Why a botched name change might actually have done CILIP some good

Last year CILIP's Annual General Meeting (AGM) attracted a maximum of 182 votes from a total membership of 14,832: roughly 1% of membership. I can't say I'm surprised by this figure. After all, who pays attention to AGMs anyway? It's just a lot of i-dotting and t-crossing and signing off of accounts; it's something that needs to be done but which does not need us all there to do it. I don't think I've ever participated in a national AGM before now (not least for geographic reasons). 

This year's AGM attracted 160 voters to the hall (up ten on last year and double that of 2010) plus 892 proxy ballots. With a reduced membership of 13,690, that works out at about 7.5% of the total: a 7.5 increase in percentage terms and a six-fold increase in real terms. Why such a surge of participation? Well, for one thing there was nothing to vote upon in the 2012 AGM beyond the standard agenda items. Indeed, a quick and inelegant trawl through archive.org suggests that this is the first time in over a decade that anybody's submitted an additional motion in advance of the meeting. In the case of 2013 we had two bits of extra business: the question of what we should be called and the question of what we should call Ed Vaizey. One or both of these item inspired the interest of hundreds of extra members, myself included.

A year ago, I suspect most of us would have been up for a name change. CILIP is not a pretty moniker. But the way CILIP went about its attempted conversion to ILPUK rubbed a lot of people up the wrong way (about 700 people by the looks of things). The prospect of a naval-gazing vote on a deckchair-shuffling name inspired the No Confidence in Ed Vaizey campaign and as a consequence we had something resembling decisive political action on the agenda. Symbolic, admittedly, but it's a start. This item's presence (and subsequent success: the motion was carried 669 to 200) marks what could hopefully be the start of something good for CILIP: the organization's dismissive and high-ham-fisted approach to the name change has led a small portion of its membership to question the purpose of the AGM and to seek a more relevant and active agenda. With the body losing 1,000 members a year, and librarianship in a state of government-imposed crisis, let us hope that this new attitude gains momentum and that next year's AGM is both more relevant and better attended.

Improved mechanisms of inclusion would not go amiss in this regard, but people have been moaning about that sort of thing for a while now. Fingers crossed for next year. For now, though, let us raise a toast: to the Knowledge People!

{display: none;}

I like LibGuides. I'm generally rather sniffy about building-blocks web content because it's usually quite limiting and ridden with javascript (*shivers at the memory of certain VLEs*). But LibGuides is different: there's none of the painful clunk and nested frames one often gets with these things, and, most importantly, a LibGuide can be as simple or as complicated as you want it to be. In a good way. In a proper web-standard sort of way. LibGuides uses boxes of content which you can arrange around your page. The box content can be edited using a WYSIWYG editor or by using a Plain-Text source editor, so you can be as simplistic or as tricksy as you like when adding stuff to the page. In theory your page could just be one big box which you edit as you might edit any other web page.  You can use their basic bits of Duplo, or you can mortar in some real solid bricks. And this flexibility is good, because it suits Walter who's up for retirement and has no interest in engaging with HTML, and it suits Zoe the web whiz-kid who wants to employ all the tricks she learnt in her computer science days.

My first encounter with this fully codable and customizable world was when I was playing around with my LibGuides profile and accidentally misused the <plaintext> tag. <plaintext> does not change styled text into unstyled text as I had guessed it might. <plaintext> renders any subsequent HTML code as plain text, and should be accompanied by a closing </plaintext> tag. I did not accompany it with an accompanying </plaintext> tag, and consequently the LibGuides profile web-form melted before my eyes into a slurry of pointy brackets. I had to hack the code in my browser (see last month's post on the virtues of Opera) to save my LibGuides from the internet version of a China crisis. It was a frightening moment, but one which excited me to the freedoms inherent in LibGuides.

So lesson one: don't use a <plaintext> tag in LibGuides. On a related note, always be sure to close any <div> tags you might use, lest they hang beyond your box and prevent you from editing it ever again. In other words: it is very easy to break bits of LibGuides and there is no "undo" button. If you're going to play around, do it with either a) a little knowledge (a dangerous thing) or b) a browser that lets you tweak the script locally should the worst come to the worst.

The last paragraph was needlessly alarmist, you will be relieved to hear. While it is very easy to break bits of LibGuides, you are unlikely to ever do anything that will break bits of LibGuides. LibGuides is pretty sturdy even if it can be unforgiving.

Last December I was charged with the task of setting up a booking system on LibGuides (using its sister application: LibCal) and spent a couple of weeks tweaking the style-sheets to get them to match the library branding. I had used style-sheets before, on my own web-pages, but never for anything more than setting fonts. It was an exciting learning experience, and I began to get an idea as to the more unconventional areas of LibGuides customisation.

During my time at the University of Hull this year I was asked to research the ways that other institutions use their LibGuides. We then pulled together something of a wish-list of ideas: what we thought should be on the guides, and how we might make them look and work in a way that would be foolproof to navigate. I was given the job of putting some of these ideas into practice.

What most LibGuides tend to look like.

The image above shows your typical average LibGuide (the content and tab order represent the mode of the top umpteen Google hits for libguides.ac.uk and subjectguides.ac.uk domains). There is some logic to this content which is why it occurs with such regularity, but the appearance owes most to the box from which it came: we're looking at a factory default, and not everything in that default is strictly useful.

In this post I'm going to talk about some of the tricks I learnt in the process of giving Hull's LibGuides a facelift. The reasons for the changes we made, both cosmetically and in terms of content, are probably better left to those still involved with the project: this is not a corporate account of a rebranding. I'm here to talk about the mechanics of LibGuides more generally, and what can be achieved. But as an illustration you might like to compare the above generic page with one of the new Hull guides (Computer Science, for example).

The secret to customising LibGuides lies in mastering the CSS. Before I started playing about the other month I didn't know very much about the finer points of style sheets, but nosing at the page source of various LibGuides across the country alerted me to some useful bits of code, and the first one of any real import was:

{display:none;}

Don't want some part of LibGuides to show up on the page? {display:none;} is your friend. Say you were worried that the LibGuides search box distracted from your catalogue search box, you could switch off the former by putting <style>.lgsearch{display:none;}</style> somewhere in your page (the custom CSS section if you have that option, though any old bit of box via Plain-Text Edit will do). All you need to know to switch off a part is its element name (e.g. .lgsearch in the case of the search box) and that's the hardest part. The slow way of doing it is to parse the page source with a fine-toothed comb and a knowledge of HTML and CSS. The quick way is to use a DOM inspector, and that's the approach I took to taking, using the Opera browser's built-in DOM inspector: Dragonfly. All I then had to do was right-click on the bit of the page I was interested in and inspect it. I could even tweak the code 'live' to see what would happen. I have no better words to describe such playing about than: "well cool!" Pretty much every bit of a LibGuide has its own class and can therefore be turned on or off. Say you wanted to generate a list of guides by using the built-in box options, but you didn't want the names of the list owners to be displayed (as they are by default in such lists). It so happens that the list authors have the class ".pdisplay_author", so you can consign them to the back of the net with a quick line of code.

{visibility:hidden;} is {display:none;}'s more sophisticated sister: she renders elements invisible rather than non-existent. Applying {visibility:hidden;} to this paragraph would leave an enigmatic gap on the page, while {display:none;} would shunt the next paragraph up into its place.

But it's not just about turning things on or off or obscuring them from view. You can set the font styles of every single different flavour of text, so if you wanted bigger type for your lists of links, <style>.itemlist li {font-size: 200%;}</style> would double the default font-size. A similar approach can be applied to the tabs at the top of the page, should you favour a chunkier look.

As with all things, the more you fiddle, the more you learn. http://www.w3schools.com/css/ has become a regular reference as I've sought to put ideas into code. Hours have been spent shunting box content around with margin tags. The best way to find out how something works remains to find an example of that something and to take it apart (this was the approach I took when replicating the quick links menu from the main University website). This is not as easy as it used to be a decade ago, because things are increasingly held in separate style sheets (which is why a DOM inspector is a handy bit of kit to have to hand). Not everyone's going to want to do that. Most of you are probably already reeling at the various different flavours of brackets and punctuation I've thrown at the page. But even if you know only the faintest smattering of HTML or CSS, you can stick it into LibGuides quite freely, and that is something rather refreshing and also rather liberating.

There are still some frustrating limitations with LibGuides, chief among them being that you can't create replicable directory structures as you might with web-pages: a link to a tab on one guide will need to be replaced if you make a copy of that guide, requiring a fair bit of tedious mucking about if you're rolling out a new template that makes use of such links. But mostly LibGuides are a Good Thing: straight, friendly webpages put together in a way that suits beginners and experts alike. And that's why I like them.

Some useful element identifiers:

topnav	The bar at the top that contains:
breadcrumbsl	The breadcrumbs trail
bc_library_home	The library homepage part of the breadcrumbs
bc_lbguides_home	The libguides homepage part of the breadcrumbs
bc_guide_name	The current page in the breadcrumbs
guide_header_title	The page title
guidedesc	The page blurb
guideattr	The bar containing:
lastupdate	Last update
guideurl	URL
printguideurl	Print guide option
rssupdatelink	RSS feed
addthis_button	Share button
tabsI	Tabs (other versions available depending on set-up)
stitle	The bar containing:
guide_tab_title_bar_page_name	Page name
guidse_tab_title_bar_page_print	Print page option
lgsearch	Search box
innerbox	Internal box content (generic)
headerbox	Box title (generic)
roundbox outerbox	Parts of the whole box (generic)
boxatt	Generated content (generic)
box_comments	Box comments line (generic)

Futurology II (or "How Many Students Does It Take To Change Higher Education?")

In my last post I vented about the state of the library profession in academia. Now, I try to look at it from the point of view of another interested party...

What do the students want from us?

• They want the books and articles they want/need to use.
• They want somewhere to work (both individually and in groups, with or without machinery).
• They want/need help with the resources and the work.

They don't strictly give a monkeys as to our pro or am status, or where we come on the pay spine. They just want to get their essay done.

Things like self-issue machines, which dramatically alter how staff operate, probably have less effect on the students. Some will be alienated by new technology and others will be liberated: giving the students a choice between machinery and humanity is the best possible approach in this situation.

Back-room changes like book sorting machinery and 'shelf-ready' purchasing do not have as obvious an effect on the students (moral or financial motivations notwithstanding). In some cases (where implemented wisely) they will speed up turnaround times, increasing the likelihood of stock appearing in the main stacks when the students go about their hunting. Better still, of course, is to make sure there are enough books in the first place.

Let's do some quick arithmetic. A year's worth of lecturer comes to about £35-40k, which is about four students' worth of fees. In other words, four friends could club together and buy a year's worth of dedicated lecturing. Add another friend and you have the best part of £10k to spend on books for the five of them. That should punch a reasonable hole in most reading lists.

This is crude maths. It fails to consider the expenses inevitable in upscaling that model beyond the capabilities of a small room. It fails to factor in the support structures and general perks of your average university. It fails to take account of the gobsmacking resource costs we are likely to meet as we ascend to those scales. But as a back of a weblog calculation, it is a lot for us to try to live up to.

Most students have not even remotely considered this sum. The student mortgage is just an obstacle they must surmount if they want to be a student. Most students, I suspect, will not actually question where the money is going. Most students will be happy to believe that we cannot (in all possible economies) afford to provide every student with every text on a reading list. In the current situation, at any rate, it is true. But that truth is born of priorities, and the university's priorities may differ from those of the student.

Remuneration is one obvious factor. In a nation of growing financial inequity, it is only a matter of time before students begin to look upon the pay-cheques of the university management with envious eyes. It might do us all a lot of good if that happens, particularly if some of that wealth were to be redirected to the library! Extra-curricular entertainments aside, the purchasing of educational resources must be high on a student organisation's shopping list were they redesigning the university budget from scratch. 

In the meantime we maximise those resources we can afford. It seems particularly in vogue at the moment to try tinkering with loan periods. I hope someone is doing a proper study of it all. Though by the time such a study is published, e-texts may have done for this whole area of debate! [This paragraph is a whole other blog post waiting to happen.]

Then there's the library as study space. The students can study anywhere. Especially if we rent out portable devices. They might equally try the campus bar, common room, or any other nook / cranny the local architecture has to offer. They needn't even be on university property. But a good library designs good study spaces, and good free space is increasingly at a premium. It needn't be the library's space, but it is, and that's good for all of us. The libraries of the future, from a study environment perspective, will be mad places: hanging bean-bag gardens overlooking spectacular scenery b/w cryptic candlelit carrels (budgets permitting).

 So we try to provide somewhere for the students to do their work, and we try to provide them with some resources to work with: not enough resources (probably not even enough spaces) but we try to do our best with what we've got. 

And then we have to explain to them how it all works. This is a necessary evil, but the whole university is operating on the premise of education so we might as well chip in, eh?

I don't think it's naïvety, then, to suggest that student aspirations for our service are broadly compatible with our own self-interest, without recourse to any macro-economic slights of hand (it probably helps that we aren't the best paid profession ever). It's far more naïve to anticipate any sort of student-led revolutionary re-budgeting. But to be able to argue from a position of genuine academic necessity (I opine that texts are the second most important element of higher education after the teaching staff themselves (some might even raise their level of importance a position further)) must be some sort of advantage for us. That said, rationality seldom has much of a place in economics...

Futurology (or "The Librarian Has Got Some Clothes On")

Academic libraries: what are we for?

We're here to support the educational process by providing:

• support materials (mainly, but not exclusively, texts)
• a study environment
• assistance in the sound use of both

Academic librarians: what are we for?

We're here to support the educational process by providing:

• support materials (the right ones, sourced in dialogue with the academics, and made sufficiently locatable and available)
• a study environment (properly equipped to anticipate student needs)
• assistance in the sound use of both

The role of the academic librarian, then, is to facilitate the sound function of the academic library. This is a "professional" role, by which I mean that this a role for which the incumbent has undergone some form of training and assessment accredited by a trade body. The idea behind such professionalism is to ensure certain standards: standards of capability on the behalf of the professional, which in turn suggest certain standards of remuneration.

(nowadays you need several grand to turn pro)

The precise framework of this professionalism need not be rigid, provided that sufficient rigour is applied in the determination of what constitutes an appropriate level of expertise. The important thing is that that expertise is recognised as being of sufficient value. 

There is a British Institute of Facilities Management, and an Institute of Chartered Secretaries and Administrators, not to mention the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development. Librarians are not the only professionals on campus. That is not to say that all cadres are valued equally. Indeed it may well be that your value is determined not by your cartel but by where your job has been pegged by the goddess HERA.

HERA and similar job evaluation schemes are an attempt to grade academic staff according to the demands inherent in their role. Anyone who has looked at the paperwork will notice that these things tend to be skewed to particular flavours of administration and that they are often just a wee bit woolly in places. Still, the consequence is that various library roles are pegged into a local framework: shelvers sit under library assistants who sit under librarians of various shades. The question for all three strata is: to what extent was my position in the grand scheme fudged, and what degree of (in)tolerance exists to threaten it?

I have seen shelvers having to be taken outside the system and treated as a special case to stop them being on the same grade as assistants, such are the limitations of role assessments (other alarming tales are heard beyond the library doors). The whole thing lands us into messy territory: any change to our role should really be met with a new assessment, although what can go up may also go down. I just did a quick back-of-a-datesheet HERA assessment of typical librarian roles and got anything from 100-300 points depending not only on how much responsibility is given to the role but also on where the limits of that responsibility are drawn. 100 points is very lowly indeed, and perhaps best serves as a cautionary exaggeration. The point is that convention and received attitudes can be as important as our actual duties when it comes to playing the role profiling game. Shift out one level of the strata that hold us in place, and the ground crumbles beneath us.

Peg a shelver on grade three, stick a library assistant on grade four, and you can start pegging senior library assistants and junior librarians at the grade five mark. But were you to remove the shelvers from the picture, replacing them with zero-hour students or trainees, the subsidence can begin to bed in. The undermining starts below us: the clue is in the name.

Self-service machines are easier to use than they once were, reducing desk traffic and with it the library assistant's communication score. Book sorters potentially de-skill the role of the shelver. Out-sourcing of processing and other back-room duties may also have a de-skilling effect, or may simply lead to redundancies. The work still exists beyond our walls, made monotonous, production-line and ill-paid, rather than as part of a varied and pleasant library job. The move to a 24-hour service may see us training up our contracted security staff (also outsourced for economy) who will happily do a lot of the work our shelvers and assistants do for none of the money, just for something to do in the small hours.

(your services are no longer required)

Outsourcing is a great way of bypassing all those expensive agreements the university has made with the unions over the years, and a brilliant way of pulling people out of the pay spine. It cheerfully disregards things like reward, happiness and work-ethic for the sake of a few quid. Councils have demonstrated that outsourcing is generally a horrible mess but this won't stop certain quarters of academia giving it a go. Mostly these will be the already well-established bad eggs, but just look at how campus security has been treated by even the nicer universities to get an idea as to what is possible. Cleaners and catering are the next obvious targets, and then they might look to the library, where outsourced staff are already keeping the place going during most of the day.

On top of all this is the concept I will now call digital slippage: as more and more of our holdings go online, they become invisible. In the past we could point to the crammed stacks and say "build us a library extension", the creaking tangibility serving as a compelling argument in our favour. Now we walk the rope in a tug-of-war between electronic and physical: our stacks can be painted as anachronisms; our digital collections, whispily drifting across campus, might equally belong to I.T. In a world where collections can be infinitely large, our powers of weeding become irrelevant and the departments might as well take over the whole stock-managing malarkey for themselves. It might even make Open Access more straightforward for everyone!

The physical collection management will remain, though it is likely to become increasingly archival in nature as current content becomes more consistently virtual (catastrophes not withstanding). The study environment could, let's face it, belong to anyone, not least I.T. We might be able to manage it better than anyone else (members of the British Institute of Facilities Management included) but space management requires less heads than stock management (nobody needs to catalogue the comfy chairs).

Which tilts the bagatelle of librarianship to information skills. Information skills are genuinely important in academia, which is why they end up being taught by librarians in brief and ill-attended induction sessions. There is more to it than teaching students how to use EBSCO: even if interfaces did become "easy" they would still inevitably bring up crap (Google is the epitome of "easy") and evaluation is just as important as Boolean logic.

(if you think The Sun's bad, you should see Page 3 of Google)

Variety is the spice of life, and academic librarianship is currently a very well spiced profession (not all of it, but some). I would like it to stay that way (it was one of the things that drew me to it in the first place): I want to be able to juggle teaching, stock-management, space-management, archiving, I.T, and all the other stuff we do: it makes for an interesting and pleasant job, and interesting and pleasant jobs make for happy and productive workers. I am worried that this interesting and pleasant job is on the verge of fragmentation: the teaching going one way, the stock management another, etc. Which bits retain the "librarian" moniker and is there any way of holding them together? Because if we don't, we run the risk of dropping down the spine: not only will our work be less varied (and hence more tedious) but it will also, as a consequence, be deskilled and therefore worth less money. As such we need to ensure that all aspects of our work are clearly and incontrovertibly associated with librarianship: all of them. Or else we must cut our losses and hitch our roles to another profession: teaching, archiving, facilities management. Either we hold together, reinforcing the core idea of the library as a centre of study support and the librarian as the agent of that support, or we let it disintegrate and throw our lot in with some other part of HE. I think the former option is still available.

The library building is still there, with both the books and the study spaces. The need for information literacy is both real and compelling. The array of products and licences, the horrors of copyright, the fog of open access, the mysteries of repositories and research data... they constitute a mess of support materials to which we can readily claim some mastery. It's easy to lose sight, from the inside, of the externally apparent mysteries of stock procurement and management (particularly digital stock). Librarians can cast and read those runes in a way that other academic staff cannot. We know what we're doing in that regard. And if we're worried that our magical capabilities might be outsourced, then we should also get our mitts on juicy research data and various repositable gubbins that might be better kept inhouse than out. We need to pull together all teh stuff and make sure everyone knows it's ours. In that regard, it is vitally important to ensure that our work is seen and valued. This is seldom easy for us: running a COUNTER report can only tell so much, and there are no truly effective ways to measure the impact of a LibGuide. So we have to talk about it. We have to show off at every convenient opportunity. We have to stick together and we have to advocate.

Which is where CILIP/ILPUK comes in. Or should come in. Unionisation also has a role (especially in terms of the undermining aspects) but the professional body is key to reinforcing the values of librarianship and of the work we do; of giving the lead and offering a sense of direction. Academia is in a very odd place at the moment, with no real sense of direction, and we could conceivably be in the middle of it, forging something wonderful. But it needs a bit of coordination and the odd gala luncheon to provide the necessary momentum to carry us forward. It needs us all mucking in and looking out for each other, and it needs a little flamboyance from our body. We should be getting out there, flapping our beautiful wings and boasting about how fantastic and essential we are, but instead we are wailing and gnashing our teeth. With a little braggadocio you can convince an emperor to parade naked, so convincing him that librarians are important (which they actually are) ought to be a doddle. If self-belief requires a name change, then (as daft as it is, and it is very very daft) let's do it so we can get stuck in to what matters.