Tales of a Librarian

I attended the AGM of the Library and Information History Group (LIHG) yesterday afternoon through in Edinburgh, which was very insightful indeed.

It was held in the Signet Library, just off of the Royal Mile, in West Parliament Square, an area of the city so steeped with history that it seemed to be the ideal location for a group that are interested in the history of libraries and of the library profession.

My interest in attending this event was primarly to attend the talk and tour of the library, which is a very important law library within Scottish Legal History. The talk that we were given detailed the development of four of the legal libraries within the area, from the 1600s, which i have to admit left me feeling a little bit dizzy with numbers, and also very appreciative of modern fire prevention and fighting techniques, as the frequency of fires which these libraries seem to experience in the early days of their history was quite astonishing!

The library itself was a Georgian masterpiece of a building, with sweeping staircases, enormous pillars and walkways, and stained glass windows. How very different to the modern constructions of libraries today! The library itself was an exercise in preservation, nevermind the books that it held. Much of the original furniture remained, and rugs which would cost upward of £0.25 million to replace today. How extraordinary!

The library contained both legal and non-legal texts, most of which were kept in shelving behind glass or metal screening. I do not think that i saw a single person using it in the time i was there! Their situation regarding cataloguing is that only three quarters of the books in the lower library (law related) are electronically catalogued and available in an online opac, the rest are included in a card catalogue (held within the most magnificent mahogany cabinet!). The upstairs library has not been catalogued for the online opac due to funding restraints. Indeed, until only a few years ago they kept a hard copy loans record!

The building is really very impressive, but i have to admit that i was a bit confused by all the technical legal type information, i.e. the different users of the library and courts and such. There was not a great turnout for the event, most people there were already members of the group and of the committee, but they were very welcoming of me, the little outsider who knew very little, if anything, of library history.

Most of the people there really seemed to be very interested in library history as a research subject, and seemed in that sense to be as much historians as they were librarians. They seemed to realise that there was a real problem for their group in getting people interested in the history of libraries and that most librarians and library staff had very little knowledge about the history of the libraries in which they worked and of library history in general.

I think that the experience gave me a real insight into a view of librarianship which i had not really considered prior to attending. Understanding how the profession has developed and how it has been regarded by the public over the many years is of interest to myself, but i do not think that i would join the group as yet - if anything, i do not feel as if i know enough about the history of libraries to merit joining.

I will certainly in the future think more about the profession from this angle, and perhaps next time I visit a library building will think not just about what it currently offers and what it will offer in the future, but also about what it has offered in the past and how it has shaped and influenced the lives of the people who have used it and has grown and changed with the community in which it is placed.

UPDATE: I forgot to also mention one of the most unusual things that i discovered on the day - that the speaker who gave us the talk and tour of the building had been only the second qualified librarian to work in the library since it first opened (hundreds of years ago!)… what does that say for the recognition of the profession!?? Also, she was the first woman to work as a librarian within the library too….. (16th June 2006)

Technorati Tags: history, libraries, agm, meeting, tours, legal libraries

This was another thing that I spotted on the CILIP Daily news email which I felt was quite interesting… it doesn’t give any more details than that below, but i remember seeing a picture of a library in which all the books had been classified by the colour of their spine… so all the black books were together, and the blue, red and so forth… I’m sure this one is a bit more systematic though

“Jason Healey, a design student at the Arts Institute at Bournemouth has developed a classification system using colours and symbols to make it easier for people with disabilities to find their way around the library. Julia Waite, CILIP Member and Librarian at the Institute said she was interested in the idea ‘to get people to the right part of the library without using numbers’. Jason Healey’s system was given a Best New Blood Award from educational charity D&AD.”
THES, pp54-55, 25 May

Hi again… I was catching up with my feeds in newsgator and i came across a really interesting one which pointed out a development in Hennepin County Library Catalogue. I thought this was really timely given my previous delight at my own new library catalogue, which allows me to do various things like create a booklist and request/renew items free of charge online.

But this one is so much better… It allows users of the catalogue to post their own comments about each book/item held in stock, and also somehow it can bring up comments from amazon.com for the user to view too, but in the same window, and without leaving the comments page of the item. Wow, this is really great. I have yet to try it out to see whether anyone can leave comments or whether it is restricted to people with a library card from that area. Have a look for yourself, and see what people are saying about your favourite book. Here is the page for the book that I am currently reading - Neverwhere, by Neil Gaiman (tis excellent by the way - as usual). Note that there is also a related book list (which is a bit dubious), an outline of the main characters in the book, and also a ‘other books about…’ list which is also a bit dubious, i think it must be some attempt at classification, but it doesn’t really work in this instance.

If these functions could be improved then it would really help the library catalogue compete with the likes of amazon etc. and be a place where users would choose to look to find out information about their favourite/intended books, rather than simply a list of locations and status.

Technorati Tags: catalogues, opacs, public libraries, books, reviews, comments

I finally got round to registering with my local library last night, it was the first time that I had been in to it. It’s just a really small community library, with a little bit of everything: fiction, non-fiction, plenty of kids stuff, cds and the possibility of ordering in ps2 games (much to my partner’s delight!). They offer interlibrary loans and a free request service (i’m not entirely sure how the two differ), so that is also really useful as there are many books that I would like to get my hands on that are not on the physical shelves of the library.

It’s really great to have a library so close to where i live - it is literally about a five minute walk away - and it is open til 7pm through the week - so that means that i can visit it no probs after work. There is also a couple of larger libraries in the area, so no doubt i shall be visiting them at some point to find out what they are like too.

The library catalogue for the whole of the area is available to be searched online, and it has some really neat user functions which make it really handy to use. They allow a user to log in and make requests for items (as mentioned before) so that I can have any book in the area sent to my local library for collection. You can also make a book list (kind of like amazon’s wish list) so if you see books that interest you but you don’t have time to take them out just yet or if you just want to keep a note of them then you can do it this way. It also has lists of books that have won awards recently so if you are not sure of what you would like to read you can get some inspiration from these…

I can’t wait to get my PIN number in the post (neccessary to log in) so that I can start using the online service. I also took out some books when i registered last night (well, it would have been rude not too!!) - about gardening!!, so i shall be green fingered by the time that i return them (or at least that is the theory!).

It just got me to thinking about the whole range of ways in which the libraries could incorporate web 2.0 technologies into their websites to bring the library back into the community - people could use discussion forums centred around the library and so forth to discuss the latest books (like online book clubs I guess), or just to comment about certain books, rate them, make recommendations etc. Another good addition to a catalogue like this would be to provide some functions for those who do not know exactly what they would like to borrow - so providing some kind of electronic/online equivelant of browsing shelves by grouping books into categories - these could even be provided by a folksomy, so that users can be inspired about which books they read next. New books could also be given a promotion on the site, or a monthly/weekly collection on certain types of books could also encourage people to read beyond their boundaries - librarians could choose certain related books, with a theme such as ‘crime week’, or ’sci-fi’, or even a specific author, or non-fiction title, such as cookery, a specific country, etc. This might help circulate older, existing stock too.

I haven’t found out yet if there are any book clubs in the area - but again this is something that i think that i would find quite interesting, so long as i felt that the books that they usually tended to read were the kind that i would enjoy… I will have to look into this.

So, overall, I am very impressed so far with the library service in my new locale and can’t wait to give it a thorough testing-out. I’ll keep you updated!

Technorati Tags: public library, catalogues, opac, library service

Hi there, it seems it has almost been a week since my last post - that would have been unheard of back in January when I started the blog so I hope that I am not falling into the track of gradually forgetting about it, as I still think it is a really great way to put all my thoughts about my work and stuff together in one place.

I have been adding to my list of rss feeds almost daily - there always seems to be new ones i have not heard of popping up in various posts. The best ones I have recently discovered so far include Caveat Lector and Info Career Trends. The former is written by one librarian/information professional/self-confessed geek about various aspects of her work - it’s really interesting and her writing style is very entertaining! Indeed, her post on Google books was unlike anything I’ve seen anywhere else (in a good way, of course!). The latter feed is from an online journal which publishes relatively short articles by practicing librarian on a whole host of career related issues. One particular post that caught my attention was written by a librarian who used to be a bookseller, and she was discussing the various positive influences that the retail service side of her previous job had upon her work as a librarian (see ‘Confessions of a Reformed Bookseller‘). All very relevant and interesting stuff.

Walt Crawford released the March edition of his Cites and Insights online journal, in which the main article was a piece discussing the notion of ‘folksonomies’ and whether they should be used in place of tradition cataloguing (OR) or along side (AND). He of course, was fighting the corner of the AND people, which is something that I also agree with. I quite enjoy putting my own invented tags on things like these blog entries, technorati and del.icio.us but it is constantly on my mind to make them relevant, accurate descriptions and to try and be consistent throughout. Scanning various people’s tags on del.icio.us shows that most people generally just use a tag once, and they are highly personal and there is no linking related terms in any way. It’s just no use for proper searching and retrieval. But for fun, for sharing and so forth, well, I’m confident that it is fairly acceptable (although work to improve it wouldn’t go amiss). You can’t really imagine someone sitting down with AACR2 guidelines to fully catalogue their bookmarks can you? Bit too much effort, even for me and I LOVE to organise things… The paper is well worth a read. And Mr Crawford also makes reference to another paper discussing the whole folksomony debate from Guy and Tonkin (2005) ‘Folksonomies: Tidying up Tags‘, in DLib Magazine, which is also worth a read.

Technorati Tags: blogs, rss, folksonomies

The Spoken Word Matters blog yesterday pointed to the University of Liverpool library webpages, which is advising students of the benefits of subscribing to rss feeds of table of contents of their favourite journals (see page). They also provide information on installing an rss reader and a list of journals that currently have rss feeds. This is very similar in to the JISC-funded TOCRoSS project that I discussed last week (see post), however, in this instance the library itself does not appear to have been involved in the development of the feeds, simply the sourcing of those which are available and the promotion of the benefits of these to students. This will no doubt become increasingly useful as more and more ejournals distribute their ToCs by RSS. Currently I have only found one ‘academic’ publication (i.e. those expensive peer-reviewed ones!!) to which I have access that allows RSS feeds (the Journal of Information Science) and a couple of other electronic-only publications such as Ariadne and D-Lib magazine. I’m sure, however, that eventually, organisations such as Emerald etc. will develop RSS feeds as part of their subscription service for all their publications (eventually!). In the meantime, I think that the way in which the University of Liverpool is utlising the facilities that are already on offer and promoting them to students in this way is a really effective (and cost-effective!) method of increasing the usability and accessibility of their electronic collection.

Technorati Tags: rss, cataloguing, catalogues, table of contents, library, opac

There have been many news articles published today discussing the growth of the ‘blogosphere’, with a ‘State of the Blogosphere’ post yesterday on the technorati blog, which reports on the growth in the number of blogs, and developments that have taken place with regards to preventing spamming and increasing the use of tags.

According to technorati, the size of the blogosphere is doubling every five and a half months! Technorati founder, Dave Sifry comments “At that rate, it is literally impossible to read everything that is relevant to an issue or subject, and a new challenge has presented itself - how to make sense out of this monstrous conversation, and how to find the most interesting and authoritative information out there.”

At least I am not the only one who feels overwhelmed by the sheer amount of information available through blogs etc.!! I think another problem in terms of searching through blogs using a site such as technorati is somehow sorting the wheat from the chaff, you know, finding a reputable, timely and intelligent source of information that is going to provide you with the information you want, and some guarantee of the quality of information presented and that the source of information won’t suddenly disappear.

There are a lot of really good blogs out there, and they are an amazing way of keeping up to date with a whole range of issues, themes, areas of interest etc. But at the same time there is also a lot of rubbish. Personally, I would like to see some kind of catalogue (or catablog!! heehee!) of reputable, reliable blogs in different subject areas. It would be great if someone could perhaps classify them as well, kind of like the way in which web resources have been catalogued by BUBL. I appreciate the difficulties that this would entail, but i think that the benefits could be enormous. I doubt somehow that my own wee blog here would be suitable material, but blog owners could apply to be included or something, and then they could be assessed in various ways and included if they were deemed to be appropriate and included enough content (and were likely to continue doing so). Users could comment on the timeliness, reliability, usefulness etc. of the blog so that quality could be gauged.

I guess something like this could be done more practically on a smaller scale, say for example, as part of a reading list for a particular subject at university, or items of interest for a library, hospital or any other organisation. In fact, it could be something that a library could incorporate into it’s catalogue of resources (again, quality of content would become increasingly important).

But well, it’s an idea, because i know from personal experience that finding blogs can sometimes be a really arduous procedure, and i think that most of the ones to which i have subscribed i have mostly stumbled across haphazardly in one way or another. So, as a librarian my natural tendency is to seek some kind of order and organisation!! I wonder if it will ever take off? if it does, and it hasn’t been thought of already, I’m calling dibs on the idea (and the profits!!)
;)

Technorati Tags: library, catalogue, cataloguing, blogs, blogging, blogosphere

Hey, just installed a greasemonkey userscript for my blog that allows me to add technorati tags to the end of my blog, which link straight to a search for that term on the site! Quite cool, no? I shall have to find time to go over all my old posts and modify them to include this, as it probably could be quite useful as evidence of my application of keywords/subject headings etc., well, in a setting that is not work anyways. So here goes…

Technorati Tags: cataloguing, greasemonkey, userscripts, firefox, tags, tagging, extensions, keywords

p.s. if you want the script for your own blog (works with wordpress and blogsome) then you can download it here.

Hi there, just another quick post to point out that the University of Huddersfield Library catalogue, as well as being integrated with Amazon.co.uk through the use of greasemonkey userscripts, has also incorporated a ‘people who borrowed this, also borrowed….’ function into their library records a la Amazon. It doesn’t work for every record yet, but you can see it in action by following this permalink. You can also read a blog entry by Lorcan Dempsey on the subject. So many new cool things that can be incorportated into library opacs now, it’s all very exciting…

Just noticed that Lorcan Dempsey posted a similar blog entry about using greasemonkey userscripts to combine amazon with the library - in this instance, the University of Huddersfield library. When browsing books, users will be informed of whether the book is currently available at the university library, and a link takes you straight to the appropriate page of the catalogue. Amazing. I’ll not repeat the post again, but urge you to have a look yourself. And if you want to try it out, the script can be found here.