Transforming Libraries - RLUK 2021 conference

 I         I was really keen to attend RLUK’s 2021 conference on Transforming Libraries, and so was delighted to win a bursary which covered my conference fee. I have been working in the area of special collections and archives for well over 15 years now, and had the opportunity to attend various conferences and events, but invariably closely connected to my specialist area. Having completed a teaching qualification in Higher Education (AFHEA) and the Aurora women’s leadershipdevelopment programme, I was keen to attend a more broadly focussed conference, broaden my knowledge of the research environment and put my recent learning in context.

I wasn’t disappointed. The key points I took away from the conference were that:

• Most (all?) university libraries already do a huge amount to contribute to the research environment of their institutions. What they’re often less good at is communicating this, both to their users and to those higher up the university hierarchy. There was much to take forward about alignment with strategic objectives, finding out user needs and communicating how we meet those needs.
• The pandemic had created opportunities for research libraries to demonstrate how central they are to the university – often staying open throughout lockdown to provide study space and resources for students, as well as providing digital content. For many, this had helped to communicate the library’s worth higher up the university, and there was a sense of urgency around making the most of this opportunity to influence and advocate.

I also found much more content than I had expected about teaching, with its links to research, and especially teaching with special collections material. From this I have noted down ideas to explore further, including around inquiry-based learning, aligning our services with what users want/improving communication with users and using visualisers to improve the service we can offer both now and when in-person teaching in the reading room is possible once again.

I also thought the practical aspects of the conference worked very well. I had anticipated missing the opportunities for informal networking at an in-person conference, but there were several ways around this. I enjoyed exploring the virtual terrace, including the swimming pool(!) and having the chance to chat with whoever I came across. This went some way to replicating the conference experience of chance meetings over coffee. Similarly with the ability to explore the virtual marketplace of vendors/sponsors and see what they have to offer. I also found the searchable list of delegates useful, and used the chat feature to contact a few delegates directly and to follow up with questions after one of the talks. In some ways, this worked even better in this environment than at a large in-person conference where you have to physically track down the person you want to talk to. Although it was a rather intense three days, it wasn’t overwhelming, as the talks were spread out, with plenty of time inbetween to have a break from my computer screen or to contact other delegates. There was a very friendly atmosphere, and everybody I approached to speak to was happy to talk to me, or to refer me onto a more appropriate person.

 
So, what next? I switched off my computer feeling like I’d got a better grasp of the ‘bigger picture’ in HE and research libraries, as well as picking up some useful tips for teaching using my collections. I’m hoping I’ll be able to put some of those into practice in my job over the next few months.

A big thank you to RLUK for sponsoring my place at the conference.

Historic Libraries Forum conference 2018: Any other duties as required: skills for non-traditional library responsibilities

Our conference venue - the beautiful Christ Church, Oxford

It was great to be back at another HLF conference, having organised the previous year's! This one was especially pertinent to many of us, because who hasn't found themselves dealing with all sorts of things as part of a library job? Particular highlights for me included:




Ann Sylph (Zoological Society of London) on managing the many weird and wonderful items that make up their collections - as well as books and archives, this includes sculptures, paintings, pictures, slides, transparencies. She described how they had done a SWOT analysis, identified their USPs and a vision of where they would like to be in five years' time and then worked on this. They had begun by

• Spending an initial six months focussing on documentation and doing a strategic review, which then led the way forward.
• addressing storage issues by obtaining suitable boxes, monitoring the environment and for pests (all of which we do already in Special Collections) and developing a disaster plan. Evidence from the monitoring was then used to improve conditions.
• Celebrating outreach wins - eg produced bookmarks rather than leaflets as these are more likely to be kept, featuring in magazines and newspapers, putting on talks for staff enabling them to get to know the collections, using zoo events to attract a different audience, lending items to exhibitions external to the zoo. They also targeted historians to publish about their collections eg by targeting history of science departments.
• Did a monthly blog to highlight examples from their collections, rather like we did with Brunel 50 library objects

Ann's suggested actions were to:

• Multi-task!
• Constantly promote and use to engage
• Have a disaster box
• Use volunteers to help in practical ways
• Be inventive/creative
• Read. Go on visits and to conferences
• Seek advice and talk to others in a similar boat
• Don't forget the bigger picture - the rest of your organisation and the world
• Take opportunities when they come up
• Have work-life balance

Louisa Yates (Gladstone's Library), the only residential library in the world had won a grant from the Carnegie Foundation in New York. Over the previous six years they had brought upon a huge increase in usage, from no data being kept and no strategic plan, and only an average of three people a day using the library, they now have a plan, six years' worth of usage data and are now at daily full capacity, with bedrooms at 95% occupancy. The grant was to pay for a project they had always wanted to do - digitisation of Gladstone's books, thus making them available to a much wider audience. He had carefully collected books that were important to them, and annotated richly. It was quickly realised that the original plan, to digitise 350,000 items would be impossible, as they weren't catalogued and very limited metadata already existed, and transcribing this amount of material unrealistic. A revised, much more feasible, bid was written, detailing the digitisation of 15,000 letters (70,000 pages) and 5734 books and involved establishing a digital studio on site, with crowd-sourced transcription of a limited amount of the material. They had used SMART goals to set the project stages but did encounter problems along the way:

• Images couldn't go onto the existing server as they were too big and the cost of alternative storage hadn't been included in the bid.
• Adding subject keywords, whilst straightforward for trained library staff, wasn't a suitable task for many volunteers or work experience students.

Her learning points from the bid experience were

• People delivering the project should have been involved from the start.
• Library staff needed improved knowledge of tech
• Get paperwork in place before recruiting staff, eg manuals and workflows

I also enjoyed talks by Freda Matassa on valuing your collections, Judith Curthoys who managed to make a talk on implementing GDPR very amusing, Dorota Antoniak on accessibility and Sian Prosser and Laura Dimmock-Jones on developing professionally.

Oh and the conference lunch venue - Hogwarts!

RBSCG conference 2015: Hidden collections: revealed

In the first week of September I attended one day of the CILIP RBSCG's conference, Hidden Collections: Revealed. The conference was split between Friends' House Library, Lambeth Palace Library and the Friday was at the British Library's conference centre.

Where they have possibly the comfiest conference seats I have ever sat on.

It can be a bit strange arriving towards the end of a conference, when it feels like everyone else has already been networking for a couple of days, but I think the different venues for each day made this a bit easier? The conference had been divided up into six sessions, and I was there for the final two.

Session five was uncovering your collections - promotion
The first speaker was Adrian Edwards, Head of Printed Heritage Collections at the British Library, who spoke about the work they had done with the BL's comic collections to bring them to a much wider audience. The initial problem was having a large collection of comics, but not all of them catalogued, many of them poorly catalogued (wrong end dates, missing issues, hardly anything before the 1930s referenced) and stored in three different locations, all of which made it very hard for all but the most determined researcher to use them.  When the library at Colindale closed and two comics experts approached the library wanting to celebrate British comics, the decision was taken to put on an exhibition. Now, any exhibition is a huge amount of work, and this one was no exception, as the objectives included getting all that cataloguing done and supporting a wider range of researchers in using the collection. The eventual exhibition, Comics unmasked: art and anarchy in British Comics was successful, containing 217 unique exhibits and attracting a lot of new users into the building. Achievements included:

• Many comics catalogued for the first time
• All comics available on one site for the first time
• The material is now used more, including two doctoral students working on it.
• Staff expertise in the subject has increased enormously
• Selected rare material has been moved to a higher level of secure storage

Adrian concluded by saying that the exhibition had been a good way of highlighting hidden collections, and a good way of getting management support to get the essential cataloguing and collection moves completed. It is important to seize opportunities such as this.

Lara Haggerty from Innerpeffray Library then spoke about the difficulties in dealing with people's perception that it's just a load of old books. Her library is physically difficult to access, being five miles from the nearest town with only one bus a week. It is highly significant though, as it is the first public lending library in Scotland. The library had effectively become a museum but was doing very little promotion before she was appointed as a result of a business based forward plan. The key to success has been concentrating on the visitor experience and making it unique. They are too small to attract big tour groups on their own, but by working with other local organisations, have been able to increase the numbers.

Katie Sambrook, Head of Special Collections at King's College London then spoke about the Foreign and Commonwealth Office library, which was transferred to KCL after two years of negotiations. The collection had been rather hidden at the FCO as their primary remit wasn't to run a library. The transfer to an academic institution meant it would be more accessible, but the initial problem was how to reveal and promote this collection? Initially there was no catalogue in a useable form, so the first task was to catalogue the books (this took eight years with 2 or 3 project cataloguers working at a time. About 30% of the collection is now catalogued) as having the items on the catalogue is the most important form of promotion you can do. The cataloguers became expert in the subject matter so were able to assist readers and answer enquiries, whilst student assistants were employed to do basic collection processing and download catalogue records for non-special collections material. The collections were then promoted via real and virtual exhibitions, and visitors have come from all over the world. Promotional activities have included:

• Have a poster on the library gates, as many visitors spot it when walking past
• Produce leaflets and guides on certain aspects/themes of collections
• Bear in mind that many exhibition visitors will never make the transition to reader but will help to spread the word.
• Foster teaching and research for academic users by developing teaching seminars using special collections material and introducing students to the material. Getting use of collections incorporated into teaching assessments is key.

Katie also stated that she had found it easier to engage English academics with Special Collections, than History academics, which certainly echoes my own experience.

Session six covered Beyond the library and first to speak was Katharine Hogg, Librarian at the Foundling Museum. This is a research library of c.10,000 items, and the first priority when the collection first arrived there was to create an online catalogue. Paintings and prints have been catalogued and digitized, and making sure items appear on external websites has been key for promotion, such as Your Paintings, Concert programmes database and the English Short Title catalogue.  Collaboration has worked well for conservation projects with West Dean College and Camberwell College of Arts.

A PhD student, Hannah Manktelow, then spoke about discovering provincial Shakespeare with the British Library playbill collection. This collection had never been used for research as many of the playbills had been closed to public access. The key here was a digitization project which also captured a lot of metadata, including dates, keywords from bills and an indication of what would attract audiences. It was a really exciting project to work on as there is very little work on provincial theatre of this period, and the collection includes c. 75000 playbills. Her PhD has focussed in on case studies based on five provincial towns, although a major obstacle is that playbills of many performances won't have made it into collections.

Finally, a rare books collector, Mark  Byford, talked about his collection focussed on Tudor and Jacobean books. He has c. 1000 books, and has no catalogue whatsoever, but welcomes people to come and see his collection, or takes them out himself to events. He also loans books to academics.

I had a really interesting time at the conference. Not only did I find that others' experience echoed my own (for instance, that it is much easier to engage English depts. in Special Collections than History depts.), but it also emphasised the importance of cataloguing first and foremost in promoting collections. Repeatedly it was made clear that you can't choose what items to put on display without them being catalogued first. You can't plan outreach activities if you don't know what you have. No one will be able to find the item for their research, or do their PhD on your collection if it isn't catalogued.

My thanks to the RBSCG for an interesting and enjoyable conference.

CLAA conference 2015

The theme for the 2015 Cathedral Libraries and Archives Association Conference was 'Placing the library and archive at the heart of the cathedral', which doesn't immediately appear to be connected to my current job! However, the theme could be applied to any institution and proved to be highly relevant to many working situations.

Westminster Abbey

The conference was held in the beautiful historic surroundings of Cheyneygates at Westminster Abbey. The first speaker was Ellie Jones, the Archivist from Exeter Cathedral Library & Archives, who spoke about the cathedral's highly successful HLF funded project to share their treasures more, which eventually also led to them becoming one of the first institutions to earn Archives Accreditation.  She outlined the improvements they had been able to make to their facilities, and how their increased outreach had made it possible for more people to experience their collections. This included a year 8 teacher who had seen one of their blog posts, leading to a project about Shakespeare. They have had a big push to make material more accessible online, partly via having an EOSweb catalogue, although there is currently no archive finding aid available online. Working with colleagues in the cathedral was very important, so they encouraged directors to bring their families in to visit to support more engagement with the collections.

Emily Naish, from Salisbury Cathedral Library and Archives, then gave a talk on the dangers of encouraging collections to be for scholarly use only, as had happened at Salisbury from 1983 until recently. This had resulted in the library becoming invisible within the cathedral and attaining an almost mythical status, with the only catalogue one printed in 1880 and available in a few Oxbridge libraries. The big change in recent years had led to the creation of a number of policies covering access and collections. Collections have been consolidated, spotlight talks now take place in the cathedral, with improved information available on the website. They are also working with the Education Officer to encourage school groups to visit. Volunteers and cathedral staff now have dedicated drop in sessions twice a week, which has encouraged guides to know more about the library. It is important that the library is relevant to the cathedral rather than an historical curiosity - it has to be useful to staff and volunteers, and has to be useful to the fundraising department.

General Synod chamber

After a trip round the corner to Church House to see the Cathedral and Church Buildings Library, Synod chamber, an extremely good lunch and the CLAA AGM, we returned to Cheyneygates for the afternoon's speakers. First was Lisa di Tommaso, from Durham Cathedral, on the renewal of their collections. Durham had already supported scholarship and learning for 1000 years and are working to make their collections more accessible now. Lisa gave a brief overview of the history of the collections and the team working there, before explaining the "Open treasure" project, designed to bring the collections into the heart of Durham Cathedral's visitor experience. The project encompasses an exhibition space and a new specialist search room, along with outreach programmes. This includes developing reading groups with people who historically have had less contact with the cathedral, and 11 - 15 year olds will be able to have a go at curating an exhibition. Key activities have included taking a replica of the Lindisfarne Gospels to visit people who couldn't visit the physical exhibition and raising awareness of the collections by making exhibition loans.

Finally Vicky Harrison, Collections Manager at York Minister, spoke about unlocking their collections. She gave an outline of York's successful HLF bid for "York Minster revealed". Communication with the rest of the cathedral, particularly Chapter, was key, and reports were structured into four sections as per the Accreditation standard, which helped to show that they were working to the future rather than concentrating on the past. The future will involve working together rather than as three separate disciplines (library, archive, collections). The key is to plan what you're doing, and to communicate this. And always have three top messages you want to get across at the forefront of your mind.

CILIP Conference 2015

At the beginning of July I spent a couple of days in Liverpool at CILIP Conference 2015, having been lucky enough to win a bursary from the ARLG London & South East region. I was keen to attend the conference, having worked in the area of Special Collections for well over ten years, so my conference attendance had tended to be restricted to those events that were closely connected to my specialist area. 

Concert Hall, where the keynotes took place

Keynotes

Perhaps what I most enjoyed about the conference were the keynote speakers. They included R. David Lankes, Erwin James, Cory Doctorow and Shami Chakrabarti. At previous conferences I’ve attended the keynotes have all been very connected to the specialist conference theme, and invariably given by someone from the library or archive world, so I had been interested to see in advance that this wasn’t so much the case with CILIP conference keynotes. It was great to see how engaged all the speakers were with the world of libraries and information, and brought an interesting perspective from the outside. Indeed, Erwin James’ account of the difference a prison library had made to his life after his conviction, what it had meant to his rehabilitation and then to his release had me almost in tears. R. David Lankes on ‘World domination through librarianship’ (you can’t beat a title like that!) was more controversial from a Special Collections perspective, as he talked about how collections are the demon, and how you may not have one to be a librarian, as often now they are leased or rented. But I could agree with him that librarians are educators, even if I am educating users about our special collections!

Erwin James

Session speakers 

The sessions I attended were mostly in the ‘demonstrating value’ stream, and I found many of the workshops particularly useful. I found that it was helpful to have to think of real life examples, and we were encouraged to share our ideas and processes with someone sitting near us, which also helped break the ice. I enjoyed the practical elements of these workshops, which provided a nice contrast to the keynotes. I also took some time out from ‘demonstrating value’ to go to the ‘digital futures’ stream and a session on MOOCs and small-scale CPD for library and information professionals. I found this interesting, having participated in one MOOC so far, and working towards my second year of revalidation, always being on the lookout for different ways to do CPD.

Exhibition

As I very rarely buy anything other than preservation supplies, I hadn’t been expecting to get much out of the exhibition, but, spurred on by a sheet to fill in with a sticker from each exhibitor, and the possibility of winning an iPad if this was completed, I spent some time on both days visiting each stand. I was pleasantly surprised by how much I enjoyed meeting all the exhibitors and finding out about their products. Most of them also appeared to be interested to meet me, and I think it was a good way of finding out about new products and services, which I can always tell colleagues about, even if they aren’t so relevant to my own role. 

Rather amazing surroundings for the exhibition

Networking

Taking part in networking between sessions was one of my main reasons for wanting to attend the conference. It proved to be very different to networking at the smaller conference I have been used to attending, as with 600 people there and no delegate list in advance, it was hard to work out who I would like to meet with once there. I found that manning the ARLG stall during one of the breaks helped, as people then came up to talk to me and found out about ARLG, and I did manage to arrange to meet up with a few people by using social media in advance of the conference. I think this was something of a missed opportunity though, as with a delegate list in advance and people’s Twitter details, for instance, it would have been a lot easier to arrange a meet up. It was possible to register as an event attendee on the conference app in advance, which I did, but very few people did this.

ARLG stand

What now?

So, what next? The conference was an intense couple of days, but I came away feeling like I’d got a better grasp of the ‘bigger picture’ in librarianship, as well as picking up some useful tips for demonstrating value. I’m hoping I’ll be able to put some of those into practice in my job over the next few months. I’ve provided feedback to CILIP on ways in which I think the conference was beneficial, as well as how it could be improved – particularly the venue, which really wasn’t very accessible with huge numbers of steps everywhere, but there were also issues with timekeeping and sessions running over. My thanks go to the ARLG London & South East for sponsoring my place.

The speakers' presentations are now available on the conference website.

Visit: Bromley House Library, cataloguing projects, volunteers and fundraising

Last week I went on an Historic Libraries Forum workshop covering retrospective cataloguing projects, working with volunteers and fundraising. I found it really useful, with lots of great networking opportunities, as well as a chance to see a lovely library and get some new ideas to try. The photos on this post were taken by me, with permission from Bromley House, but I didn't use flash so they aren't the best photos I've ever taken!

The visit was hosted by Bromley House Library, a subscription library in the centre of Nottingham, which has existed for nearly 200 years and been in its current building since 1821. The library is home to about 40,000 books, (about 200 of which could be described as "rare" and about 100 manuscripts), and the staff have spent the last couple of years getting them catalogued using the Heritage LMS from ISOxford; the OPAC will be available shortly online. The visit was centred around this process, but commenced with a tour of the building and its garden, which really helped to set the context for the project.

Children's book section - there are some lovely classics I remember from my childhood here!

The building is tall, with rooms leading off each other, and the in-house classification system had become split between rooms making it hard for people to find items using the card catalogue. The collections have been gathered together over the years, and although sections such as modern fiction are weeded, anything published pre-1970 isn't. Whilst environmental control is difficult in a building like this, an enthusiastic conservation group meets each week, trained by a conservator to take basic book conservation measures, such as cleaning, making boxes and tying tape. Other issues are the beautiful gallery room, with books shelved to quite a high level (although it now takes 2-3 people together to get books from the highest shelves) and a vertiginous spiral staircase on which only one person at a time is allowed!

 Background and staff
 A series of talks gave the background to the cataloguing project, which was funded by a grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund. Before the application, research had been done into how other libraries had coped with using volunteers to catalogue books, and it was clear that a system of training and supervision would need to be set up. This entailed recruiting a part-time project leader, plus several part-time professional cataloguers, who would then each oversee a team of volunteers, covering the whole week between them. Volunteers were mostly drawn from the library's own members, and to ensure consistency, each were asked to commit to at least one half day session each week. Adverts were placed for the professional staff, and copies of the job descriptions for these and the project leader were available for us to see.

Cataloguing process
The new professional staff put together a cataloguing procedure for their newly acquired LMS, together with the compact agreed with volunteers and handlining guidelines for the books. The cataloguing procedure was revised and updated as they went along and learnt from their experiences, particularly as the volunteers had varying levels of IT ability. Help sheets were developed for difficult groups of items. Although Heritage doesn't use MARC, records could be downloaded from the British Library and the cataloguing procedure used AACR2 and DCRM(B) (where appropriate). They aimed for a greater level of detail than in most of the downloaded records. Quality control was achieved by sampling and checking work, creating lists of commons errors to watch out for and conducting a stock check near the end using the accessions register to make sure nothing had been missed.

Rare books
Work on this area was done by two people who already had experience in cataloguing rare books. These books again were catalogued to a much higher level of detail, using DCRM(B) and with help from the CILIP RBSCG guidelines. Particular attention was paid to recording details of bindings, provenance and marginalia, in a standard form in the Notes field in Heritage. A useful feature of Heritage was the ability to add local notes (not visible in the OPAC) to record condition, meaning that reports can now be run to pick out items for conservation work. Where appropriate, items were submitted to ESTC, contributing to the international world of scholarship.

Fundraising
Money for the project had come from the Heritage Lottery Fund, and a variety of small grants from charitable trusts. Tips shared about fundraising were:

• Consider carefully the goals of each trust you are applying to and make sure your aims are tailored very specifically to their terms.
• Generally you won't get funding for things that should be a normal part of the library operation, e.g. the expense of acquiring a new LMS.
• Local trusts are particularly worth looking out for, although individual grants may be small.
• Be aware of what the rest of your institution is doing, you don't want to be obstructing their fundraising efforts, or vice versa!
• Be aware of reporting and evaluation requirements throughout the project, and try to involve the funders in your work, e.g. by inviting them to volunteers' parties.
• Be aware of outreach potential, often a key part of making a fundraising application. Trusts will often want to see outreach beyond your usual customer base, and maybe a culture change in the organisation so that this is sustained in the long term.

Photocopies are paid for by putting money in the frog

 Lessons learned
I found it really useful to hear what might have been done differently with the benefit of hindsight, as well as what had gone well.

• One good point was that the volunteers were in for 10 sessions a week, which left no time for system maintenance or downtime. 
• There were also useful tips on communication between part-time staff, especially where they don't overlap, and in motivation (apparently sweets are the key, as well as parties!).
• It was clear that both the staff and volunteers had really taken ownership of the project and had gained a lot from it, both in terms of skills acquired (such as IT) and by building networks and adding value to the institution.
• I also found it very useful to see the documentation, ranging from job descriptions to cataloguing manuals.

And finally, a picture of the garden behind the library, a little oasis in the centre of Nottingham, maintained by volunteers and much enjoyed by members.

Thank you to Bromley House for a really interesting day.

HLF conference 2012: Part 3 Social media

 Here's the final part of my write up of the HLF conference on 20th November 2012.

3) Social media in libraries 
The main speaker in this section was Alison Cullingford (Special Collections Librarian at Bradford University), who I suspect needs no introduction to any special collections librarian who's dabbled in social media already! The case study was provided by Jill Whitelock (Head of Special Collections, Cambridge University Library).

Some conference attendees were already using social media in their libraries, others were not, and Alison emphasised the importance of using it at the right level for both you and your institution. It is now ubiquitous - all good websites now include things like comment boxes and links to share pages on Twitter, Facebook etc.

• Social media is particularly good for small libraries, as it allows them to punch well above their weight.
• Much of it is intuitive and easy to learn, and there is a lot of help available out there.
• Use responsibly and with common sense. Your institution might perceive there is a risk from social media so be prepared to put together a case.
• You can only use pictures to which you have the rights, so this might limit what you can post online.
• Blogging and other social media are an excellent CPD opportunity for staff.

Where to start?
Blogging is the most comfortable place to start from, as you can use the story of your special collections and go beyond what you can do on a corporate website. Both Alison and Jill are using Wordpress. Put anything ongoing and dynamic on the blog and remember it has a long shelflife so people searching even years later on will still be able to find it.

• Moderate comments to weed out any spam. 
• Remember that the blog will not look after itself, so act like an editor and find and commission content. 
• Have some posts queued so you're never without one handy. 
• Join in with other blogs to do themed posts and make your content go further by using other social media. 
• Ask to be featured on your library's homepage to increase the number of hits. 
• Always ask someone else to read through your posts before they go live.

The 100 objects style format has worked well at various places (100 objects Bradford, 52 weeks of fantastic bindings, 52 weeks of inspiring illustrations) and ends up working like a FAQ about the collections. The  Cambridge Special Collections Blog has a mixture of post styles, some time-specific to mark anniversaries or publicise events. There are also separate project blogs, such as the Incunabula cataloguing project, and the Tower Project. Guest posts are used to demonstrate relevance and that collections are being used (you can see a guest post I wrote for the Cambridge Incunabula Project blog here).

Flickr works well for special collections images, and avoids the need to invest in expensive image management software (Special Collections Bradford Flickr photostream). Some institutions have used students to film special collections work as part of their projects (Tyne & Wear archives, LSE).

Twitter can be controversial as it's easy to say things you shouldn't, but it's a brilliant way of getting conversations started, being interactive and getting feedback quickly. During the day there are a lot of professionals using it, and a good international angle emerges when people in other time zones get to work too. I liked Alison's tip of never using Twitter if you're in a bad mood!

Golden rule: think about what you're doing and why you're doing it

Sources to find out more:
CPD23 provides a good overview of getting started with social media.
Ned Potter (the Wikiman) has guidelines for using social media on his blog.

HLF conference 2012: Part 2 Exhibitions

Continuing my write up of the 2012 Historic Libraries Forum conference: Making the most of your special collections.


2) Exhibitions
The main speaker on exhibitions was Tanya Kirk (Lead Curator of Printed Literary Sources at the British Library), who had recently curated the summer exhibition, Writing Britain: literary wonderlands and wastelands. Case studies were provided by Katie Sambrook (Special Collections Librarian at King's College London) and Emily Dourish (Exhibitions Officer at Cambridge University Library).

Tanya outlined the exhibitions process at the British Library. It is run as a project, with each exhibition usually taking 2-3 years of planning and implementation. I have added comments made by Katie and Emily in their case studies to the outline below.

• Proposal - sell exhibition ideas to colleagues and your marketing department/wider institution. Why do you think your institution is the right place for this exhibition? Does it have a broad or narrow focus, and is this likely to appeal to enough people? This will also depend on whether you are trying to generate revenue, or just raise awareness of your library/institution and promote your collections. An exhibition is an immense amount of work, even if you only have a few display cases, so are you going to be a single curator (and if so, what happens about the rest of your work whilst this is going on?) or curate jointly with someone else? Emily talked about how academics at Cambridge were keen to be involved with an exhibition because it could count as evidence for their impact rating in REF.
• Marketing - does it link with your institution's "brand"? There was a difference here between case studies. Some had marketing departments that liked to link the exhibition to modern times, and avoid having a "dusty image", other institutions were keen to emphasise the historical aspects of what they were displaying.
• Audience test and find out what people would expect to see if they came to your exhibition. Similarly. talk to colleagues to ensure you are remaining on track topic-wise. Know your audience - the BL aims exhibition labels at a reading age of GCSE grade C to make it accessible. Knowing your audience also means you know whether you can use technical terms or not.
• Build a list of collection items considered for exhibition, otherwise you'll forget them. Record information about the copy you want, which opening you want and the book's condition on a spreadsheet, and take photos to remind yourself what the item looks like. Keep in mind the overall look and aim for variety in each display case. You can also use colour pictures to mock up the display case.
• Check whether items are suitable for display, bearing in mind the limitations of your display space, for example, is the environment suitable and is the book happy to open far enough for display purposes?
• Arrange exhibition loans, if necessary. Most institutions want to receive loan requests at least six months before the exhibition. Bear in mind that loans can be expensive.
• When writing labels be rigorous about fact checking and always have someone available to proofread and edit. Avoid writing consecutive labels as people don't read everything and may miss some out. Start with a hook at the beginning of the label to draw people in and use active language and metaphor. Encourage people to look at the object, not just read the label. Always test your labels with non-expert.
• Publicity - encourage people to blog about your exhibition to raise awareness. Make sure your front of house staff know about the exhibition so they can "sell" it too.
• Katie and Emily had different policies about online exhibitions. At King's they publish the online exhibition only after the physical display has been taken down, to encourage people to go and see it whilst it's there. Whereas at Cambridge the online exhibition is published at the same time.

I thought there were some great ideas in this part of the conference, and definitely some I'll be able to use in the future. I also found it helpful to have an overview of the whole exhibition process at the British Library. Obviously, that's a lot bigger than anywhere I've worked, but the same principles apply.

CILIP CIG conference: The value of cataloguing

I had a great few days at the CIG 2012 conference in Sheffield last month. Although I've been to CIG events before, I'd never been to the conference. It was a very intense couple of days and I'm not going to attempt to blog all of it, so these are some of the thoughts and reflections I've brought away.

First of all, and I should really know this by now, librarians always seem to keen to share their knowledge and get to know you. This group was no exception. I only knew a couple of other attendees IRL, although I "knew" some of the others from Twitter, yet I quickly met a whole crowd of people all exchanging information, opinions and advice. Apart from anything else, it was enormous fun (well, have you ever been in a pub with about 30 cataloguers before?!). People had even made cake to share.

Second, don't be scared about the future. Yes, there are big changes coming - not only RDA, but also the world we work in is changing, especially in the current economic climate. Yet we heard from some brilliant speakers about how their libraries had weathered storms in the past (Heather Jardine pointed out that everyone had survived the arrival of AACR2). There was such a range of experience present: some libraries were still using UKMARC, others were about to jump to RDA. There was controversy: is MARC really about to die? (probably). Many people talked about the advantages of collaborative working, which offers so many advantages. My favourite was Deborah Lee, on NACO funnels. I'd love to join a NACO funnel, but I doubt it would be possible for me at the moment! And I really enjoyed Ian Fairclough talking about collaborating to improve bibliographic data quality - check out Typo of the day for librarians! There was a definite feeling of we're all in this together.

Third, librarians can really make a difference. Well, we knew that, but does the rest of the world?  Dave Pattern's keynote address reported on research that shows how library use can predict what grade students will get (amusingly, there is even a 2am rise in library use for students who get lower grades - demonstrating that they've left it to the last minute. Apparently the best achievers are in the library by 9am). How does knowing that affect how we promote our library services?

Other key points, which I've made into a list of Things To Do (either immediately or later):

• Make the most of the functionality in your catalogue and what it can tell you about how people are searching it. Then use that data to enhance catalogue records.
•  Cataloguing consistency AND workflow are important - how to catalogue consistently, speedily but still providing what users need. This means making some strategic decisions about outsourcing work, prioritisation, using tools that can speed things up and making use of controlled vocabularies.Areas all touched on repeatedly in presentations by Lucy Bell, Michael Emly and Gary Green.
• Also, don't ignore the history of your catalogue. Keep a record of the cataloguing decisions you take, so that future generations of people working with your catalogue will know what they're dealing with (Anne Welsh and Katharine Whaite).
• Start thinking in terms of data in networks, rather than hierarchical trees (Simon Barron). RDA is the perfect opportunity to think about how we can do this.
• Find out more about RDA. Céline Carty updated us on RDA, having been to the ALA annual conference in Anaheim. She provided a handout with helpful links to the RDA Essentials webinars, amongst other resources. Stuart Hunt provided practical tips on implementing RDA in your ILS. Both recommended exploring the RDA Toolkit, if you have access to it.
• Look into ways to promote the value of cataloguing, for example, through the High Visibility Cataloguing blog. Try to make the most of networking opportunities. (Céline Carty, Karen Pierce and Rachel Playforth)

I've got pages of notes from this conference, so this post is just selected highlights from it. Speakers' slides are available here. A massive thank you to the organisers and speakers  - I had a wonderful few days up in Sheffield and learnt an enormous amount.

I also attended the FRBR training after the conference but I'll blog about that separately.

CILIP LIHG: Lost libraries walk

Back on 22nd June I joined an evening walk around London, organised by the CILIP Library & Information History Group (LIHG). It was entitled: "Lost Libraries: a walk through some of London’s forgotten book collections", and I wasn't really sure what to expect, after all, if a library's lost, how can you go and see it? But the blurb attracted me:

Twenty-first century London contains some of the finest book collections in the world, but what about the libraries that haven’t survived? If you know where to look, London’s streets and alleyways are crammed with the ghosts of libraries past.       

This brand new walk will carry you back through London’s history, to long-forgotten libraries, readers, librarians and collectors. In the company of Alice Ford-Smith (Principal Librarian, Dr Williams’s Library), Lost Libraries uncovers some of the links between London’s past and present book collections. From Bloomsbury to the City, you will hear tales of enterprise, transformation, obsession and destruction.

I wasn't disappointed. Not only did the organiser (Renae Satterley) and leader (Alice Ford-Smith) miraculously manage to arrange for the rain to stop for an exact 2 hour window whilst we walked, I also found out more about London's history and its libraries, as well as exploring all sorts of hidden corners I wouldn’t normally have ventured into.



The rendezvous was at Gray's Inn library, one of the Inns of Court and the only library we were able to see inside. We were allowed a silent look around upstairs (it was still open to users) before Alice gave us some background. Although the origins of the library lie back in the 15th century, the Holker Library building was opened in 1929 and subsequently destroyed (along with about 32,000 books) during World War II. The library you can see in the picture below was designed by Sir Edward Maufe and opened in 1958. This was one of several moments during the tour when the sheer scale of destruction at various points in history took my breath away.

Our next stop was a short walk along High Holborn, where we stood outside branches of WHSmith and Boots whilst Alice told us about the earliest subscription libraries, including those run by Smiths and Boots.

And on to stand outside the old Public Record Office building, and hear about its history, as since 2001 it has been the home of the Maughan Library of King's College, London. Of course, the old PRO is now part of the National Archives, housed at Kew.

On again to near Samuel Johnson's house where there was an opportunity to sit down by the statue of Hodge, whilst Alice told us about the sale of Johnson's library. The books were in poor condition, but were sufficiently annotated and signed by him to make it easy to reconstruct his library.

The following stop in Crane Court (now a tiny and unprepossessing alleyway but once the home of the Royal Society) was the site, in 1742, of the first circulating library. This was launched by Samuel Fancourt, a dissenting minister and librarian. He popularized the idea of a subscription library, and the Leeds Library is now the oldest surviving model of this type.

Down another alleyway by a pub we found ourselves in Devereux Court, where there were once four coffee houses. These offered newspapers and journals, as well as libraries of books. In Tom's coffee house here there were about 2,000 books available for use. Many of these coffee houses were wiped out during the Great Fire of London (1666) when more than 13,000 buildings were destroyed.

Although it isn't a library, we walked past Temple Church, which I thought warranted a photo.

as well as the huge picture attached to Sea Containers House for the Queen's Jubilee!

Which we walked past on our way to Sion College. Founded by Thomas White in 1630 and entitled to receive a copy of every book published in London between 1710 and 1836, it closed in 1996 and the collections were split between Lambeth Palace Library, King's College London and Guildhall Library. It seemed very sad, as the building is now home to investment managers and the trading floor is in what was the library.
 

Further over towards the City we stopped near where Samuel Pepys was born, outside St Bride's library. Although not a lost library as such, it is currently closed to researchers and is at risk, although recently it was announced it will reopen at the end of September 2012. Alice talked here about ways in which to support this and other libraries under threat, such as the Women’s Library (you can read about this in my earlier blog post).

Final stop on the walk was Stationers' Hall. This has its origins in 1403, and is a City Livery Company, which once held the right to enforce legislation over publishing. Their hall in Ave Maria Lane was another casualty of the Great Fire of 1666, when another book collection was lost. However, there is still a library available on site here today.

We ended the walk by St Paul's Cathedral. Many booksellers stored books in the crypt beneath St Paul's and during the Great Fire John Evelyn records that these remained burning for a week. After the fire over 90% of booksellers returned to the area, but World War II caused more chaos and destroyed business records as well as books and catalogues. Nowadays the area is very different.

My account doesn’t do the evening justice, as there was an immense amount of detail provided by Alice and a lot of work must have gone into preparing the walk. I would highly recommend joining a future walk if you haven’t already done so though, as I thoroughly enjoyed my evening. Thank you to both Alice and Renae for organising the evening.

APML: Disaster management

Before I started working in library world I had no idea how many related organisations there are out there. Of course, I'd heard of CILIP (in those days the Library Association) and I'd vaguely heard of the Cathedral Libraries & Archives Association (CLAA) through volunteering at a cathedral library, but I hadn't heard of any others. In those days I'd only just acquired my first email address and email bulletins were unheard of so it was quite hard to find out about organisations, especially as the smaller ones didn't seem to have websites. Of course, we're in a whole new world now, it is so much easier to find out about relevant organisations, and there are so many of them out there, often providing ways of networking with librarians working in a similar field, or inexpensive training opportunities. One of those groups is the Association of Pall Mall Libraries (APML). I went to a talk they organised before one of their meetings, on the subject of disaster management.

The speaker was Sarah Hamlyn, Lead Preventive Conservator at the British Library, who gave us an overview of disaster management issues and ideas of what to do in our own libraries both before a disaster and in the aftermath. I'll just pull out her main points to write about here.

She emphasised the importance of planning in advance what to do if an emergency occurs and practising. With the growth in social networking and the ease of taking photographs any incident is likely to be in public view very rapidly and you need to know how to deal with it. If you have one, use your press or PR department's expertise to prepare a statement.

Potential risks

The part to send shivers down any librarian's spine is the list of potential risks. These include both problems that would affect just one library or institution, or much wider emergencies that affect an entire city or area. These include: theft, violent incidents, power failure, pandemics, transport infrastructure failure, extreme weather, loss of IT systems, fire, flood, environmental problems, mould outbreaks, pest infestations, physical damage (e.g. buildings being brought down by the force of flood water). Obviously these affect collection items, but it's important not to forget about your staff. What are you going to do if your staff can't get to work, or get home again at the end of the day?

Sources of information

Relevant standards to follow are ISO 31000 2009, Risk management: Principles and guidelines, available here as a free download and ISO 22301, Business continuity management.

Many disaster plans and templates are available online, but make sure you update them to reflect your library's individual circumstances.

The British Library Preservation Advisory Service (BLPAC) has an e-resource about disaster and emergency planning. This has much more detail about what to do and links to other sources of information.

Sarah emphasised the points to consider:

Prevention and preparedness

• Try and avoid a disaster happening in the first place by eliminating as many risks as possible and identifying key staff and functions.

Emergency plan

• Keep your emergency plan updated, including emergency contact numbers for staff and a priority list of items. For instance, you need to be very specific about groups of items to help the fire brigade know what to rescue in an emergency - you may not be allowed in the building yourself. Be aware that both personal phone numbers and the location of valuable items are sensitive data and treat them accordingly.

• Test the plan. This is the only way you'll find out what doesn't work, before you have to "test" it in a genuine emergency. Practising also helps your staff in a real emergency as they already know what to do.

• Be clear about who has what role in an incident, including substitutes in case of illness or holiday. 

• If the site is compromised you need to know whether you can work normally and who makes the decision to close. You also need to know the minimum number of staff you need to be able to open. Be aware that in a big incident, you will also need to update your library users about the emergency situation, as well as staff.

• The plan should be easy to carry around and use. Many institutions use a small checklist that can be carried in a wallet or handbag. Check that staff know what they need with them if they're called to an out of hours emergency - things like money and keys. Large institutions, such as the British Library, have pre-loaded mobile phones with relevant numbers in and a paid staff out-of-hours rota for the staff who carry these.

•  Make salvage and the disaster plan part of induction training, and revisit the training frequently.

CILIP in London: Women's Library

On 4th July 2012 I went to a CILIP in London talk by Dianne Shepherd, the Information Librarian at the Women's Library. The talk was about a mixture of professional issues, what the library does and what her job is like, and a bit about the current situation over the future of the Women's Library.

I hadn't been to any CILIP branch events before, despite finishing my chartership over three years ago. In previous areas where I've lived (East Midlands and Thames Valley) they were hard to get to as there was quite a lot of travel involved, but it turned out CILIP in London's talks are only 15 minutes walk from where I work, and timed to make it easy to go to them after work.

Dianne described the history and background of the Women's Library collections. The collection is Designated and documents every aspect of women's lives, mainly in this country, although there is some material from overseas. It was originally founded in 1926 by the suffragist, Millicent Fawcett, with the name Library of the London Society for Women's Service. By 1953 it was known as the Fawcett Library, and it moved to City Polytechnic, (which was later known as London Guildhall University, and which is now part of London Metropolitan University). A Heritage Lottery Fund grant meant the library could move to purpose-built accommodation in 2002. I visited there last year, with the CILIP Library & Information History Group, before the threat of closure was announced.

Various other collections were acquired, including the Cavendish Bentinck Library (in 1931) and the Josephine Butler Society Library. Donations are still accepted now (donations information is here). The library has become a very well-used collection, starting out with only 5 readers a day in 2002 and increasing to over 4,000 visits in total in 2011, and over 14,000 enquiries. This is testament both to the excellent reader facilities they now have there, reader development schemes and also a lot of work that has been done on cataloguing the collections to make them accessible (catalogues of the library, as well as archive and museum are available here).

The staff are divided into the Collections team (librarians, library assistants and an archivist) who create documentation, catalogue and conserve the collections, run the reading room and look after acquisitions (their Collection Development Policy is here) and Events staff (a learning co-ordinator and events co-ordinator) who organise study days and children's activities. Volunteers are used to undertake tasks which professional staff don't have time for and are always professionally managed and supervised.

And as for the future? Well, London Metropolitan University announced in March that the Women's Library would need to find a new custodian. Support would be provided until Christmas 2012, after which the service would be cut to one day a week opening. The current situation (July 2012) is that formal bids have been tendered and an announcement will be made by the end of September over where the library will go and what will happen to it. The list of bidders is here. You can keep up to date with the campaign to save the Women's Library on this blog.

I took away a lot of ideas from this talk. It was useful to pick up hints and tips on managing a large cataloguing backlog, as well as promoting your collections, dealing with donations and increasing the number of readers. I was also very pleased to learn that there have been a number of bidders interested in taking on the collections, as it would be awful if such a well-used and vital collection were to be split up or become less accessible.

A nice surprise right at the end was that food is provided at CILIP in London talks too! A good way to chat and network with other professionals. I'll definitely be looking out for more of these events in the future.

Latin & rare books librarians

A while ago I was asked about resources to help with learning Latin, as a rare books librarian. And it got me thinking.

Do you actually need to know Latin to be a rare books librarian? 

My initial reaction was "Yes, but...", because surely it depends on your collection. If you look after a modern special collection, for instance, Latin is going to be much less useful than other skills. But over the course of a career, knowing Latin surely has to be a good thing as most pre-1800 rare-book collections are going to include a proportion of books in Latin?

The CILIP RBSCG has a document on skills for rare books librarians on their Careers page, which mentions the need to have language skills to help you manage and research your collection, and that increasingly users themselves may not know Latin so will need your help.

If your collection doesn't have any books in Latin, or very few of them, other skills are going to be more useful. Some rare books job adverts will make knowing Latin an essential or at least desirable element, but others won't. For instance, my current job had knowledge of Latin or a European language as desirable, but not essential. So, not having Latin won't necessarily stop you getting a job as a rare books librarian, but it might count against you if you're competing against other candidates who have Latin, and it might limit the jobs for which you can apply. And even if you're not looking for a job, it can make a massive difference to your everyday work too.

How does Latin help?

I have an A Level in Latin, and I have found it very useful in my career so far. You can "get by" in cataloguing without knowing Latin, and there are resources that can help, such as the Historic Libraries Forum guide.  Rare Books in Scotland have run workshops in the past on Latin for rare books librarians, and have a guide published here (link goes to pdf), which includes links to other resources, including information about place names and a word list.With many (most) collections, you're going to end up cataloguing a book in a language you don't know at some point, even if you do know Latin.

But, especially if you work with a collection that has many books in Latin and other European languages, knowing Latin is an enormous help. You don't just match a record on COPAC, hoping for the best, you can catalogue the book yourself. You can also interpret the book more easily, which helps with adding subject headings or assisting a reader who doesn't know the language. Even if the book you're looking at is in another European language you don't know, knowing Latin may give you a clue. You'll also miss out on the fun of cataloguing, and getting to know the book if you can't understand the language it's written in.

How do I learn Latin?

I was lucky. I went to a girls' state school which didn't teach Latin, but the boys' school up the road did, so I got to do my GCSE there. I did my A Level on my own, with a few hours support from a private tutor every week. That was really tough, as there is no one else there to bounce ideas and questions off when you're stuck with a particularly knotty bit of translation.

If you're at school now and it teaches Latin, take advantage of the opportunity! Unfortunately most state schools no longer teach it, and if you're reading this, you're most likely way past school-age anyway, so how else can you learn it?

I have heard the view expressed that making Latin a requirement in a job description is discriminatory, as it excludes people who didn't go to a private school. But I don't think this is true.  You don't need to learn Latin in school, for a start.

Learning for fun
If you just want to learn it for fun, or to add to your skills in a job you're already doing, then probably the cheapest way is to go it alone with a book and study guide. I used the Cambridge Latin Course for GCSE. I learnt Ancient Greek on a summer school which used Reading Greek, and there is a companion volume called Reading Latin, which is aimed at a student and adult audience. Learning on your own requires commitment though and it can be hard with no one to answer questions. The Cambridge Latin Course has a scheme for distance learners. You could also ask around or advertise for a tutor to help you (although expect to pay upwards of £15-20 an hour for a tutor). Maybe you could arrange a skills swap with someone who could help you in return for something you can do for them, such as babysitting?

Other options include doing an evening class via adult education through your local council, university or WEA. That way you'll meet other interested people and have a tutor to mark your work.
Summer schools are also fun, and offer an intensive way of getting to know the language with support available. I've seen some advertised (this isn't a complete list, do post in the comments if you know of more!).
London Summer School in Classics - this is the Greek course I did over 10 years ago. They also teach Latin, Syriac and Coptic.
Latin in a week at Gladstone's Library (you can also do Greek in a week, or Hebrew in a week!). What could be more fun than a week at a residential library? I spent a few nights here researching a theology essay years ago and it was wonderful.
Joint Association of Classical Teachers - list of summer schools.

Another fun option is to get involved with Minimus mouse Latin teaching. Minimus is aimed at primary school children and some schools run lunchtime or after school clubs to teach it.

Gaining a qualification

If you want to be able to put Latin on a job application, you might want to aim for a qualification to show your commitment and attainment. You may be able to access a GCSE or A Level course through a local college, although this may take place in daytime.
Some of the options I've suggested above, particularly distance learning, offer the opportunity to take a qualification at the end of them.
If you're still at university, you can often take a module or two outside the subject you're studying, so why not investigate taking a module in Latin?
The Open University has a module in Reading Classical Latin, and other languages. The Latin course is based around the Reading Latin book I mentioned above.

Good luck! And please leave me a comment if you have any more ideas of Latin learning resources to share.

After all, you never know when Latin is going to come in useful...

[Photo taken by me at Wallsend station on the Metro in Newcastle. This is the stop for Segedunum Roman fort.
The other pictures were taken by me at Chedworth Roman villa, near Cirencester. Well worth a visit. Look out for the snails.]