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!

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.

“Introduction to TCP/IP internetworking”

In keeping with my aim to span the “information technology” and “information science” domains, I got some extra learning materials on how the Internet actually works – including Bush’s “Introduction to TCP/IP internetworking”.

I was pretty astonished at how it really fits together. Actually, it’s quite commonsensical, but since there’s just so much Internet, it becomes complex very quickly.

As part of my MSc I programmed a software interface for two electronic compass devices, which involved messing around with their binary and hexadecimal output and converting it into a familiar format for the physicist who’d have to work with it.

This was a pretty good preparation for understanding basic TCP/IP, which is all about coding, decoding, addressing and coordinating messages in binary and hex!

Again, it confirmed my intuition that IT, especially in its current networked phase, is all about the stuff that librarians have been doing for centuries, but simply more automated and more “mass produced”; it’s aggregated to itself many of the functions that used to be the “environment” that librarians worked within; publishing, metadata creation, (re)search and so forth.

Hopefully there will be a convergence at some point; I am a staunch supporter of at least basic IT being a mandatory part of qualifying for all library jobs; let alone the MSc and Chartership. And the more so after reading this book.

“The Semantic Web a guide to the future of XML, Web services, and knowledge management”

I picked up “The Semantic Web a guide to the future of XML, Web services, and knowledge management” in order to find out about a cool-sounding techie development, which a friend of mine is researching, and which also sounded interesting during the MSc.

It’s pretty surprising stuff! There is one chapter which quotes large chunks of the Dewey Decimal Classification and that pretty much set the overall impression – Semantic Web really is just what information professionals have been doing all along.

Now, I studied C++ programming as part of my undergraduate degree, so for me, that is “proper programming”. This Semantic Stuff is basically a mixture of markup languages, bibliographic and such like languages (as Elaine Svenonius describes them) and some interesting knowledge management stuff, which is basically Trivial – literally, it’s the grammar and logic parts of the Mediaeval Trivium of liberal arts (I’ve linked to a famous essay on this topic by Dorothy L. Sayers).

So, it neatly brings together all three of my professional interests; IT, the core concepts of library/information science, and the Liberal Arts tradition(s)  of education (and how these relate to librarianship).

Unfortunately, the book reads as a strange mixture of textbook, sales brochure and radical political manifesto (perhaps much like Sayers’ lecture on the Trivium!) and a quick look at the W3C website for the SWeb seems to confirm this impression; it’s a great idea but… erm…!

“Information society studies”

One of the tomes I’ve devoured most of, “Information society studies” is a wonderful book, in my opinion, because it does just what it says on the cover; tries to pin down exactly where the term “information society” comes from, and looks at the strands of the academic studies that have coalesced around it.

As well as being a fascinating study in “paleo-academiology”, it has some fairly worrying news for those who like to talk about “the” information society:

1. There are directly contradictory versions of this concept.

2. Some of the main versions are not very well based in empical evidence.

Duff does a nice job of summarising all the different academic traditions and making his own synthesis, which can seem pretty scathing of some of the main players he identifies (maybe this is par for the course in academic writing).

I’ve yet to read the section about the “information technology thesis” which is of great interest to me personally and professionally.

A refreshing reminder that the big words thrown around during our MSc lectures and in the professional press have a history and can be questioned.

“The Future of the Book in the Digital Age” – Updated!

I’ve just started reading a handful of books on professional issues to help me fruitfully utilise (or fruitilise) the time before I start my new job in January.

One of the more promising is “The Future of the Book in the Digital Age” – all about e-books, print-on-demand, digitisation and so on. A topic of great interest to me. I’ve read dozens of out-of-copyright books in plain text format from my own laptop and a free Internet connection in my local public library before now, so I’m not exactly averse to the idea.

When I re-started the Imperial College Physics Society newsletter, one of the first stories we ran was on e-ink, which has finally caught wide attention as the technology behind the Amazon Kindle. So I feel that this story is in some sense mine.

I’ll be adding to this post as I progress through the book!

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Well, I’ve gotten considerable more further, and enjoyed the book. The situation sure is complex, partner. The message seems to be, overall, that the media are just mixed in together, with an amazing variety of contexts for use determining the type of medium used. There’s no straightforward technological determinism, despite huge changes in some media, like those DeSaulles noted recently.

It seems that just as people use, for example, email, telephones, text messages, postal services, etc. for basically the same activity, so there are miriad economic, social, aesthetic etc. factors involved in book “use”. Fascinating stuff but hard to summarise in one blog post!

The bottom line for information professionals, I think, is to remain flexible. Formats and media will come and go, and there’s a need for people who are able to identify the core concepts that apply across the board (e.g. the book as an organised intellectual “work” that can be “instantiated” in various ways). The other side of the coin is knowing how much you need to know to implement the appropriate medium in the concrete working environment.

A really wide-ranging book, and actually quite fun to read, for the variety of topics and disciplines, the wide variety of English styles used and the topical subject!

Welcome to my world.

It’s almost Christmas 2008. I finished my postgraduate MSc in Information and Library Management last month, I am starting a temporary library position next month, and I’m getting ready to (hopefully) pass my driving test (first time).

Welcome to my world! You find me also in the middle of a job hunt. I am calling it a win-win situation. I have this rather good offer of an academic library post set up, and I’m looking forward to that. Plus, I have several other interviews and applications in the pipeline.

I intend to use this blog as a bit of a scratch pad for reflection on the job hunt, but also to record thoughts of books I’m reading and research into information work.

Today I finished watching a two-part video on TCP/IP, the basic building blocks of Internet communication. What struck me was how similar IT becomes to library and information work above a certain level – once you move up to the level of applications and networks, a lot of it is about databases, constructing protocols and allocating, retreiving and using the right contact addesses and so forth. Librarians’ minds work in much the same way!