It seems like a long time since I posted last, but a couple of recent news items deserve a mention.
First of all, UK electronic legal deposit is finally a reality, with recent regulations having come into force on 6 April 2013. More information is available on the British Library's website here. The Library also this video overview of what this means.
Possibly one of the strongest arguments for the vital role of libraries in preserving digital as well as printed information seemed to me to be highlighted by the recent news of acquisition of the free reference management tool Mendeley by the publishing giant Elsevier. Andy Tattersall of Sheffield's School of Health and Related Research (ScHARR) recently carried out this fascinating brief interview with Victor Henning, co-founder of Mendeley, which is published in full on the ScHARR library blog.
Showing posts with label british library. Show all posts
Showing posts with label british library. Show all posts
18 April 2013
20 February 2013
British Library and the Massive Open Online Course (MOOC)
There was a really interesting announcement from the British Library earlier this week about the Library's future involvement with FutureLearn Ltd, a provider of MOOCs from UK institutions. The news release is available here. The British Library is the first non-university institution to join the project, launched by the Open University last December.
14 December 2012
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:
I'm very grateful to the ALISS committee members for inviting me to speak and I very much enjoyed listening to all the presentations.
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:
I'm very grateful to the ALISS committee members for inviting me to speak and I very much enjoyed listening to all the presentations.
11 October 2012
AHRC-British Library Collaborative PhD: Archiving the Games
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.
16 July 2012
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.
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.
06 July 2012
New British Library collaborative PhD studentship available: "Archiving the Games: collecting, storing and disseminating the London 2012 knowledge legacy"
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.
05 March 2012
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!
30 July 2011
Project research methods
Some time ago now I said I'd post in more detail about the research methods I'm using for this project. Fortunately my actual use of these methods has been developing at a better pace than this post explaining them!
The plan I've devised has three main strands:
This project is funded and supported by the British Library, so I'm very fortunate to be able to link my research quite closely to the British Library's collections. I've carried out a search of the British Library's resources for social enterprise, using a small selection of relevant keywords and phrases, and I hope to be able to track the amount of use of some of these materials, both printed and online - always remembering the British Library itself is a very valuable information resource. I'm also keen to explore and use information about a range of different collection-related projects at the library.
2. Library catalogue survey of materials for social enterprise
I am using the same search terms used on the BL catalogue in strand 1 to search for similar materials in other libraries across different sectors (eg public, academic, health or other special libraries). I'm planning to search around 120-150 catalogues in total.
I will be interested to see how results from different libraries relate to the results from the BL - this might include:
So far I've carried out eight interviews - some with people involved in social enterprises, some with academics and researchers and some with those involved in providing library and information services relevant to social enterprise. I'd like to thank everyone who has taken part in these interviews so far - I've had some very helpful and insightful conversations. I hope to interview between thirteen and fifteen people in total, including more library and information professionals. I will use some of the inital results from my catalogue searching in strand 2 to identify library and information services with particularly interesting collections for social enterprise to approach for interviews.
I will blog in more detail about the interview process and about transcribing interviews, which is currently the major focus of my work outside time spent interviewing.
This interview data will enable me to draw initial conclusions about issues regarding information and library collections for social enterprise. To test whether the ideas emerging from the interviews can be generalised more widely across the field, I will then develop a questionnaire to send to a much bigger group of people some time in late 2011 or early 2012.
The plan I've devised has three main strands:
- a case study of social enterprise material in the British Library's collections;
- searching other library catalogues for materials relating to social enterprise;
- a series of initial interviews with a small number of people involved in social enterprise and relevant library and information services, leading to the development of a questionnaire for a larger group of people.
This project is funded and supported by the British Library, so I'm very fortunate to be able to link my research quite closely to the British Library's collections. I've carried out a search of the British Library's resources for social enterprise, using a small selection of relevant keywords and phrases, and I hope to be able to track the amount of use of some of these materials, both printed and online - always remembering the British Library itself is a very valuable information resource. I'm also keen to explore and use information about a range of different collection-related projects at the library.
2. Library catalogue survey of materials for social enterprise
I am using the same search terms used on the BL catalogue in strand 1 to search for similar materials in other libraries across different sectors (eg public, academic, health or other special libraries). I'm planning to search around 120-150 catalogues in total.
I will be interested to see how results from different libraries relate to the results from the BL - this might include:
- identifying works which frequently appear in different collections;
- identifying works not located in the BL search;
- comparing the level of detail provided by different types of information services (for example, which collections may include details of journal articles alongside books);
- comparing different collection approaches to web-based grey literature - such as PDFs of reports or policy statements.
So far I've carried out eight interviews - some with people involved in social enterprises, some with academics and researchers and some with those involved in providing library and information services relevant to social enterprise. I'd like to thank everyone who has taken part in these interviews so far - I've had some very helpful and insightful conversations. I hope to interview between thirteen and fifteen people in total, including more library and information professionals. I will use some of the inital results from my catalogue searching in strand 2 to identify library and information services with particularly interesting collections for social enterprise to approach for interviews.
I will blog in more detail about the interview process and about transcribing interviews, which is currently the major focus of my work outside time spent interviewing.
This interview data will enable me to draw initial conclusions about issues regarding information and library collections for social enterprise. To test whether the ideas emerging from the interviews can be generalised more widely across the field, I will then develop a questionnaire to send to a much bigger group of people some time in late 2011 or early 2012.
21 June 2011
British Library and Google digitisation project
The British Library and Google yesterday announced a project to digitise a quarter of a million out of copyright texts from the 18th and 19th centuries. A press release has the full details, and the Guardian seems intrigued by the royal hippo angle, with an interesting quotation from a Google representative about the limits of online searching.
08 June 2011
British Library-University of Sheffield social enterprise project background
I've recently been given ethics approval to begin my research (including interviews and catalogue searching). This means that I hope to post more details of the methodology for each of the proposed strands of my research soon.
In the meantime, I also wanted to mention a new webpage on the University of Sheffield Enterprise website which provides a bit of background detail about the British Library's collaborative projects with the University of Sheffield relating to social enterprise.
This provides a particularly useful account of the impressive work undertaken by my predecessor last year as part of a six-month British Library internship - this work provided the basis for the current PhD project. The page also includes links to the British Library resource guides for social enterprise.
In the meantime, I also wanted to mention a new webpage on the University of Sheffield Enterprise website which provides a bit of background detail about the British Library's collaborative projects with the University of Sheffield relating to social enterprise.
This provides a particularly useful account of the impressive work undertaken by my predecessor last year as part of a six-month British Library internship - this work provided the basis for the current PhD project. The page also includes links to the British Library resource guides for social enterprise.
15 April 2011
Legal deposit regulations and Intellectual Property review
In a previous post I mentioned the recent Consultation on the Draft Legal Deposit Libraries (Non-print Publications) Regulations 2011. The Government published its response last week, which was welcomed by the legal deposit libraries.
I've also been looking at the Independent Review of IP and Growth: Submissions Received webpage, which now includes all the consultation responses due to be published. From that site, I've just been reading the British Library's Response from the British Library to the Independent Review of Intellectual Property and Growth.
I've also been looking at the Independent Review of IP and Growth: Submissions Received webpage, which now includes all the consultation responses due to be published. From that site, I've just been reading the British Library's Response from the British Library to the Independent Review of Intellectual Property and Growth.
15 March 2011
British Library, copyright and legal deposit
Last Friday I was at the British Library in London, which gives me an excuse to post this photo I took. (Complete with a nice spring sky, in contrast to today's foggy and gloomy Sheffield...)
The British Library has recently published Growing Knowledge: The British Library's Strategy 2011-2015 its strategy document for the next four years. This provides a useful insight into the key priority areas which the library has identified, and adds detail to the 2020 Vision document, which was published last year.
I've also been having a look at some of the submissions published so far on the Independent Review of IP and Growth website. So far, this just seems to be a selection of the submissions recieved (the consultation deadline was 4 March), but the JISC (Joint Information Systems Committee) contribution is interesting - discussing copyright issues surrounding orphan works, digitisation projects, open educational resources and the advantages of open access publishing. It also refers to a British Library document Driving UK Research: Is Copyright a Help or a Hindrance? detailing researchers' personal experiences of copyright issues.
Between 1709 and 1911, copyright was linked to the requirement for the deposit of copies of every published work with a selection of "copyright" libraries. Although these functions (copyright and legal deposit) have now been separated in legislation, the requirement to provide copies of every work published in the UK to each of the 6 legal deposit libraries (the British Library, National Library of Wales, National Library of Scotland, Bodleian Library, Cambridge University Library and Trinity College, Dublin) remains. Another consultation has recently considered the implementation of extended legal deposit provisions to cover non-print materials, building on legislation originally passed in 2003. There's some useful information about this on the Consultation on the Draft Legal Deposit Libraries (Non-print Publications) Regulations 2011 website.
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