibly a long day on Tuesday, as I didn’t get home until midnight after the last meeting! If you see me asleep on the train around this time on Tuesday, please wake me up so I don’t miss my stop. Thanks.

Last week (19 July 2011) a motion was raised by Councillor Eber Kington at the Council meeting (2hr 35mins), requesting that “the Council Leader and Cabinet… halt the current plans of removing staff from the selected libraries until the ongoing audit into this study is fully completed and the detailed results are made available for discussion”. The motion was rejected by the Council.

Alan Gibbons at Surrey County Hall

Today, a lobby was held outside County Hall. At a rough estimate there were about 80 people in attendance. Many were from the 11 libraries that will be affected by the changes, but there were also campaign supporters from other local libraries. They gathered before the Cabinet meeting began, in the hope that members of the Council in attendance would take note of campaigners concerns. A number of speakers, including local library users/campaigners, UNISON representatives and author and campaigner Alan Gibbons spoke passionately about the need for libraries on both a local and national scale.

During the Cabinet meeting today another question was raised by a member of the public, regarding concerns about the current proposals for the library service. Again, their concerns were rejected by Surrey County Council Cabinet.

Library Campaigners at Surrey County Hall

(Coventry Telegraph: Library jobs could go in £2m budget cuts)

This quote, taken from a Warwickshire County Council report, just popped the simple thought into my head, “If libraries are a trusted brand, then why don’t more people use them?”

I’m not insinuating in this question that they aren’t trusted – I believe they are.

I believe they’re trusted by people who don’t even use them.

I believe that if people thought about what a library could offer them they’d use them more.

Maybe the problem is that many people don’t automatically think “Library!” when they should.

But why don’t they think like this?

Don’t they know what libraries are all about?

Is this caused by a lack of marketing?

Is it caused by a lack of branding?

A brand you can trust… but maybe a brand too many people no longer understand!?

“No one wants to see libraries cut and I understand that Devon County Council are in tough financial times. However, it is foolish to see this as an economy. If you reduce access to literacy you will end up paying for it in the future in terms of, for example, extra adult education – it’s not saving money, it’s displacing it.”

(Nick Arnold, Chair of the Friends of Appledore Library group)

Issues of concern around the study include wrong and inconsistent figures, incorrect rankings of some libraries, incorrect proximity measurements (ie distance between libraries), illogical comparisons, lack of consideration of specific issues relevant to particular libraries, and calculation errors. (Further details here)

The letter asks the council to “stop the closure threat to our village libraries.”

Key comments made in the letter are:

• Eleven libraries were selected for closure, even though some of these libraries were  ”cost effective”
• “Larger and declining libraries were deliberately excluded by the use of biased criteria.”
• The study “does not address cost savings adequately and even fails to properly consider priority areas”
• The decision about which libraries are to be selected (if any) should only be carried out once an internal audit and separate Information Commissioner’s Office audit has been carried out.
• The need to fit in with the Big Society plan and save money in Surrey exists, but spreading “savings across all libraries will answer both these objectives and will not damage Surrey’s villages.”
• “these savings are trivial when compared to Surrey’s budget and the harm which will be done to community life.”
• Surrey should follow the example of other counties such as Gloucestershire, North Yorkshire and Dorset, who have rethought their plans following residents protests.
• “We must build on the strengths we have in flourishing libraries, rather than gambling on untried and ill-thought out methods.”
• The value of technology and volunteers in libraries is understood, but professional staff must also be part of the solution to “co-ordinate these volunteers and ensure sustainability.”
• “We must ensure that our libraries can continue with their vital services to all Surrey residents – and especially to the vulnerable young and elderly.”

As literacy and libraries go hand in hand it is encouraging to see so much emphasis on the value of libraries within the report.

In defining the context of the inquiry it was indicated that “a poverty of trained librarians” was a factor contributing to low levels of literacy. At the same time you should also say that in the current climate, a lack of posts for trained librarians is also a factor. It’s no good having trained librarians if they are not employed in a role where their skills can be used.

Here are the main points made in the report regarding libraries.

“The right of citizens to visit a library and have access to a range of free reading material must be made overt and funding made available. Evidence shows that libraries both in schools and in the community have a positive effect on reading, yet many are disappearing because of financial constraints”

“The active encouragement of reading for pleasure should be a core part of every child’s curriculum entitlement because extensive reading and exposure to a wide range of texts make a huge contribution to students’ educational achievement. This is why libraries are so important to the development of a reading culture – both those in schools and those in the community.”

“Participants in the Inquiry praised the work of Sure Start Centres where parents and their children could come to improve parenting skills, address social issues and receive informal literacy help. The aims of these Sure Start programmes are to (1) increase the numbers of parents/carers reading with their children; (2) increase library membership amongst 0-4 year-olds and their parents/carers; (3) ensure that 100% of children have access to good quality play and learning; and (4) reduce the number of children who need specialist speech and language support by the time they start school.”

“Evaluations of Bookstart programmes in 2009 indicated that parents were strongly supportive of reading with babies and toddlers and generally read frequently with their children. Longitudinal evidence suggested marked improvement in book sharing frequency after receiving the packs for ‘less active’ reading families (those that reported having relatively few children’s books in the home and read with their child less than once a day). Three months after receiving a Bookstart pack these ‘less active’ reading families reported significantly increased reading frequency, stronger parental interest in reading with their child and higher levels of library membership. Early intervention initiatives such as Sure Start Centres and Bookstart should be guaranteed funding over a period of time.”

Theme 7 Specifically focused on protecting library provision…

“It was felt by all groups in this Inquiry that the lack of a coherent support for school libraries and their proven impact early in children’s education is a huge anomaly. Although it is clear that libraries are not the single answer to improving literacy, they are an important resource for supporting a school’s literacy teaching and learning.

The concern is that students without school libraries will not have access to a wide range of learning and reading resources to support their learning. A good library and, crucially, a good librarian, can be a real benefit to a school and attainment.

For example, the

School Library Commission Report, which surveyed 17,000 students, found that there was a very strong relationship between reading attainment and school library use. Young people who read below the expected level for their age were almost twice more likely to say that they are not a school library user. Conversely, those who read at or above the expected level were nearly three times more likely to say that they are school library users.”

“Many children have no books at home and such a culture will not encourage reading. Libraries are essential to provide free and open access to a wide variety of reading materials. Economic constraints are forcing some of these to close and for schools to limit their library facilities and this can only be a barrier to successful literacy for learners of all ages.”

“The Publishers Association reports that purchases of school library books have declined by 40% since 2002. The Secretary of State has said that children should be reading up to 50 books a year and that successful schools give a high profile to reading for pleasure, but current policy seems to operate against this.”

“Throughout the Inquiry, the School Library Association and several literacy associations highlighted the importance of books and reading materials of all kinds, including new technological developments.”

“Libraries must be central to literacy development, and must be appropriately resourced.”

There’s no need for me to comment on these points, but in summary I’ll just state the obvious for those local authorities who don’t understand the importance of decent library provision…

• Funding must be made available for free reading material and access to it via both school and public libraries.
• Both school and public libraries are important because they provide a broad range of reading materials, which improves literacy and this in turn improves educational achievement.
• Surestart and Bookstart schemes have a positive impact on library use.
• School library services supported by a good librarian have a positive impact on literacy levels.
• The current ethos of reducing funding for school and public libraries clearly goes against the idea of improving literacy.

Hopefully this report, backed up by the opinions of experts in literacy and all Government parties, will help secure the future of library provision in the UK.

The exhibition was broken up into different themes eg. Future worlds; ecology of sci-fi; what would aliens look like?; alternative histories (and much more). Each section displayed a handful of books or illustrations defining the theme. It wasn’t solely printed material on display – there were also a number of interactive displays which focused on different aspects of the genre.
It was great to see that it focused on the idea that science fiction can’t really be defined by a handful of pulp fiction books.  The genre is so wide open that it includes writers you may not really expect to be sitting in there.

(c) cdrummbks / Flickr

I think my favourite parts were:

• J.G.Ballard- I’ve been a fan of his for a few years and whenever the summer peaks towards the high 20′s I wonder if Surrey’s civilised atmosphere is going to crack and we are all going to end up eating each other… with a decent glass of merlot of course. The J.G. Ballard section also offered a couple of my musical favourites up – The Normal’s Warm Leatherette and Buggles Video Killed The Radio Star.
• The Steampunk section – I love the idea of technology having developed from the age of clockwork, as you’d see in the Wild Wild West film.
• Angela Carter’s “The Infernal Desire Machines Of Dr. Hoffman”. I first discovered Angela Carter through film adaptations of her fairy stories, but Dr. Hoffman is one of my favourite books of hers.

It was definitely well worth spending a couple of hours at the exhibition finding out more about this genre, even if you’re not into science fiction. Like me, you might find that some of those books you love are actually science fiction… and that’s nothing to be ashamed of.

Vaizey was a member of the well-reknowned 1964 Club in those days. It’s said that “Red Gun” was taking a drink at the saloon, when in swaggered Vaizey, spurs a chanking, looking around at the assembled bandits, cowboys and rustlers, spat out a slug of chewin’ tobaccy and said:

“Andy Burnham’s refusal to take action in the Wirral effectively renders the 1964 Public Libraries Act meaningless. While it is local authorities’ responsibility to provide libraries, the Act very clearly lays responsibility for ensuring a good service at the culture secretary’s door. If Andy Burnham is not prepared to intervene when library provision is slashed in a local authority such as the Wirral, it is clear that he is ignoring his responsibilities as secretary of state, which in the process renders any sense of libraries being a statutory requirement for local authorities meaningless.”

Well, you can imagine what sort of reaction that provoked from Red Gun. Soon chairs were flying, bottles of bourbon smashing against mirrors behind the bar, people stumbling backwards over tables. As the dust settled Vaizey strode out of there and his adversary was found as a crumpled heap of a man stuffed into a brass spittoon by the bar.

When they heard about this legendary Vaizey,  a few of our towns folk decided to offer him the Sheriff’s post – we could do with a strong man to sort out our own library troubles. Everything was hunky dory at first – he said he was going to do this and that. He made a few speeches to the town council about how great libraries were and how he’d defend them to the hilt.

As time went on nothing changed. No libraries were saved. It seems that Sheriff Vaizey was keener on sleepin’ in the jail house and big-wigging with the mayor than going out on the prairie to deal with those troublesome library varmints we had pestering us and rustling our books. Seems like one battle was enough for him and these days he’s more content to sit back and watch more libraries close around him. Why, I don’t know? Gets me to thinkin’ that maybe his words to “Red Gun” were a bluff. I don’t rightly know that it was Sheriff Vaizey who sorted Red out and planted him in that spittoon – maybe it’s a legend he created himself.

So, maybe it’s time for Sheriff Vaizey to hang up his badge, Stetson, spurs and other cowboy clichés and let someone else who gives two hoots about the library situation replace him. Or maybe we could just tie him onto the saddle of his grey dappled mare, slap its hind quarters and watch him ride off into the sunset to the theme tune of Bonanza.

“Hi Ho Vaizey! Away!”

“support the exchange of ideas, knowledge and expertise between organisations with a common interest in realising the benefits of community enterprise.” To be launched in July 2011, “The first Community Knowledge Hub will focus on libraries, providing support to community organisations and local authorities exploring community management solutions as an alternative to closure” and “support the evolution of community managed library services.”

Of course I agree that library services should be saved, but I still believe that it is the responsibility of the local authority to provide public library services. Some reasons for this include:

• Need for impartiality
• Statutory duties
• Economies of scale
• Existing expertise
• Social needs.

These are just a handful of reasons and many more can be found on the Voices For The Library site.

Even though many people see the library building and its books as “The library service” this isn’t true. A library service isn’t only defined by a building full of stock, it also depends upon the expertise of the people running the library service, whether they are staffing that building or running services that support front line staff.

With regard to the development of library services, most communities won’t be handed a library service, they will just be handed a building containing books and other stock. Depending on how much control local authorities give to the communities, the community may have to pay for other assets transferred eg. stock; and (if they want to maintain a library service of value) they will generally have to pay to be part of the existing computer network and/or consult with the local authority on running a library service.

It’s ironic that the handing over of library services to local communities is described as asset transfer. The word “asset” implies that the library service has a value. I totally agree with this idea… library services do have a value… In which case, why are local authorities deciding that some libraries are of such little value that they are happy to dump them in a way that implies they don’t care what happens? “Ah! But they are handing them over to local communities, so they are not dumping them,” I can hear people say. In which case, you may like to know that in most cases if local communities don’t volunteer to take over a library, the library will be forced to close. That sounds like ‘dumping them’ to me.

“Each network will provide specialist advice, guidance and resources to drive up the quality and transformative potential of public services that are transferred to then delivered by and for local communities.”

Handing over a service to any organisation (in this case, the community) that doesn’t contain the specialist skills, resources or knowledge to run that service just sounds crazy. It basically means building library services from scratch. Why? Why reinvent the wheel? Why get rid of all that specialist skill, resource and knowledge provided by those who had previously helped provide library services via the local authority and then rebuild it?

“We believe that library services play a vitally important role at the very heart of our communities, and that ‘doing nothing’ would come at a considerable cost. “

I agree, but doing something that fragments a library service, reduces the value of that library service and removes expert skills and knowledge that has been built up over years is also a step backwards, which would come with just as much of a “considerable cost” as “doing nothing”.

I really like the idea behind Tony Smith’s “Library Tribe” photo set on Flickr. They’re of library users and their book selection as they walk out of the library. Each photo includes an insightful comment about their choice of book loan. Really like the style of the photos too – mainly black and white, but with the book covers in vivid colour.

On Flickr Tony says: This is a little project I have thought of starting since my local library, admittedly one of the smallest in my town in England, UK was closed. I live between two great cities and in the North West, well away from Westminster and the hussle of London and the SE.

Humble as it was, while in use it was a great little meeting point for everyone in the locality and doubled up as my local polling station. The latter the place where I did not vote for some of these savage cuts that are being acted upon us across England and to a lesser extent the rest of the UK.

A technique of stealth where the village council were very late to find out appears to have been applied. The excuse that the building had not been brought up to current standards as regards facilities and fire exits etc was an excuse for its demise, down on Albert Road Grappenhall.

It can be seen in use here and my comments later on the first page show how it is today (May 2011).

All a great shame as apparently Warrington had the first rate supported public library in the UK. I wonder what those Victorians, such as William Beamont (solicitor and local philanthropist who founded several churches and the municipal library) would make of this.

This set shows some of the people I have met using my local central library. All are strangers and in some cases the books tell a lot about them and how they use the facilities.

Since Victorian days, libraries have changed a lot. Many people I have chatted to have just gone in to use the computers/internet, read the free papers provided or just been in to keep warm (as some cannot afford to put the heating on).

I am hoping this set will open a window on libraries and how they are being currently used in 2011.

If you have a view, or to let me know what you feel about this set, again, please leave a comment.

The following quotes were taken from the Executive Summary.

“library services can make use of recent evidence about consumer needs and aspirations, while policy priorities such as the Big Society create opportunities for library services to reshape themselves to be fit for purpose for the 21st century”

“Across the library sector and local government a range of activity is underway supporting change in libraries, and the Future Libraries Programme complements and extends this innovation and improvement.”

“Options appraisal should begin from an assessment of community and user need and aspiration.”

“Engaging political leadership from the outset is crucial.”

The fact that so many campaigners battled with (and are still battling with) local authorities to try and persuade them to change their plans to reduce/cut library services suggests that local authorities are not noting “consumer needs and aspirations” at the outset, but only when they are forced into doing it. Many consultations regarding changes to library services did not begin with a discussion with communities. They began with an attitude of “We need to save money, and here’s what we’re going to cut.” At this stage, communities made their discontent known (by campaigning) and then the discussions with communities began… after they had already been upset by the proposals.

The “opportunities” have been twisted into ways for local authorities to save money, rather than the development of “innovation and improvement” or “to reshape themselves to be fit for purpose for the 21st century” .  

It seems as if political leadership wasn’t part of the engagement process. It looked as if it was actually the driver in many cases, even though political agendas can often be different to the agenda of library services.

I understand that the cuts to local authority funding and the Future Library programme are not the same thing, but they are so intricately tied together. As the cuts came in, the Future Libraries Programme was there and it appears that those in power have leapt at the money saving options as the key thing, rather than picking up on the innovations that would still provide a quality library service for users. I’m not stupid - I understand that saving money would make people take interest, but at the same time, if libraries were invested in and developed innovative library services, local authorities would reap the rewards in increased usage.

Maybe the key problem is that decision makers at the top of the chain aren’t from a library background and, as such, it’s no wonder that these decisions are made. If they don’t understand the purpose of a service they don’t really understand what they are taking away from those who value and need it, do they?

A CASH boost of £100,000 has been pledged by Warwickshire County Council to help communities set up their own libraries.

The council say the move is the result of “strong interest” from residents in either setting up their own lending service or cheaply leasing libraries facing the axe due to £2million cuts.

For “strong interest” read “a fear that the council’s threat of closing their library has forced residents into a situation where they have to take over the running of it, rather than doing without it, even though it’s the council’s duty to provide such a service.”

Along with Chris Keene and Paul Stainthorp, I was recently asked by Craigie-Lee Paterson to present to around 20 people at a CPD25 training event at Goldsmith’s (University of London) on the theme of mashups and Web2.0 tools. The audience was mainly made up of academic and health library staff, so as a public librarian it was an opportunity for me to see things from another angle.

The morning was based around presentations from all three of us. Chris opened with a discussion about mashups, giving examples of what people have created with mashup tools and how mashups have developed. I followed up with a look at the tools/ resources you need to create mashups, such as RSS, Yahoo Pipes, library catalogues. Paul then went into detail about a catalogue project called Jerome at the University of Lincoln, as an example of what can be done when you get to the stage where you are able to programme and tinker with data. We finished the morning with questions and answers and a few more mashup examples.

"Simplest)l(" by Chrstphre

In the afternoon Paul and I ran a practical session to create a mashup with Yahoo Pipes. All in attendance sat at their own computer and followed an example, which took an original RSS feed from the Guardian newspaper, filtered out unwanted news articles and tweaked the information so that it was presented in a particular way. After this Yahoo Pipes tutorial we gave people the opportunity to build their own.

I really enjoyed the event. Being involved in a training session outside of my public libraries role provides me with another perspective on how mashups can be used and also what is going on in libraries in the broader arena. It’s always great for me to be involved in these events, as I also get the chance to learn from other presenters – I think Paul and Chris would agree that we all have our own specialist areas and (as with Mashed Libraries events) sessions like this help me fill in gaps in my knowledge.

I think the day worked well and the feedback from Craigie-Lee and those in attendance was positive. Hopefully it will have inspired some of those people in attendance to make use of these tools and get mashing.

I still have a few of them now and open them up once in a while to read a story or two to myself.

Little Pete Stories

I had a couple of Mr Men books – “Mr Greedy” & “Mr Tickle“; “Tales of Joe and Timothy“; “Jacko the monkey” (I think it was called this and I think this is the book on Worldcat!); “Little Pete Stories“; “Teddy Robinson” (this is the one I remember being read out at school, although I think Little Pete was too); “Children of Cherry Tree Farm“; “The Demon Bike Rider” – which contained the classic innuendo “the bike on Barker’s Bonk.” NB: Being the naive soul I am, I have just this minute (honestly after 30 years) realised that this is more of an innuendo than I first thought! It was probably due to the innuendo this raised amongst my school friends that this was the turning point in my reading choice… Into more grown up stuff. Nope, I’m not talking about dirty magazines. I’m talking about The Hardy Boys, which to be honest, I thought were really dull. Maybe that’s why I go back to the books from my earlier years for a bit of nostalgic reading – far more interesting, in my opinion.

One of the things I could never work out with these books, except “The Demon Bike Rider”, is when they were set… All in the 20th century some time, but it’s difficult to gauge.

No matter, I suppose… they made sense to me, I could relate to them and I imagine children now still can, even though we are living in a time where the world contains so much technology. There isn’t any technology in these books, but the fun of childhood is still there.

Libraries need to reinvent themselves to become more relevant in today’s world.

via Whither, librarianship?.

Personally I don’t think they do need to reinvent themselves – most libraries don’t need to start from scratch to improve their services. Most of them have the basis of a great service, they just need to tweak them and ensure that those responsible for running them and developing them actually care about what they’re doing.

ggstopflat

Anyway, the point of this blog post is to say here’s the presentation… and the accompanying notes below it.

Loud Library Voices : Gary Green (Pancakes & Mash, March 2011)

Loud Library Voices: Campaigning, The Web, Journalists & The Offline World
Gary Green: Voices For The Library founder member/campaigner. Technical Librarian / Surrey CC
Presentation – images taken from various campaigns
Presentation – #savelibraries quotes taken from Twitter

Cuts & questions
Mid 2010. Threat of cuts in funding and closures coming
Questions about relevance of libraries when you can ‘just Google it’, books cheap and everything is available as an e-book
Questions about relevance of librarians

Voices For The Library
Was anybody doing anything in defence of libraries?
All wanted to provide positive face of libraries
Founders met on Twitter – most not met in real life
Most of us librarians, but all library users
Gloucestershire, Doncaster campaigns
Decided to do it ourselves – national campaign
Within two weeks had website, Facebook, Flickr, Twitter up and running
Still mostly virtual campaign – though most of us have met now
Do it outside our day jobs
Voluntary – Big Society saying fair enough, but on our terms and for what we believe in
Team – past and present: Phil Bradley, Johanna Anderson, Mick Fortune, Katy Wrathall, Simon Barron, Gary Green, Lauren Smith, Ian Clark, Bethan Ruddock, Tom Roper, Mandy Powell, Ian Anstice, Alice Halsey

2011 – Cuts
526 libraries under threat of closure, recently closed, handed over to communities, privatised
Blog/site
User stories/value of library to them – send stories to us
Blog about situation libraries are in – question it
Campaigning ideas
Supporting statements
Reporting back

Journalists
Make connections – go to them, don’t wait for them to come to you
They can promote what is happening
You can help them with research
Don’t miss an opportunity – if you are keen they’ll come back to you again
Get out and make yourself known – get your voice heard
Write articles

#savelibraries
Started archiving ‘lovelibraries’ ‘savelibraries’ tweets in August 2010
Capture why people felt libraries were important
@Mardixon sent out tweet Jan 2011 asking people to tweet why they’d #savelibraries
#savelibraries trended worldwide and made people more aware of library cuts
Currently about 20,000 tweets archived #savelibraries

Online tools
Behind scenes – started discussion on Twitter and LIS lists
Use emails; wiki to store info; online meetings; face to face meetings
Use Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Blog to inform people, delicious as a resource of links
Use as many channels to try and reach as many people as possible
Try to connect to re-use info and reduce work
Google alerts to get regular updates about libraries

Twitter
news articles; using Tweet buttons means you don’t have to retype links, headlines
Amend headlines so people know where article is about. No good tweeting a headline like “A village library is closing”. It’s not informative.
Can put your own perspective on an article, by wording you use in the tweet
Encourage people to get involved and campaign for their local libraries
Discuss situation with others
Promote events, local campaigns, consultations
RT relevant blog articles
RT tweets by other local campaigners
Good way to report live on events and keep momentum. 5th Feb loads of RTs about the events around the country

More online presence
Facebook – similar to Twitter but less volume of updates. Feed Facebook statuses to Twitter
Flickr – sharing the library love in photo form
Youtube – favourite videos
Hootsuite – can feed info to a number of Twitter, Facebook accounts at the same time.
PC, mobile smartphone – different tools for different situation
Andricious – bookmark on phone and gets tweeted.
Even tinkered – Tagxedo of VFTL site – words are clickable links. Runs search on site
#savelibraries tweets – would love to do mashup with them

Closures Map
Leeds data – put into map with Google docs spreadsheet fed into Yahoo pipes. Pulled in employment info and stats
Wanted to expand it.
Map – Ian Anstice site Public Libraries News tracks closures- markers for each authority indicating number of libraries to close (Screenshot)
Didn’t want to reinvent wheel – started helping Ian Anstice
Added campaign/event info with links – manually – no spreadsheet
Two others – Emerson and Nick helped put it into structured format
New map built on Google Fusion tables – mostly by Nick
Means we can re-use data
I’m not getting as much time to update it, so it’s good that others are finding time to update it

Online flow of information
Use simple methods, because tools are already there
Paper.li : pulls links out of Twitter by using a search. Produces a newspaper type page (image) automatically updated and archived… don’t have to miss any news that has been tweeted… just go and look at paper.li edition for that day.
Packrati.us: Saves links to delicious from your Twitter account and any hashtags as delicious tag
Twitterfeed – automatically publish any RSS feeds you want to Twitter
My personal Twitter tweet link using #ukpling hashtag, saves to delicious bookmarks via packrati.us; Twitterfeed pulls out #ukpling bookmarks and feeds to @ukpling account – handy if I also want to tweet it from my own account
Yahoo pipes – map; behind the scenes work – identifying any campaigns, events, consultation on original closures map without having to trawl through each marker; feed of combined news stories to vftl website
Try to keep it simple – don’t get tangled up in knots when connecting everything together

Get Involved In Healthy debate
Respond to people who think libraries and librarians aren’t relevant
Online and offline
In the pub
Beyond people who work in libraries
Don’t just sit there tutting and ask who is going to save libraries?
If you want to save libraries you need to do it yourself, not expect someone else to do it for you

Roles
Different things that need to be done
Not just about updating twitter, Facebook
Talk to others outside the group
Keep an eye on what’s going on, so you can nip any problems in the bud
Fall into roles, even though maybe started in different roles
I do lots of tweeting (but not only me), some updating blog, facebook, collecting news, tinkering and saying “I know! Let’s stick it into Yahoo pipes”
Has given me opportunity to do something useful with my tinkering

Getting the point across – online & offline
Online – good way to communicate to the masses
Report back on what’s going on. Did you have a meeting with a councillor? Are you collecting signatures on a petition? Have you submitted a FOI request? Report back on it, then.
Not just about having a website or a Facebook page – you need to get out into the real world
Phil Bradley posters – used by campaigners. Adapted from out of copyright posters
Save Doncaster Libraries campaign posters
Leaflets through doors – Rosehill
Gloucestershire events 5th Feb. Friends Of Gloucestershire Libraries – events at all libraries that were open.
Petitions – both Glouc & Doncs had over 15,000 signatures on their petitions
Stony Stratford – took all books out
Correct any misunderstandings – do your research
Sometimes newspaper headlines are wrong and give false hope ie “libraries saved”… no they’re not, they’ve been given a 6 month reprieve
Attend events outside libraries – vftl planning to attend a couple of literary festivals
Lobby those in power
Question the councillors and politicians
Videos – Somerset
It works – it enthuses others
It works – it makes the headlines, it makes the BBC national news
It works – it makes politicians uneasy and unable to sweep it under the carpet

Louder voices
Connect with others who are campaigning
Get others to help – don’t think you can do it yourself
Even if someone can only give you 5 minutes of their time make use of it
Don’t think you know best – find out how others have done things
Don’t reinvent the wheel – has someone else in your area already started a campaign? – join them and build numbers of campaigners
Events
Help coordinate
Organise meetings

Difference between VFTL & other campaigns now time has moved on
VFTL national (although we do link to campaigns such as Doncaster and others)
Most others local
Have had 110,000+ visits to website since starting in September – can reach wide group – more than local campaign
Offer support and advice to local campaigns
Show how other campaigners have achieved things
Links to the media
Good links to other national organisations focussed on libraries and literacy

Anyone can campaign
Don’t think library staff in local area are going to campaign, because most of them can’t campaign – sometimes dismissable action.
If you do campaign it won’t be an easy ride, but it will stop and make councils think about what they are doing and make them aware that the people they are supposed to serve are keeping an eye on what they are doing.

I went to the March For The Alternative last Saturday. It was a protest march through London… a protest march against cuts the Government are forcing onto local authorities, including libraries. A few hundred thousand people turned up. I can’t be sure of the exact numbers, as indications in the media vary so much.

My girlfriend had helped me with my placard, which I’d built from an empty box of toilet paper… it seemed appropriate!

I didn’t know what the march was going to be like. It was my first, but for many reasons I felt it was important that I was there. I was hoping to meet up with other library campaigners, especially those involved in Voices For The Library. 

However, due to the crowds, I didn’t manage it. It didn’t matter though – I may not have known the people around me, but we were all there for the same reason.

I got to Waterloo Station by 10.30am and started the march at about 11.30am. The only celebrity marcher I saw on route was Billy Bragg. Nice to see him, especially as he has been a keen supporter of libraries. 

Starting from Embankment, the march went along the Thames and past various political landmarks, including The Houses of Parliament, Downing Street, Whitehall, Trafalgar Square, Picadilly Circus.

The people who came along were from right across the social spectrum and age ranges. They were all there to make the point that these cuts are ridiculous.

I had intended to tweet highlights along the way, along with photographs, but I had real problems with my phone. I only managed to get a signal for about 5 minutes along the whole route, so that plan failed! The photos I took are available on Flickr. It was good to catch up with tweets and photographs later in the day that other campaigners had sent out.

Despite the fact that we were all there for a downbeat reason, it was an upbeat day, with music accompanying us on our route and people making their voices heard.

I eventually got to the Hyde Park rally at about 3.15pm. I listened to a few speakers talking about cuts to NHS, care and services supplied to immigrants.  It was interesting to hear about other areas of public services, as I’ve been concentrating on cuts to public libraries. However, by about 3.45pm I was getting a bit fed up by the fact that I’d not met anyone I knew and may not do, as I didn’t know where anyone was and the battery on my phone was about to go kaput!

But then I got a phone call from Mick telling me which pub a few of them were in. Hurrah! So, I headed off in the right direction and as I was crossing the road at Hyde Park I bumped into  original Voices For The Library founder and Friends Of Gloucestershire Libraries campaigner Jo Bo Anderson with her family! What are the chances of bumping into them amongst a few hundred thousand protesters and what a nice bit of serendipity. So, I got the chance to catch up with Jo and then meet Mick, Anne, Simon, Gareth in the pub. A great way to top off what was, on the whole, a positive and successful march… and I haven’t thrown my placard away… just in case I need it again soon. I hope I don’t, but that would be too good to be true.

The decision to remove mobile libraries remains open for consultation until the end of March 2011 and the “community partnered libraries” until June 2011.

Dr Andrew Povey suggested that at the end of the day service provision for all libraries may mean “Eleven different solutions will be the case.” depending upon the community partnership proposal.

There is no definite indication as to what will happen to the 11 libraries if community partnerships are not put in place.

(Apologies: This blog post failed to be published as originally scheduled. Typical!)

Then, in some cases, the councils either went back on their original decisions, or revealed/expanded on information that was previously hidden away. Original council statements about cuts and closures can be written in a manner that allows people to interpret the statement in a number of different ways… ways that implies services are safer than they really are, but gives councils a get-out clause and the opportunity to exclaim to anyone who questions their actions, “But, we told you that originally!”, or “You never asked us!”

For example:

Wiltshire – Mere Library hours

Users of Mere Library were originally informed in November 2010 that the service would remain as it is, however they subsequently discovered that “Mere’s service could be reduced from 45 hours a week to just 14“. (Salisbury Journal, 20th January 2011) “Wiltshire Council later relented and said the service would operate for 31 hours a week, but residents’ celebrations were cut short when they were told this would consist of 17 hours of library staffing and 14 hours of volunteer staffing. They were also warned this is likely to be reduced in the longer term…” (Salisbury Journal, 24th February 2011)

How could this be interpreted as Mere Library remaining as it is?

Southampton – Librarian posts

Last year concerns were raised about the future of Millbrook and Thornhill Libraries by library staff and users. John Hannides (Libraries councillor) “said the council was working with the community in Thornhill to create a local volunteer library service. Housing boss Cllr Peter Baillie added he “expected” a library to return in Millbrook in one of the retail units earmarked for Cumbrian Way.” (Southern Daily Echo, 16th September 2010)

However, a petition was submitted against the proposals and Southampton City Council replied (29th October 2010) as follows. “It is important to stress that there will be no redundancies or loss of librarian posts as a result of the proposal to introduce more volunteers.”

Even if Southampton did keep the same number of librarian posts city-wide, just by creating a local volunteer library in Thornhill, it means that librarian posts or trained library staff would be lost from that location.

How is this not “loss of librarian posts”?

NB: These Southampton libraries have now been reprieved, but the point I’m making still stands.

Doncaster – Timescale for changes

In February 2010 Doncaster County Council stated “The budget proposals that will be considered on Monday contain provisions that: The budget required to maintain library provision at the 14 sites across the borough will be re-instated as a 2011/12 reserve for up to a year.” However, within a couple of weeks it was discovered that some local communities had only been given up until June 2010 to suggest alternative ways to keep their local public library, otherwise it would be closed.

How can three months be classed as “up to a year”?

More details of the Doncaster campaign can be found on the Save Doncaster Libraries site.

Gloucestershire – Number of libraries affected

It was suggested that only 11 Gloucestershire libraries would be affected by changes by the County Council, as they would no longer be funded by the County Council. However, it turned out that as well as this, proposals included the creation of 7 Library Link libraries, which would only have to be open a minimum of 3 hours per week! The Council’s own report stated “For Library Link to be affordable, we need a number of partners to either move into a library building or for the library to share a building owned by a partner.” ie The Council would only be able to keep libraries open if other organisations came forward to help. It was also announced that all 5 mobile libraries were to be closed.

How could the council say the service in these libraries would be unaffected?

More details can be found on the Friends of Gloucestershire Libraries site, here and here.

Gloucestershire – Freedom of Information requests

Gloucestershire were also involved partnership discussions with the local Police Authority. When a Freedom of Information request by Friends of Gloucestershire Libraries was made about these discussions/agreements between the two organisations, Gloucestershire County Council responded as follows:

“we do not hold any information relating to this request as Gloucestershire County Council does not have an agreement with the Police regarding libraries. We have only entered into discussions at this stage so there is no documentation”

Gloucestershire Police Authority responded as follows:

“Under the Freedom of Information Act 2000 s1, I can confirm that Gloucestershire Police Authority holds some relevant information. No formal agreements exist, although proposals around potential opportunities to share accommodation are being explored. Documentation relating to this is currently exempt by virtue of paragraphs 3 and 4 of part 1 of Schedule 12A of the Local Government Act 1972, and therefore closed to Freedom of Information requests.”

So, as Gloucestershire Police Authority were able to provide confirmation that information existed, could Gloucestershire County Council response be taken as understanding what was required from the request, but deciding to deliberately interpret it in a way that meant they did not provide any information? Wouldn’t it have been better (in the eyes of the voting public) if they’d shown themselves to be open and transparent and more willing to pass on some useful information. This has also happened on another occasion with a Freedom of Information request submitted to Gloucestershire.

More information can be found on the Friends of Gloucestershire Libraries site.

There’s a lack of clarity in all of these, which seems as if some Councils are trying to deliberately bury the bad news and hide the truth. It’s almost as if they are standing there looking innocent, and when questioned about what they originally said, pull tongues and shout “Ha! Ha! It doesn’t count! I had my fingers crossed behind my back when I said it!”

It’s no wonder people have trouble believing politicians. If councils gave the public the information they wanted and needed in the first place, it would be a step towards them regaining our trust in them… if that’s possible.

“To review the decision by Cabinet on 1 February 2011 to implement the recommendations of the Libraries PVR to close the mobile library service and transfer libraries into community partnership.”

The Select Committee voted five to four in favour of Cabinet re-thinking their decision. This does not mean that they have overturned the original decision, just that Cabinet have been asked to reconsider it on 1st March, 2011.

Dr Andrew Povey (Leader and Chairman of the Cabinet) recently suggested on his blog that the provision of library services should be re-examined…

“I am confident that the Big Society will give everybody an opportunity to get involved in their local communities and we are therefore keen to explore options whereby libraries might be run by local residents themselves.”

…and on Twitter

“Why doesn’t Gov let us charge for libraries? Could save money & provide more comprehensive services.”

(Edit: 25/02/11)

Doncaster libraries were given a reprieve for a year, where a proper consultation, involving ‘experts’ would be carried out to determine what would happen to the libraries. From the notes I saw there was tremendous support from local councillors and petitions were signed by at least 15,000 people. This is great news and the chance of a proper consultation could get Doncaster libraries back on track to providing a service local users need. Lauren Smith and the Save Doncaster Libraries campaign members should be very proud of the role they played in achieving this and hopefully they will be able to influence the outcome of the consultation.

Gloucestershire libraries however didn’t have a happy ending, even though intervention by central Government agencies and ministers was asked for by campaigners. A large number of libraries will be closed or reduced to token hours that can not really claim to be a comprehensive library service and mobile services will be removed. This is despite the hard work by Friends of Gloucestershire Libraries campaign group, the 15,000+ signatures that were collected for their save libraries petition, the national media attention the campaign has received, and the local people who turned out to show their support on 5th February and meetings and other protests. I wonder how ignoring this massive support for libraries is democracy? It isn’t really, is it.

I’ll admit, I’m particularly upset about Gloucestershire – I have seen the campaign grow since the first day Johanna Anderson (Friends of Gloucestershire Libraries) highlighted the plans that had been announced on the This Is Gloucestershire site (August 2010, I think) and I have seen the many of the ups and downs. In fact, seeing what was going on in Gloucestershire played an important part in my joining Voices For The Library.

I know this is no consolation for Friends of Gloucestershire Libraries campaigners and all involved, but I have great admiration for all they have tried to do. They deserved so much better than this result.

I work for Surrey County Council Library Service.

The Library Service recently underwent a public value review. (Full documents here & here.) As a result of this recommendations were made as follows to a Cabinet meeting on 1st February, 2011.

PUBLIC VALUE REVIEW OF LIBRARY SERVICES

(1) To agree to work with Parish Councils, local charities, community groups and organisations, with the aim of inviting interest to establish community partnership at selected libraries, and co-designing and developing a Surrey model for locally managed and partnered libraries, with a progress report to Cabinet following the consultation period.

(2) That local committees lead in driving the community partnering approach for libraries forward.

(3) That consultation with existing users of the mobile library borrowers and equality advisory groups be agreed, to co-design a sustainable and value for money service including consideration of appropriate and affordable support to enable borrowers to continue to access library services, with a focus on using e-technology, community transport and voluntary driver schemes. This requires a proportion of savings to be redirected to providing alternatives. The actual cost will be unknown until consultation is completed, but initial estimates suggest a maximum total annual cost of £109,000 is required between 2012-13. It is expected that this sum would reduce by 15% per annum in 2013-14 and 2014-15. In 2012-13 net annual saving would be £330,000.

(4) That withdrawal of the mobile library service be agreed. Thereafter annual savings of £439,000 in library controllable expenditure savings and £7,000 in annual corporate savings (insurance and parking) would be achieved.

(5) That implementation of the action plan should start immediately, led by Peter Milton, Head of Library Services.

(6) That progress be reported on a quarterly basis to the PVR Steering Board and the Safer and Stronger Communities Select Committee.

(7) That the recommendations set out in the implementation action plan, attached to the submitted report, be agreed.

Reasons for decisions:

 To move the Public Value Review of Surrey Library Service into the consultation and implementation phase.

[The decisions on this item can be called in by the Safer and Stronger Communities Select Committee.]

With regard to (1), 11 libraries have been named and identified as candidates for community partnerships, although the number or which ones they are is not indicated in the agreed decisions above. They are Bagshot, Bramley, Byfleet, Ewell Court, Lingfield, Molesey, New Haw, Stoneleigh, Tattenhams, Virginia Water, Warlingham.

The budget was agreed by the Conservative led Council on 8th February. However, Liberal Democrats & Labour voted against it. The Residents Association abstained. Surrey County Council elected councillors are broken down as follows: Conservative (55), Liberal Democrats (13), Independent or Residents Association (10), Labour (1), No-group affiliation (1).

The budget agreed at the meeting on 1st February was called-in by the “Select Committee for Safer and Stronger Communities”. Reasons for the call-in can be found on the BBC website and on the Surrey Liberal Democrats website. 

Edit 22/02/2011: Reasons for call-in are shown below (taken from Surrey County Council site.)

CALL IN OF CABINET DECISION – PUBLIC VALUE REVIEW OF SURREY LIBRARIES (decision of 1 February 2011)

To review the decision by Cabinet on 1 February 2011 to implement the recommendations of the Libraries PVR to close the mobile library service and transfer libraries into community partnership.

Mr David Goodwin, Mrs Jan Mason and Mr David Wood called-in the decision on 8 February 2011.

Recommendations for changes will be discussed at a meeting at County Hall, Kingston on 22nd February (10.30am). This meeting will be open to the public.

Feedback can also be sent to: library.pvr@surreycc.gov.uk

Opinions on the suggested changes can be found on Liberal Democrat Councillor’ Diana Smith’s blog and Stokieboy’ blog.

Newspaper articles about the changes can be found on the Public Libraries News site.

To sit along side that, I’ve come up with some ideas for people who can’t make it to a library on the 5th February.

1.) Find something interesting on your library catalogue from the comfort of your living room (list of online catalogues here). What hobbies have you got? See if there’s anything in stock on that topic in your local library. Found something interesting? Reserve it and pick it up the next time you visit the library.

2.) If your library catalogue lets you do it, review or rate books you have read, CDs you’ve listened to, DVDs you’ve watched.

3.) If you’re not online, why not (crazy idea coming up ) read a book, listen to a CD/audiobook or watch a DVD  you already borrowed from library… and then review it/rate it online.

4.) If you need an answer to a question, instead of just “Googling it” and not being sure if the information you’re looking at is correct or not, why not let a librarian point you to the right information?

• Many library services provide free access to trustworthy subscription only websites for areas such as business, historical, consumer and biographical information.

• Ask a librarian, by using the online ‘Enquire‘ service, which provides a 24 hour a day service.

5.) Leave a comment on the library website to say why you love your local library. Those comments get back to the library bosses high up, you know, and these comments provide evidence to show that people do value their library services.

6.) Find a reading group to join. Take a look at your library website – there should be a link on it to reading groups in your area.

7.) Join a friends of the library group or a campaign group. Find contact details of your local library and get in touch with them to find out if one exists.

8.) Sign an online petition to save your local library. Many are listed on the closures map.

This map serves as a reminder as to why this day of library events has been organised. Over 400 libraries in the UK under threat of closure. So, it’s up to everyone to get involved and make a stand to save our libraries.

Edit.

9.) Phil Bradley also suggested the following great idea… Create a really simple flyer – which maybe fits about one third to one half A4 page and print a few of them out. Then simply pop them through the doors of your neighbours.

During the interview he said ”We (Conservatives) have never said - and it’s a gross misrepresentation of what we have said – that somehow volunteers should replace professional librarians.”

“No-one is suggesting that volunteers should take over the role of professional librarians…. Nobody is saying that there’s a strategy to replace  professional librarians with volunteers.”

Lauren Smith (Save Doncaster Libraries and fellow Voices For The Library campaigner) pointed out that there are libraries being run up and down the country solely with volunteers and without librarians.

To this, Mr Vaizey responded with “That’s the point… Currently run without professional librarians. So those libraries are already open.”

What did his response mean? Was he suggesting that because there are libraries already being run by volunteers that this proves they can be run successfully without professional librarians?

Lauren continued with the statement that these volunteer libraries are not fulfilling the role of what a library should and could be.

Anyway, the Government’s Future Libraries & Big Society programme is advocating the use of volunteers, but it’s not specifically saying to what extent. In the context of libraries it’s not saying, “Don’t get rid of librarians and trained staff.” It’s as woolly as the Public Libraries & Museums Act 1964… open to interpretation and gives councils an opportunity just to dump local library services if they feel like it… and some are planning just that. Take a look at Gloucestershire Libraries.

Mr Vaizey also made the comment, “I’m constantly telling people what the role of libraries is, but I can’t tell every single person in the country.”

Really? I can’t see how the Minister responsible for libraries in England, who can easily get the ear of anyone he wanted to via the media, is unable to spell out the importance of libraries! I have witnessed lots of campaigns springing up over the past few months that are very effective at spelling out why libraries are important. If they are capable of it, why isn’t Mr Vaizey?

He also went on to say, “You have to elect councillors who believe in libraries and you have to campaign in your local area to get councils to back their libraries.”

I’d question why we should have to persuade local councillors of the importance of a local library service? We don’t vote in councillors with the thought of “Hmm! I wonder if they’ll support libraries?” You’d expect them to support and fight for any statutory service the council was responsible for, as part of their job, wouldn’t you? I would.

I had great intentions to do some kind of creative mashup with all these tweets, but never got around to it. Since starting these archives I got heavily involved in the ‘Voices For The Library’ campaign, which is a national campaign defending the value of public libraries in the UK, and that has been my focus. The reason I set up the tweet archives was the same reason I got involved in VFTL.

Yesterday something fantastic happened – Twitter user @MarDixon started the ball rolling to get #savelibraries trending. Up until yesterday the #savelibraries archive contained just under 500 tweets and today it contains 4890 (Edit: 9,193 as of 24/01/2011). When I set up the archives I was hoping something like this would happen, but didn’t know if it would. Yesterday showed the clear support for public libraries, during a time when UK councils want to needlessly close so many of them – over 370 at the last count!

So, thanks to @MarDixon we now have an archive of ‘Save Libraries’ tweets overflowing with library positivity waiting to be used creatively in a data mashup and…

I want to issue this challenge to the data mashup community.

Come up with a creative data mashup that makes use of these tweet archives for the ‘MarDixon Voices For The Library Data Mashup Challenge’.

The end result can be anything you like, as long as you use the following archive.

• #savelibraries

This archive is available as an RSS feed, HTML, or Excel file.

So, are you up for spreading the word about library goodness into the big wide world in the form of a data mashup? Come on, I know there are people out there up for the challenge. Use your mashup talents to create something around a cause that is so high profile right now. Prize is a £60 Amazon voucher.

Any contributions can be added as a link to this post.

Thanks & good luck.

The closing date for entries is 1st March 2011. Announcement of winner will be made on 8th March 2011 at the next Mashed Libraries event.

• Advanced create/edit: Access markers you’ve imported into your account; import new markers; add them manually.
• Quick create: Build a trail manually.
• Edit Trail Map: Add/edit markers while in the trail map.
• Bookmarklet: This sits on your toolbar and allows you to add markers whilst browsing the web.

Other features include…

• Firefox toolbar: Provides the ability to add markers to a trail and search for trails, without needing to visit the Trailmeme website.
• WordPress plugin: Can be used on self-hosted WordPress blogs as a way to highlight themes covered in a blog or a series of articles.
• Discussion forum: Could be useful for getting others involved in the development of your trails, or as a way to discuss the ideas raised within the trail.
• You can also identify if a marker you use has been used on another trail.
• Social gaming/interaction: Blazer’s Journey. The more active you are on the site, the higher the level you reach.

Image (c) UW Digital Collections / Flickr.

Trailmeme is a lot easier to use since the revamp, whether it’s from the point of view of creating a trail or walking one and I’ve been working on a few new  trails using it. The latest is…

Voices For The Library campaign trail: The starting point for the trail is the VFTL campaign website. By putting this trail together I was attempting to highlight different resources mentioned on the VFTL website. The trail fans out from this website in three spokes – each spoke links to other VFTL web presences; endorsements from other organisations for VFTL; campaigns mentioned on the VFTL website. I’ve had to use intermediary pages for each of the three spokes, as I didn’t want to highlight a particular endorsement, campaign or other web presence from the VFTL website.

The FoI request included details of issues, visits and PC bookings. After tracking down unemployment figures for electoral districts, I mapped them to postcodes so they related to the correct libraries. The data was then combined in a Google spreadsheet and the spreadsheet was mapped in Yahoo Pipes.

Each library appears as a marker on the map and they contain information such as “Middleton Library. Change in issues: 20185 . Change in visits: 28409 . Change in PC Bookings: 945 / Unemployment 2010: 13.6%“.

As I say, it was just a simple way of comparing usage figures of libraries situated close to each other alongside unemployment figures. It beats scanning a list of figures on a spreadsheet. I also just wondered if I could put Yahoo Pipes to practical use. My pipe tinkerings have previously been aimed at seeing what I could do with pipes, whereas this was more to do with putting it to good use and maybe building on it in some way.

They got me mashing…

I got involved in Mashed Libraries – attending events, creating mashups (combining data from different resources to present it in a new way), getting back into computer programming after a break of about 20 years. I also presented sessions at two separate events. These were the first presentations I’ve ever done outside my department.

They made me want to play a part in the wider library community…

I got involved in projects in the library community, beyond the scope of my own job. I also joined CILIP (Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals). The people I follow on Twitter showed me that CILIP does have an important role to play in the future of libraries. I also now feel as if I’m part of the library community beyond my own organisation.

They got me thinking about the future of libraries…

I became increasingly aware that the value of libraries and librarians were being questioned by people beyond the library community and within it. As the year went by I heard more stories about local authorities planning library closures. I was concerned and angry, but at the same time I got inspired/motivated by a small group of librarians and information professionals, who felt that someone needed to do something to stop these closures. From this, within about 2 weeks, we founded the library campaign Voices For The Library.

They made me smile…

There’s always someone on Twitter who will make me laugh, smile, give support, or “make it better” with a funny comment, a piece of advice, an anecdote, or a show of concern. It’s been a bit of a disheartening year with regard to some aspects of libraries, so this kind of support counts for a lot.

I appreciate all of these people and I just wanted to say thanks… Oh! Go on then. Have a hug.

Image (c) ganesha.isis / Flickr

I also realise I missed some people off my Follow Friday’s and this thanks is for them too.

There are a number of applications that use Twitter to pull together links you are interested in and present the links in a more readable way, than just performing a standard Twitter search and going through all the shortened links one by one.

I chose to use paper.li, because it allows you to create a daily newspaper page that can be published/tweeted at a preset time. It displays the title and snippet of the item you are linking to, which is better than looking at a shortened url and not knowing whether the link is useful or not. It also displays any photos or videos that have been tweeted.

It’s easy to set up. To get links into your newspaper you can pull them out from Twitter using one of the following methods:

• Choose a Twitter account (this picks up links from that account and also Twitter users that account is following)
• Set up a hashtag search
• Choose a Twitter list
• Set up a complex search

 You can give your newspaper a name and this will appear at the top of the page. Below this are a number of horizontal tabs, indicating ‘Headlines’, specific subjects extracted from the tweet (eg Education) and any hashtag mentioned in the tweets that contained the links. The paper is also archived, so you can revisit any saved links from the time you set up the newspaper.

 (c) Nationaalarchief/Flickr

I spent some time tinkering with the search methods to get the most appropriate links into the newspaper. By using complexes search containing ‘@ukpling’, people we follow on Twitter, or followers of a list, or even various hashtags, it didn’t work as I wanted it to. These methods pulled in links that weren’t relevant, because other people we follow aren’t solely focussed on library campaigning (even from my own personal account I don’t just tweet about libraries). Hashtags are also used inconsistently, so wouldn’t pick up everything we were after. In the end I set up the simplest search ever. It just contains the word ‘ukpling’. This allowed links to be picked up that were either sent out from our account, or someone sent to us, or mentioned ‘ukpling’ in any way. Sometimes the simplest solution is the best!

It’s set up to publish (tweet) at the same time every day - lunchtime. I just figured people may be more likely to be looking at Twitter at this time and can see all the consolidated links we’ve tweeted over the past day. Our followers can then also retweet our consolidated links to their followers.

You can also embed paper.li into a web page too as a widget.

As I say, there are other applications like paper.li and I played with a few of them, but I just found this to be straightforward and more or less achieves what I want it to.

My only quibbles are that:

• I’m sure there are other relevant results hiding on Twitter, but at the moment the Twitter search API doesn’t allow you to get at them easily without pulling out irrelevant links too.
• Sometimes duplicate links appear in paper.li – because more than one person has tweeted them.
• It would be good to be able to set up your own layout for the newspaper you create.

These are minor things and I’m happy to live with them. Just the fact that we’ve now got something set up to bring these links together in a readable form is very useful in itself.

You can read the daily ‘Voices For The Library Links’ here.

I decided to make use of packrati.us, which is a bookmarking service used to automatically save links you tweet to your delicious.com account. It can also be used for saving links in Historious, Instapaper, Pinboard.in, and Diigo accounts too, but I just use it for Twitter. Loads of other people use it too, so I thought I could make use of links that everyone has saved via this method.

(c) National Media Museum/Flickr

By default if a link is saved in delicious.com using packrati.us it saves it with the tag “via:packrati.us“. This gave me a starting point to create relevant RSS feeds to pull into Yahoo Pipes. I then built on it to pull in tags such as “library”, “libraries” and “librarians”.

Delicious is a bit of a nuisance, because it does rank bookmarks, but it doesn’t do it by the number of times a link has been bookmarked. It provides links to popular bookmarks (using some kind of relevance ranking), not necessarily links that have been saved the most. Strangely enough, even though delicious.com users have been asking for ranking by the number of times an item has been saved for a while, this feature hasn’t appeared.

I then:

• Put the RSS feeds into Yahoo pipes
• Combined the feeds into one feed
• Filtered them (so that each link only appeared once in the list)
• Sorted them by number of times the link appeared in the original RSS feed & date (to get most recent at the top of the list when it’s refreshed)
• Pulled out keywords from the original Tweet and delicious bookmarks (I just wanted it to give me an idea of the focus of the link. eg literacy; reader development, etc.)
• Deleted any irrelevant words (‘quot’, which appears in the text if ” is used)
• Mapped the keywords to the description field.

This is the resulting pipe.

It does what I want it to do, but it would be better if:

• All packrati links could be pulled out. At the moment I’m relying on people tagging anything they save via packrati with a tag reference to libraries too, so I may be missing out on library links that are popular, but haven’t had an extra tag added. There’s no other way of getting an RSS feed for a search on any keywords. RSS feeds in delicious.com are limited to tag searches.
• My regex skills aren’t great, so some odd keywords like “RT” and “amp” appear in the description field of the results. I couldn’t get rid of them.
• The term ‘library’ or ‘libraries’ can also refer to programming code collections, so I might end up with the odd false hit in the results.

As far as I’m concerned they’re not massive issues, but I’d like to get them ironed out if I can.

Anyway, now I don’t have to perform loads of searches every day to find the most popular library links.

The video recording of Alison McGovern’s speech is here.

It is “a unique partnership to connect authors with libraries, Friends of the Library groups and library Foundations as well as to keep authors informed about issues and concerns affecting libraries on a national level. “

Seems like a good idea to me. We’ve got so many authors like Philip Pullman, Kate Mosse, Will Self, Michael Rosen, Neil Gaiman defending UK public libraries at the moment in the press, that maybe it’s time to see if a more formal link can be made between the authors and libraries.

Libraries and authors existences  are intertwined, but I’m not sure how much authors know about all of the things that affect libraries. Obviously authors understand that libraries provide a market share for their book distribution, enable book promotion through events and that libraries are an important way of developing literacy skills, but how much do they know about the strategies and local/national politics that affect the provision of library services? From a librarians point of view, I don’t know a lot about the internal politics of publishing, so why should authors know the minutiae ins-and-outs of providing a library service?

So, wouldn’t an author/library partnership scheme be a good way to cross-pollinate the two professions and formally link authors with each public library in the country?

NB: At this point I will click ‘publish’ and within 5 minutes someone will add a comment saying “Oh! That scheme already exists. Here’s the link.”

“The members of the profession, whether in practice or in employment, must be independent in thought and outlook. They must be willing to speak their minds without fear or favour.”

I feel without this independent and free thinking we can’t really engage in debate about our profession or develop information and library services in new and innovative ways. If we are held back by what we think we should say, or what we are told to say we run the risk of getting told how we should run services, rather than leading the development of these services.

“In its specific field of learning a profession must give leadership to the public it serves.”

“…we still struggle with the question of how are we able to truly recognise and then relay to society our worth to our communities?”

We are the experts in our profession. We should be guiding our users – showing them what we have to offer. We should be thinking about the opportunities that are out there, how we make use of them to help our service users, and how we sell what we do to users and non-users. We shouldn’t wait to be prompted and guided by those outside the profession about the services we provide and how we provide them.

“One of the issues that I have grappled with this year has been to determine what we, as CILIP, are advocating.  I know I am not alone in this.  Part of the  ’problem’ is the confusion about what exactly we are advocating for.  Is it:

Libraries – as buildings and as the icons that exemplify our cultural and economic contribution to society?

Library and Information Services – as the content within those buildings, or increasingly virtually beyond them, and by which users and individuals are able to access knowledge and information?

Librarians and Information Professionals – as the agents that develop and maintain the tools, the processes and systems that permit consistent and non judgemental access?

Or possibly the unique body of knowledge that appends our professional practice and that we acquire in our education, develop in our practice and discussions with peers and which grows with our increasing expertise, confidence and the taking of  opportunities?”

In my mind it’s all of these things that CILIP and its members should be advocating – anything that promotes the idea of what an information professional or librarian does and all that entails. It’s all so intertwined that in some cases it is difficult to separate the different strands.

I thought Biddy’s speech was powerful and it made me feel positive about the role that CILIP will be playing for our profession in the future. We as professionals and individuals though, need to take note of these ideas and make sure we put them into practice. Otherwise we will just remain as we are now – undervalued and disenfranchised!

My only other concern about the AGM was that only about 80 CILIP members attended. I understand that most members would be getting on with their day job during the time that the CILIP AGM was taking place and that’s fair enough. However, those who didn’t attend had the opportunity to vote on various decisions by proxy – only a handful of people took this opportunity. Why? Was it really so difficult to look at the agenda, read the documents, make a decision and cast a vote for an organisation you have paid to be a member of?

I really hope this lack of interest isn’t going to be an indication of voting in the CILIP elections too. All it takes is a little bit of time to have a look at the various manifestos of the candidates and a moment to put a little cross in the box, pop it in the post and you’re done. Everyone should take the opportunity to vote.

Libraries are going through a time of change at the moment and the value of librarians and information professionals is being questioned in the media, by the Government and by people who just don’t grasp their importance in the 21st century and current economic climate. We need to fight this attitude and show that we are interested in our own future and that what we do is relevant. We need to support the organisation we have chosen to become members of – the organisation that represents us and our values (CILIP). By voting in the elections you can put people on CILIP Council and in the position of Vice-President who will help shape the future of CILIP and ensure that the message that libraries, librarians and information professionals are still of value in a digital society, is heard.

Tagxedo is built on Microsoft Silverlight, which is similar to Flash. The great thing about Tagxedo is that, not only does it allow you to create a Wordcloud as an image, but it also allows you to index the words in the wordcloud and make the whole image searchable. Not many people seem to have cottoned onto this fact and I think it’s a really underused feature. It makes browseable wordclouds much more interesting if you’re actually clicking around a picture to perform the search. Part of the reason why it’s not been used much might be that, to create a clickable Tagxedo, you originally had to have Silverlight installed. This changed a while back when Hardy Leung, creator of Tagxedo, added a html version of this. It’s not as dynamic as the Silverlight version (ie the words don’t pop up as you hover over them), but it still works really well. With this in mind I’ve created a clickable Tagxedo for the Voices For The Library website here.

I created it in the shape of a heart, in keeping with my the ‘We love public libraries’ theme. It’s not hosted on the ‘Voices For The Library’ site, but links through to it. Please give it a go and let me know what you think.

These two situations came about from a feeling that something was up in the library world – for a few months there’d been a rise in the number of people questioning the value and relevance of libraries and librarians/library staff in a digital/online world dominated by Google. The media ran stories about library cuts, and people commented on their vision of libraries that might have been relevant a few generations ago, but aren’t any more. “How much more of this can I listen to and read before my head pops?” I thought.

I felt like I needed to do something, rather than just sitting there moaning, getting frustrated about stories in the media and responding to the odd blog post.

To be fair, lots of people outside of the profession might still see libraries as no more than just shelves of books, and librarians just stamp books all day and point people to the nearest copy of Encyclopedia Britannica. I know this isn’t true, but it’s only recently that I’ve come to realise the full range of work that the profession participates in. Over the past couple of years my network of library friends has grown beyond my immediate workplace (a public library service). I now know people who work in academic, business, school and specialist libraries and I’ve learnt that being a library or information professional in these areas entails so much more than even I ever thought it did. Take a look at the stories on the ‘Library Day in the Life‘ wiki to see the great breadth of work librarians and information professionals across all these sectors are involved with.

Anyway, I just felt that I didn’t want the role of libraries and librarians to die out, that’s why I got involved in both Voices for the Library and Cilip. Our profession is relevant and I really don’t want to let people who aren’t librarians or information professionals taking the lead on how our futures and the futures of libraries pan out. I do feel we need to fight our corner.

The Voices for the Library campaign came about from the threats of cutbacks and closures to UK Public Library Services and the trained staff who work in them. The various people in the group come from different backgrounds, but are all either librarians or information professionals and we just felt that there was no point sitting back and complaining and tutting to ourselves about the situation. We wanted to do something to stop it and correct the facts that were being given out about our supposedly failing public libraries. An irony of the group is that I’m the only public librarian in it! The main outlet for the campaign is the website, but we are doing so much more than this. The campaign is a way for library users to tell everyone what public libraries mean to them. It supports campaigns defending libraries under threat. It is helping to make the media aware of the value of libraries and librarians/trained library staff and it promotes positive stories about libraries beyond them being places that just contain books.

With regard to CILIP, it’s seen as the representative body of librarians, but there’s been a bit of a negative attitude towards the organisation from some quarters. I’ve only recently taken notice of what CILIP can offer me. I really thought it wasn’t worth the subscription fee for 20 years, but as I’ve got involved in discussions with various members of the CILIP team and taken note of what it gets up to behind the scenes, I realised it’s doing an awful lot of work that is not acknowledged. However, I still feel it really does need to shout about what it does and make itself heard. I also think it needs to move into the the 21st century, with regard to what librarians/information professionals can offer the Google dominated information world. By joining Cilip I hope to help make it the organisation I’d really like it to be!

It’s funny, after 20 years of being a librarian, I think I’ve finally found my library mojo

I know I can’t keep up with the other members of the Voices for the Library team all of the time, but I try my best. They are whirlwinds and it tires me out just looking at/thinking about all of the work they’ve done in the space of a month (on top of their home and work lives). I’m really proud to be part of the team and I look around at who is involved in it and think, “Blimey! How did little me get involved with these top library bods? They are ace!” I know that sounds sycophantic and creepy, but I mean it.

I also know I’ll never be a top dog in CILIP either, but in both situations I think I do have a part to play, no matter how small, and I’m happy to do what I can to show people that libraries and librarians do have an important role in the 21st century.

At the top of the poster it asks if there has to be a winner, suggesting that the two can live side-by-side for a long time to come. Figures are given for average production, royalties and sales (in US $). It also humourously suggests that printed books are great if you want to impress a stranger with what you’re reading and e-books are great if you want to hide your reading habits from them.

However, out of all the information presented there, the main thing that appealed to me from the point of view of a librarian was the statement “Walking to the library is still the most ecofriendly way to read.”

It’s a great acknowledgment of the greenness of libraries! Not only do we recycle books, but getting access to them is environmentally sound too.

I feel I should be doing more myself, but I’m not sure what to do. I’m not a very outgoing/public speaking/think-on-my-feet sort of person, so I don’t feel I can offer much there.

I suppose an easy thing to do is to get positive and I thought it would be a good idea to put something together to show how many people who don’t work in libraries actually love libraries. Just to show everyone that people are positive about libraries and that we aren’t fighting a losing battle.

(image mySAPL, Flickr)

As a five minute thing some time ago I put together a very simple We Love Public Libraries webpage and I’d like to build on it in some way. It doesn’t do very much – just social mentions of people saying they love libraries, but I like the simple idea of just having people saying that they love libraries.

Today, to start with, I set up a few Twapperkeeper archives that will search for common phrases like ‘love libraries’, ‘love the library’, ‘:) libraries’, etc in people’s tweets. I’m not certain how accurate they will be in pulling out the information I want, as I’m not sure if the archiving search works in the same way as the Twitter search functions. I’ll have to wait and see – I can always filter the archives anyway. So long as I capture as many tweets as possible in the first place, that’s what counts.

I’m not entirely sure where I’m going to go with this idea and the tweets collected, but just having a positive thing like that archived means that there’ll be a long list of people saying that libraries are for them even without being prompted. To start with I could just build on my original idea. I also think that visualisations/infographics can be effective, so maybe there’s an opportunity to do something in that direction? It would also be great if it could be the basis of something practical.

So, any thoughts/ideas would be welcome.

It was interesting to see which aspects of technology had the most impact on current roles in the library and information world (pg.33). Digitised resources and E-books/journals came out top, followed by social media, virtual working, mobile working and open source software.

It was even more interesting to see how this was broken down in the different sectors.

• Academic – made most use of digital resources, e-books/journals, social media sites, open source and cloud computing
• National sector – digital resources
• Health – E-books/journals
• Industrial – virtual working, mobile working, semantic web
• Public/local authority – mobile working

I just wonder what this all implies? Does the Academic sector have more scope to experiment with technology? Does the industrial sector use of virtual and mobile technology indicate their general out-and-about working lifestyle. Is the National library sector using digital resources as part of their digital preservation role? Is the Health Sector high use of e-books/e-journals an indication of their early take-up of these resources (I remember using full text CD-Rom’s of medical journals in the mid 1990s). It’s interesting that the Public/local authority sector also has a greater use of mobile technology – maybe this is down to use of Blackberry’s etc to access emails when out of the office? 

When it came to the question about where respondents thought technology was heading in the future (pg.36), there was an increase in how many people thought technology would impact on them. There was also a slight shift in the rankings - Web3.0/semantic being the highest mover up the list. The differences in opinion in how technology would affect different sectors seemed to reflect what I’ve heard people from these sectors currently talking about – how they plan to deliver services in the near future.

The report also asked what skills the respondents used in their current roles (pg 37-38). From my point of view, the interesting thing here was the difference between the number of respondents who saw themselves as organisers/disseminators of information (eg information evaluation and management) and those who saw themselves as creators of information (eg classifiers, cataloguers, indexes, database creators and web publishers). I know this probably isn’t the right way of phrasing it, but hopefully you’ll see what I mean. The organisers / disseminators were higher up the rankings.

With regard to the future (pg.41-42), information evaluation and management were holding steady. However, the reduction in indexing, cataloguing and classification skills in the future seems to reflect the fact that we are recognising that most of the data we need is out there already for us to use, we can pool it together and we don’t need to create as much of it from scratch as we have done in the past. On the other hand as more information moves online it looks as if database design and web publishing skills will still be needed to present this information in the way that is most useful to our users.

It was also great to see communication skills were at the top of the current skills list, but at the same time a bit odd to see teaching was only relevant to 50% of the respondents. Shouldn’t this figure be higher? Aren’t we also about teaching users to find information too, no matter what role we’re in?

I just wonder how right we’ll be about all of this? I guess we’ll just have to wait and see.

(Photo by Annie Mole, Flickr)

The British Library also made great use of technology, by projecting a couple of the maps onto table tops and giving users what looked like a magnifying glass to explore the map in more detail. One of the maps was a reproduction of Fra Mauro’s Mappa Mundi from the 1450s. The magnifying glass didn’t have a lens, but when you placed it over certain parts of the map it expanded the image via the projector. It may have been RFID enabled, but I’m not certain. If you highlighted specific parts of the map it would also give you a pop up box of information and a voice-over would explain the significance. It was a really clever way of giving a bit more of a background to the map and what it meant. You can have a look at the map here and explore it in a similar way to the map at the exhibition.

(Prince_Volin, Flickr)

It was just really interesting to see all the creative things people have done with maps over the years and it’s given me a few ideas about what you can do with digital maps, rather than just putting markers on them and adding a bit of text.

QR codes are basically barcodes displayed in a 2D square and when scanned with a QR code reader (often a piece of software in a mobile phone) you are taken to a web page. They are normally used in the physical/real world to connect to information on a web page. ie You can put a QR code anywhere you like – on a desert island and as long as you had an internet connection it would link to a web page when scanned.

I wanted to do something a bit different with my QR code, rather than it just linking to a static web page. So, using Runbasic I created a very basic webpage that displayed random information/misinformation about me when the QR code on the badge is scanned. If you scan the QR code above a few times you’ll see that the information in the last line changes. If you don’t have a QR scanner type in http://ggtestspace.weebly.com/randomgaryfact.html a few times to see what happens. There’s about 5 different pieces of information.

It was a daft and simple idea (that was the intention), but I wonder if a serious idea could be built on this. For example, could you put a QR code near a subject area in a library, or an exhibit in a museum, or a historic landmark and every time someone scans that QR code it gives you different/random facts about the subject area/exhibit/landmark, as a taster, rather than bombarding you with lots of information? If you wanted to find out more information about that subject/exhibit/ landmark, you could then follow a link on the webpage to more information.

The great thing as well about my badge is that I won a prize for it (one of the top six), which I really didn’t expect. This is it… A bottle of Blandford Fly beer – It’s one of my favourites!

So, I’ve reworked the pipe to pull out all of the keywords from all of the posts (using Category RSS feeds). The original pipe listed the blog post title and keywords associated with that blog post. The new pipe lists the most frequently used keywords in all of the blog posts. When the keyword is clicked on (in the RSS feed) it runs a search on that keyword and returns any blog post mentioning the keyword.

In the pipe I’ve manually filtered out certain irrelevant words eg ‘blog’, ‘amp’ and ‘doc’. As time goes on I’ll have to manually add more words.

The only problem at the moment is that, even though the pipe returns an unlimited number of keywords, WordPress.com is limited to showing the first twenty items. I decided to compromise and call the feed ‘Top automatic Tags’. Unsurprisingly the most common phrase is ‘Yahoo pipes’.

You can see it on the right hand side of this blog (if Yahoo pipes is working, of course )

PS. I’ve not abandoned the original Tagxedo idea, but I need a bit more time to tinker with it.

What did I do?

• Identified the top 11 tweeters/presenters at the event. (the 11th was so close to the 10th that it seemed unfair to leave them out!)
• Fed their individual tweet stream into Tagxedo, using their Twitter photo as the Tagxedo image outline.
• Added the image that had been generated in Tagxedo to Audiopaint to create some digital noise.
• Visually scanned each image for the most dominant words and typed them into ‘Let Them Sing It For You‘. This software creates vocals from the words you’ve entered by using samples from existing songs.
• Created a short video clip for each person using the images and audio that had been generated from their tweets.
• Mixed all the videos together.

It is a bit odd, but it was fun to do – it gives the whole event a mad cyber-info twist, with images of the people built from the words they tweeted! I think most of them turned out well, but my personal favourite is probably Paul Stainthorp’s (with Middlemash plastered across his eyes like the robot in “The Day The Earth Stood Still“). It’s also fun trying to identify which songs are used in the vocals.

The Twitter API lets you pull out details of a users friends/followers. It does this via their Twitter id number, but by creating a URL with their id added to it, you can pull out full details. You can use a programming language to do this too, but if it goes into Yahoo pipes I’d rather do it there. Once you’ve got this, you can narrow the info down to the various bits you need. In my case I wanted biography details, location, photo and a link to Twitter profile.

In summary, I had to:

(1) Create user input boxes for ‘username’ and to identify if the map was for ‘followers’ or ‘friends’. This meant anyone can enter their user details, rather than just myself.

(2) I then had to build a url to point to the Twitter API and include the detail in (1).

(3) This url then fetched the details of the users followers or friends. ie their id numbers only.

(4) I then built another url using the id’s, to fetch full details of every follower or friend of the user.

(5) Each users profile contains a location field and if you put this into the ‘location builder’ module it extracts very detailed geographic location. Pretty impressive, considering some users only give the vaguest of details. It’s not perfect though, as, for example @therealwikiman is mapped to the USA, even though his location info is detailed. As he’s really based in England, I imagine the commute in the morning is a bit of a nightmare.

(6) From various fields in each profile I then built a description that contained Twitter image, biography and location in text.

(7) I also added a link to each of their Twitter home pages.

(8) Finally I mapped all of the data to standard RSS/map data fields (title, link, description, y:location). When Yahoo pipes works with data it changes field names to reflect what it’s done to the data, so you need to change them to a format that is recognised.

(9) I connected it to the pipe output.

When it ran, because it saw the field ‘item.y:location’ in there, it automatically displayed the information as a map, which you can see here. You can also add your own user info into the search box and create your own map. (NB: Sometimes Yahoo pipes & Twitter don’t play nicely together. If you have a problem with this pipe and have a Yahoo account, try copying the pipe and adding your own information into the search boxes.)

One thing I would like to get to grips with in Yahoo pipes is to be able to embed the output of a pipe into a web page and also allow users to add their own input on the same page, but I’ve not cracked that yet. So, if anyone else can help me with that side of things it would be appreciated. Thanks.

Now I’ve had a bit more time to think about it, I’ve managed to put something together using a spreadsheet version of our Subject index and Yahoo Pipes.

Firstly, the spreadsheet contains all of the information I need – text description of the location, plus the sub topic (eg Travel; history; etc). It also contains the Dewey number and our Reader Interest Categories (RIC). In Surrey the RIC is used to shelve our stock by subject area – helping to bring together related stock that would otherwise be separated.

I created a Yahoo pipe that pulled in the spreadsheet information.

It then filtered the subject headings based on the ‘NewRIC’ column, removing any subject headings that weren’t location-based. In the above example you can see some subject headings in the original source file that it excluded eg Aramaic Language; Arboretums; Archery.

The pipe combined the Heading/Subheading fields (so they appeared in the title) and the RIC and Dewey number (so they appeared in the description). It’s a librarian thing I do to scare off the public

I also fed the title field into the ‘Location builder’ module and it did a pretty good job of identifying the map locations mentioned. It did have some problems, as you can see from the fact that “War of the Roses” has been mapped to just off the Australian coast! This was due to the fact that some of the text wasn’t precise. I’m correcting these issues gradually, as there are over 800 items to check.

Finally I created a link from each marker pin back to the library catalogue. As the subject index contained Dewey numbers I could add this information to each link via the String builder module. The link basically acts as a catalogue search.

If you’re interested you can take a look at it here.

As a next stage I need to tidy up the subject index, so it maps more accurately and removes subject headings that I can’t map correctly.

It would also be useful to be able to present the map so it is less tightly packed and maybe add a location search too. Maybe with some location images, as well.

Also, if you do want to know what each part of the pipe does in detail, feel free to ask.

I’m not so much concerned about the ethics of using scraped data – I’m not branding it as my own, or making money from it. In fact, 99.99% of the time I’m the only person who sees it/uses it. I’m just presenting it in a way that is more useful to me. I am really just concerned about the impact my data-scraping has on the server that is hosting the web page I’m scraping.

I can see that it might have an impact on my host server if I’m pulling out lots of information. In fact, I’ve got into a bit of trouble doing this using RunBasic, as I stupidly hadn’t thought about the strain it was putting on my host server when I kept testing something online. (I’ve reverted back to running scraping via RunBasic on my own PC now!) As well as RunBasic, I’ve been using Yahoo pipes to data scrape.

Looking at how the information comes into the systems it seems that it just calls up the web page I want, caches it off-site and the manipulation goes on off-site, so it can’t have an impact on the host server (the data originally came from) itself. It seems it’s the same as if I called up a web page normally (via the address bar or a search), looked at the source code, copied it to notepad and tweaked it there. Is this right or wrong? I’m happy to be re-educated in a way that doesn’t sound patronising or rude.

I’ve read around this a bit and some people suggest it does have more of an impact and others say it doesn’t.

So, if anyone can say for definite and explain it in, words of, ummm!… 4 syllables or less I’d appreciate it. Thanks.

As a first attempt (1), I decided to use Yahoo pipes and simply feed in the RSS feed of my blog, pull out keywords from each blog post and then create another RSS feed to be used anywhere. Visitors can view keywords for the last 10 blog posts, as I couldn’t get Yahoo pipes to go beyond 10. They can also click on a link to the blog post. The words/phrases pulled out aren’t perfect (as with any automated word extraction), but I think you get a good feel for the blog posts from them.

(NB: Click on ‘List’ to see the keywords and use the link back to the blog.)

At the same time, I was thinking about whether I could use something like a tag cloud generator to do what I wanted a bit more creatively. Having a look at Tagxedo, I realised that if you use the URL function on the home page to create a cloud you could actually build the url yourself. So, I created a second pipe (2) that presented the same keywords, but also provides a clickable link that feeds through to Tagxedo and creates individual tag clouds for each entry.

(NB: Click on ‘List’ to see the keywords and use the link to generate the cloud.)

Ultimately, I did want to combine the two pipes, but I couldn’t get Yahoo pipes to create valid links to 2 places in the same RSS item.

I would have also liked the Tagxedo cloud to display in the RSS feed, but at the moment the link just creates a cloud from the RSS.

Hopefully there is a way to achieve both of these things, but as a first attempt I think they both work quite well, even if the RSS feeds/presentation do need a bit of tidying up.

The results of the embedded pipes can be found on my test site here. Links to the source code of the pipe can be found in (1) and (2) above. I’ve also added the RSS to the blog on the right hand side to see how people get on with it. The feed is labelled ‘Term Tags’.

I wonder if this 81% still use Google because they open up their internet browser and Google is there, ready and waiting for them?

Maybe if they thought about it they’d go elsewhere to do their searching? Maybe they’d go to a specialist search engine for their particular subject need eg. Healia (health), Scitopia (science and technology) if their browser directed them there.

If they are going to Google by default, or because their browser directs them there, and the majority of library users have more faith in the information libraries can provide them, shouldn’t we be trying to make this easier for them?

Most libraries are in a good position to do this if they provide their users with computers on site that allow access to the internet.

Some ideas

How about putting a start page on your computers that contains an obvious internet search function. Not a tiddly little widget, stuck in the corner somewhere, but a big box that clearly shows it’s for searching the internet.

Why not make this search box emphasise library resources your library service provides, as well as information held elsewhere on the internet?

Why not provide some weighting to sites outside your resources? eg. sites you’ve bookmarked on delicious.com that are a really useful resources in a specific subject area. Indicate that your library service recommends these resources and tell them why. Don’t make your users trawl through millions of webpages looking for a resource you already know exists. You can give users the opportunity to trawl through those millions of web pages, if they really want to, if they really think they’re missing out on something by not searching Google, but try to emphasise your library service recommendations.

If they’re looking for a book via this search method, offer them the book in your library catalogue as the first result, rather than pointing them straight to the Amazon catalogue. Or, if you do offer them the book to buy from Amazon, create it as an affiliate link from your library authority – that way you can generate some income for yourself.

We decided to create the ‘Surrey Fiction Book Map‘ – this was a Google map highlighting works of fiction set in Surrey. The map itself uses book covers for the markers, which are pinpointed around the county. If you click on a marker it opens up to reveal more details of the book and gives the opportunity to borrow it from Surrey Libraries, or any other library that appears on Worldcat.

It was created manually using ‘Google My Maps‘ – pinpointing each book individually and adding book covers and links. With the power of hindsight, if I was starting from scratch, I’d put it together using a Google docs spreadsheet fed into Yahoo pipes. I recently set up another biographical map using this method and it was much easier. The only drawback of that method though would be that I couldn’t use the book covers as markers. I also added videos to some of the markers, but the links weren’t stable and kept disappearing. Future developments could include linking to biography pages for the author on somewhere like Wikipedia.

The map is now finished and we now need to decide on where it will go. Options include linking from the website to the map, or adding to our anywhere.me page when it’s set up.

It’s been an interesting project and I’m sure we can build on it.

I’ve actually managed to turn that idea into something concrete using Yahoo Pipes to pull through information I added to a Google spreadsheet. Yahoo Pipes then automatically created the map with markers and details of influences in those markers. Here it is. The markers contain images pulled through from various websites and also link to relevant web sites too. The map only contains about 13 influences so far, but I’ll add others as I go along.

I’m pleased with the fact that I’ve managed to create this without having to manually add the information to the map, as I have done with other maps I’ve created previously. It’s also helped me understand how aspects of Google docs and Yahoo pipes work and is definitely something I can build on. Both @psychemedia and @ostephens gave me plenty of tips on how to achieve this. So, big thanks to them.

Putting this information on a map is only one way of doing things and I’d like it to be more visual (without a map), so I’ll see where I can go with it next. The data is there, it just needs to be fiddled with.

Edit: Part of the challenge of doing this, is seeing if I could provide something that could be used by others too- if they wanted to. That’s why I didn’t create the map manually (for one reason anyway). Maybe a biography of a famous person could be created in the same way, detailing their life based around locations around the world. How about a great explorer like Christopher Columbus or James Cook? All you’d need to do is copy the Yahoo pipe and pull in the data from a different spreadsheet.

So, I’ve used the middlemash blog as a central point and branched off to different presentations, linking individual presentations with web sites mentioned in them eg. Tony Hirst talked about Yahoo Pipes, so I linked to the Yahoo Pipes site (as a marker). Paul Stainthorp & Edith Speller also mentioned Yahoo Pipes, so I also linked to the same marker from their presentations too.

Middlemash Trailmeme

As well as the presentations, I’ve linked back to the Mashed Library ning, wiki, Google map, Twapperkeeper archive (for tweets) and as many blog posts about the event as I could find.

I was hoping to link to photos of the event on Flickr, but Flickr doesn’t like to be embedded in a trailmeme. As an alternative, I could probably set up some kind of intermediary link page (if I wanted to keep it all in the box).

I also thought it would be a good idea to have an intermediary page for all the blogs. Otherwise I would have had to link to one of them and then branch out from there. I created a simple document on Google docs which just said “Here come the Middlemash blogs!!!”, published it as a web page and then linked to all the blogs from there. It’s not very pretty, but it does the job.

I’d be interested to see if people find this a useful way of bringing the event information together from a variety of places?

Going off on a tangent now (and unrelated to Trailmeme)… wouldn’t it be good if you had a video of an event and at certain points in the video you could link to related web pages. eg. In the case of Middlemash we might have Chris Keene talking about Aquabrowser during his presentation and at that point a link pops up to take you to the Aquabrowser site. Maybe this does exist – I remember Tony Hirst talking about captioning video with Twitter feeds, so is this feature similar and already available for people to use???

It seems as if many members of the library profession see their area of interest/work as unique to their organisation – public libraries deal more with fiction, a wide range and level of readers (0 to 100+) and informal learning; academic libraries concentrate on research, development and formal learning; specialist libraries deal with group of users based on a specific profession/subject area. I also think that this attitude of ‘We are unique!’ can come across in library services in the same sector providing the same services to a different local area.

The focus appears to concentrate on the differences in services we provide and not the similarities, which is strange, as the similarities outweigh the differences. Maybe some information professionals just want to actively keep their services unique… it helps to justify their role??

I also feel as if some people will immediately dismiss the ideas/practices of library services in another sector as irrelevant, because they are again emphasising the differences in the services and not the similarities.

Library services appear to be constantly re-inventing the wheel on a project where someone else has already thought through the same project/problems and has solutions that may be relevant.

We should be taking advantage of these ideas/solutions from outside our own sectors and use them to develop our own library services. We need to ask if there are similarities between what we are doing and what other library services (public, academic or specialist) are providing, no matter how vague the connection may appear. If we don’t, I feel we will be missing out on some great opportunities to develop the library profession as a whole… and if we don’t develop we will get left behind.

Could the CILIP website be used as a site that scoops up relevant links/bookmarks to other sites/comments of interest that are relevant to our profession, so it acts as a single reference source to any material that may be relevant. For example, I know of a few wiki’s out there with overlapping interests in librarianship and information management – I just stumble across these things at the moment, but if CILIP was happy to archive these links I’d know that I could go to the CILIP site and any link I wanted would be there. If you made it open access you’ve probably got an army of IT literate information professionals who would help populate it.

Finally, would there be any mileage in partnering with an organisation such as the British Computer Society, to provide affiliate memberships and cross-industry training?

There are a couple of angles to this – I’m a librarian and also a bit of a programmer.

As a technically minded librarian who programs outside of work and has the sort of interests you can see in this blog, where should I be going? I can program in a few languages – I’m not an expert in any of them, but I get by. I don’t have to use them in my day job, and they’re just used for my personal tinkerings. Would you recommend I focus seriously on a particular language and get a qualification, or is that a pointless move? eg I can program in Java, but is it worth me getting a qualification in it, or should I move on to something else which will give me a better long-term result? Should I not even bother with programming using code? Sh0uld I be looking at developing other areas of IT information related skills? I have various holes in my knowledge, some of which for a clunky programmer might be considered basic, but I just tend to use/deal with things I know about and fill in gaps as I go along.

Now I think I really need to put some structure into what I’m doing and concentrate on areas that are going to help me in the long-term – I’m not normally career minded – I have been fortunate to be led down a route that I’ve been happy with, but now I think I need to put a bit more direction into what I’m doing.

Also, on the non-programming side are there other avenues in libraries and the information profession I should be exploring?

This is a genuine request. Any feedback/suggestions from anyone would really be appreciated. It doesn’t matter if what you say is at odds with other people, or if it’s just one idea or a big long list of suggestions, all thoughts will be considered.

Thanks.

Got to go now… my train just pulled into Liverpool and I haven’t finished yet (to be continued)

P.S. Apologies for spelling errors- it’s difficult writing this on a mobile phone!

P.P.S. Just found this unpublished so am publishing now.

However, how do you know you can trust the information you are presented with? What you expect to be true, might in fact be wrong. If you are using a source of information that has credentials and is regarded as an expert in the field why would you ever think that information was wrong?

For example, over the past few months I’ve come across the following lies.

Lie: My computer tells me the square root of 25 is not 5. It is 4.999999999998, or something just as daft.

I spent a long time wondering if my basic maths was flawed. Had my maths teachers been lying to me when I was at school? No, apparently it is a computer floating point error. If someone hadn’t told me about this how would I know that this inaccuracy existed? It was lucky that I tested my programme with the number 25, otherwise I wouldn’t have known there was a problem. Now I am wondering how many other of the calculations are wrong? I can get around this problem, but I’d rather be presented with the right information first time. Do I have to check n numbers of every numeric calculation I use in future? Having a computer telling me lies in a situation like this isn’t a major problem, but just think if it was a life critical situation.

Lie: The live train information tells me my train is on time.

No it’s not. It’s late – and your live train information system made me wait in the snow for hours. You know the information is wrong – you know the snow is affecting the network. You know that the live update service for my train has said that the train was cancelled right at the start of the journey (about 10 stations back), so why don’t you just spend some time providing the correct information for my station?

Lie: At £140,000, this 2 bedroom property has no faults at all.

At that price, in this area, I’m not so much of a potato head that I will believe that for more than 2 seconds and because you are trying to fool me into thinking it’s a good deal, Mr Estate Agent, you lose my respect and my custom. It either has a short lease, is in poor condition, has dodgy neighbours, or is in area that has been set aside for a nuclear dumping ground.

Lie: Political Party X can sort out all the problems caused by the Government.

You may have good intentions, but I think you’re all in the same sinking boat.

The situation you then find yourself in, is questioning information that you wouldn’t have questioned in the past. If a source of information is meant to be authoritative how do you know if anything else from that source or any other source of information is correct? The damage is already done.

Well, even though I’m still not sure about all of the above lies, I don’t tend to take things at face value anyway and I back things up with a double check using other information resources. For example, I asked around about the floating point number problem and how to overcome it; I still use the live train update, but check a few of the stations further up the line; I question estate agents about why a property sounds too good to be true; not sure about the answer to the political problem though!

The key for me to getting the right information is not to just making do with the first bit of information I’m presented with. Double checking what I can helps to reassure me that the information is correct and helps me cope with any unforeseen problems or pre-empt them as much as possible. There are so many people/systems out there saying different things, that if you don’t check what you are being told is true, one day you might end up believing that the square root of 25 is, in fact, not 5.

I realise the detail of my life isn’t something most people would be interested in, but maybe the idea/concept behind what I’m attempting to do is??

The idea came from a variety of places – wanting to create an interactive timeline of my musical influences since I was born, visiting the Wellcome Centre in London for a conference and seeing an interesting take on the idea of a family tree (sorry, I can’t remember who did the artwork), the idea of the Library Routes project, my use of Trailmeme and also wanting to develop my programming skills by doing something I’d not done before and presenting information in a different sort of way.

I just want to see if I could put something informative and creative together- not just text, but an interactive ‘This made me’ biography thing, showing key points/influences that led me down a particular path, no matter how seemingly unconnected. For example, I can connect being a fan of the band “The Stranglers” to my being a librarian and not pursuing a career as a computer programmer (short version- got computer, began programming, became fan of “The Stranglers”, wanted to make music like them, used computer for music instead, concentrated on music rather than programming, failed with my music dreams, took library degree, ta-daa!!!, Librarian and failed musician. ) (Update: I was saying I was the failed musician, not the Stranglers.)

I haven’t started the project yet and I’m not sure how I’ll present the information. But as an initial thought, creating the data as XML would make sense – at least then I can concentrate on getting the information together, without needing to worry too much about how I present it at this stage. I’ve not used strict XML in any of my programming, but have created some Gary versions of XML in the past without realising that I could do the same thing using a standard format. So, this will give me a good opportunity to explore XML more fully. The skeleton of information would be to identify the influences, their type and indicate how they link together (as a starting point).

As for presenting the information, maybe I could either create (1) A single image mashup or an image map (2) A network of visual information nodes like a mind map (3) A timeline. I’m still undecided about that. I think having it in XML will give me the chance to experiment. Whatever I do, it needs to be connected in a easy-to-navigate way.

Disclaimer: As with all of my ideas there’s no guarantee that I’ll stick to plan A or that I’ll even be able to finish it. But I’ve got to give it a go.

If you are a library holding references to resources on your catalogue, a catalogue record for and linking to a hashtag url for an event eg #jisc10 or a subject eg #rda might be useful. Twitter provides useful & concise information, links to resources, discussions, etc, so why not make use of that? I know you have to read some waffle too on Twitter, but you often have to read through more waffle in a book.

You could index the hashtag in the same way as your normal stock. ie with subject headings and classification codes. I know tweets are lost into the ether after a few days, but for more permanent links you could use a url pointing to a twitter archiving service like Twapperkeeper, if tweets about the hashtag are being stored. These services are more likely to hold onto tweets for much longer.

I wonder if this is the intention of the Library of Congress?

Phil Bradley mentioned Tagxedo - a word cloud generator – in a few tweets and it was only when he posted an interesting Mona Lisa and Wolf tag cloud that I realised you could do more than just create a basic word cloud. It allows you to upload not only your own text, but also your own images and the word cloud fits inside the image. I had a play with it and wondered if I could create an animated word cloud. I wanted the animation to be appropriate to the words, but I couldn’t think how to use the Middlemash tweets.

I still haven’t decided exactly how I’ll use it for the Middlemash tweets, but along a different track altogether, I remembered the Grand National was on last weekend. I also remembered about the old zoetrope image of a horse. So after getting a list of the runners and a commentary on the race I put them into tweaked zoetrope images one by one, added the images to Windows Moviemaker and was really pleased with the resulting animation. I have to admit that the images aren’t perfect, as I had to cut them from the orignal image via screen capture and resize them manually.

So there we have an animated Zoetrope Tagxedo word cloud of the Grand National 2010 created using information from the race itself.

As another stage, it would have been good to create a longer animation that removed horses along the way and just left the winner at the end.

It’s given me plenty of inspiration too. All sorts of animated tag cloud ideas buzzing round my head now.

(1) Set up an events RSS feed for the Library service Twitter account. We had a general Council events RSS feed, so I had a look at how it was structured and realised I could pull out the library events as a separate feed via Yahoo pipes.

(2) Put together a ‘We Love Public Libraries’ page. It was put together using a Flickr slideshow and Collecta Widget looking for mentions of the phrase. I’m going to expand it to include other relevant phrases too, as it’s not picking up as many positive vibes about public libraries as I’d like

(3) Using Run Basic I put together the basics of ”Where’s My Chuffin’ Train?”. Put in your train details and it gives you a few lame excuses as to why it’s late. I need to do it properly, and work on presentation, add signs/symbols. Pointless I know, but I can’t help it.

(4) Using RunBasic I put together a basic URL convertor to feed URLs of book searches from the Library catalogue to Owen Stephens’ “Read To Learn” project. “Read To Learn” suggests courses you might be interested in studying if you were reading a particular non-fiction book/ or range of books. We were both interested to see if it could be of use from a public library point of view, along the lines of… public library users might be interested in studying if they could find courses that related to book they were interested in. My bit of programming needs tidying up. It’s basically got the code there, converts the URL and passes it to “Read To Learn”, it just looks dull and I don’t present the returned courses properly.

(5) As part of the Celebrating Surrey event in June, the library team I’m in thought it would be good to do something to support it from a Web2.0 point of view. So we have started putting together a “Surrey Fiction Bookmap” using Google My Maps. It shows locations that are mentioned in works of fiction. It’s early days and we adding to it as we go along. It will probably also include locations associated with fiction authors too. Each of the books mentioned link back to our catalogue and have a bit of a snippet about the book in the popup.

(6) Working on term extractor using Run Basic.

I had a bit of a frustrating time at the beginning of the month, not being able to decide what to do/ how to focus on things, but with a bit of advice from @chibbie and @ostephens I’ve learnt that it’s best to go for small goals and release things into the wild even if they aren’t perfect. Thanks for the advice.

I’m going to try a different method now – Yes, I know that this project has no practical use in the world, apart from amusing myself, but it’s a challenge to see if I can get it working in the way I wanted.

(c) Tomas Rotger (Flickr)

I’ve now worked out that what it needs to do is, basically identify the most common words in any text that is entered into the text box (rather than common words in general) and twist or replace them in a way that makes sense, but also gives the horror aspect to the new words.

I realise I can’t do this with Yahoo pipes – it’s just too complicated to do it that way for my brain. I find Yahoo pipes is fine as long as I don’t make it really complicated and sometimes Yahoo pipes just stalls and sputters into lifelessness if I make anything too complicated.

So, I’m currently using Run Basic to try and achieve this. As the name suggests it’s a language based around Basic – no sniggering! Basic is embedded in my brain and I will champion this favourite language of 80s school boys until you mock me so much that I curl up into a ball and cry. The good thing is that it’s server based, so you can create dynamic web pages from it. I’ve used php to create dynamic web pages in the past, but if I don’t use it for a while I forget the syntax/methods, etc. Php also tended to go wonky on me when I upgraded browsers as my programming was less than standard. Whereas, as I spent years programming in Basic, Run Basic was so easy to pick up. Run Basic also allows you to parse XML, manipulate files, and use HTTPGET, HTTPPUT functions, as well as other useful things.

So the first thing I’m doing on this new plan is to put together a term extractor and word count. It’s not quite there, but I’ve more confidence cracking it with Run Basic than anything else. I won’t let it beat me, no matter how useless the result is!

In the past, library communities have managed to share data between their systems fairly successfully – as long as you catalogued your stock according to the rules. We achieved this sharing process through the use of MARC formats.

Unfortunately, I think the use of MARC formats, specifically MARC21 (the dominant MARC format in the English language speaking world), will be the thing that undoes the RDA plan to share data outside of the catalogue.

MARC21 records are stuffed full of punctuation that will need to be stripped out before you can share it. There’s no doubt that this can be done – if you added the punctuation in the first place, based on rules, you should be able to strip it all out again. However, it would be a lot more helpful when going down the “Let’s open this data up to the world” route if we didn’t have to do this. Why should users of the data have to frustrate themselves with this process?

So, now RDA is with us, isn’t it time to look at MARC21 and do something about this barrier to sharing data?

I think the big deal and most important thing for me, is that it puts into words and agrees rules on what a lot of cataloguers have been trying to do for some time now – providing information in catalogue records with a focus on helping users of the catalogue, rather than as an academic and formal exercise in cataloguing.

Whenever I’ve been cataloguing over the past 15 years, it’s always been a case of “this is cataloguing – it needs to fit the standards set out in MARC and AACR2, but it also needs to give the users what they want.”

I know I’m not unique in this situation – other cataloguers recognise that MARC needs to be tweaked, based on the information you know the users will make use of and how individual library systems work.

In recent years there’s been a change in the way we look at cataloguing – defining the purpose from a different angle, acknowledging that the information world is dominated by internet search and presentation and shifting accordingly. We needed to give the users a way of searching/interacting with the catalogue in a way they’re familiar with.

This is why for me the most important part of the RDA changes are:

(1) Recognising users needs, including the type of information they want to see eg. fiction genres

(2) Focussing on keyword search styles

(3) Presenting information in a human readable form -  no longer inverting subject headings and moving away from abbreviations

(4) Display issues

(5) Reducing the need for editing of data.

Now that RDA says it’s okay to focus on the users needs, I can sleep soundly in my bed and not worry about whether I’m offending another cataloguer by using the incorrect form of an abbreviated inverted main title entry, with trailing responsiblity codes, or not!

PS. I just made up the ‘abbreviated inverted main title entry, with trailing responsiblity codes‘ statement for illustration and you don’t have to worry that it doesn’t make sense. It would only be us cataloguers who’d be able to tell I was talking rubbish anyway

Each room covered a particular period or style of music and each room used a combo of presentation/interaction styles. Most of the images were projected in some way or displayed on a screen.

(1) Juke boxes allowed you to choose different genres of music and gave you some background information about the music you’d chosen.

(2) Fretboard/keyboard style input allowed you to find out more information about memorabilia held in glass cabinets.

(3) Trackballs could be used to control news time lines – images related to particular news items were displayed on a wall and you could find out more details by skimming over them.

(4) Projected images that responded to touch and ran through more detailed documentaries.

Part of my bookmarked 1975 timeline

My personal favourite was the large map of Britain, which was projected onto a stage area in the main room. Here you could use one of 3 separate track balls to move a circular cursor over the map. On a smaller projection a few feet wide, nearer your trackball, you’d be shown information about musicians associated with that location on the map.

As well as these clever ways of presenting the information, your entrance ticket was also an rfid enabled smart ticket. At many of the information points you could scan your ticket over a sensor and bookmark the information you were looking at/listening to. Then, when you take your ticket home, you can type the ticket number into the British Music Experience website and you’re shown the information you bookmarked in the exhibition. It’s a permanent record of the bits of the exhibition that you found the most interesting. I can’t help think that it would have been good if the website provided you with further details about the areas you were interested in based on your ticket number, rather than just showing you the information you saw at the exhibition – maybe pointing you to other websites related to this music genre/band. Following on from this, I wonder if libraries could do a similar thing, by recognising when a user logs in to the library catalogue that they had recently read a particular book on a particular subject and therefore work out via some clever algorithms that they might be interested in further information on a related web site.

Another minor criticism of the exhibition was the inability to search for specific musicians/bands. Browsing is great, but if you have a particular interest in a specific musician you might want to know if they are mentioned in the exhibition at all, and if they are, in which room.

It was well worth the visit and the way it was organised meant that you could personalise the exhibition according to your own musical interests, by either ignoring, skimming, exploring in detail and/or bookmarking the resources that were there. I’d definitely recommend you visit, if you are in any way interested in popular music produced in Britain in the past 60 years.

Well, I’ve sort of done what I wanted on tweaking the words, but at the same time it’s obvious that what I wanted to do wasn’t enough to make it as entertaining as I wanted.

I basically got a list of commonly used words – I looked for a few sites that covered this to get an aggregated group of words… just to make sure I was replacing the best set of words. Then, using Google docs I pulled data from tables in websites into a spreadsheet, rather than retyping the info (Tony Hirst wrote a blog post about doing this). Sometimes, because the words weren’t in a table, I had to copy/paste the data into the spreadsheet. The data was a bit scrappy, as it came through to the spreadsheet in a variety of formats. Google spreadsheets doesn’t have a regex function and I didn’t want to do hundreds of manual find/replace, so I fed into Yahoo pipe to clean it up, using regex.

I output the clean file as csv and imported it into Excel, so I could get a count on the number of times specific words appeared. This helped me decide which words I’d do the find/replace on later on. I also needed to look at a few dictionary sites to make sure I replaced words that could only be used as one class of word, rather than more than one (ie adjective, noun, verb) – more than one messes up the syntax/form of the sentence.

Then I created a new Yahoo pipe, which had 2 text input boxes for title & synopsis. I added find/replace modules & manually entered words that needed to be replaced, along with text that replaced it.

Werewolf by Schnaars (Flickr)

Still, at this stage, some words didn’t work. Some of the replacement words didn’t work either. This is partly because I hadn’t thought too much about the type of text that would work with the replacement. For example, synopsis seem to talk more about ‘he’, ‘she’, ‘it’, rather than ‘I’, ‘me’ and this affects the way that you need to deal with the whole word replacement style.

I also worked out that, even though it’s a good idea to replace common words, because you’ve got a better chance of hitting words that can be replaced out of the 171,476 words in common use in the English language (according to the Oxford English Dictionary), more synopsis actually try to avoid the cliche/common words.

It still needs tweaking and it’s presentation still needs prettifying (or horrifying ), but here’s the pipe for people to have a look at. All you need to do is enter a book title and synopsis into the boxes. I’d be interested in the output from anything you paste into the pipe, as I’d like to see how the pipe works on a wide variety of synopsis. Maybe anyone who uses it could cut/paste the output of the pipe as a comment to this post. I know it needs work on.

The series was developed with the help of the common man/woman. The BBC announced it back in Summer 2009, asking for people to contribute to its development. I thought this was a great idea, re-tweeting their calls for input into the series and it was fun/exciting watching it develop over the months.

However, when I go back to look at the blog post feedback on the BBC site and I remember the tweets I picked up around the series, I was really surprised at how little input was added by people outside the BBC. I know the programme makers also went beyond blog posts and Twitter feedback, including forums and discussion groups, but it still seemed like a miniscule response from the people. It got me quite frustrated- expecting at least a decent % of the internet world to get involved in this discussion. People had the chance to shape the programme and they didn’t take the opportunity.

I don’t know why. Maybe they hadn’t picked up on the fact they could contribute. Maybe they just didn’t want to, or couldn’t be bothered. Maybe they didn’t feel it was their place to get involved. Maybe they thought their opinions would be laughed at.

It’s a shame really, as I think a lot of people missed the chance to get involved, get their useful opinions/viewpoints heard and also, in a way, allow the social networking they get involved in over the internet, go beyond the computer and out to a broader audience on TV.

On the opening screen you can search for public Trailmeme’s by keyword. From this search you’re given a list of Trailmeme’s you can follow. Choose a Trailmeme and start following. You do this by first clicking on one of the markers and you’re taken to the web page this marker represents.

The web page is now broken up into 2 parts.

On the right hand side you get the web page that has been used as the marker (it appears in a frame).

On the left side of the screen you’re given details of that marker and you’re also shown links to/from other markers (indicated by green arrows). If you hover over the links you can see more details about the marker. To move through the trailmeme map click on these links. When moving through the trail, you can offer more than one link in either direction. So, in my example from the Java documentation page I offered a number of links, depending upon how someone might prefer to learn Java ie via forum, book, or blog tutorials.

At this stage it would be good to see why the trailmeme has been set up in a particular way, why a user has linked various web pages together and why specific links have been chosen. For example, I set my Java programming trail up on different levels – an overview to the left, getting more specific methods of learning ( eg books, forum, tutorials) and method/class tutorials on the right. Given all the time in the world I would have provided links to examples for all tutorials, rather than just a few.

I also think that it would be handy if you could highlight parts of web pages to show why a page was chosen to be included in the trail. Some pages may only be relevant because they contain a useful chunk of information, rather than the whole page itself.

Even though pages are linked, you’re not just limited to staying within the pages in the trail. You can also click on links in web pages as normal.

You can also go back to the map overview, which shows how all the pages are linked.

I found Trailmeme a really useful way of linking sites together and even though it’s early days, I can see the potential in using it as a way to provide tutorials linking related resources, a means of providing subject guides and also as a way of mapping an individuals thought trails – from A to B via Z.

The trail I created is here.

(1) Made a bit of progress on the Literary Twist project – Scraped a list of commonly used words, worked out phrases to replace them and put them into all into a Yahoo Pipe. Need to tinker with it though, to make sure it comes up with consistent and accurate output all the time, no matter what user puts in. I think I could do a bit more with regex too, but that might be another stage on. Also learnt trick for avoiding problem of pipe not running properly. Also realised on another pipe that Yahoo pipes can be overloaded and might not be great for lots of feeds going into one pipe.

(2) I also tried to work out if you can pass query to flash player. You can, but not with the one I wanted to do it to – might try to find a paste and run script, if such a thing exists.

(3) Basic programming – My first programming language was Basic and I still love it. I know some programmers look down their nose at it, but I don’t care. It’s easy for me to remember. I think my head is still in BASIC mode and that’s why I’ve struggled to suss out Java. I’ve made progress on Java, but it’s taken me a bit of time. Anyway, I got a yearning to tinker with my old MSX (still in cupboard) and decided to download an MSX emulator. I could still program in BASIC on it after so many years of not bothering, but I couldn’t save files on the hard drive. I wiped it of my computer in frustration and looked for a browser based basic instead – just out of curiosity.

I found runbasic , which looks straight-forward, but will allow me to develop interactive websites in a language I’m familiar with. So, I’ll be tinkering with that, even though I’ll still be using Java too.

(4) I also tried to get to grips with Gamemaker. I’ve had a bit of success in putting very very simple games together on it in the past. However, even though you don’t need to know how to program to use it, I think if you do know how to program you might as well program, as it’ll be just as quick. It’s not as straightforward as pointing and clicking. So, I think my tinkering time will be better spent somewhere else.

(5) I also had a scout around for free Java and php hosting – just as a way to test out some programming on a live site. I found a couple of sites via Free-web-hosting. They don’t get massively high scores, but I just need somewhere to tinker on a live system, rather than on my home test system (Apache server).

I’m quite pleased with what I achieved in my first full day of tinkering – sorting out some of ‘Literary Twist’, flash player queries and tinkering with runbasic. Even where I didn’t make any progress (MSX emulator, Gamemaker) it meant I could wipe them off my list of things I want to get to grips with and move on.

I wanted to point our Twitter followers to a few handpicked books on our library catalogue, rather than a huge wodge of titles and I wanted to do it as simply and quickly as possible. However, as I tried to pull out a few relevant skiing books I knew it wasn’t going to work using any of the search methods available, despite working out different combinations of words.

In the end I realised I was trying to make the search methods work for me, when the catalogue records should be doing the work instead. As a cataloguer/classifier I’d always been taught that cataloguing/classification should be consistent. The sacred laws of UKMARC should be obeyed. I can’t complain with this as a general principle, but in some cases if you want to achieve something different, you need to do something different to make it work. As long as it doesn’t affect the end user, as far as I’m concerned it’s fine to do it. In fact, in this case, it was for the benefit of the end user that I decided to take a different angle with this.

I decided to hashtag the catalogue entries I thought would be of interest. I know cataloguers and classifiers commonly tag records anyway, but the difference in this case was that I only tagged a handful of records, rather than tagging the entire stock with these new hashtags. Using the hashtag format would indicate that these tags had a unique purpose. It’s the same idea as giving a Twitter message a hashtag only if it’s related to a particular event ( eg ‘#van2010‘ for the Winter Olympics). You don’t need to tag all of your Twitter messages and, in the same way, you don’t always need to tag all of the records on your catalogue.

I suppose it’s like partial/filtered indexing, where you limit the results to a subset of items, based on rules you define, rather than retrieving the full set of records. If I’d just searched for ‘skiing’ for example it would have given me 208 records. I didn’t want our users to have to trawl through all of these records. Using my method I limited the results to a single page of 7 items. Anyone searching the catalogue could still retrieve the 208 skiing records if they wanted to, but my tags pointed our Twitter followers to this limited set, as a sort of mini promotion. In fact, as I only tagged about 35 titles out of the thousands of titles on our catalogue you could say it was almost micro-indexing.

I basically pre-weighted the catalogue records so that they give me exactly what I wanted. If it was an Olympic event it might call for a stewards enquiry for knobbling the competitors!

The tags didn’t need to make any sense to anyone, as they’d just be used to query the online catalogue. They just needed to be unique, so the more obscure the tag the better – I didn’t want any unrelated items in the search results. In the end I created tags such as ‘#woski10‘ (skiing), ‘#woiho10‘ (ice-hockey), ‘#wotd10‘ (Torvill and Dean). There were about seven hashtags in the end.

After running each hashtag search, they were saved as bit.ly links (bit.ly shortens long url’s). The links were added to appropriate Twitter messages, which were scheduled to run at various times over the Winter Olympic period.

I’ll be checking the items a few weeks after the Olympics are over to see if this has increased their use.

I’m also wondering if I could have made extra use of these hashtags via a Yahoo pipe mashup, but I’ve no firm ideas at the moment about what would be useful. Maybe a link between books and related Team GB/ Winter Olympic web pages, Flickr photos, Youtube videos would have been a good idea.

Every day I’d be eager to see the surprise hidden behind the numbered paper door, rushing into the living room in my Batman ™ pyjamas, squeeling with excitement at the site of a robin or snowman.

Day 22 was certainly a surprise. This little paper door was right on the side of the church and when I opened it there was a drawing of the devil!

What did it mean? Had someone put it in as a joke? Was there a devil worshiper employed by Korsch-Verlag (the makers of the calendar)? It seemed strange, but knew there must be a sensible explanation behind it.

Maybe if I’d been a different sort of fly-off-the-handle person I could have got all angry about it and written a letter along these lines to the maker…

“Dear Sir or Madam,

I am disgusted, appalled and horrified by your use of Satanic images in a child’s Advent Calendar. Blah Blah Blah. Grumpy words. Harrumph! Hoohaa! Filthy… obscene… I’ve never been so….. In all my life…. I expect £XXXX for the distress this has caused me and my little Arthur…. More grumpitudiness…Failing this monetary remuneration, I will present this non- story to my MP, the BBC and my local newspaper who will pay me handsomely…. Yet more irate language and general blusteringness… Harumph (x2)…

Yours sincerely,

Lord Faltington Bishumgon of Fiddlebury”

But I’m not that sort of person.

Sometimes, you can fall into the trap of looking at something and not really see or understand what is going on. Sometimes you can add your own meaning to what you see, hear or read. It can be easy to misinterpret the information you’re presented with, when you don’t know the full background and context to it.You can take what you want and fill in the gaps with all manner of fiction.

It’s true of information too. It can be too easy to get half the picture and follow a route that leads down a wrong path, just because you’ve taken the first piece of information that comes to you and either haven’t understood it or taken it as gospel truth. One of the keys to making an informed decision is delving a bit deeper and making sure what you’re seeing, hearing or reading is right and then fill in any gaps before making a judgement.

Anyway, as it turns out, the image of the devil was far less sinister than a locally employed satanist playing a wicked joke. According to European folklore the devil is here at Christmas to seek out the bad children and deal with them as he sees fit!

There are too many MARC fields anyway – 150 in UKMARC, probably less in MARC21 (but I’m not going to count them to find out!). With all the duplication, bar minute differences, I’d have been happy cutting them by half. No wonder different cataloguers do their own thing when it comes down to using it – it’s needlessly complicated. Most of the time taken over creating a record (if you haven’t bought it in from a bib record supplier) is spent on working out whether you can use this or that tag on a particular day, because the sun isn’t in alignment with Mars yet! Sometimes I think the only reason it was made/kept complicated is to keep the myth that cataloguing is a mysterious art. It’s not a mysterious art, MARC just makes it look that way

So, if you haven’t moved over to MARC21 yet, please just relax about UKMARC tag 248. Yes, it’s going, but it doesn’t mean this is the end of the world. It just means part/volume details are getting put with the rest of the title info., where they belong.

It just seemed like the author had chucked in a few ‘unmentionables’ and a bit of martial arts and released the literary monster onto the world. So, in a poor attempt to take the mickey, I set up a Yahoo pipe that would allow people to paste in a title and description and the pipe would do a simple find/replace action and turn the text into a cheesy piece of Hammer horror.

Zombie Librarian, courtesy 'wvs' on Flickr.

It worked on a simple level, but I thought I must be able to improve on it. I haven’t really tinkered with the idea since then, but have felt it’s probably worth pursuing just for fun & as a personal learning exercise.

I’ve decided to call the project ‘Literary Twist’.

There’s a number of stages I’ll need to go through to get something decent up and running.

(1) Work out a set of words used frequently enough in the English language that would appear a high percentage of the time in any text a user entered into the description, or use term extraction to pull out enough relevant terms in the description that could be replaced.
(2) Decide on appropriate words that could be used to replace the original words and feed them into the replace procedure.
(3) Possibly if someone entered an ISBN, author / title I’d be able to pull in a synopsis from a book catalogue instead of using manual text entry?
(4) Do the process of find/replace
(5) Output the result as a decent looking web page (all nice and purdy)
(6) I’d like to have a nice user-friendly interface (a form) to the pipe as well, which I know I can do via html and javascript, but I’ve never tried.
(7) I’d also like to go beyond the horror genre and allow users to select the genre they want it twisted into (eg romance, western) and I’d want to do it all in the same form/screen.

So, I think I’ll give it a go. I’m not sure how long it’ll take, but I’ll be keeping track of it here.

Once you’ve selected your markers you link them together to make a path through the markers/pages. You select the trail you are working on (via ‘Follow’, ‘My Trails’). It opens up with a list of markers associated with the trail on the left hand side and a  work pane on the right.

Initially the work pane displays a column of flow chart boxes and below them various menu options >> create/delete relationship between links, zoom in and out (trails with lots of markers can appear quite small in this window) and you can add further details (Node name, blurb/description, tags and comments) about the link. These details appear when anyone follows your trail. To link, just click on a marker and drag a line to the marker you want to link to. Each marker can have multiple links to and from it. You can also move the markers around the work pane.

Edit Trail Screen

In this ‘Java Trail’ I tried to link things logically. Giving an overview on the left side, different general methods of learning in the middle and specific examples of Java programming classes/methods on the right. Even though you can’t do it at this stage, I think it would be useful to be able to group markers together into these logical groups – possibly into folders/venn sets? It would just help to show the logic to myself and others for future reference.

At this stage you can still add more markers and remove any you don’t want.

On this screen you also get the option to view the xml file of your trail, which is interesting to see how it all works behind the scenes. Maybe in future the developers could offer an option to upload/import trailmeme xml files as a way to create trailmemes, as well as using the graphical interface.

It’s fairly straightforward to use and linking web pages using Trailmeme could provide a logical/structured route through what might otherwise seem like a disjointed list of bookmarks.

(to be continued…)