University of Sheffield Library

The University of Sheffield Library News February 2008 is available here. This includes news of the move of the law collection from Crooksmoor to the Western Bank Library, building work at the Western Bank Library and the National Fairground Archive.

I am always happy to pass on news from any other SINTO member libraries if you send it to me.

Sheffield Libraries

Roy Hattersley penned a heartfelt tribute to public libraries in general and Hilsborough Library in Sheffield in particular, in a Daily Mail piece on 7th January 2008 headlined Why closing local libraries is a tragedy for us all. He wrote "They still provide essential information, informal education and, most important of all, hours of pure pleasure.... Yet 40 [libraries] closed last year. What happens in Hillsborough shows what a tragedy that is."

I mentioned the Oxford Online Library Champions Award when they were launched last year and I am very pleased to see that Sheffield Libraries were joint winners (with Plymouth) of the Best Website Promotion of Oxford Online Resources category. The judges were impressed by the number of ways people could find out about the service on the Sheffield Libraries’ website. ‘The overall aim has been to ensure high visibility of the OUP packages for 24/7 use, to maximize awareness of them at as many entry points on the web pages as possible, to ensure easy access to the packages and maximize their use by as diverse a customer base as possible,’ says Karen Wallace of Sheffield Libraries.

Social Networking for librarians

Librarians have on the whole been slow to adopt social networks as a means of professional development but it seems to be taking off. The CILIP Communities website provides a number of forums where members can have lively discussions on a range of issues. Critical Eye Communications have recently launched The Skills Exchange, described as a place for librarians and information workers to meet and exchange ideas. It also has a number of forums on topics such as the role of the modern library, web 2.0 tools & applications, copyright and repositories. CILIP Yorkshire & Humber Branch has been very innovative in setting up a Facebook page and its own wiki. And of course SINTO has a wiki.

The idea behind all these is similar. Sharing ideas and discussing professional issues with librarians from other organisations is an important tool for professional development. Opportunities to do this have traditionally been limited. We read the professional press and attend the occasional meeting or conference but most of the time we are working on our own. Social networking provides the opportunity to keep in touch with a community of interest from your workplace or home. As with many new developments the critical thing is not mastering the technology but changing our behaviour to take advantage of the new opportunities. Many people would take a half -or full-day, or more, off work to attend a meeting or training event but would find it difficult to spend a few hours a week to sit down in front of a computer and take part in on-line professional discussions. I wonder how many heads of service or training officers encourage their staff to do this during work time as part of their CPD activities.

It is perhaps dissapointing that there are now so many different social networking sites on offer - but there has always been a number of different professional journals available, each with its own remit and coverage. These things grow organically and we can not expect them to conform to a central plan. What is important is that individual professionals and LIS organisations seize the opportunity that is being offered and join in with these networks.

The Next Generation

No, not the Star Trek spinoff. It is not quite "to boldly go where no one has gone before" but many professional librarians feel that they are facing a final frontier when they are faced with managerial responsibilities in their job. "I came into this job to do librarianship, not to manage" is a common complaint but the two are entwined and an effective library service depends on high quality management skills.

For several years Museums Libraries and Archives Yorkshire (MLAY) have been running the Next Generation Management development programme and this year SINTO is taking over the administration. The programme is aimed at staff who are just starting in, or aspiring to, their first management post - or as can happen, are in a management post but have never received training. It consists of a number of workshops on various key topics with the aim of developing skills and confidence.

The programme will be developed in consultation with the course participants but subjects covered will include managing your staff, your manager and yourself; project and financial management; creative thinking; influencing & persuading and presentation skills. Seminars will be held at various locations in Yorkshire. Participants will be encouraged to make use of an on-line community of interest. The programme will start in April and run for one year. The cost will be in the region of £450 for ten workshops.

Next Generation has a high standing in the museums sector and this year we hope to attract more librarians. A feature of the programme will be the sharing of experience with people from different backgrounds.

More information is available on the SINTO website or contact me at c.j.clayton@shu.ac.uk

Earn up to £100,000

Do you want to earn up to £100,000? A useful way to top up your salary or perhaps you could donate it to your bookfund? Well here is how to do it.

Copywatch, the enforcement arm of the Copyright Licencing Agency, is offering rewards of up to £100,000 to anyone who provides information on illegal copying. There is even a special section of their website for reporting local authorities and they say that research has established that local authorities "copy significantly".

It shouldn't be too difficult to spot illegal copying going on, then all you need to do is send a message to Copywatch. "No one" says Copywatch "will divulge your identity."

An alternative course of action is to sign up for the SINTO training event on Advanced Copyright. Graham Cornish will explain the copyright legislation and how if effects library. Armed with this information you can avoid infringing copyright law and advise your users and colleagues to do the same.

Of course you won't get the £100,000.

Bibliotherapy

Elizabeth Brewster

Last year SINTO set up the SINTO Bob Usherwood Prize to be awarded to a student of the Department of Information Studies at the University of Sheffield. The prize will be awarded to the postgraduate dissertation that makes a significant contribution to improving professional practice or understanding related to co-operation and partnership working across sectors in the SINTO area. The aim of the prize is twofold. First it will to encourage students to explore research topics that would be of value to local professional practice. Second it will encourage practitioners to take more interest in library research in general and the work produced by students from our local "library school" in particular. We wanted to avoid being parochial with this prize so although it will be given to a dissertation that is relevant to practitioners in our area that does not mean that it has to be about our area. This is demonstrated in our first award to Elizabeth Brewster for her dissertation Medicine for the Soul: bibliotherapy and the public library.

Bibliotherapy is using either fiction or non-fiction advisory texts to help people understand and deal with mental and physical health problems, primarily mild mental health difficulties including mild to moderate depression. The research revealed that the scheme Books on Prescription has been widely utilised by libraries as a form of bibliotherapy using self-help books. Librarians often feel that they provide informal bibliotherapy via reader development and readers’ groups. Research was carried out in a number of library authorities including several in our area. The study investigates the experience of bibliotherapy in the public library from the staff perspective. The impact of creative and self-help bibliotherapy are examined, and significant conclusions about the views of public librarians on partnership working, mental health, social inclusion and reader development are presented. The importance of partnership working is highlighted. The health service does not always recognise that the library service has assistance to offer within the sphere of treatment, and so wider publicity and advocacy may be necessary to improve perceptions and relationships. Careful consideration needs to be given to the suitability of potential partners and the timing of projects to ensure that relationships are successful, and are not undermined by external forces, such as the reorganisation of Primary Care Trusts.

Many public library staff felt that bibliotherapy schemes were of great benefit both to patrons of the library, and to the library itself. It was thought that bibliotherapy helps to reduce the stigma connected with mental health problems, as well as contributing to the social inclusion and healthy communities agendas.

Elizabeth concludes that: "Whether it is the pragmatic approach of self-help bibliotherapy, teaching people to cope with emotions and problems, or the journey of self-discovery that can be found within a fiction book recommended by a creative bibliotherapist, libraries have a role in providing the staff, services and structure that can benefit the population. Public library work has always reflected the desire to address the social responsibility inherent in their function, and bibliotherapy schemes have the potential to make a real difference in this respect, providing ‘medicine for the soul’ in diverse and accessible ways to the whole community". The dissertation will be of interest both to those authorities which run a Books on Prescription service and those which don't but are thinking of introducing one.It will also be of interest to anyone involved in partnership working with external agencies on any project. SINTO congratulates Elizabeth on winning the first SINTO Bob Usherwood prize.

For information about other dissertations from the Department of Information Studies go to their Publications database.
The Centre for the Public Library and Information in Society web page has a list of PhD Theses and Students' masters Dissertations relevant to the theme of public libraries and information in society. Many of these are available in full text on-line.

Battle lines

Does Bob McKee, Chief Executive of CILIP read the SINTO blog? I am prompted to ask because in recent postings on his own blog Bob picks up on two books that I mentioned here ages ago. Pies and prejudice; in search of the North by Stuart Maconie and Bob Usherwood's Equity and Excellence in the Public Library. Of Bob Usherwood's book he says "... I commend Bob Usherwood's book to you. It is (to borrow a phrase which should resonate with Reader Development Librarians of a certain vintage) well worth reading".

Perhaps Bob has been reading my past discussions under the heading Battle lines where I have looked at the debate between the webbed and the web-sceptics. Fighting seems to have broken out again.

Helen Nicols lives in Sheffield and works in Leeds, and writes a blog called The Business of Knowing - thoughts about knowledge sharing, learning and how business can benefit from encouraging both. In a recent post she includes a video of a presentation by David Weinburger author of Everything is miscellaneous: the power of the new digital disorder. The presentation is about the organisation of knowledge and compare and contrasts the old way and the new digital way of doing this. He argues that we have been very good at organising physical objects (such as books on shelves) but that today there is no longer any need to order things in a single way. His presentation covers Aristotle, Dewey, classification and categorising, tagging, wikipedia and other miscellaneous things. He suggests that as both data and metadata are digitalised this changes the whole way we approach knowledge. There is much in this presentation that we can take issue with - his ideas on publicly negotiated knowledge (e.g. Wikipedia) for example - but if you put up with the stuttering start, this is a masterclass in the new ideas that all librarians and information managers should be familiar with.

But that does not mean we should agree with it all. Professor Tara Brabazon who holds the chair of media studies at the University of Brighton has criticised an increasing dependency on a diet of unchecked information found through internet search engines as "white bread for the mind". According to press reports in The Telegraph and The Times Prof Brabazon claims user-generated content sites such as Wikipedia are creating an age of banality by providing consensual information and stifling debate.
"I want students to sit down and read. It's not the same when you read it online. I want them to experience the pages and the print as much as the digitisation and the pixels. Both are fine but I want them to have both – not one or the other – not a cheap solution."

This view is supported in a study by Dr Ian Rowlands, a lecturer in library and information studies at University College London. It looks at how people use and search web-based information. Young people tend to use search engines such as Google and Yahoo as their first, and often only, port of call in searching for information. They have a poor understanding of their information needs and find it difficult to develop effective search strategies. They also spend little time evaluating information for relevance, accuracy or authority, it says.

Rowlands says children born after the big bang of the web lack a mental map of the information landscape, which could be affecting their ability to search for and evaluate information.

"As a kid, I grew up spending hours in the central reference library in Plymouth. This helped me form a clear understanding of the information landscape because of the physical layout of the library, and the appearance of materials. You get a sense of how big one collection is compared to another. Dictionaries, maps and official statistics all have a specific place, feel and appearance in the library and this helped me understand the concept of these sources of information and how to use them," he says.

Libraries are not keeping up with the demands of students and researchers for services that are integrated and consistent with their wider internet experience such as Google, the study says. Information consumers do not necessarily use services in the way libraries assume, and a one-size-fits-all policy towards the design of library systems will not be effective. The study recommends that libraries invest more in monitoring and evaluating the way people use their services, to ensure they stay relevant and to allow libraries to argue against static or declining budgets.

Dame Lynne Brindley commenting on the report said that libraries should also play a key role in helping to teach information literacy skills. "That the younger generation is technologically more literate but not more information literate is a challenge that must be tackled by libraries and education more widely. Students who simply want to use Google and take what it says as gospel do a real disservice to the skills people will increasingly need to survive the digital economy".
STOP PRESS. Link to BL press release and pdf file of report.

What is clear is that this battle is not a head-on conflict between two opposing concepts. The "webbed" are not promoting the use of poor quality information but their emphasis is on using technology to open up access to all information. The "web-sceptics" don't want to dismantle the new digital environment, nor (despite the headlines) do they want to ban Google and Wikipedia. Instead they want to promote a critical approach to information. There is a crying need for a synthesis between the two points of view.