Full version of my Masters thesis online!

A year ago when I was writing up my MSc Information and Library Management dissertation, covering the situation in academic library blogging in the UK, I relied heavily on a PhD thesis by the American library studies professor, Michael Stephens. I remember being very grateful and somewhat impressed that he had made the full document available online. It saved me a lot of hassle finding it, quoting it and referring to it later!

In the spirit of the thesis, which dealt with the role of the modern librarian and his/her relationship with new technologies, I decided to share my findings as Stephens had done, using the blog I wrote as a research journal, and once it was done, the thesis itself (as long as it turned out to be a success).

Well, now I have the Masters certificate safely filed away, and another little certificate showing that my thesis won the Harry Galloway award for the highest mark in the UWE Library and Information Management course – effectively the highest mark in the South West of England! – I feel confident in posting the thing on my new blog and “closing that chapter”, as it were.

So here it is, click here to open the documents page. Enjoy!

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Other news? I’m ready to take a well-earned break with my friends. We’re off to Caernarfon for a week. I can’t wait!

I’ve learned a lot over the last six months about librarianship in action.

I’ve catalogue a lot of books, done a few hundred hours of enquiry desk work, dealt with a lot of routine enquiries and some more interesting and memorable ones, and overseen some sections of a complex collection management project. Plus I’ve worked on reviewing instructional and policy documentation for metadata, and started building some wiki pages!

I’ve taken part in a “Twitter conference”, I’ve started working on my Chartership, and more-or-less begun to produce reflective writing on my work and personal/professional development. I’ve attended 3 or 4 training courses (apart from the excellent ones provided at work) and a conference.

No wonder I need a break! It’s been an action-packed six months. I shall return to blogging in August and I wish you all a happy summer

The art of paper folding

Paper cranes - my origami progress!

As a child I loved the idea of origami, and I may well have  indulged in some (such is the fickleness of memory).

Last year towards the end of my library MSc (did I mention that it was an award-winning one?) I decided to take up a new hobby to keep my sanity intact. In the college bookshop I noted an origami calendar with one model per page, and the flipside of each day doubling as an origami paper for the next day’s design. It seemed somehow fitting to take up a paper-based hobby, and I’d always missed the whole idea of it.

So in the course of time I bought it and haven’t looked back! Many of the models are, erm, naff. However, some are very sweet and I’m learning a lot. Last week I got a book from Egham’s rather bijoux public library and finally found the famous crane design – so I made a lot of them and memorised it so at least I can say I got that far. Otherwise it would be like playing guitar and not even knowing “Knocking on Heaven’s Door”.

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I’ve started reading a new Demos report entitled “The Edgeless University”. So far, it seems a slightly breathless exhortation to embrace Web 2.0 and bring the light of learning to the masses. It makes the obvious point that universities are currently under a lot of strain and can expect more. On the other hand, the Open University has been experimenting with all kinds of distance learning experiences, including Web 2.0, for a fair old while yet, and on the other, there are already a lot of institutions that could cater for a nationwide lifelong learning culture - but then, that culture would have to exist first, and our national public media do not seem exactly hell-bent on achieving this.

Cataloguing!

Cataloguing. A word guaranteed to raise the pulse rate of any true librarian.

It’s my core responsibility at work, along with a less well-defined remit for metadata - to be honest, what with cleaning up the standards for “bibliographic metadata” (cataloguing as commonly understood) and looking at new issues like the cataloguing of e-books, I don’t have a great deal of time to address the wider questions of metadata for the institutional repository or other resources across campus.

For all that this is an age of automation, there is a hecka lot going on the metadata creation and management world. A large part of my job is editing professionally-created descriptive metadata, and keeping updated the holdings information for the books we already have. It’s a pretty interesting job as very often there are non-standard items that haven’t been picked up by the big bibliographic utilities and I have to do a little research to track them down or get the full details.

A couple of recent reports, one from RIN here in the U of K, and the other from the world-dominating US OCLC, have agreed that current practices have to change. On the one hand, cataloguing costs a lot in staff hours, and hence salary. On the other, users want more detailed and relevant data.

Creating centralised cataloguing networks and enriching our data and resource discovery environments are big projects. New ways of working and a more IT-friendly profession are going to be needed – plus, we have a lot of financial and institutional capital invested in current systems.

I would personally like very much to update my skills in terms of IT, specifically, ways of linking data from various sources into common systems, as the OCLC report describes. This is an area I think I’ll follow up for my chartership work.

The Recession and the Academic Library

Since I’ve decided to post weekly to this blog, I have been searching for a topic to get me moving.

Uppermost in my mind right now is the recession, and what it will mean for my role, my college and the sector in general.

I listen daily to Radio 4, my lifeline to the wider world, and last week’s Any Questions discussed the state of Government funding for Higher Education. It was not surprising news that there would probably be cuts.

There is talk of innovating our way out of the recession and universities’ intellectual capital is mentioned. Would those be the same universities which are themselves warned not to all even further behind the curve in the new  JISC / DEMOS report? It is an interesting irony that our universities produce gradautes who go on to “innovate” in business, while remaining fairly static creatures ourselves. Nice that many librarians are often in the front row of such things though.

A note of caution though – in the BBC article to which I linked above, I noted that “innovation” seems largely a buzzword for “increasing Web-ification” of things that we all do anyway. In fact, you’d wonder why as “information professionals we are not re-branded “innovation professionals” seeing as what we generally do is often just less flashy innovation based on pre-existing information and knowledge.

Anyhow, in a similar way to Michael Sandel’s excellent closing words in last night’s Reith Lectures, it really does seem that all this technological “innovation” often masks an avoidance of the underlying problems which are social and political.

Hopefully I can put together something a bit more structured next week!

Twittering #CILIP2

That incomprehensible title refers to a rather unique professional event I “attended” 2 weeks ago.

CILIP held a council session on the merits of using Web 2.0 techniques (such as this blog) to reach out to its membership and to librarians who are not currently members. In fact it was partly due to Web2.0-loving non-members’ enthusiasm that this session was held (at Katherine Widdows’ blog is a summary and links to the pertinent “historical” documents!).

The session was rather dificult to follow – watching a succession of hundreds tweets and blog posts appear over a couple of hours was pretty confusing and tiring (perhaps because I tried to combine it with enquiry desk duty!!!).

From my perspective, a few interesting points did come out though:

• Twitter is a format, or protocol, more than an application – it was futile trying to use the bare Twitter interface to follow the free-for-all; many, if not all participants used Tweetdeck or Twitterfall to collate and respond to the comments and links as they appeared. This made it clear to me that although we are dealing with a new piece of web-delivered software here, it is very much a question of information literacy competence that makes it effective in practice.
• CILIP is, as I have long thought, and commented during the session, already a good user of Web 2.0 technologies. The CILIP Communities forums and blog landscape are an under-used and under-valued resource for the library and information community. They are rightly somewhat protected, in my opinion. Going beyond the mistakes and misunderstandings that sparked the conversation on #CILIP2, the real problem here is a simple need to have that conversation and more of the same. There needs to be a much broader, ongoing engagement of professionals both in and outside of CILIP on these issues (which is why I set up the unofficial #CILIP2 wiki to capture some of the ideas and conversations that began there).
• The job of a professional institute is to provide continuity and coherence across a varied and changing sea of people and ideas. There’s nothing wrong with being a little cautious about change; since change has begun to happen clearly and explicitly, we can begin to move forward to a new position. I, for one, am pretty positive about the whole affair, since it reinforces the stance I took in my MSc dissertation; we need to be intelligent users and educators in the technologies available, while making the content our professional focus.

By the way, in another nice piece of news, I was awarded the Harry Galloway award for said Masters – it recognises that I achieved the highest grades in the South West for a library and information Masters!

Blogging for CILIP

I would like to extend my thanks to CILIP for selecting me as an official blogger. I hope this gives my writing a bigger audience; at the same time, I hope it spurs me to write more and better bloggage, and I welcome comments and criticism!

Now I can attempt to produce some Chartership-worthy professional reflection alongside my meandering commentary on my experience of Chartering.

Firstly, about work – I am quite happily cataloguing away now. There are a few bits and pieces that I need to pick up again; I haven’t done so much cataloguing for about 2 years now and there are DETAILS! I’ve borrowed the office copies of Essential Dewey by the great John Bowman (his dry wit and jaunty writing style make this readable) and the first volume of the Dewey Decimal Classification itself (well, I beleive in ad fontes, getting back to the source).

The occasional German language stuff I’ve been cataloguing is fun too, and often it’s almost totally original cataloguing. Wherever I’ve worked, one bonus has been to use my fluent German skills; cataloguing, making a precis, or doing ad-hoc translation duty! Perhaps my logical next step is a study tour or something in Germany? Or involvement in IFLA?

I wonder what will happen if we go further towards shelf-ready; with the current upheavals in the pulishing industry and electronic information world, I wonder a lot about the future of metadata and cataloguing work in general. As a keen advocate of information literacy and Web 2.0 in library work, I hope we as a profession will go down that route in some shape or form, but I think it will take quite a lot of work and time to get that far.

I was glad to spot a recent Facet publication picking up on Semantic Web and its links to information science - I think a concerted effort to build solid, public links with the “softer” side of IT is long overdue!

In my view, we seriously need to build our staff’s basic and core IT skills at all levels, and probably learn from U.S. practitioners about how to integrate new technologies while remaining true to our professional values – maybe also, from them, how to clearly and unashamedly express those values too!

I’d be interested to read comments and questions related to any of the issues I’ve raised in this post – and also feedback on my style and content. Thanks!

3 Weeks in

I am now 3 weeks into my new post as cataloguer at Royal Holloway. No, not the prison.

It’s been a struggle, mainly because for 4 weeks I’ve had a nasty chest infection that made me feel constantly under the weather. A few antibiotics later, I am feeling OK.

The actual work has been good; it’s similar to what I did in my previous role, just with more cataloguing.

New post about my new post!

Well, I now have a permanent post at Royal Holloway, University of London (always good to work for an institution with a comma in the name!).

I’m a Senior Information Assistant (SIA) which means I do a lot of the day-to-day work (in my case, cataloguing and enquiries) but also have some supervisory/project management responsibilities.

It’s just the kind of thing I was looking for, as it combines a lot of technical skills with library user contact, and it’s in the academic sector, which became a kind of pet interest of mine during the MSc course last year.

Speaking of which, I was told my dissertation passed muster recently so I am officially an MSc as well as an MSci ARCS now!

Although my main focus at the moment is on looking for accomodation in Egham, I have also been thinking ahead to CILIP Chartership. I’ve started reading the recommended text, “Building Your Portfolio: the CILIP Guide” by Margaret Watson, and I’ve been encouraged by its clear, simple directions and the heartening examples of people who have already passed – it makes it seem a manageable task rather than something that has to be drawn out and endlessly postponed.

I’ve already done some reflective writing on my previous roles, and I put together a sort of development plan (mainly a map of what I’ve already done), so I feel I know what I’m aiming for here.

Watson’s Chartership book reccomends Andrew Gibbons’ website and I think I will start using his learning log outline to structure my reflections in future – and even perhaps my blog postings. It follows a simple format reflected by many authors on the subject:

• What happened?
• What is its significance (what did you learn)?
• What next (how and when will you put this new knowledge into action)?

I did a lot of reflective writing as part of my dissertation for the MSc ILM last year, both by simply getting my ideas down on paper, and trying to review them and structure them. This is a chance to develop those skills further and receive recognition for them – plus, hopefully to make me a better professional.

Job hunt, credit crunch, big freeze, top threes…

Well, the job hunt seems to be rolling along now – if you measure it by the number of interviews, I’d say I’m definitely up to speed.

I have more interviews than I really know what to do with. I suppose I was a little unsure of myself to start with; not clear what kind of response I’d get. So this minor deluge is very heartening. Now I need to prioritise and aim my mental and physical efforts at the jobs I see myself enjoying and excelling at.

The credit crunch does not seem to make it more difficult for me personally to get interviews; when will we see it hit librarians / information professionals, I wonder?

The big freeze or “uksnow” as I believe it’s being dubbed, may well affect my ability to attend the interviews, though!

One strange side effect of my job hunt at the moment is that I’m putting off and re-booking interviews all over the place; I’m having difficulty prioritising them. It’s a bit of a kid-in-a-candy store effect, maybe, but even with a colour-coded spreadsheet (great info-pro skills) of all the pro and con points, I am still hard pressed to do it!

I’ve got it in a sort of hierarchy now; academic, then Government, then special libraries; various IT and uncategorisables go in the fourth place. And that’s pretty much how the interviews are shaping up too. Hmmm, blogging this has really helped me realise how well I’m doing! Thanks, blogging.

Interviews!

This is certainly going to be a season of interviews for me.

I have 3 lined up already, some of which I’m more enthusiastic about than others.

For the first, I need to produce a presentation on Information Literacy, which is good, because I’ve done that before and I just wrote a Masters dissertation on it!