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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

This blog's been a little bit quiet recently as I've not been feeling too good: for some reason one of my symptoms has been weird vision when looking at screens (I can see them but my eyes are a bit weirded out by long exposure) hence the lack of updates!

Lots has been going on, however. The best news is that I've received a funded place at Mashed Libraries 2009. This is one of those fancy unconference things looking at mash-ups within the library field. I'm really excited about attending. I don't have much experience in any kind of library technologies: the shot on the right shows the nearest I got to library tech in my last job, a new computer to access our old-fashioned LMS. However my enthusiasm for social networking, my love of playing with random software and the bits of my PhD involving representing and supporting homework through lots of different technologies should be pretty relevant.

On top of this I've been recruited to work on an HEA funded synthesis of research alongside members of CILASS, the University of Sheffield's centre for Inquiry Based Learning over the summer. Should be interesting and a way of keeping up my research skills and giving me something other than my dissertation to think about over the next few months.

Other than those exciting pieces of news, the most thrilling thing in my life has been the gradual erosion of my coursework deadlines. At the time of writing I've only got two more pieces I need to get done, and hopefully things will keep ticking along. In fact, I've got some editing awaiting as I speak, so off I go!

Labels: jobs, library tech, MA, mashlib09, professional development, Web 2.0

This week has mostly been a thesis writing week: progress is slow, painful, but ongoing. However, I had a break on Wednesday for the CILIP UCR East Midlands Group AGM and library visit to the new David Wilson library at Leicester University. An email about the event just happened to hit my inbox as I was going back to the East Midlands prior to my course, I'm a member of both the UCR Group and East Midlands Branch, and our Librarian at Essex had recently walked us through the plan of the library in a meeting, so overall it seemed like fate was calling me there!

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.

Labels: CILIP, library tech, library visits, phd

My last library visit of the graduate trainee post was to the University of East Anglia University Library in Norwich - although there's plenty more library visits coming up, I'm going to the University of Leicester in September and there's some in my course from October onwards.

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!

Labels: circulation, library tech, library visits

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