SLA vote – yea or nay?

December 7, 2009 at 11:49 pm · Filed under Uncategorized ·Tagged , ,

Now that I’ve got only two days left in which to decide whether I want to be a member of the Special Libraries Association or the Association for Strategic Knowledge Professionals, it’s probably about time I actually made up my bloody mind. Part of the reason I’ve put off voting for so long is that I’ve completely reversed direction on this almost daily since the proposed new name was announced. As Bethan noted recently, for a decision like this it’s not enough to know which way you’re voting; you need to know why. Bethan suggested imagining that the actual voting screen had a text box under the yes/no buttons, asking you to explain the reasons for your choice. If you can’t fill in that box, you’re not ready to vote.

I’ve had this blog post sitting in my drafts folder for weeks now, because I just couldn’t seem to fill in that imaginary box to my satisfaction. I’ve even toyed with the idea of just forgetting about it all and boycotting the vote, but that seems like a petty thing to do (and as my Dad always said – if you don’t have your say when you’ve got the chance, you can’t complain afterwards!). So, I think I’ve reached a decision – please bear with me while I try and wrangle some vaguely coherent explanation out of it…

I’ve already bashed out my initial reactions to the proposed new name, and my mind hasn’t really changed since I wrote that. I still think that “Special Libraries Association” is essentially meaningless; I’m still not 100% that “Association for Strategic Knowledge Professionals” is any more meaningful; and I still think that “ASKPro” is a terrible, terrible acronym (although, since the initial reaction we have been repeatedly reminded that the vote is for the name, not the acronym, which I doubt will end up being used).

What I keep coming back to though is this: simply, it is time for a change. Much as I love the L-word, it does have unfortunately outdated connotations hanging around it. Maybe “Association for Strategic Knowledge Professionals” will require as much explanation to non-members and non-information professionals as SLA did, but at least they won’t have to work their way past a set of inaccurate assumptions to begin with. ASKP is a blank slate.

I also like the fact that it’s an inclusive name. One of the commenters on my original post, a public librarian, pointed out that “ASKPro…sounds like an association for any librarian to join” – which they intended as a negative point, but I actually think is really positive. The commenter suggested that the name coudn’t be applied purely to special libraries – but one thing I picked up very quickly after first becoming involved with SLA in the summer was that “special libraries” covered a far broader spectrum than I had assumed. If the new name stops people from thinking “well I can’t join that association, it’s only for special librarians” – isn’t that a good thing?

So, I’m voting yes. I’m looking forward to seeing the results of the vote – it’s obviously caught people’s attentions, I’ve really enjoyed seeing all the commentary that’s sprung up around the web about this. To the polling station!

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Catching up…

December 7, 2009 at 2:46 pm · Filed under Uncategorized ·Tagged , , , ,

The blog’s been a bit quiet for the last few weeks, for various reasons – hurtling ever closer to my dissertation deadline, spending what free time I do have on christmas shopping and catching up with the friends I’ve been neglecting; plus the unwelcome return of my sleepwalking and occasional insomnia (last seen at about this point in my first degree…) meaning I’m pretty zombie-fied for most of my waking hours anyway!

I did manage to get a day out at Online last week, which was great fun. I went along to the SLA Europe breakfast in the morning, and got chatting to some fellow SLA members (including Gimena Campos Cervera, the 2009 SLA European Information Professional award winner – good to catch up with her; hadn’t seen her since the SLA summer soiree!), then spent some time on the SLA Europe stand and some wandering around the exhibition. I managed to make it Mary Ellen Bates’ seminar on using social media in the workplace: she’s a fascinating speaker, and always has some interesting insights.

The big news on the SLA stand was of course the launch of the 2010 Early Career Conference Awards. Having been a lucky recipient of one of the 2009 awards, I cannot emphasise enough how valuable the experience was. I would urge anyone who is eligible for the award (you just need to be within the first 5 years of your career as an information professional) to apply – details are on the SLA Europe site. Also, if you want to hear the perspectives of past winners of the award and get some advice on applying, check out the SLA ECCA Ning - we’re all happy to share our experiences and answer any questions.

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The Changing Landscape of the Information Profession

December 7, 2009 at 2:23 pm · Filed under Uncategorized ·Tagged , , , , ,

I went to an SLA Europe-hosted panel discussion on the 25th November (I know, it’s taken me a while to write this up – dissertation deadline is looming!) on the future of the information profession. There is a full report of the event on the SLA Europe blog, as well as blog posts from Sara Batts and Tim Buckley Owen (very possibly others too, but those are the only ones I’ve spotted so far!) so I won’t rehash the whole thing here. I did just want to comment on a few points that caught my attention.

First of all, one of the panellists suggested that you can manage an information team without having any subject knowledge/information management skills; but can’t if you only know about information management and have no business, leadership and communication skills. I understand where the panellist was coming from here, but I’m not sure I agree: I don’t think a manager is much use if s/he doesn’t understand what their team does. I’d be interested to hear other’s thoughts about this: is anyone currently managed by non-information professionals? How do you find it?

Secondly, the e-books question. Now, I love paper books and can’t imagine ever not having them – but that doesn’t mean there won’t come a day when I will actually own an e-book reader and get most of my reading material on that. Most of the objections raised to e-books seem to come down to either technological issues (e.g. wanting an e-reader that can survive being dropped in the bath), or a vague sense that books are just nicer. As far as the technology thing goes, I don’t see why there can’t be a waterproof e-reader sometime soon, and the same goes for most other points people like to raise about the limitations of e-books and e-readers: if the only barrier to their widespread adoption is technological, I think it’s a safe bet that the manufacturers will be working on it. The latter point is harder to argue with: the tactile experience of reading a book is something that can’t be replicated with an e-book reader. On the other hand, I have a friend who makes the same argument for manual typewriters over computers. He’s an aspiring writer, and went through a phase of only doing his creative writing on a typewritier – this phase lasted for a couple of weeks, until he remembered how much easier it was to work on a computer. At the end of the day, no matter how much “nicer” something is, convenience will always win out for the masses.

I don’t want to sound like I’m evangelising here – I don’t own an e-book reader myself; I think I’ve only ever read one e-book (on my phone). I just get a bit frustrated by people who dismiss e-books out of hand because they’re just not as nice. If people are going to argue against something, I’d like to hear more solid arguments! Incidentally, I spotted this post (hat tip to Stephen’s Lighthouse) recently, debunking some of the myths about e-books – an interesting read, cleared up some things I was unsure of.

The final point I wanted to talk about was the question on whether membership of a professional body was necessary in order to be considered/consider yourself a professional. I thought it was a real shame that there wasn’t time to debate this question properly – the panellists were limited to yes or no answers, and they were all clearly itching to say more! Personally, I would argue that while it is undoubtably beneficial to belong to a professional body, I object to the idea that you can’t call yourself a professional without membership. Ultimately I think that’s a personal choice; and I don’t think that anyone who decides that the benefits they get from their professional body are not worth the fees they have to pay (which after all, are usually not cheap – especially on a librarian’s salary!) should be told that they are therefore not a professional.

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Should we shush?

November 21, 2009 at 5:31 pm · Filed under Uncategorized ·Tagged ,

I’ve had this post saved as a draft for a week or so now – it took on a bit of a ranty tone when I first wrote it, so I decided

Found a surprising amount of NSFW pics when I googled "librarian shh". Wows.

to hold off on publishing for a while. Been inspired to come back to it by the wikiman’s excellent post on this THE article on noisy libraries. I think the THE piece was particularly snooty and ill-argued – see the wikiman’s post for a deconstruction of what was wrong with the article; I agree with most of his points so I won’t re-hash it here – but I have my own bone to pick with noisy libraries, so I thought I’d try and re-work last week’s rant into something a little more rational.

As regular readers may know, I’m currently finishing off my dissertation, for the MSc in Library and Information Studies at City University. When I started the course I was living in a (very cold and draughty) shared house with four other people who, lovely as they were, were not students and didn’t always understand that I needed peace and quiet to work in. As a consequence, I did most of my work in the uni library. I now live in a (much warmer) flat with my boyfriend, but still find it difficult to work at home without getting distracted, so still prefer to work in the library.

A little background: the library is on floors 2-6 of the main campus building. Up until before the summer, the layout was as follows:

  • 2nd floor: Issue/enquiries desk, self issue machines, short loan collection
  • 3rd floor: Group study area (open plan); PC labs (in separate rooms off to the side of the group study area – no real noise policy, but tended to be quieter)
  • 4th floor: Law collection; silent study; small PC lab (but good luck beating the law students to a space in there)
  • 5th floor: Main textbook collection; “quiet study” (i.e. you can talk quietly to your neighbour, about work, but people should also be able to study in there alone without disturbance)
  • 6th floor: Silent study. No computers, just rows of desks with the occasional power point (probably two for every dozen seats)

Now, this arrangement wasn’t perfect. If you were working by yourself and needed to concentrate, the only place you could really do that was the 6th floor – the 3rd floor PC labs were quieter than the main 3rd floor area, but as it wasn’t officially a “silent study” area you couldn’t actually tell anyone to be quiet if they were disturbing you. The 5th floor, despite being for “quiet study”, was always louder than the 3rd floor – undergrads in particular tended to use it as a social space. It was usually impossible to find a seat on the 4th floor, never mind trying to find a spare PC there – the law students got priority, and they used it pretty heavily. That left the 6th floor, which to be fair, was reliably silent.

The problem with the 6th floor was that if you needed to do some work that involved using a computer, you had to a) own a laptop, as there were no fixed PCs in there; b) get there early enough to find a seat next to a power point, or smuggle in your own extension lead; and c) not run any OS later than Windows XP (assuming you had a PC – I don’t know how the Mac OS fared) as the wifi network doesn’t work with Vista or Windows 7. Oh, and if you needed to use the silent study area at the weekends – tough, that floor is closed at the weekends. Everything else about the library’s policies I at least understand, even if I don’t necessarily agree; but I have never been able to figure out the point of that rule.

I usually ended up working in the PC labs on the 3rd floor, and just hoping that the other people working in there stayed reasonably quiet. That worked ok until September, when the library re-opened at weekends and I could head back in there to work (I’m working full time now, so have to do all of my work at weekends). Over the summer, they’d remodelled the 3rd floor (along with some other renovations that I won’t go into now). The separate PC labs are gone – it’s now completely open-plan, with fixed PCs in a long row all the way around the edges of the room.

In some ways this is better, as there are now far more PCs available for use – before, if you didn’t get there first thing you struggled to find a PC to work at. On the other hand, if you’re trying to write up your dissertation in peace and there’s eight undergrads at the next table having a heated argument about the group assignment they’re working on (as happened to me last weekend), there is nothing you can do about it. If, like me, you work full time and can only use the library at weekends, there is absolutely nowhere you can study in silence.

I do understand the logic behind opening up more areas for group study – there’s much more focus now on group learning and collaborative projects, and the library has to provide a space for that to happen. I also don’t believe that the whole library has to be utterly silent, all the time – if you need to talk to your neighbour, you should be able to do so. Unfortunately, City library has provided these group study areas at the expense of the silent areas – which, despite what the management seems to think, are still very important to a lot of students.

I used to work at City library (I left in June, just before the refurbishments started) so I know that there was a consultation with the library staff about the refurbishment plans. I was there, so I know how strongly all of us argued that what was needed was not yet more group study space (forgot to mention – the second floor is now also for group study; the issue/enquiry desk has been moved to the corner and the short loan collection crammed into a room that is far too small for it). What was needed was some space where people could study quietly, preferably with access to a few computers (or at least a couple more powerpoints for laptops!). I also remember very well how the management team nodded seriously at these points, promised to consider them, then went ahead with the refurbishment as planned.

It may be that next summer they will actually pay some attention to the silent study area. It’ll be too late for me to benefit from that of course, but at least it’ll save some future students from making the same complaints. Here’s hoping.

This is just my opinion, and I could be totally wrong about this, but I think part of the problem at City has been that the people actually making decisions about the library layout do not work in the library, don’t know how it is used, and are too easily swayed by arguments that silent libraries are an anachronism. As I said, I don’t want to see entirely silent libraries any more than I want to see completely noisy, raucous ones. I just think that there’s been too much focus, at least at City, on providing social spaces; and not enough on preserving the areas for those people who just want somewhere quiet, where they can concentrate. Is it too much to ask to have both?

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Wants a MASSIVE database with everything in it kthx

November 6, 2009 at 2:54 pm · Filed under Uncategorized ·Tagged , , , ,

**DISCLAIMER**

Mindful of what happened last time I tried to comment that a non-librarian blogger might be a bit mistaken regarding access to information issues, I’d just like to point out that I am not having a go at Andrew! Just find users’ perspective on this stuff interesting. K?

***

Stumbled across this blog post recently, written by Andrew Taylor, a PhD student, reflecting on his lit review. He made the very good point that lack of access to prior research harms the scientific process – if everyone has easy access to discoveries others have made then they can work on and improve them that much sooner. He points out that “scientific knowledge is still trapped in PDF versions of paper journals, behind a myriad different paywalls and arbitrary institutional subscription lists. That’s a terrible system” – which I would have a very hard time disagreeing with (although I do take issue with the suggestion that institutional subscription lists are “arbitrary”!). It actually reminded me of a point that one of the speakers at UKSG this year made – that scholarly journals only look the way they do because they’re based on the communication methods of the 18th century. If we were inventing the scholarly journal today, wouldn’t it look less like a collection of letters and more like Facebook? And the “myriad different paywalls” issue is one I couldn’t agree with more – it’s frustrating for everyone that there isn’t just one way into all paid-for content.

However, Andrew follows up this very sensible and understandable comment with this: “It should be on a big database, searchable by any parameter you like. If I’ve got a question to which mankind has found an answer, I should be able to run a quick-and-dirty search and get a good idea what that answer is in about fifteen minutes”.

Hmmm.

Now, I totally see where he’s coming from. As a student (not long to go now though – should have my dissertation more or less finished by christmas!) I know it would be sooooooo useful to be able to search everything in one place. And even with my librarian hat on, I can still see the appeal – wouldn’t it be great if all published information was just there, in one enormous package (properly indexed, of course!)? Think how much quicker renewals would be!

Of course, this hypothetical mega-database simply wouldn’t work. It’s a wonderful, utopian idea – but there’s just too many issues around rights and cost and so on to actually build something like it (not to mention the technical issues – I actually can’t imagine how you could hope to get meaningful search results from something that huge, the precision would be terrible). I’m probably taking this a bit too seriously actually – I suspect that Andrew didn’t mean it as a serious suggestion! I just find it interesting, looking at how users think about these things. Because what it really boils down to is that nobody wants to spend hours wading through masses of abstracts in dozens of databases, looking for something which may not exist, but worried that if they don’t exhaust all possibilities then they may miss something relevant. It’d be nice if there was a quicker way to do literature reviews, but sadly there isn’t. Sorry!

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So long, and thanks for all the spinning GIFs

October 29, 2009 at 11:20 am · Filed under Uncategorized ·Tagged , ,

The sad demise of Geocities a few days ago has got me thinking about the problems with using free services to host your data. The first I’d heard of Geocities shutting down was xkcd’s commemorative redesign on Monday (screenshot), and I have to admit it did give me a twinge of nostalgia – I’m fairly sure my first attempt at web design was a geocities site (probably for the best that if it still existed, it is now gone forever!). I then started wondering how many people actually still maintained active sites there, and realised with horror that I had actually seen one recently – one of the local campaigning groups I’m looking at for my thesis had a geocities site.

I’m writing about local campaigning groups’ use of the web, and the first stage of my project was analysing the websites of 20 groups. Of course, now one of them has vanished (typing in their URL just leads you to the stark message: “Sorry, the GeoCities web site you were trying to reach is no longer available”) I’m down to 19 – although I should still be able to use my analysis of their page as it was when I looked at it, I’ll just need to point out in my write-up that the site no longer exists. I did email my contact in that group to find out if they knew that their site was about to be deleted, and if they had already set up a new site or had plans to, but I haven’t had a response yet.

It’s a shame for them that they happened to choose a platform for their site which turned out to be unsustainable, but it made me wonder how many of the other groups I’m looking at will end up having the same problem. Given that all of the groups in my study are volunteer-led, lack of time and resources means that most of them have gone for free, easy to customise web spaces very much like geocities (in fact, quite a few use wordpress.com blogs as a base for their websites, which I personally think works really well). It’s a good solution, for now: but as Geocities’ fate reminds us, it may not always be that simple. Just something to bear in mind really – and the same goes for personal use: I shudder sometimes at the thought of how much of my data I have entrusted to Google. They’re free and relatively secure for now, but what if that changes? Of course, I’m not so trusting as to leave everything in one place: anything important is usually backed up in a few places, including on my hard drive, and a USB stick and often printed out too – the belt and braces approach! But I wonder how many other people do that?

But back to geocities: I think the most important question now is, where will people go for prime examples of what not to do with HTML?? Ah well, there’s still MySpace…

Bad-MySpace-Design-620

Gah!! MY EYES!!!

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Question on data protection and the 2011 census

October 26, 2009 at 2:38 pm · Filed under Uncategorized ·Tagged , ,

I’ve been trying to find out about the gathering of data for the 2009 rehearsal for the 2011 census, and how much of it is covered by the Data Protection Act. It’s a little beyond my knowledge, and try as I might I can’t condense my query into 140 characters, so I thought I’d post my thoughts here on the off chance that anyone reading knows something about this.

The London borough I live in is one of the areas selected to take part in the rehearsal for the 2011 census. As such, we received through the door on the 15th October a census rehearsal form, with instructions to complete and return it either on or soon after the 15th. Between one thing and another we didn’t actually get it done until Monday 19th October, and I posted it back the following day.

Last Friday (23 Oct) my partner happened to be at home during the day, and had a visit from two representatives of the Office for National Statistics, wanting to know why we hadn’t returned the form yet. He explained to them that we had done so at the start of the week, and pointed out that there had been ongoing Royal Mail strikes in the area for the last couple of months. They grudgingly accepted this explanation and left.

My question is this: should they actually have had access to data identifying who had returned their forms so far and who hadn’t? We had actually had a note through the post from them earlier last week (Wednesday 21st, I think): a generic, bulk-mailed reminder saying something along the lines of “If you haven’t yet filled out your census form, there’s still time” and containing instructions on what to do if we had lost the form. This seemed totally reasonable to me, and I didn’t really expect to hear anything else from them. I was taken aback that they were actually (presumably) paying people to go out and knock on individual doors. I don’t really know an awful lot about data protection, and all I could find on the ONS website was this commitment to confidentiality, so I was hoping that someone who knows what they’re talking about could confirm whether or not using the data collected to target individual homes constituted a breach of that confidentiality. Any advice gratefully received – am I worrying over nothing?

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Am I a “Strategic Knowledge Professional”?

October 19, 2009 at 9:00 am · Filed under Uncategorized ·Tagged , ,

You may have already heard that the Special Libraries Association (SLA), as a result of their extensive research during the alignment project, have proposed a name change. The new name, to be voted on by SLA members next month, is the “Association for Strategic Knowledge Professionals”, or “ASKPro“.

I’ve waited until now to blog my thoughts on this because I wanted to give the matter the consideration it deserves (and not at all because I am too easily distracted to blog on a regular basis…). I support the alignment project generally, and do see the need for a new name, but I’m not entirely sure that ASKPro should be it. However, I realise that my initial dislike of the name could have more to do with the fact that it’s New and Different and therefore Scary and Unnatural, so I have been giving it some serious thought over the last few days. Here’s what I’ve come up with.

For the change:

As was pointed out in the email announcing the proposed name, John Cotton Dana (founder of SLA, as if you didn’t know!) said in the first place that “The name Special Libraries was chosen with some hesitation, or rather in default of a better…”. The name doesn’t really mean much to me, and certainly means far less to non-librarians. When I first applied for the ECCA last year, on reading the stipulation that candidates “must have an interest in special libraries”, I had to do a fair amount of Googling to find out what constituted a special library. I wasn’t much the wiser after my Googling, either. Most people I told about the award didn’t know what it meant either – one library colleague said “Special libraries… Do they mean prison libraries?” It’s possible that the term is more widely understood in the States, but even so, I doubt the majority of SLA members actually consider themselves “special librarians”.

Add this to the fact that the alignment research has shown that the term “library” itself has low value to executives in charge of setting our budgets and making hiring decisions, and it’s clear that the name is not useful to us as a profession. SLA have also stated that the new name was chosen in part to “fulfil the desire frequently stated in member discussions for a name with a meaningful acronym or shortened form” – I can’t say that this is massively important to me, but it’s true that “SLA” is not a particularly memorable acronym.

Against the change

Perhaps this will vary depending on the speaker’s accent, but “ASKPro” doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue! The K and P sounds together make it, in my opinion, slightly difficult to say – and drop the K and you have either “ass pro” or “arse pro”, depending on accent – not an improvement on the innuendo-free SLA! (Someone who shall remain nameless also pointed out that “ASKPro” reminded her of “Reference services from -ahem- ‘ladies of the night’”. I hadn’t thought of that before she mentioned it but am finding it hard to get past that image!).

I’m also not entirely sure what a “strategic knowledge professional” is. SLA have been very keen to emphasis that changing the name of the organisation does not mean changing the name of our profession – individual members are still free to call themselves librarians, information professionals, knowledge warriors, or whatever they like really – but that the new name has been chosen because it “ties special librarians and information professionals to the strategic goals of their organizations, increases the perceived value of their services, and stresses their professionalism”. I’m not really convinced though – if someone asks what I do and I say I’m a strategic knowledge professional, are they any the wiser than if I’d said “librarian” or even “information professional”? Then again, would it leave them any less informed? My fictional conversationalist would be just as baffled by “information professional” as “strategic knowledge professional”; and would probably be misled by “librarian”.

I’m not really sure what the purpose of adding “strategic” into the name is, other than to make a meaningful acronym: my immediate reaction on hearing the new name was that it sounded incredibly American. “Strategic” always strikes me as one of those management-speak nothing-words – it’s filler, added in to make things sound more important than they are. According to the SLA alignment research, it’s one of the words that tested well when added in to a job description, as a way of helping non-librarians understand what we do; but I wonder if that applies more to American audiences than elsewhere.

So overall, basically, I’m still undecided. I do think we need a new name, but I still wish that it could have been something better than ASKPro. I don’t actually have any better ideas, of course! I honestly don’t know which way I’ll vote next month, so am looking forward to continuing the debate. If anyone has any compelling arguments either way, feel free to share!

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‘The Google-isation of [Re]search’

October 10, 2009 at 3:10 pm · Filed under Uncategorized ·Tagged , , ,

Went to a discussion on Wednesday (organised by SLA Europe and kindly sponsored by EBSCO) on “The Google-isation of [Re]search”. Really interesting talk – I don’t think I came away with anything particularly new, but it was good to hear a few people’s perspectives on the Google effect.

David Nicholas of UCL started by giving a brief overview of the Google generation research project. He admitted right at the start that he’d never tried to talk about it in just 15 minutes before, and it was indeed a very brief skate over some of the project findings. Interesting, but I would have liked to hear about it in more depth. He discussed the information seeking and use habits of the Google generation (which he pointed out is not limited to any particular age group – we are all the Google generation now). Deep log analysis had revealed that information users are pragmatic and direct – they will find what they need and then leave, without “hanging around” in any particular online space – and tend to browse “horizontally”, skim-reading a very wide range of materials but not going into any particular depth. He noted that people assume this is new behaviour, but that we actually have no way of knowing how people use(d) non-digital information: we assume that, for example, when someone checks out a book they read the whole thing in depth; but can’t actually verify this the way we can with digital materials. It’s entirely possible that horizontal browsing has always been the norm.

One of David’s points that I found interesting (which Sara at Uncooked Data also picked up on – incidentally I’d highly recommend reading her summary of Wednesday’s event, it’s a lot more considered than mine!) was that students he had interviewed had described academic databases as a bit unwelcoming – as if no one else had been there before. It transpired that they meant that there was no way for users to communicate with each other, comment on what was there and share recommendations. He mentioned by way of analogy a book returns trolley – the books on the trolley are rarely shelved because people like to pick up what other people have already read. People will trust recommendations from their peers. I actually find that quite an interesting idea (it made me think of some of the interesting things Huddersfield University have done with their OPAC) – although I don’t know how integrating that sort of thing into, say, Science Direct would work for anyone past undergraduate level. There is probably a risk that simply following recommendations would lead to people ignoring potentially useful information because they were focusing on what was popular, as Sara also suggests in the blog post linked to above. I don’t see that as an insurmountable problem though – following recommendations is a good starting point for most people, and surely it’s the objective of information literacy training to make sure that people don’t think it’s anything more than a starting point.

Kathy Jacob had the next fifteen-minute slot, to talk about the recent implementation of a federated search engine at Pinsent Masons. She talked about the demand for a single search interface for all of their products, which would search multiple sources quickly, be intuitive to use and have a clean, uncluttered initial search screen – in other words, something that looked and worked just like Google. I can certainly see the appeal of this – most specialist legal databases are not intuitive to use, and all have their individual quirks that you have to learn your way around, something most lawyers don’t have the time or the patience to do. The implementation has apparently been a success: Kathy reported that use of all of their paid-for databases has gone up by 15-20% on average, with the biggest increases in use for the databases which were most difficult to search. She also pointed out that the group which makes the most use of the tool is in fact the information services team – so even experienced searchers find the federated search easier to use.

Kathy did point out that the tool is only really useful for “quick and dirty” searches – for anything in-depth you still need to go to individual sources. I wondered if this in itself might cause problems: if the users get used to this easy interface, they’ll may be inclined to assume that the results returned are all there is to find (similar to the “first page of Google hits” approach). Kathy mentioned that the info services team don’t offer training on the federated search engine (she expressed the opinion that people should know how to search. If your product is aimed at average users but you need to train people on how to search it then your search screen is too complicated. I’m not totally sure I agree with this, but I see her point); but they do give extensive information literacy training. She explained the necessity of ensuring that new trainees understand that using poor-quality information can have career-limiting results, usually by relating a few scare stories of what’s happened when past trainees have tried to do all their research on Google.

The final speaker was Roger James, Director of Information Systems at the University of Westminster. I have to say I didn’t really think much of his talk – he made some very sensible points, such as the need to educate users about when to use Google and when not to; and the fact that Google allows for serendipity, where most paid-for databases don’t – but he said all this with the air of one imparting pearls of wisdom to Luddites who thought Google was the devil’s work. I think he badly misjudged his audience. For example, he started off by asking how many of us had our own custom databases in our workplaces – nearly all of us raised our hands; then asking how many of us had used those databases that day. He then looked shocked – and seemed a bit thrown off course – when nearly all of us raised our hands again. All of this made me wonder if he actually realised he was talking to librarians, or if he’d ever spent much time talking to librarians.

I had no problem with his central argument – that it’s not an either/or situation, Google is a useful tool alongside other information sources – but I thought it was a little obvious and frankly, a little patronising. I don’t believe many librarians actually see Google as the enemy. The key issue to most librarians is not, as Roger seemed to think, how to stop users from searching Google; its how to make sure they know when it’s appropriate to, and what other information sources may be better suited to their needs.

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The Library Routes Project wiki is now live!

October 1, 2009 at 11:58 am · Filed under Uncategorized ·Tagged , , , ,

A post I wrote last week about how on earth people figure out that they want to be librarians, provoked a surprising (for me) amount of comments. It seems a lot of people have an interest in the subject! This prompted a suggestion from Jennie Law that we should all blog our library roots/routes (a few people already have: see here, here and here – apologies if I’ve missed any others!). Ned (aka thewikiman) then suggested that we should try and collect these posts, to create a resource for new and potential new professionals.

While I was twiddling my thumbs and thinking what a good idea that was, Ned went off and set up a wiki to do exactly that. And here it is: The Library Routes Project Wiki. Obviously, it needs a few more entries to start with! So, if you’ve already blogged something along these lines, head over to the wiki and add in a link. If not, why not write something now? You don’t have to be a blogger to contribute: if you don’t have a blog, just create a new page on the wiki and write your entry there! Ned’s put some instructions on how to do so on the wiki, but if you have any trouble just let us know.

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