The Library Camp 2012 Memory Test

A couple of months ago I started a thrilling write-up of my experience at this year's Library Camp in Birmingham. But before I could finish it and stick it online, the demands of job applications got in the way, and so it was that it remained festering and unloved somewhere deep within the cloud. Today, quite a hopelessly long time after the fact, I complete my write-up, far after my memory of the day went stale. Let us hope my notes proved up to the job...

"I've sent the boys out to fetch more gin"

Twelve months ago [and the rest, now; ed.] something strange happened in Birmingham: quite unexpectedly, an event with the name "Library Camp" turned out to be really amazingly good. The library scene changed overnight, awoken by this Lesser Free Trade Hall style epiphany. Nothing would ever be the same again.

The event inspired numerous mini-camps across the land, and I have attended two of them. You may recall my accounts of derring do in Manchester and Leeds. All this wonder meant that the second national Library Camp would have a great deal to live up to.

What are Libraries really for?

@antlerboy of public sector consultancy firm Red Quadrant led this opening session and was met with a somewhat frosty reception. Consultants are viewed with suspicion at the best of times; when those consultants are linked to high-profile library closures the wariness is all the more extreme. Anyway, his perspective seems a profoundly Blairite "third-way" approach to public/private partnerships. Private finance has given us many libraries old and new, and philanthropy is always welcome, but PFI experiments in schools and hospitals may give us reason to express some caution. The New Labour thought-process was all too quick to leap to snap-conclusions about the role of the public sector based on private-sector metrics (not least the pound sign). As our consultant seemed to acknowledge, the effectiveness of a library is not so readily quantifiable and we should be wary of being measured by somebody else's stick. He seemed genuinely keen to discover a new metric by which libraries might demonstrate their worth. One might argue that these positions appear tautologous: that bowing to metrics of any kind is to dance to the accountant's tune. That is not to say that effectiveness should not be gauged: I type as an empiricist. But, the role of the public sector is broadly to mop up where the accountant has failed to see an economically compelling reason to get out the Flash, so to run the public sector along private lines is to destroy its fundamental purpose. As @liz_jolly was on hand to point out, there is therefore a need for the library to be a public institution run in the public interest, and perhaps the private sector might be asked to learn from the public sector now and again rather than the other way around.  


Whether it was simply the involvement of Red Quadrant, a more general feeling that a debate about public library provision had ended up on the rocky shores of economics, or a greater anxiety over the future in a world where the rot has long-since got out of hand, this opening session seemed to create a rather bitter atmosphere. Dark feelings churned. Doom reared its head and we didn't have the ammo to give it a proper gibbing. So it was that some of us turned to the hash...


#uklibchat LIVE at Library Camp

I could write about this session, but there's a Storify archive of it as part of #uklibchat's own post on the matter. The subject of the chat was "careers", so needless to say it didn't exactly lighten the mood any, but such is our profession at the moment...

Classification

@AnnaLGriffi led this somewhat cheerier session on the usefulness of classification. Who is class for? Does it just help us to put the books in a findable location or do our patrons actually make use of classification sequences? Perhaps the best classification is that which goes un-noticed: the user finds their book without even thinking about decimal numbers. As a Dewey-eyed sort, I rather value the uniformity of such a standard. Indeed, for all its shortcomings and inconsistencies, no-one would sensibly suggest a new class system given the dominance of Dewey and its Library of Congress alternative. Such would be the domain of the eccentric. Standards are useful (as anyone who's had need to borrow a mobile phone charger will know) and we tamper with them at our peril.  But classification is no pure science: associations are opinions rather than natural laws (does the creationist file her books under the 200s or the 500s?). Locations are not universally fixed, and some collections will need more decimals than others. Sub-collections will require us to rethink our approach (the specialist will necessarily abandon the generic classifications for a more appropriate system, as many a medical library will demonstrate; a spine full of numbers obfuscates the title, and the point of class is to make finding things easier, not harder) at the cost of standardization.

In a small library (a few shelves or so), we may classify by author. But classifying by author is not very helpful as a system of reference. When my sink starts backing up, the name of the editor of that book on DIY plumbing does not spring instantly to mind. Unless, of course, I had thought to catalogue my books by subject. In the drawer "P", on the index-card for "Plumbing" I find, in neat copperplate hand, the instruction "See under 'Buildings'". Alas, there are more subjects in the world than there are index cards in my collection, and by now the bottom shelves are getting a little water-damaged. To save us pouring through a thesaurus whenever we want to find something, the system is inverted: if we arrange the shelves by subject, we can create a spectrum of easily navigable interests; if we want a book by someone with the same surname as us, we we might find it in a catalogue drawer.  In the days before the difference engine, any secondary classification would require its own set of cards and so it was that we limited ourselves to a small number of dimensions, e.g. Author x Subject.

But now we have computers, we needn't be so limited. And indeed we aren't. An OPAC can potentially give us anything for which MARC's had the foresight to think up a field. Such is the power of the catalogue (and by extension the power of the cataloguer). We suddenly have a wealth of catalogue drawers upon which to pull. The order of the shelves becomes almost arbitrary. Indeed we could simply shelve by accession number if the catalogue were up to the job (save the benefit of the fact that a book mis-shelved within a subject range is, by virtue of residual relevance, marginally less lost than a book mis-shelved in an effectively random collection). As technology and data transmission speeds improve, the prospect of browsable virtual shelving, reorderable at the click of a button to whatever field we like, becomes real and enticing (and like all such advanced catalogue tools, will probably be woefully under-used if implemented). But the most relevant and useful order for the physical shelves (at least whilever they're the domain of humans rather than machines) would still seem to be by subject, be it to the tune of Dewey, Congress, or our own bespoke notions of how the world is best organized.

Books can still be lost or deliberately mis-filed in such a system, of course (perhaps the most useful use for RFID is finding such strays). Students have long since taken advantage of the haystack to hide their favourite books from their colleagues. Mis-filed numbers can stand out surprisingly well (no points for spotting the alien on this shelf: 300, 300, 300, 300, 300, 300, 725, 300, 300, 300, 300, 300, 300), which helps us in the war against such selfish gits. Except for the really clever ones. The ones who will go out and buy a Brother label-printer in order to forge convincing false spine labels. The ones who will go on to be librarians...

Knitting

I'll adapt the pattern to add a second arm-hole.

I took a break at this point to work on some knitting. Knitting is a fundamental component of librarianship, as I learnt at the first Library Camp. I'm currently trying to knit this. It's looking a bit like a string vest.

LGBTQ Library Workers and Customers

Another decade, another letter added to the acronym. At some point in my life I've corresponded to all five of them, which is quite an impressive feat really (though all it really means is that I'm B and T). @davidclover led the session, and an interesting one it was too. From a staff perspective, we considered the lack of any obvious professional network (there was an email list once, apparently, but it never really got going), but the majority of the session considered our engagement with library users. From a local history perspective there is a need to gather a historical record before generations of us die off; a need, therefore, to encourage an open dialogue with people who may never have been very forthcoming on the topic in the past. On the book front there is the matter of the "Gay Fiction" collection: Should it be obvious and prominent (a trumpeting of our right-on liberal ethos; normalisation by exhibition) or will that just put people off using it (not everyone is so out and proud)? Should the collection be hidden? Brown paper bag; top shelf; dark room? That would be rather discouraging to everyone involved, and a bit of a pain in the bum. Should it be integrated within the main collection? Here's where my personal sympathy lies. Factual materials have their place in the wider classification and I've never been a fan of sub-dividing fiction too heavily. And yet sub-division of this kind is unquestionably of use: if I want to read a western, I can lay my hand on one quite quickly if there's a westerns category; likewise if I want a (straight) romance. Is it not helpful, therefore, to have a gay section too?

Again, we're back to Classification. Again, the OPAC and digital collections offer virtual solutions to such problems. But not every library offers a catalogue terminal, and maybe we want to be in and out without too much hassle. Such, then, are the pros and cons of the LGBT section. Does it normalize or abnormalize this literature? Does it include or exclude? Did we answer these questions? Do we ever answer questions at Library Camp? Is that what it's for?

Open Access

By this point I was flagging, I must confess. It had been a long day, and the cake was starting to wear off. Since this session I've read an awful lot on the subject of Open Access, and I intend to do a full post on the issue soon. I will therefore outline the key notes I scribbled:

expectations [book] [switch] [open access lock] HIGHLIGHT REPOSITORIES!! [graph of escalating journal prices] feed the ego [branches] money / reputation ["Journal of Cool Academics" with "£1m" price-tag] [more branches] author pays [abstract doodles, including a sperm] PHYSICS-ARQIV [increasingly confused doodles] nesli [picture of the Milkybar Kid] I am starting to fall asleep - copac / sconul - lack of awareness of current open systems.

As I say, I will flesh these notes and doodles out a little more in a future post. For now, take note of the difficult balances we will have to strike between kudos and cost as we negotiate our way along the double-dipping gold path.

Cake

I made some parkin for Library Camp and it seems to have gone down well. Here's what went into it:

8oz oats, 4oz self-raising, 4oz soft brown sugar, 4oz syrup/treacle, 2oz butter; milk, egg, ginger, baking powder

1) Sift flour, baking powder & ground ginger, and mix in oats and sugar
2) Melt butter, syrup (or syrup & treacle to taste) & milk (a slosh of about 6 tbspns) and allow to cool
3) Beat egg and add everything together, beating well
4) Put into greased 9" tin at 160°C / mk3 until it rises a bit and comes in from edge. Cut, tin, and leave for a couple of days.
5) Enjoy...

And so to the pub... A livelier end to a subdued sort of day. Perhaps it couldn't live up to the highs of last year or the sunny park in Horsforth. Perhaps there's a sense that we LibCamp veterans have talked all there is to talk on the subjects that interest us, and should perhaps now be concentrating on the doing rather than the nattering about doing. Perhaps we were all just feeling doomed. One could easily exaggerate the extent to which the spark was not as sparky as on previous occasions. I think the simple truth is that after so many cosy mini-camps, the scale of a big national event was just a bit overwhelming, and some of us didn't adjust back to this as well as others. The sombreness has been overplayed. It was not the revelatory excitement of last year, nor the joyful cuddliness of the mini-camps, but it was a useful and welcome event in which librarians met, sororized and learnt from each other. And that remains a very good thing indeed. I hope to see you at the next one!

Paging the Oracle

A teletextual blogpost.

Dance lessons

I am typing this while watching Strictly...It Takes Two, because that's the kind of crazy, risk-taking chancer I am. If this post gets infected with talk of Argentinian tangoes, I apologize in advance.

PowerPoint projection put to good use

Last week was the first week of term for the students here, and I spent much of it delivering library induction sessions for the new intake. Monday saw the first time since graduation that I gave a solo presentation to students, but thanks to some canny choreography by my fab-u-lous colleagues the monumental nature of this event was less than it might've been: in previous weeks I had done a couple of library tours,  helped out in one session, and delivered part of another (a part of equal size to that which I would be delivering on my own in the Monday session), thereby lulling me gently into the swing of it all.

I'm covering for somebody who is off sick, so the first part of my preparation for these sessions was to find her PowerPoint slides from last year -- not so straightforward when the person who made them isn't there to show you where she filed them, and when you yourself are completely new to an organization and its conventions. Once found, the slides needed reformatting according to glitzy new style-guides (each one requiring a thousand pink sequins), and the content had to be updated in light of at least severrrn policy and platform changes that came in over the summer. All this allowed me considerable opportunity to rework things to suit my own particular style.

What if all the students have table-tennis bats with numbers printed on?

The first session would be for the Women's Studies students, and my impression was that it would be a rather informal affair. At one point in the preceding week I awoke in the middle of the night (imagine James Stewart in Vertigo) and thought to myself "what if it's so informal that there's no projector?" (an indication of the sort of paranoia that keeps me on my toes). So it was that I prepared an alternate routine: I made several good lines of notes of the things I needed to say so as not to be reliant on the slides, and took with me some induction brochures to hand out. Both these moves would prove to be good, sensible things to do, whether there was a projector or not. As it happened, my paranoia proved sound: this would be a PowerPoint-free induction session, and the small group permitted the flexible conversational informality of the library tours I had done previously. 

Now, longstanding readers of this blog will be aware that I am no great lover of PowerPoint anyway. Indeed, I am rather dismissive of it. But when you're starting out in a new job, it's a very handy crutch. It's also much easier to steal and tweak somebody else's slides than it is to make sense of and rework somebody else's lesson plan. In this regard, I've found PowerPoint a very useful framework upon which to build. But as an aid to learning, I'm still not convinced it's anything more than a bit of fancy: a distracting rectangle of light in which to capture attention (and in the scale of distractions it falls closer to someone running around in circles with a cape than it does to Kristina Rihanoff). In all my subsequent inductions I was able to employ my slides, and they seem to have worked ok, but they did feel a little surplus to requirements at times: in a small group it feels ridiculous to be using them, and in a large one the subtleties of a demonstration are invisible to viewers at the back of the room (much as subtle footwork may be invisible to a TV audience). I began to wonder if it really mattered what was showing on the screen behind me.

This was tested when I accidentally used the wrong set of slides for a session (postgrad slides for an undergrad group). The difference between the two sets was incredibly slight (part of the problem!) and I was able to avert disarster quite easily by being light on my feet and filling in with the appropriate patter as necessary. Good to get these things out of the way in the first week!

What if my music-hall doll-dancing routine lets everybody down?

My first session with the PowerPoint took place in a room where I used to be taught as an undergrad. It felt kind of weird setting up the projector and leading a class there but it was a small room and a friendly audience, and things seemed to go ok. I was more nervous about a longer session with a half-hour practical attached, but in the end it waltzed along nicely (though I definitely need to work on my 'getting everybody's attention again' technique!). As the week went on, my confidence got a lift, and I think by the end of it I'd become pretty adept at outlining the library service. I've been on something of a roll, and I've just finished the slides for my first bit of real teaching: a two hour session on literature searching (one hour of me talking and one hour of the students going through a workbook I've prepared, assuming my calculations go to plan). Again it's a reworking of somebody else's slides, but this time even more liberally so (cue dancing cats and dogs to illustrate Boolean). I might even get to do a bit of whiteboarding if I can find a suitable pen! I'm looking forward to it, in a funny sort of way, safe in the knowledge that I can fall back on the workbook if I miss my footing and things start to go a bit pear-shaped. Whatever happens in this session, I can build on it, and use the experience to inform my other lit-searching classes in the coming weeks.

What if I'm partnered with Anton?

Keeeeeeeeep teaching!

Ducks and Cover

Ah, 'Avocado', how I've missed you...

John Bowes Morrell is much changed since I last met him, twelve years ago. I suspect his unconventional partnership with Raymond Burton and Harry Fairhust has helped brighten him up. He's redecorated, and while I do miss the old wood finishes I have to confess that the modernist white paint-job looks rather smart. Harry's looking grand too, having kicked out the itinerant compscis and laid out some beanbags for his all-nighters.

I'm lodging with Harry now; have been for a fortnight. I share my digs with a lovely assortment of librarians, and am doing my best to blend in. Two of them, like me, only started recently, and also like me, are providing short-term cover for someone else (one of them even has a blog). The three of us, variously experienced in the dark arts of librarianship, have been enjoying an impressive spread of induction events (some of which go on right up to the end of my contracted term), and these have been invaluable in helping us to settle into our new home. 

Interlaced with this training has been the steady drip drip of actual work. My first task was to transfer the old subject guides across to a new system, and tidy them up a bit. As someone who's been tinkering with HTML for over a decade, this was quite a pleasant introduction to my new role, and I'd soon wrestled the lists into some sort of shape. Tidying them up further is an ongoing task and there are some dead links still to weed, but the work of an academic liaison assistant is many and varied and one must prioritise accordingly: for another, more pressing aspect of my work arrived this week: teaching.

I am not entirely green when it comes to standing in front of a group of people and speaking. I've run exams as an invigilator, I've spoken between songs when playing in a band, I've done presentations as a student, and I've assisted in library teaching sessions before (I got to do a little spot of that sort of thing again this week, which was fun). In October, though, I'll be giving my own student induction sessions, and that's both exciting and just a little bit terrifying too. Things are complicated slightly by a number of factors, primarily the not insignificant detail that I myself am still being inducted. This is balanced to a small extent by the fact that the library is undergoing a number of little revamps here and there that are not yet implemented, making lesson-planning tricky for everyone, not just us pesky kids. That the more experienced members of staff are in boats similar (if not quite identical) to ours does perversely lend a tot of confidence.

Not bumped into my old nemesis yet. Only a matter of time.

During the course of this week I also popped two important library cherries: I bought some books and I discarded some others. The purchases were not my own selections, and the discarded books were donations rather than proper weeding, but it's a start! I'm beginning to feel just a little bit like a grown-up librarian...

An Upward Movement

Just a quick note to let you all in on some good news: come September I shall be starting a new job as an Academic Liaison Assistant supporting social work and women's studies. I'm looking forward to putting my library school education to some use, and hopefully the work will help inspire an exciting array of future posts (my other blog already has a couple of bits of writing on the subject). Needless to say, I'm really rather excited! Having worked in my previous job for seven years, I feel I've had my fill of it, but I've enjoyed those seven years a good deal and I shall miss everyone there terribly. At least I am trading one city I love for another, and I hope my new role will prove as fulfilling and inspirational as my last.

Career Development Group National Conference, Birmingham, 2012

To say I was looking forward to this event is something of an understatement. As I mention in the first post of a new blog, this would be a big step for me. Indeed one might legitimately describe it as life-changing. This is becoming a bit of a habit for CDG conferences: it was their New Professionals Conference last year that broke my cynicism and inspired me to get involved with the wider library community. Without CDG there would be no Succentorship without Sneers. 

This year, the New Professionals Conference has been absorbed within the main event. I can see the point in this: I don't think it's healthy to ghettoise ourselves as graduates, and as the conference title puts it: "Together we are stronger". But some of the enthusiasm and energy I experienced last year seems to have been lost in the process of this merger, and I miss the focussed attention on graduate development. Still, it gets us newbies together with those who've racked up some practical library wisdom, and that is not to be sniffed at.

Liz Jolly's keynote address was a perfect example of this: an inspirational biographical account of her "learning journey" through the library profession and its supporting networks. She stressed the importance of professional involvement and warned us not to rely overly on the Twitter echo-chamber. Read journals and seek out different people; "not all heroes are on social networks". I was particularly taken by her advice to focus ones fire: to be disruptive but not irritating. Liz is proud to call herself a librarian ("if we're not proud, who is going to be?") and I appreciated the reminder that while we may often find ourselves complaining about CILIP, CILIP is its membership: we are CILIP. It inspired me to consider getting involved on some level or other, although I think I ought to wait until I get a job first.

Liz's address is exactly the sort of thing we graduates need: it was inspiring and informative. If I take nothing else from her talk, it is the value in life of a good haircut. That's advice I shall definitely try to follow!

The next session I attended was Steph Bradley's account of resurrecting a library service for the Bristol NHS. When she arrived it had no fixed staff, just a visiting librarian, and consequently the collection had suffered: items were out of date, stuff was missing, and the catalogue was riddled with inconsistencies.

Steph talked to colleagues and users (including getting out to remote users) accosting everyone with blanket emails both to establish need and to advertise improvements to the service. New books were bought, inter-library loans were enabled, and an improved website was created (including a useful "Where's Steph?" link).

Steph stressed the importance of being flexible and positive. We should shout about ourselves and our service whenever we can. Enable face-to-face contact, and remember that word of mouth is often a better advertiser than posters. Find out what our users want and prove our impact through feedback. Fit in within our organisation and seek to adapt others rather than letting them adapt us. Make use of our colleagues: find out what's worked before and what hasn't. Keep on keeping on: effort pays off in time.

I found Steph's experience uplifting and I hope I'm able to put what she's learnt to good use in my own career. By her own admission, she's been lucky enough to have good and helpful managers who've supported her in this project. I hope the same will be true for me.

After a brief break, it was the turn of Patricia Lacey & Emma Gibbs. Their presentation described the development of a library network to support knowledge sharing and facilitate job shadowing and mentoring. They organized whole day knowledge sharing events, and day-long job-shadow opportunities, getting para-professional staff involved (something which strikes me as a decidedly Good Thing). A similar arrangement was described in a later session by Kristine Chapman & Karen Pierce. They told us about CLIC: a cross-sector staff development group in Cardiff which organises job-shadowing, library tours and talks. It's a free service aimed at all library staff in Cardiff. It was funded by government grant until 2010, and since then it's had to rely on the good will of participants. Demand exceeds availability and the organization can no longer afford the larger venues it used to use for talks. The lack of funding led to the website stagnating somewhat, but it has recently been redeveloped as an information hub and social media takes a greater role in advertising events. Despite the difficulties with funding, the service is clearly valued, as a recent survey demonstrated, and the ability to network and learn about different sectors is highly regarded. I particularly liked the idea of the Do Something Different job-swap day. Clearly it's a shame that money is no longer available for larger scale projects, but it is great that CLIC has managed to keep going in spite of this set-back.

In the second of the day's parallel sessions, I chose Stephen Ayre's report on a collaborative research exercise within the NHS. It was a great insight into the health library sector. Stephen took us through the results of a recent survey of users who had received information skills training. Most such users were from nursing & midwifery and allied health areas, and the vast majority had used their skills since their training. The skills were mostly employed in research, advice for colleagues, and service development, with major influences of such application being treatment, advice, and guideline development. It was a useful demonstration of how collaboration between libraries can gather more meaningful results of service impact than might be achieved individually.

Time for lunch: a pleasant buffet, albeit with staff who were a little over-keen to take away our plates. The room was arranged around a number of podium tables that made mingling quite easy, and I enjoyed the opportunity to get to meet new people.

The afternoon began with a talk from Michael Martin about CILIP's Future Skills Project which has redrafted the "Body of Professional Knowledge" and is reviewing the processes of certification and chartership. Then it was time for a workshop session: I chose to attend Virginia Power's session on change. In addition to offering some useful advice regarding support networks, it was also another good chance to get to know other people at the conference, and it allowed me an opportunity to mention LISNPN.

For the final session of the day, I went to Stephen A Bowman's rousing appeal to outreach and advocacy. We should be getting out to schools and teaching them skills and aspiration; we should be volunteering for university committees to get ourselves and our libraries seen. Like Steph Bradley, Stephen acknowledges that he's had a certain amount of luck in having the backing of a supportive management for his endeavours. Still, if we evidence our projects properly, perhaps even the most unenlightened management can be made to give them some consideration.

Stephen won one of the two prizes for presentations, and the other was won by Rebecca Dorsett whose 'Shelving together' talk was the parallel session in the same slot. Although I didn't see it, I've since taken a look at the slides and I suggest you do too (and not just for the naked men!).

A conference is about getting to know people as much as it is about learning, and so while the presentations may be over, the day was yet young! There were two-for-one cocktails to be drunk in a bar in the city centre, and new friends to be made (although by the end of the night it was, as tradition dictates, the same familiar collection of University of Sheffield graduates propping up the bar!).

CDG 2012 may have lacked the focussed energy of last year's New Professionals event, and there was a sense that some of the content, while perhaps new to those longer in the career, was already familiar to recent students. I also worry that the mix of those attending was not as varied as it could've been: I welcome the opportunity to meet more experienced staff, but such individuals seemed well in the minority. I like the idea of a combined event, but I'm not sure it worked as well as it could have done. But perhaps this is just a case of first-year teething troubles. Despite these minor quibbles, the event was still a massively motivating experience, and on a personal level I feel tremendously proud to be part of what seems (not least on the basis of this conference) to be a genuinely supportive and inclusive profession.

Thanks to everyone involved in organizing the day, to the speakers for their motivating thoughts, and to everybody else who went for just being downright lovely. 

Evelin's Evil Excel Exercises

My last post was perhaps a bit too much to take in in one go, so I've written a little walkthrough exercise to demonstrate how some of the stuff I mentioned might be put to practical use. The walkthrough is in 60 steps broken up into six stages of varying difficulty, and is peppered with screenshots. I hope it's understandable enough, and that it's of some help in getting to grips with spreadsheets. You can give it a go here.

How to Excel at Excel

Microsoft Excel is one of my favourite computer games. I find it endlessly playable. I even chose my dissertation topic with an eye on its potential for spreadsheet-based entertainment. But apparently not everyone feels the same way. Or perhaps they've just not had the opportunity to put in the same hours as I have, and never worked out how to get past that pesky end-of-level baddie in the Hall of Tortured Souls. So it was suggested to me on Twitter that I might cobble together a few Excel tips by way of a blog post.

I've been toying with Excel for about twelve years, from doing the accounts for a business I used to run to managing huge tournaments of a Formula One computer game, and most recently I racked up some stupidly big files while data-mining my way to a dissertation on catalogue search-term analysis. By and large, the skills I've picked up are more pertinent to data extraction than to simple accounting and record keeping (I am very much guilty of using Excel as a database, not least because I've always found it considerably more friendly than Access), but hopefully some of the stuff I'll mention here will be of some use. Some of it, on the other hand, will be baffling, and there will be the odd bit of egg-sucking to balance that out. I don't profess to know the full intricacies of Excel: I'm still very much learning myself. But over the course of the last twelve years, and particularly the last twelve months, here's some things which I've discovered and thought, if only I'd known that before:

EDIT: I appreciate that this list is a bit of a "wow, look at all the cool stuff" kind of mess, so I've also produced this little exercise that you can work through.

A fistful of Dollars

=$A$1+B1

Suppose we want to add the figure in column A to the figure in column B. We can type =A1+B1, and ta-da, there's our answer. And we can then drag that cell down and expand the formula for each row of the column: =A2+B2, =A3+B3 etc. All very lovely. But suppose we wanted to add all the figures in column B to a single number in column A (i.e. =A1+B1, =A1+B2, =A1+B3...), we can't just drag. We could copy and paste into each cell, and then edit the reference accordingly, but we don't have to. We can use a fixed cell-reference instead. We fix the reference by adding a $ to the front of whichever coordinate(s) we want to maintain. $A$1 is a constant reference to cell A1, $A1 will fix to column A but return the relative row, and A$1 will fix to row 1 but will return a relative column. 

A Colour Licence

Adding colour to a spreadsheet, be it cell colour or font colour, can be very helpful as a means of highlighting important data. It's also useful in so much as we can sort or filter by these colours. This can be particularly handy when used in conjunction with...

Conditional Formatting

On the Home menu, this is a useful tool for at-a-glance analysis and makes your spreadsheet very pretty in the process. As you add content and insert extra rows into your data, it's easy to get lost in overlapping conditionality, so it might be worth cleaning out any unused conditionality now and again using the Manage Rules dialogue.

Text to Columns

Ideal for imported data, but also handy for quickly splitting cells, the Text to Columns feature lives on the Data menu, and breaks up text into columns, either based on a fixed width or on a delimiting character of your choice.

Merging Cells

A pretty spreadsheet is a happy spreadsheet, and the Merge option on the Home menu is a button I use often enough to have it duplicated on the Quick Access Toolbar (something well worth customizing if you use Excel a lot).

Transposition and Other Pasty Plays

Perhaps we don't want our stuff arranged in columns. Perhaps we'd rather it were in rows. Well we can copy what we've got and then Paste Special, selecting Transpose in the dialogue. There's a load of other paste options in there too; particularly useful are Values (pastes the results rather than the formulae) and Format. We can also paste onto an existing array and perform a mathematical transformation in the process by using the Operation options.

Cleaning up the Content

=TRIM(A1)

=VALUE(A1)

TRIM will remove any unnecessary space characters in a text string so that there is only one space between each word ("  ducks   and      donkeys    " becomes "ducks and donkeys"). VALUE will ensure that anything that looks like a number is treated as a number rather than as text. Both are useful for cleaning up data before we start playing. 

Concatenation

=CONCATENATE(A1," ",B1)

=A1&" "&B1

Got some bits of data in different cells that you'd really like to be in the same cell? =CONCATENATE(A1," ",B1) will paste together the contents of A1 and B1, with a space character between (thanks to the " "). To save on columns (and typing), you can even concatenate on the fly within formulae by using &: =A1&B1; =A1/(B1&C1) (the latter example relies somewhat on B1 and C1 being numbers).

Substitution

=SUBSTITUTE(A1," ","")

SUBSTITUTE is our search and replace mechanism. If we want all the 10s in column A to become 15s, we can =SUBSTITUTE(A1,10,15) etc. More complicated search and replace exercises (including particularly useful format replacements) can be done under ctrl-H (it should be pointed out that Excel's Find and Replace dialogue has a curious blind-spot on the "~" character, as I discovered to my annoyance during my dissertation). I've also been known to make search/replace alterations in Word (Word's ability to replace punctuation is useful when preparing material before importing into Excel).  

Filter Tips

We can locate similar data using the Filter function on the Data menu. Filters are useful for comparing and working on related data within the larger set. We can filter by colour formatting and by various permutations of text content, as well as by cell values as a whole. 

A Friendly Sort

We can order our data alphabetically, numerically, or by colour using the Sort function on the Data menu. If you're worried about messing up the order of your spreadsheet, add a new column and fill it with ascending numbers (you can auto-fill an ascending sequence in several ways; here's two: 1) type 1 in the first cell, 2 in the second, highlight both, and drag down to auto-fill the sequence; 2) click the bottom cell of an empty array, press Shift and Page Up together repeatedly to highlight all the way to the top, and use the Fill Series option from the Home menu). Now you can sort by this column to return to the previous order.

Macro Economics

Macros are your friends. They may seem daunting but they will save you so much time. You can set up a macro in the Developer menu. Just click on Record Macro, give it a name and a keyboard shortcut, carry out some laborious, mundane task that you're fed up of repeating (like formatting a cell or setting up an elaborate sort routine) and then stop recording. Remember to select Use Relative References first if you want your macro to operate relative to the highlighted cell rather than in a fixed location. Two important notes to bear in mind: 1) when you save your spreadsheet, you'll have to save it as macro-enabled if you want to be able to use the macros again; 2) (and this is especially important) you can't undo changes made by a macro, so save your spreadsheet before running one. These inconveniences aside (and the latter point is quite an inconvenience), macros are great.

Graphic Design

Excel's good, but it has one horrible flaw: its graphs are a pain to format. I would that this were not the case, because it is capable of making some lovely graphs if one has time to spare formatting every single data series or typing out label-sets for scattergrams. To explain how to get the most of charts and chart formatting requires a blog post of its own. But we can plot some pretty things if we put our minds to it. We can scatter-plot coordinates to map locations, or use a surface chart to generate a relief, and afterwards we can feel smug about our achievements, happy in the knowledge that we have triumphed in the face of adversity.

A Domesday map of Strafforth plotted using Excel.

Doing your Sums

=SUM(A1:A10)

Simple but useful, this adds up all the cells from A1 through to A10. Beats typing A1+A2+... Current versions of Excel also give the sum of a selected array of cells (along with the count and arithmetic mean) in the display at the bottom right of the screen (very handy for quick reference purposes). 

What's in a Name?

The Name Manager on the Formulas menu allows us to give shorthand names to data arrays. If we find we're referring to A1:A10 a lot, we can go to the Name Manager and give this array the alias "a", allowing us to write =SUM(a) instead of =SUM(A1:A10). This is especially useful for more complicated arrays.

If...

=IF(A1=B1,"Oh, wow! A1=B1!","Meh...")

A straightforward conditional formula. We can nest up to eight IFs, i.e. =IF(A1<B1,B1,IF(A1=B1,B1)) which gives us the largest value of either A1 or B1. Many of the things we can achieve with IF can be done in a simpler way with other commands such as MAX and...

Choose Life

=CHOOSE(A1,"1st","2nd","3rd")

At first glance, CHOOSE seems to offer nothing that cannot be achieved by a nested series of IFs. But it's quicker to write out, and it has a maximum of 254 clauses to IF's eight. The above example assumes a value of 1, 2, or 3 in A1, and returns an ordinal equivalent. Any other value in A1 will cause a #VALUE! error. CHOOSE is reliant upon a numerical reference, starting from 1, so you'll likely need to create some sort of transformation on your data to get everything set up for it.

Untangling Knots

It's easy to get lost in formulae. Fortunately, the Formulas menu has some useful tools including Show Formulas which does what it sounds like it might, and Trace Precedents / Trace Dependents which draw lots of coloured arrows all over the place to show the trail of your data that you might more easily unpick your knitting.


Coming to terms with ones Errors

=IFERROR(A1,0)

=ERROR.TYPE(A1)

Fed up of pesky errors such as #VALUE! or #DIV/0! messing up your spreadsheet? Stick in an IFERROR and it will clean any error away and replace it with whatever you prefer (in the above case, "0"). If you want to differentiate between different error types, you can use ERROR.TYPE to return the numerical value for the error: #NULL!=1, #DIV/0!=2, #VALUE!=3, #REF!=4, #NAME?=5, #NUM!=6, #N/A=7 and #GETTING_DATA=8. 

Big Ones, Small Ones, Some as Big as Your Head

=LARGE(A1:A10,1)

=MAX(A1:A10)

=SMALL(A1:A10,1)

=MIN(A1:A10)

=RANK(B1,A1:A10,0)

In the above examples, the paired formulae produce the same result: =LARGE(A1:A10,1) and =MAX(A1:A10) both find the biggest number in the array (A1:A10), for instance. But LARGE and SMALL can also find the nth largest or smallest number. If we wanted the third largest number in an array we'd use =LARGE(A1:A10,3). 

RANK is a related function. In the example given, we are finding the numerical position of the value B1 among the values in the array A1:A10. The "0" indicates that we are ranking in descending order ("1" would be ascending). So if A1:A10 were the numbers 1 to 10, and B1 was 1, this formula will give us a value of "1" (i.e. "1st"), and the same result would occur if the values of A1:A10 were 10 to 1 or any jumble of those numbers.

Measuring Length

=LEN(A1)

=LEN(TRIM(A1))-LEN(SUBSTITUTE(TRIM(A1)," ",""))+1

LEN is a simple little function: on its own it will give us the number of characters in a cell. There is no equivalent tool for measuring the number of words, but we can use the longer formula above, employing TRIM (to get rid of any extraneous spaces) and SUBSTITUTE (removing all the spaces) to effectively do a space-character count, and hence (by adding the 1) the cell's wordcount.

Learning to Count

=COUNT(A1:A20)

=COUNTA(A1:A20)

=COUNTBLANK(A1:A20)

=COUNTIF(A1:A20,"hello")

=COUNTIFS(A1:A20,"hello",B1:B20,"world")

Here are a handful of ways of counting cells. COUNT counts cells that contain any number, COUNTA counts cells that contain anything at all, COUNTBLANK counts cells that contain nothing at all, and COUNTIF counts cells that match a defined value ("hello" in the example above). There's also COUNTIFS, which will count entries fulfilling multiple criteria: in this case, "hello" and "world" in adjacent cells of a two-column range.

String Theory

=LEFT(A1,5)

=MID(A1,1,5)

=RIGHT(A1,5)

=MID(A1,LEN(A1)-4,5)

The above pairs of formulae return the same content as each other: the first pair will give the first five characters in a cell, the second pair will give the last five. This is useful for data extraction, but we can do more with MID if we feel compelled. We can, for instance, further cut down on any IF / CHOICE programming by creating a reference string. For example, we could convert a number in cell A1 to a letter using a reference string such as "abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz" in B1: =MID($B$1,A1,1). We can reverse this process using:

Advanced String Theory

=FIND(A1,$B$1)

Keeping the "abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz" string at B1, but with letters in A1, this formula returns the numeric position, so "a" (and indeed "abc") = 1, "z" = 26 etc. FIND is case sensitive, so we might also choose to make use of...

Case Sensitive

=UPPER(A1)

=LOWER(A1)

These functions standardize the case of a text. There's also PROPER Which Capitalizes Everything. On a related note:

Code Selfish

=CODE(A1)

=CHAR(A1)

CODE operates using an internal text string: the Unicode character reference. It takes the first character in a given cell and converts it to the decimal version of the Unicode reference for that character, so "0"=48, "A"=65, "a"=97. The process can be reverse using the CHAR function. If we start messing around with Unicode references, we might also find the following useful:

Hex Enduction Hour

=DEC2HEX(A1)

=HEX2DEC(A1)

These functions convert a decimal number to a hexadecimal one and vice-versa. There's also some binary functions. It saves having to do complicated base conversions using maths. Speaking of different bases:

The Trouble with Time

=TIME(A1,B1,C1)

=HOUR(A1)

=MINUTE(A1)

=SECOND(A1)

=QUOTIENT(A1,1)

=(MOD(A1,1))*100

Time, with its pesky division into 60s, is a troublesome beast, especially if we're processing imported data. Excel treats time as a part of a larger date, and as a fixed point rather than a duration. Both these details can prove problematic. The best approach I've found is to keep separate any hours, minutes and seconds in different columns, and then combine them using the TIME function above (I then give it a pretty custom cell format: "hh:mm'ss""). The process can be reversed using the HOUR, MINUTE and SECOND functions. If a time has been entered as a decimal (e.g. 1.3 rather than 01:30) we can separate the numerator and denominator using the QUOTIENT and MOD functions (multiplying the latter by 100 to get "30" rather than "0.3"). This latter trick applies for any decimal expression, of course. We can also play about with these various functions to create decimalised times if required.

Blinda Data

=DATEVALUE(A1)

This time function is particularly handy for extracting Excel-friendly date values from imported text. Suppose cell A1 contains "21st May: Went swimming", we can do something like: =DATEVALUE(LEFT(SUBSTITUTE(A1,"st",""),6)) to shave off the "st" and work our magic on "21 May". We can then format the result as a date in the cell format options. DATEVALUE ignores blank space, so if we're doing a batch of diary entries of the same format we can safely replace the colons with a lot of spaces and up the character limit for extraction so as to include dates of a different character length.

Now Now

=NOW()

Today's date and time. Handy for date-maths. 

Then Then

=ROMAN(40)

A spreadsheet based pun there for you all. x

The Saint's Birthday Message

It is my birthday today! Not my real birthday, but my official Saint's Day: it was a year ago today that I adopted the moniker @SaintEvelin, and began to embrace and become part of the online library community that had daunted me until that point. So it is that I have been attempting to succent without sneers for a whole twelve months, and in this 43rd blog post I shall gaze at my belly-button to see if the fluff therein has corresponded to the aims I set out in my first post, or whether, like Charles Foster Kane, I have diverged from my declared principles.

"This blog...will document my attempts to find my place in, and embrace firmly, the library community..."

Of the 42 posts prior to this one, 33 (79%) have been about libraries and/or my personal or professional development. This figure includes 16 posts devoted to the CPD23 project. Beyond this core, five posts have been about language or literature, and four posts have been concerned with that other great love of my life: fashion. I think this is a reasonable division. If one removes the crutch of CPD23, 65% (17) of my posts have been 'on-topic'.

"The title of this blog: "Succentorship without Sneers", describes (with pithiness and alliteration) my desire to balance a passion for libraries with an inherent suspicion of almost everything. This is not to say that an empirically minded doubt of all is a bad thing; it is demonstrably not. But I am a pessimistic soul at times and all too often place barriers that are unwarranted. This bloody-mindedness must stop. Thankfully I am an optimist at times too. This isn't a question of faith or doubt, but of genuine openness: of listening and considering things without taint of preconception. It's also about showing a bit of enthusiasm and not being such a miserable git: beyond any question of science or discrimination, there is a simple matter of attitude: I have to go out and get stuck in, rather than stay sitting here on my beautiful arse, waiting for the world to come knocking for my services."

Here's the nub of the blog. It's not just meant to be me sat here typing my thoughts about libraries. It's supposed to be me getting out and engaging with the profession; expanding my horizons and embracing new developments. I don't suppose it's helped that I've still not got myself a professional post: it doesn't encourage an awful lot of optimism and it leaves me with only so many new and exciting frontiers to explore. No surprise then that this blog has descended into the odd didactic rant now and again (I am still, it seems, "a cynical bitch"). But I've had three Library Camps to help inspire me along the way, and to have had a blog post referenced in print has been a particular honour: a real validation that I must be doing something right here. Above all, my new-found library friends both in the flesh and on Twitter have been invaluable in keeping me perky and engaged during the discouraging tedium of job-hunting. It really means a lot.

"I shall attempt to be honest both to myself and to my readership, whilst maintaining a reasonable modicum of diplomacy."

I do think I've broadly succeeded in this regard, though I think I need to do more reflection. I'm a timid creature, and I'm always a bit scared about how my attitudes and opinions are received by my peers (all too often I've snuck my posts out when nobody's looking). I need to be braver and I also need to be more honest and open. That said, it's hard to be fully open without breaking into distracting exhibitionism; there's always an element of fear in expressing oneself, and I suspect that there's a happy medium to be achieved somewhere between retention and extroversion. Locating this medium is something I find a considerable struggle in reality let alone online. I'm always concerned, for instance, that people find it irritating, weird or disturbing when I tweet about pretty clothes, just as I'm concerned that people find it irritating, weird or disturbing when I wear them. So it is that I try to limit my tweets on such topics and avoid allowing my every blog post to descend into some hand-wringing whinge about the social tribulations of a genderqueer librarian. As much as this aspect of my identity might impact upon my personality and my interaction with the world (and it is, for me, a genuinely big issue with which I'm constantly wrestling as I take these first steps in my career as a librarian), I endeavour to treat it as something unworthy of special attention or remark: to normalize it rather than to have this blog become dominated by that theme. I don't really want to find myself pigeon-holed in such a way. Perhaps this is the wrong approach to take. Perhaps it's unhelpful, or maybe even fundamentally dishonest. That's a big worry I have: that I mislead through omission and give an offensively false impression to my audience. I don't know. It seems a difficult balance to strike. I welcome any thoughts you might have on the matter (and on anything else I've had to say today).

Aims, then, for my second year? Be less timid, but not too ranty. Keep sharing my experiences and what I've learnt. Hopefully I'll be in a new job soon, and then I shall have a world of new learning to exploit, but there's still much I can write about even now (I'm currently working on some hopefully helpful tips for Excel, in response to a suggestion on Twitter). I feel I've come a fair way in the last twelve months: no longer am I a terrified and daunted newbie. I'm increasingly engaged with Twitter, and thanks to the Library Camps I'm starting to get to know people in real life too. It amuses me a little to think that just over a year ago I approached my first library conference with real dread, while now (thanks to the near-damascean conversion I had there, and the warmth and encouragement of the library community I've entered) I'm filled with excited anticipation for the CDG event in Birmingham next month. If you're going, I look forward to seeing you there, and whether you're going or not, I'd just like to take this opportunity to say:

...thanks for reading. x

The Great Sheffield Book Hunt

In my last post I talked a bit about catalogues and how I should write a post in which I test-drive a few. So here we are. I've given five Sheffield-based library catalogues a spin: two from the two Universities in the city, and one from the public library service. Let's take a look at tonight's contestants:

Sheffield Hallam University's Innovative WebPAC Pro "Classic" catalogue:
The out-of-the-box OPAC for the Millennium LMS. This is a simple little piece of kit with a drop-down choice between searches for Keyword, Author, Title, and a few other bits and bobs (plus an advanced search option). But for the challenges we're about to put its way, we shall only be using the default Keyword option.

Sheffield Hallam University's ProQuest/SerialsSolutions Summon "Library Search" catalogue:
After dabbling with Innovative's "Encore" for a year, SHU have recently (last Autumn) opted instead for the Summon federated search catalogue system. While there's an advanced search option, and opportunities to limit searches to particular criteria, the default approach is a Keyword search of everything except newspaper articles and book reviews (which were taken out of the default search just a week before I conducted this test), and it is upon this default that we hurl our challenges.

The University of Sheffield's Talis Prism "Star" catalogue:
Upgraded from a previous Talis system in 2003, Star definitely looks its age. There's a choice of Keyword, Author and Title search, and again we shall be taking the Keyword option for purposes of parity.


The University of Sheffield's ExLibris Primo "StarPlus" catalogue:
They thought it would never happen, but at long last Star has been updated. The new catalogue (in a perhaps perpetual "Beta" stage) came on-line in November 2011 (not long after SHU's Summon). The default search is by Keyword and limited to university collections (including journals and etext subscriptions), with a secondary option for literature cross-searching across multiple databases. There is also an advanced search, but we shall be using the default set-up.

Sheffield Public Libraries' SirsiDynix iBistro library catalogue:
The aesthetics of Star alongside the drop-down functionality of the classic SHU. As with the other contenders, we shall be using the Keyword ("words or phrase") option for our search experiments.


Our contestants met, it's time to start...

Round One: Vital Statistics

"Clicks to search" is the number of clicks it takes to reach the catalogue search box from the institution's front page. "Results per page" is the number of search results per page. "Average loading time" is based on a search for pride and prejudice and is the mean number of seconds calculated from five successive attempts on my home connection of a Sunday afternoon. The results of that search are converted to MHTML to give the page size (in megabytes).

Both SHU catalogues take quite some finding from the University's homepage, although access is more direct from the student homespace and VLE. The slowest loading time was achieved by the public library, despite having the second smallest page size, but such is the nature of the server. Heaviest on the bandwidth is Summon: its results exceed the 1MB mark, making for a loading time twice that of its classic companion (the fastest of the five on the day) despite the fact that the classic search packs in twice the number of results per page. Unquestionably, then, SHU Classic is the most efficient in terms of time and bandwidth.


 Round Two: Error Correction

Just a quickie, to test the catalogue's error-correction capacity. SHU Classic and Star don't do correction. What you type is what you get, and what I've typed is pride and predujice. The public library offers a list of "closest matches" which includes what we're after (the novel by Jane Austen), so that's a pass. StarPlus correctly deduces that we're after pride and prejudice and offers that as an alternative search, so that's a pass too. SHU Summon, however, thinks we want pride and predjudice which gets us 28 (irrelevant) results. Only then does it offer pride and prejudice.

So having finally got some results for pride and prejudice, how do they look?

Round Three: The Austen Test

Here's three formulations of the title: pride and prejudice, pride & prejudice, and "pride and prejudice". The first is a basic test, the second will challenge the catalogue's ability to cope with ampersands, and the third will demonstrate the effectiveness of quotes.

Star does not do ampersands (not in a Keyword search at any rate). It cries if you try.

In the above table, the second column for each catalogue is the number of matches retrieved, and the first column indicates how far down the list we have to go before we find our first example of the Austen novel. With the exception of the public library, our book appears on the first page of results, and in the case of StarPlus, it is right at the top. Curiously, although it limits the number of results, adding quotes to the search also drops the book lower down the page for both SHU catalogues.

The lower number of returns for StarPlus compared to Star is down the way that StarPlus groups like titles within a combined record. The higher returns on Summon compared to SHU Classic are on account of the breadth of external material being included within the search.

Round Four: The Proust Test

In this round we test the way the catalogue (and perhaps to a larger extent the cataloguer) handles the questions of translation and the episodic novel. In all seven of the above searches we're trying to find for ourselves a copy of Proust's "Swann's Way" (in either French or English; we're not fussy). The diacritics in the French formulations garner no results from the public library and the classic SHU catalogues, which is unfortunate. In the case of the SHU catalogue, at least, this is due to the diacritics being absent within the catalogue records. The University of Sheffield has superior catalogue records regarding its use of alternate titles, but the search also seems to strip diacriticals from a character, thereby giving the same hits for Du côté de chez Swann as it does for Du cote de chez Swann. On the first three searches, Summon fails to find our book within its first 100 records (an arbitrary cut-off on my part) though does manage to find later volumes. The Star catalogues on the other hand are immensely successful in giving us what we're after, with StarPlus being spot-on every time.

Round Five: The Godard Test

Here's a similar test, but one which is broadly passed. This time we're looking for a film by Jean-Luc Godard. The only failure is the missing diacritics in the public library, but the grave has made it to the SHU catalogue record this time round. SHU has a problematic lack of overlap, though, unlike Star's results.

Round Six: The Taylor Test

Now we shall see how the catalogues cope with a popular initialism. Ideally, the results for ajp taylor should be a subset of those for alan john percivale taylor, and this appears as if it may be the case for all the catalogues except Summon, where the noise from various articular references to AJP creeps in. Understandably, the a j p taylor returns are comparatively high, but in all cases bar Summon we still get a top rank result (we don't get a work by AJP Taylor till page 2 on Summon).

Round Seven: The Orwell Test

This round is another test of the ability to locate a work given the author's name. We're after any individually credited work by George Orwell (letters excluded). Unsurprisingly for a Keyword search, the search for george orwell gives the same results as the search for orwell, george, and likewise with g orwell and orwell, g. The problem with searching for the author by Keyword is that there are an awful lot of books about the author, with the author's name in the title, and these tend to rise to the top of the rankings. Summon is a particular victim of this, and it takes a set of inverted commas to bring any works by Orwell into the top 100 returns. Conversely, adding the quotes to StarPlus drops our first hit beyond the first page. In fact it is the old version of Star that is the most successful in this round (failures on the initialised formulation notwithstanding), while only SHU Classic gives us a front page hit for every case.

Round Eight: The Plural Test

I want to find a book about search engines. Or should I find a book about search engine stuff? A wildcard would go well here, but is unnecessary in Star which automatically knocks off any terminal "s" and adds those findings to the pool. So it is that a search for foxes in Star brings up a page of works by John Foxe. A similar phenomenon appears to be occurring in SHU Summon, although it seems the results are more relevantly ranked without the plural than with it.

Round Nine: The Amey Test

Our contestants have made it to the final round, and the toughest of them all. For this is the specialist round. Their task is to find "The Collapse of the Dale Dyke Dam, 1864" by Geoffrey Amey. It's a book about the Great Sheffield Flood of 1864, and it's a book that all three collections contain. To find it we shall use the simple but likely search terms sheffield flood and sheffield floods. As can be seen from the above table, it was not a task well-met. Again, the problem here is one of cataloguing more than it is of the catalogue itself. Even the one catalogue to give a direct hit (thanks to the MARC 650 entry "Floods|xEngland|xSheffield.") does so in a rather hit and miss way (three of the ten hits for the sheffield flood search are relevant texts, with only one of them appearing in the results for sheffield floods . Star uses its plural trick to give us all the books it can in both cases, but Amey is not listed among them (despite being in the collection). In Summon it's the last book we deign to look at, right at the bottom of page 4, and Sheffield Public Libraries aren't much more forthcoming. But at least it is there in both cases.

Final Results

Summon and StarPlus consistently returned results irrespective of the rigour of our tests, though Summon gave an average return of 58,203 results which is three orders of magnitude out from the rest of the catalogues. Such high returns were not stacked in our favour, however, and the average relevance ranking of 23 is the lowest of the five, though it is at least on the first page of results. Most successful in retrieving our desired items (and also in ranking them prominently) is StarPlus, though Star and SHU Classic don't do badly in these regards either.

The above tests are all simple searches made upon the default search settings of each catalogue. The noisy irrelevance we encounter in Summon could be cut back were we to refine our search, either through the advanced options or via the limiters in the side menu. Unfortunately, the bulkiness of Summon makes it the slowest of the four Higher Education systems here, and we know from Google how important speed is in our searches. Having to make secondary moves, such as limiting our searches to books, makes the search process all the slower. Those behind Summon would point out that I am using a screwdriver to hammer a nail here; that Summon is geared towards the literature searching needs of the modern student, and is more than a book-locating tool. But I do feel that book location is an essential feature of a library catalogue, and that Summon isn't really all that good at it. Again, I throw in the caveat that we've been using Keyword searches where more specific advanced field searching might serve us better, but the same caveat applies across the board. When StarPlus is capable of being near-consistently on the money for us, while also offering a range of federated search options beyond the main holdings, the bulkiness and noisiness of Summon appears unhelpful.

But it isn't all about the catalogue system. As a number of the examples demonstrate, the catalogue record itself is of immense importance. Charles A. Cutter wrote (in 1876) that the purpose of the catalogue is "To enable a person to find a book of which either (a) the author / (b) the title / (c) the subject is known... To show what the library has... [and] to assist in the choice of a book". The most difficult index to achieve is that of the subject, which is why we have things like AACR2. Attempts to Google-ize the catalogue experience have all-too-often fallen at this hurdle: it's hard to build a foolproof relevance ranking from MARC fields, as some of the above experiments show, and things can get particularly messy if you begin to introduce some full texts into the mix. This is what seems to be happening in Summon: full-text articles are getting more matches for the search-term and are rising to the top of the results at the expense of the terser records. In the long term, when everything in our collection is fully searchable, such Googly games might actually work, but we're not there yet. That's not to say that one couldn't come up with a sensible (and probably quite complicated) algorithm to deal with both types of material, but Summon has not done this, and StarPlus has gone with a less integrated model in an effort to avoid such pitfalls. On the strength of the above tests, it's an approach that seems to have worked: as a catalogue of the university's holdings it is undoubtedly an effective tool. By not attempting to be a jack of all trades, StarPlus succeeds in mastering the core role of the catalogue. Whether it operates as successfully when employed as a wider literature-searching tool remains to be seen. That's one for another day's testing.