Tom Roper's Weblog

National Review of NHS Health Library Services in England

The National Review of NHS Health Library Services in England has published its report: http://www.library.nhs.uk/aboutnlh/review with no fewer than fifty, count them, fifty recommendations.

health, NLH, healthlibraries

Hollywood Librarian

Not long to go now till Monday's showing: 7 pm in Arts A2 Lecture Theatre at the University of Sussex. To whet appetites, this Technorati search finds blog reactions to earlier showings.

I understand Thursday's showing at Athlone by the Health Sceinces Libraries Group was a great success.

Hollywood Librarian: British première

The Sussex sub-branch of CILIP is holding the British première of the film the Hollywood Librarian, on Monday 25 February, at 7 pm in the Arts A2 lecture theatre, University of Sussex.

How to find the university

There's a trailer on YouTube

European première of Hollywood Librarian

I see that the European première of Hollywood Librarian is to take place in Athlone at the Irish Health Science Libraries Group conference. I believe a UK showing, organised by CILIP, is not far off.
See the trailer on YouTube

Libraries once, twice, three times in the THES

In today's Times Higher Education Supplement (soon to become the Times Higher Education) I was surprised to find two items of interest in among the tedious lists of establishment gongs. Michael Jubb of the Research Information Network discusses the differences between librarians' and researchers' ideas about what librarians should be doing. Subject expertise and information literacy training are best delivered by academics, the researchers believe, and while librarians have tried to find a place in the open access movement, and in the management of institutional repositories, Jubb reports that most repositories are 'short of content and little used'.
Elsewhere, Rebecca Knuth reviews Lucien Polasatron's Books on Fire: the tumultuous story of the world's great libraries*. Her review appears twice, on page 24 with the headline, 'a flaming injustice that destroys our records' and again on page 25, with the same headline but shorn of the initial indefinite article. The final paragraphs of the two versions of the review differ. Another review appears in full on page 24, and then its latter half is repeated on page 25 with the headline repeated and an accompanying picture. A pity; too much sherry at the THES sub-editors New Year party, I suppose.
*Polastron, Lucien X
Books on Fire: the tumultuous story of the world's great libraries
London: Thames & Hudson, 2007
9780500513842

Technorati Tags: judd, libraryhistory, Polasatron, RIN, THES

The curse of Roper

The dying Aleister Crowley is supposed to have cursed Hastings, or in some tellings of the story, Eastbourne, which explains a lot. A dreadful fate awaits any library that rejects a job application from me. Senate House , or to give it its more formal title, the University of London Research Library Services, were unwise enough to do this. They found themselves the subject of scathing letters in the Times Literary Supplement. This, on its own could have been coincidence. The national library, the British Library, whose unwritten rider on job advertisements seems to be 'librarians need not apply', also rejected my applications, and often come in for stick, but the BLis the library we all love to hate, so I have never read any great significance into it. Now, once more in the TLS, I see that the London Library, who also lacked the vision to employ me, are now being lambasted for an 80% subscription increase, presumably as their new extension has bled their reserves dry.
Future employers might like to think hard before rejecting me.

Technorati Tags: jobsearch, curse

THES: boomers in thrall to a wiki universe

There's a curious article in the latest THES:
Brabazon, Tara
Boomers in thrall to a wiki universe
THES, 16 November 2007, 1820:14
It doesn't yet appear in the electronic version, either in the free area or the subscribers section.
Brabazon who, it seems, is Professor of Media in that  institution that lies the other side of a railway line and a main road to mine, is complimentary about librarians, but dismissive of bloggers: writing about recent library conferences, and I wish she would say which she means, she concludes that we promote 'right-wing populism' and replicate 'colonial structures of the 19th century'.
I think she is wrong to set librarians against bloggers. I belong to both groups, and I think I and others are trying, as the best librarians always have, to use new technologies to make our services to scholars better.
She thinks that we have lost 'the capacity to value the particular, the unique, the ephemeral and the transitory. I could cite several blogs whose sole function is to present particularity, uniqueness, ephemera and transitoriness. I hope some of my posts may have those qualities too.
Professor Brabazon rightly inveighs against male consultants who leech off a predominantly female profession. May I proudly point out that I am a male librarian, but I am emphatically not a consultant?  Indeed my only attempt to be one, during an unfortunate period of unemployment, ended horribly.

OCLC report: Sharing, Privacy and Trust in Our Networked World

OCLS's new report Sharing, Privacy and Trust in Our Networked World goes to the top of my reading list, all 280 pages and 8.69 MB of it.

Collaborative Collection Management

Sally Curry of the Research Information Network whose presentation at the WESLINE colloquium I blogged last week, e-mailed me to point out that I underestimated the extent to which collaborative collection management has developed: 'I was interested to read your comments about CCM. I am not sure that you are entirely correct about the lack of development since ASVIN. Some collaborative programmes have not just run for the duration of their initial funding but have managed to carry on such as SCoRe and the White Rose/British Library Collaborative Collection Management Project programme and CoFoR. And of course, one of the large developments in the area of collaborative collection management  is the UKRR'.

I'm happy to set the record straight and the projects Sally mentions may be found here:

SCoRe: a catalogue of printed company reports held in UK libraries
White Rose/British Library Collaborative Collection Management Project: a mechanism whereby very low-use monographs can be withdrawn from individual White Rose Consortium libraries (Leeds, Sheffield and York univeristy libraries) and offered to the BL’s own collections
CoFoR: a project aiming to promote collaborative collection management, which developed a downloadable toolkit (pdf format)
UK  Research Reserve: an agreement between higher education and the British Library whereby the British Library will store journals no longer required by HE libraries

 

WESLINE colloquium: Exploding the Canon

I attended the WESLINE Colloquium, Exploding the Canon. From Medieval Romance to TV Soap:
meeting the challenges in resource provision on 12 September at the Institute of Germanic and Romance Studies.

David Pearson, Director, University of London Research Library Services (ULRLS)  drew attention in his welcoming remarks to the problems libraries face. All University of London research libraries run at a deficit. The average library spend by  CURL  member libraries rose from £8.5 million in 2004-205 to £9.6 million in 2005-06 and libraries shave to handle an increasingly wide range of resources. David drew attention to the SAS-Space project, their institutional repository, of which more below. He wondered if the arts and humanities were not more backward when it came to self-archiving than other subjects. He also warned of the decline in languages in schools and universities. Languages, he felt, are a prime candidate for collaboration, but collaborative collection management is always popular until an institution is asked to give something up.

He then introduced a panel discussion and open forum on trends in French/Hispanic/Italian studies research and implications for resource provision. The first speaker was Trevor Dadson,  Professor of Spanish at Queen Mary, who reported from the Arts and Humanities Research Council Postgraduate Panel panel. Today’s postgraduates are tomorrow’s researchers and academics, so the results have important implications for staffing and for the future of the disciplines.
Across all languages, between 80 and 90% of applications were in post-1950 subjects, and many ignored book-based subjects in favour of film, cultural studies and the visual arts. Applications also showed little originality, and showed evidence of excessive supervisory influence. He wondered if institutions would have the right resources to support these applications, and whether staffing was adequate. Increasingly Spanish nationals are recruited by British universities to teach the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries. He also felt that many of the applications were unsuitable for the AHRC and were more with in the scope of the Economic and Social Research Council.
Then Jane Everson, Professor of Italian at Royal Holloway, reported from the AHRC research panel. One of the difficulties the panel has is in judging applications where one has no experience. There are many also PhDs in modern languages which are not supported by AHRC, and she endorsed Trevor Dadson’s point about applications that fall into the ESRC’s remit. In Italian, a smaller discipline, the medieval period, above all the writers know as the Tre Corone, Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio, is still central, and she praised the Bodleian’s recent exhibition, Italy’s Three Crowns. Increasingly Italian nationals, including medievalists,  are being appointed to British university posts. Electronic resources are well developed, particular in Dante and Boccaccio studies: see for example Brown University’s Decameron Web or Princeton’s Dante Project. 

The visual arts remain strong, as does 16th century lyric poetry. Popular themes include women, censorship, driven perhaps by the opening up of the Inquisition’s archives,  the holocaust, translation studies and detective fiction. There is a big  historical gap, with very little interest in the 17th, 18th, or 19th centuries, in contrast to Italy itself where the 19th century remain strong. In the Italian tradition, the preparation of a critical edition remains an important part of a scholar’s career.
Book-focussed research remains important and there is interest in work on secondary figures in Italian literature, cinema (though not yet photography), linguistics, immigrant writing, identity, both regional versus national, national versus European and European versus the wider world, comparative culture, exile and, last but not least, food; see for example UCL’s Cappuccino Conquests  project . In questions Jane was asked whether modularisation could be blamed for the lack of contextual knowledge displayed by applicants, She felt that, yes, it might, or the excessive emphasis on illusory choice in the undergraduate curriculum.

Eleanor Quince of Southampton presented the results of the AHRC Review of research in modern languages undertaken for the AHRC by the Subject Centre for Languages, Linguistics and Area Studies, an attempt to analyse the intellectual health of the subject area. There are around 2,000 active researchers and 2,500 postgraduates in the field, something which will change as the decline in undergraduate numbers works its way through. There has also been a migration of some linguists out of modern languages, growth in collaborative research, a rise in applied language research, and in interest in intercultural communication and in interpreting and translation studies at postgraduate level. Literature is still a focus, but interest is declining in schools and among undergraduates; gender, post-colonial and cultural studies remain strong. From a chronological point of view, the Cinderella centuries, that is to say the 17th and 18th, are in danger of disappearing altogether. Objects of study are changing, with ICT allowing the development of online editions, and research growing in new genres such as sports literature or graphic novels, while textual criticism is in peril.
Eleanor didn’t mention it, but for me, by far the most interesting element of the report is the analysis of modern languages publishing in part 4 Trends in dissemination.

Michael Moriarty, Professor of French at Queen Mary, gave a British Academy perspective, and drew attention to the BA's response to Dearing .
He was concerned that many resources in the field were not sufficiently known or used, for example CESAR, the Calendrier électronique des spectacles  sous l’ancien régime et sous la révolution . He warned of insularity, and that poor language skills, even at postgraduate level, meant a great deal of teaching is now done through translation. To check the availability of sources in their original language, he had run a check on the British Library catalogue  and those of  the University of London  (I was unclear whether he had used the University of London Research Library Services catalogue for this  or the M25 consortium’s cross-searching tool ) for French editions of the works of three authors, Michel Foucault, Louis Althusser and Alain Badiou, with disappointing results. I should be interested to see this exercise repeated on COPAC for a national picture of availability of these texts, indeed would also be interested to see what institutions’ collection development policies say on the matter.

The last member of the panel to speak, who discussed the Research Assessment Exercise, was Margaret Atack, Professor of French at Leeds.  The RAE has rescued modern languages from vocationalism, she claimed, and referred to HEFCE’s review of the impact of quality-related (QR) funding for research in English higher education institutions . In modern languages there was consistency across subjects, but most research is concentrated in the modern period. There is some interest in new areas such as film studies. The age profile of researchers suggests that appointments are not keeping pace with retirements. There is some concern that opportunities for publishing are diminishing, but there are increasing opportunities for e-publication, including in repositories and an increase in inter-disciplinary and collaborative work.

After lunch David Lowe  of Cambridge University Library chaired a session on projects, with presentations by Stephen Bury on the British Library's Content Strategy,  Zoë Holman and Richard Davis  of  the School of Advanced Study, University of London) on the SAS-SPACE institutional repository  and  Ed King  also of the British Library on the BL/JISC Newspaper Digitisation Project This last project will take an impressive range of 19th century British newspapers and make them available online, but we were dismayed to hear that access would be restricted to users in further and higher education. See more here on the matter: http://tomroper.typepad.com/tr/2007/09/british-library.html
In a final session on resources, chaired by Geoff West  of the British Library, we heard a fine report by Vanya Murray, of Oxford University Library Services  on researching film: changes and challenges, a fascinating look at establishing a new service, including some of the issues of classification and certification, format issues, cataloguing and classification standards. There’s some resources based on her guide at: http://languagelearningcentre.wordpress.com/2007/09/13/film-studies-resources/

Stephen Hart, Professor of Hispanic Studies at UCL,  spoke on sourcing material for the study of a living author: compiling a new biography of G. García Márquez an insight into the problem faced by the biographer who chooses to tackle a living subject. The sources available to him included García Márquez’s own radio interviews, documentaries, journalism and his attempt at autobiography, Vivir para contarla as well as interviews with friends, family and servants. But García Márquez is elusive, enigmatic and some times self-contradictory. There is also another biography by Gerald Martin due to appear soon.
Finally Sally Curry, the  CURL/RIN Collaborative Collection Management Programme Advisor  spoke on supporting engagement with the research community through Collaborative Collection Management and the developments towards a British distributed research network. Libraries face problems if space, of budgets, of a loss of specialists and a lack of institutional support. CCM covers selection and purchase, stock transfers, resource discovery and storage (the UK Research reserve) and shared retro-conversion and digitisation. She mentioned the CoCoRUPS  project  a qualitative survey of researchers behaviour in medieval and early modern studies, and the Research Information Network's study  Researchers Use of Academic Libraries and their Services . Visits to collections are declining, and when researchers use electronic resources they may not automatically identify them as having been provided by the library   I was interested to see that collaborative collection management seems not to have advanced very much since the days we were doing it in the ASVIN project