Charleston Conference, Part 6

This will be the last of my posts about the conference (for now, at least) and I'll mainly use it to talk about the presentation I gave last Friday.

This was a lively lunch session titled New subjects, new communities, new formats: The library collection in the digital world - 75 minutes which included a presentation (about 45-50 minutes) and opportunities for discussion. I described my research project and then explored some issues relating to the challenges posed by emerging interdisciplinary subjects, new types of user community (communities of practice and online communities) and format issues in the digital world. I included some audience questions, gathering responses using a very basic voting system (pieces of paper of different colours and numbered 1-5) and asking the audience to record their responses on a questionnaire sheet. I'm very grateful to the audience for taking part in this - these responses will be very valuable to me as I try to refine some of the questions for inclusion in larger questionnaire which I'll be working on over the next few months. There were some really valuable contributions made during the discussion - I am particularly grateful to the people who pointed me towards Radical Reference (an example of a type of social enterprise information service acting for social justice), who suggested alternative search terms which I can use to extend my literature review and who discussed different approaches to linking to freely accessible web based materials. I was also very fortunate that my supervisor was able to be there, too (thank you!).

It was the longest presentation I've given so far about my research - it was good to be able to use some of the data I've collected over the summer and to feel that it might have value for library practitioners working in collection development and management, particularly people working with collections for interdisciplinary subjects. At the same time, I'm very aware that this project is still very much a work in progress: I'm only a year into the project and still very much in the initial stages of data collection and analysis, so it was very helpful to have suggestions about things I could improve.

Partly for this reason, I've been unsure about how widely to share the presentation - I feel that by sharing it I give some of its content a sort of permanence which doesn't really reflect how fluid this is. However, I have decided to add a version of the presentation to the Charleston Conference 2011 presentations site which I'd heartily recommend having a look at for many of the rest of the conference presentations. I've paraphrased some of the information from interviews, but the rest of the presentation is as I delivered it last week. I've also embedded it below - let me know what you think!

New subjects, new communities, new formats: The library collection in the digital world

View more presentations from AngharadRoberts

Charleston Conference, Part 5

On the final day of the conference, Saturday, I attended a morning plenary session by Brad Eden, Dean of Library Services, Valparaiso University focussing on change management and making risk taking change work for libraries. Particularly in technical services, he suggested that libraries can make radical changes - for example, by moving to open source library management systems (Koha, Blacklight, OCLC web scale management, Open Library Environment etc) rather than letting commercial vendors hold library data. Similarly, he argued that libraries, acting collectively, could fundamentally change current publishing models - if we're prepared to accept the possible instability which may result. Details of a report for university provosts and extensive quotations from another unpublished report were included in the presentation (I'll include a link to it when it's available). The talk closed with a discussion of self improvement and personal effectiveness techniques which can help to lead and deliver change.

Next I attended an innovation session looking at how LibGuides course pages can be used to find out about the information needs at course level by undergraduate students. This talk by Michael Matos and Robin Chin Roemer of the American University, Washington D.C. explored how librarians can use collaboration at a course level to find out more about emerging subject areas - particularly in really challenging cutting-edge fields. This talk seemed to reinforce the idea that course level guides are more valuable (and better used) than subject guides.

The final session I attended was a Hyde Park style discussion between Melody Burton, Chief Librarian, Okanagan Library, University of British Columbia and Kimberly Douglas, California Institute of Technology. Some key messages to take from this exchange:

• We need to be committed to transformational change, but it may be unlikely in our lifetimes;


• Move emphasis from reader services to author services:


• Start thinking like economists;


• The internet will go on surprising us;


• Be relevant;


• Initiate the change.

Charleston Conference, Part 4

Friday morning started with an executives' roundtable, bringing together speakers from libraries and publishing. T. Scott Plutchak, director of the Lister Hill health sciences library at the University of Alabama, Birmingham, Paul Courant, Dean of Libraries, University of Michigan, and H. Frederick Dylla, CEO, American Insitute of Physics engaged in a platform discussion about the blurring boundaries between publishing and libraries, including contributions, comments and questions from the audience. This was followed by a conversation between Anne Kenney, University Librarian of Cornell and Kevin Guthrie, President of ITHAKA, facilitated by Greg Tananbaum of Anianet and ScholarNext. They discussed the major challenges for library collections and for publishers, including preservation issues, alumni access to electronic resources and how university presses and scholarly society publishers can work more closely with libraries.

I passed over the opportunity to hear a discussion of the legal issues concerning libraries (the final morning plenary session) - I thought this would probably have a very specific focus on the American legal context. My presentation was due to be one of the next lively lunch sessions and I thought I might find somewhere to look over my notes. Instead, I took a stroll around beautiful Charleston, which certainly helped me to feel less nervous. I'll blog about my presentation separately later.

The first of the concurrent afternoon sessions I attended was titled Triage in a digital age. I missed the first part of the session (wrapping things up after my own presentation) but I was interested in particular in the problem based approaches to staff technical services training. This included working through technical services problem scenarios, inviting to staff to suggest solutions and then being able to review their individual approaches with a mentor.

After this session, I went to another concurrent session presented by my supervisor Sheila Corrall of the University of Sheffield and Mike Sweet, Credo Reference about resource discovery systems and their potential role in promoting information literacy. This discussed the pros and cons of the concept of a "one stop information shop" and some of the different ways in which library content can be made more accessible to users in its most relevant context. For example, LibGuides enables the integration of library resources within user workflows. Integrating Credo Reference resources within web scale discovery systems will enable users to locate relevant, reliable reference information about topics entered in their searches, with these results displayed at the top of result lists.

The afternoon plenary session featured discussion about the future of online newspapers. The session was facilitated by Frederick Zarndt, CEO, Global Connexions and all three speakers - Deborah Cheney, Head, News and Microforms Library, Penn State, Chuck Palsho, President, Media Services, NewsBank, and Chris Cowan, VP Publishing, ProQuest - outlined the major challenges facing newspapers as technology creates more minute-by-minute news, less original reporting and community facilitation by news organisations. I was struck that all three felt that paywall models would prevail - I'm not sure whether this seems as convincing an argument in the UK context, where News International's experience of pay walls seems to have met with mixed results and where so much quality news content is freely available from the BBC. The Guardian's business model also suggests that there may be a future for free web-based news content provided by major newspapers, although this also supports the idea of news sites as facilitators of communities - I'm consistently impressed by the content in the Guardian's Social enterprise network, for example. Chris Cowan gave the full quotation from Stewart Brand (1984) - putting a famous phrase in its proper context:

On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it's so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other.

The full quotation and more of the story of the phrase is available here.

Derek Law of the University of Strathclyde gave a very impressive summary of the conference so far - all the more impressive by being videocast from Scotland. A couple of really big take home messages from his comments were that librarians have perhaps got out of the habit of collective action - and need to rediscover that with some urgency, and that - although nothing is really free - free at the point of use for customers is crucial.

The final Friday concurrent session I attended looked at new economic models for e-books. Michael Porter from Library Renewal spoke about this project for developing new e-content models starting at the grassroots and guided by librarians. Eric Hellman of Gluejar spoke about the Gluejar project to use a funding model from US National Public Radio to enable individuals to fund open access to individual titles. Although it's an intriguing idea, it seems to be very much in the early stages of development, without much testing. I don't think any existing e-book vendors would move away from their existing sales models because of it, although it may help some self-published materials to reach a wider audience.

Charleston Conference, Part 3

Thursday afternoon saw the first of the lively lunch and concurrent sessions, meaning I had the difficult job of choosing between a very wide range of interesting and relevant sessions.

On Thursday afternoon I went to a Lively Lunch session led by Samuel Demas, Rick Lugg and Bob Kieft talking about the emotive issue of relegating materials to off-site storage or for removal. Three case studies showed the perils libraries encounter in this area and discussion was then opened up to the floor with members of the audience sharing their experiences in this difficult area. I think this might be a more contentious issue in American academic libraries than in the UK, where most university libraries have lacked comparable opportunities for expansion experienced in the US during the mid-twentieth century.

I then went to a session led by Joan Petit of Portland State University about locating good online collections of primary resources and informing library customers about these. UNESCO, The Digital Scriptorium and various Flickr library image collections were all suggested - it was great to hear the British Library's online content getting positive mentions in this session, too! An obvious resource to suggest for helping with this would have been the UK's Intute site. It's so disappointing that the funding for this resource has stopped, although it does seem like access will remain for the next couple of years, but without records being added or maintained.

Another concurrent session featured Anthony Watkinson from UCL, Fiona Murphy of Wiley-Blackwell and Linda Beebe of the NISO-NFAIS working group discussing issues in sharing research data. Fiona provided an overview of some of the reasons for, and barriers to, effective data sharing - in the context of the morning sessions, it was valuable to hear a publisher's perspective on this. Linda spoke about the issues relating to data contained in supplemental materials for journal articles - the definition of data used here (developed by the NSF) seemed significantly more inclusive than definitions used in earlier sessions. Case studies were suggested as a good way of helping librarians to get started on helping researchers with issues surrounding data, ideally from the very start of the process of planning for data collection.

Clifford Lynch and Lee Dirks led the afternoon plenary session, talking about Microsoft Academic Search Microsoft's free resource, and other tools which facilitate "open research", including Vivo ("Facebook for scientists"), Orcid which aims to resolve name ambiguities), Dataverse, Datacite, and Total Impact, which evaluates the impact of research in social media. A new tool, DuraCloud, was only formally launched last week, but provides mechanisms for backing up content in multiple online cloud computing systems (with a back-up back-up held offline).

The final session I attended on Thursday discussed the future of the collection development policy. This was led by Matt Torrence, Megan Sheffield and Audrey Powers of the University of South Florida. There was a lively discussion about the motivations and uses of policy documents - but I found it particularly interesting that the USF library has a LibGuides section devoted to collection development http://guides.lib.usf.edu/collection-development. The presentation from this session is available at http://guides.lib.usf.edu/futurecdpolicy.

Charleston Conference, Part 2

A lot of what I write in the next few posts will be principally descriptive, but I hope this will still be of some interest. There's been so much to take in at each session, I think serious reflection will take a little while longer. I hope I'm not misrepresenting any of the speakers arguments or the projects they discussed - if any speakers are reading this, please do let me know if I have!

Wednesday was preconference day. There were a range of events organised on the day to coincide with the start of the conference, in the same venues, but not part of the conference proper. I didn't register for any of the talks on Wednesday, but I did go along to the vendor showcase. This provided opportunities to find out more about the latest product developments relating to library collections, including about resource discovery systems and collection management services, and from journal publishers, e-book vendors and database suppliers. I was particularly struck by the move into e-book publishing by producers of other types of e-resources. For example, Project MUSE and JSTOR both have e-book collections due to launch next year.

Thursday saw the start of the main conference (at 7am, an early start at least partly mitigated by residual effects of coming to terms with the GMT-EST time difference). The morning plenary sessions began with a presentation by Michael Keller of Stanford University about linked data. This described the opportunities offered by semantic web developments to get away from the silo approach to information storage which has been a feature of many library systems. Linking open data about authors, papers, quotations and citations in a single place assists disambiguation. An example of how this can work can be seen in Freebase, to which Stanford's libraries have contributed information, on topic pages such as this one about Vincent Van Gogh. The report on which this presentation was based can be found at http://www.clir.org/pubs/archives/linked-data-survey based on a workshop held at Stanford in the summer.

The second presentation, by MacKenzie Smith of MIT, stayed with the theme of data. She discussed the importance of data sharing for research and some of the current difficulties in encouraging this. Interestingly, she described a key feature of data suitable for sharing as the prohibitively expensive cost of collecting them again or reproducing them. This might seem to exclude more types of data than would be case using more inclusive definitions, and seems to me to place a greater emphasis on what not to collect - in a way which may be familiar to librarians who face difficult decisions about withdrawing or deselecting materials or who specify exclusions in collection policy documents. The presentation advocated that librarians and publishers need to work together to be part of the data creation process - with publishers utilising existing peer-review structures to ensure quality control, and librarians both promoting data management tools and taking on a longer term archiving role to preserve access to data.

Mark Dimunation of the Library of Congress gave a presentation about "hidden collections" - special collections not included in routine library processes, or caught up in cataloguing backlogs. Although the topic has been discussed for at least a decade, limited progress has been made - including the establishment of a US hidden collections register. This talk picked up on some of the topics raised in the first session - especially about the limitations of a silo approach to collections. He argued persuasively that new formats will continue to challenge librarians for as long as we persist in separating them out. A Library of Congress report about bibliographic control was mentioned - I think this refers to this 2007 report.

The final Thursday morning session featured Robert Darnton of Harvard University Library, Rachel Frick of the Digital Library Federation and Sandford Thatcher of Pennsylvania State University Press talking about a recently announced initiative to develop a Digital Public Library of America, with an aim to launch this in 2013. This will aim to carry digitised content from books and AV materials in the public domain, but advocating appropriate legal methods - such as Extended Collective Licenses - to facilitate the inclusion of much more recent content (following the example of JSTOR's moving wall approach to negotiating digitisation arrangements with journal publishers). The idea seems ambitious (especially in difficult economic times, envisaging grassroots political organising to raise funds) but the scope of its ambition seemed well summed up by Darnton as a version of Google books in which interest in the public good prevails over commercial solutions. This is definitely a project to watch - it has already announced a collaboration with Europeana and its content will be available internationally as well as in the US. The Digital Library Federation also features news about this project.

Charleston Conference, Part 1

This week I've been attending the 31st annual Charleston Conference in South Carolina. This is probably the most significant annual gathering of librarians, publishers, vendors and others interested in collection development and management issues. In terms of numbers of attendees, it's probably comparable to CILIP's Umbrella conference (an annual conference for UK librarians) - but Charleston focuses just on collection issues.

I originally intended to blog day by day, but, frankly, the program for past few days has been so full (a 12 hour day on Thursday and an 11 hour day on Friday) I haven't managed to find the time. I'm going to try to catch up now with some accounts of the talks I've attended - for ease of reading, I'll split this over a number of different posts. I'll probably add more posts to this blog in the next few hours than I've added in the whole of the last couple of months!

I want to round off this post by saying that this is one of the most exciting things I've ever done - it's the first time I've been to the US, and simultaneously one of the most enjoyable and challenging conferences I've ever attended. I gave a presentation here on Friday and I'll blog a bit about that experience, too.

A summer of interviews

The last few months I've fortunately been fairly busy with interviews. I say fortunately, because I was a bit uncertain about how willing people will be to participate, when I first started sending out invitations to take part. I'm really grateful to all the people who have been willing to give up their time to speak to me.

I've now carried out 11 interviews - with librarians, people working in social enterprises, people supporting them, and academics working in the subject area. I feel I've learnt so much more about social enterprise just by meeting with people from a range of very different organisations. Although the interview process can be challenging, I've found it very rewarding. So much of the research I'd been doing previously had been self-directed individual reading, it's great to meet and engage more with people and to visit organisations. The practicalities deserve a mention: I've travelled between four different towns, worked my way through three sets of AAA batteries for my voice recorder (none have yet run down mid-interview, luckily), and transcribed about 9 hours of recorded material (just over 68,000 words).

Each hour of interviews has taken me two to three days to transcribe. This has probably been the most challenging part of the process for me - background noises which seemed insignificant at the time drown out speech when listening to the recording, additional words and phrases emerge as I listen again. Most importantly, though, the process of transcribing has brought home to me just how sketchy even the most detailed of notes will be, compared to a proper transcript.

I'm hoping to do more interviews later, but for the moment I'm concentrating on analysing the information I've collected so far. I will be using this data in my upgrade report - this is the process which enables me to transfer from MPhil status to being a fully-fledged PhD student and usually takes place around a year after the start of the course (so that's about now for me).

Project research methods

Some time ago now I said I'd post in more detail about the research methods I'm using for this project. Fortunately my actual use of these methods has been developing at a better pace than this post explaining them!

The plan I've devised has three main strands:

1. a case study of social enterprise material in the British Library's collections;


2. searching other library catalogues for materials relating to social enterprise;


3. a series of initial interviews with a small number of people involved in social enterprise and relevant library and information services, leading to the development of a questionnaire for a larger group of people.

1. Case study of social enterprise material in the British Library collections
This project is funded and supported by the British Library, so I'm very fortunate to be able to link my research quite closely to the British Library's collections. I've carried out a search of the British Library's resources for social enterprise, using a small selection of relevant keywords and phrases, and I hope to be able to track the amount of use of some of these materials, both printed and online - always remembering the British Library itself is a very valuable information resource. I'm also keen to explore and use information about a range of different collection-related projects at the library.

2. Library catalogue survey of materials for social enterprise
I am using the same search terms used on the BL catalogue in strand 1 to search for similar materials in other libraries across different sectors (eg public, academic, health or other special libraries). I'm planning to search around 120-150 catalogues in total.

I will be interested to see how results from different libraries relate to the results from the BL - this might include:

• identifying works which frequently appear in different collections;


• identifying works not located in the BL search;


• comparing the level of detail provided by different types of information services (for example, which collections may include details of journal articles alongside books);


• comparing different collection approaches to web-based grey literature - such as PDFs of reports or policy statements.

3. Interviews and the questionnaire
So far I've carried out eight interviews - some with people involved in social enterprises, some with academics and researchers and some with those involved in providing library and information services relevant to social enterprise. I'd like to thank everyone who has taken part in these interviews so far - I've had some very helpful and insightful conversations. I hope to interview between thirteen and fifteen people in total, including more library and information professionals. I will use some of the inital results from my catalogue searching in strand 2 to identify library and information services with particularly interesting collections for social enterprise to approach for interviews.

I will blog in more detail about the interview process and about transcribing interviews, which is currently the major focus of my work outside time spent interviewing.

This interview data will enable me to draw initial conclusions about issues regarding information and library collections for social enterprise. To test whether the ideas emerging from the interviews can be generalised more widely across the field, I will then develop a questionnaire to send to a much bigger group of people some time in late 2011 or early 2012.

LIS DREaM event materials online

Materials are now available online from the LIS Research Coalition DREaM event last week. These include videos of Professor Hall's welcome, Professor Cronin's opening keynote and Dr Evans's closing keynote.

There are also links to some really excellent reviews of the event - definitely much more informative and stimulating than my blog post below.

What with the worrying news about reductions in research council funding for Masters and PhD students for the next academic year, a project like LIS DREaM at least provides some possible grounds for optimism about the prospects for research in LIS.

Oh, and there's also a video of the one-minute madness session in which I participated - I'm speaker number four.

DREaM Launch Event

Today I've been at the British Library for the launch event of the DREaM project. This AHRC-funded project is working to establish a network of library and information science researchers - the title stands for Developing Research Excellence and Methods.

Professor Hazel Hall introduced the project - including three forthcoming research workshops and a concluding event next summer. The initial project runs for a year, but the aim is to create a sustainable network which can be maintained beyond that. Professor Hall argued this is only possible with the involvement of a "cadre" of committed professionals.

Professor Blaise Cronin gave the opening keynote about the development of library science research and factors which have influenced this (including differences between arts and humanities and social science approaches). This presentation included some really interesting metrics about LIS research, such as the citing of LIS research by non-LIS fields, and the increasing role of non-LIS supervisors in LIS research, as well as general encouragement to use LIS metrics more in research.

I contributed to the one minute madness session by talking a bit about engaging with social enterprise networks for my research. It was an interesting experience - both the shortest talk and the biggest audience I've ever had! In hindsight it seems good fun: the session went very smoothly and I thought all the one minute talks were excellent.

In the afternoon, I went to a breakout session about three research methods which were fairly new to me: Delphi studies (iterative consultation of experts), co-operative inquiry (working collaboratively with others in an action research approach), and community consultation (engaging directly with relevant communities).

The final keynote was by Dr Dylan Evans. It was fascinating to hear him talk about his career path from linguist to psychoanalyst to research in the philosophy of science, with some interesting examples of the role of serendipity in a career trajectory. He gave a couple of examples of exchanges of expertise and knowledge across disciplinary boundaries, including between medical science and art. Finally he encouraged engagement with the media to communicate about research.

There's lots of useful information about the event, including presentations from the day on the event website.

British Library and Google digitisation project

The British Library and Google yesterday announced a project to digitise a quarter of a million out of copyright texts from the 18th and 19th centuries. A press release has the full details, and the Guardian seems intrigued by the royal hippo angle, with an interesting quotation from a Google representative about the limits of online searching.

British Library-University of Sheffield social enterprise project background

I've recently been given ethics approval to begin my research (including interviews and catalogue searching). This means that I hope to post more details of the methodology for each of the proposed strands of my research soon.

In the meantime, I also wanted to mention a new webpage on the University of Sheffield Enterprise website which provides a bit of background detail about the British Library's collaborative projects with the University of Sheffield relating to social enterprise.

This provides a particularly useful account of the impressive work undertaken by my predecessor last year as part of a six-month British Library internship - this work provided the basis for the current PhD project. The page also includes links to the British Library resource guides for social enterprise.

Intellectual Property and Growth review

The Independent Review of IP and Growth today published its report Digital Opportunity: A Review of Intellectual Property and Growth. Its recommendtions cover the whole range of Intellectual Property issues, including designs and patents as well as copyright. However, some elements of the report are of particular relevance to libraries including:

• encouraging the creation of a Digital Copyright Exchange to manage the licensing of copyright material;


• creating "Extended Collective Licensing" to enable digitisation of orphan works (works for which copyright holders cannot be traced);


• introducing a copyright exception to facilitate text mining for non-commercial use (and advocating for changes within the EU to permit this for commercial use);


• recommending extending copyright exceptions to facilitate library digitisation of orphan works and to enable preservation of multimedia materials.

The report also makes other important recommendations (some of which were proposed by the Gowers Review of Intellectual Property in 2006 - but have yet to be implemented), including the creation of a copyright exception for format shifting activities for private use (eg copying CDs to computer or MP3 devices), and steps to prevent commercial contracts from overriding copyright exceptions. It discusses how "the concept of 'ownership' and 'purchase' has itself been redefined" (p.68) by new technologies and sales models - a major challenge for libraries since the beginning of online database and e-journal delivery.

Another significant observation from the review, potentially of relevance to my interest in social enterprise, is the scale of the potential benefits to small and medium enterprises from improving IP frameworks.

PG Cafe Forum

I recently gave a 15 minute presentation about my research to the university's Postgraduate Cafe Forum. These sessions provide an opportunity to meet and discuss with fellow research students from a wide range of different subject areas, so the first part of the presentation aimed to provide a brief overview of the field of information studies and librarianship.

I discussed some aspects of the modern library collection, moving beyond print to digital materials - ejournals and ebooks - and to new types of content, such as research data and online teaching resources. I also introduced the concept of social enterprise, describing how this has developed in the UK since 1997, and why social enterprise makes a particularly interesting area of study in relation to library collections.

Finally, I discussed my three proposed research methods for my project. These proposed methods need to be reviewed by the Information School's ethics board, so they may well change following any recommendations made by the board. However, at the moment I'm hoping:

• to conduct a case study of British Library collections for social enterprise;


• to carry out catalogue searches for social enterprise material on publicly-accessible catalogues for a range of different types of library;


• to carry out interviews with a small sample of people involved in using, creating or maintaining library collections for social enterprise - for example, social enterprise practitioners, academics and researchers, and librarians. This would be followed by a survey of a larger sample of stakeholders, to see if any of these findings can be generalised to the wider population.

Overall, I think the presentation went well - and although my concerns about my reliance on a script still apply, in this case using PowerPoint slides provided an alternative focus for my attention!

Sheffield iSchool researchers: blog discussion

Just over a week ago, I helped to lead a conversation about blogging for research in the monthly Sheffield iSchool researchers informal discussion meeting. You can read about some of the issues we talked about on the iSchool researchers blog. My contribution followed a fascinating talk about the Warburg Institute library - I recommend having a look at the post about that, too.

Since then, I've been thinking about how this blog is developing and how I could improve it. A comment on a previous post suggested that more pictures would help and I'll certainly try to add some in future. I think I still have work to do clarifying the topic - I'll return to that subject again as my ideas develop. I also hope to write more about the reading I'm doing (articles, books and reports etc). However, I also thought this might be a good time to ask you if there's anything else which you think the blog could benefit from. Any comments or suggestions would be very welcome!

Legal deposit regulations and Intellectual Property review

In a previous post I mentioned the recent Consultation on the Draft Legal Deposit Libraries (Non-print Publications) Regulations 2011. The Government published its response last week, which was welcomed by the legal deposit libraries.

I've also been looking at the Independent Review of IP and Growth: Submissions Received webpage, which now includes all the consultation responses due to be published. From that site, I've just been reading the British Library's Response from the British Library to the Independent Review of Intellectual Property and Growth.

Six months in: progress so far

It's now six months since I started my studies, so this seems like a good time to think about how my work has been progressing - and perhaps to talk a little bit about my day to day studies, which I realise I haven't really described much on this blog so far.

On Monday I attended a lecture about research methods - this is the third module I've taken since I've been here, all intended to provide particular skills relevant to my research. For example, last semester, as part of a module about systematic reviews, I studied the literature about library information services for small and medium enterprises in some detail. This is potentially quite relevant to information provision for social enterprises - although there are significant differences between these organisations and other types of business, there is some overlap in the kind of generic financial / legal / management information which may be needed.

Much of the rest of this week so far has been spent reading - I'm currently working on a draft literature review section about social enterprise, having already drafted sections on collection development and management issues. I have also been working on some draft documentation relating to the potential methods I might use when I move on to the practical research stage of my project. I'm hoping to get this finalised over the next month or so, with a view to starting the research proper in early June, if all goes according to plan.

The highlights of the last few months have definitely been my visits to the British Library, and the opportunity to attend relevant events like Footsey and the Digital Curation Centre Roadshow: especially all the conversations with librarians, social enterprise practitioners and others along the way!

Social enterprise and library collections

A comment on an earlier post asked an important question about how I'm connecting social enterprise with library collections. It's a central issue for the project and I hope this post will help to provide an answer.

I think the connection between social enterprise and collections exists on two levels. Firstly, the overall ambition for this project is to draw conclusions about library collections generally, developing a concept of what the library collection is in the digital world. Hopefully, looking specifically at collections for social enterprise will provide a wide-angle lens for identifying and exploring more general issues. Later in this post, I'll go into a bit more detail about why social enterprise seems to be useful field to study, and the ways in which it can be seen as reflecting some of the issues affecting modern library collections.

Secondly, I hope there will be a practical connection: helping to suggest how those involved with social enterprise can benefit from library collections, and helping to explore how libraries can optimise their collections to meet the needs of these potential customers. I should say that this practical connection isn't an explicit research objective - but I do hope that it suggests the possible practical value which this research could have, both for the field of social enterprise and for the library and information profession.

When considering how library collections for social enterprise may reflect issues for modern library collections more generally, I have found it helpful to think about the following aspects of the field:

• Social enterprise has a wide range of stakeholders - people who may be interested in information about the field potentially include social enterprise customers, students, and people working in the public or private sectors, as well as social enterprise practitioners, people thinking about starting up a social enterprise, policy makers, and academics and researchers in the field.


• The social enterprise community seems highly networked - there is a lot of information available on social media and networking websites, or located through personal networks: how do libraries find out about, and meet, the needs of communities which connect online or through networks?


• Social enterprise is an interdisciplinary field - there may be some general business information which is relevant to social enterprise, but the purpose of a social enterprise is crucial, and may involve finding out about specific topics in any of a range of different areas (health and social care, education, social exclusion etc).


• Social enterprise information may be found in a range of different types of library - information may be found in the collections of a range of libraries - such as health, government, business or voluntary sector libraries, or the libraries of professional associations - as well public, academic and national libraries. This means that the project can try to provide a genuinely cross-sectoral view of issues in library collections.


• Types of information for social enterprise - the types of information which may be most useful - such as information available from social networking websites or blogs - may not be the types of information traditionally found in a library collection.

There are more issues to explore here (I'm sure I'll return to this topic again), but I hope this helps to begin to answer the question posed earlier - any comments about this would be very welcome...

British Library, copyright and legal deposit

Last Friday I was at the British Library in London, which gives me an excuse to post this photo I took. (Complete with a nice spring sky, in contrast to today's foggy and gloomy Sheffield...)

The British Library has recently published Growing Knowledge: The British Library's Strategy 2011-2015 its strategy document for the next four years. This provides a useful insight into the key priority areas which the library has identified, and adds detail to the 2020 Vision document, which was published last year.

I've also been having a look at some of the submissions published so far on the Independent Review of IP and Growth website. So far, this just seems to be a selection of the submissions recieved (the consultation deadline was 4 March), but the JISC (Joint Information Systems Committee) contribution is interesting - discussing copyright issues surrounding orphan works, digitisation projects, open educational resources and the advantages of open access publishing. It also refers to a British Library document Driving UK Research: Is Copyright a Help or a Hindrance? detailing researchers' personal experiences of copyright issues.

Between 1709 and 1911, copyright was linked to the requirement for the deposit of copies of every published work with a selection of "copyright" libraries. Although these functions (copyright and legal deposit) have now been separated in legislation, the requirement to provide copies of every work published in the UK to each of the 6 legal deposit libraries (the British Library, National Library of Wales, National Library of Scotland, Bodleian Library, Cambridge University Library and Trinity College, Dublin) remains. Another consultation has recently considered the implementation of extended legal deposit provisions to cover non-print materials, building on legislation originally passed in 2003. There's some useful information about this on the Consultation on the Draft Legal Deposit Libraries (Non-print Publications) Regulations 2011 website.

Sheffield iSchool researchers informal discussion session

Yesterday I gave a very brief informal presentation about my research as one of the speakers at a Sheffield iSchool researchers informal discussion session. You can read a summary of what I said in a post on the Sheffield iSchool researchers' blog. This covers some of the ideas emerging from my reading of the literature so far and some initial ideas about possible research methods. I wonder whether this might help to clarify how the collections and social enterprise elements of my research fit together; I'd welcome any comments about the ideas I discussed.

Although this was a very informal session, with a pleasantly relaxed atmosphere, I did feel slightly apprehensive about speaking about the project to a small group of colleagues and fellow researchers for the first time. In these situations, I tend to feel either very overprepared (as yesterday, reading from a script) or underprepared; although I do feel that with a little work what I said could form the basis of my elusive "coffee break pitch". The talk was followed by questions and discussion, providing useful feedback.

Reflections

I've been thinking about the two events I attended last week in a bit more detail. One interesting thing which both brought home to me was that my research is definitely a project of two halves - librarians are interested in the collections aspect and social enterprise practitioners are enthusiastic about their field; being equally interested in both is my role. I think I need to take this into account as I work on a coffee break pitch for my project (I would say "elevator pitch" but being trapped in a confined space with me talking about my research isn't really something I'd wish on anyone...).

There's a related issue here, which is that in both social enterprise and specialist services related to data curation, professionals need to be able to speak different languages to different stakeholders. In data management, this may range from training students to engaging in very technical conversations about relevant systems; for social enterprises, this involves talking with customers, funders, the public and private sectors and with other social enterprises.

It's an important skill in other areas of librarianship, too - seeing it done well at an enquiry desk is very impressive - but perhaps sometimes our systems don't facilitate this as well as they could. For example, many libraries call interlending and document supply "interlibrary loans" (for historical reasons, or perhaps because this is what library management systems call the modules we use to administer the process) - even when most requests are satisfied with photocopies / electronic copies which the customer can keep. I'd be interested to know what you think about these issues of "different languages" in librarianship - or any examples.

Footsey

I've just returned from a trip to Footsey, a social enterprise trade fair which took place at Doncaster racecourse. I've written briefly about what social enterprises are in a previous post, but I have to admit that abstract definitions and my initial reading on the topic hadn't really prepared me for the variety and breadth of social enterprise activity represented at today's event (and most were just from the Yorkshire and Humberside region). Stalls included social enterprises, funding and investment organisations and networking and support groups. Most of the people I spoke to seemed genuinely interested in my research, with a range of opinions about the significance of libraries in providing information for social enterprise.

I also attended a question and answer session and a couple of workshops (one by Doncaster West Development Trust about social enterprises and public sector contracts and another about a soon to be launched social enterprise emerging from an NHS organisation). Key themes emerging from these sessions included:

• The challenge of securing investment in the current climate, with the loss of revenue streams affected by public sector cuts - the recent Growing the social investment market document was mentioned, outlining government thinking about opportunities for new forms of social investment;


• The range of opinions (positive and negative) about the potential impact of government policies - such as the bills currently before Parliament about localism and the reorganisation of the NHS - on social enterprise;


• The importance of networks - between social enterprises, but also as widely as possible with other organisations, such as local authorities, health and social care organisations and the private sector;


• The challenge of providing staff learning and development opportunities within social enterprises - for example, in order to develop the skills and knowledge necessary to compete effectively for contracts.

Just like Umbrella, I've managed to come away with far too many leaflets and other bits of ephemera - it may take me a while to read them all...

Digital Curation Centre Roadshow

Today I attended the first day of the DCC Roadshow Sheffield: Institutional Challenges in the Data Decade.

Amongst the participants, librarians were in the minority: only two (of eight) speakers were from libraries; the role libraries are expected or able to play in leading on this issue clearly varies considerably between organisations. The University of Sheffield's Director of Library Services, Martin Lewis, spoke of managing research data as one of the biggest professional challenges facing academic librarians. He and other speakers also emphasised the importance of close cooperation across different departments within an institution.

Dr Liz Lyon (DCC Associate Director) discussed the scale of the data challenge, mentioning a recent special data-focussed issue of Science (11/02/2011), and suggested three useful ways of thinking about data:

• "data sets are becoming the new instruments of science" (quoting the Report of the International Panel for the 2009 Review of the UK Research Councils e-Science Programme);


• "data as the new special collections" (quoting Sayeed Choudhury) - I think this is a particularly useful approach from a library perspective;


• data as the "crown jewels" (Charles Arthur and Michael Cross).

The presentation also discussed the findings of the report Open science at web-scale regarding transparency in scientific research, the growth of "citizen science" (crowd-sourcing research tasks) and the use of data in predicting outcomes.

Key data management issues include:

• developing data management policies (increasingly a factor in Research Council funding evaluations);


• ethical issues in data sharing;


• data storage (including cloud computing - and the recent HEFCE grant for development).

The presentations which followed provided five case studies of projects managing, using, or providing training about, data. Meik Poschen described the Manchester eResearch Centre MaDAM project working with biomedical researchers. Two presentations covered data management training programmes: Richard Plant discussed the University of York's DMTpsych training for psychology postgraduates and Stuart Jeffrey talked about the DataTrain programme for postgraduate archaeologists and anthropologists at the University of Cambridge. Mark Birkin discussed the NeISS (National eInfrastructure for Social Simulation) project, which facilitates data curation and data use for developing models to predict the impact of policies on populations.

Matthew Herring (Digital Library Officer, York) described different tools for data management in use at the University of York - including YODL (York Digital Library), a multimedia resource currently mainly containing images relating to the university's research. This presentation also provided the quotation which, for me, summed up the day and seems like a good way to finish this post: "openness rocks".

RIN report on social media

I've just been reading the Research Information Network's recent report Social media: a guide for researchers. It's a useful guide to using social media for research and I find it quite persuasive about the advantages of these tools. It is also quite open about the criticisms / perceived disadvantages, and I think it addresses these well. It includes some interesting case studies (including links to researchers' blogs) - the brief summary of network theory also seemed useful.

The research topic

First of all, a few words about my research topic: "Conceptualising the library collection for the digital world: a case study of social enterprise". I'll go into this in much more detail over the coming weeks (months, years...) but essentially the project involves looking at how the library collection is changing, using the example of collections for social enterprise to explore current issues in collection development, management and exploitation. I also hope that it will provide an opportunity to explore perceptions of "the collection", from the perspectives of customers, librarians and other stakeholders. Is this (still) a meaningful term for all or part of the information resources a library offers its users?

The project will also involve getting to grips with the theory and practice of social enterprise - a new field for me, but very fascinating. There are a number of different approaches to defining social enterprise (definitely a potential topic for another post or several) but for present purposes I'll be using the definition provided by the Department of Trade and Industry (2002) Social enterprise: a strategy for success:

"A social enterprise is a business with primarily social objectives whose surpluses are principally reinvested for that purpose in the business or in the community, rather than being driven by the need to maximise profit for shareholders and owners."

According to this definition, a social enterprise operates as a business serving a social purpose. Other definitions place varying degrees of emphasis on the different elements alluded to here - for example, there is a hint here that the ownership structure of a social enterprise might be different to that of other business types; other definitions may place a more explicit emphasis on this difference, focussing, for example, on the role of democratic decision-making within a distributed ownership structure.

Another useful introduction to the social enterprise field, from the practitioners' perspective, is available from the Social Enterprise Coalition website.

Starting off

I've been thinking about setting up a blog to share and discuss ideas and experiences relating to my research project for a while now. Following the principle that good ideas are the ones we keep on coming back to, I finally thought I'd take the plunge and give it a go.

I'd like to use this blog:

• to "think aloud" about my project;


• to reflect on particular experiences and challenges;


• to share information about events I attend and things I read along the way;

...and maybe to demystify some aspects of the research process, especially for librarians who may be interested in pursuing this path themselves.

I hope that blogging about this project will encourage people from the library world and other fields to share their comments. I'd particularly like to continue to benefit from the wisdom of colleagues who have helped me so much in the past - if I start saying things which really don't reflect how things are in practice, or if there are particular issues you think I should be considering, please let me know!

I hope the blog will be interesting and helpful for you too - ask me questions if you think my research might be able to help with any practice issues. It'll certainly be a big learning experience for me, finding out how it feels to be writing informally about my research and thinking about the most appropriate style and content.