Working Lives of the Saints

Thanks to The Wikiman I am aware of a thing : another internet version of one of them foldy things we used to make at school. Like a moth to the energy-saving lightbulb, I am compelled to complete...

Location: Yorkshire.
Current gig: Academic Liaison Assistant (an assistant librarian).
Current mobile device: an LG mobile telephone (second generation) with a qwerty keyboard.
Current computer: a Lenovo laptop (Intel, 6GB RAM, Windows 8), plus peripheral keyboard, mouse and monitor.
One word that best describes how you work: Fitfully.

What apps/software/tools can't you live without?

The Opera web-browser. Also on my quicklaunch toolbar at home are Oolite, Spotify, Corel Photo-Paint, XChat, Eudora, SeaMonkey, Notepad++ and Foobar, some of which show my age and my willingness to embrace change, though not all are essential to my existence. Before I made the error of buying a 64-bit computer, I also had a 16-bit copy of the OED to hand too. Windows is another bit of software I've come to rely upon a great deal (running Classic Shell these days, necessarily), and I spend a considerable amount of time in Microsoft Office.

What's your workspace like?

I am rather messy. Papers everywhere. I'm currently at home, sprawled out on the settee, keyboard on my lap, mobile phone by my side, bottle of coke and tin of biscuits in near reach. On the coffee table are:

1x roll of gaffatape

1x Royal Opera House ticket (used)

3x bottles of nail varnish

1x steel ruler

½x adhesive fabric for putting inside evil shoes

1x pair of scissors

1x pen

2x AA batteries (spent)

1x ring

1x hair grip

1x ear-phones

1x sunglasses

1x badge from Library Camp

1x nail file

2x coasters (pads in my vocab)

1x mug of water

1x wireless dongle

1x microSD to SD adaptor

1x monitor

1x laptop computer

What's your best time-saving trick?
Shortcuts. Make shortcuts to documents and use "Recent..." folders. Self-plagiarise instead of repeating work. And remember that few things have to be "perfect", they just need to be "pretty decent". It also helps if what you're doing's fun, of course.

What's your favorite to-do list manager?
I use the one in Outlook. It does the job adequately.

Besides your phone and computer, what gadget can't you live without?

Plumbed water and electricity are pretty essential to my lifestyle. Oven, fridge-freezer, washing machine, shower... The telephone is less essential (very presumptive of you, that), and I use it more as a clock / portable Twitter device than as a telephone. Aside from my computer, I'd say the lamp that's illuminating me is currently the most essential bit of tech in this room.

What everyday thing are you better at than anyone else?

Being half-decent at things. I think I'm a bit of an all-rounder, probably specializing in computery stuff. My general knowledge used to be pretty good too, but less so now. 

What are you currently reading?

Salway - Roman Britain; Cooper - Appassionata; Nabakov - King, Queen, Knave; Grand - Babs the Impossible. I'm not generally a big reader, especially of fiction. Mostly I read history books. 

What do you listen to while you work?

If I'm really hard at work, music can be a distraction. Otherwise, music is good. Verdi tends to be my default option at work, or maybe some Mahler or Shostakovich. I am currently sitting in silence but only cos I forgot to put Spotify on earlier. Instead I shall now fire up Foobar and open the playlist that is just the entire musical contents of my hard-drive at random. First up is a MIDI version of Creep by Radiohead [fastforwards] the right channel of a noise piece I made, entitled "Lynch" because it sounded like the sort of sound you might hear in the background of a David Lynch film [fastforwards] The Chromatics - Cosmic Radio Show [fastforwards quickly] Gainsbourg & Bardot - Comic Strip... As you can see, playing my hard-drive is a little too fraught with trouble for working porpoises. 

Are you more of an introvert or an extrovert?

Introvert, mainly. Except when the mood takes me. I'm an only-child. At school I could be quite zany, with all the horror that implies, but I lost some of that after I left university and failed to sell records for a living. Once I get to know people I start to come out of my shell. Alcohol helps this process slightly. I'm trying to come up with a better method.

# A MIDI version of one of my own compositions [fastforwards] Michael Hurley - Hoodoo Bash #

What's your sleep routine like?

I like my sleep. At one point, in the days before a proper job, I got a bit too much sleep and started getting sleep paralysis of an afternoon's lie-in. That's how much I like sleep. I try to avoid getting out of bed until the Sun has had chance to warm up the world. My natural sort of pattern tends to be to sleep from about 3am to about 1pm, but working life has intervened. I currently get up at about 7am and go to bed at about 10:30pm, except at weekends when I try to approach the preferred behaviour. Sleep is important to me. I enjoy it a lot. Dreams can be brilliant entertainment.

# Pink Floyd - If #

Fill in the blank: I'd love to see ______ answer these same questions.
You. But only if you want to.

# Heddy Lester  - De Mallemolen (Eurovision '77 version) #

What's the best advice you've ever received?

Oh, the usual "life is for living" stuff, I guess: get stuck in and enjoy it. Can't point at anyone specifically. I expect the best advice I was ever given was something I failed to act upon. The advice to go to library school would have to be pretty high in the list (thanks to Karl (my ex-boss) and Anna (former work-colleague / former History teacher) for that).

# Danny Elfman - Theme From Black Beauty #

Is there anything else you'd like to add?

I've not really talked about "How I Work", which was the point of the exercise. I should like to add that.

# Off-air recording of Five Live Drive (2008): Jane Garvey interviewing a little boy about a hamster (radio palladium) #

Leonardo Da Vinci had a bit of a reputation for starting great works, getting bored and moving onto something else before completion to his or his sponsor's satisfaction. I aspire to such greatness: my hard-drive is a graveyard of abandoned projects.

# Unlistenably crusty recording of Pulp - The Boss [fastforward] Marais and Miranda - What is an Animal? (What is a Plant?) #

When being paid, however, I operate to different rules. I tend to add things to a To Do List (a recent development to save me juggling calendars), prioritising the more urgent demands and interspersing with contrasting activities if available so as to thicken the plot. It's worked so far.

# Carlos Paião - Playback (from Eurovision '81) #


Some of it... a lot of it is intuitive. I don't sit and analyse my workload. There is no complicated mathematics (if task x takes two weeks and task y takes three days etc). The sense of a deadline and the safetynet of flexitime can help, but I've moved on from the last-minute Saint Monday mentality of my undergraduate days.

# Nico - Ari's Song #

Still, I don't usually get properly stuck in to a project until I can begin to feel a modicum of urgency (like starting an essay with a couple of weeks rather than a couple of months)... I prod at it and poke at it with a little too much leisure, making too much of a fuss; developing too many vested interests in bits I might later have to dismantle. As such I prefer to get heavily stuck into a project, work through it quickly, and get it done.

# Spirogyra - The Furthest Point #

Unless it's something that really really fascinates me, in which case I will lovingly explore layer after layer of it (as was the case with a recent LibGuides project). It's this type of project that comes too close to playtime and runs a risk of being abandoned before satisfactory completion when something else shiny catches my eye. Spirogyra are singing...

"We, who started off so wide eyed / Never doubted success / But we were foolish to undertake such a mammoth task"

...which is a little defeatist if you ask me, but presents a cautionary tale. So far I've been chewing my morsels sufficiently, and at school my party-piece involved seven Highland Toffee bars and a single mouth. Back then I had the good sense not to step up to eight. People, know your limits!

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...