Four events have been brought to my attention recently – a trade fair, a 2-day workshop and 2 webinars. In a time of financial stringency, staff must justify requests to attend events out of staff development budgets or funds set aside for specific projects. So what coud you get out of each of these events?

Collect 2010 is organised by the Collections Trust, “for collection managers, registrars, archivists, librarians – in fact, for anyone who works with collections, both physical and digital”. This free event will be held at the Kingsway Hall Hotel in London on 28th June. See the Collect 2010 Web site for more details.

With this type of event, attendance is free but you’ll need to take time away from your job to be there and there are travel costs to factor in. You’ll be able to talk to a range of trade participants – in this case they include digital asset management companies and digitisation specialists – which is useful if, say, you are about to embark on a digitisation project or actively in the market for (or just thinking about) buying or upgrading a content management system. With this focus on face-to-face contact though, the only Web 2.0 aspect is if individuals attending on the day post tweets on Twitter or refer to the event afterwards via a blog, so the value is being there on the day.

IWMW 2010 is UKOLN’s annual Institutional Web Managers’ Workshop, which takes place this year at the University of Sheffield from the 12th to the 14th July 2010. The programme includes institutional case studies, presentations on national initiatives and emerging technologies and the chance to actively participate in a number of parallel sessions.

While cultural heritage sector staff aren’t likely to be attending this (you need to pay for your delegate place), the event Web site is a useful resource in itself, demonstrating how social media can be used to build a community of both delegates and non-attenders, before, during and after an event. For example, Ideascale was used to identify and vote for topics for some of the sessions. IWMW 2010 also has its own blog, and a Twitter tag ‘#iwmw10′. To see how this all builds up to a resource that has value after the event, take a look at the IWMW 2009 site.

Finally, the webinars. UKSG’s one-day seminar “Introduction to Serials and E-Resources Today” will be run as a series of webinars, with the content split into three two-hour parts (Part 1 on 30th June, Part 2 on 7th July and Part 3 on 14th July) each taking place from 2pm-4pm BST. The webinars include both presentations and a chance to ask questions and discuss relevant topics and are targetted at “staff new to working with e-resources and serials, whether from a publisher, an intermediary or a library, [while] this seminar may also be of interest to those looking to consolidate and update their serials and e-resources knowledge”.

The second webinar is on RDA, with ALA Digital Reference Publisher Troy Linker giving an overview of Resource Description and Access (RDA), how it is integrated into the RDA Toolkit, pricing, subscription options, and future plans for the continual improvement of the RDA Toolkit. The same content is delivered on 3 separate dates at different times of day, and if you can’t make one of these, they will be recorded and posted to www.rdatoolkit.org/training.

Thursday, June 17, 9:00am CDT (GMT -5) [Good choice for European and African participants] https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/205709491
Thursday, June 17, 8:00pm CDT (GMT -5) [Good choice for Australian and Asian participants] https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/458233635
Friday, June 18, 3:00pm CDT (GMT -5) https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/774310874

The webinar format means you don’t have to be away from the office for a full day and no extra travel is involved. But it may not be cost free – the RDA webinar is free but UKSG is charging for its webinar series. Another feature of webinars is that they can have an international audience and both the RDA and the UKSG webinars make this point in their event advertising, identifying local times for various parts of the world.

If you’ve been to an event which has integrated social media into the experience, or have “attended” a webinar, why not add a comment and tell us about it?

Just noticed this request on the lis-link email list.  The British Library is now running to a survey about the customer use of digital storage devices (e.g. memory sticks) in libraries. Here’s the request.

Dear Colleague, we are investigating the possibility of allowing downloading to memory sticks, and other digital storage devices for our customers in The British Library. As part of this project we are trying to find out what activities are currently taking place in libraries such as yours.

The survey consists of 9 questions and it should only take about 10 minutes to complete. I would be grateful if you would pass this survey link on to any contacts you think might have useful information.

If you have any questions about the survey or are interested in seeing the results of this survey please feel free to contact me at neil.infield@bl.uk. I will be happy to share the results if you are interested. The survey will be live until Monday 21 June 2010. http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/ZV7MXWK

Many thanks in anticipation,  Neil Infield, Manager, Business & IP Centre, The British Library, St Pancras, 96 Euston Road, London NW1 2DB

neil.infield@bl.uk     +44 (0)20 7412 7461

http://www.bl.uk/bipc; http://ninfield.wordpress.com; http://twitter.com/ninfield

Many collections have photographs of unidentified places and people and have thought that they had little chance of ever getting the information needed about specific images.   Now the Flickr Commons initiative offers a place to show these images from public photograph archives; people can then comment on the photographs, perhaps identifying locations and people, as well as adding their own photographs. So that seems a good idea, but how is it going?

http://www.flickr.com/commons/institutions/

Several UK institutions – the National Library of Wales, the National Galleries of Scotland, the National Archives UK, the Imperial War Museum and the National Maritime Museum – have uploaded images to the Commons.

So how are they doing? They are getting comments – but it seems not the useful ones they had hoped for.  One of the NMM images is titled ‘Cat on Steam Yacht ‘Morning‘ – although it’s had three responses, no-one has provided any further information. And that seems to be the case with the other images I looked at.

Are we expecting too much from these initiatives? Is it that the people who did have the knowledge are now dead? Recently I’ve been working my way through some unlabelled family photographs dating back to 1890 to 1930 and all the people in my family who would have known the details are no longer around. Would uploading these to Flickr achieve anything?

If your institution has uploaded images to Flickr Commons, please add a comment to let us know what you put up and what response you’ve had.

With RDA Online due to launch in June 2010, where do you go for the latest information? We’ve pulled together some useful links to help you.

If you want the fullest information on RDA content and its development, the official Web site is the Joint Steering Committee for Development of RDA. The November 2008 Constituency review draft text is still available but some of the PDFs are large files so bear this in mind if downloading or printing out.

Looking for discussion? Well, in addition to threads on other lists, there is also a dedicated email discussion list RDA-L@LISTSERV.LAC-BAC.GC.CA.

Want to know in general terms about the changes from AACR2 to RDA? You can find a couple of PDF document files on the JSC Web site, while Barbara Tillet, Chief of the Policy and Standards Division at the Library of Congress has done an overview “RDA Changes from AACR2 for texts” that is available as a Webcast (you’ll need Real Player for this) which is 75 minutes long – 50 minutes of presentation followed by Q&A. The Web page for the Webcast includes a link to a downloadable Powerpoint file of the talk – the second link under “Related Library Resources” at the bottom of the page.

The Library of Congress has also put up some documentation about the U.S. RDA Test. Of particular interest might be “MARC 21 encoding to accommodate RDA elements”.

The prices are decided by the publishers, ALA. Prices for the U.S. were announced in January 2010 and they’ve recently added another category for solo users. For other countries it’s ‘watch this space’ on the new RDA Toolkit website www.rdatoolkit.org.

The CILIP Cataloguing and Indexing Group has also put up some useful links on RDA in its Tools and References section.

Previous posts on this blog on RDA are Talking About RDA and The Brave New World of RDA.

There are more library blogs about these days but what do users think about them? Now bloggers are commenting on other people’s blogs. One example is The Metablog – a Blog about Blogs which was created by a University of British Columbia library and information science student as part of their coursework. According the author ‘more specifically, it is a blog about how public libraries in the UK, Ireland, Australia and New Zealand are using blogs’. The UK blogs reviewed to date are Edinburgh City’s Tales of One City, Paige Turner – Swansea Libraries semi-official blog and the Manchester Lit List. I suspect that this blog will not be continued past the end of the course, but it’s worth a look even with just the current content as there is food for thought here – how does your blog compare?

This fits well with this blog’s previous posts on library web sites: Dull Library Web Sites, a guest post by Margaret Adolphus and Why are Library Web Sites so Dull?.

About this guest post

In this guest blog post, Rhian Tritton writes about the ss Great Britain Trust’s use of Twitter as part of it’s Incredible Journey project. Rhian is Director of Museum & Educational Services for the Trust.

What’s happening? ss Great Britain Trust and Twitter

ss Great Britain Trust is an independent museum and visitor attraction, welcoming 150,000 visitors a year. As Director of Museum & Educational Services for the Trust  I’m responsible for the curatorial function, the education function and all interpretation on site. The Trust’s newest project is the Brunel Institute for conservation and learning which will contain a new visitor centre, state-of-the-art stores for the Trust’s archives and a publicly accessible library, all housed in a £35 million development next to the ship herself.

I’ve been at ss Great Britain for just under two years and am still, after over 20 years in the museum business, passionate about museum objects and the stories they can tell. Recently I have become increasingly interested in using Web 2.0 as an interpretation tool. This has been sparked partly by a personal interest in all new forms of technology; I tweet regularly about my cake-baking hobby. I also believe firmly that museums have to adapt constantly their ways of communicating with their audiences in order to stay fresh and current.

Web 2.0 – how to use it?

In the summer of 2009 I heard Brian Kelly’s presentation at the Association of Independent Museums conference, which confirmed my view that Web 2.0 was a hugely exciting area in which ss Great Britain Trust could develop. I started to investigate how other museums were using Web 2.0. I found plenty of examples but sometimes they felt like your dad dancing at the PTA disco – a toe-curlingly embarrassing attempt to be trendy. The most interesting examples came from Twitter, such as Historic Royal Palaces’ “I am Henry VIII” campaign, or the tweets from the whale on the ceiling of the Natural History Museum in New York (yes, really). These two examples both used Twitter as an interpretation tool, and the creative and impressionistic nature of the tweets
seemed to me to foster a sense of imaginative engagement in readers. This was very exciting, and chimed exactly with the aims of ss Great Britain’s interpretation aims;  on the site the objective is to educate and delight visitors. At this point I began to use Twitter myself; my hobby is baking and I tweeted regularly about my cakes.

There was still some work to do to convince the rest of the organisation that the Trust should embrace Web 2.0. Though no-one at first shared my fascination with its possibilities, the Trust prides itself on taking calculated risks and constantly refreshing its offer, and there were clearly potential benefits of using the web in a new way. It was decided to develop a Web 2.0 strategy first, to ensure a coherent approach, but before that could happen, in autumn 2009 a clear opportunity to use Twitter presented itself,  in the shape of The Incredible Journey oral history project.

Dipping a toe in the water of Web 2.0: ss Great Britain tweets

This HLF-funded project celebrates the fortieth anniversary in 1970 of ss Great Britain’s heroic salvage from the Falklands and subsequent return to the Bristol dock  in which she was built. Surviving members of the salvage team were interviewed, and some of the 150,000 Bristolians who lined the bank of the Avon to see the ship return also shared their memories via Memory Collection Boxes. As the oral history recordings started to come in I was stunned by how deeply the memories of the salvage still resonated with those involved; more than one was moved to tears during the recording. The nature of oral history recordings (which is a function of the disjointed way in which memory itself works) meant that the stops and starts and idiosyncratic cadences of individual speech were captured beautifully, resulting in some vivid phrasing. Suddenly the Trust’s first foray into Web 2.0 was clear: a Twitter campaign using fragments of the oral history interviews. I wanted the tweets to be deliberately fragmentary, a little like overhearing a really interesting bit of a conversation on a bus. This also fitted with the aim of The Incredible Journey project, to collect a host of often quite small memories which would build to create a mosaic of the collective experience of those who remembered the salvage.

ss Great Britain in Sparrow Cove, in position over the submerged pontoon which then floated up with the ship on top of it. The pontoon then carried the ship 8,000 miles across the Atlantic.(photo Malcolm Macleod)

Tweets could also drive visitors to the Incredible Journey pages on ss Great Britain’s website. The salvage operation started on 25 March 1970 with the attempt to raise ss Great Britain from the bottom of Sparrow Cove in the Falkland Islands, included her epic journey 8,000 miles across the Atlantic on the back of a pontoon, and finished on 19 July when she triumphantly returned to the Great Western Dock in Bristol where she now sits. Each day during this period a new “real time” update was to appear on the website, taken from the detailed and vivid diaries kept by the salvage team during the operation, and using photographs from the Trust’s archive. The philosophy behind this, that daily updates would help create a sense of excitement about ss Great Britain’s fortieth anniversary on 19 July, also married well with the immediacy of Twitter.

Over 100,000 people watched ss Great Britain towed up the Avon

With the help of the Web Marketing & Content Officer the campaign was launched, with the username 1970Salvage. The tweets have been deliberately impressionistic, using phrases from the oral history interviews and memories submitted via the Memory Collection Boxes. Examples include “Day 21 – With local help we had to clean the ship off …tons and tons of mussels” and “Day 5 – We couldn’t walk anywhere, it was extremely dangerous, all the decks were totally rotten”. So far over 200 people are following the tweets, and the campaign has garnered the Trust good local publicity. Other benefits have been development for the staff immediately involved, and increased awareness of Web 2.0 amongst other staff and trustees. The next task is to develop a Web 2.0 strategy that builds on the Twitter experience and sets out a methodology for using Web 2.0 as a tool for interpretation as well as marketing and listings information. And though I won’t be tweeting about the Web 2.0 strategy (that would be like James Joyce’s Ulysses meets Blade Runner), expect to see more light-touch use of Twitter by the Trust in the future.

I see that UK museums are among the winners of  the Best of the Web awards at the Museums at the Web 2010 event – I spotted this announcement in a message on the Museums Computer Group email list.

So congratulations to:

• Royal Observatory, Greenwich for Solar Stormwatch

• Culture 24

• Victoria & Albert Museum Search the Collections

and

• Dulwich Picture Gallery Dulwich OnView

About this guest post

In this guest blog post, Sue Batley considers the impact of Web 2.0 on library and information management teaching. Sue is the leader of the MA Information Management course at London Metropolitan University.

What educators do is driven by the needs of practitioners and employers, so Sue would appreciate your thoughts on the challenge of using Web 2.0 within the library and information environment; she can be contacted at: s.batley@londonmet.ac.uk

Web 2.0: transforming libraries and the curriculum

I’m probably preaching to the converted here, but everyone seems to acknowledge that Web 2.0 has the potential, at least, to break down the boundaries between libraries and their users. Traditional library services are increasingly being accessed by users who are operating from outside the library walls and we are seeking to introduce new, collaborative ways of engaging with people for whom the library is only one of many sources of information. This can be perceived as either an opportunity or a threat, it is certainly a challenge.

Technology has long been a driver of change in our profession. It perhaps started with the fountain pen (so much easier to write catalogue entries), and continued through the automation of technical processes, the introduction of online information services, and development of web-based services and e-collections. None of these innovations, however, substantially changed professional practices. We were doing basically the same things, just more efficiently. Web 2.0 is different. It could fundamentally change the role of the library and information professional.

At London Metropolitan University we have, in the last few months, examined our curriculum and have started to prepare ourselves for the future. What I want to do here is to explain the background to recent developments in our CILIP accredited MA and then go on to describe a new module which, we feel, addresses the particular challenges of using Web 2.0 to enhance library and information service delivery. We would very much like to know your thoughts on this as what we do is, of course, driven by the needs of practitioners and employers.

As educators and as trainers of information and knowledge professionals we obviously have to continually review our syllabuses in response to professional needs and technological innovation. We knew that our syllabuses had kept pace with change, we were confident that we offered a good, up-to-date professional education, but we were also aware that the title of our course hinted at a rather outdated model of library and information provision. Historically in our courses there was an emphasis on sectors and specialist information sources. We had modules on Academic Libraries, Special Libraries, Business Information, Health Information, and so on. This sectoral approach was reflected in the course title: Information Services Management. We no longer operate in this way. This is not to say that specialism isn’t desirable or necessary, but that we as educators are well placed to develop transferable skills which our students’ own inclinations and experience can contextualise in specialist areas. So we’ve developed modules in Information Architecture, Managing Digital Resources, Applied Information Research, etc. The culmination (for now) of these changes is a new course title: MA Information Management. It looks like a small change, and there’s nothing surprising or innovative about the name, but it suggests a broader, less compartmentalised perspective.

So where does Web 2.0 come into this? The answer is actually ‘everywhere’. I can’t find any module, in either the MA Information Management or in our other CILIP accredited programme, the MSc Information and Knowledge Management, that doesn’t either address Web 2.0 applications directly, or at least assumes their use in communicating with and engaging with professional and user communities.

Since the technologies emerged writers have been demonstrating how they can be incorporated into professional practice. As academics we use Web 2.0 applications in our personal and professional lives. Our students are active in the blogosphere, in collaborative tagging and bookmarking, and in social networking and they are increasingly incorporating Web 2.0 technologies in their working lives too. Part of their professional education and training has to address how they can use Web 2.0 to best effect.

This brings me to a new module developed by my colleague Susie Andretta, which I think best demonstrates our commitment to embracing the opportunities presented by Web 2.0. Probably the main challenge lies in Web 2.0 facilitating a new kind of relationship where there is the possibility for an equal dialogue between librarians and their users. One manifestation of this is that users are demanding a new kind of language in their dealings with information systems and services, one that does not include the jargon which, and this is common in most professional groups, seems to define our professional identity. As Susie Andretta has argued this is not a threat to librarians, but an opportunity to speak the language of the users and make libraries more responsive and user-driven. Susie’s paper at the IFLA 2009 conference in Milan focused on transliteracy and urged delegates to ‘Take a walk on the wild side’.

Susie’s research found that transliteracy, the ability to communicate and interact effectively via multiple channels across a range of platforms, has already permeated the library and information world. Maybe not all of us realise it yet but we are transliterate, we’ve already risen to the challenge of Web 2.0. What we haven’t done so far in our professional courses is to embed transliteracy skills in the curriculum.

Susie’s research has resulted in the development of a new module: Transliteracy and Web 2.0. The aim of the module is to examine approaches to Web 2.0 technologies within the context of information provision and education and to evaluate the impact on the transliteracy attitudes and
practices of their users. Students taking the module will be able to:
•    define the meaning of transliteracy based on the information context in which it is situated
•    interact with a range of Web 2.0 technologies within diverse contexts
•    create a Web 2.0 technology resource targeting a particular group of users/learners
•    evaluate the impact of this provision in terms of fostering the users’ transliteracy attitudes and practices

The assumption is, and it’s surely a correct one, that if we’re going to make the most of the opportunities offered by Web 2.0 then we have to embrace it wholeheartedly and utilise it to communicate with our users in diverse ways and on equal terms. In doing so we benefit ourselves as a professional group and we benefit our users, by enhancing their information skills and their engagement with Web 2.0 applications. It is all about collaboration after all.

Reference:
Andretta, S. (2009) Transliteracy; Take a walk on the wild side. In World Library and Information Congress: 75th IFLA General Conference and Council. 23-27 August 2009, Milan, Italy.

About This Guest Post

In his role as chair, Martin Bazley introduces us to the Digital Learning Network (DLNet). The group was formerly known as the E-Learning Group for Museums, Libraries and Archives and has much to offer cultural heritage professionals looking to expand their knowledge in technical areas and make contact with peers with similar interests.

Martin can be contacted on using the DLNet email (info@digitallearningnetwork.net).

Find people, build networks, share ideas

The ELG has become the Digital Learning Network – DLNet for short.

DLNet has been created by the group formerly known as the E-Learning Group for Museums, Libraries and Archives. The idea is to go back to basics and get people talking about technology and learning. There are so many people whose job involves some kind of educational/digital role, but who don’t have a network and really depend on colleagues and informal relationships to share information about new developments.

It’s all about connecting people and sharing ideas

The Digital Learning Network arranges events, meetups (called ‘ThinkDrinks’) and tries to encourage people to come together – whether it’s 3 people in a pub or 100 people at a conference.

Have a look at a short video from the first London ThinkDrink:

So we are changing our name from the E-Learning Group to the Digital Learning Network – DLNet for short – and putting more effort into getting people talking and sharing ideas, as well as doing all the stuff we used to do.

Just created, and growing fast

In the first few weeks more than 65 people have registered, and 15 local groups created.

Have a look at how the site works, in this short introductory video:

Find people, build networks, share ideas

• Do you want to find people working in digital learning in your local area?
• Do you want to build networks?
• Do you want to exchange ideas, experiences, and best practice?

We can help. We’re getting conversations going about using digital technology to support learning:

• online – through the website or Twitter
• face to face – all over the country, in networked groups

Here’s what you can do:

• get a few people together for a ThinkDrink – at the pub, out for tea, at the zoo – wherever you like
• let us know what you talked about – Tweet it, post pictures on Flickr, write a blog post, or post a short video on YouTube
• form your own Digital Learning Network group

And don’t worry, we are still:

• exploring how technology can help deliver inspiring and creative learning in museums, libraries, archives and the heritage sector
• running our highly popular events such as conferences and seminars
• hosting the email list, which is now DLNet@jiscmail.ac.uk (instead of elearning@jiscmail.ac.uk)

You can be a member of DLNet Online for free.

Or become a full member of DLNet – and receive discounts on bookable events and other benefits. Costs £12 individual, or £40 corporate (up to 3 member discounts per event)

If you’re already a paid-up member of the ELG, you are now automatically a full member of DLNet.

Have a look around the Digital Learning Network website and let us know what you think: http://www.digitallearningnetwork.net

The recent CILIP Executive Briefing Days on RDA (at which I was one of the speakers) included one presentation by video from a speaker based in the US.

This could have been done in a variety of ways. It could have been a ‘talking head’ with the person simply speaking to camera; initially that may feel more interesting but there is an obvious disadvantage of no slides to refer back to after the event (unless these were supplied either in the delegate pack or made available after the event). Another way is for the speaker to be filmed giving the presentation so you see them and the slides. Thirdly, the speaker could simply do a voice-over narration while we watched the slides. We got a combination with a five-minute introduction of the speaker talking to camera followed by voice narration while viewing the slides. This meant that we got a feel for the person and an image of them we could hold in our heads during the slide section. For me, that worked well.

Why do this? Cost is an obvious factor – paying the travel expenses from the US for a fifteen-minute slot is not realistic, especially if this has to be re-couped via the delegate fee. It can also help provide a balanced programme, especially if it is not possible to get a specific viewpoint from UK-based presenters or the video presenter is particularly known and well-regarded.

Do delegates feel cheated by including video presentations? I think that depends on various factors. For example, how many video presentations are there within the programme? In this case there was just the one video presentation alongside four longer face-to-face presentations, which seemed to work well. In the context of a whole day event, I think that two short video presentations would have been acceptable (e.g. one in the morning and one in the afternoon) but for a shorter half-day event better to have just the one. And of course, there can be no face-to-face interaction: delegates cannot ask questions of the speaker or speak to them during the breaks and the speaker cannot join in panel discussion sessions.

Could one have an entire event by video presentation (or video-conferencing)? Yes, but this turns it into a different type of event and delegates would have different expectations. The Collections Trust Museum Development Officers Support Day in Nov. 2009 filmed the presentations on the day and then made these available on YouTube after the event. Have a look at these and you’ll get a feel for how wathcing an entire event via video might feel. So, if you have experienced individual video presentations or virtual events using video presentations or video-conferencing, please add your comments.

About This Guest Post

Libby Taylor is the English Faculty Librarian at the University of Cambridge and gave a great presentation at our last Web 2.0 workshop in Cambridge.

Libby initially trained as a teacher before moving into librarianship and as a result tends to focus on training, communication in its broadest sense, and the delivery of effective and personalized services. She is passionate about addressing the needs of users and tailoring the service she works for appropriately. Her post is about the English Faculty’s use of Facebook and the dilemmas it posed.

To ‘fb’….or not to ‘fb’

Running a subject-specific library affords the opportunity to tailor services and resources towards a very specific clientele. The 600+ undergraduates and 200+ postgraduates, plus Faculty, who regularly use the English Library at Cambridge tend to have similar research and working habits. Whilst always sociable, the mode of study is solitary for the most part, and involves a mix of online and print, where print is the staple diet and online is useful largely for reference-style study.

A very recent survey poll (March 2010) of undergrads and grads (approximate 40% response rate) in terms of Web 2.0 tools shows widespread knowledge of the most popular tools. However, in terms of active use, there are relatively few tools regularly being used with Facebook and YouTube most commonly used. It was disappointing to see that less than 5% of those responding to the survey used RSS feeds (as our library news has an RSS feed it’s clear we need to educate users more about using it rather than just assuming that they will).

Effective communication relies on good interaction between people, where information is shared, and where collaboration leads to re-packaging and further dissemination. The key issue for information providers is to effectively communicate with our users. Web 2.0 tools are clearly focused on interaction, sharing and collaboration which should make them ideal for effective communication. However it is crucial to know your users and work within their context. At the English Faculty we can make use of other means of communication which in many ways better suit the people there (at least for the moment). Non-text based communication in the form of flowers, or pictures/photographs on the plasma screen situated above the issue desk often result in effective communication. They are useful precisely because the users are physically there in the Library with resulting face-to-face contact far more likely than in a science subject, for example. Effectiveness may also depend on making the right choice for disseminating/sharing any particular type of information and choosing whether we need to engage users interactively or not; choosing perhaps between using the VLE, face-to-face, or a blog or Facebook.

Using Facebook at the Faculty Library stemmed from a summer of playing with Web 2.0 tools in 2008. However we were also considering changes in the website and also how to set up and make use of the Cambridge VLE facility, CamTools. To add to this, we had also spent some time in the previous few months considering how to market and promote the library’s resources and services better.

By the end of the summer there were simply too many ideas, too many formats, and no real focus on what we were using the any of the tools at our disposal for and what purpose they would fulfill that would make sufficient difference to warrant the time invested in them. It took very little effort to set up accounts e.g. to Facebook, for a WordPress blog, for Delicious, for iGoogle, for a Wiki, for Pageflakes etc. But what were we going to use them for and did we have the time to make them useful as well as covering all the other services that we felt we needed to do?

Taking stock was crucial and we did this by firstly making decision about which formats/tools we were going to use. Secondly we wrote an information delivery procedure document where we described all formats to be used to effectively communicate with our users, the purpose of each, what style of delivery suited the format, who would be in charge of disseminating information via that format and finally space for evaluation.

Drawing up the document helped us to consolidate what we were doing and to consider what we could use most effectively. With respect to Web 2.0 tools we now use a WordPress blog for the Library News on the Library website: http://lib.english.cam.ac.uk. It’s tied down and is just for staff to add news i.e. it is not intended to be interactive. We also have a fairly active Facebook library page.

The style of delivery of information on the Facebook page is lighter, it includes ‘fun’ information, and has become a place that we store our photographs. We keep basic information about the library there. Statistics seem to indicate that we have a fair number of visits to the page, but realistically we know that many library users will not be ‘fans’ of the page or ignore many of the wall posts. Many ‘fans’ have nothing to do with studying English at Cambridge. Using our procedure document as a basis we can make decisions about what we include on Facebook. However, Facebook is just one example from the list of different formats that we use to communicate with our users.

Lessons we learnt from trialing Web 2.0 tools:

1. Making sure that we make efficient use of the time available.
2. Working with staff skills and interests will usually result in focusing on certain methods more than others .
3. Tools change, users’ study habits change and with day-to-day priorities changing it is important to re-visit the tools and formats for effective communication.

Finally, for us, the most important factor underlying all decisions about what to use, whether it be Facebook, or an email, is the need to understand our users and know how they will best absorb the relevant information that they need. Personal interactions are an excellent method for communicating and Facebook provides a means for replicating the personal approach in an online environment. However, change is all around us and we need to be flexible enough to regularly re-consider all the options available to us.

The Mashed Library series was mentioned to delegates on the UKOLN/MLA Web 2.0 Workshops.

The event is aimed at those who work in libraries and are interested in how they can use technology to deliver their services. The offical byline is “bringing together interested people and doing interesting stuff with libraries and technology“. Although the event is looking at ‘mashing up’ services and using data sets you don’t have to be a ‘techie’ to attend and those who aren’t developers but have fair technical skills will still enjoy the event. The series is organised by people in the Higher Education sector but it has a lot to offer those in the cultural heritage sector too.

The first Mashed Library event (Mashed Libraries UK 2008) was held on 27th November 2008 at Birkbeck, University of London. Since then there have been events at the University of Huddersfield (Mash Oop North, 7 July 2009) and Birmingham City University (Middlemash, 30 November 2009).

This year the event is taking place in Liverpool on Friday 14th May and registration has just opened. Places are limited so sign up as soon as possible.

For more information on the series of events keep and eye on the wiki or the ning group.

I recently came across this feature at Nottinghamshire Public Libraries Web site on their NeLib2 ‘your online library’ page. At the bottom of the left hand side bar there’s a link to the Visual Library to ‘search your Library’s books and materials using pictures’. That sounded interesting so I had a look.

The first thing to note is that it is only for the junior stock (Kid’s Library) and not for adult stock. That said, the immediate impression is good. The layout is simple and uncluttered and it looks interesting. The first search page has image icons for ten categories: animals, fun stuff, handicrafts, holidays, kid’s concerns, science, spooky things, sports, stories and United States. Here’s a slightly edited view of the first set of icons.

Clicking on either the image or the link text below any one of these takes you to another page of images – Autumn is one of the images under Science. Clicking this image takes you to a results page with a nice simple presentation of the details (title, author, date and shelf mark) alongside an image of the book jacket. Picture books get a PIC indicator, other items are marked J for junior stock.  But the results page can be long – under Stories I found Fairy Tales which has 442 titles – and appear to be in random order. I think the image part of the search works well but do wonder whether a child would look at more than the first page of results?

I also wondered how this might work for adult stock.  Who would it help? Maybe adults with lower literacy levels or without English as a first language? And for other users the visual route does provide a different impression to the usual text based pages – if I came across it in my public library catalogue I’d probably have a browse around. There would certainly need to be some work on first chunking up the stock with suitable headings and then finding sufficient appropriate images. It might not work for all parts of the stock. The number of items in the final display is an issue (even if I – as a professional – am making a search for something specific, my heart does sink when faced with more than a couple of pages of results) – and I wondered if further intermediate levels of images might be needed.

When I asked how it had been developed, Nottinghamshire said that ‘Kid’s Library’ was a standard package supplied by their library management system SirsiDynix.  They have had little feedback and feel that most of their customers are not fully aware of it and while they would like to develop it for other types of stock and customers, they have not had the time to do so.

Is anyone else with a SirsiDynix system using this package? Please share your experiences – it would be good to get some other views on this.

About This Guest Post

In this guest blog post Deborah Davis explains how Essex Libraries have been offering Homework help to their patrons using Answers Direct.

Deborah works at Essex County Council in the Adults, Health & Community Wellbeing (for Libraries) department. She is the Answers Direct Supervisor. Answers Direct is the central enquiry service for Essex Libraries. It takes enquiries directly from the public and/or from the staff of the 72 libraries in Essex.

Homework Help through Answers Direct

There have been numerous media discussions recently about the state (and fate) of libraries. The expectation is for library authorities to create a 21st century library experience with extremely limited resources.

Here in Essex we have been working for a number of years on creating the best virtual experience for our customers by offering a range of digital resources. The premise is that we should make as much of the library service available as many hours as possible. You can reserve or renew your books, download eBooks or eAudio books to your PC or other portable device, access subscription databases and chat online with a librarian 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

In order to offer an enquiry service that is available 24 hours a day Answers Direct, the central enquiry service for Essex Libraries, participates in a wonderful collaborative service. The Enquire UK initiative is made possible by the 80 authorities in England and Scotland that participate by subscription, librarians from the United States OCLC’s 24/7 network, Questionpoint software and service management supplied by OCLC, and support from MLA. Local authorities staff the service on a rota basis, but according to a schedule provided by each authority.

For us the greatest advantage to our participation in Enquire is the ability to use the Questionpoint software to offer a local service: Homework Help. School children can instigate an online chat with our staff from our website. We are able to help them with their homework (not do their homework for them) by engaging them in an online conversation to clarify their enquiry and ‘push’ web pages that open up on their browser. Once we conclude the chat children receive emails of their transcripts and hyper-links to the web pages we pushed during our conversation.

Our service aims to provide an alternative channel for school children to get help with their homework enquiries. It adds to the variety of ways in which we are able to offer the traditional ethos of public library information services in ways that reflect the needs of today’s generation. In particular we hope that this service, utilising ‘chat’ technology, will attract youngsters who might not feel comfortable using another communication method. We offer advice and guidance about sources of information that they might use as well as making suggestions about developing good searching and study skills. Sections of the website reassure parents and teachers that we will not ‘do’ their homework and they will only be in conversation with a member of our staff.

This month’s regular summary of posts on other UKOLN blogs which may be of interest to the cultural heritage community is given below.

ASBOs, Linked Data and Open Data

What should the priority be: provision of open data or provision of Linked Data?
Published 31 March 2010

Rewired State: Rewired Culture Event

A report on the Rewired State event which focusses on development work for the cultural heritage sector.
Published 30 March 2010

#AskTheChancellors and Twitter

Is Twitter beginning to form a part of engaging with the democratic process?
Published 30 March 2010

Fragmenting The Discussion?

If you provide your content in other environments should this be regarded as a danger, as the discussions could be fragmented, or an opportunity, as it widens the debate?
Published 29 March 2010

Microformats and RDFa: Adding Richer Structure To Your HTML Pages

This posts reviews experiences in using microformats and asks whether it is time to start embedded RDFa in HTML pages.
Published 25 March 2010

Issues In Crowd-sourced Twitter Captioning of Videos

This posts describes a service which allows Twitter feeds to be used to caption video streams.
Published 23 March 2010

What Price a Cup of Coffee?

What is the true value of allowing your staff to take regular tea/coffee breaks?
Published 24 March 2010

Criteria for Successful and Unsuccessful Web Standards

What makes a successful Web standard? That’s not an easy question to answer.
Published 18 March 2010

The Project Blog When The Project Is Over

How should you manage a blog when the funding for it has finished?
Published 15 March 2010

Look! We’re on Google Street View!

What is Google Street view and what are the privacy issues?
Published 12 March 2010

The ‘Quiet Zone’ At Conferences

A description of an approach to providing a ‘quiet area’ at an event for people who do not want to be disturbed by Twitterers or do not wish to be photographed.
Published 10 March 2010

The Lowering Costs of Teleconferencing

This post looks at teleconferencing and how you can get the most out of it.
Published 10 March 2010

Where Exactly are You?

A look at location data and the related issues.
Published 2 March 2010

At the recent CILIP Executive Briefing Day on RDA held on 23 March (and repeated on 30 March 2010 due to heavy demand for places at this event),  I  spoke on the development of the new cataloguing code, Resource Description and Access (RDA): my slides are now available on Slideshare (and embedded below). The day focused on the need for RDA, the strategic aspects of moving to RDA and the challenges of implementation; the audience included delegates from both academic and public sector libraries.

The last in the series of thirteen MLA/UKOLN workshops on Web 2.0 and the social Web took place last week.

The UKOLN/MLA Web 2.0 Workshops

The workshops were funded by the MLA to enable museums, libraries and archives staff to get up to speed on the concepts behind Web 2.0, the challenges it presents and the opportunities it offers to cultural heritage organisations, including small organisations with limited budgets and technical expertise.

Thirteen

Thirteen workshops took place in venues all over England. An online map of the location of the workshop venues is available.

Links for the main page for each workshop are given below:

1. Preston Workshop (the Gujarat Centre) – 13th November 2009
2. Devizes Workshop (Wiltshire Heritage Museum) – 16th November 2009
3. London Workshop (Clore Learning Centre, Museum of London) – 3rd December 2009
4. Leeds Workshop (Leeds Discovery Centre) – 9th December 2009
5. Leicester Workshop (School of Museum Studies, University of Leicester) – 18th December 2009
6. Dulwich Workshop (Dulwich Picture Gallery) – Friday 29th January 2010
7. Newcastle Workshop (Discovery Museum) – Monday 8th February 2010
8. Chelmsford Workshop (Goldlay Gardens) – Wednesday 17th February 2010
9. Birmingham Workshop (Central Library) – Monday 22nd February 2010
10. Sheffield Workshop (Millennium Gallery) – Monday 1st March 2010
11. Bath Workshop (Kingston Room) – Monday 8th March 2010
12. Nottingham Workshop (E-Learning Centre) – Wednesday 17th March 2010
13. Cambridge Workshop (Central Library) – Monday 22nd March 2010

Thank you to all our host venues!

Two hundred and forty-two

242 delegates attended the workshops. The workshop programme included: presentations introducing and discussing Web 2.0/social Web, case studies from local practitioners, (if the venue allowed) a chance for delegates to try the tools out for themselves on laptops and PCs, an opportunity to discuss the issues and time for delegates to chat to their peers over a free lunch.

One hundred and twenty-seven

While the workshops were running we managed to take quite a few photos (127 in total) of the venue and delegates at work. These photos are now available on Flickr.

Why not have a look at the slideshow or the selection used in an Animoto slide video (now on YouTube).

Nineteen

We were lucky enough to have 19 case studies given by local practitioners during the workshop series. Most of their presentations are online and out there for you to use – have a look on the corresponding workshop page.

1. Preston – Web 2.0 at Huddersfield: Dave Pattern, University of Huddersfield Library
2. Devizes – Wiltshire Heritage Museum Case Study: Google Books, David Dawson, Wiltshire Heritage Museum
3. London – Museum of London Social Software, Bilkis Mosoddik, Museum of London
4. Leeds – Artspace and Artspace Online – Attempting to support users in the practical space with the virtual space, Dominique Attwood, ELearning Leeds Museums and Galleries
5. Leeds – Follow Alex – Facebook and engaging with young people about culture, Dominic Burton, Marketing Officer, Libraries, Arts and Heritage, Leeds City Council
6. Leicester – Using Social Networking on the Museum Studies distance learning course, Ross Parry, University of Leicester
7. Dulwich – Dulwich OnView Case Study: Ingrid Beazley, Steve Slack, Angie Macdonald, Yang-May Ooi, Dulwich OnView
8. Newcastle – Making Heritage More Engaging, Janet E Davis, Museum Consultant
9. Newcastle – Democracy, Jim Richardson, Sumo
10. Newcastle – Geek inside and BALTIC, David Coxon and Craig Astley, BALTIC
11. Chelmsford – The Essex experience, Janice Waugh, Essex Libraries
12. Birmingham – Birmingham Libraries 2.0, Jen Bakewell and Matthew Jelfs, Birmingham City Library
13. Sheffield – Web 2.0 at Sheffield Library, Karen Wallace Sheffield Library
14. Bath – Communicating with the Facebook generation, Nicola McNee, Librarian, Kingswood School
15. Bath – Me and my blogs, Ann Chapman, UKOLN
16. Bath – Twitter at Reading, Peter Barnes, Corporate Information Systems Group, University of Reading
17. Nottingham – Confessions and Lamentations: Social Web at the University of Leicester Library, Gareth Johnson, Document Supply & Leicester
18. Cambridge – The UL on Twitter, Emma Coonan, University of Cambridge
19. Cambridge – To ‘fb’…. or not to ‘fb’, Libby Tilley, University of Cambridge

Thank you to everyone who came and presented!

One hundred and ten…and counting

Over one hundred URLs have been bookmarked on Delicious that are relevant to the workshop subject area. More are being added by the day.

To support the workshops a number of complementary materials were created and utilised. All materials are available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 licence. The workshop materials are available from the individual workshop pages.

Please do use the materials available with your teams and pass on details to any one interested.

Priceless

After the workshops had taken place we solicited feedback from delegates using a Google docs evaluation form. Thank you so much for your constructive comments, we really appreciate the positive feedback and did our best to take on board the suggestions made.

We hope we helped people feel positive in a practical way about what Web 2.0 can offer them. As one workshop delegate said:

“I was inspired and several days later am still excited about the web 2.0 possibilities opening up for my organisation. It was one of those training days where you reflect and say “that made a difference“.

We will be running a new series of workshops for the MLA on related areas.

Keep an eye on this blog, the Cultural Heritage events RSS feed and the Cultural Heritage Twitter feed for details.

About This Guest Post

In this guest blog post James Boardwell, Design Research Lead for Rattle, introduces us to exciting project encouraging people to engage with digital objects through different participatory media, including Twitter.

James can be contacted on Twitter using jamesb.

My Life As An Object

There are millions of objects held in our museums and galleries in the UK and yet our interpretation of them is generally constructed in the third person. They’re seen as static, inanimate things without effects, without lives.

This was the initial thought that led us at Rattle to a project for Renaissance East Midlands, an experimental project that looks to engage people around the objects’ lives. Each week for three weeks, we’re taking an object from the Nottingham galleries collection and bringing it to life in different ways, using different participatory media.

The project kicked off last Monday (15th March) with the Yellow Chopper, a story of the Raleigh Chopper which is held in the Nottingham galleries collection (as it was created in Nottingham by Raleigh). This story is quite linear, with a narrative arc spanning the life of the bike, from being given as a gift to being redundant in the shed, a victim of the next product innovation, the BMX. You can read Frankie Roberto’s overview of this bit of the project on his blog.

Subsequent stories will bring a watercolour by Paul Sandy (Tea at Englefield Green) to life and as well as Boots baby weighing scales. The objects were chosen to represent different ‘types’ of object you can find in museums and galleries and which consequently required different ‘design’ solutions to engage audiences. We won’t ruin the fun with any spoilers, so you’ll have to check in at the project site to see what happens and how the project evolves. But we’d love your feedback as this is a learning project and so sharing our thoughts on what works and what doesn’t can only help in designing better experiences for all going forward.

A few days ago I gave a talk  on RDA – what it is, how it’s been developed – and also how RDA has influenced changes in MARC 21, the library cataloguing format. It was also an opportunity to reflect how these standards could change, for example, future library OPACs.

I was giving this talk to students taking the cataloguing module of the information management studies courses at London Metropolitan University.  This sort of occasion is always a great opportunity to meet the next generation of professionals in the information sector. These people are right at the beginning of their career and don’t as yet know where this will take them – public libraries, private sector libraries (e.g. law firms, business companies), education (the whole range from schools through to colleges and universities), research or the voluntary sector (charities). The core skills they need will remain the same but the environment in which they use those skills is continuously changing. Drawers of catalogue cards have been replaced by OPACs, library stock is expected to inlcude e-books and e-journals and libraries are using blogs, microblogging and tagging to help users.

Back in the office it’s now down to making my talk more widely available. So I’ve uploaded my slides to my account on Slideshare as well as making them available from the Cultural Heritage and Bibliographic Management areas of the UKOLN web site. The next step is telling people I’ve done this, for instance by doing a short news item for the UKOLN news feed.  And of course writing this blog post – which will potentially  get to a further audience because the RSS feed of this blog feeds into our account (ukolnculture) on twitter.

ISTC stands for the International Standard Text Code (ISTC). This is a new numbering system developed to enable the unique identification of textual works and is published by the International Standards Organization as ISO 21047.

The ISTC Web site states that: “The International Standard Text Code (ISTC) system is a global identification system for textual works. It is primarily intended for use by publishers, bibliographic services, retailers, libraries and rights management agencies.” and “An ISTC can be applied to any textual work by any authorized representative of the author of a textual work”.

So whereas the ISBN distinguished between hardback and paperback versions of a text, the ISTC works to bring together a group of resources with the same content.

Crucially, “an ISTC does not ‘belong’ to a single author/publisher” – it belongs to the work. Put simply, that means that when the next Terry Pratchett novel comes out in hardback, the publisher can apply for an ISTC for it. The same ISTC is then also used for example, for paperback and large-print versions published in the UK even if they are published by different publisher(s) and for any versions published elsewhere.

So it could be a useful bit of data to include in library catalogue records, making it easier to search for a specific text work, for example, where a public library has multiple copies of the work in a number of branches, some in hardback (with its ISBN) and some in paperback (again with its own ISBN).

If you are a cataloguer, you might like to take a look at MARBI Discussion Paper 2010-DP03 which looks at the detail of where to place the ISTC within MARC 21 bibliographic and authority records.

Perhaps you’ve not seen an ISTC yet, but I gather around 4,000 have been assigned already. Initially they’ll be turning up in book trade records; then I’d expect to see them in bibliographic data suppliers records, and finally in public (and other) library catalogues. So keep a watch out for them.