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Just a couple of pieces of news to share. The first is rather self-evident, given the photograph accompanying this entry: I graduated from my PhD! It was a lovely day. I have decided I like the floppy PhD graduation hats much better than mortarboards, they are so much easier to keep on your head. My parents visited and took me for a fancy meal to celebrate. It's rather strange to be officially receiving my doctorate as I write up my dissertation for the MA, and I'm sure I've confused lots of people "You're graduating from a PhD? I thought you were doing an MA?!". Still, I think this slight career path adjustment been the right choice for me.

The other news is that the conference report myself and the other sponsored students at LILAC put together has been published in the Journal of Information Literacy. The report centres around the key themes of the conference, and you can see my handiwork under the 'Supporting Research' theme, one of my favourite topics. The report also features a photo of me in party frock. I'm obviously having a photogenic month!

Labels: conferences, LILAC Conference, media, phd, research libraries

As well as commenting on the more formal learning I took from Mash Oop North, explored in my blog posts on the opening sessions I also wanted to take time to comment more generally on the unconference.

I was funded to attend Mashed Library by CILIP Yorkshire and Humberside - I'm writing a report for their newsletter in 'payment' and because I was travelling from Nottingham rather than Sheffield, where I study, they generously offered to put me up in a hotel before the event to allow me to avoid a super-early start.

I'm really glad I got to go to the event early as the Monday night getting-to-know-you meal and drinks were invaluable in finding my feet and getting to know some delegates beforehand. I commented on my previous posts that Twitter was useful in following ideas being generated and discussed elsewhere in the event itself, but the pre-show was great in that I got to meet up with people who I knew from Twitter beforehand. It was great to put people to IDs / pictures of faces, and I found a few more interesting people to follow as well. I've always tended to arrive at events like this on the day, and I think I might actually arrive early wherever possible in the future, as it really helped me settle in.

The conference was brilliantly organised: not only were we asked to indicate our own experience and interests beforehand, but we also got to vote on pizza toppings for the lunch, and influence which of the opening sessions ran parallel to each other. I missed the Yahoo! Pipes session, as it ran opposite one my choices, but fellow-Twitterer @spiky7 and I had a play with it in the afternoon and created an exciting tool for stalking conference organiser Dave Pattern. Unfortunately we had to edit out his #mashlib09 tweets as they overwhelmed the timeline!

If you're interested in learning more about Mashed Library then it's well worth visiting the Mash Oop North blog, where there should be further updates on the event. Next year's event will take place in Birmingham, entitled Middle Mash, and I'd recommend attending if you can find a place - this year's sold out with speed!

Note: the picture shows the Ikea rat on display at the Rat and Ratchet, which we called into on Monday night. I have the exact same toy rat, so he made me feel right at home.

Labels: conferences, library tech, mashlib09, professional development, Web 2.0

The second session I attended at Mash Oop North was by Brendan Dawes who "does things with data" as he described it, creating playful and interactive visualisations. The major message, for me, in his talk, was how much more creative we could be with the way we represent data in libraries. The OPAC tends to be quite serious and workmanlike, and, sure, usability is important. But what about encouraging playful and creative exploration of information? Maybe libraries need to learn a lesson from Donald Norman's Emotional Design where he realised that his focus on usability in his earlier works could divert attention from the kind of design which we fall in love with. There's a more obvious place for playfulness in public than academic libraries, but a more ludic approach might be a good way to engage students and encourage them to explore library services in the early stages of their university careers.

The final formal session of the day was perhaps the most practically useful for me, a whistlestop tour through applications by Mike Ellis. He particularly focused on applications which could be used to 'scrape' data from webpages which aren't formally set up for data sharing through RSS feeds or APIs. I must admit to getting a little lost in this session, joined by a few others in the Twitter chat, but Mike came to the rescue by putting all the information down in a blog post on scraping, scripting and hacking which I'll definitely be revisiting.

The nice thing about being at a techie conference was that lots of people were using Twitter, and so I got to experience bits and pieces of the other talks by following along on the #mashlib09 hashtag on my borrowed-for-the-day iPod Touch. More on Twitter to follow in my other thoughts on the conference.

Note: photo features obligatory white-blood-cell-in-transit-to-conference shot. The white blood cell team did quite well at fending off conference lurgy.

Labels: conferences, library tech, mashlib09, professional development, Web 2.0

This week I attended the Mashed Libraries event Mash Oop North. This is an unconference (informal conference) event looking at the use of mash-ups in libraries. I've put together a few posts on the day, and in the first two I'm concentrating on the opening sessions, as these were the most information-rich parts of the event.

My first opening session was Dave Pattern and Iman Moradi talking about "Making data work harder". The simplest way to sum Dave's section up was that it was about libraries doing an Amazon - harnessing library usage data to enhance the user experience. There were lots of great examples of how this could enhance user activities. I was also provoked to wonder whether there were opportunities for libraries to go beyond some of these more commercial models of data to create more library-specific data usage. Free provision of resources which adds a whole new angle to features like book suggestion, and there's some aspects of library usage – such as renewals and repeat borrowing of books – which don't feature in the commercial sphere.

Dave's thoughts were followed by a section from Iman about design in libraries. I had a brief chat with Iman later in the day about ethnography in libraries, and his comments about how libraries might capture information about using the library from students before they leave – almost a form of student-focused knowledge management – were thought-provoking. It resonated with some of the intentions of my dissertation, although my work is focused on harnessing that knowledge for institutional rather than community learning.

Note: Picture shows the deluge Mashed Library was treated to at lunchtime. The misty effect in the background is genuinely caused by sheer weight of water.

Labels: conferences, library tech, mashlib09, professional development, Web 2.0

I was initially pleased to see that UKeiG were offering a student place at their annual conference, and then disappointed to see that I wasn't eligible as the place is only available to those who are "not in receipt of another award, bursary or scholarship". As my MA is AHRC funded this puts me out of the picture. My funding (unlike AHRC research degree awards) has no provision for career development within it, so I don't think it is arguable that it should include conference attendance. I therefore assume that the UKeiG just feels that all opportunities should be spread evenly between Information Studies students. I don't think this is an untenable position; however, I do think it highlights inconsistencies in the way student places on conferences are distributed.

Aside from my funding I've attended both the Research Libraries UK and LILAC conferences on student places this year, and I've applied for and failed to get other opportunities. I certainly intend to be proactive and enthusiastic, although the wording of the UKeiG email did, I'll admit, make me wonder whether applying for all these opportunities looks greedy. I'd understand if UKeiG's criteria were shared across the sector. However, there are noticeable differences between the conferences to which I've applied: LILAC, for example, allows any student registered for any library qualification to apply. I know that these are separate organisations, and standards don't really apply, but I wondered what people thought was the 'fair' way to do things. Should students be restricted to only one set of funding over a year? Should opportunities be determined by merit alone? Please do comment and let me know what you think.

Labels: conferences, LILAC Conference, MA

At the start of last week I went to LILAC, the Librarian's Information Literacy Conference, for which I was lucky enough to win a student award. The growth of information literacy in academic libraries particularly drew me in, plus two of the key themes of the conference were emerging technologies and supporting research, which reflect my interests quite well. Overall, LILAC was a great mix of research and practitioner accounts, particularly in the HE sector, so was ideal for me to get a good understanding of best practice.

One of the most interesting themes of the conference for me was the idea of doing information literacy without saying information literacy. I think that generally people outside the information professions don't really know what the 'information' in 'information professions' means. Whether we within the information professions agree with what it means is another blogpost entirely! More than one speaker (such as Jonathan Westaway and Moira Bent) mentioned needing students to acquire habits rather than skills, expressing that it's not really the ability to spot the seven pillars that counts, but making effective use of information so automatic that it might not even be articulated. Keynote Melissa Highton suggested that maybe digital literacy might be a more inspirational phrase for non-librarians, and in the final session of the conference Claire Packham from the British Library mentioned that the major factor in increasing attendance at the Information Literacy sessions in their new reader education programmes was stopping calling it information literacy.

On the other hand, if we're not saying information literacy we hide the message that certain key skills transfer across contexts. Perhaps the solution is to make the information professions synonymous with information literacy practices in the minds of the public so they automatically see new contexts of information use as under our remit. I think librarianship suffers from the idea that librarians are experts on the resources under the library's roof (physical or digital). An awareness that we are experts on doing information literacy even if we aren't saying information literacy requires us to focus on our practices rather than our products. Therefore the importance of the information professions acting as advocates and implementers of information literacy practices is what I'll be taking away from LILAC.

Photograph of the Cardiff University dragon reading the LILAC 2009 Conference Pack taken by Katie Fraser.

Labels: conferences, information literacy, LILAC Conference, professional development

I've just heard that I've received a sponsored student place at the LILAC Conference 2009. LILAC is the Librarian's Information Literacy Annual Conference, and this year it's looking at emerging technologies and supporting research, which is right up my street. I enjoyed the first semester module on information literacy but didn't feel the second semester one reflected my particular interests in the area, so I'm glad to have the opportunity to round out my understanding of the topic. Definitely looking forward to it.

On the course, I'm one week into the second semester and starting to find my bearings after a busy week working out my new schedule. This semester we get to pick and choose our own modules, and I'm taking Academic, Research and Special libraries (which pretty much fits perfectly the range of libraries I'm hoping to work in), Electronic Publishing and Educational Informatics.

Although some of the Electronic Publishing and Educational Informatics work overlaps with what I've studied in my PhD (or self-taught skills, such as the creation of xhtml / css websites) I think I can learn a lot from information scientists' perspectives on these areas. For example, Electronic Publishing concentrates on standards and legislation, and the Educational Informatics modules focuses on the use of established technologies for formal education, whereas my own research covered more informal uses of emerging technologies.

Finally, I'm currently discussing working with Sheffield's Information Commons for my dissertation, which promises to be an exciting exploration of evaluating new learning spaces. More on this soon as the details get worked out - I submit a proposal at the start of March.

Note: The picture accompanying this post was taken at the Apple Store in London. It's my website on the largest computer screen I think I've ever seen, which for some reason I found incredibly amusing.

Labels: conferences, information literacy, LILAC Conference, MA, professional development

As a second step in my campaign for media dominance, I'm mentioned in an article in this month's (the January / February issue) of CILIP's Library and Information Update. Hello to anyone who's found their way here from the article - it's on the RLUK (Research Libraries UK) Conference I attended back in October 2008 and here are the posts from the conference mentioned in the article.

Just to avoid / add to the confusion, the article's got a teensy error in it: I'm actually a student with a PhD, rather than a PhD student - I'm currently studying for the MA in Librarianship at Sheffield, and my PhD was in Learning Sciences at Nottingham University. Still, nice that Update were so interested in our experiences as student attendees at the conference, and I hope this is a positive sign for RLUK continuing to offer student places at their future events.

Labels: conferences, media, professional development, RLUK Conference

The final theme was the future of librarianship, and this covered two main aspects - the need for leaders of the future, and the research library-specific consideration of how librarians' roles might change.

There were two talks on leadership. The first came from Alistair Work, and mainly focused on how individuals react when the moment to show leadership arises. He also asked an interesting question - given that long-term professionals tend to develop certain styles of thinking, with associated neural changes, what does a librarian's brain look like? For me, an equally interesting question was whether a newly qualified librarian is going to end up with a similar brain to the librarians in charge today, and what, if any, differences there are between the current cohort of library school students and those of a few decades ago. In addition, Sheila Corrall, my Head of Department presented an evaluation of the Leading Modern Public Libraries programme - it seems well worth a look for those interested in library leadership across the sectors.

The other main theme was the emergence of new types of librarian role in research libraries. Often when speakers talk about the changing role of librarians it is simply a matter of integrating new technologies into old posts; this was about how changes from technologies might create entirely new posts. For example, with the advent of open access, researchers will need librarians to manage internally produced repositories of publications, and even data. In research libraries it seemed like librarians were being encouraged to move away from liaison roles to the support of researchers' information needs, and with my background in research this certainly sounds like an exciting opportunity!

So, that's the end of my thoughts on the RLUK conference. There's a bunch of stuff about the course and visits backed up to talk about, but that will have to wait until my next update!

Labels: conferences, future of librarianship, leadership, professional development, research libraries, RLUK Conference

Another theme of the conference was digitisation, and as one of my main interests is in the use of technology in libraries both of the parallel sessions I attended focused on this theme. Alice Prochaska from Yale University spoke to the whole conference about the opportunity for libraries to exploit their special collections as a "unique and distinctive" resource in the information age. The major question to be asked in doing this, however, was "how do we prioritise our digitisation programmes?" and several speakers over the course of the conference gave their opinions.

A session themed around OCLC's Shifting Gears paper, led by John MacColl, argued for mass digitisation - getting as much 'out there' as possible so that collections could be sifted through by researchers rather than librarians. A number of strategies were put forward for this - from 'scan on demand' to simple 'scan the first one and keep going' strategies. However, researchers still have to find the digitised information. One issue identified in the following JISC / RLUK session was that collections tend to be available through individual portals, and designing usability and interoperability into these has not been a priority. The other, recurring throughout the conference was whether to add metadata at the collection level, at the level of items, and whether user tagging could substitute for / add to metadata added by librarians - I'm a fan of the tagging route, but it was interesting to see the range of (passionate) opinions on whether it was a good idea!

Again collaboration rose as a core theme, with the collaboration between JISC, JSTOR and the pamphlet owners on the 19th century pamphlet collection an interesting example - JSTOR provide the infrastructure for storing / accessing the collection. The difficulties (and opportunities!) of working with commercial partners were something I hadn't seen spelled out in concrete terms before, and again the OCLC Good Terms report on such collaborations seems like a useful resource.

Finally, and particularly up my street, the difficulty of storing born digital information was considered. At RLUK the focus was very much on how to store websites / pages, and whether regulatory backing could be achieved to allow this to happen. This discussion came up again recently for me in the context of Game City where the National Videogame Archive was launched. Videogames can be 'born digital' but they are associated with physical media, such as cartridges, and other physical materials such as instruction booklet and inserts. Digitisation of materials sounded like such a simple concept before I started digging!

Labels: computer games, conferences, digitisation, professional development, research libraries, RLUK Conference

It seemed inevitable that the credit crunch would crop up at some point during the conference - it seems to be everywhere at the moment - and Sir Drummond Bone launched straight in. He predicted less funding in the pot, and the responses research libraries would have to make to this, such as finding funding elsewhere. In what might have been good news for the majority he predicted that major financial changes wouldn't hit until 2010, although as I'll be launching myself at the job market in late 2009 it could have been better news for me!

What hadn't really entered my radar is what a big effect small changes in government have on funding research. Apparently Gordon Brown was a big supporter of research funding as chancellor, and his move to PM may not be great news for funding. Less surprisingly, a complete government change is likely to make waves. The Conservatives are apparently enthusiastic about evidence-based practice, but whether this would translate to cash flow is debatable. I won't be voting based upon these considerations, but it was interesting to think about the impact of the political climate on funding priorities at a range of different levels.

The big issue for RLUK and funding was, however, the move from the RAE (Research Assessment Exercise) to the REF (Research Excellence Framework). As a PhD student I was highly aware of the effect of the RAE on departments. This was notable among my graduating peers looking for employment in university departments, and the emphasis placed on publications in staff recruitment as the 2008 RAE approached. The REF is planned to have a major bibliometric component to it: using staff publication citations to assess quality. On the one hand removing the administrative burden of the RAE on higher education sounds promising. On the other, part of me baulks at the idea of assessing departments in this way, particularly as it has not yet been decided whether staff can take their publications with them when they move jobs, which would preserve the same job market issues.

Stephen Pinfield's comments about the REF, and its trial at the University of Nottingham were particularly relevant to me, as I was both PhD student and library assistant at Nottingham, and know the organisation well. In addition, Alison Weightman's presentation on internal peer review for developing research quality at Cardiff University was also intriguing. While I was a PhD student informal peer review - commenting on work and reading through papers - was a common process among students and some staff. However, it would certainly be beneficial to officially recognise these efforts. The idea of the library / information service acting as a facilitator or this process also appealed to me: the potential for a well thought-out and centrally coordinated peer review process to encourage interdisciplinary research seemed high. As Alison Weightman pointed out, better publications are possible with internal peer review, better publications lead to more funding in a bibliometric model, and this is a great example of how the library can work together with researchers for the good of the institution as a whole.

As well as collaborating with researchers, however, the library might also need to procure more funding for their own work. One particular need for funding for libraries explored during the conference was for the digitisation of special collections. Presenters discussed ways in which the library could partner with institutions like JISC or corporate partners such as Google to support digitisation projects, as I will discuss on the next entry, on digitisation.

Labels: conferences, professional development, research libraries, RLUK Conference

From the 22nd to 24th October I attended the Research Libraries UK (RLUK) Conference, thanks to a competition for places set by my department. Over the next few days I plan to write a little about what were the major topics of the conference for me, influenced by my choice of parallel sessions. These were funding, digitisation and the future of librarianship, with the idea of collaboration running through all of these.

As my major ambition is to link together my background in research and technology with my new librarian skills, this was an ideal conference for me to attend. I found thinking of my participation in terms of Lave and Wenger (1991)'s concept of 'legitimate peripheral participation' was particularly illuminating - it's a concept I referred to in my PhD, so it was at the top of my mind!

Lave and Wenger used the term legitimate peripheral participation to describe an apprentice learner's participation at the edge of a community of practice he or she has entered - in this case librarianship. As part of my legitimised participation in the conference I was not only able to learn a lot about its major themes, but also to start placing myself in relation to the community I am entering.

Legitimate peripheral participation in the conference allowed me to learn more about being a librarian within the world of research libraries as a whole. It highlighted the topics that are of importance in the field today, the way librarians view the problems facing them (us!), and the behaviours of those who have been successful in the field. Furthermore, it allowed me to think about how my own skills might be of benefit to the community - for example, my interview, questionnaire and HCI / CSCW / design background and its use in understanding the needs of users, something highlighted as a particular concern throughout the conference. Finally, I was able to think about the range of careers that are open to me in the world of research / librarianship. There were representatives from research libraries in HE, in institutions, and also from organisations supporting librarians, such as JISC, Mimas and the Research Information Network, all of which seemed to have close links with my skill set.

Myself and my co-winner were the only students at the conference, but it seemed like a trial run for including more students next year - I hope a successful one! We were certainly grateful for the opportunity, and my thanks go to Sheila Corrall, our Head of Department, and RLUK for organising our participation. We appreciated that everyone went out of their way to make us feel welcome, particularly the RLUK team. It was also great to meet some of the librarians from Sheffield, who we haven't had the chance to meet on the course, and some of my ex-colleagues from Nottingham too!

Labels: conferences, professional development, research libraries, RLUK Conference

This week is week one - the first lectures of all my modules in the MA. Everything so far has been pretty interesting. The modules I'm taking this term cover management, libraries and society, information literacy and information retrieval, and the practicalities of the course itself. Each one's been a good mix of subjects I've got a genuine interest in, subjects I've got a background in and subjects where I feel I have a need to grow, so I'm neither feeling out of my depth nor like I'm covering old ground. I hope this persists!

The other big news is that I've won a place to go to the RLUK Conference (Research Libraries UK, formerly CURL) from the 22nd to the 24th of this month in Leeds. My department ran a competition for two sponsored places, and my essay was one of the winning two! The full details are available on the Department of Information Studies blog. My essay focused on my interest in the new Research Excellence Framework (which is to replace the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE)) and the talks on digitisation I'll be able to attend, so the conference should be relevant to my background in academia and learning technologies. However, I'm generally keen to hear talks from my new Head of Department Sheila Corrall and Dame Lynne Brindley from the British Library. The RLUK consists of several research libraries, including Sheffield University, where I'm undertaking my MA, and Nottingham University, where I worked as a library assistant and undertook my PhD, so the conference feels like it's on my home turf, so to speak. I'll update later this month with all the news from Leeds.

Labels: conferences, MA, professional development, RLUK Conference

I've been on holiday this week, but I went on a bit of a busman's holiday, and popped in for a quick seminar on developments in the British Library - part of the British Library Roadshow. There was a bit of a mix-up and so I ended up in the seminar for commercial interest rather than the HE seminar, but as I was really interested in attending for my wider career development rather than my current work, it didn't really matter which I attended.

First, and most frivolously of all, I highly recommend the British Library chocolate we got free. Yum. There was also some interesting content.

One thing that I didn't expect to be hearing was about the British Library's dissatisfaction with copyright laws. In some senses this was rather hypocritical of me. In our own library we constantly have to persuade students that our attempts to stop them from breaking copyright law aren't part of our evil library plans, just a genuine professional need to demonstrate that we are enforcing the law. Somehow (subconsciously) I must have felt like the British Library had evil library plans of its very own, as hearing a spokesperson for the BL say it was actively campaigning to change copyright law to be more appropriate to everyday needs was almost shocking! Balancing legal requirements with my idealism is something I'm going to have to get more used to doing as a librarian, so it's good to have a role model for doing exactly that! I also heard about the projects they're working on, the Turning the Pages project and British Library Direct Plus.

Turning the Pages is basically e-book software designed to present manuscripts and ancient texts, but what is fascinating is the way that focusing on a specific style of text changes design requirements from the textbook e-books we see in academic libraries. The ability to view the actual layout of books and the actual quality of pages and text with this software is enthralling, and you can really understand why it's useful with unique and beautiful illustrated works.

British Library Direct Plus is (or at least, will be) a database searching tool that lets you plug in and search across different databases to which your library subscribes. It then links to the British Library's holdings, and your own library catalogue, and explicitly states the cost of article supply through the British Library. My own experiences of cross-database search engines as an academic library user have not been overwhelming. The University of Nottingham eLibrary Gateway I used as a student seemed to hide the functionality of individual databases, encourage the user to confuse databases and e-journals, and limit interdisciplinary users by a rigid use of subjects to categorise databases. At first glance, the British Library system seems like a bit of a step forward: the wide catalogue of the British Library, saved searches and alerts and promising local integration means it's something I'd be interested in working with as a librarian, despite my continued reservations about the limitations of grouping searches and results from a range of database styles.

Lastly, and second-most-frivolously, the new British Library building at Boston Spa is going to be staffed (well, enabled) by robots! This is obviously very exciting, and almost certainly quite practical too.

I'd highly recommend the roadshows: I'll certainly be keeping an eye out for them in future years. It's quite a relaxed session, it's interesting to see what the British Library are up to, and I imagine if you attend as a full librarian at the correct session it could be quite a useful networking event too!

Labels: British Library, conferences, interlibrary loans, library tech