Tom Roper's Weblog

Countless reasons why lists are bad

Library people, what do you want from a library organisation / body twitter account? Generally speaking? Would really like your views.

— Ned Potter (@ned_potter) February 4, 2015

It started as on Twitter. @nedpotter asked a question. What, did we think, a library organisation Twitter account should be like? I weighed in, to say,as did many others, that I thought it need to combine professionalism leavened with humanity. The next day, as an afterthought, I also said that I disliked the infantile lists, or listicles as they are sometimes known, which are tweeted from our professional association.

@ned_potter @sophiebiblio An afterthought: whoever can cure our professional body of puerile addiction to numbered lists would be my hero

— Tom Roper (@tomroper) February 5, 2015

Examples, should you need them, include, ‘Five books that took decades to get published, What we learned in 12 months, 4 Ways Copyright Law Actually [why that redundant actually?-TR] Controls Your Whole Digital Life, Top 10 Science Fiction Books & Movies, The top library and information stories from Jan 2015. 
Of course the @CILIPInfo twitter account is not the only offender. The internet is littered with the damned things and my Twitter feed and my e-mail inbox are crammed with messages from people convinced I am so stupid I can only grasp information in a numbered list. 
The conventional wisdom is that lists are attractive and work. Ned himself notes that his posts constructed as lists being significantly more visitors to his site. I believe that lists are written by lazy writers for lazy readers. I blame many things, not least among them PowerPoint, which has made bulleted list impossible to avoid, and lent them spurious authority.
I first noticed this some twenty-five years ago, when working for an organisation whose aim was to promote British culture. I wrote something for a newsletter we published. My manager, who had to give it her imprimatur, before the presses could roll, said it was fine, but it needed a bulleted list. I held my tongue, being on a temporary contract, but I knew perfectly well there was nothing in my writing that required to be presented to the reader as a bulleted list. Her wish for a bulleted list came, I believe, from a belief that lists were, in themselves, good, and that every piece of literature  that came out from her department had to have one, in order to show the world our modernity. 
Lists treat both reader and writer as infants, incapable of sustained thought. Marx, Darwin, Freud, Proust, Wittgenstein, any writer worth reading needs something more than a list. A professional association that represents those who organise, preserve and disseminate knowledge needs to reflect that in the ways it communicates with both its members and the world. 
Now I’m off to read 44 Medieval Beasts That Cannot Even Handle It Right Now, as recommended by Ned.  

What's in the singles box?

On Facebook, Tominthelibrary posted the first ever independent singles chart, from Record Week, published thirty-five years ago. The Wikipedia entry for the UK Indie Chart cites the following work as its source: 

Lazell, Barry (1997). Indie hits : 1980-1989 : the complete U.K. independent charts (singles & albums). London: Cherry Red.

I was astonished that I either owned, or was familiar with, fourteen of the twenty. I went to my box of 45s, and found the number one, Spizz Energi’s Where’s Captain Kirk? 

I bought singles in the mid to late 70s and early 80s, though many have been sold, lent or lost over the years.  I was urged to list the contents, so here they are, with minimal metadata, no details of B sides, label etc:

Alternative TV Love Lies Limp

Alternative TV Action Time Vision
Buzzcocks Orgasm Addict
Buzzcocks What Do I Get?
Chelsea  Right to Work
Dead Kennedys Too Drunk to Fuck
Guns for Hire I’m Gonna Rough My Girlfriend’s Boyfriend Up Tonight
Leyton Buzzards 19 and Mad
Misty in Roots Wicked Man
Protex Don’t Ring Me Up
Protex I Can Only Dream
Protex I Can’t Cope
Sham 69 Angels With Dirty Faces
Spizz Energi Where's Captain Kirk?
Stiff Little Fingers Alternative Ulster
Stiff Little Fingers Suspect Device
Swell Maps Loin of the Surf
The 101’ers Keys to Your Heart
The Boys You’d Better Move On
The Business Smash the Disco’s [Sic] 
The Clash Bankrobber
The Clash Clash City Rockers
The Clash English Civil War
The Clash The Call Up
The Cure Killing an Arab
The Distractions Time Goes by So Slow
The Mekons Where Were You?
The Ruts In a Rut
The Tours Language School
The Users Kicks in Style

Eleven years a-blogging

I’ve now been running this blog for eleven years. When it started my hair was mostly dark, and I could run a half marathon in under an hour and forty five minutes. Now my hair is grey and same distance takes me two and a half hours.

Time to take stock — posts have been infrequent, latterly, and mostly concerned with the tedious and difficult internal affairs of my professional association, CILIP. Much of the online effort that used to go into the blog now goes into Twitter; I also find myself contributing to more institutional online thingies of one sort or another. But I still think there’s a point to this blog.

It was a good moment, therefore, to attend a UKEIG course on Digital Communications, led by Ned Potter. While I took away many ideas on how to improve and focus what Brighton and Sussex NHS Library and Knowledge Service does online, it was not without relevance to the tools I use personally.

UKEIG courses, and their predecessor organisation, UKOLUG, have probably influenced my professional life more than any others.  I well remember a searching Medline course I attended way back when, taught by Lindsay Curtis, then of the Royal Postgraduate Medical School, just before someone had the bright idea of putting databases onto CD-Roms. 

I’ve also been thinking about podcasts, whose star rose, then fell and now seems to be rising again. I listen to a number, though I find many ill-disciplined and over-long. If I were to podcast, it would be terse, succinct. There is something of a gap in the market — there are few library podcasts, and the British one I listened to most, Talking with Talis,sank without trace, when that organisation, once a co-operative of libraries run by its members, wound up run by private equity and taken over by Capita. Perhaps there is room for regular recorded conversations on subjects of interest to this great profession of ours. 

 

Setting the record straight

The paper for Agenda item 8 at tomorrow's CILIP AGM factually inaccurate. It states, 'Council took a vote and decided by a majority of eleven to one to present the amended proposals to members for vote at the AGM. The Trustee who abstained on this decision, Tom Roper, then took the decision to resign from Council citing the difference of views from the other members of Council on these issues.

That's not how it happened. I abstained on the proposal that the President and Vice President must be CILIP members and elected trustees and not appointed trustees, because it ignored the central point that the President should be elected directly by members, as madated by a past AGM. I then voted against proposals for a third of Council to be unelected appointees, and the consequent changes to the  Royal Charter, Bye-laws and General Regulations. The minutes are clear, though they do not record my name as a dissenter, which I requested. 

I did not resign at the meeting, but did so on 15 July, after a few days reflection. 

'Something of the cordiality displayed by an old-time innkeeper'

'Something of the cordiality displayed by an old-time innkeeper': thus Samuel Swett Green described the correct demenour of the reference librarian towards an approaching user in 1876.  The full citation is:
Green,  Samuel Swett
Personal relations between librarians and readers
Library Journal 1 (November 1876):  74-81

I fear the title of his article might give rise to sniggering at the back of a modern library school lecture hall. 

I came across this while skimming the chapter on Reference and Information Service in Sandra Wood's new Health Sciences Librarianship¹, an update of her 2008 Introduction to health sciences librarianship. 

Once upon a time there was a multi-volume series, Current practice in health sciences librarianship. It ran to eight volumes, published between 1994 and 2001 by Scarecrow Press. I cut my teeth on titles like Shane Godbolt and Leslie Morton's Information sources in the medical sciences,  Michael Carmel's Medical Librarianship, and his later work, Health care librarianship and information work. We no longer have a textbook aimed at the new entrant into British health information work. Perhaps we should. 

For the moment, however, I shall be cultivating the mien of an old-time innkeeper. 

 ¹ Wood, Sandra Health Sciences Librarianship Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2014. ISBN 9780810888128 

Was the CILIP Governance Review conducted 'in plain sight'?

Nick Poole, CILIP Council member and former Tresurer, has made the assertion at Public Libraries News that CILIP’s Governance Review, on which we vote at Saturday’s AGM, was conducted ‘in plain sight’.

Not so. I have commented as follows, ‘I am afraid that Nick Poole is simply wrong when he says that the discussions on the Governance Review were carried out ‘in plain sight’. The review began in 2012. The minutes of the March 2013 Council meeting state, ‘C2013/05 Governance Review Report Council discussed and agreed proposals from the GovernanceReview Board’. Intrigued by this, on 11 July 2013 I wrote to ask when the proposals would be in the public domain. The Chair of Council replied to say that they would be available in October of that year. By the time I attended my first Council meeting in January 2014, they were still not public. The discussion on them at that meeting took place in camera, and my proposal that the discussion be moved to open session was defeated, finding no support from any of my fellow councillors. The subsequent consultation was perfunctory. I know, I was a part of it.At my last Council meeting, members defended this secrecy, claiming that they would not have been able to talk freely if the review had been conducted openly. I fear I cannot see why members elected to office in a membership organisation by their peers should be scared of openness.'

The same post conveys the news that the site’s tireless author Ian Anstice has resigned from CILIP. I very much regret this; Ian has done more for the profession than many a card-carryng CILIP member. I hope, if we can maintain the democracy of our professional association, we will be able to welcome him, and many others, back.

[Posted with iBlogger from my iPhone]

Unity or partition

I have no vote in Thursday’s referendum in which the SNP are urging Scotland to secede; I think I should, but that won’t change in the next forty-eight hours. So I hope those who can vote will look at history. Most people in Ireland, divided in 1920, want a united island. Partitions since 1945, those of Germany, of Vietnam, of Korea, of India, of Yugoslavia all went badly, often ending in war. Germany and Vietnam both achieved reunification, but especially in the latter case, at great cost. I hope those who have a vote will use it wisely. I came across an article in the Gramophone, of all places, on Scottish composers and their ability to take pride in their traditions without following the secessionist road to ruin. Read the words of composer Eddie McGuire, 'I see Scottish traditions as part of a British family of similar traditions; you’ve got Northumbrian bagpipes, you’ve got great part singing in Dorset, you’ve got Welsh choirs. Scottish music, theatre and visual arts are all part of a fabric of British culture… And, to say that we are going to split working people’s ability to resist the onslaught of impoverishment in this capitalist crisis, is, to me, a bit of a betrayal.'

Public Libraries News: Two past presidents on the CILIP governance proposals

The influential Public Libraries News site has published statement from two past Presidents on the CILIP governance review. Tom Featherstone and Bob Usherwood. 'CILIP members are rightly proud of the part they play in maintaining democracy and want their professional body to reflect democratic principles. For many members, the governance proposals under discussion do not do that,’ they say. Read their views in full at http://www.publiclibrariesnews.com/2014/09/2-past-presidents-express-fears-over-cilip-leadership-proposals.html

I shall be at the AGM, and would be pleased to cast proxy votes for members who can’t be present. Forms in MSWord format can be downloaded at AGM Proxy vote form 2014.doc and must be returned to CILIP by 1.15 pm on Thursday 18 September. Contact me for my address, which you’ll need to put on the form. 

CILIP and the cobbler's children

I commend to any reader interested in the affairs of our professional association this blog post by Brian Kelly on his UK Web Focus blog, Wikipedia, Librarians and CILIP. Brian has been encouraging library and information professionals to get involved in editing Wikipedia. He pointed out that CILIP’s Wikipedia page contained membership information from 2012 and suggested, in keeping with Wikipedia’s neutral point of view principles, that members might like to update it. 

To do so, Brian tried CILIP’s website, but there he could only find annual reports back to 2010. He used the Internet Archive and the UK Web Archive, but without success, and he is now asking members to check their personal archives so that the Wikipedia article can be expanded with full membership information.

I hope this works, and I am checking my own papers, both dead-tree and electronic. Nevertheless, I can’t help wondering why our own website does not contain this information. It is important, because we are accountable both to our members, who should be able to find this basic information on their professional association’s website, and to the public, on whose behalf we regulate the profession. 

There is a saying that the cobbler’s children are always ill-shod. It seems to be the case that our organisation, which should know more than any other about standards of information management, has not applied these to our own website. I hope this can be corrected. 

 

Tony Benn's five questions for the powerful and the CILIP Governance Review

The late Tony Benn in the years when he left parliament in order to devote his time to politics devised five questions to ask anyone who exercises power. They were these:

1. What power have you got?
2. Where did you get it from?
3. In whose interests do you exercise it?
4. To whom are you accountable?
5. And how can we get rid of you?

'If you cannot get rid of the people who govern you, you do not live in a democratic system’, he said. These questions are worth considering vis-à-vis the CILIP Governance Review proposals. Suppose the proposals for a third of the seats on Council to be appointed, rather than elected, were agreed, how would the unelected councillors answer these questions?