Science Learning Centres Resource Bank

Last week I attended the CILIP Y&H member's day at the National Science Learning Centre, York. While I was there Emma Jones gave me a quick introduction to their Resource Bank and she has kindly provided the following information.

Science Learning Centres Resource Bank

The Science Learning Centres Resource Bank was quietly added to the Science Learning Centres portal last year and can be accessed from the ‘Resources’ link on our homepage.

It has been populated with a broad selection of resources: from a large array of examples of how science stories are reported in leading newspapers, websites with useful teaching resources such as: Atmosphere, Climate & Environment: Information and teaching resource (includes practical information sheets and related fun games and puzzles), through to details on a group of Wellcome Trust funded projects titled ‘Creative Encounters’, that have found innovative ways to communicate about science with young people.

A number of collections form the Resource Bank:
The Agenda: policy and white papers related to the Science Education community and professional organisations
The Exchange: resources created by and for teachers that can be edited or reused
Science Links: web sites and pages of interest selected by Science Learning Centre staff and our users
New collections will be available over the coming year for Controversial Issues and Creative Encounters

Browse for resources by Subject, Age range, Audience type, Collection or any combination of these. Keywords can also be used to help you locate a resource quickly. A full text search option finds keywords when used within a resource (on a webpage or in a PowerPoint for example).

If you have a favourite site or resource you have created and would like to share it, all registered users can contribute resources to both ‘The Exchange’ and ‘Science Link’ collections.

All contributed resources under go a Quality Assurance process, before being added to the Resource Bank and are tagged with learndirect and Curriculum Online vocabularies to enhance their ‘findability’.

Creative Commons Licences can be assigned to user contributed resources – the licenses (copyright statements) let others know how you as the contributor would prefer the resource to be re-used and distributed.

Once your resource has been published you can view a list of all your contributions and share the link to this page with your colleagues.

We are looking at ways we can improve the Resource Bank to make it more accessible and useful to our users. New developments coming online over the next year include: improved page layout for search results and resource details; opportunities to share your thoughts on resources with a commenting feature; a ‘bookmarking’ tool: find resources on the Internet and quickly add them to your Science Learning Centre’s Portal personal area and choose whether to share them with others through the Resource Bank.




Find the Resource Bank at: www.slcs.ac.uk/resources
A short online guide describing how to contribute is available at:
www.slcs.ac.uk/resourcebank/contribute

More on Creative Commons at: http://creativecommons.org/international/uk

DEL Information Unit, Sheffield.

Sheffield City Council has decided to close the Development, Environment & Leisure (DEL) Information Unit (Technical Library) which was based at Carbrook and Howden House. This was a specialised information service covering urban design, architecture, construction, highway maintenance and design etc., mainly used by the staff of DEL. It was a member of SINTO.
The press release says that "Following an extensive consultation and business review that found that colleagues are increasingly able to satisfy the majority of their own information needs using the intranet or Internet, the DEL Information Unit (Technical Library) will be closing on the 9th August."
If this is the case then I cannot argue with the decision but one is left wondering how fully staff are able to meet their own information needs in this specialist area from the intranet and Internet. Assuming that Sheffield City Council does not expect the information needs for, say, highway maintenance to be met by looking things up on Wikipedia, I assume that staff will have access to specialist information resources through the intranet and Internet. But who is now responsible for providing access to these resources for staff? One of the library's staff members is taking up a new "communications and information role in the Strategy Team and the press release says that "questions regarding future technical information provision should be addressed to line managers". This should mean that a new structure will be in place so that staff will have access to the information they need whether it is in print or electronic format. Given the importance of urban design etc to the development of Sheffield I certainly hope so.

Battle lines

One of the issues in this debate concerns the quality of information that is available with Web 2.0 in general and Wikipedia in particular. Michael Gorman in a posting titled Jabberwiki, is blunt:
"Let us ... concentrate on the central proposition that one can gain useful knowledge from texts written by any Tom, Dick, or Sally with time on his or her hands. Do we entrust the education of children to self-selected “experts” without any known authority or credentials? Would any sane person pay fees to take university courses that are taught by people who may or may not be qualified to teach such a course? "

Gorman cites Andrew Keen and his new book The Cult of the Amateur which makes similar complaints. Keen claims that "Wikipedia ... is almost single-handedly killing the traditional information business." (p127-8). and "Since Wikipedia's birth, more than fifteen thousand contributors have created nearly three million entries in over a hundred different languages—none of them edited or vetted for accuracy."(p4).

Many people defend Wikipedia. Some claim that unlike Britannica, Wikipedia’s credentials don’t come from its editors but from references and sources cited at the end of articles. However not all articles include citations and citations don't guarantee that the research is comprehensive and balanced.

Others have argued that Wilipedia articles are edited and vetted for accuracy by other Wikipedia contributors. Helen Nicols in her blog The Business of Knowing argues that regulation by a community of on-line users as with Wikipedia is equivalent to the academic peer review process as ways of establishing authority.

Wikipedians like to point out that traditional resources such as Encyclopedia Britannica contain errors which have been corrected by the on-line community.
Errors in the Encyclopædia Britannica that have been corrected in Wikipedia

Gorman and Keen would argue that the on-line community is just as likely to introduce errors into an authoritative article as it is to correct errors. There have been cases of individuals submitting corrections to their own biography on Wikipedia only to have other contributors deleting these corrections so as to maintain the "authority" of the original article.

Another argument used by defenders of Wikipedia is that traditional resources present a single world view that may be influenced by cultural norms while Wikipedia allows debate and the presentation of alternative views. As an illustration here is an extract from the 11th edition of Encyclopadia Britannica (1911).

"Negro
For the rest, the mental constitution of the negro is very similar to that of a child, normally good-natured and cheerful, but subject to sudden fits of emotion and passion during which he is capable of performing acts of singular atrocity, impressionable, vain, but often exhibiting in the capacity of servant a dog-like fidelity which has stood the supreme test. Given suitable training, the negro is capable of becoming a craftsman of considerable skill, particularly in metal work, carpentry and carving."

With hindsight we now see that Britannica reflected the prevailing social views and prejudices of the time. Is it not likely that today's "authoratitive" works are also biased? On the other hand there is a danger of falling into the trap of relativism - the doctrine that no absolute truth exists, but that truth is always relative to some particular frame of reference, such as language or culture. Surely most facts (the date of the battle of Hastings; the atomic weight of Hydrogen) are facts and a reference source can get them either right or wrong


Further discussion can be found in the Wikipedia entry Reliability of Wikipedia and the entry in the LIS Wiki Librarians' claims and opinions regarding Wikipedia.

I think that the TS Eliot quote is relevant:
"Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?"

There is a lot of information available from Wikipedia and the like but this is not the same as knowledge. At the very least we need to heed the advice of the Bellman "What I tell you three times is true" - and not take any information on trust until we have checked with several sources. We also need the wisdom to understand that any information can be inaccurate, incomplete or biased in some way and we should make allowances for that fact.

Battle lines 2

In my previous posting on this I drew attention to the debate that has been going on between the Webbed and the Web-sceptics(to use Sheila Webber's terms) . I based this on articles published in CILIP journals because I wanted to provide a link between print-based forums and on-line forums and (as a blog with a regional focus) I wanted to keep things as local as possible. My hope is that this will help to make my comments relevant to the majority of library workers in the SINTO region.

However a feature of the Webbed community is that it is not restricted geographically - it is as easy to debate with someone on the other side of the globe as it is with someone in the same town or even the same building. Also what happens in the blog sphere tends to stay in the blog sphere, so if you are not part of that you can miss out on the debate.

These observations were triggered by my reading of the Encyclopedia Britannica blog. This describes itself as a place for smart, lively conversations about a broad range of topics but its significance is that Britannica represents the scholarly, authoritative and traditional source of information which is often seen as being in opposition to the Internet, Google, Wikipedia and Web 2.0. At one level Britannica Blog represents the "establishment" adopting Web 2.0 tools in order to remain relevant but it is also a platform for the Web-sceptics to hit back.

Britannica Blog recently invited Michael Gorman, past president of the American Library Association, to explore the state of knowledge, learning, and authority in a series of essays. These provide a primer for anyone interested in this topic. To take some quotes at random (and out of context - please read the originals):

"The true challenge for businesses, search engines, schools, and publishers is discovering how to tap into and exploit this source of reputable and reliable information. Until that occurs, we may well be raising a generation of screen potatoes who, blinded by speed and made lazy by convenience, are ignorant of the knowledge they will never acquire and the rich world of learning that search engines cannot currently deliver to them."

"Print does not necessarily bestow authenticity, and an increasing number of digital resources do not, by themselves, reflect an increase in expertise. The task before us is to extend into the digital world the virtues of authenticity, expertise, and scholarly apparatus that have evolved over the 500 years of print, virtues often absent in the manuscript age that preceded print."

"An encyclopedia (literally, the “circle of learning”) is the product of many minds. It is not the product of a collective mind. It is an assemblage of texts that have been written by people with credentials and expertise and that have been edited, verified, and supplied with a scholarly apparatus enabling the user to locate desired knowledge. It differs in almost all relevant particulars from one of the current manifestations of the flight from expertise—Wikipedia, which bills itself as “the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit” and to which everyone can contribute irrespective of whether they possess, or simply pretend to possess, credentials and expertise. "

The blog also carries posts responding to these essays. I suspect that Britannica has weeded out the more extreme postings but what remains provide a lively and passionate debate from both sides. Some posters have claimed that it is ironic that a critic of Web 2.0 should be contributing to a blog but that misses the point. It is not the technology that is the problem but how it is used. It would be ironic however if the web-sceptics were to miss out on this important debate because they do not read blogs. Perhaps you, dear reader, could ask yourself the question - what do you do to ensure that your colleagues in your workplace are kept in touch with these forum? What policy does your workplace have to ensure that all staff are kept up-to-date with the latest professional debates? Is there an issue of professional ethics involved here? Comments please!

Floods of information

I am back in the office today - I was working from home yesterday. My colleague Gilly Pearce was in yesterday so SINTO did not close!

It seems that library services in our area escaped without too many problems. Obviously there was a lot of disruption over the past few days but actual damage to buildings has been slight and only a few closures of branch libraries have been reported. However there is the threat of power blackouts in Sheffield today.

One feature of a major incident like these floods is the way in which people need information. At the moment people in Sheffield need to know which roads are open, when the power will come back on and where they can get help. So what is the role of public libraries in providing information?

In a situation like this the first source of information is the media and Radio Sheffield and the other local radio stations provide a vital service. Their web sites, such as BBC South Yorkshire, are an important part of this service.

The local authority web sites such as Sheffield.gov.uk are another vital source of information and have tried to keep up with the changing situation in the aftermath of the flood.

A good example of community information on the Internet is the Sheffield Forum: a discussion forum where people can post messages about any topic related to Sheffield. This quickly set up a thread about the floods which as attracted a lot of postings. Many of these contain very useful information, links to further information and offers of help. However, as it is a discussion forum, it also contains a large amount of general chat which can make it difficult to find specific and reliable information.

So where do libraries fit in? Hopefully they are able to act as an access point for people who do not have Internet access and I expect that librarians are able to refer people to reliable sources of information. It would be nice to think that libraries are providing a proactive service in making information available to their communities.

What does concern me is that libraries have a very low profile in all this. I have heard nothing on the radio to suggest that people could use their local library as a source of information. The local authority websites do not refer people directly to libraries as a source of information and the library web sites are not carrying special links to flood related information. As far as I am aware libraries do not feature in the local authorities emergency plans. For example Sheffield City Council has set up a Humanitarian Assistance Centre in the centre of the city to provide advice and information. Are library staff involved in this? Given that many people can not get into the centre are the branch libraries acting as local contact points? If they are then why is this not being advertised on the library web site or advertised on the radio?