Library Camp Sheffield, 2nd February 2013

Profuse apologies, all. It's been quite a while since my last post, and also since the subject of this one. I've been busy settling into a new home, and working on some other bits and bobs, including, appropriately, a fantasy alternate Sheffield inwhich long-lost planning proposals were enacted: noodling with questions like how one might marry 1924's planned viaduct across the Sheaf valley with the cliff-straddling multi-storey monument of the Owen Building...

 

My rather simplistic solution.

It was in this very building (somewhat further down the cliffside, beneath the perforation of the non-existent bridge) that Library Camp Sheffield was convened on the 2nd of February this year. Naturally, I leapt at the opportunity to attend a Library Camp in my native city and hosted by an organization that employed me for seven rather pleasant years. [Ooh, I just saw my first bee of 2013 buzzing around the blossom in the tree outside; thought you'd like to know]. Here, over two months after the fact, owing to the aforetyped distractions, is my report of the day, tarnished as ever with my own opinions:

Session 1: Library School

[Note: Fantasy Sheffield library students will be pleased to learn that Portobello has survived unscathed, with Jessops (all three wings still erect) gaining a new park of my own devising] 

The first session I attended was an opportunity to vent the frustrations of library school. Is it just a hoop through which we pass en route to a rather expensive but helpful piece of paper, or should we actually be learning something in the process of what is an expensive and stressful period?

Those who had passed through the hoop (myself included) felt we didn't get all that much learning out of  the experience. Exceptional modules were Management and Cat/Class (the latter infuriatingly not treated with any seriousness during my own MA at Sheffield). 

Graduate Traineeships have been of far more benefit to those who have taken them. Unquestionably they provide real and valuable librarian-y experience: a requirement in the current job climate. At the time I left library school I had seven years' experience as an assistant, but none as a librarian proper, and so it was that those of my fellow coursemates who had done Grad Traineeships were getting jobs for which my experience was deemed inadmissibly lowly (cue furious scrabbling for work-shadowing opportunities on my part to make up the largely indifferent difference). Clearly, then, there is an essential need for the library school graduate to have relevant in-job experience of being a librarian (the old Catch-22) that could be catered for by the library school but which isn't. Even alliances with institutional libraries seem non-existent. If a library school is there to equip us for the profession it is failing in a crucial regard. If only we were offered placements as part of our learning...

There is a problem with that model. Voluntary work undermines our profession (back to the old Catch-22), and if every library student had a few months embedded into a library the reality would likely be one of job-losses in the very sector we're seeking to enter: if we're doing a job as part of our studies, it won't be there for us as part of our career. It needn't be this way, but in practice it almost-certainly would be.

There are other ways of delivering practical content within a course, of course. But here we reach something of a crux: the university is trying to provide an academic, not a vocational course, hence its academic bias. Clearly, though, such academic training, while addressing the institutional purpose, fails to address the needs of the student. Any change in this regard lies at CILIP's door. It's their accreditation that terraforms the library school landscape. If their degrees are to remain meaningful in an increasingly experience-demanding and competitive sector (and in a world where degrees become a second mortgage hanging around our financial necks), they need to pander to that sector. Otherwise that first item on the job spec will find itself slipping away down the Desirable column. There are already fine examples of Grad Trainees attaining a job sans-MA and distance-learning in the job. In a future of higher and higher student fees there is also a real chance that these bits of paper will price themselves irrelevant: not so much an investment as an imprudence. Money is a big big issue, and the student-as-customer model skews demand, changes expectations, and has the potential to induce genuine bitterness into the equation.

Where are the courses going right? Beyond the vacuum of experience there is some good to be had (for those lucky enough to be taught it! - not all courses are equal): stuff about rights, legality and photocopiers; group work and presentations (an essential ticked off in most applications these days); the pleasure of finding a dissertation topic that really interests you... And then there's the stuff that comes as a bonus: the student experience: getting stuck in, mixing with a wide range of people, forming a peer-group that will live with you as you collectively progress through your respective careers... It is these friends, and the time I spent (and occasionally continue to spend) in their company that I believe were the greatest outcome of my four-figure investment/imprudence. We look to our peers for help and reassurance as we take our first steps into the real world...

Session 2: Academic Libraries and Public Engagement

Academic libraries are teeming with wonderful stuff. I'm not an active member of any public library because I work in an academic library which caters pretty satisfactorily for my every whim. Some members of the public have also come to realise what wonders we hold, and this session was about how we engage with them. Should we charge fees for external borrowers? Should we seek to join up with other libraries to create a huge pool of public/academic resources?

Many academic libraries offer walk-in access for members of the public, offering resources beyond the capacity of the public library system: we don't have it, but they do over the road... This may be met by surprise: "am I allowed?" Thankfully the historical approach of the higher education system in this country has been one of social improvement for all. In such an atmosphere, cooperation between the two sectors has been good, to the point that joint ventures have been created, such as The Hive and the Hull History Centre. Sharing is good. 

Two complications have arisen in recent years. Firstly the development of the 24 hour university library: a central, easily securable hub where students can pull an academic all-nighter. 24 hour access raises questions of safety and security. All-night opening of university buildings is nothing new, and tramps have been finding their ways into student bathtubs since the dawn of academia, but now there's the added temptation of all that fabulous library stock. Security of the stock, and of the students themselves, ultimately demands secure access (usually in the form of a swipe-card). And while measures may be retained to allow external users during working hours, the barriers create an architecture of exclusion. Faced with no obvious means of entry, the potential visitor may wander off unenlightened.

The bigger umbrella in the spokes is the £9k problem. This stuff is no-longer paid for by the state. It's the result of a private subscription that will take a working lifetime to recoup. This new state of affairs gives the student no incentive to share. Without tuition fees it is conceivable that academic libraries would be working together with public libraries, creating online information literacy guidance, offering info skills sessions to the populace, generally widening participation and reaching out to the community. Now there's a paywall mentality emerging.

Perhaps we worry too much. The number of external readers is small. There isn't that much demand as things stand. In part that may because the public don't realise we're available to them, but it's not every member of the public who has an interest in academic materials. Dismantle the public library system, though, and things might change. How would we feel if more members of the public started knocking on our door?

Things have changed a great deal since Mark Firth opened his college that he might better educate his steelworkers or have decent doctors to tend to their injuries. The philanthropic spirit was always partially born of self-interest, but none-the-less incorporated a greater social duty. The university was an arm of the state: education for the benefit of all. Now universities are being forced to think of themselves as businesses rather than philanthropic exercises. They scout the world for lucrative markets, and one of these days one will completely relocate to Dubai. We need to take a long hard look at ourselves and sort out what we need to be; what our role is in society. Because while on the one hand we're being forced down a commercial road populated by pot-committed students keen to see the benefit of their destitution, on the other hand we're being encouraged towards open access: tax-payer funded research should be free for any tax payer to view. Both are Tory notions at heart, but the latter potentially offers the philanthropically minded of us a potential exit strategy: an excuse to pursue social engagement. And even the £9k problem can be turned to our advantage if we lay thick the alumni benefits: library rights in perpetuity: exciting perks and all the books you can eat! All part of the investment: a way to keep in touch with your subject and community of interest.

The academic library has finite stock and finite space. Any external demands upon its contents are to the potential detriment of the students. But even if we're to think in business-minded terms, the value of outreach as a means to connect with potential customers is immense, and academia's most immediate shop-window is its goodie-filled library. Come and have a free ride! Get them through the doors and all that...

The original design for Sheffield Hallam University's Adsetts Centre,

just across the road from the Central Library and my beneficent gaze.

Session 3: Research Data Management

The academic library's key resources are, traditionally, books and journal articles: research outcomes neatly parcelled up for our consumption. But behind every exciting research publication is a great mess of raw data, and, as anyone who's played with raw data will know, raw data can be used to tell us far more than half a dozen pages of A4. A bag of coloured balls yielding results for one study may also have uses for another, avoiding unnecessary duplication of effort and resources. And now we have the internet it seems silly not to propagate the stuff online for anyone else who might want a dip.

Should academic libraries be doing this? Well we are, after all, the resource hub of the whole university: the font of information from which the students and their lecturers draw. This is the library with its repository hat on. Some universities might have more appropriate sections for the job, but where we're hosting their articles and theses, why not host the spreadsheets, databases and tallytables too? If you're managing the output, why not also the input?

There are certain reasons why academics might not want such data made available, from selfishness, messiness or a fear of showing their working, to ethical considerations such as anonymization and confidentiality. But in those cases where such protectiveness were overcome (generally via a funding council mandate more than a realisation of the altmetric), and hurdles regarding old data and retroactive permissions were successfully leapt, there exists material which we might as well house.

The first problem is that we're not used to it. Our bookish librarian brains are not designed to parse raw data. We raise our tweed skirts and flee, shrieking (as quietly as we can -- this is a library). Citation searching is one thing, research data quite another. And we have enough troubles housing the output text, juggling different formats like .doc(x), .xml, .pdf. While some standardization in research data exists, we know what our academics are like; we've seen their desks. There's a Pandora's box sitting on it under a pile of unmarked essays, eight clock-cold mugs of gelatinous coffee and a Bakewell tart that's growing legs. But nonetheless, the dataset is a resource, and librarians manage resources. It's what we do. It's who we are. We live to manage resources, and drink stale coffee and eat evolved Bakewells. We have the power deep in our buns. Repositories should be everything... everything associated with the project.

We're being offered a new role: another string to attach to our rather fetching bow. I know what some of you are thinking: some of you are thinking "my bow already has far too many strings: it is impossible to fire an arrow without it getting tangled in them; it's more harp than bow now". There may be others wandering around, curating a Souness 'tache as they wander up Bernard Hill in search of something to do, but by and large we keep ourselves pretty busy. And isn't there a flaw in the "We hold the books; why don't we hold the stuff that goes in the books?" mentality? Isn't it the archive that holds the manuscripts, not us? There's another consideration... the idea of looking at the raw data is nothing new: previously if I wanted to find out more about the background of a study, I'd just ring up its author.

But all of this may be us trying to invent an axle for a wheel in the age of the hovercraft. While the current publishing model orbits the .pdf, it is hardly the steaming ramblings of a vox-futurologist section on Nationwide to imagine a hypertextual means of research publication whereby the research data is an embedded component of the published article. As the last print journals are sent to the remote store in the sky, it seems an inevitable development of online provision. Research data management as we're currently wittering about may be a very shortlived fad indeed.

Session 4: Open Access

So yes, the .pdf is just the stop-gap at the door of a brave new world of enriched, all-singing, all-dancing online research. Bibliometrics are sent to the dressing-up box with the cap and gown. Arise the altmetric; hail the citation score; email Paul Erdos to collaborate on a paper; set fire the Strand. There is a drive towards openness and openness is what libraries do best, especially academic libraries with their 24-hour policies and their walk-in access. With the latter we really already have open access, just not online from the comfort of our bedrooms, although publishers may get us to sign rights agreements restricting access rights. Publishers... they're sods aren't they? They create problems and we keep giving them money. We keep giving them money because academics still want to see their name in print in the pages of the best journals; because bibliometrics are not yet dead to them; because getting a lecturer to put something into a repository is contrary to stereotype. 

Not that it is necessarily a good idea to let the publishers go to the wall... they may theoretically be surplus to requirements, but bureaucracy keeps people in work at least. Many people, myself included, have written about the potential roles the publishers can play in the future of research distribution (not least peer-review and content management). Life would be so much easier were they just a little bit less sharp in their practices. But that's desperation for you, and the lesson of the music industry has not made it beyond pre-print. 

Quite what will happen with OA is constantly shifting tea-leaves, but in the long short-term, strapped cash will encourage the transition from cachet to cache: the prestige titles will price themselves out of the market as universities are forced to manage their research budgets in line with OA rules. In the short long term it might all become irrelevant because talking horses will have evolved and we will be their slaves, or because technology and academia will have both shifted towards yet another distribution concept. It's hard planning for tomorrows: too many variables.

It seems to be the way with Library Camps that a theme emerges. Here it was academia and its engagement with the public. But it was also about how we can implement that engagement without really having a very clear idea as to how it might work. We're trying to steer the tanker of academic publishing while simultaneously anticipating its potential transformation into a giant robot. On one side swims the Scylla with its many heads bearing the contrasting ideological motivations for a wholesale release of state-funded research materials. At the other, charybdian publishers pull us from an ideal course. All the while, merjournals fill our crew of academics with beguiling songs. And perhaps we're not even full of high-demand oil. Perhaps we've got a hold full of mini-discs or something. It's all a bit of a mess.

But messes have their benefits. Because while our tanker may be hard to steer, at least we're on the bridge and having a go at the steering. There are opportunities here to capture important ground, to further our own ideologies, to maximise our audience and propagate knowledge even further than in the past. If we're concerned that universities may become increasingly protective of that knowledge, now's the time to scupper such coracles; cast our tentacles into the wider society while we still can. And we need to cast them now, before the concrete of the agenda sets. The best way of getting our own way is to act first and set the agenda in a way that suits us: let's take control of open access and research data management; let's revolutionise the distribution of knowledge and research; let's reach out to the public and re-engage with the wider community (historically part of many a university's remit). 

The trouble is that it's difficult. Things are messy. The rules are in flux. The red tape is stuck in the machine. But as a basic concept; as an idea to be working with and to try to push whenever one gets the chance, we might as well have a go at taking a positive lead on this stuff while we still can.

This final session was hosted by your humble Saint; my first attempt at leading such a discussion. In hindsight I should perhaps have prepared a little better, or at least picked a subject people knew about. As it was we all sat in a circle and looked blankly at each other, wondering what this Open Access thing is and how we might be expected to deal with it. Part of the problem was that it was the last session of the day, another part was that we'd kind of discussed all the fun bits in the RDM session previously, a third was that we had an informative session on OA at the national Library Camp and so perhaps people had had their fill there. Still, I'm painting a bleaker picture than is due, and modesty prevents me from asserting too much protest on the matter lest I come over all Gertie. My thanks go to all of those who attended and helped it through the stilt and silence.

Thanks also to the organizers of another excellent Library Camp. We ended up in the Sheffield Tap, but spread over two groups so I didn't get to chat with everyone. I shall make amends for this come the next such event. I look forward to it.

[Interested in going to the next national Library Camp? Express your interest here.]