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 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!
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...
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!
