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!

Project research methods

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

The plan I've devised has three main strands:

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


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


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

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

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

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

• identifying works which frequently appear in different collections;


• identifying works not located in the BL search;


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


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

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

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

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

Intellectual Property and Growth review

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

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


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


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


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

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

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

PG Cafe Forum

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

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

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

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


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


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

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

Social enterprise and library collections

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

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

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

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

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


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


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


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


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

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

Reflections

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

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

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