PLEASE NOTE

We are very sad to announce the death of our Research Officer Norman Briggs, a long-standing member of the CILIP in Thames Valley committee, and a vigorous champion of professional issues within CILIP. Norman died peacefully in hospital on Friday 8th March. The CILIP in TV committee would like to extend our condolences to Norman's family.

Running a Reading Group for Mental Health Patients

Our first meeting of 2013, held in Reading in March, was well attended and this may have had something to do with our new later time of 6.30pm for a 7pm start. We have made this move so that people in the Thames Valley who live further away from our usual venue can make it after work. However it was probably to do with the guest speakers visited us from The Reader Organisation and the Prospect Park mental health unit. Sue Colburn, a reading leader and advocate, and Sue McLaughlin, a Nurse Consultant at Berkshire Healthcare Trust, came to tell us about The Reading Organisation’s work leading reading groups with vulnerable people.

The Reading Organisation’s method is to read the whole text of a piece of literature together, slowly, so people can interact with the text and each other. In newer groups they tend to work with a lot of poems and short stories, but with more established groups they get through whole literary classics. They use literature as an in-road to helping people with their problems – many finding a way to talk, confront, or contemplate their problems by identifying with the literature. Participants can be as active or as passive as they like, but they can rely on the reading group running week in, week out, except Christmas, giving them a constant source of contact, release, or comfort when they may not feel they have this in other areas of their lives. They have open access public groups in some libraries across the country and others are help in care homes and mental health units.

At first the group at the Prospect Park unit was run as a pilot course, called Tea & Tales, which grew week after week. Some of the success of this may have been due to the fact it flattened the hierarchy, during the reading nurses and patients were all just participants. For a while they could not find the funding to continue running the group. The problem was finding a way to measure the success of these groups. They had qualitative evidence in the form of patients’ reactions and they ran demonstration sessions, but they seemed to be missing out to other things. The good news is that they have now found funding from the Healthcare Trust and hope to start up again in April. They intend to train four nurses to run sessions and run a session at Wokingham Public Library for outpatients that want to continue to use a group. They are also learning how to measure the outcomes of the programme to support their case and prove their value, however they believe that qualitative evidence should not be discounted, how people feel should count.

Currently the programme is little known in the Thames Valley, the only open group run here is in Wokingham Library. If anyone would like to become a group leader they can train to do so through the Read to Lead course, the details are on The Reader Organisation. It was a very inspiring evening and The Reader Organisation is a really worthy charity that makes a difference to lives through literature, what with being a librarian, something I have always believed in. I haven’t done it justice here but hopefully we can do our bit to spread the word in the Thames Valley region; as well as their website they have a blog, you can follow them on Twitter @thereaderorg, or email for more information: info@thereader.org.uk.

#uklibchat – don’t panic! – a beginner’s experience

Our new guest post comes from Slough Library's Audience Development Officer, Gaby Koenig. She has supplied a most welcome crib sheet to a first try at #uklibchat. If you are someone who has intended to join in for months and yet never got round to it (like me), this may encourage you to give it a try, because you won't have to figure out all this stuff for yourself. Over to Gaby...

What do you use twitter for? Some people use it for professional development or just as part of their profession. For others of us it’s more of a personal general fun tool, perhaps a bit like an RSS feed for sites we’re interested in with added bonus material. Some of us have no clue what we’re doing there and are making it up as we go along.

#uklibchat is a monthly twitter chat about libraries and library and information work in the UK. But what is it FOR? I could just say ‘professional development’. More specifically it’s more about having conversations that interest you with other people in the field, making connections to people you might not otherwise meet or speak to and learning about different ideas and working going on in other locations.

That all makes it sound extremely simple. It is, however, both exciting and incredibly confusing to first time users. It’s a bit like being in a room where everyone is talking at once and you have no idea what is going on. Due to the nature of twitter, tweets in a conversation are not grouped together, everything is in precise time order.

Because it is so immediate, it’s very tempting to try and hurry to catch up on the latest comment, but if that is the third reply in a conversation other people have been having on q4, you’re probably going to have to backtrack and by which time it won’t be the latest thing any more.

The two things that will save you from drowning are being prepared and being very clear about what you want to do or say, although being a speed reader doesn’t hurt.

Every chat has a public overall topic and agenda. This is hosted on Google Docs, where anyone can add their own questions but personally I prefer less questions and responding to what’s there rather than adding to the agenda, which may not be got through anyway. Reading the agenda in advance is a good idea, as is keeping it open while you are involved, as with only 140 characters, people may just reply to a question with just “q2” and #uklibchat without any preliminaries to explain what went before or what they are talking about. This gives you a good key to follow topics or when a certain question has come up. I also plan any responses to any questions that particularly interest me or at least what I might like to say.

During chat I have several tabs or windows open. One for the agenda, one for my twitter interactions, one following the hashtag and one following @uklibchat – the twitter feed for the organisers. I try and make sure I follow etiquette and include the question number I am talking about (eg. Q3) and the #uklibchat.

Once the chat starts, I try to do two things, firstly skim for anything that interests me and secondly watch out for prompts that the question I want to answer is officially up for answering. I try really hard not to attempt to join in with every conversation,  to avoid trying to read every single tweet and only respond when I have something to say. This takes a certain amount of self control.

Some people use twitter clients to help them follow the chat. Of these Tweetchat does look rather good and doesn’t require you to create a separate account for it. If you aren’t going to use it to respond, you don’t even have to log into twitter. Best of all though, it automatically adds the hashtag you are following to your tweets when you reply, which is easy to forget in the heat of the moment.

The organisers of #uklibchat asked us to mention the help they can offer new uklibchatters. They have a page that gives a bit of info about how to tweetchat: http://uklibchat.wordpress.com/guide-to-uklibchatting/<http://uklibchat.wordpress.com/guide-to-uklibchatting/ and if you ever get lost or need help, people are very welcome to ask @uklibchat, either during, before, or after the chat, as they can answer questions while it's happening. So now there really is no reason to not join in. Many thanks #uklibchat for the extra pointers.

Library Camp 2012: 13th October, Birmingham

This guest post comes from Charlie Lythgoe (@maniccharlie), Assistant Information Specialist, NHS Blood and Transplant, Oxford, about her experience of the runaway success that is Library Camp UK, which took place last month.  All the more welcome as we had to cancel our November event. Over to Charlie...

On Saturday 13th October, I attended Library Camp 2012 in Birmingham. This is the second year a UK-wide Library Camp has been held, and there have also been smaller regional spin-off events. Library Camp is described as an “unconference”, which their website defines as an event where “participants decide on the programme at the beginning of the event, working on the principle that the sum of the knowledge, experience and expertise of the people in the room is likely to be greater than that of those on the stage at traditional conferences.”

This democratic, participatory approach was also evident during the planning stages, as a wiki was set up where participants could suggest ideas for sessions they would either like to present or to attend. Oh, and suggestions for cake too! Apparently, library camps are renowned for their cakes. Unfortunately, I didn’t have to time to bake anything but many people were more organised than me and turned up with an astonishing amount of whoopee pies, tiffin, brownies, cupcakes etc etc ...

The day began with people pitching ideas for sessions they’d like to lead. These were placed on post-it notes and a rough-and-ready programme was quickly assembled on a flipchart.

The first session I attended was on mental health in libraries, led by Penny Bronchia. This examined the language and attitudes we use in libraries to deal with mental illness in library users and colleagues. We discussed the way that mental health is still a taboo topic that unsettles many people, in a way that other issues (e.g. sexuality and race) largely do not. Should people with a mental health condition be “out” at work? While this may initially cause awkwardness, it can help raise awareness and tolerance among colleagues. Also, by not disclosing a mental health condition, it can be harder to access any support or assistance that the organisation can provide. We discussed how managers can best support employees with mental health conditions and we heard about schemes and reading groups some public library services run for their users.

For my second session, I chose to hear about free and open-source software from Liz Jolly and Andrew Preater. Andrew has already written a comprehensive blog post about this session, so I won’t write at length about it. We talked specifically about what OS software is and what roles it can play. But we also placed it in context by discussing why organisations may be resistant to OS software, how the collaborative mindset present in OS development can trickle in to other areas of work and what skills are necessary in the OS workplace.  I was struck in this session, as in many of the others, at the incredible depth of knowledge and expertise possessed and shared by those who weren’t leading the sessions. If this were a “normal” conference rather than an unconference, then these views would largely remain unheard.

Next, I went to a talk about classification. This session wasn’t as lively as the first two ... perhaps we’d all gone too long without a trip to the cake tables. We shared experiences of classification successes and failures, the pros and cons of in-house versus standard (e.g. LC or Dewey) systems, and the tendency for classification decisions to reflect the need of library staff rather than the need of the user. We wondered how libraries could go about systematically measuring the success of different classification schemes, in terms of how quickly users could find what they needed. We mused on how relevant traditional concepts of classification are for e-resources, especially since there isn’t the “I can only put this book in one place, even if it addresses two topics equally” mindset. E-resources can be “located” in as many locations as the user needs them to be (I recommend the book Everything is Miscellaneous for a good discussion of categorisation in the digital world).

Some participants felt there was a lack of sessions focused on academic libraries, so Christina Harbour squeezed a general academic libraries forum on to the flipchart. I feared that this was too big a topic to generate any meaningful dialogue, but we all had a very good attempt! I’ll just list some of the questions that were thrown in to the mix:

• What impact will the rise in tuition fees have?
• (How) should libraries ‘brand’ their e-resources, to demonstrate the link to the physical library?
• How can we involve academics in the work of the library?
• How do we demonstrate or quantify the value that libraries have?
• Are converged library and IT services a good idea?
• Does outsourcing work? If so, what services can be outsourced?
• Should members of the public be allowed to use academic libraries?
• How do libraries contribute to the employability agenda of universities?

Whew! I feel like we covered as much ground as I did in a whole term of the Academic Libraries module of my MSc, mainly because of the wide range of experiences and backgrounds that were shared.

I then went to a session about the logistics of lending out iPads to library users. Personally, I’d be concerned about the chances of loss or damage, but those sharing their experiences said that this was minimal. We discussed whether users should be allowed to use the iPads outside the library or off the premises, and what state they should be returned in (i.e. delete all photos and log out of Facebook and Twitter). The range of educational apps (for students, medical professionals, scientists etc) is growing all the time, but it can be hard to evaluate the quality of these, and whether they represent value for money. It seemed to me that any library wishing to start lending iPads or other tablets to their users could learn an awful lot from other libraries who’ve already taken the same step.

For the final session of the day, I intended to go to a session on open access. Due to my muddling up the rooms, I ended up in a session on Roaming Libraries. By the time I’d realised my mistake, I’d already got into conversation with the people sat next to me, so thought it would be easier to stay put. A fortuitous mistake! The speaker, whose name I didn’t catch, runs The Itinerant Poetry Library. The name is fairly self-explanatory - she travels all around the world with a poetry library, which opens up for a time (this time can vary) in bars, cafes etc. Depending on how long the library is in a city, readers may be able to take books away with them. They can then check on Twitter to see where the library will be over the next few days so that they know where to return the book.

 I learnt about Radical Reference, who are a group of professional volunteers working with political activists in the USA. Any questions that can’t be answered on the ground can be relayed back to a back-up team who will use their resources to find the answer. And then there’s the Mile High Reference Desk, who provide an information service to passengers on planes! Unlike in many other sessions, this was an area that very few of us had experience in. But it was the last session of the day, and I liked how everyone shared related experiences and anecdotes from earlier sessions they had intended. For instance, there was an earlier session about living libraries, so someone fed back their experiences from this and wondered whether a roaming library of people would be feasible. Once again, if this were a “normal” conference, this opportunity to share and synthesise ideas from other sessions may not have been possible. So, while I don’t know what I missed in the open access session, I do now know some of the amazing ways that librarians are challenging our ideas of what and where a “library” is.

There was a tremendous amount of energy and passion on display at Library Camp 2012, which was particularly impressive since everyone had given up a day of their weekend and many of us had travelled a long way early in the morning.  The conversations that started at Library Camp have continued on Twitter and blogs, and will hopefully generate some great new ideas and good practice.

Phil Bradley comes to the Thames Valley

As one might expect, the turn-out for CILIP President and internet search extraordinaire Phil Bradley probably exceeded that of any event we have had before. So much so that we had to up sticks to a different location, just next door to our usual haunt to one of the conference rooms in the Reading RISC Global Cafe. Phil started by telling us about what he does as the President of CILIP and the structure of the upper echelons of the CILIP hierarchy. Basically he acts as a conduit between members and the Council and looks at the way CILIP is governed and whether this could be improved. He is continuing as President for another year due to the Vice-President stepping down and therefore not able to progress into the President role. They are currently looking for new Vice-President candidates so if any CILIP member is interested, do contact Phil.

Phil then moved on to the endlessly interesting subject of social media, of which he is and expert. As an enthusiastic amateur I can only presume to try and outline what I learnt from his talk! He told us that social media is not a tool, it is a transition, and the internet will just morph into something else after web 0.2, and something again after that. Many people are scared of how the web is developing because they don’t understand it and know how to use it to their advantage. This can include institutions, with IT departments restricting the use of certain platforms because this is deemed easier than trying to make them work well for the institution. The spectre of an irredeemable slip-up looms too large. The fact that many institutions don’t use these technologies actually says more about them than if they did allow their use. They conversations on these platforms will happen anyway, including those about their institution and if they do not use them they will miss out on being able to influence this.

The model of search engine results being compiled solely of traditional websites is now fundamentally broken. Searches are increasingly recalling interactions from social media, because these are the opinions of customers and users, they say more than a static website could about any institution or service. Increasingly it is individuals that are adding credibility to what is on the internet, it is the value of the people that you follow and increasingly we will find our information in the realms of our own virtual networks.

You can find a Slideshare presentation very similar to the one he used at our event here.

National Trust Libraries

Yvonne Lewis is Assistant Libraries Curator of the National Trust and she came to help us see in September by talking to us at a very well attended event. She gave us a potted history of the acquisition of National Trust Libraries and told us a little bit of what they are doing now. This was accompanied by slides featuring images of some very beautiful books (the Huguenot binding was my particular favourite), all courtesy of the Trust’s photo library.

The National Trust was founded in 1895, their first sight being a hillside, but their first property being Coleridge Cottage. These early acquisitions were usually stripped of all contents by the owners before being transferred to the National Trust. As a result there were no libraries, at least none with any books in them. They often had to ‘dress’ the libraries in houses that had them, to make them appear to the visitor how they may have once looked. In some cases, like that of Osterley Park in Middlesex, acquired in the 1940s they were helped by having documentation, such as a catalogue which they could use to try to reconstruct the library contents. If a book or a collection comes up for sale that once belonged to the library of a National Trust property where they can they have been purchasing them to rebuild the original collection as much as they are able.

This changed gradually from the 1940s with the introduction of the Country House Scheme (which sometimes allows the owners to stay in the properties).  The affects of which began to be felt around the 1980s along with the help of laws such as Acceptance in lieu (see a good blog post about it here). This also means they can sometimes even establish which books were in the libraries, and at what point, by studying the paintings of the interiors of the houses and portraits of the inhabitants.  This was not the only detective work they were able to carry out. They can also study the collecting habits of various owners, such as moving the books of predecessors up to second level shelving to make way for their own, newer, books.

They started cataloguing all the books under their remit offline but now they are all online and through that they can connect the libraries of all the houses. As is mostly the case with rare books they these records are concentrated on the copy specific information. They have now joined Copac  and cataloguing activities are ongoing, including all the library objects - tennis balls in one case! The current policy is to look for grants or funding to look after a collection ongoing, before they take it on, so they can catalogue and conserve it in the future.

Many thanks again to Yvonne Lewis and National Trust Libraries.

A summer slumber

But only on the blog! In actual fact we have been rather busy, with a very well attended meeting at the beginning of July, to hear Emily Goodhand (@copyrightgirl in the Twittersphere) to talk to us about the copyright landscape as it currently stands. As you can imagine, there were plenty of questions, thankfully we can rely on people like Emily to keep up with this rapidly changing domain, so we can draw on their vast knowledge as and when we need to. However, most of us should probably try to grasp the basics, so here are Emily's very complete slides which will better demonstrate what was covered than I ever could.

We also had an informal get together at the Catherine Wheel pub in the beautiful Berkshire village of Goring where there was much talk about what we could do in our upcoming events and meetings. This included the possibility of a CILIP special interest groups roadshow, to showcase what the special interest groups are all about. Hopefully we will get this off the ground so watch this space. Remember, if there is any event you would like us to look into organising then we would like to hear your ideas.

On the subject of future events, on 5 September in Reading we have Yvonne Lewis, Assistant Libraries Curator for the National Trust, giving a potted history of how the Trust acquired its libraries, its recent acquisitions, and the cataloguing and digitisation of documents. Then on 3 October we have CILIP President Phil Bradley (@Philbradley on Twitter, and this is his website), a popular and well-known speaker on the web, internet searching, and new technology matters. This event will be in a new venue RISC, and being a Reading resident I can vouch that it one of the most interesting bars in town.

Hope to see you at an event in the near future and I will be blogging about Yvonne Lewis's talk very soon.