Genuinely the coolest lanyard I've seen at a conference: it had the programme, wireless internet log-in, campus map, a QR code for the updated programme on the event wiki and a barcode giving access to the university library.

On Tuesday last week I went to my third (and the eighth overall) Mashed Library event at the University of Lincoln. It probably goes without re-saying that I love these events: both as an opportunity to expand my knowledge of what can be done with technologies in libraries and as a chance to network and swap ideas with like-minded information professionals.

Pancakes and Mash (named as it fell on Shrove Tuesday) kicked off with an opening keynote from Gary Green from Voices for the Library, talking about the role of social media and data in his team’s project to save public libraries in the UK. I won’t go into much detail here, but please do go and check out the website and at least read their guide to 10 things you need to know about library closures / campaigns.

This Mashed Library I wasn’t aiming to extend my techie skills, but instead focused on learning more about the kinds of events and projects others were using tech to support. Exposing your data with Nick Jackson and Alex Bilbie from Project Jerome was a great introduction to the kinds of challenges libraries face in using data. Key learning points from this session for me:

• Cultural change is required to truly seize open data in libraries: asking what companies will allow you to do with data when taking on new software and services
• Licensing of data is immensely complex, but it is worth trying to negotiate changes or exceptions to terms and conditions
• It’s easy to substitute data you’re not allowed to use (e.g. bought-in catalogue records) for data you can use (e.g. by matching data by ISBNs)
• It’s not unusual to find obtaining rights to use data which belongs to your own institution as complicated as using external data.

After lunch, I then went to see Alison McNab talking about De Montfort University Library’s Mash at Lunchtime events – see their blog at http://librarymashups.our.dmu.ac.uk/. Essentially this is a platform DMU is using to share knowledge about technology in libraries internally (within library and across the institution) and represents an interesting model for developing a technologically aware community. This was followed by an interesting chat led by Stephanie Taylor about the ways in which librarians and geeks can work together: although it soon grew clear that library-geeks talking to computer-geeks was a better analogy, as most of the communication challenges were two way!

Shot of the University of Lincoln Great Central Warehouse Library interior.

To finish, a few of us went to have a look around the interior of the Great Central Warehouse Library of the University of Lincoln. Rather appropriately for a Mashed Library event the architecture is a beautiful combination of old and new, with modern glass panels in amongst the old brickwork, and there’s some ambitious use of new technologies like information screens to convey library information and get feedback. Also on the techie side, I have to say that this conference was the best I’ve ever attended for wireless internet access and availability of power points for charging laptops: good work Lincoln and the organisers!

This event was great fun and has yet again extended my knowledge of what libraries can do with data and information. However, one thing that was discussed both at the (un)conference and on the associated Twitter feed, was that many of those attending weren’t funded by work (in my case a combination of different reasons meant I didn’t feel it was appropriate to ask). I encountered mixed feelings about this: the Mashed Library events in general always seem affordable for those living locally, which is great, but it’s also a shame that for most of us this kind of developmental work just isn’t central to our job descriptions. In tough economic times, however, perhaps that’s inevitable.

View from the upper floor of Worksop Library. Apologies for the blurriness: only had my camera phone!

In November I went on a visit to Worksop Public Library run by the East Midlands branch of CILIP, which combined a workshop on CILIP qualifications (relevant to my chartership) and a tour of the library.

It was good to meet people who were in a similar stage of chartership and the talk from Kath Owen was great. This was the first part of my plan to get beyond the ‘gathering evidence’ stage of my chartership and actually start putting together something which looks like a portfolio. As I’ve finally regained my free time after buying a house in September (hence the lack of activity on this blog since then!) I should have lots more opportunity to make that happen!

Worksop Library is newly built and only opened on 20th September 2010. It’s lovely: my photos really didn’t do it justice, so I’d recommend checking out the photos from the day on the East Midlands Branch Flickr page at http://www.flickr.com/photos/emboc/sets/72157625342805449/. It’s a beautiful rebuild.

What was really inspiring for me, though, was hearing all about how the library had gone the extra mile in embedding itself in the community since the reopening. The library had worked alongside community businesses to help open up author days and put on lots of community activities. They were also co-located with other services, including a registry office (and gorgeous little wedding chapel!) and a day centre for those with disabilities.

With my chartership hat on I was particularly interested in how the library has fostered relationships with the other services in the building. I think it’s often assumed that putting two services together will automatically lead to collaboration, but in my experience it’s far from that easy! For example, the Student Development team in the University are based in the library building at my current post, but we’re still working on ways to work together.

At Worksop collaboration and co-location seemed to have worked well: you could tell that staff from different services all knew each other, and day centre users were happy to wander out into the library and get books. I asked after the tour and the staff were keen to stress that it had needed a lot of personal commitment. Clearly something to think about doing more in my post (I’m a liaison librarian, after all!).

The only downer of the day was going into the staff room and noticing a newspaper clipping about library cuts on the noticeboard. It’s all the more heartbreaking to think about the impact of cuts when you see what a little investment in library services can do, and Nottinghamshire County Council is getting hit hard http://www.thebookseller.co.uk/news/131578-protests-begin-over-library-cuts-in-nottinghamshire.html. I hope the momentum Worksop Library gained when the new build opened isn’t lost completely in these hard times.

The day started with a talk from Kath O’Donovan, Associate Director of Library Services at Sheffield. She talked a little bit about the background to the IC project – a lot of which was familiar from my interviews with staff – and gave a good introduction to the IC.

Kath was followed by a presentation by Krishan Mistry about his IC-related video IC Girls. It’s worth following the link to see this playful take on the IC. I must admit, I have always found the video / song lacking on the feminist front, but it was interesting to hear about how the idea for the video had developed: Krishan’s explained that the lyrics of of the song were intended to mock one womanising friend’s tales of the IC, which made me a little more comfortable with it. There’s all sorts of interesting discussions about viral marketing and student ownership of university spaces triggered by this video, and it was interesting that Krishan had been accused of developing it in partnership with the University – he assured us that he had been avoiding staff during the filming!

Next, Phil and I presented the findings of my dissertation, and I took everyone on a tour of the building ‘through students’ eyes’: specifically focusing on how individual areas in the IC can be meaningful to individual students. I had 30 minutes, but overcompensated for touring 40 researchers / librarians around the building, and only took 15, so we had time for some interesting discussion afterwards.

After lunch, Matthew Cheeseman, the convenor of the event, talked about his Folklore PhD looking at students in Higher Education. He talked about how the nighttime economy – the economy of bars, clubs and alcohol in which mainstream students participate – fitted with the idea of a 24 hour library. I have enjoyed his work a lot, and would recommend checking out his 2008 paper – The impact of a 24 hour library on the student experience at Sheffield.

Finally, IC Manager Alex Hunt wrapped up the event with some tips on managing a facility like the IC. One of my favourite facts from her is that cleaning a 24 hour library is more like cleaning an international airport than cleaning a library – it’s never shut, and you’re always having to clean around the people!

It was a good event, and I particularly enjoyed the range of perspectives from the speakers – from Kath’s focus on the development of the building, to Krishan’s personal student experience, to my relatively study-focused findings on how students used the building, to Matthew’s understanding of the IC as a social phenomenon, through to Alex’s experiences of running it. The event really emphasised to me the different views of the Information Commons (and libraries in general) we have, and how much we can learn from stopping and thinking about these facilities from the perspectives of other stakeholders and users. A big thanks to Matthew for organising the event!

Note: Photographs are views of the IC from one of the higher floors, and of the CILASS space within the IC.

This visit was a little bit different from the Derbyshire Public Libraries visit, as instead of going to the flagship library as we did in Chesterfield, we visited a couple of branch libraries, in this case Parson Cross and Upperthorpe Libraries. These were an interesting mix. Parson Cross is quite far out of Sheffield, and a fairly old library, but due to be replaced by an exciting new library within a community centre soon. Upperthorpe is a relatively new library, based in a community centre including a swimming pool – in fact, I remember the renovation works on the old swimming baths where it’s housed taking place when I lived in Sheffield before! To illustrate this post you’ve got a picture of the children’s library in each, Parson Cross to the right, and Upperthorpe below. I’ve picked the children’s area as they’re always nice and cheerful, but I also think the pictures nicely illustrate the slight differences between the two – with Parson Cross being cheery but slightly dingy (or well-loved, perhaps), and the Upperthorpe slightly brighter and airier.

After the tours around the two libraries (we were bused between the two) we had the opportunity to talk to some senior staff from Sheffield Libraries. As with the Chesterfield Public Libraries visit I came away feeling a little bit of guilt about public libraries not being my sector of choice. However, I think the visits did confirm for me that I really wouldn’t like to work in a branch of a public library. Don’t get me wrong – they both looked like fantastic places, and I’d happily be a library user in either. The community aspect of libraries, while valuable to me, however, is not what I’m interested in libraries for: my passion lies in the information side of library work, and helping people locate and use resources. On the other hand, it made me think about the possibility of working in a public library in a more central, administrative area. Some of the profit making and project based arms of Sheffield Libraries sounded really intriguing, and I’d definitely be happy working in a more information-focused role in a public library. Never say never!

The Brotherton Library is a beautiful old building, and one I had the opportunity to wander round at the RLUK Conference. I haven’t included any images of the Brotherton library, partly as they didn’t turn out very well, and there’s plenty of images available on the Internet which give a much better impression of this beautiful building. However, it’s also partly because I wanted to focus on the other two libraries.

The Adsetts Centre – pictured to the top right – was one of the first of a new line of learning centres, built in 1996. The Edward Boyle – pictured to the left – was built in 1975. The two share a common feature – the library atrium. I’m familiar with this architectural feature from Essex and from the Sheffield Information Commons with its good sides – letting natural light penetrate the darkest library depths – and its bad sides – mainly students dropping things down. Unlike both of these libraries, however, the Adsetts Centre and the Edward Boyle also have open floors, and, as visible in both photographs, it means that it is near impossible to zone different types of study area for groups and individuals.

I’ve been reading Lorcan Dempsey’s Recombinant Library paper for my collection management essay, and it emphasised something I’m quite interested in – the recent emphasis on library social space as a consequence of the increase in electronic resources, the need to balance the social and individual study aspects of the library. Such considerations are obviously affecting both these libraries. The Adsetts, while revolutionary in its day for its technological resources, has recently had to build an extension to allow social study spaces without drowning the library in noise, and the Edward Boyle has had to grab social space where it can, and where the noise is least likely to filter through to quiet areas.

Whenever we build a new library, it is always a gamble, and perhaps the library world just has to face up to the fact that the kinds of space required aren’t predictable. The Adsetts was revolutionary in its time, built to overcome the difficulties of space introduced by technologies, but it has still required reworking. The Edward Boyle is now in line for a complete rebuild. Both these visits made me wonder what the space I’d be working in by the end of my career would look like. It’s possible that I’ll be in a current building like Sheffield’s Information Commons or Leicester’s rebuilt David Wilson Library desperately trying to reconfigure it to fit new styles of working! I know that new buildings are designed to be as reconfigurable as possible, but these visits made me wonder if that’s really a pipe dream.

Derbyshire sounds like a fantastic library service to work for: they seem up to speed with the political agenda, open to new ideas about how to make the library service work for the public, and full of initiatives for drawing new users in. My personal favourite aspect of the library was how much natural light came in: I find so many libraries in every sector lack this. Of course, part of their agenda was to sell their service to us – in a year we’ll be potential job applicants – it’ll be interesting to see whether that’s a theme in future visits too!

One of the things I enjoyed thinking about during the visit was how academic and research libraries could learn from the way things are done in public libraries. The picture in the top right shows the front-facing books displays which seem to be becoming pretty common in public libraries. I was wondering if academic libraries could benefit from similar displays. Universities often concentrate on core texts for undergraduates, but as a postgraduate I certainly would have been tempted by a display of intellectual classics. For example, when I was an undergraduate my lecturer claimed that every educated adult should have read ‘The Selfish Gene‘ by Richard Dawkins, and I know I’m always telling people to pick up ‘The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat‘ by Oliver Sacks. Promoting books as tangible and desirable artefacts isn’t really done in academia, but it could lead to wider reading, expand minds and encourage interdisciplinary thought. In fact, reading without a specific learning outcome in mind is something the academic sector could borrow from public libraries in general!

The AGM itself was reasonably brief, but it was good to go and hear about the kind of events they’d run during the year, most of which I was sad I’d missed out on (but unable to attend during my trainee post anyway). Then we hit the library for the tour.

The library has been built using the shell of the old library – the extension was added, then the library moved into the extension, then they renovated the old section, and joined the two, fairly seamlessly. It was a £35m job, and boy, did it show. Everything looks and smells new: especially the leather seating. There are fabulous facilities, like large and well equipped group rooms, and it has another of the exciting book sorting RFID machines I saw at UEA, only this time with the books going directly onto the trolleys!

Everywhere we went there seemed to be something new and exciting to see, from the graduate study lounge, available only with card access (oh, how I want one!) to the chair sponsored in honour of Engelbert Humperdinck! The only bit that isn’t super-sparkling, beautifully ventilated and light, and glamorously furnished is, of course, the staff area, but still, a lot better than most.

Do I actually think that this was money well spent? Well, the summertime is always a quiet time for libraries, but over above this the quality of the experience of using the library made the students appear extra-studious in their activities. Of course, it’s not possible to rebuild every 5 years, but I think a lot of libraries could benefit from a face lift every once in a while, to avoid a slide into mild grottiness. Also, it seems a rather mundane point, but as someone who’s worked in rather old library buildings, I can’t even imagine how great it would be to work in somewhere well-ventilated and temperature controlled. What a sad statement about librarianship! The downside? Well, of course, the staff offices were where the air conditioning didn’t work, but at least units were being installed! Lastly, the benefits of having enough space for all the books – a rarer luxury than I was aware before I entered the library world – can’t be underestimated.

I guess I’ve come away with library envy.

First things first, the library did look like a nice place to work and study. It was very light on the ground floor and there were obvious and welcoming reception, enquiry and IT areas. I’m not too fond of the multi-layer concrete labyrinth style of architecture that’s employed in the university as a whole, but the library was welcoming, and there was an absolutely lovely computer lab attached – one of the few computer areas I’ve ever entered that felt light and airy rather than slightly oppressive.

The UEA tour is fairly notorious in my current workplace for having the most technically advanced systems of any the libraries we visit. Their books are RFID tagged and can be issued electronically or returned into a post-slot affair on the outside wall or the inside wall of the library.

As you can see from the picture on the left the books are then seized by a conveyor belt. Then the clever bit happens: the machine reads the RFID tags and sorts the books into bins, one for each floor. Clever. However, I do have my reservations about the system. In fact, these reservations extend across a lot of library technologies which I’ve seen. Library systems just aren’t… well… perfect. I’ve worked in design research doing my PhD, and a lot of the time in that area you’re working with prototypes, or even ‘Wizard of Oz‘ set ups, where apparently working systems are fudged together, and I see some of this spilt over into library technology, where systems require a bit of fiddling to actually work.

I’m sure I’m not the only person to encounter the ‘reads your barcode when you put your card in here if you give it a bit of a wiggle sometimes’ phenomenon in a number of research and public libraries. And the UEA RFID sorter system suffered from a slightly different problem, poor integration into existing practices. When I first saw this wonderful conveyor belt system I was really impressed, and imagined it zooming books straight up to the floor for shelving (or at least reference) in seconds. But in fact, the system you can see on the right applies – the books are wheeled over to some shelves, and then from there they are put on trolleys and then taken to the correct floor. This leads to a significant delay, which may mean students have to ask enquiry desk staff to check on the shelves in the (locked off) room if they can’t find recently returned books (and if they know to ask). This was partly an issue with the size of the room: apparently there just wasn’t enough space to put trolleys in the room and easily access their shelves, which would have removed one step from the process, at least.

On one hand, this is kind of disappointing: a system-wide problem of the ‘works if you give it a wiggle’ school. The other side of this, however is that UEA is not only trying new things but forging ahead into new ground. My traineeship this year has been in a very traditional library, and it’s the kind of place that will benefit from the struggles and pioneering attitude of places like UEA in the future. However, the part of me that’s worked producing make-shift technologies in a research context just can’t help but disapprove when make-shift technologies are sold through commercial channels for real money!

Anglia Ruskin University Library, Chelmsford seems rather modern in comparison to the more traditional university library where I do my graduate traineeship. One of the major takeaway points of the visit was how the differences between the two libraries reflect the differences in our studentship. For example, Anglia Ruskin has a lot of distance learners, in comparison to the large number of international students we actually have living on campus here, and our large number of postgraduate students mean that we need a much larger legacy collection than them, which even affects the cataloguing – they get in books already classified, whereas ours have to be altered to fit a legacy system. Anglia Ruskin are a lot larger in terms of the number of students, and this means they also have a much larger number of staff, with faculty and subject librarians across the two campuses. Overall, their set up made them feel more vibrant and efficient, but our library feels more learned and home-y. Each has its place, I guess. Interestingly, they used many of the same technology providers as we used when I was at Nottingham University Libraries – such as LMS, digital library, RFID scanners – I wonder if there’s any connection there.

Colchester Sixth Form Library was also very interesting. I’ll admit that I hadn’t really considered working in what I’d deemed to be ‘school libraries’. However, the sixth form college seemed far from school life, and while the library was small, it had a really nice atmosphere. Because of the small librarian staff I felt quite envious of the range of tasks that were involved in work there. The College Librarian had a fantastic job involving everything from cataloguing and classification, to information literacy training, to maintenance of the Virtual Learning Environment. The small team seemed to mean much more variety, and she was able to use a wide range of internet services to present and provide information to students. I guess without the corporate image of a University to support, it’s a lot easier to mix and match and be a bit more 2.0! Universities are still where my heart lies, but I’ve got to say I’m tempted!

Apologies for the lack of photographs – rain and a lack of good vistas prevented it. A hectic time and reduced internet access (house moves etc.) mean that this blog hasn’t been updated to my usual targets, but hopefully I’m back on the wagon now!

Colchester Institute, while it’s broadly in the same game of academic librarianship, is quite a different cup of tea to a university library. The staff were keen to talk about making their library as welcome as possible for their students, and one of the ways they did this was to make their library as appealing and welcoming as possible – along the lines, in fact, of a public library. It feels weird to admit that the place you work at isn’t that welcoming, but I guess it makes sense for a university to have a more weighty academy-of-learning feeling to it than a place that offers vocational courses. Interestingly, Colchester Institute does have a staff with a large proportion of subject librarians (although on a much smaller scale than here), and it certainly made me think more about the range of academic library posts that were on offer to see it.

Essex Public Library Headquarters made me think in a different way about public libraries. On one hand it was fairly inspirational to see the range of activities supported across the county. The number of books that were passing through were simply phenomenal, and there were lots of interesting projects underway, such as one to provide picture books to nursery schools across the county, various tie-ins with the Essex Book Festival and Year of Reading, and it was staggering to see the sheer number of books that pass through its system. On the other hand, it felt a little under-funded and under-staffed: leavers did not seem to have been replaced, and it really highlighted the budget crunches that this sector has faced.

Chelmsford Public Library on the other hand seemed to be thriving on the changing world of librarianship. It housed a number of services which tied into the library ethos, such as a Learn Direct centre promoting skills acquisition and the county’s Answers Direct service, a phone service which answered complex library queries from across Essex. The Answers Direct offices also included a homework help instant messaging service, which was particularly interesting for me, given my PhD topic of homework technologies.

All in all, then, these were valuable experiences, and a great way to get a picture of the range of library careers that are available to me. However, I’m yet to be convinced away from a career in university libraries: I think they’re where I’m most useful and where I feel most at home.