A thousand small hurdles to Web 2.0

Tim Davies asks "What’s the big challenge to using new technology for mobilisation / communication around social issues, where government or large existing organisations are to be players in creating change?" His theses is

• The big challenges are not about technology - they are about the content and the process of mobilisation and communication.
• When it comes to technology we’ve not got one big challenge we’ve got 100s of small challenges - and we’ve got no systematic way of dealing with them.

He lists 50 of these these challenges, as found in local government, under the headings
Internet access
Office technology
Systems and procedures
Policy and guidance
Organisational culture
Basic technical skills
Leadership and management

To take some at random

33 Senior managers see Web 2.0 and the Social Web as something to be scared of;
34 Senior managers see Web 2.0 as a passing fad, or at best a persistent distraction and minority interest;
35 Staff see Web 2.0 as an extra burden to add to already busy and pressured days;
36 Ideas from outside the organisations are treated with suspicion;
37 The organisation wants to be in control of any discussions that take place about it online;

I recognise most of the challenges Tim mentions either in my own organisation or in others - including CILIP. As Tim points out, it should not be difficult to remove these barriers, once we have identified them, if the desire to remove them is there. if we are to achieve Open Government and Open organisations at all levels, we need to start!

Training events from SINTO

The Library and Information Show has rebranded itself as the Library Show and moved to June but it is still at the NEC and SINTO will be offering its annual coach trip on Wednesday 10th June.

Places on the Advanced Internet Searching event on 14th May are going fast. If you want to reserve a place while awaiting confirmation contact the office now on 0114 225 5739.

And to look forward to this summer – three very different events but with a common theme – reaching out to our users:
SINTO Members’ Day and AGM: New Ways of Working – creating Library 2.0 - 26th June
Web 2.0: Blogs, Wikis & RSS feeds. -2nd July
Display Techniques with the Alternative Display Company. -6th July.

The SINTO Members' Day is a forum for librarians in our region to consider professional developments. Roy Clare, Director of MLA is the keynote speaker and there will be a number of short presentations looking at how libraries can reach out to their users.

Web 2.0 will look at various Social Computing tools that are being increasingly used by libraries both as a source of information and as a way of interacting with users.

Display Techniques is a pratical workshop looking at putting on displays to promote your service.

Details of all these events are on our website.

The world turned upside down. Open access and academic journals.

Paying for open access publication charges: guidance for higher education and research institutions, publishers and authors.
www.rin.ac.uk/openaccess-payment-fees

This publication from the Research Information network and Universities UK looks at the practical implications of the emergence of open access publishing for scholarly articles. The old model was that academics had their peer-reviewed articles published in journals and the publishers sold subscriptions to academic libraries. When electronic publishing came along it first followed this model (though often with dramatic increases in the cost of subscriptions and tight restrictions on subscribers to prevent them making the articles available outside the institution.)
Increasingly however publishers are making articles available free of charge to all readers immediately upon publication but in order to maintain a revenue stream they are charging a publication fee for authors. The authors in turn look to their institution or the funder of their research to pay these fees. As the report says "This turns the traditional publishing model on its head, and this poses challenges for publishers but also for researchers and the institutions that employ them. They have to find new ways to meet the cost of publication fees, alongside the well-established budgets for the majority of journals that still operate the traditional subscription model". All this against a background of even higher price rises due to the falling value of the pound. Academic libraries are particularly concerned that their institutions should develop a coordinated and strategic approach to this development and not just let it fall on the library budget by default.

I don't feel myself qualified to comment on the guidance itself (as I am a bear of little brain) and I am sure my colleagues in the HE sector will do this. I am, however, interested in the wider implications. First, all librarians need to be aware that the model is changing. Public libraries have never seen it as their role to purchase specialist academic journals and with the increase in subscription charges and the move to electronic publishing I suspect that few librarians outside the HE sector are familiar with how much things have changed.

Second, public libraries are concerned with the wider issue of making research accessible to the public and these developments will help with this in many ways. If the author pays for open access rather than the reader - or the reader's library - having to pay a subscription then this should remove some of the barriers that currently exist. It is good to see that this report acknowledges that open access brings benefits not only to the research community but to society at large. Having said that, we are talking largely about material published by academics for academics and its direct relevance to most public library users is limited. (see my postings with the access tag).

Changes at Sheffield Central Library

Work will start soon on the reorganisation of service points at Sheffield Central Library. The current Business, Science & Technology (BST) and the Arts & Social Sciences (ASS) Libraries will merge and become Reception, Reference and Information - a single access point for reference services and a reception /information point for the central library. It will be located in the current BST room on the ground floor. The current Sheffield Information Service and reception will close.

The Local Studies library will move to the current ASS room on the first floor. The current Sheffield Information Services room on the ground floor will become the Computer and Internet Centre. The current Local Studies room may become an exhibition/activity area. Sheffield Community Information Unit will move to a new office.

The lending library will not be affected.

The timetable is as follows:

• Current BST Library: closes Saturday 25th April. Reopens as RRI Thursday 28th May.
• Current ASS Library: Closes Thursday 21st May. Reopens for People's Network service only Thursday 28th May. Closes Wednesday 24th June. Reopens as Local Studies Library - to be decided.
• Current Sheffield Information Service: Closes Wednesday 27th May. Reopens as ICT suite Monday 29th June.

Further information and updates will be available on the Sheffield Libraries website.

Happy to help the MLA

My job is to help preserve the integrity of civilisation. It's a dirty job but someone has to do it. One of my duties in PTIOC is to read MLA news e-bulletins. As such things go, they are not too bad - short and to the point so it is easy to pick out any useful bits of information. Keep up the good work John.

Recently the bulletin contained an item from Katie Pekacar on gathering information about libraries' role in health. The MLA is gathering information about health and wellbeing activities undertaken by museums, libraries and archives to gain a full picture of the sector’s contribution in this area. They would like to find out which museums, libraries and archives have health and wellbeing projects or programmes at present and any information the sector has collected about their impact. This information will inform the MLA’s future policy and best practice guidance for the sector on health and wellbeing activities. If you would like to share information about health and/or wellbeing projects and programmes that you are involved in or know about, please contact Katie Pekacar, Policy Advisor at MLA at Katie.pekacar@mla.gov.uk or call her on 020 7273 1405.

I was able to send Katie information about the 2007 winner of the SINTO Bob Usherwood student prize, Elizabeth Brewster and her dissertation Medicine for the Soul: bibliotherapy and the public library. I will also draw her attention to the Sheffield Libraries Hillsborough Disaster Research Guide as it contains some health related references.

How does the MLA meet its own information needs? It has an active research programme but the web site makes no mention of a MLA library to support this research. I don't want to make a cheap point. These is no need for an organisation like MLA to have its own library but it does need an information policy which covers how staff get access to the resources they need. I assume there is an agreement with local public and academic libraries to cover this. The MLA staff list has an impressive range of posts concerned with research and IT: Senior Research Manager; Head of Research and Evidence; Research Database Manager; Web Manager; ICT Manager and IT Infrastructure Consultant.* There is no mention of an Information Manager (let alone Librarian), but this may not be significant as this function is surely included in the job description of at least one of these posts :-). Anyway, the library profession is always happy to help the MLA.

*There is also a post of National Security Adviser. Clearly the MLA also helps preserves the integrity of civilisation!

Hillsborough remembered

Twenty years ago today 96 people died as a direct result of the Hillsborough disaster when Liverpool football fans were crushed to death at the Sheffield Wednesday ground.
The disaster deeply affected the people of Liverpool but Sheffield was shocked by the fact that those who had come to the city as guests should have faced such suffering. The role of the South Yorkshire Police in the events leading up to and after the disaster was also controversial and many questions remain unanswered.

The City of Sheffield will remember the event with a two minute silence at 3.06pm this afternoon. Libraries are the memory of society and their role in preserving the memory of this event is important. Libraries preserve documents such as the Taylor report into the disaster, academic articles about crowd behaviour, architects reports on the design of football stadia and archives of the organisations involved. They also collect published and private accounts from those who were affected by the events of that day. Of course libraries can only make available the information that has been released. Two government ministers will today call on the police, ambulance service and other public bodies responsible for the 1989 Hillsborough disaster to make available all documents they hold relating to the incident and its aftermath. Meredydd Hughes, the current South Yorkshire chief constable has agreed to investigate whether there are other documents relating to Hillsborough which have not been publicly disclosed.

Sheffield Libraries,Archives and Information has published a research guide on the Hillsborough Disaster. It is not a detailed account of the tragedy; it merely points the reader who wishes to carry out their own research to what is available within Sheffield Libraries and Archives. Although most of the material is freely available in the library, some of the official records, such as those from the police and the coroner, can only be accessed with their permission.

This publication, as much as the two-minute silence, is Sheffield's way of remembering this tragic event

Twitter 2

At the beginning of April I blogged about setting up a Twitter account. Well how is it going? There is no doubt that Twitter is addictive. It works at levels 2 and 3 of Maslow's hierarchy of needs - friendship and esteem! It is also a useful professional tool if, like me, you want to keep in touch with a wide range of professional news and thinking. I am currently following 28 organisations. Some of these are professional organisations such as MLA and JISC which occasionally tweet about news and activities. CILIP does not have an official Twitter account but I am following Debbie Raven's Gazette tweets, the West Midlands CILIP Branch, Youth Libraries Group and UKEIG.


I am following several libraries including Sheffield University, the Information Commons at Sheffield University, Leeds Metropolitan University, Manchester Libraries, Leicestershire Libraries and Newcastle Libraries. They provide information about their services for their own users.


Library Web, the rolling news site for UK public libraries, is a useful feed as is the Credo feed which provides a daily quote or factoid plus the occasional news item.
I have now discovered several librarians who tweet. Some of these are a useful source of information such as Tom Roper, Neil Ford and Phil Bradley. Others are more of a personal nature.


My tweets are being followed by 34 individuals and organisations. Many of these are a direct response to my following them. Others are librarians who have discovered me through various sources. As a result of my tweet about Sheffield Libraries' LGBT history source guide I am being followed by Daily Gay which is cool but I suspect they will loose interest as I don't have a lot to say about LGBT issues.


My main concern was to develop links with local libraries and librarians as part of the SINTO community of interest but I have to admit that I don't have many links so far. The University of Sheffield has taken to Twitter with enthusiasm. As well as the library tweets mentioned above, several members of staff including Martin Lewis, head of library services, have accounts. Apart from that there are only a handful of others.


So is Twitter a useful professional tool? It can be criticized in many ways. It is too ephemeral, personal ("What are you doing?") and brief (140 characters) to allow you to say anything serious. Yet these are also its strengths. In many workplaces the casual contacts you make at the water cooler, photocopier or in the lift are often an important source of information and Twitter is a way of expanding this. At its best, the haiku of a tweet is better than the sonnet, or epic poem, of more formal communication channels.

Follow me at http://twitter.com/SINTOcarl