The Labyrinth-City

It was not his city. He had not been born here. His family were not from here. The Victorian tall houses, the excess of graffiti along the train-lines into King's Cross and Euston, the byzantine beauty of the Tube map: they were not his. The regimented maze of Bloomsbury, the curling confusion of Soho, the glimmering heights of the City, the opulence of the Finchleys, the mysterious expanses south-of-the-river: they were not his. The network of the Northern, the modernist subterranean cathedrals of the Jubilee, the contradiction of the Circle, the crowds of the Central, the criss-crossing blue streams of the Piccadilly and the Victoria: they were not his. The city was a mystery, a riddle, a puzzle, a maze. Though it wasn't his, it welcomed him. 

In the North, the city had been a place defined by its opposition to Northern values. London was otherness: by definition, not-home. The place-where-no-one-says-hello, the place-where-no-one-smiles-on-the-Tube, the place-that-dominates-the-news-coverage, the place-where-such-basic-foodstuffs-as-gravy-and-mushy-peas-were-alien. A grim city of Union Jacks hanging sodden in the rain, the view of them blocked by a red bus moving slowly through a morass of traffic. He saw people – friends and family – move down south and become seduced like sailors visiting Circe. One by one they fell to it and returned to the North (briefly) convinced that “It's the only place worth living.” No, he said. Anywhere but there. 

Experience changes us. The North became too quiet. The stillness he had once enjoyed became suffocating and the time that stretched out demanding to be filled was a silent accusation of his own tedium. Only when he was busy did he feel like himself: only when he was over-stretched and exhausted did he feel his personality growing and evolving. Rare weekends away, infrequent trips to conferences and events, were the occasions when he felt himself becoming the person he was born to be. 

Over a summer, he discovered the city to be a place that defies definition. It wasn't the place he had thought it was but no-one he spoke to could quite tell him what it was. City of artists and culture? City of business and finance? City of learning and education? City of hipsters or city of yuppies? City of liberals or city of conservatives? City of happiness or city of sorrow? All of these and more. Layers of city laid on top of one another and shifting based on the perception of the individual. Not one thing or another but all things simultaneously. A puzzle-city. A contradiction-city.

While he was there, the puzzle-city filled his mind and freed him from the questioning and anxiety that usually filled the vacuum of his consciousness. Even from a short time in the city, he was filled with himself. "...a complicated love... it's exhilarating, frustrating, surprising, reaffirming. It's tiring, it's never-ending, it fills your life. That figure I'm chasing out in the distance, out in the grey streets, always slips away." In this city, chasing work, chasing friends, chasing love, he felt himself filling up and at long last achieving his potential. 

From Flickr user: @Doug88888

The energy of the city begs for definition and defies it. Books are written about it, TV shows defined by it, music inspired by its people. Wandering the city's streets, a thousand images and cultural allusions come to mind. Before he even lived here, his idea of the city was suffused through cultural osmosis. The skyline over the river: the opening title music of Sherlock. The Old Bailey: the Fifth of November. Earl's Court: the Marquis de Carabas. Senate House: a boot stamping on a human face. London calling. Not now that strength which in old days / Moved earth and heaven. 

He can count the number of native Londoners that he's met here on one hand. Everyone else came here for a different reason. It's a city of people with stories of how and why they ended up here. One glance around a late-night Tube train is enough to know that this is a city that attracts the broken and the lost. People who want to fill themselves with distraction; people who crave the anonymity of a crowded street; people who ran here to hide. Those who weren't lost before quickly become so. 

The city's energy and beauty fed him and made him more than he thought he could be. He achieved. He walked the great halls of learning. He met the people he admired and emulated. He gave out awards and steered an organisation. He discovered that among the broken and the lost of the city, he was not as broken as he thought. He shed his anxiety became socially functional. He worked himself to exhaustion, laughed harder than he'd ever laughed, broke the law, loved and lost, philosophised and danced. 

From Flickr user: Jason M Parrish

No-one he talked to could define the city's mysterious allure. It drew them for different but shared experiences. The name itself has power and substitutes for entire sentences expressing a myriad of perspectives: “London” said looking towards the Palace of Westminster at night while watching trains rush over the bridge to Charing Cross; “London” said handing someone a glass of wine with a roll of the eyes; “London” said huddled under an umbrella amidst the crowds of Covent Garden; “London” said hopeless before a crowded Underground train; “London” said looking at The Shard on the horizon from a hill in North London. 

"Every Londoner must have a story, I was told. But it's not true. Some people retract when they come in contact with this city, like salt on a anemone; they become lesser versions and pine for the country. But more often than not, the word 'London' stirred up great emotion. Asking them about the city, people grinned unabashedly, winced or sighed, or would roll their eyes or reminisce. London meant a new beginning, a hell-hole, a wonderland; too big, too foul; a safety blanket, point of pride, unfortunate problem, temporary mattress location; safety, salvation, life's work. A place to stack empty tins of lager. Stage, Mecca, my water, my oxygen. London as cell, jail and favour. London meant 'not living in England while living in England', it meant 'ignoring what my father said', it meant 'I hope I like the husband I'm going to meet at the airport.' Londoners cling to reserve, but find a reason to ask a question and their reserve is broken. Living history is thrilling, especially in an eloquent city, in a talkative town, in a place where people fought to get here, fought to stay here, fought to get out." (Taylor, C., Londoners) 

One morning, he stopped stock-still in the Tube station closest to his workplace. He stopped, with the morning crowds bustling around him, and he stared at an image on the wall. He was certain that he hadn't seen it there before and even more certain that he would have remembered. It was an image of a labyrinth. The labyrinth had followed him for years. He was obsessed by mazes and riddles, confusion and madness. When he closed his eyes, he saw the curving circle of a labyrinth. He had devoted his formative years to the exploration of the tortured labyrinth of his own mind. He had seen the same image carved into thousand year-old stone and wondered if the ancients had shared his obsession. For him, the universe was a labyrinth and a puzzle: a mystery waiting to be solved. He feared its Asterion – and occasionally feared that he was Asterion – and yet found the labyrinth comforting. 

From Flickr user: grahamc99

Labyrinths appeared in Underground stations across London that month. Each one a unique black and white circular labyrinth – in the classical sense: a maze with a single path to the centre. Designed by conceptual artist Mark Wallinger to mark the London Underground's 150th anniversary, one is installed at each of the system's 270 stations. The artwork represents the labyrinthine nature of the Underground system – a meandering system that takes commuters on a single route from where they are to where they need to be and back again. It also represents the labyrinth that is London: a city of curling streets, fantastical engineering, dreams and nightmares. 

On seeing a labyrinth, he was transfixed. In this city where he's decided he can escape from himself, he is confronted by a labyrinth – his labyrinth – and realises that he can't escape and nor should he. It's only natural, he realises, that he should move to a city that is a puzzle. The labyrinth hasn't only found him again: it's consumed him. He is in the labyrinth-city and it's where he belongs. 

When Borges called London “a splintered labyrinth”, he was not quite accurate. London is a labyrinth of splintered people. A labyrinth of the broken and the lost. It's here, in a city of confusion and contradiction, that he will discover who he is.

The future of librarianship: a LibCampLdn session pitch

On the 2nd of March, I will be pitching a session at Library Camp London: 

I, for one, welcome our new robot overlords…: technology, digital libraries, and the future of librarianship. 

The quantity of digital information now far surpasses the quantity of printed information (1). Technology is now unavoidable in librarianship and new developments in mobile computing, cloud computing, information retrieval, and augmented reality continue to change the way that users interact with information. In this session, we’ll discuss the future of librarianship in an age of abstracted digital information. Will librarians need to become librarian-IT hybrids and what skills does this require? Is librarianship moving from a traditionally humanities-based subject to a science subject? What should a digital library be? When software can replicate the capabilities of the human mind, what role does the human have in information management? 

In January, as I was compiling my music playlist for the month ahead, I stumbled across I Monster’s Daydream in Blue (2) in my digital music collection. I added Daydream in Blue to my January playlist because the track represents an important sea-change in my thinking that has impacted my career and my entire professional life. 

Daydream in Blue was the first MP3 I ever downloaded (3). This file – which, due to copying to different hard drives and different music devices is ontologically distinct from the one I actually downloaded in 2001 – represents to me the unique potential of digitally-encoded information and how digital information overcomes the limitations of information encoded in print format. When I downloaded this file all those years ago, I discovered that digital music was easy to access, it took up no physical space, it could be copied and manipulated in various ways, and, due to this ability to manipulate it, I felt a keener sense of ownership of the music than I felt about the ownership of physical music (4). 

For me, music IS digital. Music lends itself peculiarly well to digital formats. Musical works “are not objects you can pick up or steal of even locate anywhere. They aren’t anywhere, it would seem. They’re not situated in space and time; not, apparently situated in our world.” (5) Music is a more abstract art-form than literature, painting, or cinema. Music floats through the air: it doesn't belong in any physical prison. Though mathematics and computational logic were the first information forms to be transferred to the digital realm, it was the transfer of music to this realm that sparked the digital revolution and changed the thinking of so many people. The Digital Music War of the early Web – and in particular the Battle of Napster – involved fights that were not just about ownership of music and creative copyright but were painful convulsions as an industry’s soul transferred from the analog realm to the digital realm. 

By the digital realm, I mean what Gleick refers to as the ‘infosphere’: “Most of the biosphere cannot see the infosphere; it is invisible, a parallel universe humming with ghostly inhabitants. But they are not ghosts to us - not anymore. We humans, alone among the earth's organic creatures, live in both worlds at once. It is as though, having long coexisted with the unseen, we have begun to develop the needed extrasensory perception.” (6) 

'labyrinthine circuit board lines' by Flickr user: quapan

We’re now at a point where books and most other forms of information are being transferred to the infosphere and, like when music was transferred, we’re seeing convulsions. It is a time of change for information management and librarianship. Information is becoming divorced from its paper moorings. There are young people in the world who are discovering ebooks in the same way that I discovered digital music: people for whom books ARE digital; who see digital formats as the best, most functional way to encode textual information; who have grown up in the presence of a planet-spanning digital network of information. In the same way that ‘Daydream is Blue.mp3’ changed the thinking of a teenage boy in a bedroom in Manchester, digital information changes the way that we think of information and knowledge. "We’ve grown up thinking that this is how knowledge works. But as the digital age is revealing, that’s how knowledge worked when its medium was paper. Transform the medium by which we develop, preserve, and communicate knowledge, and we transform knowledge." (7) 

More than any other profession, LIS is at the heart of this information maelstrom. Our defining commodity – our ‘product’ – is changing (/ has changed) from a physical print-based format to an abstracted digital format. This is a similar but greater shift to when information first became an encoded commodity. The growth of the infosphere changes us and makes us more than human: "Latour and others have rightly identified the domestication of the human mind that took place with pen and paper (Latour 1986). This is because computers, like pen and paper, help to stabilise meaning, by cascading and visualising encoded knowledge that allows it to be continually 'drawn, written, [and] recoded' (Latour 1986:16). Computational techniques could give us greater powers of thinking, larger reach for our imaginations, and, possibly, allow us to reconnect to political notions of equality and redistribution based on the potential of computation to give to each according to their need and to each according to their ability." (8) 

In order to adapt, we use new technologies and integrate them into our existing organisations. Libraries have become hybrid libraries containing shelves of printed books and extending beyond their walls with even more expansive digital collections. Library staff are becoming library-IT hybrids: we use computers to do our work; we carry mobile computers to help us with navigation, communication, information access, entertainment, everything; we are at the forefront of the development of ‘everyware’ (9); we use technology and in so doing we become more than human. We are becoming 'everyday cyborgs' and for all its advantages this may lead to a sense of existential angst and uncertainty: 

Dante Cyborg by Flickr user: The PIX-JOCKEY

"We're cyborgs, creatures of nature and culture, biology and technology—-prosthetic gods whose sleek carapace, like Darth Vader's mask or the Borg's body armor, conceals the increasingly obsolete Darwinian holdover shriveling inside. I think McLuhan and Simmel and even Toffler, with his arm-waving about "information overload," "the overstimulated individual," and "bombardment of the senses," are responding to one of the fundamental cultural dynamics of the industrial and post-industrial ages, namely, the psychological effects of the growing chasm between Darwinian evolution, which moves at glacial pace, and the social and cultural changes brought on by technological innovation, changes that seem to be happening at mind-blurring speed. What you're calling future shock is the sensation, at least in technologically advanced societies, that the Cartesian mind/body split is reaching the breaking point; that our Darwinian legacy is just so much drag coefficient in a society that lives more and more of its life on the other side of the screen, in social networks and virtual worlds. Cognitive neuroscience is providing abundant evidence that this divide is real: scientists talk about the "forebrain bottleneck," the evolutionarily determined limits on our ability to multitask that affect, say, our ability to navigate rush-hour traffic while crossing against the light and texting and listening to our iPods or talking on the cellphone while driving." (10) 

In my Library Camp London session, I want to discuss what it means to be an information professional in an age of digital information. What impact does this the infosphere have on the information profession and on the people in the profession? As we further augment ourselves with the technology required to access the corpus of digital information, as we develop new skills (Gleick’s "extrasensory perception") to survive integration with the digital realm, as information management tasks that were traditionally performed by humans become performable by machines and software, do we feel liberation or alienation? Are we becoming cyborgs and should we? Must we be upgraded? What roles are there for humans in information management? 

The central professional question is: what is the future of librarianship? 

The central personal and existential question is: how do we deal with feeling like this: "[We are] dealing with massive, high-entropy amounts of info and ambiguity and conflict and flux; [we’re] continually discovering new vistas of personal ignorance and delusion. In sum, to really try to be informed and literate today is to feel stupid nearly all the time, and to need help." (11) 

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(1) As of February 2010, the Library of Congress contained approximately 10 terabytes of information in book form and 160 terabytes of information in archived websites (1a). 

(1a) Gleick, J., 2011. The information: a history, a theory, a flood. London: Fourth Estate. 

(2) Daydream in Blue is an unremarkable but catchy electronic remix of an existing recording. It enjoyed a brief popularity in 2001. I have never heard anything else by I Monster but I’m aware that it is an English electronic music group whose music is similar to but inferior to The Avalanches’ (2a). 

(2a) Interestingly, in contrast to the discussion in the main text above, The Avalanche’s single Frontier Psychiatrist is one of the few CD singles that I own. 

(3) Via means of questionable legality and morality. 

(4) For me, ownership is about ‘control’ rather than ‘holding a physical item’. Which could be a whole other blog post (which could explore why I dislike iOS and Apple devices). But I digress (in what is already a digression)… 

(5) Kivy, P., 2002. Introduction to a philosophy of music. Oxford: Oxford University Press, p. 203. 

(6) Gleick, J., 2011. The information: a history, a theory, a flood. London: Fourth Estate, p. 323. 

(7) Weinberger, D., 2011. Too big to know: rethinking knowledge now that the facts aren't the facts, experts are everywhere, and the smartest person in the room is the room. New York: Basic Books, p. 8. 

(8) Berry, D. M., 2011. The philosophy of software: code and mediation in the digital age. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 22-23. 

(9) Greenfield, A., 2006. Everyware: the dawning age of ubiquitous computing. Boston: New Riders. 

(10) Dery, M., 2013. ““Futureshock” proves that the future really is unevenly distributed.” Published 8 February 2013. Available online at http://io9.com/5982864/futureshock-proves-that-the-future-really-is-unevenly-distributed. Accessed 17 February 2013. 

(11) Wallace, D. F., 2007. ‘Deciderization 2007 – A Special Report’. In: Wallace, D. F., 2012. Both flesh and not: essays. New York: Little, Brown and Company, pp. 316-317.

Unpacking the draft page: time, space, and computer games

A few weeks ago, I went to a seminar organised by the King’s College Centre for E-research. It was delivered by Elena Pierazzo who is a lecturer and researcher at the Department of Digital Humanities at King’s College London. 

The focus of the seminar was modern draft manuscripts and how to represent these digitally. These are texts such as notebooks, first drafts of monographs, or other texts which are initially produced by authors for personal reasons. As specific examples, she pointed to the notebooks of Kafka, Proust, da Vinci, Austen, Nietzsche, and many of the manuscripts which are kept in the British Library’s Treasures gallery. 

The difficulty with these texts is that they are quintessentially human and quintessentially print commodities: the layout of the writing is messy, incoherent, and idiosyncratic. They feature ‘exploded notes’, doodles, separate blocks of writing running in various ways in various places on the page. They can be read geographically (traditional left-to-right, up-to-down reading) or chronologically (in terms of how the author put them together followed by revisions, corrections, etc.). Although they are complex and beautiful print commodities, they cannot hold the interest of the average reader for longer than a few seconds. 

Various attempts have been made to represent these draft manuscripts digitally (see the British Library’s Turning the Pages™, for example) but these usually involve either marking-up a print reproduction or mimicking the print version in digital version. Often these are poor representations which focus on structure and syntax rather than layout of the text. Though they are attempts to mimic the print, they essentially look like different objects. 

A page from the Lindisfarne Gospel

The solution of Dr. Pierazzo’s team is to use TEI and gamification to create digital versions which accurately represent the semantic content of the draft manuscript and engage readers to explore that content. TEI (the Text Encoding Initative standard) is the de facto standard for transcription of texts in digital humanities. Pre-2011, TEI focused on transcription based on structure and semantics rather than appearance. This failed on certain texts such as medieval manuscripts in which the layout can be as important as the text’s semantic content (see, for example, the Lindisfarne Gospel). 

At the end of 2011, TEI P5 v2.0.1 was released which offers support for ‘genetic editing’. The new version can transcribe manuscripts based on layout rather than solely on semantics. It can recognise complex writing phenomena such as notes that aren’t part of the main text, metamarks, scribbles under doodles, etc. 

The team was also interested in using aspects of gamification in the design of new digital editions. Gamification involves using the engaging elements of computer games in other areas such as scholarly research. It’s about making activities engaging by setting achievable goals, making activities task-oriented, and enabling the tracing of progress. For example, one throws angry birds at evil pigs in order to achieve a goal, in order to earn points, in order to create achievements towards which one can point. The team was keen to use these principles to engage readers with draft manuscripts. 

To produce a prototype, they took a draft manuscript by Proust. They divided the digital reproduction into distinct blocks of text and then tracked two separate sequences: the writing sequence (in what order Proust wrote the text) and the reading sequence (in what order the text should be read for the reader’s understanding). From 5 days of work and processing using TEI, XML, XSLT, and some JavaScript for the animation, they created the Proust Prototype which is a dynamic, animated way of viewing the manuscript page digitally (which unfortunately doesn’t appear to work in Internet Explorer). All the details and code that was used are available on the website. 

The Proust Prototype showing some markup.

The limits of this prototype include visualising sequences across separate pages, visualising sequences across separate notebooks, and micro-interactivity with small blocks of text (metamarks, stage directions, comments, etc. which were all encoded in TEI but not intuitively interactive in the prototype). 

Dr. Pierazzo ended by making the point that computers can help us to do something new in this area. Computers and computer technologies have permeated so many areas of scholarly research particularly in the natural sciences, the social sciences, and mathematics: the humanities however, with their particular focus on human interpretation and subjective judgement, have been the last subject area to properly use computers to advance the discipline. Digital humanities represent the exploration of the last frontier for computer interaction in the intellectual domain. If computer technology can be used to analyse something as essentially human as a messy notebook, then there is no limit to their application in academic research.

My first week. Or: How I learned to stop worrying and found the bathroom.

The first week of a new job is strange. You spend your time performing actions and doing things that will eventually be quotidian and dull; that will eventually fade into the background tedium of life and pass unnoticed as you go about your daily routines. But because it’s the first time, they have the sheen of the new and the exciting glamour of the unexperienced. Getting a London Underground train to work, entering the library’s staff entrance, getting some lunch from the staff restaurant, checking my emails at my desk, finding the bathroom (1), getting the Tube home. Soon all of these things will pick up the patina of the overly familiar but for now, for at least one week, everything feels different. Everything is different to Durham, to what I’m used to, to my life. Amidst all this difference and without the stabilising effect of routine, who am I? 

At 1030 on Monday 10th December 2012, I stood in the staff lobby of the British Library’s St. Pancras site idly chatting to a couple of other new starters and clutching an ominous-looking envelope emblazoned with the words ‘WARNING – DO NOT OPEN’ like the envelope that a spy would receive containing details of his/her mission or that an assassin would carry containing the name of his/her target. The lobby was unfamiliar: though I’d been in it before during the interview process, it still struck me as very different to my previous libraries. More than anything else, it reminds me of the Ministry of Information in Terry Gilliam’s Brazil: from the excess of marble to the bank of four elevators from which people emerge and into which they disappear; from the electronic and futuristic clock-in, clock-out terminals that smack of mechanized bureaucracy to the bizarrely incongruous and Gilliamian statue of Mr. Punch which stands in front of the elevators like a creepy, diminutive sentinel. Amidst all this ‘newness’ – this ‘difference’ – my nervous energy was keeping me on my feet. 

(Not) the British Library's lobby.

Eventually two of us were chosen from the assembled throng to ascend to the 6th Floor. The 6th is the top floor of the building: inaccessible from the public elevators; inaccessible by stairs (2); highly secure due to the delicacy and rarity of the manuscripts and archives being digitised. The Qatar Digitisation Project currently occupies a custom-built office space designed for 42 people. There are 12 staff currently on the project (2 of whom spend most of their time in the conservation lab and digitisation studio respectively). We are spread throughout the room creating an eerie emptiness that somehow makes one feel closer to one’s scattered colleagues. In the quiet of the practically-empty office, someone singing softly to music can be heard on the other side of the room. 

Everything about my first day enforces the notion that this is something different for me. The scale of the British Library is different to any library organisation I’ve worked in. Among a flurry of facts and figures that my manager presents, I hear that the British Library employs approximately 2000 people. On the ‘new starter’ area of the website, Roly Keating, the Chief Executive, describes the British Library as “one of the greatest libraries in the world… operating at the cutting edge of the information revolution… [A] world leading provider of global knowledge in the digital age… look[ing] for the best and the brightest people…” I’ve heard it referred to as ‘the heart of British librarianship’, ‘the Mothership’, ‘the Death Star’ (3). Frankly it’s all a little overwhelming. 

And as my induction continued and I got a broader overview of the project, I was struck by the realisation that this is a different kind of work. As a manager talked through the project and what we’re trying to achieve over the next two years, the ramifications of the word ‘project’ hit me: we are trying to achieve something; there is a definite goal in place. In every other library job, I’ve been continuing an ongoing service: keeping an Army library open; providing continued access to e-resources for Durham University students. In this new job, there is a defined goal and one endpoint with specific deliverables which must be ready by that time. 

It reminds me of Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings films (4). As a spotty teen, in lieu of partying and kissing girls and whatnot, I watched every documentary on each The Lord of the Rings Extended Edition DVD box-set. I watched that team of amazing film-makers come together and work for years towards a set goal. They found the best people and brought them together to use their skills in an atmosphere crackling with intelligence and creativity. I imagined how close the people on that team would be after struggling for years to create those films. Working together; socialising together; sharing ideas together; having fun together. I wanted to be part of a team like that. I wanted to create something as important as those films (5). 

As I met the project team last week, I was struck by how different we are. It’s like a stereotypical ‘crack team’ of people from different backgrounds. There are archival experts, cataloguing experts, tech experts, Arabic experts, medieval Arabic experts, project managers. And me. Why, I wondered, have I been brought onto this team? What niche do I fill? 

Another team of experts from varying backgrounds. I feel like the character at bottom-left.

On Tuesday 11th December, after my second day at work, I attended a lecture at the British Academy entitled ‘‘All the World’s Knowledge’: Universal Authors’ Rights’ delivered by Professor Jane Ginsburg of the Columbia University School of Law. The first section (6) was on ‘the dream of universal knowledge’ and digital libraries. Professor Ginsburg spoke about the history of the dream from the librarians of Alexandria to Paul Otlet to Vannevar Bush to Google. And I realised I knew all that: I’ve researched those figures and read around the subject; I wrote about digital libraries for my postgraduate dissertation; I’ve written articles about digital libraries. 

Our self-identity – how we define ourselves in our own eyes – can change so slowly, so glacially, that it seems not to change at all. To ourselves, we appear to be the same person from one day to the next. And sometimes it takes a complete change – doing completely different things in a different environment – for us to realise that we’ve gradually and imperceptibly become someone else. Amidst all the confusion and stress and socialising and networking of the past few months, I forgot that I know about digital libraries. Creating a digital library from scratch will be a challenge – even in a team as good as this one – and I’m scared… but maybe we can create something great. 

Everything is different now. But everything suddenly being different can remind you of who you are. 

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(1) This was a job for the third day. My staff pass initially wouldn’t allow me access to the highly secure 6th Floor where my desk is so I was afraid to leave the work area to go find the bathroom in case I couldn’t get back in and I’d have to knock forlornly on the door while someone on the other side of the glass tried to remember who I was having only met me once and I’d self-combust in embarrassment and involuntary blushing and the incident would somehow end up in the library’s newsletter. 

(2) Ominously so. We can get down in case of an emergency (2a) but if we feel like exercising of a morning we have to ascend to the 5th Floor and then take the elevator the rest of the way. 

(2a) Likely scenarios were thoroughly and terrifyingly covered in the online induction training. 

(3) The canteen – a sprawling, high school-like canteen based on cashless payment cards and offering amazingly cheap subsidised meals – particularly reminds me of Eddie Izzard’s ‘Death Star canteen bit’. For some reason. 

(4) Why I’m thinking of The Lord of the Rings at this specific point in time is a mystery…

(5) While not that important in the Grand Scheme of Things, those films were important to me then. 

(6) Of three. Without going into too much detail, Professor Ginsburg’s thesis was that the dream of universal knowledge (or at least our current attempt to actualise that dream vis-à-vis large-scale digital libraries such as Google Books (6a) or the Digital Public Library of America) fundamentally conflicts with the dream of universal authors’ rights (ie. the right of every author to be recognised and compensated accordingly for his/her work). Although we desperately need updated copyright and intellectual property law to reflect the abundance of digital commodities, such laws should not be rushed through or ill-judged. For librarians, she also offered a cautionary note about libraries cosying up with commercial partners including Google and Amazon: when libraries do so, isn’t something lost? 

(6a) Also I cannot tell you how excited I was to meet, on my second day at work, someone at the British Library who works directly on the Google Books Digitisation Project: the Project I have studied extensively; the Project I enthused about in my postgraduate dissertation; the Project that aspires to the Total Library.

An idiot's guide to Annual Staff Reviews

One of my last major tasks at Durham University Library was delivering performance reviews for several members of my team. At this point in my career, professional colleagues and friends are approaching similar levels: a level of semi-management where we’re asked to perform tasks involving supervision of co-workers, people management, and people skills. There’s a point at which a career built around a love of books and computers becomes a career about people and this task felt like a milestone on that professional journey. 

Process 

At Durham University, the Annual Staff Review (1) process requires a university employee to reflect on his/her performance over the past year (ideally with reference to his/her review from the previous year). He/she then meets with a supervisor to discuss his/her performance, to set some objectives for the coming year, and to identify any development needs.

Generic image of a manager and his young, dynamic, multi-ethnic team with only one woman. From Flickr user: Victor1558.

That’s how the process was explained to me at a Human Resources course. I was open-minded as I entered the ‘Old Library’ (2) at Grey’s College and availed myself of free (filter!) coffee and free (fresh!) cookies. I’d returned from London a day earlier than I wanted to specifically so that I could attend the course. I wanted to understand more about the process and to develop myself. But as the Human Resources representative spoke at length about the corporate philosophy behind the process and the pop psychology that undergirds the exercise, I felt my enthusiasm wane. The more the rep explained that it was not a ‘box-ticking exercise’, the more I felt it was. I drank more coffee and thought that the ASR process formalises something that should happen organically. True development – true growth – comes not from filling in forms or setting clear, quantifiable objectives in a report to be signed and countersigned by two heads of department both of whom are performing dozens of identical reviews themselves with dozens of employees and thus filling in more forms and setting more clear, quantifiable objectives to be signed and countersigned ad infinitum. Psychological development is free-flowing and natural following from what a person wants and chooses to do. Not everyone fits a rigid model of 12-month objectives and 5-year plans: some people take years to grow into themselves; some, in a spurt of months, suddenly become the person they’d always wanted to be; some push and push and still find themselves unable to change. I left the training course with a bladder full of coffee and a heart full of disappointment. 

Panic 

However, my ideological objections were a cover to my real problem. I was scared. I’m not a manager and I’ve never thought of myself as a leader. At library school, I hated – and got the lowest marks in – the module on management. Aside from feeling like I lacked the requisite skills, I thought that I was no fit person to evaluate anyone else. I’m a lucky moron who, through some hard work and a lot of luck, manages to live a charmed life muddling through his career and his personal life. I also felt too ‘meta’: as if I’d always be standing outside the process looking in it while it was happening (3). How could I evaluate someone else? How could anyone? 

And what if I failed? Management, in some sense, requires taking responsibility for other people’s wellbeing. I felt responsible for helping someone to develop: for looking at him/her, evaluating him/her, and seriously and earnestly helping him/her to grow as a person and an information professional. That’s why I returned from London a day early for the training course and that’s why I refused to go home on that day despite a terrible migraine. I was responsible to those I had to review. 

Preparation 

Generic image of 'preparation'. From Flickr user: agrilifetoday.

As with any challenge, preparation helped. I organised dates and times to meet my reviewees, I booked rooms for the meetings, and I read their self-completed Annual Staff Review forms. I prepared scripts dictating how I intended to guide the hour-long conversations. Most importantly, I sat down and really thought about the other people. Who are they? What do I know about them? How do they work? What do they do on a day-to-day basis? How do they feel about that? How have they developed? This was a fascinating experience: how often does one really think long and hard about the experience of being another human being? One can attain high levels of empathy with good friends or those with whom one is in a relationship but co-workers can be a different matter. We can share the same room with them for 7 hours a day every day but never stop to consider their phenomenological experience, their stream-of-consciousness, their unique Dasein. Who is this other person and what it is like to be him/her? 

Professionalism 

When the time came for the reviews, I dressed more smartly than usual and comported myself slightly more professionally than usual. I took the reviews seriously and hoped that my reviewees would follow my example and do the same. I continued to prepare to the degree that I would want a reviewer to do: made sure all was ready for the meetings and read through my notes.

I decided to conduct the reviews in a three-part structure covering past, present, and future (4). 'Present' outlined the procedure, gave a quick introduction to the ASR process, and told the reviewee what was going to happen. 'Past' involved a review of the year as a whole, a discussion of major successes, a discussion of failures, and any comments that the reviewee wished to make about how the library is run. 'Future' involved identifying development needs based on our previous discussion and setting objectives to meet these needs over the coming year. This structure seemed nice and neat and turned out to be a good way to drive discussion forward.

During the actual reviews, I pretended. I pretended that I was a confident manager in a position to evaluate someone’s performance. I pretended that I knew in what direction I was taking the conversation. I pretended to be an interviewer having had years of experience on the other side of the interview desk. I pretended not to be scared. 

And not only did I get through the reviews but they went extraordinarily well. I drew people out of themselves, led them to discuss their ambitions and dreams, set themselves goals, and uncover psychological and developmental threads that hadn’t been set down in the forms. I pretended to be a professional and a manager and I pretended enough that I came to believe it. If you pretend to be someone for long enough, maybe it becomes who you are. 

People 

The rep in Human Resources said a lot about how to conduct reviews and how to treat people but I thought I could boil it all down to one phrase. A golden rule for management and a golden rule for how to be a human being: 

Don’t be a dick. 

Dickishness makes Jesus facepalm. From Flickr user: tonystl.

In some ways, this is a modern variation on Immanuel Kant’s Categorical Imperative (“Act in such a way that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, never merely as a means to an end, but always at the same time as an end.”) which is itself a variation on Jesus of Nazareth’s Golden Rule ("Do unto others as you would have them do unto you"). Both of which are put differently by Atticus Finch in Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird: “…you never really know a man until you stand in his shoes and walk around in them.” 

People sometimes tell me that I’m nice. Occasionally when I wonder why people are so nice to me, friends tell me that it’s because I’m nice to people. Delivering Annual Staff Reviews led me to realise that I am good with people: over the past two years, I’ve levelled up and am therefore capable of whole new tasks and a whole new skill tree that had previously been blocked off. When I move next month and open up a new area of the world-map to explore, I know I’ll be able to survive. 

The only way to survive and to succeed around other people is to think of them as people in their own right as valuable and important as yourself. Treat people with respect, manage them as you would want to be managed, listen to them, understand where they’re coming from, don’t be a dick. (5) 

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(1) ASR. 

(2) A room which turned out to be neither particularly old nor, judging from the lack of books, a library. 

(3) I’ve done this in the past in interviews, dates, and other social situations whereby I ‘step outside’ the high-pressure event I’m taking part in and comment on it while it’s happening. These are generally descriptive comments about clichés that I notice, analytical comments attempting to analyse why I’m behaving in a certain way, or evaluative comments like “This is going badly” or, far more often, “This is going well.” 

(4) A Christmas Carol is one of my dad's favourite books and its influence continues to be felt on my psyche.

(5) Last Sunday, Charlie Brooker used this as his third rule for interacting with other people on the Internet but I have referred to the phrase as my philosophy before this and the tweet is somewhere out there to prove it.

Gestalt shift

In psychology, a gestalt shift is when your perception suddenly changes. In his Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein illustrated this with the duck-rabbit illusion: you can see either the duck or the rabbit but not both at the same time. Your brain switches between the two in an instant. Your perception changes. In life, there are longer term gestalt shifts: moments when your perception shifts and suddenly everything has changed. Afterwards, you see things anew and the universe clicks together in a different way (1). I can think of at least two times in my life when these gestalt shifts have occurred and changed everything. 

A German duck / A German rabbit

The first was on the 15th of July 2009 on the day I decided to become a librarian. After an interview for a graduate trainee position at Manchester Metropolitan University Library, I realised I had been more comfortable in that interview room with those other candidates – those library folk – than I had been in many social situations. I gave up a place at law school and completely adjusted my plans in order to pursue a career that felt… right. 

The second was the 18th of July 2012 on a day when I was in Chicago and realised that not only had I survived my trip to America – a trip involving confusion, exhaustion, anxiety, and fear – but I had enjoyed it. I’d enjoyed it more than almost any other experience in my life. By straining at the very edge of my social anxiety, I pushed through the barrier and discovered that I wanted to be around people and do things. 

Since Chicago, things haven’t been the same (2). When I came home, I wrote that I felt like Frodo Baggins at the end of The Lord of the Rings: 

At the end of The Return of the King, after all his adventures, Frodo Baggins returns to his nice quiet home in the Shire. I always thought that Frodo should be so happy to get home, to write the Red Book of his experiences, and to finally relax after all his hardship. But, Frodo, like his uncle Bilbo before him, finds the Shire changed on his return: or at least, changed for him. He’s seen too much; done too much; suffered and fallen and won. How can you go back to the way things were? How can you ever settle down again? 

That feeling never went away. It seems absurd given all that I’ve done and seen in the past three years but I got into librarianship for the chance of a quiet life. To be left alone with books and infinite curiosity. But experience has changed all that and my curiosity reaches beyond the pages of books. 

A solicitor for whose firm I was doing work experience once told me that I was intelligent and that the curse of intelligence is boredom. He said that intelligent people grow bored easily and that they need – they crave – constant mental stimulation. Otherwise they collapse in on themselves. Since July, I’ve travelled to Sheffield, Edinburgh, Birmingham, and London (several times) in attempts to stave off boredom and recapture the spirit of adventure. Durham – a charming city that I really like – has come to seem too quiet and the North-East has come to seem too empty. When I’ve not been travelling or meeting people or doing things, I’ve been bored. 

Life doesn’t change on its own: you have to make change happen through work, rigour, and intelligence. I’ve worked over the past few months to change things to match my new perception. This has meant a renewed focus on the people in my life, making some personal changes which I don’t want to go into, and making some professional changes which I do want to go into. 

And so, I have several announcements: 

1. I have accepted an invitation to join the Board of SLA Europe as Co-Chair of the Early Careers Committee. I will be taking over from Bethan Ruddock and joining Lyndsay Rees-Jones in organising the Early Career Conferences Awards 2013 (3). 

2. I have accepted a position at the British Library. I will be helping to co-ordinate the Qatar Digitisation Project.

And, as a result of the above: 

3. I will be moving to London. 

I have dreamt of working at the British Library for years. It sounds silly. Some men dream of walking on other planets, some of curing diseases, some of amassing great wealth. Since I read Borges' 'The Library of Babel', I have dreamt of the Total Library (4). The opportunity to work at our main legal deposit library - at the heart of British librarianship - is incredibly exciting. It comes at a point when it benefits me professionally and personally to move to London. And, for the first time in years, I'll be living with other people again rather than on my own: meeting new people and doing new things. 

I've very much valued my time at Durham University Library - particularly the people I've met there. I'm very grateful for the experiences there which have changed me into the person I am now. But it's time to move on.

The British Library at St Pancras in London

Everything is going to change. Gestalt shift. 

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(1) For a better expression of this, listen to the song 'Suddenly Everything Has Changed (Death Anxiety Caused by Moments of Boredom)' by The Flaming Lips.

(2) Somehow it seems trite to say this. As if admitting how much that Experience meant to me somehow makes me less because there are people who have been through so much more. But I don’t care. Subjectively it was important. 

(3) A secondary purpose of this blog post is therefore to promote the awards. Look, new professionals! Look at the impact winning the award had on me!

(4) I wrote an essay on the subject for Panlibus and you can read that here. Funnily enough, I did most of the research for that essay in the British Library's Boston Spa Reading Room.

Librarians vs. users

Libraries serve humanity. 

Michael Gorman and Walt Crawford's first law of librarianship, 

Future libraries: dreams madness, and realities, p. 8.

Libraries provide a service to users (1). That is their raison d’être and we should never forget it. But there are circumstances in which conflicts arise between the service as envisioned by the user and the service as envisioned by the librarian: between the users’ immediate desire and the librarians’ professional judgement. There is a difference between ‘being good at serving’ and ‘providing a good service’. 

Campaigners in Manchester recently won their campaign to stop the “destruction of hundreds of thousands of books at the UK’s largest municipal library”. Manchester Central Library is currently undergoing renovations and, as part of the process, discarding a lot of non-fiction books. In June, a group of authors and writers – led by Melvin Burgess and containing Carol Ann Duffy, Jeanette Winterson, Simon Armitage, Mike Garry, and others – called for a halt to this destruction. Manchester City Council has acquiesced and the books will be stored in a warehouse until a decision can be made. 

From Flickr user: d.billy.

As librarians know, weeding is a necessary part of librarianship and collections management. Old books must be discarded to make way for new books. The UK publishes 206000 new books per year: libraries buy these books, fill their shelves with stock, and weed the less-used books. Non-fiction reference books – dictionaries, encyclopaedias, computer books (2) – have a limited shelf life and at a point – the publication of a new edition, the obsolescence of the software – they must be considered to be of little to no historical value and discarded. Libraries are finite buildings that contain the infinity of the written word… which is very poetic and magical and all but there’s no such thing as magic, there’s no Santa Claus, and library management is a practical job. 

It’s no longer acceptable for institutions to have basements of unknown collections, often the legacy of indiscriminate and undocumented collecting in the past. So we need to take the initiative in working out what we have. This is something that Manchester Public Library have been doing during the current refurbishment: they’ve been assessing what was, and what should be, stored in their closed stacks, and working out how that can be used in the future.

Katie Birkwood, 

Speaking truth to power: Rare Books Group annual conference 2012 (#RBSCG12)

This is a clear-cut situation (3) in which the users’ immediate desire conflicts with the librarians’ professional analysis of the library management situation. The users want all books to be kept regardless of their utility in the collection; the librarians want to trim the collection down in order to conform to Ranagnathan’s Fourth Law – “Save the time of the reader” – and make the collection more usable. In a situation like this, how does the librarian best serve the user? By doing what the user wants? Or by doing what the librarian knows to be best for the user?

Insert your own example from your workplace here. Do you ban a book because a user is disgusted by it or keep it on the shelves because you know intellectual freedom to be more important? Do you catalogue every item of digital ephemera on a reading list given to you by the faculty or do you keep the catalogue smaller and more usable? Do you spoon-feed users or encourage them to develop their own research skills? Do you allow users to eat food in the library or ban it because you know it attracts vermin?

Librarians are beholden to our users. It is our users who pay for the building, the books, and our salaries. In Higher Education, there is some concern that higher tuition fees will lead to a corresponding rise in student expectations. In university libraries, the words ‘user focus’, ‘added value’, and ‘customer service excellence’ are being floated around and partly used to justify more acquiescence to users’ demands. We regularly rely on input from our users in areas like acquisitions because they know their specialist subject better than we do. If we deny users what they ask for – and pay for – on the grounds that ‘We know best’, we open ourselves to accusations of elitism (4). And occasionally we need users to correct us: whether right or wrong, Nicholson Baker's Double Fold provided an outside perspective on print disposal practices and opened a seam of professional discourse.

From Flickr user: Celeste.

On the other hand, librarians are professionally trained, we have a base of Professional Knowledge and Skills on which to draw, and we adhere to a Code of Professional Practice. We have been taught how to weed, how to catalogue, how to acquire books. Broadly speaking, we know what we’re doing and the users do not. In the case of Manchester Library, the implication on the part of the council is that they think that the users know better than the trained library staff. That the ability to write words in a poetic order and construct compelling narratives qualifies one to manage a major metropolitan library and that the informed opinions of the librarians can be disregarded. This kind of judgement questions librarians’ professional competence and arguably indicates changing social attitudes towards the status of library staff.

Libraries serve humanity. The definition of the word 'serve' makes this a more complicated statement than it first appears. When the users' desire does not align with the librarians' judgement, to whom do we listen? The answer is probably balance, a nuanced approach, exercising individual judgement, not making sweeping generalisations about every possible situation, etc etc. As ever, life turns out to be more complex than tidy little aphorisms would often suggest.

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(1) Or patrons. Or customers. Or readers. Or visitors. Or members. Or etc.

(2) Even the most ardent book-lover could not but feel sheer staggering levels of indifference when holding a dusty, heavy copy of Microsoft Access 2001 for Dummies with a scratched accompanying CD-ROM.

(3) This is a lie. Nothing is ever clear-cut. This post isn’t about defending Manchester Libraries’ collections management policy since I know nothing about it. For all I know, they are indeed throwing away First Folios by the armload. However at the Rare Books and Special Collections Group Annual Conference 2012 a month ago, Neil MacInnes, head of Manchester Library, denied that the heritage collections were under any kind of threat.

(4) This is Devil’s advocacy. I agree with Bob Usherwood in this post that “At a time when we can see all around us the dangers of a celebrity and consumerist culture public librarians have a responsibility to provide and promote more worthwhile material. They should seek to influence rather than slavishly follow populist trends. This is not, as some critics maintain, an elitist position but one that will increase people’s enjoyment and open up new opportunities and experiences.”