The conference opener was a keynote address by Gerald Leitner, the president of EBLIDA and the secretary general of the Austrian Library Association, a man whose CV almost defines overachievement! He spoke about what he saw as the two main challenges for libraries:

1. the need for both a Europe-wide policy on the role of libraries and to embed them in the educational culture of each member country, especially in the light of the PISA report which identifies educational attainment levels in each country

2. the challenges presented by the economic crisis, which results in a crisis for libraries across Europe. For example, he pointed out that South Korea as a burgeoning society is opening 180 new libraries this year whilst the UK are trying to close 400.

 It struck me throughout this address that we often lack a wider perspective from our little island. As Gerald talked us through the differences between the European Union and the Council of Europe, and what the legal implications were for a common library policy, I felt he had uncovered a huge gap in my knowledge of what happens in the rest of Europe; Personally I’m probably far more aware of US and Canadian libraries than European. The PISA report of 2009 identified Finland as having the highest levels of literacy due, he told us, to them having the best library system in Europe. The lowest levels of attainment were found in Romania. Approximately 20% of young people there are at risk from all that follows from poor literacy as they cannot be reached by the written word. Gerald concluded that libraries make an important contribution to a country’s culture, education and knowledge, and that they are part of civic responsibility and vision. Herr Dr. Leitner also pointed out something that resonated across the advocacy strand of the conference: that the press and politicians, like anyone else, hold preconceptions and prejudices about libraries and librarians; the difference being that they, rightly or wrongly, have the power to influence. What has been tremendously heartening has been the formation of Voices for the Library(VftL), represented here by the very impressive and seemingly endlessly energetic, Lauren Smith and the ever-entertaining and informative CILIP Vice-President Phil Bradley. VftL has been moving mountains in addressing those prejudices and when you hear the passion with which everyone at Umbrella speaks about the LIS sector it starts to feel like a fight we can win. We can show everyone our worth. Tuesday was a long day, but too exciting and interesting to let tiredness get in the way of more experiences. I’d started the day at 5am to travel from York to Hatfield, but I was glad I’d made the effort to dress up and head out to the gala dinner because it was a chance to hear Bonnie Greer speak. She opened with the news that MPs were going to vote overwhelmingly to refuse Rupert Murdoch’s bid to buy BSkyB thus thwarting his monopoly over information flow in this country. This was met with rapturous applause and has pinned the moment to my memory of the conference, something I’ll always remember. Bonnie spoke about free access to information and the written word with great passion, we were all entranced by this impressive, charismatic and erudite woman who made us all very proud of the work we do. Over the two days I listened to presentations from academic, public, government, museum and other special libraries. I learned about working with digital, hard copy, photographic and digitised collections. I heard from non-professionals, paraprofessionals, newly-qualified librarians and very experienced specialists. I can’t see where else you would have the opportunity to experience the breadth of this profession, be inspired, motivated, confused, captivated and moved to tears in the space of just two days. The tears came with the ‘Libraries Change Lives’ award that was won by Kent Libraries ‘Making a Difference’ project, although all three finalists deserved recognition for their wonderful work. Some of what I heard was familiar to me, but much of it was outside my sphere of experience and I’ve had a chance to learn about information work across the sectors which has broadened my horizons considerably. I came away from the conference with a feeling of pride to belong to such a respected and august institution: as soon as anyone looked at my name badge and saw The British Library they were immediately impressed. Similarly when touring the exhibitors’ stands, as soon as the vendors saw I was BL they immediately switched off their hard-sell, from the SWETS representative to a vendor that specialises in outsourcing cataloguing and authority control; the latter because we’re already good customers of theirs, the latter because she knew that we do much of our metadata work in-house. It seemed to me that a lot of librarians look to The British Library to lead on best practice, especially those who work in small teams or as solo librarians who rely on our metadata in order to catalogue their own collections (this is certainly something I did when working at the National Railway Museum). Looking back over my copious notes from each session, initially I’ve hit information overload. But as I begin to digest and reflect on what I’ve heard, start to investigate online resources, and make contact with people I met, I feel confident that I have chosen the right profession; I really love the challenge of using the skills, the collections and the technologies to make a difference in people’s lives and I look forward to a long and interesting career. Helped along the way by all the free pens I got from the exhibitors!

When East Coast deigned to allow us to arrive at Kings Cross, Simon Barron and I hotfooted it round the corner to The British Library conference centre just in time for Hazel Hall to get started; (was there ever a better way to let people know you’re running late than tweeting that fact with the conference hash tag?) This conference was the beginning of a project whose noble aim is to develop a nationwide network of top quality LIS researchers. Prof Cronin got things off to a good start with a nicely provocative keynote, part of which was some fairly robust criticism of current LIS research and that’s what I’d like to think about here.

One of my fears about my MA research was that I was just taking a snapshot of public libraries’ online activity and that it’d be out of date instantly and therefore pointless. That it was just me prodding around online looking at library websites and and scribbling something down to fulfill my degree requirements. From my experience of being related to PhD researchers, once being married to one and having loads of friends doing one, it seems to me that a healthy feeling of fear is pretty much a constant for researchers. Sometimes it’s a good thing: it keeps you keen, relevant and scrupulous in your reading and current awareness. Sometimes it pushes you over into generalised anxiety, sleeplessness and misery. But underlying all of that you hope against hope that it has some point, that you’re putting yourself through the mill for The Greater Good. Well Prof Cronin has called us all on that one and pointed out how some LIS research is ivory tower, narcissistic twaddle. Stuff that gets published and keeps the researcher in academia but contributes nothing to the canon. That’s what I was worried about and I’m glad it’s been voiced because it leads on to something that Prof Nigel Ford said just the week before at Umbrella: that research and practice need to be a lot closer to one another.

Prof Ford’s lecture was called “Technology, Personalisation and Librarians: Research & Practice”. Nigel’s lectures are always entertaining and I wasn’t going to miss the opportunity to relive my MA days so went along to hear him speak. The thrust of his opening was that we can leverage the different information needs and information processing styles to provide personalised information services, this personalisation is the way we do our jobs in future, it’s how we prove out worth. But in order to do this we need far more interplay between LIS researchers and practitioners. So when Prof Cronin called for meaningful and rigorous research I immediately doubted my own efforts.

However, when I’ve reflected I think I’ve managed to convince myself that my snapshot was useful. I had a huge response to my initial questionnaire, so much so that I had to scale back what I could achieve with the data. So, practitioners who I surveyed clearly cared about what I was asking. There were some very strong feelings expressed. One of my initial hopes was that in casting my net to capture UK public libraries’ participation in Web 2.0 I would be creating a list, a resource, that others who wanted inspiration could turn to. I think I achieved that in some measure. I think that because after I published that research on my blog last year, I immediately got asked to write a guest blog post for UKOLN Cultural Heritage Blog, off the back of that I was asked to write an article for Ariadne magazine. I was asked to speak at a Oxford University Press Panel Day on Discoverability for Public Libraries. I wrote an article for CILIP’s MmIT group newsletter and have just had another article published in CILIP’s ISG group journal, Refer. So I’m thinking that people did give a damn about what I wrote, what I found and what I was able to point them towards. I think I’m pretty much done with it now, it’s ancient history really and I can’t sustain follow-on research (see my Chaos postings for why not!), plus I want to move on to whatever’s next now.

So all that meandering has led me to draw a line under my MA research, it’s time to move on. But I look back on it fondly, it got me some great opportunities and I think I’ve decided that it was good, solid research that did fulfill my ambition to be of actual use to practitioners.

And just in case anyone wonders how it’s possible to write a master’s dissertation with a 7 month-old baby, I attach a photo in explanation. And now it’s time to relax for a couple of hours, safe in the knowledge that I have blogged today, although not impressively or meaningfully, but I can tick that box.

Collating and presenting results from Excel, nourishing my mind whilst nourishing my child.

I never even blogged all my exploits last ruddy Summer, I send myself emails from work to home, from home to work, from work to my Kindle, from my phone to work and occasionally accidentally to my dog. I might be an okay librarian professionally, but personally I’m information addict with a real problem. My approach to information gathering is hit and run, haphazard and with a barely-controlled level of information anxiety much of the time. I’m trying so hard to develop my career and get my first post as a professional (at my age, pah!), I’m trying to help set up a trial for donor breastmilk to be used on the special care baby unit at my local hospital, I’m researching health information for myself and my family, I’m teaching my partner how to use the social web, I’m balancing debts accumulated getting my master’s degree, I’m constantly battling with my hardware (I don’t want to have to know how to fix it and cobble it together all the time, I paid hard-earned cash, I just want it to ruddy work) but most of all I’m doing my best to be a good mother – and of course, researching the hell out of every possible parenting method I like the look of. And loads of other things I just can’t keep in my head all at once.

I was so lucky to win a place at the Special Libraries Association annual conference in 2008, so lucky. But I never really capitalised on my experience; I made some contacts and I learned loads and loads but I wasn’t so wise to how you have to follow up on those leads, write reflectively and make the most of everything straight afterwards, not let the vitality of the experience fade before you act. As soon as I got home I had to finish my dissertation which I couldn’t because I got ill, then I got pregnant, then I got ill when I was pregnant, then of course I had my baby. Which is the single most focussing experience of my life. For a while everything professional fell away as I immersed myself with my beautiful child and how having her made everything worthwhile. Then when she was 5 months old I started writing my dissertation up, submitted when she was 7 months old. I have to say, I can’t really recommend that as the ideal way to write up but I sure as hell started to manage my time ruthlessly, and it worked. Thinking all along that I just wanted to do a “good enough” job, get it finished, submit it then never think about it again, it seemed that I was incapable of doing a bodge job of it and ended up with a distinction from the University of Sheffield. Bloody hell! I surprised myself there, and slightly irritated myself for not being able to leave well alone, not switching off, letting my brain get carried away with itself again. I remembered why I’d chosen this profession, because I love it and I can’t switch off from it, I love to learn all the time and connect with all the great folk I’ve met in person, virtually and now both. I realise that I spend most of my time outside my comfort zone, that’s who I am and I need to accept that, embrace it and move on.

So here’s what I’ve decided to do. This idea fully crytallised this evening when I was watching our customary pre-bath, pre-bed episode of Come Outside (yes, inspiration strikes at the strangest times), Auntie Mabel and Pippin the dog were moving house and packing everything up in boxes, big boxes, little boxes, boxes for everything (you think I’m watching too much children’s television? I’m inclined to agree). She had boxes full of the crap you drag around your life, a box of buttons because you never know when you might need it. You know the kind of thing. I recently read a Lifehacker post that suggested having a box to put in all those little things for which there’s no home but which you can group together until it’s full then you can sort it out. Well that’s my house, that’s my brain, that’s my files and crap on my various devices. Conclusion: that day is never going to dawn. There will never be a time when I can sit down and review, categorise, sort and generally get all my shit together. Not going to happen. Life seems to be permanently set at breakneck speed, so it’s time to stare reality full in the face.

I’m going to draw a line in the sand, that line is going to be Monday 10th July. Anything that I set aside before that date, set aside to do later, read, think about, get to grips with: in the bin. Away with it. No keeping stuff in case it comes in handy one day. What’s the point in keeping gazillions of pdfs of academic papers from my master’s degree? If I ever need to refer to them, I’ve got my bibliographies and oh yeah, I’m a librarian – I will find it if I need it.

I’m drawing the line pre-Umbrella cos it’d be churlish in the extreme to cast that aside. I’ve got shedloads of notes and things to follow up on from that; current, relevant, bang-up-to-date LIS gold. So, in order to maximise the usefulness of all that splendour, I’m going to blog every day until I’ve milked it for all it’s worth. Not for some imagined reader who’s going to trawl through my drivel, for myself. I owe it to myself to let up on my perfectionism and just crack on with this.

I need to create a research strategy for myself, a way to move my other projects forward. I need to write everything down. I need to get that massive piece of paper and draw that spider diagram, extract priorities from it, devise strategies for addressing them and throw the rest in the bin. Leave it alone, move on.

A bold promise, perhaps rash, but I’ve got to give it my best shot.

But what I wanted to take the time to do here was to take a step back and appreciate the benefits, I’ve experienced, of being a paraprofessional, after having been one since 2004 (yikes):

• you get to talk to service users, which I love
• you don’t have to worry about strategy and budget and five year plans and mission statements
• you don’t spend all day on personnel issues
• best of all: you get to handle the stuff!!!!!

Whilst cramming in several other huge tasks into my overfull life, I decided to become a giver for the inaugural World Book Night. This event has had it’s critics, both very negative and critical yet supportive and I agree with many of the points, especially that this could be a lot of terribly nice bookish people giving a book to their terribly nice bookish friends. This was my initial concern and is why I’m holding my event in the local chip shop in the middle of a council estate. The owners have been incredibly supportive although did warn me that some of their customers probably cannot read very well and may be hostile to the idea that someone is trying to give them something for nothing.

Well this is precisely the audience I’m after, my success rate may be poor but I feel that it’ll be worth more than an event held in a library. If only one of my books reaches someone who wouldn’t otherwise have read it then I’ll be pleased. I got very worried when I started re-reading A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry: it’s huge, uses an unfamiliar vocabulary and is frankly quite depressing. But it was the book on the list I most loved so I’m thinking that’s the most important thing.

Maybe if I could’ve chosen any book, I would’ve gone for something more “accessible” but I don’t want to be patronising. That said, I do think there’s too much emphasis on only reading books when surely reading pretty much anything is better than not reading at all. Especially while the internet is so heavily text-based I’m happy to promote most material as good reading practice, football magazines, newspapers or Tolstoy.

• I’m interested in
• Can afford to go to
• Can arrange logistics of childcare such that I can get to them

All of a sudden July provided lots of opportunities that fitted the bill. In the run up to this I’d been putting the finishing touches on my MA dissertation research to make it fit for public consumption online and as it turned out that led to more opportunities to travel and meet librarian-types too, so here in chronological order are my exploits.

9th July, Liverpool – CILIP MmIT group event: Social Networking in Libraries which has been extremely well-blogged by Katharine Widdows, so I need not attempt my pale retrospective! My reason for going to this event is that I figured this would be a good opportunity to see what academic libraries are up to online; my own interest being public libraries online activities. My rough and ready reckoning is that it can be good to hang back a little to see what the academic libraries are up to before cherry-picking the best bits, those that seem robust and well-suited to the public libraries’ role. My two take-home messages from this event were:

1. All academic libraries have not been given carte blanche by senior managers to just go ahead and do whatever they like online, some are more participatory than others while some have not been able to so much as dip their toe in the Library 2.0 communities online. I confess this did surprise me, I had blithely made the assumption that as an integral part of the higher education’s delivery of services to the nation’s brightest and best young minds, the library services would all be trusted to innovate in communication and information service delivery methods (reading that last sentence back, I can see that I have spent far too much time reading corporate bumf recently, yuk!). So just as many public librarians are straining at the leash wrapped around their necks by their local government wranglers, so are many academic librarians. That lack of trust in their own professionals is widespread it seems. All the more reason to converse across sectors and share ideas and experiences; I’ll get to that activity in due course.
2. GPS is the next thing. Many would guffaw at my lateness to that table but until this event I had never heard of foursquare; I obviously signed up immediately and have barely used it since! But this has been the pattern for every new platform I’ve used: initial sign up followed by inactivity then suddenly “getting it” and off and away I’ve gone. This is exactly how I started using (in chronological order): facebook, WordPress, twitter, HootSuite and now foursquare and Prezi.

It was at this event that I saw my first use of the presentation application Prezi, I’d heard of it but not seen it done. Dave Puplett from LSE gave us his experiences of social networking using Prezi and I was extremely impressed. I of course immediately signed up and haven’t used it since. But use it I will!

Standing guard over t'Internet

Just been reading Rudman, R. J. (2010) “Incremental risks in Web 2.0 applications.” The Electronic Library 28 (2) 210-230, as you do on your average Saturday morning. It’s written from the point of view that as libraries access and implement more Web 2.0 applications they’re increasing their surface area that is open to attack. Ok, I’m with it so far (I think). When the author starts detailing protocols for risk and control frameworks it all starts to go way over my head BUT it is useful in making you think about security and looking at your activities from the IT department’s point of view; after all without a good working relationship with your IT department life online would be very hard indeed. So that you don’t have to read it, here’s the take home message:

Work closely with the IT dept in all that you do in order to implement a security program that at the very least:

• take a multi-layered technological approach using filters, anti-malware, anti-virus software (this is where you need your IT buddies, cos if you’re like me you’ll need to phone a friend on this one – shouldn’t be your job as a librarian anyway!)
• Web 2.0 policy – detailed yet enforceable, continuous tweaking may be necessary; users should be aware of their ultimate accountability
• Training for all users on acceptable use and security features.

I think what it boils down to is that as a Library 2.0 zealot it behoves you to learn some basics that mean you’ll be doing your bit to keep your library and authority safe, just some rudimentary knowledge of stuff like phishing attacks would be good for everyone to know. I really think you can’t afford to stick your head in the sand because those threats are there. Without going into detail, we had a phishing attack at work a few weeks ago and it’s caused mayhem, our email and web traffic has been blacklisted by a lot of our stakeholders. My personal email filter places those emails that I send myself when at work in the spam folder; I’ve been bothered to go and fish them out and tell Outlook that emails from there are not spam but how many of those people we contact have known to do this? What a right royal pain in the arse.

the Pulse / te Auaha

I’m really impressed with this website / blog. No sooner do you set your research free than comments and information starts flowing back to you. This is so exciting! I’ve also been asked to write a guest post for the UKOLN Cultural Heritage blog which I’m really chuffed about.

I had been quite concerned that a year out of the loop, not logging on every day (sometimes I only managed once a week, the shame) being a full-time mummy would make it hard to get back in the swing of things, but actually it gave me some perspective coming back in to online information environment: I can see what’s stuck and what hasn’t. Can I stick my neck out and ask what happened to Second Life? I was never that impressed with it but I don’t see much evidence of it being used anywhere now. Lack of APIs? The difference I see coming back is the interchangeability of applications, e.g. I tweet a lot more now and simply feed it into my facebook status. (I need to get that through to here too though!) People seem less concerned with what website they’re on, it’s the raw info they’re interested in.

Anyhoo, lots to do. When I get more than five mins I’m very keen to get hold of Nicholas Carr‘s What the internet is doing to our brains: the shallows. The notion that we don’t go in depth into info any more, just skim over the surface of everything, want  a quick info byte, is compelling. I certainly have my butterfly brain days. I think when going online one needs a clear purpose in mind, a desired outcome, otherwise you end up faffing and the hours go by………