Blatant self-promotion

I am absolutely delighted to share a link to a blogpost that I wrote for the IAML (UK & Ireland) blog. I had submitted my "third"* year dissertation to their ET Bryant Memorial Prize one year, and was really surprised that my work came joint-first with another. The blogpost shares the more unexpected and tangential outcomes of my work - the bits that didn't make it into the results pages of the dissertation when I submitted it to Aberystwyth.

* I was possibly their second-slowest continuous student *ever*, starting in April 2008 and actually graduating in May 2014.

British Library Labs Project Showcase and Ideas Lab

This was a workshop organised by British Library Labs and Cambridge Digital Humanities as part of a wider roadshow advertising the Labs and promoting the competitions currently being run. Essentially, teams from the British Library came and said "Look, we've got all this stuff, and we've been able to pull all this sort of data out and mash it up and produce something else. What ideas have you got to do the same?" There were a few short presentations about the teams, and what they did, and what resources they had to offer, before we all sat down in groups to look at the datasets the BL Labs had available, and try to come up with an innovative way of using that data. The team that won suggested a kareoke booth which took Victorian music hall songs from the collection, and people could be filmed performing them and the results put on YouTube.

Excuse me while I photoshop top hats, monocles and moustaches onto this lot.

There were a lot of librarians at the workshop, but it felt it was pitched towards researchers (not saying that librarians can't be researchers, just that there are many researchers in the university who could have made use of this opportunity and didn't!). Nonetheless, I shall take a moment to have a think about a better pitch than the one my team came up with (using sheet music titles to chart naval history and developments in the military - interesting academically, but not very sexy, which I think is what they were looking for). There is a competition to see what new things can be come up with (details here) and an award scheme to reward the best use of currently available datasets (details here).

I say cataloguing, you say metadata - let's sort the whole thing out

This was a talk and demonstration organised by the Office of Scholarly Communication (OSC) and the Open Access team, presented by Danny Kingsley (Head of Scholarly Communication), Sarah Middle and Philippa Grimstone (Repository Assistant).
Sarah Middle discussed the changes taking place in the institutional repository. Presently known as Dspace, the repository is going to be upgraded and renamed Apollo.

The repository structure is based around communities, which is a coverall term to describe all the departments, faculties and other institutions within the university. Within each community there may be sub-communities (for example for specific groups within a department), and three collections: scholarly works, research data, and theses. Currently the repository is browsable, and searchable by authors and titles, and better subject keyword searching is something being worked on, but it is also well-indexed by Google.
At the moment, it is compulsory for students to provide a print copy of their PhD thesis, but an electronic copy is optional (unless stated otherwise by funder of the PhD). An electronic copy can be self-deposited or done through the OSC.

There are sometimes issues preventing an author from submitting an electronic copy, such as licence agreements and 3rd party copyrights (e.g. in having used images or quotes). However, it is possible to put an embargo of up to 2 years delay on open access which allows time to sort these issues out.
Sarah outlined some projects and future plans for the repository. These include:
‘Unlocking Theses’
When someone requests a digital copy of a thesis, they pay for a copy which can be held in ‘dark space’ in the repository until the author approves it to be made available online (35% positive response rate).
‘Hero Theses’
The OA Team are proactively digitising the theses of famous alumni of the university and holding them in dark space until the author approves its availability (49% positive response rate) – the intention is to encourage people to follow in their heroes’ footsteps and make their theses available online.
Future plans:

• Creating a “Request a Copy” button
• Providing a facility for author to claim works and consent to make available online
• E-theses pilot (taking place in selected departments only)

Philippa Grimstone began with a description of what was meant by ‘Open Access’, and the types of Open Access that exist.

	Green OA	Gold OA	Hybrid OA
Access through	Institutional Repository	Publishers' websites	Both IR and publisher
Cost	Free	Not free	Not free
Limits	Embargos (delays) and restrictions	Available immediately in final published form	May be embargos or restrictions applying

Journals can be fully open access, partial open access, or completely closed access.

In order for research to be eligible for the post-2014 Research Excellence Framework, it must comply with the policy of whichever group funded the research in the first place. HEFCE is the biggest funder, and say that peer-reviewed articles must be deposited in an IR within 3 months of its acceptance by a journal. There are other funders too, such as RCUK, COAF and Wellcome Trust, all with different policies.
Philippa then took the audience through the process of depositing in the IR, which is made up of 4 simple steps:

1. Submit author’s accepted article to www.openaccess.cam.ac.uk
2. Zendesk® ticket is generated
3. OA team picks up the ticket and deals with the submission
4. A record is created of the article within the IR

1. Submission
Which version of an article is acceptable?
Pre-print >> Goes for peer review >> Accepted for publication >> Final version is published
An article can't be accepted until it has reached the third stage (accepted for publication).
2. Ticket generation
Zendesk is the management software used by the OA team, which can be used for communication, will store information, and can generate reports.
3. Processing submission
The OA team deal with answering questions like:

• what is the funder’s policy on OA?
• what is the publisher’s policy on OA?
• what type of OA is used?
• will fees apply?
• is this the correct version of the article?

4. Repository record creation
This is done by the OA team based on the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative. There are still problems to iron out regarding author authority headings. In the future it is hoped that Dspace will be able to create automatic citations too.
Once the record is created, it is uploaded to a collection/community and granted a cc-by licence (the default, though others may apply). The author is then informed that their work is available.

Datasets can also be uploaded like articles, but there are more issues inherent:

• datasets aren’t published like articles, so may be unclear/incomplete
• there is no standard format for datasets or for metadata
• there may be proprietary software involved
• they may be large files (there is a fee for files larger than 1GB)
• they may be zipped files
• how much data constitutes ‘enough’? (e.g. hundreds of hours of viedo footage, or several samples?)
• there may be ethical concerns with making data available

Danny Kingsley rounded off the session with a a Q&A. She mentioned that there are lots of rumours and worries amongst researchers who may be reluctant to put their work online, but perhaps the majority of this is misinformation which can be dispelled by encouraging researchers to talk to the OSC.
Q. Are articles placed in the ‘dark space’ OA-compliant?
A. Yes. While not presently OA, there is a record within the IR of that article.
Q. Are there exceptions to this seemingly straightforward process?
A. Yes, and the OA team do their best to account for everything in each case.
Q. Will the approved manuscript (pre-publication) be retained in the IR even if the final version becomes available?
A. Yes, as this is the version owned by the university, but when the final version comes in, it will be appended as ‘additional information’ to the record of the final version rather than being a separate record.
Q. How do we find out if something is being made available on Open Access?
A. We need to be logged out of the university domain, then try to access the article.
Q. Why can’t we use our archive, why do we have to use the IR? (Faculties with own repositories)
A. You can still, at the moment, and the OSC is looking at ways of porting the data across, before ultimately supplanting the faculty repositories.
Q. How much does Open Access cost?
A. Millions. Gold OA can often cost £1500-£5000, with some major publishers charging £7000. This is in addition to the subscription cost (this is known as ‘double-dipping’, where the publishers charge the university twice – once to publish, once to access) and it is estimated that publishers like Elsevier and Wiley are scalping an extra £2m each out of the university in this way.
What next?
Having attended this talk, I looked at what the museum had deposited in the university IR: two newsletters. I’m sure there must be lots being published, as the staff here are incredibly scholarly and constantly researching things, so the next step is to find out what is happening to this research, and whether it can be shared with the university and beyond.

Update:

I reported back to my line manager and discussed the workshop, and found out some additional things to think about. The first is that museum staff are academic-related, not academic, therefore not subject to the same terms as academics when it comes to things like REF. This also probably has knock-on effects for things like funding, which doesn't pay for specific research so policies for OA may not come into play the same way. The other thing was that a lot of staff publish on academia.edu (not linked here), which is a venture-capital for-profit organisation, and they need to be aware that the data is mined for commercial purposes. It also doesn't count as OA for compliance purposes because it's behind a membership wall.

Introduction to Art and Design Resources - an Arlis Workshop

Two posts in as many days? Only because I needed to write about this one immediately so I had to deal with the backlog from all my earlier CPD...(all one of it. Ahem).

Yes, it's been a busy time, but not with work. I've become a parent, and discovered that apparently the feeling that I had no time at all before is nothing like the feeling that I have no time at all now. Fortunately at work I currently have a temp to help me with collection management and other projectwork, which means we're almost treading water sufficiently that I'm slightly more freed up to attend things which will, in the long run, make our job slightly easier anyway.

The National Art Library (c)V&A

This was one such event: on Monday 18th January I travelled down to the National Art Library in the V&A for an Arlis workshop. It was an all-day event, and I stayed for everything except the final tour of the National Art Library (getting back in time to pick up the little one from nursery would have been tricky had I stayed).

The library appeared pretty well appointed - they have numerous terminals for readers, with access to lots of online resources. In addition the shelves are full of materials, and there's more in the rolling stacks. They even have a seminar room, where we had a networking lunch - yes it was a little bit cold in the room, but at least they have one! I was very envious - and I think if I ever do go on a tour there, I'll only become more so. Nonetheless, I should try and arrange another visit sometime, in order to learn more about their work and where their collections can support ours.

The event itself consisted of several presentations from a range of libraries, and a hands-on task:

• Enquiry work in an art and design museum (Bernadette Archer, NAL)
• Enquiry work in an academic library (Cathy Johns, RCA)
• Practical session on enquiry referral work: specialist sources (Yamuna Ravindran)
• The future is paperless! (But the present still needs 3 x 5 cards...) (Joseph Ripp, NPG)
• Finding connections - art, artist and audience (Jane Bramwell & Allison Foster, Tate)

The reasons for my wanting to attend were multiple.

1. To fill in the gaps in my knowledge and use of standard art resources 

I found Bernadette's talk particularly useful here. She talked about how the NAL deal with their enquiries, which are massively diverse. At the end she supplied a brief analysis of some of the resources they used. A lot I'd come across or use regularly, but there were a few resources I wasn't aware of which seem useful for the library here. The Guide to the Literature of Art History is one such - our reference collection is based both on the museum collections and the interests of the keepers who curate them. When a keeper is replaced, the new keeper will bring new and different specialisms to the museum, which may not be well catered for in the library, so this book is a great starting point to ensure that we have the fundamentals covered.

Success? Yes, lots of good information here, including where to go when I don't know the answers.

2. To ensure my current awareness is, well, both current and aware!

I think I didn't really learn about much here, which either means I'm sufficiently up to date, or that it wasn't really covered. There was again a lot of useful information in Bernadette's talk, with online resources that she uses, and their limits and strengths. EBSCO: ArtSource was recommended as being the most useful, but ProQuest and various other databases were mentioned too, the majority of which we have access to through the University Library.

Success? Yes, I think so. The UL keeps us well-covered for e-resources (although it doesn't subscribe to either AKL or Benezit online. Luckily, we have the hard copies).

3. To test out any resources before potentially purchasing them for my library

This was quite successful in one sense, in that during the hands-on session we made use of the many e-resources offered by the NAL. As museum staff had been asking for access to art valuation websites, I was particularly pleased to have a go with Art Price. However, buoyed up with the possibility of subscribing to this, I later found out that someone in the museum has a personal subscription and everyone gets him to do the searching, so "no need to waste the money". I must admit, I feel a bit flat when people find ways to avoid asking the library for things.

Success? On the day, absolutely. In the end, it turned out more irrelevant than I'd've liked. =(

4. To gain contacts in the area, particularly within museum libraries

I'm really not great at networking. I talked to a couple of people, including someone from The Goldsmiths' Company and a couple of university arts librarians. I thought it was interesting that speakers from museums tended to be people who worked with archives or collections that were considered special in their own right - I'm certainly not in that situation here, so it would be more helpful to make connections with other museum libraries more like mine, assuming there are any!

Success? Low to moderate. I need to be braver!

5. Finally, to raise the profile of my own library amongst those outside the university who might find it useful as a resource

Again, I wasn't great at promoting this library. One thing I hadn't realised was quite how extensive the National Art Library's holdings are when it comes to auction catalogues. They have a lot from overseas, whereas our collection only really focuses on UK, with sporadic German catalogues of antiquities, and the odd French, Chinese and Japanese catalogue from the bigger auction houses. However, I know for a fact we have items in our collection which fill gaps in theirs (and probably vice versa), so the sooner we get our volunteer cracking on the dealers' catalogues project, the better. After this, I am keen to investigate getting our records onto COPAC (currently the UL is there, but none of the other libraries in Cambridge, I believe). The library holds collections of items not readily available elsewhere in the country, so we could do a lot to support scholars from outside Cambridge if only they knew about it as a resource.

Success? Low. Getting our collections visible on the web will do more, I think.

On the whole, more successes than failures (and nothing was really a total failure). Definitely worth going on the course, and I'm very grateful to my line manager and the HR manager at work for supporting me and allowing library budget to be put towards this useful training.

CaKE 2: Attack of the Gin CaKE

CaKE 2 took place in February 2015, so a long time ago now. However, I made copious notes at the time, so they’ve jogged my memory sufficiently that I feel I can talk about the event with an air of authority. But if I’ve missed anything, or anything piques your interest further, you can access the Storify here and the main CaKE blog here.

First was Lucy Welch, talking about the accessibility issues of non-print legal deposit materials, which was the subject of her dissertation. Now publishers are able to choose to provide LD copies as print or non-print, obviously it’s cheaper for them to go for non-print; however this causes a number of issues for LD libraries trying to offer access to these materials:

• Lots aren’t accessible for the visually impaired – using personal devices would benefit accessibility, but publishers aren’t really on board with this idea.
• Usually they’re read-only and users can’t print out copies – this is worse than the previous situation as readers could take photocopies from print materials, but now libraries can’t provide a loan copy or print off a copy for users.

Her conclusion was that there is a wide gap between user expectation and the reality, but that libraries are firmly on the side of the readers so improvement in the situation is likely.

Liz Osman then took to the stage, discussing what she learned at the Rare Books and Special Collections Group (RBSCG) conference. This was with a view to creating a special space for the rare books in her library, so this talk was specifically geared towards improving knowledge of housing rare books collections in the non-specialist library.

The conference covered a wide variety of projects. One of the tips Liz pressed home was when planning for something like this, to ask for everything, so if you have to make cuts you've got more to work with. Another useful thing to note is that the British Library Collections Care team will come and do free monitoring of a rare books space, but offer paid services for anything more.

Other lessons Liz learned for rehousing projects were:

• Librarians and archivists know best - don't let others tell you what you need
• Demand contracts are written: promises are worthless
• If you're leading a project, bring your team with you; it can be disruptive and scary for them if they don't know what's going on.

I think this was a useful talk, because there’s a lot of practical advice there which is applicable to all projects, not just those relating to special collections.

The next talk was from Celine Carty, who attended the Cataloguing and Indexing Group (CIG) conference. This was a more general overview of what the conference is like, which is helpful for anyone wondering if this conference is suitable for them.

For something so specific, it actually covers a wide area, and all kinds of libraries, from BBC footage metadata to the pharmaceuticals industry. Talks can be quite technical, but Celine assured us there wasn’t too much RDA! It’s quite a small conference, so attendees don't have to choose between talks, everyone attends everything. There were two points that Celine really impressed upon us:

• Don't worry about feeling like a fraud for not being a good cataloguer, everyone feels a bit like that!
• Go for bursaries too, often there are not many applicants

It certainly sounds like a conference I’d like to attend at least once, just to get the flavour of what’s happening in cataloguing. I’m not a cataloguer, but I have to catalogue, so knowing where to go for the best information would be really helpful.

Clair Castle covered her experience at the UK Serials Group events. My notes say check out the blogpost for this one, which is available here. The talk touched on a number of things, covering altmetrics, good networking, open access, things libraries should be providing (such as getting libraries to do Open Access instead of academics). She did that it could be quite overwhelming, as these are quite big conferences.

The next talk was a very practical one: Claire Sewell and Katherine Sendall, with Presenting Conference Posters – Some Top Tips! The presenters drew on considerable experience for this talk, which made it highly accessible and full of ideas for implementation. Advice and comments included:

• Posters are great for shy people because interacting one-on-one with individuals is a lot easier than addressing crowds.
• Posters are there to share ideas, like a visual essay. So make sure you have clear headings, try not to be overwhelming with information, and make sure the logical path is easy to follow.
• Your poster should be eye-catching but not cluttered. Use a sensible font, readable from about 3 feet away but attractive from 6 feet away.
• Include contact information!
• Look up examples online, there are often good tips available (Colin Purrington’s website is good).
• 800 words is about right, don’t go any higher, but you can use less.
• Be careful choosing colours - dark backgrounds make a poster hard to read.
• Font size should be 24pt minimum for text (headings should be bigger).
• Creating it in PowerPoint is fine, then it can be saved as pdf before printing out.
• Think about the kind of questions you're likely to be asked so you can prepare answers.
• Speak to the person, not your poster!
• Bring correction materials in case anyone spots any errors!

The next talk was one I was particularly interested in, as it focused on an event I couldn’t make in the end: Chris Barker, with UX and ethnographic methods for librarians.

It was a very practical day, full of discussion of methods, including cognitive mapping, interviews and diaries. One particularly successful method of gaining feedback (used in a lot of college and faculty libraries around Cambridge!) was the graffiti wall – somewhere with post-its and pens where users could write comments (‘can we have sofas’, ‘lights not working’, and so on); informality works well. The workshop then included the attendees trying things themselves to get idea of how users feel.

On the whole I’m starting to have mixed feelings about the usefulness of UX in libraries – at least, UX in my library. I think it works best in a large, diverse library, where maybe you have a lot of repeat visitors (like students in college/faculty libraries), and you don’t really get to know how they work and what they’re succeeding and failing at when using the library (or choosing not to). This isn’t so much the case in the library here, where the library staff engage directly with every user, every time.

There are other aspects I’m not so comfortable with too – one is the lack of reliability. Because it’s so focused, UX is really valid for the user or users it samples, but it’s too small-scale to be reliable, therefore it has to be used in conjunction with other, larger-scale methods to ensure that you’re not just changing everything around to suit one person, thereby inconveniencing thirty others. The other problem is the question of ethics. When conducting research, it was firmly drilled into me that shadowing or observing people without their knowledge is at the very least, morally dubious. However, by making your presence known, you affect the result. So do you want detail and validity, or ethical soundness and the Hawthorne effect? Decisions, decisions..

Jo Harcus discussed attending three management courses, including an ARLG event. Despite being quite diverse management courses, there was some overlap, and a lot of what was covered was applicable to the library setting. Some of the real take-home points she made:

• Management and leadership aren't the same thing, but both sets of skills are important.
• Often people have a natural dominant management style, but may be required to adopt different styles to get the things done.
• Authentic leadership: leaders are self-aware, knows their strengths and weaknesses, are open, and acknowledge that management is a process, you're always learning and improving.
• Communication is key. Unexpected responses give you a clue to what's the problem.

Corpus Christi runs these sorts of courses, with a staff discount, so keep an eye out. She also encouraged interested people to participate in the library leadership reading group (#llrg).

This was definitely something I wouldn’t have thought twice about (I am obliged to do very little in the way of managing or leading at work), but Jo made it sound interesting, and the courses aren’t that costly, so this is something I hope to revisit in the future.

Getting toward the end, the penultimate talk was from Helen Murphy, who had attended a course on copyright.

The course was quite expensive, so think twice before going on it. It also assumed a lot of prior knowledge of copyright issues, but there were lots of areas where a lack of knowledge didn’t impede her. The course covered, amongst other things, accessible copying, preservation copying, what is "reasonable", VLEs, and what to do if you get found breaking the law. These areas were covered mainly by actual scenarios, so the take-home point for Helen was that copyright is often a thorny area, and there’s not always one right answer. A useful link provided was www.copyright user.org, and for more information on digital copyright there’s also the UKEIG (UK e-Information Group in CILIP).

Last, it was Charlotte Hoare, who went to Marketing Your Library, a social media workshop run by Ned Potter, which I believe he does on a reasonably regular basis, so the opportunity to attend will come round again. There were lots of important messages from this:

• All marketing is communication, all communication is marketing.
• Avoid white noise. Be timely and personal; talk benefits, not features.
• Promotional activities are not enough. It's a cyclical process including dialogue between library and user.
• Have a plan, document it.
• Make sure your team is with you.

And his rules for social media:

• Know why you're there
• Don't overcommit
• Get the tone right
• Chase engagement, not numbers
• Listen!

I thought there was a lot of good stuff coming out of this, but I would have liked more practical information rather than these sorts of overarching objectives – hopefully though I can go on the course, and get the practical help I need to market my individual library!

Finally we read through the post-its which we had filled in at the start as an ice-breaker: what makes a good conference, how do you get the best out of a conference, and which conferences/courses would you recommend to others. These are all available on the CaKE blog.

One tip that really sunk in was that it’s a good idea to always ask for training budget money every year. Even if you’re not successful every time, it gets your institution into the habit of expecting to give the library money for training, which hopefully they’ll then start to set aside as a matter of course.

So that was the workshop – phew! We covered so much, and I really enjoyed it (and the cake was superb!). There was lots of new information to take home, resources that other people discovered and shared, and ideas for the future. I couldn’t go to the last CaKE because I was on maternity leave, but if there’s another one, I’m going to be there with bells on!