Links to the ALISS presentations

All three presentations from last month's ALISS Christmas seminar are now available on Slideshare.

Sharon Johnson's (Head of Content Development Implementation, The British Library) presentation "Are we nearly there? Measuring progress and success on the road to implementation" is available at: http://www.slideshare.net/alissinfo/are-we-nearly-there-measuring-progress-and-success-on-the-road-to-implementation

The presentation "Transforming our collections: How we reviewed over 1 million items in five years and got them all to fit!" by Paul Johnson (Head of Collections and Space, University of Reading) and Claire Cannings (Collections Project Co-ordinator, University of Reading) is available at: http://www.slideshare.net/alissinfo/transforming-our-collections-how-we-reviewed-over-1-million-items-in-five-years-and-got-them-all-to-fit

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...

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!

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

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.

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.

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.

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!