Promoting reading to young people.

Fiction promotion in Thomas Rotherham College

The MLA Love Libraries award celebrates the work libraries do with young people. The winner of the award will receive a Trophy and £2,000 towards the project. I posted about this award back in May.

One of the five projects short listed for the award is from a SINTO member organisation - Derbyshire Libraries.
Derbyshire Libraries Book Pushers are teenage reading advocates trained by library staff to spread their love of reading among young people. They give presentations in schools and libraries; influence the selection of library books; produce creative displays of their recommended reads; deliver training for library staff to help improve services and encourage more people to discover all the great things libraries have to offer. Jaci Brumwell, Deputy Director Cultural and Community Services, Derbyshire County Council said: “The Book Pushers are enthusiastic advocates promoting both the love of books and reading and the use of libraries. The young people involved have grown in confidence, developed new skills and encouraged many others to experiment with their reading.”

The five finalists face a public vote to select the winner. Voting starts on Monday 13th August and closes on Friday 14th September with the winner being announced at an awards ceremony in London on Wednesday 3rd October.
You can vote on the Love Libraries website .

I wouldn't want to encourage unthinking regionalism of course but this is a great opportunity for SINTO members to show their support for this local project.

And while on the subject of promoting reading, SINTO is running a seminar on this subject in December. The seminar is delivered by Anne Harding and is on the 11th December. Further information is on the SINTO website.

New head of service for Rotherham

News of new appointments at Rotherham Library and Information Services. Elenore Fisher has got the job of Manager Cultural Services in place of Guy Kilminster who has moved to Cheshire and Bernard Murphy has been promoted to the post of Libraries and Information Services Manager in place of Elenore. Congratulations to everyone.

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.

Library design

Oldham Library

The Guardian Weekend magazine recently had a feature where they took architects back to the buildings they had designed to see how well they were working in practice. Colin St John Wilson was taken to the British Library, St Pancras, which is generally regarded as having been a great success. Unfortunately Sir Colin (who died in May this year) was not able to get into the reading rooms as his reader's pass had expired. The person on the desk insisted that he must produce some ID to rejoin. "There's a bust of me downstairs, Will that do?" he replied.


The article also featured Will Alsop returning to the Peckham Library, London which won the Stirling Prize in 2000. This has received some criticism from users and staff - one librarian commented that the light bulbs are difficult to change and that ventilation is poor. If buildings really are machines for living (and working) in, rather than works of art to look at, then this needs to be fixed. Alsop was reported as being unimpressed by what has been done to his building - "It looks a bit municipal now and that's what I didn't want it to be" - but why didn't he produce a machine that worked well in the first place?

Designing a library that looks good, inspires its users and yet works well on a number of different levels is an enormous challenge. In September I have organised a visit to see the new Oldham Public Library. This building attempts to integrate a range of functions while contributing to the regeneration of a neglected part of the town. It is also a "green" building with rainwater collected from the roof being used to flush the toilets. It has been shortlisted for the 2007 Prime Minister's Better Public Building Award.

But does it work? Sign up for the visit and find out for yourself.

CPD events from SINTO

The summer is always a quiet time for SINTO training events and given the weather we have been having that is probably a good thing! However, planning is underway for the autumn season. This kicks off with Financial skills for librarians on the 11th September. The aim of this is to equip delegates with the basic understanding they need to undertake a first line financial management role in their library.
It is a broad generalisation but I suspect that most librarians are literate rather then numerate. When it comes to dealing with a budget for the first time many of us will experience anxiety. In many cases we will be operating within procedures set out by the finance department of our organisations but this course will explain the basic principles and jargon. It will cover payments to suppliers, dealing with income and understanding VAT.
The course is presented by Larraine Cooper, an independent trainer specialising in training and development in business planning, financial awareness, costing and pricing, budgetary control, budget setting techniques and management skills
This course will help anyone new to budget responsibility and will be a refresher and confidence booster for anyone who finds this aspect of their job challenging. For further details see the SINTO web site.

Petitions and school libraries

In November 2006 the web site for 10 Downing Street introduced an e-petitions service. This allowed anyone to create a petition and then invite members of the public to sign it to show their support. It was clearly intended as an exercise in popular democracy enabling people to express their opinion on matters of concern but it has been criticized as at best a token gesture and at worst a way for the government to compile a mailing list that they can use to spread official propaganda!
There have been two petitions recently about libraries. One called on the Prime Minister to keep the British Library Free of charge to users (16,646 signatures) and the other asked him to make the provision of professionally staffed libraries within all schools, both secondary and primary, statutory (1,794 signatures).
The Government's response to the BL petition was
The British Library preserves, promotes and celebrates our language and literature, two of our greatest contributions to the world's cultural heritage. It also underpins research in the higher education and business sectors, playing what is an essential part in a modern knowledge economy. This Government has supported the Library in fulfilling these roles since 1997, and will continue to do so.
It is, however, independent of Government, and makes its own management decisions, including on issues such as admission charges.
On school libraries it said:
The provision of a school library is not a statutory requirement and there are no current plans to alter this situation and change the legislation. It is the Government's policy to put as much money as possible directly into schools' budgets, allowing schools to target resources appropriately and to make their own choices about their school library provision and book resourcing.
At their best school libraries are an invaluable asset to teachers and a source of great enjoyment, and learning, for children. There are various models of library provision in schools. Schools may have an on-site school library managed by a librarian, the collection may be managed by teachers and/or volunteers; or the onsite library may be run with or without the support of a Schools Library Service.
Schools Library Services are optional services run by local authorities. Where there is no school library, book loans and professional advice are usually provided by a Schools Library Service. The Ofsted report 2006 'Good School Libraries' states that "Schools Library Services provided good support for schools, including specialist audits and advice, additional resources, training and opportunities for networking".

The BL statement is supportive but does not commit the Government to any action. The school library statement is dismissive, talking of models which may not feature a librarian or the input of the School Library Service.
It is probably a mistake to believe that the Government would ever want to intervene directly in the running of libraries of any type and we would be naive to believe that a petition would make a difference. The only e-petition to have had an impact was the road charging petition which attracted 1.5 million signatures. Unless we can raise that sort of support for an issue the Government's response will be "bovvered?"

As the response to the school library petition indicates, we need to identify who makes the decisions and who holds the budget. We then have to sell the benefits of our "product" to these people. We can't expect schools to be interested in employing a professional librarian as an end in itself. Rather we have to convince them that a professional librarian will enable them to achieve some goal that is important to them i.e. a better (cheaper) way of educating children. This requires school librarians to demonstrate a high level of professional competence and a broad view of the role of the library in the school. An example of this (and a valuable source for CPD) are the presentations given at the recent School Library Association weekend school in Nottingham. These presentations are available on the SLA website

I suspect that a school would be far more impressed by an individual who has this level of professional expertise than they would by an e-petition to the Prime Minister. The paradox of course is that a school that uses the model of a library run by teachers or volunteers will probably not be expose to this sort of person and will never know what they are missing.