ALISS Christmas Seminar

On Wednesday, I was very glad to have the opportunity to deliver a presentation about my research to the ALISS (Association of Librarians and Information Professionals in the Social Sciences) Christmas Seminar.

There were three presentations: Sharon Johnson from the British Library was discussing the challenges and opportunities presented by the process of developing a content strategy. I found the idea of strategy development and implementation as a journey very persuasive; it certainly resonates with some of the findings from my research. I also liked a matrix which can be used for deciding priorities for collection or content delivery, plotting potential benefits of different initiatives against their probability of success. I think that this matrix could be very useful for decision-making in collection development and management. It seems to me that one of the challenges of decision-making in this area is that it can be quite difficult to actually visualise issues relating to collections in a meaningful way.

This was followed by a presentation about a project at the University of Reading to review, relegate and deselect large amounts of printed materials, combined with the development of an off-site store. Paul Johnson, Head of Collections and Space and Claire Cannings, Collections Project Co-ordinator gave a valuable insight into the challenges of such a massive project. I particularly liked the photographs of the library reading rooms in the 1960s, compared with the same rooms more recently. In the 1960s the reading room was predominantly taken up with study space; in more recent years, storage of printed materials has encroached on that space, leaving just a small number of study desks around the outside of the room. It was very interesting to hear about the role of UKRR (UK Research Reserve) - a collaborative multi-institution project for the management of print journals - in facilitating some aspects of this local project to free up library space.

In my presentation, I talked about "Exploring concepts of 'collection' in the digital world", drawing on interviews and surveys conducted as part of my research. This is the presentation I gave:

ALISS Christmas Seminar 2012 from AngharadRoberts

I'm very grateful to the ALISS committee members for inviting me to speak and I very much enjoyed listening to all the presentations.

Charleston Conference presentation

I've finally got around to uploading a version of my presentation from the Charleston Conference to SlideShare - it's embedded below.

Charleston Conference 2012: part 6

This should be my final Charleston Conference post for 2012, about the final half-day of presentations, Saturday 10 November. After that, the sun set on the conference for another year.

On Saturday morning, I attended the "Long arm of the law" session. Winston Tabb (Dean of Libraries and Museums, The Johns Hopkins University) described IFLA's work on developing an international approach to copyright limitations and exceptions, charting some of the national variations in library exceptions (or lack of them) in different countries. In particular, Tabb discussed IFLA's recent recommendations (July 2012) for a Treaty on Limitations and Exceptions for Libraries and Archives (TLIB). Bill Hannay of the law firm Schiff Hardin then provided an overview of recent legal cases regarding publishers, book sales, authors and universities. Brilliantly, two of the cases discussed (USA vs Apple and Kirtsaeng vs Wiley) were summarised in song! Nancy Weiss from the Institute of Museum and Library Services explored further legal issues for libraries and museums including the implications of the Golan vs Holder case and the Authors' Guild vs Hathi Trust case, regarding digitization of published works to make them accessible to people with visual impairments. All these cases either have been or are going to be decided by the US Supreme court and it's difficult to know how relevant the cases would be specifically in a UK context, but of course the global reach of organisations such as Apple, Amazon, Google and the Hathi Trust does mean these judgements are bound to have international ramifications.

Then it was time for my 45 minute innovation session "Exploring concepts of 'collection' in the digital world". I was very pleased to see quite a large audience (around 25-30 people). I spoke for around 35 minutes, summarising some of my interview findings and a few very initial results from a survey I conducted over the summer and early autumn. The main part of the presentation explored ideas of collection-as-thing, collection-as-access, and collection-as-process. Paradoxically, I think that in some respects I tried to say too much and in other ways I probably didn't quite say enough about my findings. There was a really useful and interesting discussion after my presentation and I'm very grateful to all the audience members for their contributions. The major message which I've taken away from this discussion is to think more about immediacy, peripherality and convenience when thinking about 'collection'.

The morning concluded with a lively Hyde Park style debate, focused on the controversial proposition that "the traditional research library is dead". The motion was proposed by Rick Anderson (Interim Dean, Marriott Library, University of Utah) and opposed by Derek Law (University of Strathclyde). The debating style was robust and humorous, but ultimately focused on serious points which define the changing nature of library and information services. I thought both speakers made useful points, whether about the importance of library as space, the implications of the ending of a tradition in which information was trapped in physical objects, and that "uniqueness is not the same as vitality" (Rick Anderson), or about the continuing significance of the preservation role of libraries (Derek Law). In the end, the proposition carried the day, with a fairly evenly split initial poll (52% yes and 48% no) converted to a significant majority for the proposition (65% yes, 35% no). It seems the sun may be setting on more than a conference...

Charleston Conference 2012: part 5

On the afternoon of Friday 9 November, I attended a lively lunch session about inter-consortial licensing. This discussion session invloved Ann Okerson of the Center for Research Libraries and Tom Sanville of LYRASIS. Tom suggested that "'wide' deals" between consortia could represent the best deals available for subscribing to e-resources. A range of examples were cited including inter-consortial licensing efforts for Gale's 19th Century Online collection and Bloomsbury's Churchill Archive. However, other projects such as the Knowledge Exchange project seem to be "in hiatus".

Following this, I attended a packed concurrent session addressing the question "Does format matter? Comparing usage of E-books and P-books". Michael Levine-Clark was presenting and described a really interesting comparative study of the use of e-books and printed books from Duke University Press. What makes this study so fascinating is that it was possible to compare use of e- and p- copies of the same titles. The study raised really intriguing questions, such as what constitutes use in relation to print books and how e-book usage figures can be compared with print use. A big issue in gathering the data related to multiple ISBNs - and the presenter gave a convincing plea for better standardization of these (a partial solution which was suggested was using a 9-digit ISBN taken from the core of the 10- or 13-digit versions). The COUNTER data showed that 36.7% of the e-books were used, compared to 66% of the print books, with nearly 39% of the 841 texts which were available as both electronic and print versions being used in both formats. Materials used in both formats seemed to be used at a higher than average rate, leading the presenter to conclude by posing the question "does this mean that people's preference is for good content, not format?"

For the second afternoon concurrent session, I attended a presentation about developing collaborative collections in the cloud. Aisha Harvey of Duke University Library gave an overview of interlibrary lending schemes and discussed recent moves by the Triangle Research Libraries Network to develop new initiatives in resource sharing as part of its Beyond Print initiative. Lars Meyer of Emory University described a shared print repository with Georgia Tech, focusing on the unique holding strengths of each library's collections and providing an opportunity for the partners to deduplicate their collections. Finally, Chuck Spornick of Emory University described a collaborative approach to developing future collections in Biomedical Engineering.

Ann Okerson of the Center for Research Libraries gave the first afternoon plenary session about SCOAP3 (Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics). Work on coalition-building for this project has been led by CERN and aims to redirect funding which would have been spent on journal subscriptions to funding peer review based on nations' shares of publications in the field of high energy physics. The journals funded in this way would then make their content available on an open access basis. The project is due to go live at the start of 2014, but CERN will establish its own repository next year.

The second afternoon plenary session was a discussion of "Find > Search", featuring five panellists: Majorie Hlava (Access Innovations), Elisabeth Leonard (Sage), Meg White (Rittenhouse), Stanley Wilder (University of North Carolina Charlotte) and Elizabeth Willingham (Silverchair). All offered their perspectives on how their organisations help users to find more effectively, with less searching. For me, a key message in this discussion was "find consensus, pool resources and do what works".

The final session I attended on Friday afternoon was a presentation about the role of patron driven acquisitions in a research library. Both presenters - Thomas Teper and Lynn Wiley - were from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and they described how central a patron driven approach to collection development has been in libraries. Teper cited some interesting figures (I think based on the local collection at UIUC) suggesting that in the 1930s as much as 80% of material selection was done by academic staff; in the 1970s the majority was done by librarians. Lynn described a range of initatives:

• a consortial pilot program of PDA for print purchasing (2009);
• a test of PDA for e-books (2010);
• a local PDA system which provided customer access to subject selector records from the library's approval plan supplier (2011);
• a new consortial program beginning February 2012;
• a very new e-book PDA system which began in late October 2012.

This provides a rich set of data about comparative approaches to PDA, although the complexity of the combination of methods used seems to make it slightly difficult to draw clear conclusions about the comparative strengths of PDA versus library subject selector approaches.

Charleston Conference 2012: part 4

I'm back in Sheffield now, but still catching up on my posts from the Charleston Conference (7-10 November), which might take me a while. In the meantime, there is a more complete official blog about the conference on the Against the Grain website.

Friday 9 November began with Kristin Eschenfelder's presentation about research at the University of Wisconsin-Madison to explore what e-resource licences say about perpetual access, interlibrary loan provision and scholarly sharing. Kristin reported on two content analysis studies of a single dataset of 224 licence contracts from 2000-2009, obtained in 2009 by a team led by Ted Bergstrom at the University of California Santa Barbara, using state freedom of information legislation to request the documents from state universities. There's a summary of some of the controversy and legal action which accompanied this initial data gathering process on Ted Bergstrom's website. The first study examined all 224 the licences for content regarding interlibrary loan, document supply and scholarly sharing and the second study, conducted by Mei Zhang (PhD student), examined 72 licences for content relating to the provision of perpetual access to e-resources. In the perpetual access study, it appears that most licences do mention perpetual access, with an increasing emphasis on library perpetual access and a slightly declining role for publisher perpetual access - surprisingly, Portico was seldom mentioned. Key findings from the study on ILL and scholarly sharing included:

• 55% of licences acknowledge scholarly sharing (this actually seemed like quite a high proportion to me);
• 60% allow secure e-delivery of their material for document supply services;
• 79% require libraries to have print copies in order to provide copies of their materials through document delivery services;

The presenter acknowledged the limitations of dealing with data which is at least three years old and in some cases 12 years old - future work will aim to gather more recent copies of licences.

The second morning plenary session was a lively discussion on the relationships between provosts (I think this is a post broadly equivalent to UK university vice chancellors) and librarians. J. Bradley Creed from Sandford university described librarians as indispensible in navigating information and central to the university mission. Jose-Marie Griffiths from Bryant University outlined some of the broad challenges facing universities - from the economy, technology, competition (including international competition for students), geopolitical changes. She talked about specific library roles in providing open access, open data and managing institutional repositories. I also thought it was interesting that she mentioned the role of the library in serving non-academic readers. The core message here was one of interdependence and the importance of innovation. Jim O'Donnell (formerly Provost of Georgetown University (2002-2012)) echoed some of these points - particularly about the importance of Big Data, and how library data can be used to tell university administrators new things about faculties and departments (not just about the library).

This was followed by presentations discussing the role of the academic press in the 21st century. Douglas Armato of the University of Minnesota Press gave a very engaging presentation about the history of the university press. I also liked his characterization of an academic press as a place where "money and mission [are] equally on our minds". To me, this seems like a quintessential description of a social enterprise, an idea echoed by Armato's use of the analogy of Bailey Building and Loan (from It's a Wonderful Life), a comparison which is also popular with many writers on social enterprise. One big question posed by this presentation was whether libraries and university presses are on a shared path of "co-evolution or co-extinction" and Douglas emphasized the importance of moving away from closed silo structures towards more open database structures. Alison Mudditt of University of California Press picked up on some of these ideas in her presentation - one thing which stood out for me was a quotation from the UCal Press editorial committee statement from 1938 outlining the obligation of the press to provide academic publications for "the whole world of educated men" - not just people in academic institutions (and presumably meaning educated women, too...).

The final morning session was a brief update by Emily Gore on the progress of the Digital Public Library of America project. One of the things which I found really interesting was the emphasis on the DPLA community, demonstrated by the use of a platform geared towards promoting participation ("WE are the DPLA"). It's obviously a massive project with global implications, but at the same time, resources are being committed to support locally hosted community outreach initiatives. The DPLA will also be collaborating with Europeana to create an online exhibition about migration from Europe to America.

Charleston Conference 2012: part 3

In the afternoon, I attended a lively lunch session by Billy Kane of Wake Forest University about providing textbooks to undergraduate students. The session gave an overview of some of the problems associated with these types of materials, including their unpopularity with students, the fact that they are expensive for students to buy, and the limited success of a range of alternative methods of delivering relevant content, such as course reserves or electronic versions. The proposal at the core of this presentation was that students should be offered an 'All you can eat' textbook purchase plan - like a meal plan - potentially priced at around $500 per semester. The most surprising thing for me was the extent to which textbook purchases are separated from core library materials budgets in US academic libraries. It was interesting to hear that the campus book shop seems to have a much greater significance as part of the university information landscape than might be the case in the UK. I also wonder whether UK academics are as likely to teach from one specific textbook (although of course this varies depending on the subject area) - certainly, my impression generally is that UK academics are more likely to want to mix and match content from different texts and to provide details of a range of alternative texts. Finally, although I think the challenges of needing multiple copies of any core course materials apply equally in the UK and the US, I think that students in the UK might be more likely to expect these texts to be provided by their library.

The first afternoon concurrent session which I attended included presentations by Hazel Woodward and Frances Pinter discussing Knowledge Unlatched. This is a UK based Community Interest Company (it's a social enterprise!) which aims to leverage collaborative purchasing by libraries to open up access to academic publications. This is based on an experiment by Bloomsbury Academic to deliver open access content. The new funding model outlined involves publishers offering scholarly titles via Knowledge Unlatched in advance of publication; libraries interested in acquiring the title commit to paying their share of a fixed title fee and once the title fee is reached, a basic HTML version of the text becomes accessible to anyone under an open content licence, and libraries can purchase copies of the titles as books (print or electronic) for a reduced price. The key potential advantages of this system include:

• For publishers - reducing the risks associated with publication;
• For libraries - purchasing costs less than on a unit-based model, contributes to connecting scholars globally and assists in furthering the development of open access;
• For readers - potentially anyone can access the content of these scholarly texts.

A pilot is planned for 2013 focusing on humanities and social science titles. It sounds very ambitious, but I think it's an interesting innovation and represents a promising departure from more conventional purchasing models.

The second afternoon concurrent session which I attended described the three-year LibValue project undertaken at the University of Tennessee and the University of North Carolina-Wilmington. The project examined the changes in people's use of library resources over 3 years, including how academic staff used collections to support their teaching and showing the imporvements experienced following a series of workshops delivered by library staff.

Returning to the main conference room, the Charleston Players delivered a series of entertaining skits with characters as varied as the 21st century reference librarian and a 3,000 year old bookseller! This was followed by a panel discussion on innovation moderated by Greg Tananbaum of ScholarNext and including Peter Binfield of PeerJ and Timo Hannay of Digital Science. For me, the main messages here were about the role of libraries in fostering innovation; the importance of planning today for our future information infrastructure; and the impact of the dramatic rise in open access journal publications (and the variety of publishing models which might deliver them).

The final Thursday session which I attended discussed the value chain of scholarly communication, including the roles of publishers, abstracting and indexing databases, resource discovery systems and libraries. I think that the core messages for libraries were about the need for new types of skills needed for new types of work, the opportunities to use new indicators to match content to users more effectively and to facilitate user customization of content, and the importance of working together with other partners in the scholarly communication chain to establish industry standards for interoperability and metadata.

Charleston Conference 2012: part 2

The main part of the Charleston Conference began today with two fascinating morning plenary sessions. Annette Thomas of Macmillan talked about a publisher's role in making science more effective. Interestingly, as one of the questioners pointed out, a number of the resources she described such as ReadCube 1DegreeBio or labguru are pieces of software, rather than anything resembling traditional published content. Altmetrics (alternative metrics) - the focus of yesterday's preconference - were also discussed, including how they can use mainstream and social media mentions to evaluate article impact now (rather than in several years, when citations have had chance to emerge).

Anurag Acharya from Google Scholar set out a bold ambition "everyone must be able to find everything". He focused particularly on describing approaches to overcoming the access barrier which limits the ability to link through to many items found in a search (even if the relevant library has a subscription) including:

• Link resolvers - popular in the UK and US but less so elsewhere;
• Libraries making case-by-case approaches to publishers to allow access;
• Consortia making requests to publishers on behalf of their members;
• An opt out system, allowing libraries to remove themselves.

An interesting point was that many journals provide public access to archive articles, but that this is often not promoted effectively. Anurag also described initiatives to provide access to electronic content in developing countries including:

• HighWire Press;
• HINARI (Access to Research in Health Programme), AGORA (Access to Global Online Research in Agriculture), OARE (Online Access to Research in the Environment);
• JSTOR Africa Access Initiative;
• INASP PERii (International Network for the Availability of Scholarly Publications Programme for the Enhancement of Research Information).

Indexing repository content more effectively would also provide better access to preprints of articles.

In the next plenary session, three different innovative approaches to publishing were described. Mark Coker of SmashWords described benefits of online self-publishing. Eric Hillman of Gluejar described the Unglue.it project which uses a crowd-funding model to raise pledges of donations sufficient to purchase rights for in-copyright (but out of print) texts, in order to digitise the content and make it freely available to everyone under a Creative Commons license. Rush Miller of the University of Pittsburgh described library involvement in the publishing process, using Open Journal Software to safeguard at risk peer-reviewed journals, and now moving into digital monograph publishing using Open Monograph Press.

The final morning plenary session featured Peter Brantley of the BookServer Project at the Internet Archive and Mike Shatzkin of The Idea Logical Company, discussing the future of e-book acquisitions. Peter emphasized that "simple works best" when it comes to e-book delivery, whilst Mike gave an overview of a trade publisher's perspective of the development of e-books. I think he made important points about the extent to which most readers will continue to want an "immersive reading experience" - essentially a digitized version of a printed book (or, indeed, a printed book itself) - rather than looking for lots of additional multimedia content in their e-books. He also discussed some of the ways in which enhanced content would be beneficial - such as providing the opportunity to retain and preserve richer contextual and background materials which chart an author's creative writing processes, or by adding video content to non-fiction or instructional publications (gardening books, for example).

There's much more to come! (Including pictures, which I'll upload when I'm back in the UK.)

[This post was amended on 17 November 2012 to include an additional paragraph about the final morning plenary session and a photo of the main conference hotel.]

Charleston Conference 2012: part 1

Yesterday I attended the preconference day in Charleston. The 32nd Charleston Conference proper started today, but yesterday provided an opportunity to meet publishers and suppliers during the vendor showcase and to participate in preconference meetings. I went along to an afternoon meeting 'COUNTER at 10: Evolving measures of journal impact, value and utility'. In this session, moderated by Carol Tenopir (University of Tennessee) five speakers - Paul Wouters (University of Leiden); Hazel Woodward (Co-chair Usage Factor Project); Richard Cave (PLoS); Mayur Amin (Elsevier); Ellen Rotenberg (Science and IP Business of Thomson Reuters) offered a range of perspectives on new forms of metrics for evaluating research. This included author or institution metrics, as well as more traditional article-level metrics such as citation counts.

The first two presentations seemed particularly interesting. Paul Wouters provided a good overview of the issues involved in developing new ways of measuring impact, outlining three criteria for tools:

• Scalable;
• Transparent data management;
• Allow for normalisation - should be usable across the full range of subject areas;

He discussed findings from the study: Wouters, P. and Costas, R. (2012). Users, Narcissism and Control: Tracking the Impact of Scholarly Publications in the 21st Century. Utrecht: SURFfoundation. This compared a number of approaches to new metrics and highlighted a few promising tools:

• F1000;
• Microsoft Academic - "to our own surprise";
• Total Impact - now ImpactStory - which allows users to build pictures of impact from diverse sources, including social media;
• PLOS ONE - which was discussed by Richard Cave in more detail later in the session<;/li>
• Google Scholar - although it lacks transparency about its coverage.

Hazel Woodward discussed the Usage Factor project, suggesting that journal usage statistics can complement impact factor measures - providing very different information. A draft code of practice for usage factors has already been released with a view to testing the methodology in 2013.

I'll try to post links to all these presentations when they become available.

Blogging about research and visiting Pittsburgh

This week I'm in the USA, attending the 32nd Charleston Conference. On the way to South Carolina, I spent a few days in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. On Monday, I visited the University of Pittsburgh's School of Information Sciences. This was a really valuable opportunity to get an insight into the US approach to doctoral studies. The US PhD course seems to have a much greater focus on equipping students with the skills they need to become faculty members. The final thesis or dissertation only occupies around one year to eighteen months, rather than being the focus of the full three or four years of study, as it is in the UK.

In the afternoon I facilitated a discussion session about blogging for research. I gave a brief presentation, which included talking about three blogs created and maintained by members of the University of Sheffield's iSchool. I also discussed my own experience of blogging including the benefits of maintaining this blog, such as:

• Popular posts about events which I've attended - sharing experiences which may be relevant and of interest to other people, but which not everyone would have the opportunity to attend;
• Acting as an informal record of the progress of my research and a place where I can embed resources such as presentations or documents;
• Leading to contacts from people interested in my research, either through comments on the blog or by email;
• Providing further information about my research for research participants or potential participants;
• Giving a global dimension to my research, with a significant number of blog visitors being based outside the UK;

I also talked about some of the challenges and limitations I've experienced, including:

• My lack of integration of the blog with other social media tools;
• The somewhat sporadic nature of my postings and the challenge of finding time to post;
• A relatively small number of comments - I'm aware I could do much more to encourage discussion here;
• Ethical issues and issues relating to prior publication - how much can I say about my research findings here on the blog and how much do I want to save for journal articles or conference papers?

The presentation was followed by a lively discussion about the pros anc cons of blogging about research and encouraged me to resolve to blog more frequently.

Many thanks to everyone at the University of Pittsburgh iSchool for giving me such a warm welcome!

AHRC-British Library Collaborative PhD: Archiving the Games

The University of Central Lancashire and the British Library are advertising an AHRC-funded PhD opportuntity. The project title is 'Archiving the Games: collecting, storing and disseminating the London 2012 knowledge legacy'.

Summary information about this is available at: http://www.uclan.ac.uk/research/prospective_students/research_studentships.php#rs1204

More detailed information is available at: http://www.uclan.ac.uk/research/prospective_students/files/RS1204_Description_and_Specification.docx

I think it sounds like a really fascinating opportunity - especially after the success of the Olympic and Paralympic games.

Charleston Conference Proceedings go Open Access

The Charleston Conference, one of the major conferences for library practitioners and researchers working on collection development and management topics, has now made the proceedings from its last three conferences freely accessible online at: http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/charleston/

I'm quite excited about this - I gave a paper there last year, which I wrote up for the proceedings and which you can access here.

Print and e-book copies of last year's proceedings are also available for purchase from Purdue University Press: http://www.thepress.purdue.edu/titles/charleston-conference-proceedings-2011

DREaM concluding conference

Last Monday I attended the DREaM project concluding conference at the British Library. I blogged about the launch event last year and found last week's event provided an excellent opportunity to catch up on some of the progress made in building a UK network or cadre of LIS researchers during the three intervening workshop sessions.

Professor Hazel Hall began the presentations by summarising the DREaM project's work and achievements so far and also outlining the relationship between DREaM (funded by the AHRC) and the LIS Research Coalition and the RiLIES project. Particularly interesting was the description of the impact of the DREaM project beyond the UK LIS field - with potential international interest in the model developed and interest from other disciplines which may experience a similar gap between practice and research. The three key themes highlighted for the final conference and for further development were: measuring value and impact of LIS; establishing evidence to demonstrate this value and impact; developing the UK network.

The morning keynote was delivered by Professor Carol Tenopir from the University of Tennessee on the subject of "Building evidence of value and impact: methods, metrics and ROI". This discussed research from the Lib-Value Project - which includes numerous organisations and stakeholders, such as JISC Collections. This highlighted a number of techniques for establishing value from the economic (including "purchase or exchange value" or "use value" based on outcomes described by Fritz Machlup), or the economic / social / environmental trio described by Bruce Kingma. Research which extrapolated up the time UK academics reported spending reading suggested that they "spend nearly 3 months of work time reading scholarly material", with the majority of the articles coming from the library. Although some academics may claim not to use the library, they are actually using it a lot, in the form of its online collections. Another approach to showing value provided cost ratios for the return on investment from access to journal articles in grant proposals, with quite a broad range of values depending on subject and study level. A fascinating slide synthesised some of the findings from the research to describe the archetypal successful academic: publishing 4+ items a year and having won an award in the last two years were key features which caught my eye.

The 20 One Minute Madness sessions which followed were once again excellent. I think they really seemed to benefit from not having a fixed topic for the session: the talks included Carolynn Rankin's description of the IFLA Sister Libraries project, which provides an opportunity for children's librarians in the Global South to pair up with others in the Global North; Louise Doolan's announcement of the exciting news that CILIP's CSG Information Literacy Group is now a Special Interest Group in its own right; Rossitza Atanassova promoting the UK Web Archive, and concluding with an invitation from Sue Reynolds (RMIT University, Australia) to collaborate with Australian LIS researchers.

After lunch, Dr Louise Cooke gave an excellent presentation examining the changes in the networks between cadre members who attended the DREaM workshops. It was really fascinating to see how links between individuals multiplied and diversified over time, with the effect of strengthening the group by reducing dependence on a small number of core participants.

The afternoon panel session gave the opportunity for discussion of some core issues in LIS research - how is this defined? How can academics and practitioners collaborate? How can we avoid short termism and ensure research is disseminated effectively and used in practice? How can we create a central place to store the relevant research?

This was followed by the presentation of the LIS Practitioner Researcher Excellence Award to the North West Clinical Librarian Systematic Review and Evaluation Group.

The afternoon keynote was delivered by Dr Ben Goldacre - "Bad Science". Some of this was familiar to me, such as the fact that positive studies are twice as likely to be published as negative studies. However, much of this was new news - one particularly interesting proposed project involves tracking PubMed search strategies to see which are most likely to succeed in locating reports on the outcomes of registered clinical trials.

The event ended with the LIRG AGM, followed by a wine reception - a great opportunity for networking.

New British Library collaborative PhD studentship available: "Archiving the Games: collecting, storing and disseminating the London 2012 knowledge legacy"

The University of Central Lancashire, School of Sport, Tourism and the Outdoors and the British Library are now recruiting for a collaborative AHRC PhD studentship exploring the management and dissemination of materials relating to the 2012 Olympics and Paralympics.

More information is available at: http://www.jobs.ac.uk/job/AES852/ahrc-phd-studentship/ and the deadline for applications is 18 July.

I'd particularly recommend considering this opportunity if you are a current library and information practitioner, with an interest in moving into academic research. The collaborative PhD studentships provide an excellent opportunity to carry out doctoral research whilst spending time with the British Library. It's been a really extraordinary privilege for me to be involved in a project like this, and I'd highly recommend similar opportunities to others.

LIDA 2012: part five

On Friday morning I took part in the PhD Forum, sponsored by ASIS&T (American Society for Information Science and Technology). I delivered a brief paper about my research so far and then benefitted from the advice and comments of a panel of experts. Key points included identifying terms for clearer definition in my research questions, considering how well my chosen methodologies are likely to answer some of these research questions and showing more clearly which methods are intended to answer which questions. This was a really useful and valuable experience for me - and should hopefully be good practice for a potential future viva!

The rest of this final day focussed on the official celebration of the 75th anniversary of ASIS&T with a panel discussion examining the history and future of ASIS&T in Europe, followed by three presentations on information science in Europe by Christian Schloegl, Lyn Robinson and Elena Corradini. I was particularly interested in some of the Italian theoretical work cited in the third presentation and came away with more references to follow up! Although the conference continued with three further presentions and an evening celebration, the need to catch my flight back the UK meant that these were the last sessions I was able to attend.

Overall, the week was a wonderful experience. It was an excellent opportunity to hear about research into issues affecting libraries in the digital age from across the world. I think the final thing I should say is "Hvala" to the organisers and hosts at the University of Zadar.

LIDA 2012: part four

Another keynote presentation started off Thursday morning's session. Herbert Van de Sompel gave a talk on "The Web-Based Scholarly Record: Identification, Persistence, Actionability", discussing the dynamic scholarly record and the growing significance of non-traditional assets such as blogs and wikis in scholarly exchange. A brief survey of recent developments in this field included:

• PeerJ, an author-pays online publication system for biological science and medicine, including a peer-review journal option - with a one-off lifetime access payment plan;
• the Utopia PDF reader, which enriches PDF articles and documents by linking to dynamic content and to datasets (and can dynamically create citations from article metadata);
• myExperiment and Taverna for sharing research workflows;
• BioCatalogue detailing web services for life sciences;
• the idea of executable papers initially conceptualised by Elsevier to facilitate data sharing and to enable readers to input their own comparable datasets to test whether results are reproducable.

All these tools challenge fixed ideas of what constitutes the scholarly record - and a fundamental principle of services developed by libraries should be that the web is "the infrastructure for scholarship". This includes social components and machine components, such as the semantic web and linked data. The second part of the paper discussed the challenge posed by the fact that the web "exists in a perpetual now" and describing tools for reconstructing the web-based record as it was a particular time. In particular, the Memento project offers a way to search for versions of webpages from different points in time, drawing on the full range of available "in the wild" web archives from around the world.

Later that morning, my supervisor and I presented our joint paper "Information Resource Development and "Collection" in the Digital Age: Conceptual Frameworks and New Definitions for the Network World". (Trying hard not to be distracted by the view from the conference hall, pictured above.) We discussed the technological changes affecting library collections over the last fifty years, and argued both for the continued value and relevance of the concept and terminology of collection in the digital age, and the opportunities and importance of adopting a networked approach to collection-related issues. There were some really interesting questions afterwards, particularly relating to the place of specialised terminology (such as "digital curation") within our framework. We argue that more specialised terminology can be useful at one level, but seeing these activities as still being part of "collection" development and management is crucial in order to avoid creating multiple silos of information and data, which may potentially dilute the impact of the value a library can add to these kinds of material by treating them as part of a coherent overall collection. Other issues raised included the importance of the process of selection and of some prospect of persistence or permanent access to materials. The morning session concluded with a paper by Luiza Baptista Melo, which included an interesting attempt to calculate a cost-benefit ratio for accessing electronic information resources in Portuguese academic libraries.

In the afternoon, three papers by Mats Dahlstrom, Isto Huvila, and Jela Steinerova explored different aspects of digitisation and digital scholarship. I found the third of these presentations especially interesting, particularly its suggestion of "information ecology" as an emerging framework for digital scholarship, stressing the importance of collaboration and complex relationships. This included a study of relationships between repositories in Slovakia, with many universities apparently having multiple collections of electronic documents, something which sounded to me a bit like the multiple subject or department-specific libraries in some UK universities.

Liz Lyon gave the afternoon keynote presentation on the topic "Incremental Change or revolution?: Libraries and the Informatics Transform". This coincided with the publication of the Royal Society's final report on Science as an Open Enterprise (another must-read text). The presentation gave some idea of the scale of the skills gap in libraries for dealing with data - particularly big data ("the next frontier for innovation, competition and productivity"). A study by Mary Auckland for Research Libraries UK - Re-skilling for Research suggested that as few as 2% of faculty librarians have an understanding of core issues relating to research data, such as metadata requirements, and discipline standards and practices. The paper drew on the author's article 'The Informatics Transform: Re-engineering Libraries for the Data Decade' (International Journal of Digital Curation, volume 7, issue 1, pp.126-138) analysing the potential roles of 7 key groups of library staff (such as service directors, data librarians and IT staff) in developing library approaches to managing research data. A particularly interesting idea was that information professionals involved in managing data and making it useable should be formally recognised (for example, in publications). The afternoon sessions finished with another panel session, discussing some of the issues raised - "the digital future is now!".

LIDA 2012: part three

Wednesday morning began with two presentations on the topic of information seeking behaviour. Colleen Cool presented the findings from a study of information behaviour associated with frustration while searching digital libraries. This study used social interaction theory to explore the behaviour of 20 searchers in help seeking situations involving digital information resources and their self-expressed levels of frustration, with digital libraries seeming to inspire greater frustration than other types of online resource. Particularly interesting were the findings showing different behaviour patterns depending on whether the frustration took the form of participants blaming themselves or blaming the system (participants blaming themselves seemed to be more likely to persist with their searches, despite their frustration). In the second presentation, based on a paper by Polona Vilar, Tomaž Bartol, Jan Pisanski and Primož Južnič, asked the question "Are librarians familiar with information seeking behaviour of teachers and researchers in their respective institutions?". Two Slovenian studies have explored the information behaviour of scientists and librarians' perceptions of these information behaviours. The survey of researchers suggested that people are not enthusiastic about library services, and have difficulty identifying the services provided by the library. There was an interesting observation about the role of the library as a social space, rather than a storage space - this is something which I might have thought was more associated with undergraduate level students, but which seemed to potentially apply to the career researchers and academics, too.

A panel discussion about curriculum design for LIS courses involving digital content in library services followed - a video of this discussion is available here. This included presentations giving a genuinely international perspective on curriculum design in this area. Makiko Miwa described a revised LIS curriculum in Japan (I thought the summary of core curriculum areas on pages 5-7 was particularly clear and useful), Ron Brown from the University of South Carolina, who described the use of cutting-edge technology, such as 3D scanners, and the role of relationships and partnerships in developing courses and Yin-Leng Theng from Nanyang Technological University in Singapore dicussing her university's MSc in Knowledge Management course and research work on reuseable learning objects.

In the afternoon, Christine Borgman introduced the second part of the conference programme, setting out some of the key challenges for libraries in the digital world, including the "data deluge", the need to develop local and global infrastructure for managing digital objects, challenges in identifying and preserving access to digital objects and determining who should lead in developing policy in this area (funders, publishers, data repositories, or universities...). Alyssa Goodman Professor of Astronomy at Harvard University offered a acientist's perspective on crowd-sourcing, data sharing and data citation tools (such as Harvard's Astronomy Dataverse) and using social media in astronomy. Particularly impressive was the example of a photo posted on Flickr of a cluster of stars which were then accurately located using Microsoft's WorldWide Telescope tool, and the positive impact of using this tool to enthuse school students about astronomy.

A poster session took place in the evening - this included some really interesting work including a poster by my superviosr summarising results from a study of innovation in research support services in academic libraries in the UK, Ireland, Australia and New Zealand; a poster summarising research into belief in a just world and online piracy; the grey literature typology described in Monday morning's workshop session and a summary of the Croatian experience of both thematic and domain wide web archiving - which aims to make archived content available over the web (a big difference to the proposed UK regulations in this area).

LIDA 2012: part two

Tuesday's sessions began with a talk by Eileen G. Abels "Change: Opportunity or Threat for Reference Services in the Digital Age". This began with the classic quotation attributed to Asimov "the only constant is change" accompanied by some illustrations of changes taking place in the shift to digital. The key questions posed by this talk were how libraries can find new ways of doing new things, as well as new ways of doing old things (such as equipping roving librarians with iPads to provide connected and cool reference services, or using QuestionPoint consortial aproaches to provide local, regional and international services), and how libraries can look to lead in this time of transformation, rather than just following in the slipstream of change. There were some really pertinent, challenging ideas - I was particularly interested in the quotations from Brian Mathews (2012) Facing the future: We don't just need change, we need breakthrough, paradigm-shifting, transformative, disruptive ideas - a paper which went straight onto my reading list. The paper concluded with some helpful tips on identifying opportunities for new services and on dealing with change.

Later in the morning Tian Xiao Zhang delivered a paper on the experiences of St John's University Libraries (New York) in using Pay Per View article purchasing. Crucially, it could provide a way to "unbundle the big deal", although the presentation also described some major potential drawbacks, including limited user controls and a shift in responsibility for policiing potential misuse of content from the publisher to the library. This contrast was borne out by two statistics in particular - 592 articles within the trial period were downloaded from previously non-subscribed publications, suggesting improved access to content for customers, but more than a quarter of downloads were made by a handful of people systematically downloading materials.

This was followed by Bob Pymm's presentation which posed the question "E-books, e-audio and public libraries: is it lift off or steady as she goes?". This was the first paper I had attended to focus on public libraries, based on a study of e-book and e-audio use in the public library system of Canberra, Australia. The paper suggested a period of "slow evolution, not revolution" in e-format use in public libraries - without quite the sort of scale of shift occuring which e-book publishers may be suggesting. In the system studied, the emphasis seemed to fall on providing access to content (e-books as files for download) rather than hardware (circulating e-book readers), and readers seemed to favour e-content (both e-books and e-audio) similar to the most popular types of printed content, particularly fiction. One particularly interesting point for me was the observation about the potential opportunities for libraries to use e-formats to record and preserve user-generated content, engaging local communities by being able to "collect their stories literally".

During the lunch break, I went on a tour of the Zadar City Library (pictured above, with some more photos of inside available at the City Library's website). I found the library really impressive. It opened in 1999 and features included an extensive programme of cultural and educational events and a Kinect / Xbox system, set up for customers to use - younger ones playing games and older users finding it a great way to keep fit! It also had some very well-designed and creative publicity material. However, one major drawback seemed to be its charges for full library membership (with borrowing rights) - even though the charge is relatively low.

In the afternoon, presentations included Roswitha Poll's summary of progress in revising the ISO standards for library services. Ann-Louise de Boer gave a presentation on leadership traits, skills and competencies for librarians in the digital age. I found the analysis of the potential gap between current skills distribution and recommended skills areas for development (including visionary leadership) particularly interesting. The day closed with a panel session, discussing whether research can help education in digitial libraries. Key points included questioning whether the LIS curricula provide the skills needed to curate new materials (including research data), emphasising the multidisciplinary nature of digital librarianship, suggesting the importance of reviewing the digital repository process and providing opportunities for researcher and student publishing. Lynn Silipigni Connaway emphasised the need for libraries to be proactive and to define their users clearly. Christine Borgman also emphasised the importance of understanding the networked nature of the research process and the need for librarians to be involved in research from the data creation stage onwards and Marie Radford suggested that the librarian has a dual role - both educator and researcher. This led to discussion of some big questions about the nature of the LIS core curriculum and the need to avoid becoming preoccupied with inward-looking discussions if librarians really want to shape "the new information infrastructure".

LIDA 2012

This week I'm attending the biennial Libraries in the Digital Age conference in Zadar, a stunningly beautiful town on Croatia's North Dalmatian coast. I'm involved with a couple of papers later in the week (on Thursday and Friday) and I will write more about them then.

Monday morning's sessions began before the conference formally started with Petra Pejsova's workshop 'Grey literature: from hidden to visible'. She described the work of the National Technical Library of the Czech Republic in this field including a National Repository of Grey Literature and its involvement with the international grey literature network, GreyNet. This presentation also included a demonstration of OpenGrey, the successor to OpenSIGLE (since June 2011), although still provided by SIGLE (Systems for Information in Grey Literature in Europe). One particularly interesting exercise during this session involved examining and commenting on a typology of grey literature - which seemed to me to be quite an impressive attempt to define more clearly the somewhat ambiguous meaning of this term. It was particularly interesting to see discrete format types - such as websites and datasets - which are often collected and managed separately included in this typology.

The opening speeches welcoming participants to the conference summarised the two main themes of the conference:

• "Changes in the world of services: Evolution and revolution in library services"
• "Changes in the world of electronic resources: Information and digitization"

This was followed by Lynn Silipigni Connaway's paper "'I always stick with the first thing that comes up on Google': Motivating student engagement with the digital information service environment"*. This described the information behaviour of groups of high school students (the "emerging" phase"), undergraduates (the "establishing" phase), postgraduates / research students (the "embedding" phase), and respected scholars (the "experiencing" phase), as identified from a study which used semi-structured interviews, diaries and an online survey. The results were sobering - as information sources, librarians were rated lowest by student participants although academic faculty and teachers were rated highest. Student comments included "Google doesn't judge you" - in contrast to librarians who, that respondent felt, did judge. The presentation ended with an appeal for librarians to judge contexts and situations carefully in order to give the most appropriate possible service and to be aware of the barriers created by jargon.

The afternoon parallel sessions began with a presentation by Jette Hyldegaard and Haakon Lund on "IL web tutorials: constraints and challenges from an HE perspective" which discussed the findings of the SALLY project which evaluated three Norwegian information literacy tutorials using usability tests, focus group interviews and questionnaires. The paper ended with recommendations to integrate information literacy tutorials "with students' social practice" and with course pages (to ensure they are not seen as library stand alone services). The SALLY project was also described in the final afternoon parallel session, "Evaluating the role of web-based tutorials in educational practice: using interpretative repertoires and meaning negotiation in a two step analysis" which developed on the original studies of three tutorials to explore the meaningfulness and relevance of such tutorials. One particularly interesting point was that the check list role of the tutorials seemed popular - it could be used as a reference tool for checking that references and bibliographies are correct.

In between those two papers, Judy Xiao added an American perspective (from City University of New York) with a presentation on "Collaborating for student success: a model for librarian embedding in Faculty Blackboard courses" describing how the Blackboard VLE could be used to support information literacy, providing opportunities for pre- and post-instruction surveys and in some cases including plaigiarism detection software. In particular, the paper advocated embedding services for courses with a significant research element and where the librarian has specialist subject knowledge.

The afternoon sessions finished with three demonstrations of library management software, including Vero a Croatian next-generation catalogue system based on an Oracle database; Qulto, an integrated collection management system in use in central and eastern Europe; and Austrian Books Online, a collaborative digitisation project undertaken with Google.

I'll write more about day two soon!

* Generally, where proceedings papers or presentations are available for the sessions I describe, I will include a link to them. The proceedings are free to access online, but you may need to register to read some of the full-text papers.

Business & IP Centre, Newcastle

Last week, I was in Newcastle briefly and had the opportunity to visit Newcastle Central Library. It's a very impressive new public library which opened in 2009 - you can read more about it here. I found the library every bit as wonderful in design, facilities and scale as the description suggests.

The major point of interest for me here is the Business & IP Centre, Newcastle - a very innovative collaborative project between the public library, local university libraries and the British Library. There's more information on the project here. It seems to be quite a significant attempt to deliver focused business support resources using a cross-sectoral approach. In particular, it may address some of the issues raised in the report:
British Library (2009). Business Information Resources: Landscape & Feasibility Study [Online]. London: British Library. http://www.jisc.ac.uk/media/documents/programmes/bce/stream4resfinalreport.pdf

Although social enterprise is in some ways very different to other types of business - or to voluntary sector organisations - the issues about how libraries can support all these types of organisations can be quite similar. There are also similarities to questions about how libraries can support independent researchers - people working on research projects but who don't happen to belong to any academic libraries or to have easy access to a research library or a national library.

The mixture of resources (print and electronic), events, training sessions and one to one support sessions with advisors offered by the Business and IP Centre, Newcastle, mirror the approach taken by the British Library's Business & IP Centre in London (which you can find information about here). At a time when regional support for small and medium enterprises is being significantly reduced (Business Link advice centres closed last year, and funding for other smaller support organisations seems increasingly scarce) there does seem to be a real opportunity for libraries to provide vital information and support to these types of organisations - especially if they can work across sectoral divides. That's not to deny the very significant barriers in the way of such initatives, such as declining library funding and license conditions which prevent libraries from opening access up to electronic resources for business. But the Newcastle initiative seems to me to offer a really exciting example of what libraries could do - I hope it is successful!

Online survey tools

When I outlined my proposed research methods for this project, I mentioned that I'm planning to use a survey to explore the extent to which findings from my initial interviews can be generalised to a wider sample of library and information practitioners, social enterprise practitioners and academics working in the field. I'm now just beginning to think about the kind of survey I will use for this part of my project. As part of this process, I presented a document comparing a range of online survey tools at an informal departmental discussion session yesterday. You can read more about the details of this discussion on the Sheffield iSchool researchers' blog.

I have used both free and subscription versions of SurveyMonkey in the past, but I realise that I've never really evaluated a wider range of potential survey tools. The document I've prepared covers a few different aspects of about ten survey tools. As well as a copy available for viewing, downloading and printing, I thought I'd add it to this post:
Online Survey Tools - summary sheet

More thoughts about data

Is managing data a bit like designing a fountain, striking a balance between a contained flow and a deluge?

Last week I attended an event about data management, led by the Digital Curation Centre. There's also a new book out about this topic: Managing Research Data, edited by Graham Pryor and published by Facet.

The session I attended here in Sheffield focused particularly on the importance of effective data management planning and introduced us to the DMP Online tool. It offers an interesting way of building a data management plan, particularly for supporting applications for funding from research councils.

One of the issues about data management which seems to be given different emphasis in different contexts is the question of when not to share or retain data. Are all data equal or are some data more equal than others? For example, in my project I can imagine a possible future use for raw quantitative data from a survey I hope to carry out later this year. However, I don't think the same applies to qualitative interview data. I'm almost tempted to say that these data are just too unique: the process of carrying out the interviews and my subjective participation in them as a researcher is too significant and important an influence on them for them to be truly reusable by others. I also think that even carefully "anonymised" qualitative data, when taking the form of a full transcript, is rarely truly, fully "anonymous".

It's also interesting to think about this in the context of library collection decisions. How do we assess the potential use or usefulness of an item (or a dataset) before adding it to a collection? Would some version of a 20:80 rule apply to large data collections, as it is said to apply to print collections?

Another question which interests me is the division between different types of data. In November it was announced that more government data will be being made freely accessible including, controversially, the potential release of anonymised health data. There's more detail here, but it's interesting that the separation between "research data" and "data potentially useful for research" seems so clearly established. And what about the grey data generated by organisations which are neither public sector, nor research-led - perhaps including social enterprises?