025.04: Michael's blog

On book issues in these tough economic times

2009-05-28T15:46:00.000+01:00

I'm a curious soul. I like to find things out. I hope that's one of the things that makes me good at my job: I'm genuinely enthusiastic about finding information for people, whether that's the availability of the book they've come looking for or the British Standards relevant to tea*.

So being curious, I asked our LMS-wranglers to pull some stats on books classed at 322.024. This little number covers your personal financial advice books: Alvin Hall (remember him?), Martin Lewis, general hints and tips on making the most of your cash.

I had a hunch that these books might have been more popular since we entered the economic downturn/credit crunch/recession/moneygeddon. Logic - or a certain brand of logic - suggests that there ought to be significant interest, given the blanket news media coverage of the situation, and the fact that our books (and reservations) are free.

In Q1 2008, we issued 126 of these books; in Q1 this year, we lent 171. That's a 35.7% increase. Q2, Q3 and Q4 2008 showed pretty consistent business in this area, with around 120 issues per quarter followed by a dramatic upturn from the start of this year.

I'm aware how unscientific this is, and I'm not claiming it's representative of a new direction for public libraries: rather, I think it's probably indicative of how existing public library stock can meet new demands with little effort. It's also worth pointing out that I took it upon myself, one relatively quiet afternoon, to set up a credit crunch book display at the Central Library. It stayed there for a couple of months and had to be topped up regularly.

Nothing happens in isolation, but there are sometimes opportunities for us to rise to. What's your library doing to help people meet new challenges?

* This is not a genuine enquiry (or at least not one I've ever had), but BS 6325 is my absolute favourite standard ever.

On this Wirral business

2009-04-03T18:43:00.000+01:00

DCMS is intervening: this is potentially very important, but I don't need to tell you that.

The process and the outcome will both be interesting to watch. The 1964 Act is an odd thing, trumpeting the importance of "comprehensive and efficient" library services without actually defining them. That's good and bad: it gives us scope to deliver a service beyond what our forebears in '64 could have thought up, but at the same time it means we don't have a very substantial stick for beating our paymasters when cuts are threatened.

So, two pieces of advice: watch what DCMS (or the department's representative on Earth) does; and watch the way the library community - in its broadest sense - reacts.

On not having drunk the Kool-Aid

2009-04-02T19:20:00.003+01:00

I've been a children's and young people's librarian for about six months now. It's been a heck of a difference: having done mostly online stuff for the five years I've been in the library biz thus far, the change has taken some getting used to.

The main difference as far as I can see is the sheer number of folk who appear to have some say - self-appointed or otherwise - in how children's library services are run. Doing online reference work means worrying about Enquire, the MLA online ref bundles, and whatever other e-goodies your management and funds allow you to buy and use. There's freedom in this role to think about what we're doing and how to do it better, and to investigate thoroughly the ways and means of using, publicising and encouraging your colleagues to become familiar with these products. My first "OMFG I want to be a librarian" moment came during an instructional session on online databases in my first week at university, so this is an area very close to my heart.

In my current job - a secondment while the real children's librarian is doing a Clore fellowship - I'm required to follow the law as laid down by third parties. There's a proliferation of folk whose companies, charitable organisations and what have you all claim ownership of the reader development space, which seems to have subsumed children's librarianship. We're actively discouraged from thinking stuff through, and instead we rush headlong from one organisation's big idea to the next.

There are advantages to this, of course. It's getting us closer to a single, universal approach to library service delivery (note the difference between this and a single national service, which I don't think is really likely or viable) and ought to ensure more consistency in service delivery across the sector.

But I don't buy it. It's stifling, and it's kind of insulting too. Are my ideas not good enough? Librarianship is supposed to be a profession, and I think that part of that is about individual professionals - used here in the most fuzzy, open and Guardian-reading sense, rather than the elitist, MA-only one - making decisions based on things like their own judgement and their interactions with the communities they work for.

So part of this groupthink I'm required to participate in is the statement that "young people" (a term I detest: was I a "young person" in my teens? No, I was the same Michael you know now, only short and skinny) will come to the library for stuff that's not books. We'll then put them next to the books, and they'll develop an interest in reading by osmosis.

This seems to me an explicit admission that we've failed: that teenagers won't ever be interested in what we actually do, and the only way to get them to come into the library is effectively to trick them.

Maybe I'm getting old - 30 is less than seven months away now - but I think we're wasting a lot of time, money and effort on chasing a demographic that keeps running. Maybe we should let them run? If we did that, couldn't we focus our resources with greater efficacy on providing a decent level of service and, erm, some more books? Couldn't we work with the people in
that age group who actually enjoy reading and help them enjoy it even more? Maybe if we manage this, we could highlight the readers, make them visible in the library through traditional things like book groups, and start to build interest in our core service that way?

You know I'm not some hidebound traditionalist. I love a gadget as much as the next Wired reader. But I can't help feeling that this focus on tangential shiny stuff is hurting us, inhibiting our ability to do what we're actually supposed to do. If we're going to attempt to engage with any specific target demographic, I think we need to do it by planning at a local level and tailoring services to meet the needs of our communities properly and meaningfully. Buying into a package dreamt up by someone else might do that job, but we as professionals need to exercise our skills, earn our keep, and create ideas of our own.

Oh my gosh. I suck.

2009-04-02T16:21:00.003+01:00

My last post was in November. I am a terrible blogger.

But I need to get started again: blogging helps me clarify my thoughts on the stuff that's important to me. I've been reading some very good library blogs lately, and I want to get back into the fray.

So I shall. There will be more posts. They will be frequent. And they will be awesome.*

*Awesomeness is not guaranteed.

Trying to sneak back into the biblioblogosphere

2008-11-17T16:07:00.002Z

In lieu of a proper post, here's my current to-do list. Names have been obscured to protect the innocent:

Manga:
* Speak to [Schools Library Service]
* Neo sub?
* Speak to [Library Manager]
* Dig out Bookseller supplement? Check online archive?

[Well-known children's author, who is visiting us in January]:
* Copy for [Marketing person]
* Schools via [other YA librarian]/[Schools Library Service]
* Get very excited
* Float idea of working w [bookshop]?
* Mugshot from publisher for our publicity

[International organisation I'd love to work for] visit:
* Book the catering
* Firm up programme, email to [person organising visit]/[person employed by international organisation]
* Talk to [the community library which our visitors will be visiting] (but who?)

HeadSpace:
* Meeting date
* Manga stuff

Pratchett:
* Talk to [reader development librarian] re teen group's lack of interest
* One-off adult group poss leading to regular genre fiction group?

Note the following:

None of these is "post regularly to blog", although I'd really like to.
Similarly, there's no "spent most of your time at the reference desk or being timetabled on counters at the library", which is what I find myself doing most days.

I'm writing something for the Public Library Journal on People's Network Enquire. One of my regular hobby horses is how online reference is just like face-to-face ref, only without the nonverbal cues you get from someone standing in front of you. The reference transaction is pretty much the same, regardless of the medium. Imagine that, but for a couple of thousand words (or however many Liz lets me have). Only better, and cleverer.

My TDL is a .txt document which lives on my desktop and is opened when I start my computer. It's supposed to spur me into action. It sometimes works.

Youth Libraries Group rocks.

2008-09-29T21:37:00.002+01:00

I need (yes, need: it goes beyond want) to blog about the YLG conference in Lancaster a couple of weekends ago. It was my first taste of children's/young people's librarianship, and it was awesome in many and varied ways.

Children's librarians are really into what they do. It's almost scary, in fact. They know their book stock and their audience better than any other group I've come across so far, and they're genuinely passionate about what they do. It's infectious, but in a good way.

This is going to sound stupid, and there's no way around it: I've never been to another library conference which was so profoundly about books. Authors, publishers, illustrators, all talking about their books. It's abundantly clear that children's librarians know what their agenda is, and they're pretty clear about it.

There was some genuinely powerful stuff about raising boys' achievement, and the importance of reading fiction as a part of that. A lot of the emphasis on getting boys to read is/has been about non-fiction, which is more likely to encourage short attention span behaviours like dipping in and out of the Guinness Book of Records, without actually reading, understanding and enjoying a narrative thread.

The publishers were excellent. Obviously, they're there to sell me their product, but I appreciated the effort they went to all the same. I'm a noob, so I don't know the first thing about what children and teenagers read. Being told, "this book is for teenage boys, it's a bit like [insert well-known series here] and it's going to be pushed by booksellers in November" is really helpful. Plus I got tons of free proofs, all of which are sitting in two teetering piles in my living room at the moment, getting in the way of my shiny new bike (more on that later, when I've taken some pictures. Just humour me and act like you care!).

The conference fired me up. I want to start some teenage book groups, and I don't really care if they stray off-topic every now and then; I want to get more manga, so I've got a collection as good as Matt's; I want to spend more time talking to people about what they read, and what they want to read.

And last but not least, the YLG people were lovely.

Answering today's most important question

2008-09-10T14:51:00.002+01:00

This site answers the question on the media's collective lips today:

http://hasthelargehadroncolliderdestroyedtheworldyet.com/

There you go. You can have that one on me.

A Genius OPAC

2008-09-10T08:15:00.000+01:00

OPAC vendors: you probably downloaded iTunes 8 last night, as I did. You probably set up the Genius function too, like me. You were probably pretty impressed by its ability to build a playlist based on a single track: give Genius a song, and it finds more to go with it.

It's not perfect: it picked some Sugababes and Destiny's Child to go with rockin' '80s classic Summer of 69, but the playlist I listened to on the way to work this morning - based on a White Stripes track - worked really well.

Wouldn't it be good if the OPAC was like iTunes, but for books? It has a nice, clear interface; it has pretty pictures of album covers; it allows you to arrange content by genre; and you can attach any tag you like to any track.

There are some iTunesesque bits and pieces out there, but two years after Ed Vielmetti suggested Coverflow for libraries and Mike Cunningham built it, why aren't we seeing these things built into our OPACs?

Genius is not rocket science, but as you'd expect with Apple, it's the implementation that impresses: my iPhone is not the most technologically advanced device on the market, but it's a joy to use. I'd love to see a library catalogue put together as well as this.

YLG Conference

2008-09-09T13:46:00.000+01:00

I will be attending the YLG Conference in Lancaster later this week. If you read this blog, do come and say hi. I'll attempt to collect my thoughts here as the conference progresses, but I suspect I'll fail miserably.

Fish in a barrel

2008-09-08T18:53:00.000+01:00

It pains me, at least a little bit, to do this. Yet I'm doing it anyway, hypocrite that I am. If it's any consolation, I feel quite bad about it.

This Wednesday, our august professional body is running an inforum - basically an informal forum - on "Dressing for success":

Dressing for SUCCESS
* Does what you wear actually matter?
* What should you wear?
* Can you use the way you dress to communicate?
* Come and join us for a fun evening and review your approach to life from the perspective of the ‘outer you’.

As the kids say: WTF?

I'll answer those questions for you, and for only a fraction* of the inforum's £5 entrance fee:

* Yes, of course it does.
* Something reasonably smart and definitely clean. Chaps: stick to tops with collars please.
* Yes. My T-shirt with a picture of Wolverine on it communicates the fact that I like Wolverine. I could go on, but I won't: the important thing is that your smart, clean clothes say "I know how to use detergent *and* an iron. I can, therefore, be trusted to help you find what you want in the library."
* Well, there's nothing on TV on Wednesday, but I'll still decline that offer. Not least because it's in London, which is three hours and £100-odd away by train. And, really: fun?

Do we need to be told that if we're going to go around claiming to be professionals, we have to look like professionals?

It's good that CILIP is attempting to address the day-to-day concerns of its members. Seriously, honestly, it is. But if those members haven't yet figured out that they need to look halfway presentable at work, we may be in far worse shape as a profession than even the gloomiest commentators think.

* Simply put your £2 in an envelope addressed to "Michael, c/o the Biblioblogosphere" and it will reach me.

Umbrella 09: the rockingest Umbrella yet?

2008-09-01T18:31:00.003+01:00

With membership of the Public Libraries Group Committee comes great responsibility, as Peter Parker (almost) said. My responsibility is being the Group's liaison to Umbrella, the great big biennial conference for all library staff.

PLG is one of the biggest Special Interest Groups in CILIP. Possibly even the biggest, but since I can't back it up it's not a claim I'll make here. On joining the Committee, I was told that the Group works us hard, and that's certainly turning out to be the case for me.

Umbrella has nine conference tracks and six sessions. We're aiming to have something going on in each session, plus the announcement of the Public Library Building Awards shortlist. That's a lot for a noob like me to do, and it's been a learning experience. I went into the first Umbrella meeting somewhat overprepared, with 10+ suggestions for sessions from PLG Committee and your humble author. Lesson 1: don't overcook it.

Since then, I've managed to get my six suggested sessions arranged, and I've emailed them to CILIP where they'll be considered by the Director of Studies for the conference. I had scads of emails from other Groups' representatives, all stating that they normally do something with PLG. It's nice to be popular, but I've had to ditch a couple of my own ideas to maintain good relations with our fellow Special Interest Groups. Another speaker I really wanted didn't feel that the timing was appropriate for various assorted and complicated reasons: I've got my fingers crossed for them, and for some of my other ideas, in 2011.

I'm proud of the programme I've pulled together. Since Umbrella is genuinely a conference for all inhabitants of LibraryLand, I've tried to get a balance: some serious stuff; some whizz-bang technology stuff; some worthy stuff; and some fun stuff. Mostly fun stuff, to be honest.

I'll blog more details when I can. Expect a happy Michael in three weeks if they've all been accepted, and a sulky Michael otherwise.

Library services on mobile devices

2008-08-27T18:27:00.000+01:00

A month or so ago, my fiancee and I had a couple of days in Edinburgh. We were talking about our Prime Minister and how he describes himself as a "son of the manse". We knew that a manse is basically a vicarage, albeit a Church of Scotland one, but we (or more accurately I) felt the need for a proper definition.

I used my Nokia N95: it has a web browser, 3G connectivity and does a pretty good job of rendering web pages. I went via the library home page to our online subscriptions and logged into OED online. Only it wouldn't let me log in, claiming that cookies weren't enabled. The thing is, they were: I assume the phone's browser doesn't want to play nicely with the OED, but I don't know why.

Wikipedia didn't have any such reservations: it worked fine and gave me a definition I was happy with. But let's be honest: I'm never going to be content with a Wikipedia article on a subject like this. It's great for tech stuff, or anything with a cult following, because your "proper" reference tomes won't cover that kind of topic in as much (rabid, scarily-detailed) depth. And Wikipedia articles are often pretty well-referenced, pointing to authoritative sources.

I got myself an iPhone a few weeks ago, and it's been a joy to use. Look at what it does with the OED:

Perfect. No problems logging in, and the iPhone's zoom function embiggens the text enough to let me read it without squinting.

It renders the OPAC pretty well too: that came in very handy on a book-buying excursion last week. Being able to show it to enthusiastic teenagers and say, "look, we've got 16 copies of that already" saved us buying a few duplicates.

The moral of this story, if there is one, is this: the paid-for subscriptions we push to our users need to better than the free alternatives in a number of ways.

Findability - going through half a dozen library web pages is no good. Going straight to Google is easy.
Access control - Wikipedia doesn't ask me for my library card number. Nor does it require the first three letters of my local authority's name as a prefix.
Interoperability - I've had trouble with the OED on Firefox at home, plus there are the issues with the N95 above. Why? It's unfeasible to test a product on every feasible piece of hardware, but it makes a great deal of sense to write code which conforms to standards.

Personally, I'd love to see MLA renegotiate the deal a large number of us take up. Would the publishers consider dropping the login rigmarole in exchange for, say, 90-odd of the 147 English library authorities signing up to the MLA package?

Free audio book downloads from NYR 08

2008-08-04T09:25:00.004+01:00

I'm really getting into the National Year of Reading, and my new role as a children's and young people's librarian will mean I'm more involved with it.

You too can share the NYR love this week, as it's Free Downloads Week: download an audiobook every day this week. Titles swap over at 12 noon, so you've still got a couple of hours to grab Sunday's first title, Francesca Simon's Horrid Henry's Stinkbomb. Tomorrow features some Morse, read be Kevin Whately. Other highlights include Anthony Horowitz's Stormbreaker on Wednesday, and some comedy highlights on Friday:

As a special Friday treat, we’ve got a range of free comedy downloads including
clips from The Mighty Boosh, Flight of the Conchords and Hitchhiker's Guide to
the Galaxy.

The only problem with that is I'll start wanting to be Vince Noir again. Oh well. Enjoy the downloads, and spread the word.

I am so going to finish my chartership

2008-07-31T20:33:00.002+01:00

Evidence-a-thon '08 has begun:

I'm assembling evidence for my chartership portfolio. The cat is neither evidence nor as helpful as he tries to be. Just as soon as I can summon the energy, I'll get my portfolio assembled and submitted. Then I will ~~have the most letters after my name~~ truly be able to demonstrate my commitment to the profession.

What Michael's been up to

2008-07-28T13:23:00.001+01:00

So it's been ages since I last posted anything. Life trumps blogging, as they say.

I have been: trying to sort out PLG's sessions for Umbrella; writing something about leadership; enjoying some days away in London and Edinburgh; attending PLG committee in London; looking at library websites and seeing how deficient ours is in comparison to some of them; buying (and playing with) an iPhone 3G; reading Batman graphic novels and then watching Dark Knight at the IMAX; writing reviews for our new Intranet book review thingy...

I applied for an SCL NW-funded place at PLA in October this year, which I'm rather pleased to have won: I'll be a full residential delegate, and I'm looking forward to it. PLA is, strictly speaking, for Chief Librarians and lead Members: there's a lot for a normal librarian like me to learn from those people. It's in Liverpool, where I went yesterday entirely coincidentally, and the programme looks varied, serious, and engaging.

I applied for a job as well: one of my colleagues has won a Clore Fellowship, so her job will be vacant when she goes off to do that in September. My interview is tomorrow, so I could be - sharp intake of breath - a children's and young people's librarian by the time I write my next post. Think of the damage I could do with that remit! More graphic novels in the library, a Wii with a big LCD TV...

David Murray (London Borough of Newham): Staff roles and qualifications

2008-06-25T16:26:00.002+01:00

10 libraries in Newham
Issues going up
Services = lots and innovative
Just do it
4th most deprived borough in the country, but one of the most successful in London
Good enough? No
Incremental change? No. No time!
Why change? Need to deliver corporate priorities, measure impacts, be *seen* to make an impact
Change to:
- New language (e.g. community cohesion)
- Core service specs
- Services that shift, flex, respond
- Corporate service with strong political support and readily understood
- No separate library staff/buildings/service - all housed in a generic service
- No books on shelves? No shelves? Tables with books piled up by subject
- Dewey is useless
- New enquiry service - no desks
- More surgeries for visiting services
Staff skills:
- Passion, people-centred, share core values (smile, say "hello," say "can I help you?")
- Core product knowledge
- Books
- People
- Services
- Place
- Know *why* what you do matters
- Know your impact
- Know your managers' agendas
- Know their managers' agendas too
- Understanding why Members matter
- Understanding of LSP
- Understanding of LAA
- Understanding of CAA
- Understanding of cohesion
Brave new (Newham) world: not for everybody
Find your own way

You probably don't get much of a sense of it from my notes, but this was a presentation clearly designed to shock. Dewey is useless! We won't have our books on shelves! We won't even have shelves!

That's a shame, because I think it turned a lot of people off David's message: define and deliver a service fir for your users. There's not much in the pipeline for Newham, as far as I can tell, that's entirely new: elements of David's plan have been seen before, and there are good examples out there.

And personally, I'm getting heartily tired of this "just do it" thing. It was fine in Lynne Brindley's keynote at Umbrella last year, but it's rapidly become the cliché of choice. Too many people seem to be urging each other to "just do it" rather than actually doing it.

Dr James Dearnley (DIS, Lougborough University): Future roles of librarianship

2008-06-25T10:33:00.002+01:00

Cleveland (Ohio) library in Second Life - good design, content tends toward exhibition
Info Island comparatively empty
Alliance Public Library in SL - rooms devoted to different collections
Cleveland - buildings designed to reflect purpose/content
Avondale library has doors - why?
Talis Cybrary City - free space for a year for libraries
Capacity/maintenance/hardware issues for SL
SL-based duplication of web services not necessarily the way to go
High churn rate of 60-85%
Gartner research (taken with a pinch of salt) - we're likely to become disillusioned with SL soon
Is SL a technology without an application?
Gartner's hype cycle
DIS streams media into SL
Two-tier - paid customers get better treatment in SL
User base tends more toward "mature" than teenaged?

This was, erm, different. I got the impression that a lot of the audience didn't know Second Life, and there wasn't really any attempt to explain what it is or why we should care. The message, I think, is that we should consider online environments *like* SL and what they might evolve into, and we should think seriously about using them as service delivery environments.

Pete Gascoigne (Wigan Leisure and Culture Trust): Libraries in trust - the inside view

2008-06-25T10:16:00.003+01:00

Defining public value - looks at equity in service delivery, legitimacy, efficiency, capability, what customers *really* want, national and regional studies
Wigan's trust established in 2003. Includes catering and grounds maintenance trading companies
Trust provides all leisure and cultural services in the borough
Turnover about £30m
Council retains assets: Trust acts as tenant, operator and strategic adviser
NNDR on buildings £600k
Reason: need to improve services
50th most-deprived borough - long-term ill health/incapacity issues
Borough has ca 305k citizens
Efficiency of delivery is key
Meeting more performance benchmarks since moving to Trust
Customer satisfaction improved
13% increase in visits/14% increase in opening hours over last five years
Restructured to improve management capability
Project development officer brings in £100k p/a above his salary
Rebranding and refurbs - lots of investment
Consultation on community needs when developing vision for service
Used a market research company to talk to non-users
Inform, consult, involve, devolve
Two "outreach" libraries run by the community

I'm still a little unclear about why Trust status, specifically, allowed Wigan to do what they've done. Yes, there were some fundamental changes made to the structure of the service etc, but could they still have been made under the council's umbrella? Still, their story is a good one: it's about talking to customers and reengineering the service to fit their needs.

John Hicks (Kentwood Associates): One way or another - options for public library governance

2008-06-25T09:57:00.003+01:00

Yes, I know the BMLG/PLG conference is well and truly over, but I haven't yet got around to writing up my notes. Between going to work and playing GTA IV, I haven't had a lot of spare time...

Disconnect between DCMS (policy) and DCLG (funding)
1964 Act unenforceable (according to Hodge)
DCMS doesn't have a history of intervening
PLSSs replaced by voluntary benchmark - very little value
Do you think DCMS cares what happens to public libraries?
1997: 97 PL authorities. 2008: 149+
Ongoing cuts in staffing, book funds, building maintenance
Political support for PLs variable across the country
Libraries now lost in large council departments
Do you think public libraries have a stable and long term future in local government?
Drivers for change:
- Local Authority budgets
- Councils are asset rich, cash poor
- Government objective to drive up standards through competition
- Government's desire for a mixed supplier market (ODPM's Library Markets paper in '07)
Options for governance
- By the council, as now (e.g. Manchester)
- In partnership with other library services to provide joint services (e.g. backup services, shared IT)
- by another library service providing the whole service (savings - no need to duplicate senior management; also economies of scale)
- by a separate library trust (tried in north east; had to bring it back in-house. Not much extra money available other than a few tax breaks)
- By placing the library service in a trust with other services (e.g. Wigan, Glasgow, Luton)
- By an existing trust (e.g. CIP - formerly of Hounslow, looking at other London boroughs)
- By the private sector (16 companies "ready" to step into the market)
Is there a market? Yes - from 01/07/08, the first public library service in the UK will be outsourced (Hounslow) to a consortium led by John Laing Integrated Services via a not-for-profit company. John Hocks will be chair. Tribal Information Management will lead on library and cultural services
Horizon scan:
- Some in-house council-run
- Some trusts
- Increasing outsourcing to private sector. Milton Keynes and 12 other services "interested" - mainly London boroughs and small unitaries
- Fewer services?
- Increasing integration
Still a need for professionally-qualified librarians - but will they be working behind the scenes or spending all day on the enquiry desk?
The sky will not fall in
This is a "people" service. It's for people, provided by people. You are important - if this is not recognised within your service, you're in the wrong service.

How to use the web

2008-06-19T12:32:00.002+01:00

Charles Arthur wrote on the Guardian tech blog about a new code for civil servants interacting on the web:

Principles for participation online
1. Be credible
Be accurate, fair, thorough and transparent.
2. Be consistent
Encourage constructive criticism and deliberation. Be cordial, honest and professional at all times.
3. Be responsive
When you gain insight, share it where appropriate.
4. Be integrated
Wherever possible, align online participation with other offline communications.
5. Be a civil servant
Remember that you are an ambassador for your organisation. Wherever possible, disclose your position as a representative of your department or agency.

Change that last one to "Be a librarian" and you've got a nice little set of guidelines...

Things they don't teach you at library school no. 5,017

2008-06-18T07:56:00.000+01:00

Sometimes, you have to take the reference desk printer apart in order to make it work:

I don't know when I became the person to call when the printer doesn't work. Maybe it's something to do with being young and male, or maybe it's my lack of fear - if I lose a finger inside a printer or copier, it'll grow back. Won't it?

BMLG/PLG day one

2008-06-13T23:34:00.002+01:00

It's been a good day. Challenging yet familiar, in the right combination, and certainly enough to get me thinking seriously about a lot of the issues raised by the speakers.

Here's a photo, because I haven't posted any lately and my blog looks kind of dull:

Did that help? I feel vaguely, yet simultaneously quite thoroughly, threatened.

Tom Forrest: Leadership for modern public libraries

2008-06-13T23:13:00.003+01:00

Everyone in this room is a library leader
Late '90s: where are tomorrow's library leaders?
Leadership development was patchy
Framework brought an agenda and money for a strategic intervention which became Leading Modern Public Libraries
Three tiers: heads of service; senior managers; future leaders
Most important lesson: confidence, confidence, confidence
Self-confidence *and* confidence in the value of what we do (cf the problem of all the "what are we here for?" stuff)
Rosabeth Moss Kanter: "The fundamental task of leaders is to develop confidence in advance of victory"
Reader dev strong - information less so, especially our values/ethics around it
Finding confidence:
Purpose and values
Change behaviour to reflect them
Foster openness
Demonstrate respect
Turnaround principles:
Believe in people and their power to make a difference
Direct the energy taken up in negativity into positive actions
Make initiative possible and desirable
Start with small wins - taste success
New generation of leaders doesn't want/need to walk the same paths that current leaders *think* they should walk
Tying future leaders down is not the answer
Cut the crap: make it happen! (c.f. Greg Dyke)

Now, I like Tom. A lot. I'm a veteran of his Future Leaders program, and that led to me going with him to Bulgaria to talk about what we do in English* public libraries. A lot of this stuff is familiar to me, but that doesn't diminish its impact: he means it. We should all mean it too. The sad truth is that, too often, tools like Future Leaders are treated as no more than a box-ticking exercise. I certainly don't feel like I've been pushed, or given opportunities, appropriate to what I (and the other participants) started learning to do with Tom. This is the biggest leadership problem we have, imho: the current leaders of the profession are not sharing those opportunities out.

Tom also touched on his work with reader development, and how he feels he made a significant contribution to getting it on UK libraries' collective map. He mentioned the lack of an analogue for information, the reference function. That's a thought worth returning to at a later date.

Lyn Brown MP: A political perspective

2008-06-13T18:24:00.003+01:00

Libraries enjoy broad cross-party support. Always have
Range of skills needed in addition to library qualifications
We must stay relevant
If they are to survive, public libraries need to be part of the bigger picture - sometimes participating, sometimes leading
Good library authorities should ensure that devolved assets [community-run libraries] remain strong and relevant
Community libraries need hard outcomes
Need locally-defined outcome targets
Libraries with clear vision and proactive staff can deliver a good service, irrespective of their position within the council's structure
MLA has not, to date, been configured to provide a library leadership role
Need for a national library leadership agency(?)
Wolverhampton - mapped socioeconomic characteristics of people living within a one-mile radius of libraries
Need a coherent, non-knee-jerk, evidence-based response to challenging green and white papers

Fewer notes here, but Lyn Brown was in no way any less thought-provoking than Roy Clare - she knows her stuff and is not afraid to ask difficult questions of the profession. Some challenging stuff here, and you can see a theme emerging: we need evidence!

Roy Clare (MLA): Public Libraries - Towards 2020

2008-06-13T18:08:00.003+01:00

Be proactive, not reactive
Consumers/customers have views
How confident are we that the data we have on/from our customers is good enough to run a service?
timeliness
content
granularity
Insist on evidence, then *use* it
Consultation *and* engagement with customers
Success is not about book issues - there are other things that should be celebrated
Focus on the programmes we know work
e.g. people who borrow books about health feel better afterwards
MLA in its new guise is very data-focussed. Roy needs our help to make it work
People like stories *as well as* data - helps with advocacy
Regeneration in the cultural sector comes too often after "core" local government service areas
Living Places - about bringing community spirit and "life" to developments which would otherwise only receive new infrastructure
Blackpool - new library planned(?) in Sainsbury's - why not in nearby FE college?
Local Authority Chief Executives have two concerns - local economy and social divide. We have tools to address both
Roy knows we *need* to close some public libraries and that we can improve services by doing so. MLA can be an independent third party in these discussions and demonstrate evidence in support
Dudley - closing five libraries but increasing opening hours by 75 hour *net* across the authority
Libraries should be offering seven-day service and 24hrs where appropriate
We should not be overly precious out the qualifications needed to run a library service
53% of the adult population has a library card. What about the other 47%? We need to get to understand them
JANET into public libraries! Depends on content - some JISC content not appropriate - and OfCom

I know what you're thinking: it looks like I took a lot of notes. I needed to - Roy Clare has a lot to say, and invites a lot of participation. The stuff about closing libraries to improve service seems counterintuitive if it's approached naively, but the point is that redistribution of resources - your book fund, staff time, maintenance budget and what have you - can be more effective than maintaining a struggling, underused library indefinitely because it's always been there. Interesting stuff.

It's conference time!

2008-06-13T18:03:00.002+01:00

I'm at the BMLG/PLG Conference in Bedfordshire. I'm on a discussion panel about libraries and whatnot on Sunday, but until then I'm going to do some of those obligatory-but-annoying blog posts of the notes I make during conference sessions.

Fortunately for you, I'm not much of a note-taker...

My story. Let me tell it to you.

2008-06-03T20:31:00.001+01:00

Since I started working in public libraries four years ago (almost to the day - June 14th 2004 was my first day), I've been doing pretty much the same thing: online stuff.

I started with some vague responsibility for the People's Network, which became the management of bookmarks on the public (and staff) PCs, then metamorphosed into the creation of an intranet page. Then came Signpost, followed by Explore Online, while I maintained the list of usernames and passwords for our online subscriptions. I was involved in a corporate electronic records management project, and I've made contributions to the development of a new OPAC.

So, like I said: online stuff. And lots of it.

When I'm not doing this stuff I work at the reference desk or in a roving Customer Support capacity (more on that another time. Possibly.), playing at being a librarian.

But I've never done any children's stuff. At least, not until this afternoon...

A group of us traipsed over to Castle Hill to learn about storytelling. Each of us had to take a book to practice with, and we discussed various issues:

It's OK to ad-lib. You can point out how sad the cat's face is, or where the alligator's footprints are.
Don't worry about parents in the audience. They won't think you're stupid. They're probably having a really good time.
Props - puppets, telescopes, teddy bears dressed as pirates - are cool.
Don't ignore the girl in the audience with her hand in the air. Maybe she's about to throw up. On the rest of the audience. Yuck.
The ruder the better, especially for older kids.
Have fun. That's what it's all about. If you have fun, so will everyone else in the room.

I'll get to put this theory into practice on June 19th at Washacre Family Centre. I won't be flying solo - I'll be with another, experienced colleague - and I'm looking forward to it. I've never done anything like it before, and at the moment, I'm all about trying new things. I'd like to have a go at as broad a spectrum of library things as possible.

The book I took was Flabby Tabby. It's a little close to home - my 7kg cat had an operation a few weeks ago (here's his somewhat gruesome scar, now pretty much faded) - but I like the story, and I hope that comes across when I read it in front of a real audience in a couple of weeks' time. I'll let you know how I get on.

On reading groups

2008-05-12T07:40:00.001+01:00

I don't know how your library's reading groups work, but ours are led by librarians. They meet every four weeks, and everyone turns up having read the same book. We also have reading circles, which have more of a free-for-all vibe.

There's one school of thought that says staff should leave RGs to get on with it themselves. Our reasoning is that it gives staff an opportunity - guaranteed - to talk to library users about what they've been reading, what they'd like to read, and how we can improve our stock and service. It works reasonably well, offering a decent return on the hour and a half we put into each session.

I'm running a reading group this evening, which is my first "proper" one. I've run the graphic novel group, but that's relatively easy: I just need to get them talking about Marvel Zombies and I'm away. Tonight's group will be discussing Memoirs of a Geisha. This is doubly problematic for me: not only is it not the sort of thing I'd normally read, but I haven't read it at all as all of our copies have been given out to the group.

Darn.

It's a bit like being an English lit undergrad again: I'll have to wing it, having not read the set text. The Monday group is apparently quite chatty, so it should be fine...

Kitchen classification

2008-04-28T11:28:00.003+01:00

Having seen this in G2 last week, I knew I had to visit Kendals when I was in Manchester on Saturday. Here's the result:

Yes, my chopping boards are indexed. £40 well spent (or so I keep telling myself), although hacking up a shoulder of lamb on an A4-sized board was a little tricky. Note how my kitchen is basically incredibly shabby, but with a liberal sprinkling of Nice Things.

Next unnecessary purchase: an Eee. Possibly this Friday, because I'm incredibly jealous right now. I've already sold the idea to my girlfriend, so it's all good.

Full of BS

2008-04-22T15:32:00.000+01:00

We're having a let's-promote-our-online-resources day on Thursday. You know the drill: we pay for all of this stuff, but it doesn't get used particularly well, so maybe if we tell people about it we'll see usage go up...

We used AviScreen Portable to grab five-minute videos of a few of our online subs: OED, DNB, Encyclopaedia Britannica and British Standards. They all follow the same format: a couple of searches, a couple of results lists, a couple of pauses while we look at the kind of content these things can offer us.

The final resource above gives us the title of today's post, and my new favourite British Standard: BS 6325. It's a glossary of terms relating to black tea.

Best. Standard. Ever.

So now I know that I can, technically, describe my tea as stylish ("describes the leaf of the tea which has been well manufactured and is of superior appearance") or pre-autumnal ("describes a desirable taste found in early autumnal teas from north India"). We're drinking teapigs tea at home, which is unsustainably pricey, but rather lovely. Their English Breakfast is at once pointy and juicy, to use my newly-acquired vocabulary.

We'll have these demos running on a loop on a projector in the reference library (aka In-Depth). We'll be able to interrupt the loop to show folk how to do specific things, or to leave a particular record on view.

We'll also stick the videos on the intranet at some point, as they'll be useful for staff training. This little endeavour has inspired me to put together a batch of these videos on different topics: five-second masterpieces on logging into FAME, searching Grove Art, finding books on the OPAC, or anything else that comes up. Great fun, all free, and potentially very useful.

Almost-hilarious National Year of Reading promo

2008-04-15T10:07:00.002+01:00

We have a big stack of these in our office:

"50 limp copies per parcel" - could this be a comment on the way the National Year of Reading is shaping up?

On one's value within an organisation

2008-04-11T10:23:00.002+01:00

Picture the scene: your Chief Librarian tells you she needs you to deliver a Big Lottery bid to Birmingham on Monday, instead of coming to work and doing what you would normally be doing on a Monday (reference and being sleepy, in my case).

There are two interpretations:

I'm the best person for the job. I'm trustworthy, a safe pair of hands, I took the original bid myself, and I can team up with the folks at Talis after I'm done playing courier, so we can discuss the new OPAC they're developing.
I'm so freaking worthless, I might as well clear off to Birmingham for the day. I wouldn't be doing anything useful at work, so I'm expendable.

I've chosen to believe Option 1. I keep telling myself it's the right choice...

Spirals and whatnot

2008-04-07T12:22:00.004+01:00

Welcome to yet another typical half-formed ramble!

This morning's Team Meeting (a fortnightly event) raised an interesting issue imo: the library is getting more involved in promoting other Council departments' services, as part of a national drive to make local authority officers work together more. We've been getting more involved for the last few years, and there's a new push within the Council for us to do more of it. This is all (in theory) reciprocal, so we should see our "core offer" being promoted by other departments as well, where appropriate.

As we've put more effort (anecdotally) into this sort of work, we've seen book issues declining in public libraries.

Now, I don't agree that book issues are an adequate measure of a library's performance. Much of what a library does is about providing space - physical and mental - for people to explore ideas. Book issues don't cover the guy who's learning about an ancestor using the DNB or the woman who's trying to use Halsbury's statutes to understand her legal predicament. But, basically, it's about the only measure anyone takes any notice of.

So if book issues are spiralling, is there a correlation with the effort we've redirected elsewhere? If we thook that same time we use to cross-promote other services and actually spent it talking to our users, working on our collections and promoting our reference (and other) services, what would happen?

Maybe too much of our time is spent fostering these relationships rather than actually being librarians. Personally, I'm surprised I'm having these thoughts. It seems a bit old-fashioned, I suppose.

Change is hard, and we're in the middle of a big change within the profession. It's represented in every library you visit: the tension between the old and the new; the 1.0 and the 2.0. I've considered myself to be part of the second camp - "let's try new stuff!" - but there's a genuine need for careful consideration, and more of it than we're able to take.

The two worst reasons for change, or for avoiding it, are "We've always done it this way" and "Because we can". Let's not rush headlong into propping up other people's agendas. Let's get our own house in order first.

Michael's two laws of library science

2008-03-20T11:35:00.004Z

I'm on Enquire this morning, doing online reference as part of the People's Network cooperative. I answered a question and received this feedback:

This is a great service that I didn't know existed. Michael was courteous and professional and also helpful in answering my question. I am very pleased with this service.

[Blushes]

Feedback is rare on Enquire: each reference transaction ends with a survey for the user, but only about 6% actually get filled in. Of the 116 questions I've answered in the last couple of years, I've had 12 surveys back. That's 10.3%. So if I'm beating the average, I must be doing something right.

I'd like to share the two guiding principles I bring to the reference desk, whether it's made of chipboard and veneer, or silicon and pixels:

Be excellent to each other
Party on, dudes

Abe Lincoln's words ring as true today as they did in 1989.

But seriously, I believe quite firmly that half of the battle in modern librarianship is in building relationships on a positive footing. Maybe this wasn't necessary back in the day: the reference library as a physical entity contained everything that could be known on a subject. People had no other options. These days, of course, "everyone" assumes that Google will give them the answer. Immediately. For free. We need to know not just our physical collections, but also the online resources we subscribe to, *and* the pockets of quality information available for free on the Internets.

If we're competing with multiple destinations, and calling on more and diverse sources, it's going to be a struggle. We don't have long to convince people that we're the better option, so that relationship has to be built very quickly. Being excellent to our users helps, as does partying on - or at least chatting a bit - where appropriate. Exercising a little judgement is not difficult.

If this is the case for face-to-face reference, it goes double for the online environment. If you can't see your patron, you won't pick up on their body language, so you need to try extra hard to win them over. They can't see you checking the OED or the road atlas by your desk, so you need to tell them what you're up to. The conversation needs to keep going, to fill in those holes.

Now, if I can beat Wayne's World into a metaphor for librarianship, my work here is done.

No human being would stack books like this

2008-03-19T15:05:00.002Z

Apparently, a library in Australia has called in a spiritual adviser, or Ghostbuster, in order to exorcise a library. Or maybe just a toilet in a library.

Read the article, and read the comments. What does this tell us about how interested people are in public libraries?

A customer service experience

2008-03-19T12:07:00.003Z

One of the biggest problems in LibraryLand is our collective tendency toward introspection. Generally - and I know *all* sweeping generalisations are wrong - we don't look beyond the walls of the library for ideas. This means that we miss a lot of opportunities to learn how other organisations respond to their customers, and how relationships can remain positive in spite of the diffuculties that will, inevitably, aries.

I've been given a gift in this respect: my Xbox 360 has been cursed by the Red Ring of Death.

Now, this is a known problem. The Internets tell me that circa 30% of all 360s have shown this fault, which is apparently down to poor air circulation around the console. The irony here, of course, is that I had been feeling quite smug about how I'd survived for over a year without the RRoD. I was confident that, since I keep my 360 on an open shelf with plenty of space around it, it wouldn't overheat. Oh, how wrong and foolish I was...

We know that 360s go wrong, and so does Microsoft. They have a procedure in place, whereby they send UPS to pick up your console and send it for repair. This costs the end user nothing, other than the time it takes to fill in a form, print out a mailing label, and call the courier. Yes, it took MS a while to accept responsibility for these faults, but they did it in the end.

So why don't we adopt a similar approach? We know that some of our systems are broken. We have freestanding bins for book returns - dump your books on the way in, and we'll return them using the LMS. But we know that, sometimes, we don't manage to scan all of the books in the bin. When you're scanning a large batch - maybe 50-odd - you'll probably miss a couple. Sometimes, the LMS hangs for a few seconds. If this happens, you might scan the next couple of titles in good faith, assuming that it's still working, when in fact it's taking a breather.

I know this happens because it's happened to me. I drop my books and DVDs in the return bin, partly because I'm lazy, and partly because I like to make sure that emptying the things isn't an entirely futile experience: surely it's better if there are some books in the box? On at least three occasions, my returned items have gone overdue. This is very easy for me to fix, but for your average library user (without access to the back end of the LMS) it's harder.

So why can't we [sharp intake of breath] be a little bit more like MS? Why can't we accept that some things don't always work as we intend them to, and give our users a bit of slack? Why do we treat every instance of this as a single, isolated event, complete with interrogation of the library user and the involvement of managers?

I think we should recognise our shortcomings and prepare for them. Having a process like the one Microsoft has instituted would give staff more confidence in dealing with these situations, would leave our users happier, and would probably save time. Does your library do what MS does, or does it assume guilt/mistake/worse on the part of your users by default?

Oh, and don't worry about me: I've got a PS2, a PS3 and a Wii as well as the 360. I can still get my game on while Bill's people fix up my Xbox.

And finally: lessons learned in Bulgaria

2008-03-11T14:17:00.004Z

The visits to Bulgarian libraries were great, and they helped give me a bit of context for the real reason we were there: to talk to Bulgarian library directors about how we do things. Seeing a couple of libraries - even if they were unrepresentative of the whole picture - meant that we had some common ground.

There were 19 delegates from all over the country, including our friend Mr Belchev from Sofia. I'd never spoken formally to as large a group of chief librarians, let alone a group that (literally) didn't speak my language. We had simultaneous translation, so it was like being at the UN: everyone had earpieces and microphones.

I found the first day very challenging. I was nervous - I *look* nervous most of the time, but that's just a function of the pale skin and dark eyes, and I'm usually a Zen master - and as a confirmed introvert, it was a hard thing to do. Tom (who invited me along in the first place) knew this, but he also knew that I'm keen to push myself, and see how far I can actually go. I felt much more comfortable after the first day, mostly because I actually managed to get some sleep. I think I got better at presenting as we went on, but I'm teaming up with Tom for a full post-mortem next month.

Here's the empty conference room, featuring Kate (kick-ass chief librarian from Bristol) and Tom (world's greatest library consultant):

The group was incredibly formal at first, which probably didn't help. It may have been the translation, or the way that Bulgarian grammar forces sentences to be constructed (the translators told us that Bulgarian sentences are 20-30% longer than English), but everybody seemed set on a very rigid structure. We were markedly informal, and thankfully this seemed to catch on on the second day. My favourite moment was after a group exercise, when the library director from Plovdiv cracked a joke. After that, things were much less tense.

So I learned a fair amount about me, and how I handle situations like this. If I want to progress my career - and I do - I've got to get used to this stuff.

The most valuable lesson is that libraries everywhere do the same things. There was a programme in one municipality that did the same thing as our own Bookstart. They're all trying to keep up with technological advances, just as we are, and everyone looks to America to see what the next big library innovation will be.

But what's missing in Bulgaria is some connection between the individual municipal library services. There are 27 library directors. What's stopping them getting together avery few months, as a Society of Library Directors? I know SCL gets a lot of flak from certain quarters, but it's undeniably a great forum for bragging about what you've achieved and pinching ideas from other people.

I was surprised by what we have in common. Librarians in both countries are struggling to (re)define their context in the face of massive technological and societal change. As I've said, there's a huge amount of potential there: the Chitalishte have the right locations, but the municipal libraries have the resources. I'd lke to see a model that combines the best aspects of each type of library, and I'd like to see it work here in the UK.

A tale of two libraries, part two: Sofia Municipal Library

2008-03-11T10:14:00.003Z

Old Communist Party building + shoehorned-in library = this:

We met the Library Director, Georgi Belchev, in his office upstairs. He gave us the facts and figures - 1,000,000 items in stock, three (yes, three) branches - and described the 15 departments in the Municipal Library.

We know already that there are 3,000-odd Chitalishte libraries in the country, but there are only 27 Municipal library services. These are like our own public libraries, in that they're attached to and funded by local government. They provide reference and lending services (as do the Chitalishte libraries), and maybe 50% of them provide public internet access. But in Sofia, a city of 2,000,000 people, there are only three local government-funded libraries. This is the capital, and as such it's not representative of the norm, but I certainly expected a larger number.

You've already seen how fond they are of card catalogues... And those 15 departments? Actually, they're just rooms. As in, the art department is a small room full of art books. As it's a repurposed office building rather than somewhere designed as a library, the collections have to fit the space. We have a similar problem with our older purpose-built libraries: we don't use them they way they were designed to be used in, say, the 1930s. We have to compromise on the service we deliver because of the physical space available to us. I don't need to tell you the impact I think online service deliver can have in this area, but I've yet to see it make any real difference.

So, back to the shoddy photojournalism. This is part of the adult non-fiction area:

The traditional layout, furniture and decor have gone from being out of date to charmingly retro. There was a very traditional feel to the whole place, and it probably suffers from having been a Party building in the past. The reading room is very trad, with its single desks:

I really, really hate plants in libraries. There were lots in Sofia. What does it say above the door: library (in this case it says Stolichna Biblioteka) or garden centre? You have no idea how pleased I was when we got rid of the 20-year-old fake plants from the mezzanine in the Central Library a couple of weeks ago. Plants are bad, but fake plants are worse!

This is, I think, the type of library that many commentators on the position of public libraries in the UK would like to see. But there's a problem: we were there between 11am and 1pm, and how many library users have you seen in my photos? A monument to the accumulated knowledge of society is a fine ideal, but it's kind of dull and pointless.

Digression: card catalogues a-go-go!

2008-03-10T18:37:00.003Z

Them Bulgarians love their card catalogues...

Svetlina Chitalishte Library:

Sofia Municipal Library:

And another, this time with a plant and some insouciant stacking:

A blurry action shot:

A corridor o' catalogues:

And then I felt I'd taken enough photos of card catalogues. I'm strangely attracted to them, mostly because I've never used one. The children's library in Barton* had a ring binder instead of a card catalogue, and Goxhill library is small enough to not need one. Hull University's Brynmor Jones Library has been computerised since way back in the day, and they didn't hang onto the card catalogue as a relic of a bygone era, as many universities have. Bradford Uni's JB Priestley Library was (and is) similarly advanced. I think I encountered a card catalogue somewhere at Sheffield, but I wasn't compelled to use it: where they still exist in the UK, they tend to be snapshots of the collection in, say, 1973, before their first LMS (or ILS for North Americans) was implemented.

The thing is, I asked one of the Bulgarian librarians if her OPAC contained all of the records in the card catalogue. Yes, she said, it does. I asked if this included the old books, from maybe 30 years ago or more. No, she said, they're not in the catalogue. I bet most of them don't exist any more.

* How old is this photo? That Sierra looks newish, and there's been a Police station next to the library for at least a couple of years.

A tale of two libraries, part one: Svetlina Chitalishte Library

2008-03-10T12:03:00.009Z

This was my first visit to a former Communist country. Some people might argue that living in Sheffield for a year (which I did in 2003-4) counts, but Bulgaria has serious post-Communist issues. Then again, they've been coping with all sorts for centuries.

Under Ottoman rule in the 1850s, there was a revival in Bulgarian culture. Wealthy locals gave land and buildings to the newly-formed community clubs - chitalishta - allowing them to promote traditional activities, literature, and so on. Each chitalishte is independent, and is run by a local board. Most of them established public libraries, and they continue to exist today. There are about 3,000 chitalishte libraries. The country's population is about 7 million, so there's a feeling that they're possibly overserved.

We went to Svetlina Chitalishte in Sofia:

A few people have pointed out the similarities between Bulgaria's long-established system, and the current desire to move toward double devolution - shifting power from central government to local government, and from local government to communities - in the UK. The chitalishta are both in and of the community. We visited a nursery class (where very small children were learning English, as they used to learn Russian and German); there were some people using the gym; and there were posters for ballet, and traditional Bulgarian dance sessions. There's a lot going on in these places, but Svetlina Chitalishte is apparently one of the better examples.

The library is on the first floor, and it starts off well:

I practised my Cyrillic alphabet a little before the trip, so I recognise "biblioteka" when I see it!

All in all, the place was a little sad. Chipped paint, shabby furniture, some very old books... But there was a genuine sense of purpose from the staff. The library itself is a decent size, comparable to a good branch library. There is an OPAC, issue and discharge is automated, and staff have access to a union catalogue covering 300-odd chitalishte libraries using the same software vendor.

I was standing next to the magazine display when I took this picture (and I learned the Bulgarian for Ben Affleck from said magazines). The stock on the right is non-fiction, and there is a separate room for art and literature reference materials behind the camera and to the right. The room at the far end, past the card catalogue, was described as the special collections. It looks more like a reserve collection - old books in poor repair, but still with some utility. For a branch library, this collection seemed very broad: where our community profiling would lead us to stock, say, fiction and popular non-fiction, there were some very serious titles here.

Like any good branch library, there was a display of new children's books:

You can have bonus points for translating the titles and authors into English. And, of course, they had a stack of romance novels... So, altogether, the place had a very familiar feel to it.

Think about it for a minute: this is a community library, owned and operated by the community itself. It's similar to our branches in many respects - budgeting is a struggle, the fabric of the building is problematic, opening hours may not be entirely suitable. But there's a mechanism built in to ensure that the running of the place - from the hiring and firing down to new stock purchases - is overseen by the community.

One of the biggest problems we face, imho, is that our mechanism for public and political engagement - local Councillors - is not used well enough. Every citizen in the UK should be able to pinpoint and contact their Councillor(s), and communicate their issues and interests. We have this system, so we should use it.

Svetlina Chitalishte Library was encouraging, with its new stock, keen staff and plenty of potential. What let the place down was the presentation, as is so often the case in our own libraries. It was reasonably busy at 11am, with that usual public library stalwart: the man reading the newspaper. And they do a fair amount of work with classes from the local schools. But I think they should work together, rather than independently, to reuse each others' ideas rather than start from scratch every time, in 3,000 locations.

Basically, I liked the place.

Note to self: actually do the stuff you've been planning to do for ages!

2008-03-10T11:54:00.003Z

I'm supposed to be presenting to the library's Operational Management Team tomorrow afternoon, on the lessons I learned on my trip to Bulgaria. My photos are on Flickr, but I've been meaning to get my thoughts down on (virtual) paper. It was an interesting trip, not just for the reasons my Higher-Ups will be interested in.

I'll write a few short(ish) posts, with photos, to help me collect my thoughts for tomorrow. Bulgaria is a complex place, and I need to get everything straight.

World Book Day 2008

2008-03-06T14:05:00.000Z

Today is World Book Day, but only if you live in the UK or Ireland. Everyone else does it on April 23rd.

In the UK, school children get a £1 token, which can be exchanged for a book written specifically for the event. These are actual proper books, maybe 100 pages long, written by people you've heard of.

I bought one of said books from Amazon: Neil Gaiman's Odd and the Frost Giants.

It was a mere 10p, so part of me feels bad for ripping off a well-meaning organisation by getting something for 90% off the (already cheap) cover price; the other part is pleased that I've got a shiny new book for less than the cost of a Freddo...

2008 is the UK's National Year of Reading, which is generally keeping the nation's reader development librarians rather busy. Each month from April onwards has a theme. I'm supposed to be doing some sort of science fiction thing for June, which is bound to be exciting enough for me to blog about here.

I'm almost exactly halfway through after reading some of it at lunch. I would have got more of it read, but I had the most enormous sandwich and I needed both hands to hold it. It's got Norse mythology, a boy called Odd, and plenty of the typical Gaiman sparkle. The book, that is: my sandwich was a Club Triple from the Doorsteps Deli.

Two Bulgarian libraries

2008-02-04T11:00:00.000Z

So here I am, in the British Council Library in Sofia. Not a bad collection - piccies to follow, if/when I get the means to upload them. It's five past one and the BC library seems pretty busy.

So far, we've visited a Chitalishte library - Svetlina - and the Sofia Municipal Library. A Chitalishte is basically a community society, which often puts on events etc. for locals and, most importantly, has a library (more explanation is needed here, so I'll fill it in when I get the chance). It was quite old-school in many respects - every facet of human knowledge seemed to be represented, regardless of an apparent lack of demandd. Some of the book stock was shabby, but obviously still used, and they had a good range of new children's stock. And they had that mainstay of public libraries everywhere: men reading newspapers.

The municipal library was a bit odd - 15 departments (read "rooms") dedicated to different subjects. The architecture suffers from its heritage: it was originally some sort of Socialist Party building, and a lot of that culture seems ingrained int he form of the place. Again, stock was mixed, with a lot of old stuff and some new items. They had public access PCs, some of which were running - wait for it - Win 98! Needs must, I suppose, but they'd be much better off with Xubuntu for low-specced, old(er) hardware.

We transfer to Bankya for the seminars this afternoon: the hard work starts tomorrow!

Test post

2008-02-03T08:33:00.000Z

I'm going to Bulgaria this afternoon, to do my 'Hi, I'm a modern public librarian' bit.

So I thought I'd try a test post, complete with a photo (in this case, Bolton Central Library), on my phone via email.

The BMLG/PLG Conference

2008-01-31T15:30:00.000Z

This is one for acronym fans everywhere: CILIP's Branch and Mobile Libraries Group is joining forces with the Public Libraries Group for a weekend conference this year.

It's a varied and genuinely interesting programme, with the overall theme of "Learning our futures today." If you ask me, the panel session on the final day - Looking to the future - should be good... I enjoyed the discussion panel at Talis Insight, so I'm sure I'll have a good time taking part in this one too.

Second place: like first, but one louder

2008-01-22T10:16:00.000Z

We almost won the quiz. We came second, which is perfectly respectable, yet avoids both glory and abject failure. We walked away with a tenner's worth of Waterstones vouchers each. I'm not sure of the wisdom of encouraging librarians to buy their own books, rather than borrow them, but what do I know?

We should have won the competition for best team name: 027.442737/BOL, for public librarians in Bolton, was obviously superior to the winning Zoobrarians 2.0. That name doesn't even make sense. I'm assuming that the administrators felt they couldn't give us two prizes...

Anyway, check me out, engaging with my profession:

Oh yes, I rock. I also gurn in photographs, apparently. And I need to get my hair cut.

In all seriousness (I know, it's a break from tradition), combining the AGM with a pub quiz seemed pretty effective. The turnout was good, there was an opportunity to chat to fellow professionals from other disciplines, and a good time was had by all. More of the same wouldn't be too bad an idea.

Pub quiz, hotshot!

2008-01-17T15:17:00.000Z

Today will have one of two outcomes: glory or failure.

It's the CILIP NW AGM and pub quiz! 7.30, the Ape and Apple, John Dalton Street, Manchester. Entry is a fiver. We're entering a team in the quiz - our senior managers, two of my colleagues, and me. The mixture of booze and an AGM worries me slightly: it's too easy to volunteer yourself for things...

The naming of the quiz team is tricky. I've vetoed "One Young Librarian of the Future and his friends" as it puts too much pressure on me. I favour "Shoot the hostage," as an homage to Keanu's answer to Dennis Hopper's question in Speed. We're likely to go with a very long Dewey number for public librarians in Bolton, keeping our fingers crossed that there aren't any expert cataloguers there to pick holes in our classification.

2007: a year in review

2008-01-10T12:33:00.000Z

I'd give it seven out of 10. It was pretty good.

High points:

Umbrella

Joining the PLG Committee

Getting a pair of Five Ten Nathan Rennies

Finally starting to do something about Chartership...

Being on stage at Talis Insight (seriously, it was great fun!)

Low points:

Too much sulking in the biblioblogosphere about libraries being doomed

The word "biblioblogosphere"

The week just before pay day, when I've spent all of my money on ridiculous shoes

My favourite author of the year:

Chris Simms, an up-and-coming crime writer. I haven't read any of his stuff (I mostly just read sf because I'm a nerd), but people who have assure me that he's good. I like him because he did a talk and a Q&A session for us, and he was great.

My favourite book of the year (actually two books):

Nextwave : agents of H.A.T.E.: this is what they want
Nextwave : agents of H.A.T.E.: I kick your face

Both of these graphic novels, written by Warren Ellis and drawn by Stuart Immonen, are hilarious. Thirdrate Marvel heroes form a fourthrate super-team, fighting broccoli men. I laugh out loud every time I read them.

So there. 2008 should be pretty good as well: I'm flying to Bulgaria on February 3rd to teach them there Bulgarians a thing or two about modern public librarianship!

Must... update... blog...

2007-12-31T12:45:00.000Z

But not yet. Not properly, anyway. Work has been too busy for me to want to think about library things outside of work time. Admittedly, today is my first day at work for a week and a bit, but I like my excuse and I'm sticking to it.

Normal introverted sulking about libraryland will resume in the new year. Probably.

Insight roundup

2007-11-21T18:55:00.000Z

Yeah, I know, this was a fortnight ago, but I've only just got around to blogging about it... I;m not a great note-taker, but here's the stuff I jotted down so I could share the Talis Insight experience with my colleagues in a Team Meeting.

I'll write some more about a couple of these when I get around to it, which might even be on Friday (depending on how my currently-tricky media PC build goes). You lucky people!

Day 1

Dave Errington
Set the “inspiration for change” theme pretty well
Dave likes apes

Euan Semple’s opening keynote
KM (without actually saying KM)
Social stuff
Communication
If the monolithic BBC can do this stuff, so can we

John Dolan
What MLA’s up to now
Post-Framework position
No mention of Blueprint…

A conversation with the future
A very attractive bunch, despite what Frances said…

David Lightfoot
A genuinely interesting approach to the challenges of rural service delivery

Ken Chad
I had no idea he was so tall
Pretty darned thorough view of the LMS landscape
Even a confirmed OPAC nerd like me could pick up a lot from this session
Definitely worth a look when the video becomes available

Tim Coates
Worst. PowerPoint. Ever.

Richard Wallis
Came out as a big fan of the Young Librarians panel. I’ve always liked Richard!

Drinks reception
Free booze! Woo hoo!

Day 2

Roy Clare
Genuinely engaging, with more-or-less equal input from public and academic librarians
I get the impression that MLA will achieve something with Roy in charge

Tony Durcan
Showed us urban challenges as David Lightfoot did their rural equivalents
Some interesting (and seemingly viable) metaphors for different levels of service delivery
Dealt admirably with “F-bomb” Hendrix

Towards a total resource management solution
ERM is something I’m really interested in
Comments from Chris Armstrong on “e-content” and evangelism

Empowering customers through open development
Another one featuring very attractive people…
Actually a reasonable depiction of the customer/developer relationship in the Talis context
Not quite enough arguing though. We usually argue more (e.g. over geographical searching – that's a hint for Talis, btw)

The semantic web and libraries
Richard Wallis, rather than the advertised Paul Miller
A whistle-stop, audience-appropriate tour of the concepts
Very, very good and worth a look when the video appears
Macs make very pretty presentations

Liz McGettigan
Like Lightfoot and Durcan, but for Scottish libraries
Quite a transformation achieved over 10 years

Dave Errington’s closing comments
The single most disappointing aspect of the conference, primarily because they weren’t “Congratulations Michael, you’ve won an iPhone”. Don’t worry about it though, Dave – I stopped sulking a couple of days later and got myself a Nokia N95 instead!

Kindle or kindling?

2007-11-19T18:02:00.000Z

The blogosphere is literally* ablaze with comment on Amazon's new e-book reader, Kindle. Richard Wallis asks about the likely impact on libraries:

If, as Amazon predict, these devices will end up everywhere how long before the
first librarian is presented with one along with the request to check out the
library's copy of Harry Potter on to it?

Admittedly, I would be super-impressed if we could start lending books on devices of this ilk, but I can't see it happening soon. As Richard's colleague Rob Styles pointed out at Talis Insight** earlier this month, the DRM implications on issues dear to our hearts, like the Public Lending Right, are inherently problematic. Copyright for electronic content doesn't work anything like its equivalent for printed matter, with convoluted licensing and contractual agreements introducing far too many limitations.

I like e-equivalents of reference materials, as I've probably mentioned here before (although I'm too lazy to actually search for relevant posts), but I like my fiction in printed form. Printed books will just about survive a drop in the bath, they have pleasantly off-white pages that mellow and yellow with age, and they require no technology other than my specs, and maybe a bag to carry them.

You can't say the same for e-books. If I dropped a Kindle in the bath, I doubt I'd get it working again. I'm not going to do the hyperbolic "and it'd electrocute me and burn the house down as well" bit, which is bound to come up somewhere, because I don't actually believe it would. But still: a printed book will become usable again after a couple of hours on a radiator. I'm not convinced that any electronic gadgetry would survive the after-effects of a Lush bath bomb.

Personally, I'm holding out for the direct neural interface. Much more sf, and considerably cooler imho.

* Used here in the Colemanballs sense, i.e. metaphorically rather than literally
** Which I really must write something about, seeing as I enjoyed it immensely

Blog readability

2007-11-18T19:41:00.000Z

Check me out:

These fine individuals pointed it out, and it was a bandwagon I felt like jumping on. Go here if you fancy doing the same.

I suspect it's nonsense, especially since the badge above comes with a link to some sort of loans company (which I deleted). There's also much debate on the blogs linked to above about the algorithms used and how inaccurate they're likely to be. And, more importantly, my blog is clearly not the work of a genius. If I was a genius I'd be doing something far more lucrative.

Talis Insight

2007-11-05T18:43:00.000Z

I'm at Talis Insight tomorrow and Wednesday. If you're there too, come look for me: I'm the one who looks a bit like Louis Theroux.

I'm on a discussion panel on the first day, called "A conversation with the future". The title makes me think of Futur Noos off Trevor and Simon... I'm sure it'll be fun, and it ought to give me the opportunity to ramble on about technology and stuff.

On day two, I'm involved with a presentation about agile software development. That should be slightly less demanding for me, since my job is basically to sit there and look pretty.

I'm really looking forward to this. I need to get some sweets for the road trip!

Chartership: a warning!

2007-10-30T16:38:00.000Z

Picture the scene: it's summer, and after three years of faffing about, you've finally got your act together enough to register for Chartership. You've only registered, mind: you haven't actually managed to get a PPDP sorted yet.

A few days pass, and you get an email confirming that you've registered for Chartership. You've got six months - that's *ages*! - to bung your PPDP and Mentor registration stuff CILIP's way. It'll be cake: you'll manage to do that, no worries.

Cut to the end of October. The nights are drawing in, it's almost cold enough to be scarf weather, and your boss has made vague threats about your Chartership progress. You get that weird vertigo feeling as you realise that, maybe, those six months are almost up...

So this is my warning: don't do what I did. I've got two days to get my PPDP and Mentoring forms sorted out. It's not going to happen, but at least I (probably) won't put myself in this situation again.

Resource discovery: translation tools

2007-10-24T16:31:00.000+01:00

The ever-excellent Lifehacker has a post about online translation tools. I've got a soft spot for this kind of thing - I don't know why - and there are a few tools here I haven't come across before.

What's missing from most of this stuff is reliable, accurate translation of languages using non-Western character sets. In my neck of the woods, Urdu, Gujerati and Arabic would be handy, as would Polish. Admittedly, automated computerised translation will never (other than in a utopian sci-fi future) beat real human-powered translation. But for those of us who are monolingual - my A* for GCSE German is now reduced to "Ich habe Durchfall", which is hardly ever even true, let alone the basis for polite conversation - translation tools can often smooth the way.

It leads me in a roundabout way to some thoughts about library interfaces. The OPAC is pretty much an English-only affair. It's possible to provide alternative languages for the interface, as Google does (featuring my own favourite, Bork Bork Bork!). But decent, functional, on-the-fly translation could go one step further in the OPAC and provide the bib data, location etc. in other languages too. Provided that it worked well enough, obviously...

A good IDeA; or, a terrible pun

2007-10-24T09:42:00.000+01:00

As a public librarian, I need to keep an eye on the bigger picture: the local government context. It's a many-headed beast, but I find the IDeA's Knowledge email newsletters quite handy.

They outline a couple of the big issues every week, with examples of good practice and new ideas (a terrible pun, and only partly unintentional). And while I might not need to consider, say, local government responses to climate change as part of my job, it's useful to know that a) it's an issue that's being considered and b) there are contributions that public libraries could make to such efforts.

The email also contains a fun cartoon. What I like most about it, though, is the alt text. Here's this week's:

*That* makes it funny. I don't know why, but it makes me giggle a little bit. Maybe I need to get out more, but I like the seriousness of the description. Without it, I honestly wouldn't know that the cartoon showed participatory budgeting, let alone participatory budgeting in action.

Au revoir Tim

2007-10-22T20:03:00.000+01:00

I am 28 today. True fact.

Having been away for the weekend, I just checked my RSS alligator. It seems that Tim Coates has given up blogging.

The question: did he jump, or was he pushed? He's been saying (and then hastily deleting) some pretty dicey things lately. I wonder whether his hosts/publishers/whatever have been getting a little twitchy...

While it's interesting, valid and useful to consider viewpoints in opposition to your own, Coates' polemic has often been tainted by his name-calling, insults, and downright unpleasantness. I don't think I'll miss his blog.

"Unfortunately, you weren't successful on this occasion"

2007-10-05T16:04:00.000+01:00

InterviewFest '07 is drawing to a close. We interviewed 50-odd people for Saturday vacancies. It's been a really useful experience - I've learned a lot about what the interviewer is looking for - but it's also been ever-so-slightly soul-crushing.

Offering jobs to people is a wonderful ego boost, which I'd recommend. It's nice when people tell you that you've made their day/week/lifetime, and frankly I couldn't care less whether they actually mean it or not - it's nice of them to say it! The bit that sucks, though, is being the guy who rings up to say "unfortunately, you weren't successful on this occasion", like some sort of HR robot. I've spent most of today doing just that.

I know, it's not really about me, and I have a tendency to whinge in a really unattractive and undignified way... But I'm a sensitive boy and I just want everyone to be happy. I stuck to the Council's Recruitment and Selection guidelines and tried to break the bad news in as positive a way as possible: the old feedback sandwich. Next time I have to do this, I'll do a little more mental preparation. It probably helps to be in the right frame of mind.

Librarian on tour

2007-10-03T18:18:00.000+01:00

I’ve got a busy few months ahead of me. The day job is becoming increasingly hectic as the launch of our shiny new community information solution approaches. We’re still beta testing, but it’s pretty much ready to go as far as public access is concerned. I’m also involved in the development of a next generation OPAC, which has the potential to be really cool. Or, you know, as cool as OPACs get.

I’ve got a lot of other stuff planned as well. I’ll devote a separate post to each of these – or a series of posts to some of them – but for now, read on for a list of dates on my Autumn/Winter World Tour…

On Monday October 15th, I’m going to MLA to judge the Top 10 New Librarians 2007. I can’t guarantee that I’ll award bonus points for Buffy fandom – I’m really into Heroes and BSG right now – but anyone who cites Rupert Giles as an influence rules as far as I’m concerned.

Friday November 2nd is my first “proper” PLG Committee meeting, at Ridgmount Street. It’s a full day, and I’ll be contributing to the Professional Practice Panel. It's nice to have an opportunity to put something back into the profession.

The following week, I’ll be participating in a panel discussion at Talis Insight. The session will be compered by Frances Hendrix, and the panel will be mostly made up of my fellow Young Librarians of the Future. We're on stage (or whatever) at 12.10 on Tuesday 6th November.

Our Council has recently set up a Library Policy Development Group. This cross-party posse of elected Members works with our senior managers to define library policy, and is unarguably A Good Idea. I’ll be guest starring at their meeting on Friday November 23rd, talking about partnership working, the importance of online library services, and my general awesomeness. I may have made that last one up. I’m not *that* vain.

But the best bit is in February. My excellent friend Tom Forrest does a lot of work with the British Council. He’s involved with their programme in Bulgaria, which is developing a modern legal framework for statutory public library provision and equipping Chief Librarians with equally modern skills. He’s taking me with him. I’ll be going as an expert on online library service provision, an alumnus of MLA Future Leaders, and an all-round example of why you need to invest in the future of the profession. I didn’t make that last one up. We need to stop underselling ourselves.

Busy, busy, busy!

Your profession needs you!

2007-09-26T13:40:00.000+01:00

If you're reading this, and you a) have been working in public libraries (in England) for less than three years; and b) are generally awesome, you need to enter Top 10 New Librarians 2007.

It's not just for "librarians" with "qualifications", it's about recognising the contributions made by newcomers to the public library domain, whatever their title. The deadline's this Friday (28th September), so you'd best get a wiggle on.

Being one of last year's Young Librarians of the Future has opened doors for me and brought a lot of positive attention to me and my esteemed employers. Spread the word! But do it quickly...

I [heart] OPACs: a rant

2007-09-24T07:51:00.000+01:00

Or, more accurately, I [heart] what they could be. Since the dawn of time, OPACs have been modelled on card catalogues: you get your basic bibliographic details, a shelving location, and a bit of subject classification.

Admittedly, you get the occasional bit of descriptive text, or even an image of the book itself if your OPAC is really fancy. But that card catalogue metaphor is still there, and it bores me silly. I don’t mind giving the occasional nod to old-skool librarianship – I wear specs and can often be seen in corduroy – but we need to move on from that old catalogue mindset. I’ve never even used a card catalogue, but it’s still the model for our most important tool.

Amazon and iTunes do something that approximates the function of an OPAC. They’re finding aids: they help you locate the resource you’re looking for. But they differ from the current OPAC model in several ways. There are two broad categories here: eye candy and functionality. Each is as important as the other. The OPAC is our shop window, it shows the world - and I really mean The World, not just the people in ur library usin ur catalogue – what we’ve got to offer, and our users deserve something prettier and shinier than they currently have.

The iTunes-as-OPAC issue has been discussed on NGC4LIB. iTunes does a wonderful job of managing my media files. I can (but rarely do) search the database. I can sort by pretty much any criterion I’d ever want to. And the whole thing feels really well put-together, right down to the mirrored CD covers that make you think your Raconteurs album is floating on a pristine lake. Nice.

The Cover Flow browse function is great fun: big, hi-res images of your CDs (or, in the library context, any content) for you to flick through until you find what you’re looking for. Or, and this is a real advantage over the current OPAC paradigm, you’ll make some sort of serendipitous (re)discovery before you reach your original goal. At-shelf browsing is one of the principal advantages of using a real-world library, but it’s one that’s lost in the virtual surrogates we use today.

Amazon has, as far as I’m concerned, every book I’ll ever want to find. Amazon succeeds where every library and bookshop I’ve ever used has failed me: it has the book(s) I’m looking for, when I’m looking for them. My pet subjects change on a weekly basis. Bookshops and libraries can't keep up, but Amazon can.

I often find myself looking for, say, a mountain bike maintenance book, an underwear pervert graphic novel, something about Ubuntu and a semi-obscure (i.e. not Neuromancer, which is usually all I can find) William Gibson book. No single outlet has managed to satisfy all of those requirements at the same time, except Amazon. It makes everything seem easy to get hold of, which just doesn’t happen anywhere else. Bookshops will (sometimes grudgingly) offer to order books in; libraries can offer interlibrary loans; but Amazon has it there, waiting for you.

Your search options range from the simple, ubiquitous single box to the more complex search inside the book. Advanced options allow you to limit your search to author, title and so on. Or alternatively, a reasonably comprehensive category list allows for browsing. I’m never entirely happy with the taxonomy Amazon uses, but it’s a step in the right direction.

So I [heart] OPACs, but I would *really* [heart] a pretty OPAC with a wide range of functions to support serendipitous browsing, structured genre cataloguing, simple searching and advanced search strings. I don’t want too much, do I?

Meetin' 'n' greetin'

2007-09-21T17:57:00.000+01:00

On Tuesday, I spent the afternoon guiding some visitors around three of our libraries. My excellent friend Tom Forrest brought two people from the British Council’s Information Policy Planning Unit (IPPU) to see some examples of good practice in British libraries.

The British Council has had some negative press attention recently. I’m not going to go into it here, but if you subscribe to the CILIP Weekly Information World email (free to all CILIP members!) you’ll know what I mean… The IPPU’s focus is on presenting British exemplars as models for service provision in other countries. And that’s where we come in.

We started at Horwich Library, which was refurbished a couple of years ago and functions as a joint public/school library. We have a few libraries with that dual function, but Horwich is our only branch providing library functions to a primary and a secondary school.

High Street Library is the Pegasus to the Central Library’s Galactica: it’s brand new, very stylish, and about as cutting-edge as it gets. The library was built on the site of its old, crumbling, inaccessible predecessor. The local community has been involved with the new library from the beginning, starting with the now famous arts-based community consultation.

The tour finished at the Central Library, which is a 1930s masterpiece into which we have to shoehorn 21st century services. It’s not easy, but it works. Central was refurbed just after Horwich, and shares some of that library’s open aesthetic. The big draw here for our visitors was the integration of the Primary Care Trust library into our revamped reference service, In-Depth. Partnership working: definitely ~~the~~ a way forward.

We had three hours, but ended up running slightly behind schedule. With this being a fact-finding mission, there was a lot of talking going on. Talking takes time, and so does arranging for the right people to be there. A whole day, rather than an afternoon, would have allowed for more flexibility. But now that the dialogue's been opened, we're not really under any constraints.

This should lead to mutually beneficial future working relationships between us and the British Council. More on that at a future date!

Platformy goodness

2007-09-20T10:50:00.000+01:00

The latest issue of Talis Platform News features a brief piece by me on harnessing the awesome power of the Talis Platform. It's actually a very easy thing to do. I've used it to put our OPAC's search function in a couple of different places.

If I can do it, you can too, whether you're a Talis customer or not.

Bad news/good news

2007-09-19T15:58:00.000+01:00

Bad news: Hampsons have discontinued their Chilli Beef Slice. Today is a sad day.

Good news: my Region 1 Heroes box set arrived!

Today is a happy day.

It's all about the Benjamins, baby

2007-09-13T18:37:00.000+01:00

From The Times, via the CILIP Weekly Information World email:

... graduates in arts and humanities subjects, such as history, art, French or
English literature, had among the lowest earnings.

How glad am I that, as well as my English degree, I've got an MA in Librarianship? From a Russel Group university, no less! That should keep me in Doritos and Hendricks gin* for the foreseeable.

It reminds me of an old joke I can't remember well enough to relate here, save for the fact that the punchline intimates that arts graduates work at McDonalds. It's not that funny anyway.

But seriously, folks: are we paid that badly as librarians, or do we just expect more than we get because of the hoops we have to jump through in order to qualify? I lean towards Option B, but I think employers have a deficit of knowledge about what we actually do, and how taxing some of it can be. Flame me in the comments if you feel otherwise. I can take it.

* Nicest (imo) in G&Ts. I prefer Plymouth or Tanqueray 10 for martinis.

Boarding the Charter ship

2007-09-12T19:53:00.000+01:00

Worst. Title. Ever...

My boss tells me I'll be in trouble if I haven't done anything about Chartership before our next meeting, so here's my PPDP:

Yes, I know, there's not much there yet. I've gone all 1.0 and written some stuff down on paper. If all goes to plan, I'll have the PPDP in the post by the end of the week. This kind of plan is usually based more on my default naive optimism than reality, so we'll see how it goes.

The Borrowers

2007-09-11T17:25:00.000+01:00

From Worldmapper, via Walking Paper, via Library Stuff: a world map, with the countries resized to represent how many books are borrowed from public libraries, as a proportion of the total number of books borrowed worldwide. Got that? Good.

Click the link and see for yourself. It took me a while to find the UK (which makes me sound much stupider than I really am). It's actually much bigger than I expected it to be, what with the whole "public libraries are doomed" thing we're going through currently. Yet it turns out that we in the UK eat more slices of the book-borrowing pie* than our size - and all of that negative publicity - might suggest.

There are flaws with the data sources used, and the folks at Worldmapper are pretty up-front about that, so it's indicative rather than conclusive. But I think it's pretty cool.

*All this talk of pie makes me hungry. Sadly, I've spent what would have been my tea break writing this blog post...

Forms, requirements, entry barriers, sulking

2007-09-10T20:41:00.000+01:00

I don't know whether you've ever had the misfortune of losing your passport. I have. You have to answer some stupid questions on a form in order to get a new one. I need a passport for some upcoming international librarianing (which may or may not be happening in February, but would make my Chartership submission pretty much unstoppable), so I need to get my act together.

The form asks me where I lost my passport. Erm, if I knew that, it wouldn't be lost. My answer to this question is "Bolton". I'll probably end up on one of those junk emails my sister forwards to everyone she knows, as an example of how some idiot has filled a form in wrong. I'm pretty sure I lost my passport somewhere in the borough though...

Another question asks whether you've reported the loss to the Police. You can answer Yes or No to this. A note next to the question tells you that reporting it is compulsory: you cannot get a new passport without reporting your old one lost. So why is there a No option if I have to do it anyway?

I hope library membership forms aren't this hard to cope with. We ask for two proofs of ID; I'm likely to have to provide a similar number for my passport, one of which is basically one of my friends vouching for me. So, in effect, is our library membership procedure more exclusive than a passport? I'm not sure I'm comfortable with that: we should be minimising entry barriers, not building them up.

Michael smash coin!

2007-09-07T18:09:00.000+01:00

This MAKE podcast shows you how to beat the crap out of a pre-1965 silver half dollar and turn it into a nice, shiny ring.

I bought two coins from a shop on the Shambles in York a few weekends ago. I spent a couple of days with a hammer, a benchtop anvil/vice, a drill and a Dremel. I ended up with this:

And I'm rather pleased with it - you can still see a little bit of the text from the face of the coin in this picture. This one is for my girlfriend, and I think I'll make one for myself this weekend. I like the naive quality of the piece - it looks like jewellery made by a complete amateur. I don't know why that is...

Web usage of library services

2007-09-04T13:49:00.000+01:00

I've been doing some work over the last few months, on a very sporadic basis, on benchmarking the usage of online library services across Greater Manchester. We compare a lot of library service provision across the region, which seems to work very well.

So the questions I've been tackling are, in no particular order:

What technologies are used for measuring website use?

What terms do those technologies use?

What methodologies do those technologies use?

What, if any, measurement goes on in libraries rather than via the Council's ICT department?

This all comes from the statement we librarians are likely to make when faced with declining visit and issue statistics: we have more stuff online, so people don't actually need to come to the library as often. What we don't seem to do very well is measure how much use people are making of the online equivalents for our services - renewals, reservations - and the services we buy in - dictionaries, encyclopedias, British Standards, business information...

Just as every Red Hot Chilli Peppers song is basically the same, the many and various web performance management tools are inherently similar. The terms are different, the algorithms behind the methodologies are trade secrets (and likely to stay that way), and we seem to rely on our ICT providers to crunch numbers for us. This makes our position simultaneously easy to deal with - everyone's figures are probably measured in a broadly comparable way - and complex at the same time - there's too much "probably" involved, and not enough "definitely". OPACs, again, are much of a muchness and are increasingly good at providing this sort of data for us: ours can provide stats for online as opposed to in-person renewal, which is the sort of activity we should be measuring.

In an ideal world, I'd stick a Google Analytics tag in every library's website so that the same (free) standard tool could be used. I'd also encourage MLA to negotiate with our online resource providers for a single statistical monitoring package: since MLA negotiates our deals for us, and sets the performance targets that rely on measuring usage, they ought to be in a position to do that sort of thing.

I'm making an initial presentation on Thursday afternoon (after a morning stint on Enquire that I can't really weasel out of). Hopefully, I'll get to write the work up properly after that, and I'd definitely like to expand it a bit... How does your library measure online usage?

Shortlisting without short tempers

2007-08-24T15:59:00.000+01:00

I've been shortlisting for a post at work. We had the best part of 300 applications for this particular post. If I never see another application form again, it'll be too soon...

We've now selected our interview candidates, but it's taken us a while to get there and it's likely to take even longer to interview them all. Having been on the recruitment and selection course (mandatory for all members of a selection panel) 18 months ago, this is the first opportunity I've had to give it a try.

It was difficult. Really difficult. It's time-consuming and it can be genuinely challenging to treat each application fairly; it would be too easy to face Application No. 1 with a sunny disposition, only to watch it ebb away as the numbers rise. But I *think* I did it, and the three members of the panel sat down together for an hour and a half this afternoon (actually 1 hour, 26 minutes, 1.4 seconds - I timed it) to pick the best candidates for interview. We rarely disagreed, which can only be a good thing.

The most important lesson learned, though, is that you need to keep your application short and relevant. Address each criterion you're given, *with examples*, and provide an amount of detail in proportion with the demands of the post. Maybe I should try applying for some jobs so I can practice my application forms...

Marvel-lous

2007-08-24T13:38:00.000+01:00

Tomorrow brings another meeting of the Central Library's Graphic Novel Group!

Our main theme will be Marvel superhero teams - a.k.a. books that Michael has bought lately - with the usual mix of other stuff we've read. We'll also be talking about Heroes, which is currently doing an excellent job of making Wednesday nights rather entertaining. Hiro is my favourite Hero, but that's kind of like saying Wolverine is your favourite X-Man: he's an obvious choice.

On missing one's sister; or, the 21st Century Grand Tour

2007-08-22T18:03:00.000+01:00

My little sister and her boyfriend left on their round-the-world trip today. I spoke to a teary sister at lunchtime, while she was waiting to get on her plane to Mexico City. I'm going to miss her while she's travelling for the next six months or so. Sniff.

One of the positive aspects of this is that I have a reason to be on Facebook now: it's one of her chosen communication methods. If you're reading this and you have a Facebook profile, look for me: I'm not the only Michael Stead on there, but I'm definitely the only one who looks like me and I *think* I'm the only one who's a librarian.

Shameless self-promotion

2007-08-14T13:11:00.000+01:00

I recorded a podcast with Richard Wallis from Talis last week, as part of his ongoing series on the future of public libraries. It's available for your listening enjoyment here.

I'm narcissistic enough to listen to it on the way to work, so I'm halfway through it. So far, I've realised two things:

1. I need to speak up. This is probably less of an issue when I'm not being recorded on the phone.
2. I increased the number of Highly Commended runners-up in last year's Young Librarians of the Future to 15. Oops! There are only really five of them, but they're probably three times as nice as normal people.

For the time-poor, or the people who don't want to spend 38 minutes listening to me, I don't think there is a crisis in public libraries. Yes, we're facing challenges and coping with change, but that's been going on for the last 150-odd years of "proper" public library provision in this country. Describing these issues as a crisis is, imho, unhelpful and diminishes the value of the term. Change is not an alien concept to libraries, despite the impression we tend to give (and perpetuate).

Here's a fun fact to illustrate my point: one of my colleagues was tasked with researching the inception of one of our branches. In order to do this, he read through Library Committee minutes from the '20s and '30s. Recurring topics included dwindling issue figures, whether people are interested in reading any more, and what the future of public libraries would be. Does this seem familiar?

The future?

2007-08-09T18:15:00.000+01:00

What does the future hold for public libraries? I know you'd do something more lucrative than answer that question if you were gifted with the ability to see the future (possibly while hopped up on goofballs), but stay where you are and keep reading.

It's something a lot of us have been thinking about lately. MLA has completed the initial consultation work around Blueprint, and is now making use of the feedback. Talis has an informative, ongoing series of podcasts on the subject. And I've spent some time thinking about where I fit into all of this (my preferred mode according to MBTI is introverted thinking, so I do stuff like this a lot!).

But today's professional introspection was inspired by an email on NGC4LIB about a post on Tim Spalding's Thingology. Tim (of LibraryThing fame) says this:

I have seen the future of libraries: It is to spend the future discussing the future of libraries.

It's starting to look that way, isn't it? Maybe it's time we accepted that we're living in the future now. Maybe it's time we started doing something other than just talking about it.

One of the most popular criticisms of public libraries is that we're not adequately prepared for the impending skills shortage when the wave of librarians recruited in the '60s and '70s retires. As someone who struggled to find a professional post, but who is apparently pretty darned good at this librarianship thing, I'm offended by that. There aren't enough jobs for newly-qualified librarians: either that or the library schools are churning out librarians without relevant, modern skill sets.

What's more, we're addressing the perceived shortfall in leadership capability. I completed the Future Leaders strand of MLA's Leading Modern Public Libraries programme this year. Future Leaders was put in place to equip the leaders of tomorrow - those of us who aren't necessarily in management roles right now - with the skills to lead the profession. It's by far the most rewarding, realistic and usable course I've been on. 294 people have been through that process, which is probably more than we technically need.

I was talking to someone the other day about the crisis in public libraries. There is no crisis. There are challenges and changing landscapes, but there have been since public libraries began, well over 150 years ago. Challenge is not a new concept in libraries. One of my colleagues was tasked with researching the history of one of our branches recently: the minutes of the Library Committee from the 1930s were filled with issues like librarians' (relatively low) salaries, whether enough books were being loaned, and what the purpose of libraries actually was. Does this sound familiar to you?

The fundamentals of the service haven't changed, nor has the context. We'll continue to change, just as we always have.

Chartership schmartership

2007-08-05T11:21:00.000+01:00

OK, I have absolutely got to get chartered. No more excuses. No more hiding from it. I've got to sit down, write a PPDP and submit it before the end of August. That's my personally-imposed, entirely arbitrary deadline. Let's see if it works...

Here are my Top 5 reasons for being chartered:

1. You get even more letters after your name!
2. You get a nice certificate!
3. You might find yourself in a position where you'll get paid more!
4. Er...
5. That's it.

I'm not a fan of the process, nor do I think it's necessary. The phrase "morally and intellectually bankrupt" comes to mind, but that's a bit too strong for the way I actually feel. I just think that if I've already got a first degree, a Masters in Librarianship and three years' experience at the coalface of public librarianship, what does this extra (not to mention costly) piece of paper give me? All it does is recognise what an individual has already achieved and how s/he has increased his/her ability to function as a professional.

In theory, it should be cake. I've achieved a heck of a lot in a short time, certainly more than I imagined I would. I'm enjoying my work, which is a rare and wonderful thing. But chartership gets on my nerves.

Enough grumpiness. I'm only 27, I'm not supposed to be this grumpy until I hit 30. But the system is, imho, broken enough to put me in that sort of a mood.

The people of Hampshire vs their libraries

2007-08-01T15:20:00.000+01:00

Tim Coates ~~- fresh from claiming sole credit for the departure of key individuals from MLA (if only he could direct his awesome magic powers toward, I don't know, curing cancer) -~~ points to an article on Hampshire libraries.

Well, maybe the cuts to the service *are* being made because of a smaller-than-average grant from central government. Who knows? What interests me is that the article reports a petition of 12,000 people calling for a rethink on the Council's reorganisation of libraries.

12,000 is a lot of people. Except, of course, when you put it in context: there are 1.26 million people in Hampshire, discounting the UAs of Southampton and Portsmouth. That's 0.95% of the population who disagree with the proposals. So it's either a non-issue (perhaps even a good idea? I certainly don't know enough about the situation to have an opinion), or those opposing the changes need to communicate their concerns more effectively. Diminishing the quality of a public library service is undoubtedly A Bad Thing, but people need to care about it happening in order for it to have any real meaning.

The article also mentions Unison's campaign to defend the public library service. They've got a little man made out of books as a mascot. And he's wearing a mortar board, also made out of books. That's exactly the image we need to promote: librarians as intellectually superior, bookish freaks. I, for one, welcome our freaky book-man overlords.

UPDATE: Coates' post claiming responsibility for the departure/retirement of those MLA chaps has vanished mysteriously. It was there the other day, honest. But I know you trust me, because I'm a librarian.

Obligatory biblioblogosphere survey post

2007-07-30T18:46:00.000+01:00

If you're reading this, you're probably a librarian. You probably have a blog as well. Point your web browser at Meredith Farkas' 2007 Survey of the Biblioblogosphere post. Do the survey.

It's a shame there isn't a more satisfactory term than biblioblogosphere. I don't know what it is I don't like about it. Maybe it's because it takes me ages to type. I like Steven Cohen's librar* blogs personally: that wildcard gives me an old-skool CLI vibe. And of course, Walt Crawford favours liblog which has the advantage of concision.

Hulk smash!

2007-07-27T16:23:00.000+01:00

We've got a Graphic Novel Group meeting tomorrow. Normally, I'm just a punter at these meetings: I don't work Saturdays in my current post. But this month, I'm running the show!

I've never actually run a reading group. I tend to stay away from the touchy-feely stuff. But I'm running it tomorrow because the person who usually does it is off on her hols.

The chosen theme is a double header: Hulk and Transformers. We'll probably have a group outing to see the Transformers movie, like we did with 300 and Spider-Man 3. I've got to prepare, so I'm reading lots of comic books - the sacrifices you have to make - because the members of the group are scarily knowledgeable.

We're a little short on Hulk books at work, so I'll re-read my Ultimates books, Marvel Monsters, and anything else vaguely Hulkish. We've got plenty of Transformers books in stock, so that's OK. Fortunately, I was a big Transformers fan when I was a nipper. You'd probably have a hard time finding a man in his late twenties who wasn't (am I really in my late twenties?).

Tea, biscuits and nerdy comic talk will commence at 3.30pm, Saturday 28th July, Bolton Central Library. We'll be in the Adult Fiction section.

My new favourite word

2007-07-16T18:27:00.000+01:00

Or technically words, I suppose. Paranoia about spelling takes me to the OED online quite regularly. I found this:

pasty-wench n. Obs. rare

1631 J. MABBE tr. F. de Rojas Spanish Bawd xv.
166 That old *pasty-wench.

I'm obviously never going to use the term in a pasty shop (of which there are many in these parts), but I thought I should give it some publicity.

Get on your bikes and ride

2007-07-11T21:14:00.000+01:00

Since I obviously can't be bothered to blog about library things at the moment, here's a picture of my most recent project:

Inspired by MAKE, I made a singlespeed road bike. It cost £15 via eBay. Jack at Green Machine gave me the wheels, and I bought most of the other bits from there. I'll probably chop and flip the bars at some point, depending on how I get on with them. I think I'll strip the frame back to bare metal next summer and respray it too.

I gave it a quick test ride on Monday - a very quick ride, because I was recovering from Sunday's eight hour Manchester-Blackpool jaunt - and it's flippin' sweet. I'm riding it to work tomorrow, so I hope I hooked the brakes up properly...

Coming soon: the messenger bag I made (also from MAKE) and my embroidered iPod case. It's nice to create things.

The one and only PLG

2007-07-06T19:51:00.000+01:00

You gotta love PLG. Not only did they send me to Umbrella, they also asked me to join their committee.

Today, I went down to Fancy London and sat in on a couple of meetings to see if I like it. I do. I can't overstate the importance of professionals engaging with each other, driving policy forward and making a difference. We should all do more of it, so I'm going to sign up.

So there.

CDB732F

2007-07-05T12:38:00.000+01:00

The last couple of weeks have been hectic: Umbrella from Thursday to Saturday (I will write bits up for the wiki, honest!); meetings and writing a piece for CILIP Gazette on Monday; Future Leaders Tuesday and Wednesday.

And it continues: I'm going to attend a PLG Committee meeting tomorrow, at CILIP HQ; and I'm doing the Manchester to Blackpool bike ride for Christie's on Sunday. That's 58 miles, most of which I imagine I'll spend being grateful for my padded shorts. Then I'm off on Monday (probably wishing my shorts had more padding), and I've got what will be one of the last meetings of my Project Board on Wednesday. Oh yes, and I'm on Enquire on Thursday morning.

So it's nice that, in the middle of this where-the-heck-am-I maelstrom, I received a mysterious email with the subject CDB732F.

What does it mean? With a nonsense title like that it's got to be spam, right?

Nope. The email says:

I acknowledge receipt of your Registration to Charter under Pathway 1

So I guess I'm officially registered, which is good news. Next stop: PPDP!

Umbrella: day one

2007-06-29T00:27:00.001+01:00

I'm freaking exhausted. Most people seem to be partying into the wee
small hours, but not me.

I spent seven and a half hours on the motorway today, which probably
goes some way toward explaining my tiredness...

I got here in time for Phil Bradley's session on Web 2.0. Since I'm
basically the poster boy for electronic library services, I don't
think it taught me anything new. Phil is an engaging and enthusiastic
speaker though, which explains his popularity. Since Rupert Giles is
pretend and Ranganathan's dead, he's the closest thing to a hero we've
got. I have to question his insistence on librarians trying Web 2.0
things regardless of their organisations' ICT policies: some things
just ain't gonna happen, regardless of whether you think they should
or not.

I liked the PLG AGM so much that I've sort of volunteered to join the
committee. I'm not sure how that happened, but the cava may have
helped...

Now I'm going to read me some Bizarro World before catching some Zs.

Umbrella: T-1 day

2007-06-27T12:00:00.000+01:00

I've got my directions printed, I've tidied my desk (this is a significant development, believe me) and I'm raring to go. Or as raring as I get.

I still need to sort out a playlist for the journey (I'm saving the John Dolan/Talis podcast and a couple of Escape Pod stories) but that should take mere minutes. Oh, and I need to pack. I made a couple of T-shirts for the event last night and I need to remember to take them.

Since I've completely failed to get a PCMCIA Ethernet card for my laptop, I won't bother taking it with me. I'll have to resort to analogue media for my note-taking. This won't be a problem, because:

As we all know, a good librarian is never without a pencil
I tend not to take many notes anyway. Most of my notes in English literature lectures were things like "I'm so hungry" and "Are we going to the bar after this?"

I could always do a Richard Charkin... Or not, since I have at least a vague grasp of property law: if it's not yours, you can't just walk away with it.

I'm looking forward to meeting up with new and old friends, learning about what's going on in LibraryLand, and cramming my face with free food.

Umbrella: T-6 days

2007-06-22T18:22:00.000+01:00

I'm getting spammed by Umbrella exhibitors. I've had umpteen (OK, four or five) emails and a letter, telling me about products and services I might be interested in learning more about. The emails aren't so bad, but the letter is a complete waste of trees. Not that I'm a hippy or anything.

All they really need to do is provide quality schwag and I'll be happy to talk to them. I'm on the lookout for three promotional mousemats: our all-new reference area (called In Depth) has three mousematless PCs. I'd prefer something that advertises products we subscribe to and which I like (I'm looking at you, OUP!), but essentially I'm not fussy.

What's on your freebie-shopping list?

Books about cats

2007-06-21T17:48:00.000+01:00

While I was waiting for the conference delegates to show up in Central Junior so I could do my bit, I had a look through the picture books. I read the incredible Where's that cat? by Dan Crisp and Flabby tabby by Penny McKinlay and Britta Teckentrup.

I liked them so much, I thought for a moment that I might like to be a Children's Librarian. Is this a good idea, or does it indicate that I've got some sort of brain fever, brought on by a lack of sleep?

Resource discovery: one for the nerds

2007-06-21T17:47:00.000+01:00

The most fun thing about today's visit is a tip I received from a (Canadian?) delegate: Living between Wednesdays. This is a blog about comics; the reference to Wednesdays makes sense once somebody explains that new issues are published on Wednesdays in North America.

It's quite possibly the most awesomest blog about comics (now there's a niche worth exploring!) I've ever seen. I could lose hours to this, so I've allowed myself a cursory look at it and I'll save the rest for another time. The writing is knowledgeable and incisive, and the recurring feature, Rating the Super-Hunks, looks hilarious.

Read it or I'll charge up my power ring and kick your [expletive deleted]!

Visiting dignitaries

2007-06-21T17:20:00.000+01:00

Today was the final day of Joint use libraries: an international conference. My boss gave a presentation on Tuesday. A busload of delegates went to two of our libraries, and I spoke to them about my job when they came to Central. The justification is that my role is a good example of partnership working, because I'm employed by three library services, and I work with our LMS vendor.

I gave the delegates a quick spiel on my job and how it works, anticipating the questions that people always ask me about it ("How do you make sure you spend equal amounts of time on each service?" is the biggie). I acquired a business card from a Californian university library: with a little luck, they'll invite me out there for a chat about what I do...

It reminded me that I need to up my presentation game a bit. I try not to "erm" too much, but my inner Hugh Grant has a tendency to emerge in these situations (which is not helped by my decision to grow my hair to foppish length, emulating last summer's homage to Clark Kent in Superman returns). Fortunately, my new PDP has a presentation skills course on it. Mind you, so did last year's, and that never happened.

Umbrella: T-7 days

2007-06-21T10:19:00.000+01:00

This time next week, I should be somewhere in the vicinity of Hatfield. That's down south somewhere, isn't it?

Love Libraries

2007-06-14T13:52:00.001+01:00

The MLA-hosted Love Libraries campaign has just launched a revamped version of the Young Librarians of the Future competition.

This year, it's Top 10 New Librarians 2007. There are a few differences between the new contest and the old one:

Last year, it was for under-30s. This year, it's people who have been working in public libraries for no more than three years. I could enter!
Last year, the judging panel was made up of various worthies from MLA, TRA, SCL, and even M&B. This year, you get to be judged by last year's winners. That's basically me and my friends...
The name, obviously. I suppose you can only do Young Librarians of the Future once.

If you've been working in public libraries for less than three years, and you (or your colleagues/bosses/whoever) think you've got what it takes, you should enter.

Umbrella: T-15 days

2007-06-13T12:23:00.000+01:00

Having seen Pete's post, I came back from a quick chat with my boss via the post room. Lo and behold, there was a little envelope for me. Here are the contents, arranged artfully on my too-crowded desk:

My badge has an orange "First timer" sticker on it, just so everyone knows I'm a noob. And I seem to have scored tickets for the Awards Dinner and the Elizabethan Banquet. Not my choice, but since the nice people at PLG did the booking, I guess they just wanted to make sure I'd have a good time.

I'm still not going to the Elizabethan thing though. It scares me.

Exhausted

2007-06-13T08:58:00.000+01:00

Next week is Bike Week, which is an annual fixture. One of the many events that happens in Bolton (scroll down for the PDF) is next Wednesday's Bike 2 Work Commuter Challenge. The town centre's employers compete to see who can get the most staff cycling to work. All participants get a free breakfast, which pretty much negates the health benefits of cycling in...

This is my awesome bike:

Today was a practice run. It's the first time I've ridden in for yonks, so I have to have a bit of a sit-down before I get changed and clock on...

Umbrella: T-17 days

2007-06-11T18:46:00.000+01:00

Perfecting my craft

2007-06-08T10:47:00.000+01:00

I've been a bit slack on the old crochet lately, but I'm going to have to get my act together because of this: an amigurumi Bender off Futurama! I've already got some grey yarn...

Thank Spongebob for Craftzine, that's all I can say.

Being healthy

2007-06-07T17:14:00.000+01:00

One of the many interesting things about my place of work is that we've incorporated the PCT Library into our Central Library. The PCT has a health education role, providing information for medical professionals and the public. Siting their service in our library makes that public side much easier to achieve.

The PCT Library's manager was casting around for volunteers to help out with some training today. They've just recruited some people to act as Health Trainers, advising people - primarily over-45s - on lifestyle changes that could decrease their chances of developing cardiovascular disease and whatnot. The Health Trainers will work in GPs' surgeries, running through a questionnaire about lifestyle, diet and exercise. Today's training was about making sure they're ready to be unleashed on the public.

I went to the Quaker Meeting House - awesome '70s architecture - and sat through the hour-long questionnaire. The purpose, other than learning about how healthy I am, was to provide feedback about my Health Trainer. She was great - I made her explain her role, and what the questionnaire was for. She told me what constitutes a portion of fibre, and how much a unit of alcohol actually is. It's an interesting process, and I think it could be really valuable. Gentle intervention before people develop serious health problems can only be a good thing.

The future?

2007-06-07T12:07:00.000+01:00

Mr C sent me the link to this video on libraries in 2010. It's another light-hearted stab at what's wrong with public libraries, but it has a serious message: how can we ensure that public libraries will remain relevant, even in the short term?

I agree with the suggestion in the video: we need to make the effort to stay relevant, while sticking to the core idea that books are cool.

Carnegie & Greenaway

2007-06-06T18:17:00.000+01:00

I've just been sent a link to the CILIP Carnegie & Kate Greenaway Children's Book Awards.

You (yes you!) can vote for your all-time favourite Carnegie and/or Greenaway winner. There's a week to go until the deadline. I'm not voting - I can't remember having read any of the books, and it seems unfair to judge them based solely on the TV adaptations.

My favourite book as a child was this thing about a dragon, or definitely a dragon-like creature. The story was told in verse, with a two-page illustration for each stanza. The protagonist got into some sort of bother, and endured a series of events before things were (I think) put right again. He/it was definitely tried by a kangaroo court, which was made up of beautifully-drawn kangaroos, one of who was possibly dressed as a judge. I have no idea what that book is, but I loved it. I must have been 5 or 6 when I found it in a box in the garage. I remember taking it to my mum, and telling her I'd found a book; she told me it wasn't lost. She's still like that now.

And while I'm reminiscing, I remember reading a series of books about a magic cat, and a magic ring, and other magic goings-on. It was a black cat, and the books were part of a series for teaching children to read: they got progressively harder as the series went on. We moved over Christmas, after my 7th birthday, and I started at a new school in January. They gave me these books to read because my old school hadn't sent any records over, so they didn't know whether I could read or not. I got my first computer that Christmas, and I discovered that I could spell - I didn't realise I could before then (now there's an admission that'll alert people to misspelins on my blog!), so it was a pretty good time for me. Which is not to say that the following 20 years haven't been equally fun-packed, obviously.

Nostalgia: not what it used to be...

Umbrella: T-22 days

2007-06-06T12:07:00.000+01:00

Umbrella starts three weeks tomorrow. I'm starting to do the important bits of preparation - wardrobe planning, sorting an iPod playlist for the four-hour drive to Hatfield, buying a wired Ethernet card for my laptop - as well as the run-of-the-mill stuff like deciding what I'll actually do when I'm there.

So far, it's hard to decide between some of the strands. The first one is a no-brainer: Phil Bradley on Web 2.0. One of the first, and best, pieces of advice I was given in LibraryLand was to read Phil's column in LAR (as was). I was told this at about the same time I was told that a good librarian is never without a pencil, and I've found both of those nuggets invaluable.

I'm going to the PLG AGM, since they're very kindly paying for me to attend, which clashes with the Exhibition Opening Party. My only concern is that the best swag from the exhibitors will be gone by the time I get there.

Other than that, I might have to make it up as I go along: there are several slots in which I could quite happily attend two or more seminars for the good of my employers. When I'm confronted with a menu, I can't make a decision until my order is being taken. It usually turns out OK, so maybe the same principle will work at Umbrella.

Xubuntu: ZOMG!

2007-06-03T12:51:00.000+01:00

After not doing anything with it for a couple of months, I've finally got my ancient Toshiba laptop running quite happily with a Linux distro.

I've played with Knoppix and Kubuntu before, but I've settled on Xubuntu now. It's the lightest of the famous *buntu family, and it's running very nicely. The only tricky thing I had to do was to edit xorg.conf and switch it to the VESA driver. Installation took a while - maybe a couple of hours all in - and I ended up with very warm knees after balancing the laptop on them for that long!

The laptop now connects to my wireless router with ease, so all that remains is to make it play nicely with the Windows PC via Samba.

025.04: Michael's blog

On book issues in these tough economic times

On this Wirral business

On not having drunk the Kool-Aid

Oh my gosh. I suck.

Trying to sneak back into the biblioblogosphere

Youth Libraries Group rocks.

Answering today's most important question

A Genius OPAC

YLG Conference

Fish in a barrel

Umbrella 09: the rockingest Umbrella yet?

Library services on mobile devices

Free audio book downloads from NYR 08

I am so going to finish my chartership

What Michael's been up to

David Murray (London Borough of Newham): Staff roles and qualifications

Dr James Dearnley (DIS, Lougborough University): Future roles of librarianship

Pete Gascoigne (Wigan Leisure and Culture Trust): Libraries in trust - the inside view

John Hicks (Kentwood Associates): One way or another - options for public library governance

How to use the web

Things they don't teach you at library school no. 5,017

BMLG/PLG day one

Tom Forrest: Leadership for modern public libraries

Lyn Brown MP: A political perspective

Roy Clare (MLA): Public Libraries - Towards 2020

It's conference time!

My story. Let me tell it to you.

On reading groups

Kitchen classification

Full of BS

Almost-hilarious National Year of Reading promo

On one's value within an organisation

Spirals and whatnot

Michael's two laws of library science

No human being would stack books like this

A customer service experience

And finally: lessons learned in Bulgaria

A tale of two libraries, part two: Sofia Municipal Library

Digression: card catalogues a-go-go!

A tale of two libraries, part one: Svetlina Chitalishte Library

Note to self: actually *do* the stuff you've been planning to do for ages!

World Book Day 2008

Two Bulgarian libraries

Test post

The BMLG/PLG Conference

Second place: like first, but one louder

Pub quiz, hotshot!

2007: a year in review

Must... update... blog...

Insight roundup

Kindle or kindling?

Blog readability

Talis Insight

Chartership: a warning!

Resource discovery: translation tools

A good IDeA; or, a terrible pun

Au revoir Tim

"Unfortunately, you weren't successful on this occasion"

Librarian on tour

Your profession needs you!

I [heart] OPACs: a rant

Meetin' 'n' greetin'

Platformy goodness

Bad news/good news

It's all about the Benjamins, baby

Boarding the Charter ship

The Borrowers

Forms, requirements, entry barriers, sulking

Michael smash coin!

Web usage of library services

Shortlisting without short tempers

Marvel-lous

On missing one's sister; or, the 21st Century Grand Tour

Shameless self-promotion

The future?

Chartership schmartership

The people of Hampshire vs their libraries

Obligatory biblioblogosphere survey post

Hulk smash!

Note to self: actually do the stuff you've been planning to do for ages!