UHMLG (University Health and Medical Librarians Group) Conference 2009

 

Last week I enjoyed a very brief visit to this small and friendly conference of health librarians.  I was one of the speakers, talking about our project ‘Using web 2.0 to cultivate information literacy via the construction of personal learning environments’  at Leicester last year.

Sadly I had only made the Friday morning of the conference.   There I managed to catch Isla Kuhn sharing some of her expiences using web 2.0 at the University of Cambridge.  Using clickers in during her presentation we soon found out that of those in the room 68% didn’t use Twitter, but 14% did specifically for their library.  I admit I was surprised that so many are not using Twitter, perhaps I’m in more of a clique than I realised.  Isla described herself as a ‘complete non-paper librarian’  which raised a smile, well thats me too and I’m sure quite a few of others could say the same.  Do we have the right job-title?  Thats another issue.  The work of the Arcadia Project at Cambridge, exploring the role of the academic library in the digital age is worth watching, and they have already produced a favourite of ours here at Leicester, the science@cambridge portal. 

Sara Clarke from the Royal Free Hospital also gave an entertaining presentation on ‘Memoirs of an Invisible Librarian’, describing how her library had set about raising its profile at the hospital.  They worked on embedding their services, using the Map of Medicine to create a patient journey as it happens specifically at the Royal Free Hospital, to help clinicians redesign their services.  This way they reintroduced a new set of clinicians to the library services.  They did alot of the traditional profile raising activities, getting physically in the way of staff offering an ipod shuffle as a prize drawer in hospital corridors.  One interesting point was their posters campaign which promoted not just the services but what their staff could do for their users.  This is relevant to us – we need to show we are adding value and emphasise our human skills – not just say that we subscribe to a range of databases.  Sara said their membership rates doubled during that period.  They have also set up a clinical library service (we can smugly say we have an excellent clinical library service here at Leicester already) and have set about making their services known to senior management.  This sounds familiar but its continual process we can’t afford to forget. 

 

There’re Mash(ed Libraries) Oop North

This Mon and Tuesday I was up at the University of Huddersfield at the 2^nd Mashed Libraries unconference.  Monday evening was all about networking and meeting a fair number of the delegates who like me had come the night before, and was a splendid affair complete with a tour of the city centre ending at the state of Eric Morcombe* by the station.  I just wish I’d decided not to walk the 3 and a bit miles into town and the same at the end of the evening!

The main event was held in the uni’s relatively new Creative Arts building, which is a very impressive space.  Despite some early wifi problems everything went fairly smoothly.  Delegates were badged according to their perceived experience with mashups.  Greens were n00bs (like me), yellows had some experience, oranges were experts and blue were local staff helping to facilitate.  We also had our areas of interest on the badges so you could see at a glance whom might share your areas of enquiry.

The day was made up of parallel sessions, breakouts, lightning talks and collaboration; so there’s no way one person could experience the whole event.  The first session I went to was by Brian Kelly entitled Enthusiastic Amateurs and overcoming institutional inertia.

Mash ups are exciting Brian said says demonstrating some simple ones such as Thumbalizr (thumbnail shots of series of web pages on one screen), then Google Custom search, GoogleMap geolocating unis in the UK.  He then showed off some of Tony Hirst’s mashups which demonstrated and tracked down press releases; and how often these were being reused into the blogosphere.  In this way freely available data could be analysed to provide useful information. 

He moved on to talk about barriers, taking a straw poll from those in the hall about their IT services.  Most saw them as a barrier to innovation; though not everyone shared this view.  It did appear that the smaller, more agile universities were more willing to allow overt experimentation.  For everyone else an audience member suggested that you should seek to experiment in alignment with stated institutional business goals, which should help you to get more support centrally.  Another suggestion was to experiment in your own time and space, and then introduce senior staff once a more polished object was ready to demonstrate; akin to how we’ve developed this blog.

Brian enthused that greater openness to your data is a good thing, as other developers could build services and resources on top of your data, meaning you don ‘t need to do the development.  He also stressed the importance of documenting what you do via blogs and the like to show others how to approach the same things.

Next I went to a session by Brendan Dawes (www.brendandawes.con) entitled Somewhere I Have Never Travelled.  He noted that a lot of the web is based on print paradigm, which isn’t great for everything.  His site is a playground for him – a way to represent data in a way that interests him – with no set goal.  While there were some wonderful graphical interfaces and perhaps very exciting way of presenting data I imagine most of our users would be terrified rather than enlightened if we started using them.  On the other hand selling them to people would seriously have the wow factor. 

The next session I was in with Mike Elis was about using APIs without knowing technical details.  Unfortunately this session licked along at such a rate that rather than exploring a lot of the technical or practical details this turned into a long list of resources you could use.  While some were familiar names (like YahooPips) others (Dapper.net, YQL) were very unfamiliar.  Rather than listing them here, I’d suggest you go to the Mashed site and have a look at the slides yourself.

Before lunch we broke into small discussion groups.  We were supposed to be moving between these a bit during the session, though this didn’t really seem to work (I got trapped in a corner).  I was in a group talking about overcoming institutional and other barriers to innovation, which was quite interesting – though one group member (not I) did slightly dominate discussions.

Following an excellent lunch the rest of the day was given over to various lighting talks on aspects of mashed technologies that might be of interest, as well as elements and applications of Web 2 that delegates might be interested in.  This had a much less formal feel to it, and whilst the organisers expected only small audiences for the talks most of the participants stayed in the room to listen.  Bit of a shame as it was during this time that there was the best opportunity for hands on collaboration, but few people took up the option.

Overall this was an intensive, but very interesting day.  I came away if not with more hands on experience of technologies, but a greater understanding of some of the activities that are going on in the library world today.  The next mashed event will be towards the end of the year, entitled Middle Mash.

 *Yes I know it’s Harold Wilson, but frankly the post he’s in is more Eric and Ernie than politician.

Mashing Libraries

I’m heading up to Huddersfield this afternoon for the gathering that is Mashed Libraries Oop North.  We’ve a pre-event meeting tonight, but the main event is tomorrow – so if you’re interested keep an eye on the tweets that will coming out of this event.  Or the blog site for the event.  Not 100% sure quite what I’ll get out of the day (I’m keeping a very open mind on this one) – I’m sure it’ll be intensive, hard work but fun.

Full report on my return.

Mothballing the SM@LL project

Just in case you missed the earlier posts here and on the ScienceLeicester blogs, I’ve just posted about the feedback we had for the SM@LL project from the funders.  For now, any future discussions about similar projects will be over on this blog - so leave us in your RSS feeds folks!

Podcasting mandates

From the UKCoRR discussion list

For those of you who are interested, a podcast from the last RSP event, Resarch in the open: How mandates work in practice, is now available.

The death of the textbook?

I first heard about Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s proposal to replace textbooks with online materials while driving to work the other day.   Since then, it has attracted my attention in a number of places.

The report I heard first was on the Radio 4 Today programme and suggested that he wanted to replace textbooks with websites and laptops.   This might, it was suggested, be as expensive as the textbooks.    But then another report I read (and I can’t remember where, sorry!) suggested that he wanted to replace textbooks with ebook readers.  And then it turned up on Have I Got News for You?, the BBC satirical news quiz.   There it was dismissed by one participant as a bad idea, in a tone that suggested that there could be no other reaction.

I think the most important thing, whether it is websites or ebooks, is the thing suggested by John Dunford, the head of the Association of School and College Leaders, who appeared (metaphorically) on the Today programme – the main issue with this replacement of books with electronic content is the issue of quality.  How will students know that the material they are reading is of good quality?   Of course, this is an issue with books too, and exactly the same issue is present in the same way if ebooks are used instead of print.  But if it is really websites, the issue has a new dimension.

Finally, on the HIFA2015 discussion list (HIFA2015 is campaigning for access to health information for all by the year 2015), several contributors have extended Governor Schwarzenegger’s suggestion to a developing world context and pointed out that access to electronic information is much more difficult there, so replacing books with anything electronic just does not work, for most people, yet.

Tweeting in a pedagogical kinda of way

I see that Leicester’s Beyond Distance Research Alliance (BDRA) is thinking about exploring twitter for pedagogical and learning activities.  Excellent, this is really good news.  Let’s hope that those of us twitter veterans here already can support them and help welcome them into the community.  As we’ve explored and discussed on this blog (and elsewhere) more than a few times, twitter has been a great tool for us.

PEERing through the scholarly publishing gloom

PEER (Publishing and the Ecology of European Research) is a pretty major European Union funded project looking at the impact and effects of arching in repositories of academic papers and the like.  The site has been live since late February but it was only through a mailshot yesterday that I became particularly aware of them.

Glad to see that repository managers and libraries are stakeholders.  Actually, I’d have been happier to see libraries paired off as a 5th separate stakeholder as I don’t believe that library interests and those of repositories are strictly speaking coterminus.  Repository administration is often, but not always, based within a library but this can be a marriage of convenience – a functional – decision rather than a strategic one.  Perhaps this is an area PEER needs to think about carefully.

After reading through the Web site, I can see how PEER may well produce some interesting information and reports on the European repository and publishing scene.  However, as with so many of these large inatives I’ve yet to spot where the directly applicable and readily employable outputs for repository people will be.  Is PEER to act as a lobbying service on our behalf?  No.  Will PEER mediate discussions twixt the various stakeholders?  Maybe.  Will PEER change the way our repository functions?  In some way I guess.

Perhaps it is too early to pour cold water on what PEER can, may or will achieve – but I’ve seen these big EU wide initiatives before (I’m thinking of DRIVER) which have had only a minor impact within the UK HEI repository community.  Worthy work for sure, but so much at a nebulous, Ivory tower strata rather than a practitioner level.  On the other hand initiatives such as the RSP or UKCoRR have had a real beneficial role directly supporting repository workers as well as performing a research and stakeholder interface function.  IMHO we need more of these, and less of the long term study initiatives.

Actually I think that’s perhaps a little harsh on DRIVER, which I believe had a bigger role to play in the European repository scene.  Unfortunately for the project, the UK repository scene was perhaps further along with it’s networking and building supporting communities, so what it did he;lp facilitate wasn’t as noticeable.

With this in mind I’ll be interested to see how PEER will interact with the UK HEIrepository community.  There aren’t currently any major UK comparable projects (I’ll happily be corrected on this point) on this scale, so it’s a noble endeavour for sure.   I am hoping they’ll be looking to directlyinteract with repository managers like me who work at the sharp end of things; though I suspect a lot of their work may end up being at a more strategic higher level.  I could be wrong though.  They’ll be appointing an advisoryboard soon, and I imagine that might shape significantly how, where and at what level it engages with the community.

All the same, it’s a site that’s well worth a look from anyone working with repositories; and no doubt in time some very interesting information will begin to seep forth from it.

JISC Landscape Study

Hopefully you’ll have spotted the announcement that UKOLN on behalf of the JISC are doing a study about those of us in HE and how we’re using Web 2.0 tools and resources.  It’s well worth going along to and adding your comments on working practices, favourites or indeed those tools that are perhaps less in favour (Second Life for example) with some.  It’s being run on a WordPress platform, so if you’re familiar with commenting on blogs, you should find it easy enough to use.  If you’re not familiar with blogs – you’ll probably also find it easy enough.

So please go to the site (linked to above) and share your experiences.  The more comments they receive the more representative the outputs of the project will be.  And don’t forget to tell them you heard about it on our blog!

Talk like a librarian (or at least understand them)

Following on from (and in no way inspired by I regret to report) my earlier posts about repository language, my colleague Andrew has put together a page on library language.  He’s aimed it at our distance learning community, of which it is fair to say Lre have a lot.  Andrew also has probably the lion’s share of them in his supported departments as well. 

You can find the A-Z of Library Terms here.

I’ve chipped in on a few of these terms, and I’ve already had a few suggestions to add to the page.  But I think anything we can do for the students (or indeed the staff) that helps demystify the terminology and processes that go up to make their library services are a good step in the right direction.

Open Science

Just wanted to recommend this article to any science librarians out there:

Doing science in the open

by Michael Nielsen

A excellent distillation of the barriers facing open science. Issues such as a lack of trust infrastructure and incentives and a lack of appropriate collaborative/science network tools. Plus the fact that the current grant and journal system, which was initially set-up to ensure scientific discoveries were shared, is now stopping people from sharing their research in the more efficient ways offered by the web.

Managing Change course

On a very sunny Tuesday this week I travelled to the Nottinghamshire Archives to attend a training day entitled Managing Change.  This had been organised by the Libraries and Information Group (East Midlands), and was hosted by Diane of Bridgford Consultancy.  It was good to go to a library event where people from across the sector, not just academia, were represented.

To say it was a packed day would be an understatement, there was a lot to get through and I’m still digesting it and thinking about it even today.  Thankfully though a lot of it was interactive, so plenty of group work and discussion.  Some of the things we went through included the change cycle, communications, and practical steps for managers and team leaders to take when enacting change in their organisation.  We also had to develop points for action for use on return to our organisations.

There was a real focus on the people element, not so much as getting people to change, as leading them through the process and out to the otherside.  One of the groups I was in came to a conclusion during our discussions that in reality not every member of staff will be able to remain throughout a major change process.  A sad fact, but we looked at ways in which we could support people in moving sideways as well as out as an effective way of still offering them management support.

We also did a fair bit on effective communication, something fairly familiar to me.  I brought up the use of social networking technologies (as might be expected) in discussions, since the focus seemed very much on organisation 1.0 approaches in terms of dissemination and information.

All in all a very useful day, and one that I can highly recommend.