Undaimonia

"You can't take the sky from me": the DPLA and the open Web

2012-01-19T12:02:00.001Z

On Tuesday, I went to see Robert Darnton speak at a JISC lecture on the Digital Public Library of America. Professor Darnton is the Director of the Harvard University Library and has been a major influence on me – on my advocacy of a UK National Digital Library and on my MA dissertation on large-scale digital libraries – so I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to see him talk about such an interesting project. Though it would be a fascinating project at any time, what particularly struck me is how the DPLA is an appropriate project for this time.

Jefferson compared scholarly learning to the lighting of a flame

As a scholar of 18th Century history, Darnton emphasised the dream of the Founding Fathers in America and of the Age of Enlightenment in Europe: the republic of letters, described in Wikipedia as “an egalitarian realm governed by knowledge that could act across political boundaries and rival state power.” In his introduction, Darnton argued that the artificial distinction between the real world and the academic world shouldn’t exist. As in the republic of letters, access to knowledge should be a public good. Particularly in the case of publicly-funded research, the fruits of such research should be available to the public who funded it (rather than our current odd situation in which the public can pay twice for the same research).

A group of people including Professor Darnton propose to change this situation, to open up access to knowledge by creating a National Digital Library for the public – the Digital Public Library of America. The DPLA will be a distributed system aggregating different digital collections already existing in America’s libraries. It will work with HathiTrust, Brewster Kahle’s Internet Archive, the Library of Congress, various universities, and government sources (primarily US states which have digitised newspaper collections). This aggregation will then be open to everyone in the United States (and beyond) to allow them to access their cultural heritage. This expansive vision has massive financial and legal obstacles. In terms of cost, a somewhat comparable project, Europeana, runs on a budget of €5 million a year; Brewster Kahle estimates the cost of digitisation at $30 million for a large library. But America is unique in having private foundations which are willing to donate money for public goods: it’s an economic culture that doesn’t exist to the same degree in Britain and makes the DPLA a unique undertaking. In terms of law, the DPLA will of course respect copyright law and in the first instance will focus on ebooks in the public domain and, where possible, orphan works.

As an advocate of a National Digital Library for the UK, I think that the DPLA has potentially massive implications for similar projects. At the least, it provides a proof of concept; at the most, it could expand into the Total Library that we’ve previously only glimpsed in fantasies. The DPLA sets a precedent by proving that institutions can work together to build something great and that there are still people who recognise that access to knowledge is a public good – not a public good that is without costs but a public good nonetheless. I look forward to seeing the DPLA develop and to its launch, currently projected for April 2013.

But what particularly struck me is how appropriate the DPLA is for the time in which we find ourselves. This is a time when we see the Internet threatened with censorship and restrictions, when information is sealed behind publisher paywalls, when those vested interests try to pretend that digital objects are the same as physical objects. This is a time of conflict between the philosophies of closedness and openness.

The DPLA site went dark on January 18th to protest SOPA

Professor Darnton has been a great advocate of openness in information and research. He began his lecture by summarising the serials crisis in which the price of scholarly journals has risen a grotesquely exploitative rate – often four times the rate of inflation resulting in publishers (especially the ‘Big Three’) reaping 20-40% profit margins. He’s written about this before in his Three Jeremiads article for the New York Review of Books and in The Case for Books. It is a monopoly on information which Professor Darnton has done his best to combat by encouraging Open Access, open digital projects, and influencing the ‘Harvard Model’ which has increased the compliance rate of Harvard academics depositing their material in the university’s Open Access repository from 4% to 50%.

This emphasis on the philosophy of openness struck me partly because of the stark contrast I saw between the openness of the planned DPLA on Tuesday and the closure of many websites in protest at SOPA and PIPA on Wednesday: the open Web contrasted with a vision of a closed Web; a dream of openness set against the nightmare of what could come to pass if we don’t exercise, in Darnton’s words, “eternal vigilance”. When I asked Professor Darnton about the potential impact of legislation like the Stop Online Privacy Act, he pointed towards similarly restrictive legislation that could close off access to information: as well as the PROTECT IP Act, there is the lesser-known Research Works Act which threatens public access to the US National Institute of Health’s publicly-funded research.

And so the DPLA struck me as an appropriate project for this time. The DPLA represents openness; it represents the idea of knowledge as a public good; it represents intellectual freedom. As such a high-profile and ambitious endeavour, the DPLA seems like a marshalling of the troops of open access. It is a massive effort to resist the publishers and media barons who fight against the drive towards openness in media distribution and digital distribution. It’s a way to tell these controlling influences – Pullman’s “greedy ghost of market fundamentalism” – that we won’t let them take away our intellectual freedom in the name of profit. And I hope it succeeds.

Help! How much help should libraries be?

2012-01-11T10:06:00.000Z

Libraries are here to help people. We help the public, we help university students, we help soldiers, we help lawyers, we help MPs, and we help people from diverse organisations. We provide a support service giving information and access to information. And so our raison d’être – our professional identity – somewhat depends on the definition of the term ‘help’.

Since I started my first full-time job in an academic library, I’ve been thinking about how much help we provide to the students. In the Army College library, it seemed expected for the library staff to provide a high level of direct help to the Junior Soldiers: the soldiers were in a job rather than in full-time education. University librarians expect something different from their users: students and researchers are in full-time education and should have (or should be developing) independent research skills. The university librarian therefore has more of a background support role. I, for example, work in a back office most of the time ensuring that day-to-day access to electronic resources is maintained: when I work on the enquiry desk, I’m usually pointing students towards resources or helping them use the library’s equipment. Generally our level of ‘help’ extends to providing the resources for the students to discover and use themselves which is a lower level of ‘help’ than was provided to the soldiers.

But it seems like the demands of students are increasing. It certainly seems as if students expect more of the library staff than I ever expected when in university. For example, it’s common practice in many universities for the libraries to give the reading materials directly to the students. Lecturers send the reading lists for their courses to the librarians who (depending on the copyright licence of the text) will usually scan the specified chapters or articles and upload them to the VLE for students to find and read. This makes sense for books where few print copies exist in the library: it allows a lot of students – usually one to two hundred – to access the reading materials required for their course and in the long term it reduces the demand put on librarians.

Questions arise when this idea is pushed a little further. Should this be done for every piece of essential reading? Should it only be done for essential reading or for recommended reading as well? Should it be done for articles / chapters available online? Should it be done at all? Can a certain level of help be detrimental to students and if so what level? Too much help can be detrimental in a couple of ways.

Firstly, providing undergraduates with all the reading material that they’ll need via the VLE robs them of the opportunity to research the subjects themselves. Part of a university education is learning how to research: learning how to find different sources in different media; learning how to assess sources; selecting the right material to provide the right evidence or make the right argument. When I was an undergraduate, we used to complain when there weren’t enough materials to go around but ultimately it meant that we had to search for different sources, we had to look elsewhere, and we had to think outside the proverbial box. If the library gives the students all the material directly, they never have the chance to research for themselves and therefore never learn how to do it. Arguably the level of delayed gratification from better research skills is higher than the level of instant gratification from the library directly providing materials.

Secondly, this practice can affect the originality of research. No-one expects soaring original insights from undergraduate coursework but with whole courses of students reading exactly and only the research material they’ve been provided by the librarians, there’s bound to be more homogeneity in essays. This homogeneity not only makes coursework duller for the lecturer to read (or more likely, for some postdoc to read) but makes the course less fulfilling for the students who end up not discovering contrary opinions and thinking about subjects for themselves.

One of the reasons why students expect more from their university is the rise in university tuition fees. Students paying more expect more for their money. By paying whooping tuition fees, undergraduates are keeping universities afloat and so universities need to keep these primary stakeholders happy. Academic libraries are part of their organisations and need to respect the wishes of the students, the faculty, and the administration. So if high-paying students want more help, isn’t the library beholden to provide that help? Even if the librarians don’t feel that the help is in the students’ long-term best interests?

The question comes down to: how do libraries best help people? Is it by addressing their short-term need for information or is it by addressing their long-term need for information literacy? And who gets to make this decision: the librarians; the students; the university management? And since ‘helping’ is part of a library’s raison d’être, the question of what level of help to provide leads to the question of what a library’s purpose is. Bob Usherwood wrote a great post for Voices for the Library about the purpose of public libraries and their corresponding level of help. Do we need to ask the same existential questions for academic libraries?

Robert Darnton on National Digital Libraries

2012-01-08T10:33:00.002Z

If research libraries are to flourish in the future, they must band together. They prospered in the twentieth century by pursuing self-interest independently of one another and of interference by the state. But in the twenty-first century, they face the impossible task of advancing on two fronts, the analog and the digital. Their acquisitions budgets cannot bear the weight. Therefore, they must form coalitions, agreeing to invest in some subjects while leaving others to their allies. They must develop common off-site depositories, perfect interlibrary loans, exchange documents electronically, prepare interoperative metadata, integrate their catalogs, and coordinate their digitizing.

Experiments of this kind have been tried and failed, I know. But we must try again. Through trial and error, we must inch forward toward the creation of a national and then an international digital library. Google has demonstrated its feasability and also the danger of getting it wrong - that is, of favoring private profit at the expense of the public good.

Technological changes wash over the information landscape too rapidly for anyone to know what it will look like ten years from now. But now is the time to act, if we want to channel change for the benefit of everyone. We need action by the state to prevent monopoly and interaction among the libraries to promote a common program. Digitize and democratize - not an easy formula, but the only one that will do if we really mean to realize the ideal of a republic of letters, which once seemed hopelessly utopian.

From The Case for Books by Robert Darnton.

At time of writing, there are still tickets available to hear Robert Darnton lecture on the Digital Public Library of America and its implications for the future of digital libraries. The lecture is on Tuesday 17th January at the Royal Society in London. I am massively excited to be going.

Five things I want to happen in 2012

2011-12-14T11:18:00.000Z

‘Tis the season for arbitrary lists. At this time of year, we exercise our human urge (or perhaps just librarianly urge) to rank, classify, and categories our experiences and we consume ‘top tens’ of books, films, music, or fantastically tedious graphs from across the year, lists of cultural events in order of significance, and lists of resolutions or wishes for the coming year. Last year, my arbitrary list looked back on the year just passed; this year, I want to look forward to the year ahead. These are some of the things I want to happen in 2012.

I want...

...the DCMS Select Committee on Public Library Closures to make the right decisions.

Next year, the Department of Culture, Media and Sports is launching an inquiry into the public library closures across the UK. This is due to the “unprecedented cuts in library services throughout the country and the inaction of the relevant ministers” *coughEdVaizeycough*. This inquiry has fantastic potential for public libraries: high-ranking Members of Parliament will be discussing libraries and the value of libraries for communities and we have an opportunity to influence their discussion and make sure that they see the right evidence. Some of the ideal results of this Committee inquiry include the strengthening of the Public Libraries and Museums Act 1964, a firm definition of “comprehensive and efficient library service”, increased protection of trained and paid library staff, and a moratorium on all closures until more research has been conducted on the impact of closures and until councils have done proper consultations with their constituents. This ideal scenario depends entirely on what kind of evidence the Committee receives and so I urge everyone reading this to stop reading this and go write some evidence.

Read Voices for the Library’s post and read John Kirriemuir’s post. Voices would like evidence sent to us by the 20th of December; the Committee wants correctly formatted evidence sent to them by the 12th of January. This is our chance to make a real difference for threatened public libraries so please take some time over the holidays to write something about why libraries are important.

...CILIP to become an organisation to be proud of.

I am a member of CILIP. I have been a member of CILIP since I started pursuing librarianship in 2009. But I don’t think CILIP is perfect and I certainly don’t support everything that comes out of it. This year I gave serious thought as to whether I should renew my membership or not. Every time I think about CILIP’s problems, I think about this blog post from Phil Bradley. I think about what our professional organisation could be; I think about what our profession would be like without a central organisation; I think about the professional organisation described in this paragraph:

CILIP HQ: the heart of librarianship in the UK?

This professional organisation could provide really good recruitment facilities, it would be able to represent librarians in their organisations, it would be able to be the voice that librarians scared for their jobs could listen speaking on their behalf. It would be able to talk to LIS schools, enthusing students, it could get into career seminars for children still at school. It could really assist and inform employers on what qualifications a 'professional librarian' should have, and it could help monitor them.

And then I renew my membership. Because I want that professional organisation and, for the moment, I think the benefits of CILIP outweigh the problems. Next year, the President and the Vice President will be two people who I know want to do the best job they can, who I know are willing to make personal sacrifices for libraries, and who I hope will make CILIP into the organisation described above. Good luck, Phil and Lauren (and continued good luck to Annie). While CILIP still stands up for the profession, I will support it.

...more discussion about a UK National Digital Library.

Earlier this year, Ed Vaizey said he had no plans to establish a National Digital Library service for the UK. As electronic materials, ebooks, and the Web become more important in education, in research, for leisure, and in most spheres of life, it seems short-sighted to not plan to develop our national electronic resource services. Although the country is planning on spending billions of pounds on our transport infrastructure and on certain 2-week sporting events, our information infrastructure is falling behind. We desperately need more of our national information materials to be made accessible for more people and we need to ensure that materials owned by the public don’t fall into private-sector hands like those of Google Books. The books and documents in our libraries belong to us: we need to have access to them and we need to digitally preserve them for a future that’s speeding towards us.

...less conflict, more communication.

It seems like there has been more conflict between different groups in the past few years. Between the rich and the poor; between the public sector and the private sector; even arguments about something as innocuous as public libraries tend to turn vitriolic and divisive. On a large scale, there is a widening divide between the haves and the have nots: this year we had riots across England which were quickly blamed on a feral underclass and we still have Occupy movements across the Western world protesting the divide between the 1% and the 99%. George Monbiot writes about this divide and the media coverage of it here.

The riots in Salford. Can't we all just get along?

On a smaller scale, there are divides between librarians of different sectors: fragmentation of the profession was a talking point earlier this year and since we’re all stretched thin working with reduced budgets, fewer resources, and fewer staff, we have less time for communication with each other.

The solution to our conflicts is communication. We need to talk to one another, we need to pool our talents, and we need to share resources – nationally and locally. In terms of librarianship, disparate groups working towards the same end need to communicate to avoid pointless duplication of efforts. In terms of the national picture, we need to understand other groups: we need the traditional political right-wing to stop blaming the poor for being poor and we need the traditional political left-wing to stop villifying the rich many of whom have legitimate belief systems and real human concerns. We need everyone to talk to everyone else to reach compromise with regards to the sharing of resources. Basically in 2012 we need to understand one another: to put on someone else’s shoes and walk around in them.

...all of us to make these things happen.

These things won’t just happen. The future is not immutable. We make it how we want it to be. If we want the above things to happen in 2012, we need to make them happen. We need to think about what we want and we need to take action. What do you want to happen in 2012 and how do you intend to make it happen?

The nightmare of the Total Library

2011-11-29T09:56:00.001Z

I have an article in Talis’ Panlibus magazine this month. You can read issue 22 here and I’m on pages 14 and 15. My thanks to the editor for accepting it and putting it out there.

The article is about the concept of a ‘Total Library’ and how this concept has been treated by literature and philosophy across the centuries from The Great Library of Alexandria to Paul Otlet’s Mundaneum to modern-day legal deposit libraries. It ends by pointing to the Universal Library’s ghostly electronic shadow, the National Digital Library, as the next development and practical embodiment of the Total Library ideal. Basically this piece combines the concept of a Universal Library, the dream of a National Digital Library, my love of Borges, and the idea of the infinite: all topics that I am ~~obsessed with~~ interested in and have written about before.

Though this article exclusively discusses the dream of a Total Library, my original concept for the piece was to present both sides of the idea: dream and nightmare. It would have discussed both the positive aspects of the idea followed by the negative aspects leaving the reader to decide whether the Total Library is paradiso or inferno. For Borges, the Total Library is both dream and nightmare, everything and nothing: “Everything would be in its blind volumes. Everything: the detailed history of the future, Aeschylus’ The Egyptians, the exact number of times that the waters of the Ganges have reflected the flight of a falcon … the complete catalog of the Library, the proof of the inaccuracy of that catalog. Everything: but for every sensible line or accurate fact there would be millions of meaningless cacophonies, verbal farragoes, and babblings. Everything: but all the generations of mankind could pass before the dizzying shelves – shelves that obliterate the day and on which chaos lies – ever reward them with a tolerable page.” (1)

So I gathered and wrote a lot of material that, for reasons of space and word count, I had to cut. Here is the counter-argument to my own argument in Panlibus (make sure you read the Panlibus article first otherwise this won't make much sense) – the idea of the Total Library as a nightmare:

The Total Library is nothing: a nightmare of meaningless promise.

The Total Library represents all that we cannot be: the idea taunts us with promises of infinity, calling to us like the Sirens leading us to wreckage and madness upon the shoals of deadly knowledge. As well as the sheer shuddering horror of the misprints and contradictions throughout the Logically Complete Library, the Universal Library is ultimately useless to us and reveals in itself a void of meaning. In acquiring everything, the Total Library reveals nothing.

The paralysis of choice inside the Universal Library is unrelenting. With literally every printed word at one’s disposal, where could one possibly begin? The Universal Library offers a taunting glimpse at everything that we do not and cannot possibly know. Even the polymath – a dying breed – can only know a percentage of all there is to know. Even if we constructed the Universal Library – the written mirror of the universe replete with every theory, every manifestation of idea, every supposition and every contradiction – there is not a single person who could understand it. Standing at the threshold of the Universal Library, we feel the pull of everything, of the infinite, while knowing that it will never be ours: as finite beings, the mysteries of the universe are forever inaccessible to us. There is not one person who could gaze long into that abyss without losing themselves.

As finite beings, we bestow meaning through selection. A random cluster of objects is meaningless but if the same objects are carefully chosen and ordered, they are given a meaning comprehensible to at least the person who chose them. The books on our bookshelves mean more to us than the books in the library because we have chosen each one individually. By collecting everything without discrimination or selection, the Universal Library becomes as meaningless as the universe itself: the model offers us nothing that the subject itself cannot give.

Even today, as we flounder in the ocean of ‘information overload’, we look to libraries as respite, as carefully ordered sanctuaries from the chaotic miasma of unordered data on the Web. Kruk is correct that librarians filter, select, choose, and present. To have meaning a library must be carefully chosen and constructed to meet the user’s needs: “We may discover that in times when a former relative scarcity of information is being replaced by indiscriminate over-abundance, the selective or filtering function of libraries is more important than providing indiscriminate access to information. What was a dream of humanity may be a nightmare. The ceaseless torrent of words hinders understanding.” (2)

In the Universal Library, secret choices have already been made. For one, the primacy of the written word. By collecting only books and printed texts, the library has made a choice and has artificially limited itself. Why only collect published books and articles? The greatest work of literature could be written on the back of a bar napkin. Why not include ephemera? Why not what librarians refer to as ‘realia’: physical objects, gifts, tools, flags, clothes, that one special shirt, the present she sent you, the watch you no longer wear? “Every library both embraces and rejects. Every library is by definition the result of choice, and necessarily limited in its scope. And every choice excludes another, the choice not made. The act of reading parallels endlessly the act of censorship.” (3)

The primacy of the written word is a cultural prejudice reflected by the composition of the Universal Library. On close examination, words reveal themselves to be utterly inadequate as a mirror of the universe. The key Anglo-European philosophical project at the start of the 20th Century was the construction of a perfect language. The cloistered men of Cambridge attempted this by refining formal logic. Heroes and knights errant like Hilbert, Frege, Russell, and Wittgenstein set out to create a model of the universe using the elegant, simple notation of mathematics. In the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Wittgenstein constructed his perfect description of the universe; in the Philosophical Investigations published years later, he exposed the impossibility of any logically perfect language. For all their trials, the philosophers could not make language perfect. The written word is an arbitrary, brute system: as Death says in a Terry Pratchett short story, humans try “TO UNDERSTAND THE COMPLEXITIES OF CREATION VIA A LANGUAGE THAT EVOLVED IN ORDER TO TELL ONE ANOTHER WHERE THE RIPE FRUIT WAS” (4). How could the arbitrary sounds we make and commit to paper through arcane symbolism possibly capture the infinite?

The Universal Library is utterly without meaning. When we gather every book, every word ever written, what is it that we’ve captured? In ‘A Yellow Rose’, Borges depicts the death of the poet Giambattista Marino who, as his life ebbs away, looks upon a yellow rose: “Marino saw the rose, the way Adam must have seen it in Paradise. He sensed that it existed not in his words but in its own timelessness. He understood that we can utter and allude to things but not give them expression, that the proud tall volumes that made a golden shadow in the corner of his room were not the world’s mirror, as his vanity had figured, but simply other objects that had been added to the world.” (5)

Books are objects like any other with no more meaning or dignity than that which humans bestow. The Universal Library is an expansive collection but its perfection is an illusion. With no-one to understand the model it creates, it has no more meaning than a warehouse of yellow roses. Without the minds to understand them, books are useless assemblages of paper and the model of the universe that they purportedly create is a sham. In another Borges story, an ancient order of cartographers set out to create a perfect map of the Empire. They find they can do this only by making the map successively larger and more detailed until eventually it encompasses the whole Empire. “The world encyclopedia, the universal library, exists, and is the world itself.” (6)

(1) Jorge Luis Borges. “The Total Library,” in Jorge Luis Borges (Eliot Weinberger, ed.), The total library: non-fiction 1922-1986 (London: Penguin, 2001), p. 216.

(2) Miroslav Kruk, “The Internet and the revival of the myth of the universal library,” Australian library journal, 48 (2).

(3) Alberto Manguel, The library at night (London: Yale University Press, 2006), p. 108.

(4) Terry Pratchett, “Death and What Comes Next”.

(5) Jorge Luis Borges, “A Yellow Rose,” in Jorge Luis Borges (Alexander Coleman, ed.), Selected poems (London: Penguin, 2000), p. 77.

(6) Manguel, Library at night, p. 89.

Freedom of speech 2.0

2011-11-26T11:58:00.001Z

Yesterday, a fellow library campaigner directed me to this blog post by Roger Pearse criticising the Suffolk public library service. The main thrust of his argument has some validity: if his story is accurate, then the library in question needs to modernise and make efficiency changes. There are many libraries that need to make changes: I do not campaign for libraries because I believe they are all perfect; I campaign for libraries because I believe that good libraries have superlative value and that even bad libraries have potential. There’s an interesting debate to be had about whether bad libraries are caused by library managers, overhead council intervention, or simple budgetary concerns.

Unfortunately, Mr. Pearse’s valid concerns about his public library service were drowned out by the following statement and his subsequent response when challenged about it:

And so it went on. Item after item of inefficiency, maladministration, neglect or wrong-headedness. In real terms, there was nobody in charge. Doubtless there is some woman somewhere who receives a salary to run the organisation. (You can tell that it is a woman in charge because the conversion of Ipswich library into a playgroup is something that only a woman would do).

This throw-away comment is not the core of Mr. Pearse’s argument but it is offensively sexist and exclusionary (as are similar comments about children’s groups in libraries). It’s a statement that, since he made it freely and of his own accord, he should either defend or retract.

You can always just pepper-spray people with whom you don't agree.

Freedom of speech is a tricky concept. It’s essential to a functioning democracy and very important for equality of all people. Everyone has the absolute right to express what they believe: Mr. Pearse has the right to make negative comments about women and the corollary of this is that people who disagree with him have the right to challenge him.

Or rather, should have the right to challenge him. After several people commented on his blog about his sexist statement, these comments were deleted and labelled as “abusive”. Which accords with my own opinion that the only limitation to freedom of expression is the Harm Principle: the only circumstances in which it is permissible to censor or otherwise prevent someone expressing him/herself is if their expression causes or will cause harm to another person. The classic example is someone shouting ‘Fire!’ in a crowded theatre. Where I disagree with Mr. Pearse – and where the Harm Principle falls down – is in defining the vague concept of ‘harm’. What exactly is harm? Can it be quantified? Can there be any objective measure of harm?

Mr. Pearse has since written another post about his experience of “political thuggery” and his conception of free speech. He’s included several comments – including my own – as evidence of trolling. I seem to be included in the category of commenters “pretend[ing] to be polite.” I’m also accused of ad hominem attack (which is a false accusation since I’m attacking a point (a non-substantive point admittedly) that he made in the piece rather than Mr. Pearse himself). He characterises the level of debate as “deliberate violence, intended to give pain…” Ian Clark (unable to respond directly to Mr. Pearse for fears of deletion) has responded here and I encourage you to read it particularly the last paragraph.

Now maybe I have a laissez-faire ‘sticks-and-stones’ attitude but apart from direct threats or intimidation, I would not consider any other kind of speech as causing harm under the Harm Principle. I have been blogging on this site which is open to comments for several years and have received numerous comments disagreeing with me. I have never deleted any of them. This is not a diary: it's a blog and as such it operates under a different paradigm of communication. Under a definition of ‘trolling’ as irrational attacks against a person or argument on the Web, I wouldn’t define any of the comments on my blog as trolling. Some of these comments have hurt my feelings, some have made me feel bad, and, most importantly, some have made me rethink my position. There’s a comment on this post about a symbol of philosophical logic that calls me a moron. That comment made me angry enough to do some research and discover that, annoying though it may be, the commenter is right and I was wrong. When I check my blog’s statistics, I’m frequently annoyed that this post denying human-induced climate change gets consistently high traffic: I now fully retract that post but I will not delete it however wrong it is. It's true that I have censored some blog posts in the past but only at the request of an external party (this censorship and secretive attitude towards information is part of the reason why I no longer work for the external party).

Required by law to be included in any writing about Web discussions.

Ultimately my attitude to freedom of speech derives from the fact that I don’t believe I have the right to delete something that someone spent precious time writing down. I don’t believe anyone has that right (unless as mentioned it harms others which I don’t believe the comments on Mr. Pearse’s sexism do). John Stuart Mill expressed it wonderfully in a passage from On Liberty that I return to time and time again:

If all mankind minus one, were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind. Were an opinion a personal possession of no value except to the owner; if to be obstructed in the enjoyment of it were simply a private injury, it would make some difference whether the injury was inflicted only on a few persons or on many. But the peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error.

Roger Pearse is free to make whatever statements he wants. In exchange for that freedom, I think he should allow other people the same right.

Why I got a Kindle *

2011-10-26T16:11:00.000+01:00

Last night after another discussion with Ian Clark about the Kindle and its relative technical and ethical merits, I decided that I needed to fully establish my attitude to the Kindle and to Amazon and that this needed more than the 140 characters afforded by Twitter **.

To my mind, there are two dimensions to the purchasing of a Kindle: the technical dimension amounts to an argument in favour of it; the ethical dimension amounts to an argument against.

Technical dimension

I love my Kindle and I recommend the device to other people principally because of its technical capabilities. Prior to getting a Kindle, I owned the now-discontinued Sony Reader PRS-505 model. Switching to the Kindle felt equivalent to when I switched from an MP3 player to an iPod: it felt like moving from a device that did its job adequately to a device that did its job well. Compared to the reader, the Kindle is easier to put documents onto (via the WiFi/3G email service), works faster (particularly with PDFs), and has more internal memory, more intuitive menu screens and more ergonomic button placement.

The success of the Kindle can be attributed partly to aggressive marketing by Amazon (so much so that ‘Kindle’ is becoming synonymous with ‘e-reader’ in the same way that ‘Hoover’ became synonymous with ‘vacuum cleaner’) and partly to the fact that it’s so much easier to use than other e-readers on the market. The average consumer doesn’t care about ebook file formats or openness: the average consumer wants a device that they can use to read books.

Ethical dimension

...but we’re not average consumers: we’re librarians. And we do (or arguably should) care about ebook file formats and openness. It seems that the major argument against the Kindle is its parent company’s attempted monopolisation of information provision. The Kindle supports MOBI format, Amazon’s own AZW format, and PDFs. The Kindle doesn’t support the industry standard ebook format, ePub, and therefore cannot support ebooks provided by public libraries via OverDrive. Although certain DRM-free ebook files can be switched to the MOBI format using programs like calibre, this is beyond the average consumer (or my mythical version of him/her).

This means that anyone who buys a Kindle is funnelled into providing continued financial and consumer support for Amazon since the Kindle-owner has little choice but to purchase Amazon ebooks. This amounts to attempted monopolisation of electronic reading material on the part of Amazon. It’s a particular concern for the UK’s public libraries since it means that they can’t provide lending ebooks to anyone who owns a Kindle. Amazon are working with public libraries in the USA but arguably libraries are getting the raw end of the deal.

OK, this may be the real reason I got a Kindle. From xkcd.

Justifications

Generally I own a Kindle because the technical functionality of the Kindle outweighs my ethical qualms (and indeed my liberal guilt at using such a blatantly consumer-restricting product). More specifically, with all the issues laid out, I can explain why I use the Kindle.

A. My reading habits. When I’m looking for a book, I have two major considerations: first, I prefer reading print books to reading ebooks (as do “almost all” participants in a recent study); second, I’m just a poor librarian and so I try to get books for free when possible. So my sources of books in descending order of preference are: the library I work in; the local public library; a friend / family member; waiting for a customary gift-giving occasion and getting someone to buy it for me. If it comes down to actually spending my money on a book, only then will I buy the electronic version and I’ll do this purely for the convenience of being able to carry multiple books around. Therefore I don’t accept Ian’s – I assume semi-ironic – ‘Love Kindles; Hate Libraries’ equivalency. For me at least, libraries are way up my personal scale of preference as a source for reading material.

B. Public libraries have bigger problems with their ebook provision than Amazon’s looming dominance over the market. This post sums up the potential difficulties of getting an ebook from a public library. It’s unfair to blame libraries for all these issues – some are imposed by publishers, some are imposed by OverDrive. Amazon has more resources and certainly more funding available to make its technical process as smooth as possible. But the fact remains that as it stands, it is easy to get ebooks from Amazon and it is complicated to get ebooks from public libraries. Consumers go for the easy option and to say that Amazon’s dominance is a primary contributor to levels of public library ebook lending is disingenuous.

C. Amazon’s ‘monopoly’ is not that big or that threatening. Without any facts to back me up (apart from Amazon’s list of bestselling ebooks), I would guess that the majority of Amazon’s ebook sales are for reading-for-pleasure books primarily fiction. The Kindle is a great device for reading a book from beginning to end: it’s designed for reading-for-pleasure rather than reading-for-information. Libraries – public, academic, commercial – are massively important for reading-for-information (and as suggested in Justification A also have a key role in reading-for-pleasure). It’s true that each person who purchases a Kindle is funnelled down the digital primrose path towards supporting Amazon’s monopolisation of ebook provision but Amazon are nowhere near complete market dominance and I think that suggesting otherwise is an over-reaction.

The point

The point is that I like and recommend the Kindle as a reading device but, for the most part, I share Kindle detractors’ legitimate concerns about the ethics of Amazon’s consumer practices and attempted monopolisation. I am however not as concerned as they are.

* Or more precisely, why I dropped extremely unsubtle hints last December leading to my parents getting me a Kindle for Christmas.

** Turns out I needed 5979 characters. Huh.

Thoughts on military librarianship

2011-10-03T16:15:00.000+01:00

The British Army's Prince Consort's Library

EDITED: 14/10/11

My time as Assistant Librarian at the Army College is coming to an end and so I thought I’d offer some thoughts on a little-known niche of librarianship: military librarianship. There isn't much information available about military librarianship and, due to security issues, precious little communication between military librarians (unfortunately there is no 'Secret Covenant of Army Librarians'). Here is some of what I've learned and what I've thought during my year and a half working as a librarian for the British Army.

Classification

Army libraries use a unique military classification system which is functionally distinct from Dewey or Library of Congress. Our copy of the scheme is from 1985. I have never come across it anywhere else and I can find virtually no reference to it online other than in Tidworth Library's Army Stock catalogue. Basically it divides all military books into Military Biography (MB), Military Equipment (ME), Military Forces (MF), Military Warfare (MW) (which is basically military history), and Regimental History (RH). These categories are then divided using Dewey-like numbers and auxiliaries relating to geography and history. So, for example, books on the Iraq War are MW.365.67-67; books about the War in Afghanistan are MW.365.81; books about nuclear weapons are ME.47 subdivided into ME.471 for bombs, ME.472 for missiles, and ME.473 for nuclear artillery. Military Biography just uses the first three letters of the biography subject's surname eg. Saddam Hussein is under MB.HUS. The scheme also allows you to divide books on World War I and World War II from the Military Warfare division using a separate classification schedule: for example, books on the D-Day landings are WW2: 251.61.

Working with restrictions

Librarianship is all about making information available. Military security requires that information not be made available. This basic conflict is a challenge for any military librarian who can be restricted by the Army, Navy, or Air Force’s security protocols.

I’ve written before about how narrow access to the Web affects the soldiers’ ability to retrieve verifiably true information. This applies equally to library staff. During my time at the college, the restricted Web access on the college’s computers has made it difficult to do so many things: to get Creative Commons material for displays, newsletters, posters; to find ideas for literacy development, library promotion, and inductions; to ask for advice from colleagues on social networks; and, most importantly, to find up-to-date information on military campaigns such as Operation Moshtarak and Operation Panther’s Claw. As well as the difficulty of accessing Web materials, the use of USB sticks is restricted which makes what should be simple – the transferring of files – extremely difficult.

These restrictions are challenging – particularly for someone like me who focused his career on electronic resources, the Web, and ebooks. Learning to do without these resources has been frustrating but good for my development: it makes military librarians more resourceful, more willing to use different technologies, and less reliant on the Google-Wikipedia crutch.

Army culture

I can’t speak for the other Armed Forces but the British Army has a very distinct (and in some ways unusual) culture with its own norms, values, and etiquette. In the civilian world, it may be unacceptable to take your dog into the office with you everyday but in the Army, it’s perfectly fine. Every library is heavily influenced by its users and so the culture of the Army massively impacts Army librarians’ day-to-day work. Military librarians need to be more active in their assistance. More than anywhere else I’ve worked, I look for users struggling instead of waiting for them to come to me. This often leads to the problem, how do you help someone who doesn’t tell you what they’re looking for?

Reading and learning

The single biggest challenge of providing the military with reading material is that the military by and large don’t want reading material. There will always be people who don’t want to read but the incidence of non-readers among soldiers is higher than in the general population.

Some soldiers need no encouragement to read.

In general, a soldier only reads The Sun, Soldier magazine, or books that they have to read – because they are ordered to by a superior officer or because they’re doing some kind of further/higher education course. A lot of the soldiers only use the library during their free time to access Facebook. Military librarians need to encourage the few soldiers who read for pleasure. During my time at the College, partly inspired by Patrick Hennessey’s book The Junior Officers’ Reading Club, I’ve tried to encourage reading by representing it as a refuge, as a therapy, and as a way to pass the time during the periods of waiting and inaction that punctuate a soldier’s life.

It’s rare but in some soldiers there is a genuine desire to learn and, whatever else I may think about the British Army, it’s admirable how much emphasis they put on education and learning – especially at the Army Foundation College. One afternoon in the library, I overheard a discussion between a Captain and a Junior Soldier: they intelligently discussed the Taliban, the false conflict between Islam and Christianity, and the human cost of war. I hope that when that Junior Soldier gets to Afghanistan, he will remember that discussion he had in the library and hopefully make the right decisions.

A soldier once told me that soldiers fight for peace, not for war. The military librarian’s job is to support soldiers’ learning in order to make sure that when they have to fight, they do it intelligently and humanly. I hope that I’ve done that in my time at the college and I hope that other military librarians continue to do the same.

From Gods to humans: the values of libraries

2011-09-20T13:53:00.000+01:00

There have always been links between libraries and certain moral values particularly those embodied in religions. Throughout the centuries, libraries have survived by adapting and moulding themselves to fit the predominant values of the time: from the religious narratives of past civilisations through the growth of the Enlightenment and scientific values into whatever theological milieu we occupy now. Libraries have shifted their role, changed their values, and even taken on some of the traditional functions of religions in order to fit the society around them.

Wei T'O, protector of libraries

Religious values dominated society for centuries and arguably still do. In ancient cultures, writing was a kind of power and so libraries were important places for scholarship and theology and mysterious places to those who couldn’t decipher the written word. ‘Knowledge deities’ – gods devoted to writing, learning, letters, or calligraphy – were assigned to protect libraries. One of the only dedicated ‘gods of libraries’ is Wei T’O, the ancient Chinese god who was patron of libraries and books. According to this unusually corporate website, "Wei T'o, an ancient Chinese god, protects books against destruction from fire, worms and insects, and robbers, big or small." Laura Payne pointed me to Seshat, the ancient Egyptian goddess of wisdom, knowledge, and writing: her name means ‘she who scrivens’ and she was credited with inventing writing. Later, another strand of mythology from Hermopolis developed with Thoth as the god of wisdom and scribes which led to Seshat’s priestesses being usurped and the goddess taking a subservient position as Thoth’s daughter or wife. In ancient Babylon, Nabu protected clay tablets; in Hinduism, Ganesh who has the head of an elephant has the equivalent memory of an elephant and so is associated with scholarship and knowledge; the Aztec and Mayan god, Quetzalcoatl, was the purported inventor of books and the calendar. Christianity in various areas has Saint Lawrence (Europe), Saint Jerome (US and Canada), and Saint Catherine of Alexandria (Orthodox) as patron saints of libraries.

As these religions died, libraries’ moral values changed to fit the changes in society. Michael Gorman, the past president of the American Library Association, identified eight central values for librarianship in his book, Our Enduring Values. These include such familiar values as service, equality of access, and intellectual freedom (celebrated next week by the ALA’s Banned Books Week). One that embodies the values of a certain time period is ‘rationalism’: Gorman said that libraries are “children of the Enlightenment and of rationalism”. Libraries may predate the Enlightenment but they were peculiarly suited to the values and philosophy of the time: the sense that the universe can be understood through knowledge; the idea that collecting information can lead to a model of reality; that organising, classifying, and bringing order out of chaos is a good in and of itself. Jonathan I. Israel said that during the Enlightenment, a “general process and rationalization and secularization set in which rapidly overthrew theology’s age-old hegemony in the world of study”. The Enlightenment may represent the start of the decline of religion but it was a time in which libraries adapted and thrived.

The British Museum's Enlightenment room previously contained King George's Library

In fact, it can be argued that libraries took over some of the traditional functions of religion. We frequently hear libraries referred to as ‘temples’ – temples of learning or temples to the written word. In her book, Sacred Stacks, Naomi K. Maxwell gives examples of quasi-spiritual functions of libraries: some librarians may feel as their work is for a higher purpose; libraries connect us to the past and help us remember our ancestors; libraries can provide a sense of the immortal and unchanging (the perception of libraries as islands of stability and conservatism (with a small C) may explain some people’s overwhelmingly negative reaction to council’s plans to close public libraries (and of course closing libraries is a genuinely bad idea)).

Now the world is changing again: in the current philosophical zeitgeist, Enlightenment values are outdated. John Gray has written about the decline of Enlightenment values and the emergence of a world in which intellectual progress does not equal moral progress as previously assumed ie. constant improvement in intellectual and scientific knowledge will not necessarily lead to constant improvement in human wellbeing. The future is not necessarily better than the past. According to Gray, Western society has a mythology of its own – an Enlightenment narrative no more true than the mythologies and narratives of ancient civilisations. “Western societies are ruled by the myth that, as the rest of the world absorbs science and becomes modern, it is bound to become secular, enlightened, and peaceful – as, contrary to all evidence, they imagine themselves to be.”

This is not an image to accompany the text

In the 21st Century, we occupy an age of postmodernism, existentialism, and post-Enlightenment values. The creeds of religion and the Enlightenment are becoming less relevant: in the words of King Crimson, “The wall on which the prophets wrote / Is cracking at the seams.” The philosophical fashion is for subjectivity of knowledge and reality as a social construct rather than an object which can be modelled. With this line of thought, what becomes of the Enlightenment model of reality, the library? In our post-rationalist age of subjectivity, is ‘rationalism’ still a central value of librarianship and do libraries have a place as storehouses of objective knowledge? Do libraries need to adapt their values again?

It does seem that librarians share some core values à la Gorman’s eight values. Obviously library and information workers don’t all think or feel the same way. But I’d be interested to hear other people’s thoughts as to what shared values and ideals are shared by library people (if any).

This post was inspired by a Twitter conversation with Dave Pattern which was ostensibly about OPACs until I got sidetracked, thrust my head into the clouds, and started thinking about hokey religions and ancient mythologies. Thanks Dave!

UK Government rejects idea of National Digital Library

2011-09-08T16:05:00.000+01:00

This afternoon, Ian Clark pointed out this TheyWorkForYou answer from the UK Minister in charge of libraries, Ed Vaizey. Asked “whether he has considered the merits of establishing a national digital library service”, Mr. Vaizey replied:

We have no plans at present to establish a national digital library service. However, local authorities continue to provide remote access for their users to catalogues, e-books and online reference resources and the UK remains a partner in Europeana—the European Digital Library network which provides access, through its website, to objects from cultural institutions within the European Union.

(Note that, in true politician style, this doesn’t answer the question posed.)

In a previous article about developing a UK National Digital Library, I named the British Library and/or the BBC as potential institutions which could undertake the project. I deliberately did not mention the UK Government and I did this for a couple of reasons. First, I don’t think the Government should develop an NDL. It would be a concern for any state to have such control over such a large body of information and the country’s cultural heritage. Though a National Digital Library would need to be publicly funded (a. in order to be ‘national’ and b. to avoid the pitfalls of private-sector ownership of shared cultural resources), it would not be beneficial for it to be under the direct control of the Department for Culture, Media and Sport. The DCMS is a Government department and is under the whims of whichever political party is in power: the reason to worry about this is not because the current Government cannot be trusted but because such power has the potential to be abused by successive governments. A National Digital Library could however be government-led under the control of a quango with a suitably high degree of autonomy (the Arts Council England, for example). But this leads to the second reason I didn’t mention the government: I don’t think the current Coalition Government would develop an NDL. Thus far the Coalition hasn’t shown education to be one of its core values and Ed Vaizey has shown no inclination to expand the UK’s library service (demonstrably the opposite, in fact). The Government’s public spending cuts leave no room for bold expansive projects for the future of education and culture.

That said, it’s disappointing that Vaizey so casually dismisses the notion of a UK National Digital Library. His answer doesn’t show any sign that it’s an idea they are considering or that could be effected if more money were available. There are simply “no plans at present”. It’s most unfortunate because this is an opportune time to make a National Digital Library and the UK should do so before it’s too late. Other governments are investing in the idea for their own countries: notably France (Gallica as part of the Bibliothèque nationale), Norway (NBdigital) and the United States (the Digital Public Library of America and other projects). It seems naïve and foolish to have no plans and no plans to develop plans.

Vaizey’s answer confirms that the Coalition Government will not provide a National Digital Library. We need to look elsewhere for an organisation willing enough, bold enough, and with enough foresight to work on such an important project.

Things 15 and 16 - Events, Advocacy, and Writing

2011-09-05T15:38:00.001+01:00

In an effort to catch up on 23 Things for Professional Development (or CPD23: my other posts are here), here are a couple of Things.

Thing 15 - Conferences and events

Thing 15 is about conferences, seminars, and events. This year I’ve been lucky enough to attend several library-type events (partly thanks to the generosity and support of my current employers Nord Anglia Education (by the way, you can now apply for my job which is a great opportunity for people new to the profession who want to learn the ropes of librarianship)).

From Sarah Ison's New Professionals Conference photos.

There are loads of benefits to attending events and these are just some of the most important ones to me. The first is the opportunity to break out of my environment. I (currently) work in a fairly restrictive, isolated, and cloistered environment: when I first started working at the Army College, I felt cut off from the world of librarianship in which I was immersed during my Masters. Events and conferences have allowed me to reconnect with the wider librarian community, look past my own four walls, and feel that I’m not alone – that other people share my interests, my concerns, and my ambitions. Particularly for young librarians, events enable a wider point of view and confer a knowledge of one’s place in The Profession. This leads to the second benefit which is meeting new people and old friends. We librarians are spread across the country, across sectors, across the world. Sure, we can connect through Twitter or email but nothing beats face-to-face communication for sparking a connection with other people and having real discussions about the topics we’re interested in. And then there are the benefits that Katie mentions in the blog post: “feeling more inspired, motivated, or capable”. Getting out of work is exciting but a key benefit of attending events is the impact they can have when you get back to work. Perhaps you’ll have a new idea about doing things in a different way; perhaps you can work on a project with someone you met; or perhaps you just feel reinvigorated with a renewed appreciation of librarianship.

This year I was also lucky to be asked to present at a couple of events: I presented a paper at the CILIP Library and Information History Group Conference and I co-presented a workshop at the CILIP New Professionals Conference. Doing my first presentation was scary – being fairly young and by no means an expert on library and information history, I was terrified of reading my paper in front of so many people more intelligent than me – but good things are often scary. Both presentations turned out to massively rewarding experiences: as well as developing my presentation skills for future jobs (and job interviews), I discovered that I enjoyed the immediacy of the presentation format. I enjoy writing: that’s a whole other blog post suffice to say that there’s something about constructing a well-formed argument or a beautiful turn of phrase that appeals to me. I discovered that by presenting something that I’ve written, I get to see the immediate impact of my words and my argument and I get to discuss criticisms or ramifications with the people who’ve engaged with the piece. So presenting at conferences is something that I enjoy doing, that develops my career, and that, as mentioned above, helps me to connect with other people in The Profession. It’s scary but good things often are.

Thing 16 - Advocacy

Thing 16 is about advocacy, activism, and publication on behalf of libraries (ably written by my Voices for the Library buddy, Lauren). I believe that, as professionals, advocating for our libraries is not only our duty but it’s something that we should be doing naturally.

Premise 1: I enjoy librarianship and I love libraries.

Premise 2: If I enjoy and love something, then I will enjoy talking about it.

Conclusion: I enjoy talking about librarianship and libraries.

An advocacy poster from Ned 'thewikiman' Potter

Aside from this kind of day-to-day advocacy with family, friends, and colleagues, I advocate for my library at work (which – for those applying for the job – can be a challenge with the military staff), I try to advocate for a UK National Digital Library (an idea I feel passionate about), and I do a little for public libraries as part of the Voices for the Library campaign group (radio stuff, writing, marching, keeping an eye on the news, etc.).

Advocacy comes down to doing what you can do and taking what action you can take on behalf of the things that you love. As mentioned above, one of the things that I can do is write so I try to advocate through that. Whether it’s deliberately writing for a publication after having an idea (as happened with my Guardian article on ebooks) or writing something for my blog and then deciding it’s good enough to publish (as happened with my Guardian article on Google Books and my CILIP Update article on National Digital Libraries). When I write something, I want it be read and so I try to get it spread as far as possible: this can spread the word about libraries or about an issue I’m passionate about. That’s just how I feel I can best advocate: other people may vary.

As Lauren mentioned, library advocacy has taken a step-up recently. Advocacy is becoming an increasingly important skill to learn for young librarians since more and more libraries and library staff have to justify their existence. Every librarian should be advocating what they do and, particularly in the UK, public libraries need our support and need voices shouting for the people who can’t.

The benefits of Open Access

2011-08-30T10:44:00.006+01:00

In today’s Guardian, George Monbiot discusses academic publishing, specifically the exorbitant costs of accessing peer-reviewed research and the blatant profiteering of the publishers. In academic libraries, this has been known for years as the ‘serials crisis’: it's the fact that libraries need subscriptions to journals and rising costs mean that, as Monbiot points out, journal subscriptions now take up 65% of university libraries’ budgets. As well as the idea of large-scale digital libraries à la the National Digital Library – “a single global archive of academic literature and data” – Monbiot discusses Open Access publishing as a possible solution.

Open Access publishing basically involves making access to research data and scholarly literature less restricted. Universities and academics can do this in a couple of ways: Green Open Access involves putting research in openly accessible institutional repositories; Gold Open Access involves publishing in specialist open access journals. Fundamentally, Open Access publishing cuts through the limitations placed on academic research.

Academic research and scientific research are currently constrained by the requirements of society. There are financial restrictions such as those imposed by academic publishers and there are legal restrictions such as copyright law. Both of these can prevent scholars from accessing materials or working with them in new ways. These financial or legal constraints are often opposed to the spirit of research: to the Enlightenment ideals of sharing knowledge in an atmosphere of open creativity; to the communities of scholars working together and sharing information to further human progress. There is no reason for limitations in research: the only constraint should be the limits of imagination.

Open Access logo from Wikimedia Commons

Open Access publishing cuts through the financial and legal Gordian Knot. Green Open Access presents research free via institutional repositories and digital libraries; Gold Open Access gets the money for publication from non-consumer sources. Open Access can also cut through the legal requirements usually through Creative Commons licensing: in The Power of Open, Mark Patterson of Public Library of Science refers to Creative Commons licensing as “an integral part of the success of open access publishing...”

And Open Access has benefits other than those immediate, practical ones. Arguably more important is the atmosphere of openness and mutual co-operation that Open Access publishing encourages. This links to the parallel movements of Open Data and Open Content. A spirit of openness and sharing of information is conducive to creative and intelligent output. It can free academic research from the suspicion and competition of the commercial sector and encourage researchers to consider themselves as part of a community working together for the greater good.

As well as the qualitative impact on atmosphere and good feeling, an open atmosphere can quantitatively improve research. Studies from 2001, 2006, and 2010 (see below) have shown that articles published as Open Access have a citation impact advantage: they are cited more often by other researchers and so more people see the results of the scholars’ hard work.

Stevan Harnad, a big voice in Open Access, believes that university libraries and particularly institutional repositories can maintain and encourage this atmosphere. It’s vital that libraries and repositories recognise the importance of Open Access and work as much as possible to encourage this open atmosphere to create strong and productive scholarly communities in our universities and to dismantle the rampant and damaging capitalism of the academic publishing industry.

Lawrence, S., 2001. Free online availability substantially increases a paper’s impact, Nature, 31 May 2001.

Eysenbach, G., 2006. Citation Advantage of Open Access Articles, PLoS Biology, 4 (5).

Gargouri, Y., Hajjem, C., Lariviere, V., Gingras, Y., Brody, T., Carr, L. and Harnad, S., 2010. Self-Selected or Mandated, Open Access Increases Citation Impact for Higher Quality Research. PLOS ONE, 5 (10).

I, Digital Native

2011-08-17T14:55:00.007+01:00

I’ve been reading Born Digital: Understanding the First Generation of Digital Natives by John Palfrey and Urs Gasser. Wikipedia defines a digital native as “a person who was born during or after the general introduction of digital technology, and through interacting with digital technology from an early age, has a greater understanding of its concepts.” Since I currently work with 16 to 17 year-olds and will soon be working with university students, I thought it was important for me to understanding this generation of digital natives so that I’m able to provide a better library service.

And so I was surprised to discover that Palfrey and Gasser’s definition of ‘digital natives’ describes me:

They were all born after 1980... They read blogs rather than newspapers. They often meet each other online before they meet in person. They probably don’t even know what a library card looks like, much less have one; and if they do, they’ve probably never used it. They get their music online – often for free, illegally – rather than buying it in record stores. They’re more likely to send an instant message (IM) than to pick up the telephone to arrange a date later in the afternoon... And they’re connected to one another by a common culture. Major aspects of their lives – social interactions, friendships, civic activities – are mediated by digital technologies.

(Apart from the library card comment and [LEGAL DISCLAIMER] the illegal music comment.)

A digital native. Probably with disgusting sticky fingers.

I had never considered myself to be a digital native so reading this was like discovering that an anthropology text is about my subculture. The term ‘digital native’ seems to imply an innate grasp of technology: using mobile phones in the playground and taking ‘coding for kids’ classes. I remember learning to use technology: teaching myself to use a mouse; my first experience using the Internet; teaching myself HTML. Sometimes I still get the feeling that devices like the Kindle are astoundingly futuristic. The point being that I am fully aware of all the technology I use and that, unlike my imagined digital native, I don’t feel blasé about it.

But the more I thought about it, the more I realised that technology does have a different role in my life compared to, say, my parents. The different ways we approach technology, for example. When my parents don’t have a clear step-by-step procedure for doing something on the computer or on a device, they can’t do it: if they don’t know how to reset the clock on their mobile phone, then they just don’t know. Whereas I will look through the menus, try out likely options (Settings, Options, etc.), and figure out how to do it. I’m not worried that fiddling with technology and trying things out will break it – sometimes it feels as though my parents and older family members do. This seems to indicate different approaches to the use of technology and different levels of understanding.

There are also the different ways that technology has integrated itself into our lives. It’s common – particularly among newspaper opinion columnists – to distinguish between the ‘real world’ and the ‘online world’. I see no distinction: the ‘online me’ is me albeit with some of the restrictions of online communication.

Another quote from Born Digital:

...Digital Natives live much of their lives online, without distinguishing between the online and the offline. Instead of thinking of their digital identity and their real-space identity as separate things, they just have an identity (with representations in two, or three, or more different spaces)... For these young people, new digital technologies – computers, cell phones, Sidekicks – are primary mediators of human-to-human connections.

I spend a lot of time online. The Web is my primary source of information about the world. Since my friends from school and university are scattered across the country, I communicate with people primarily using email and social media. I would rather chat with someone using Facebook or Chatzy than talk to them on the telephone. I have friends – even close friends – who I have never met in person. Voices for the Library is a group made up of people who primarily communicate with one another online and meet in person very rarely.

So I suppose I am a digital native. My life is integrated with and augmented by technology. Things 8, 9, and 13 for CPD23 are all about web-based tools and technologies that are used to organise oneself and make life easier. These kinds of tools – Google Calendar, Google Docs, wikis – and certain pieces of hardware – laptop, USB stick, Kindle, iPod – are integrated into my life in such a way as to make them crucial to my normal operation. Google Calendar augments my memory; my Kindle augments my capacity for communication: these pieces of technology are integrated with me and make me a more effective human being.

Transhumanism argues that the next step in human development will be merging with technology to make humans fitter, smarter, and better. To some degree, this is already happening with digital natives: as humans whose lives are so integrated with technology that they are recognisably distinct from generations before them, there is a strong case that this is the first generation of posthumans. Although I don’t agree with Ray Kurzweil’s quasi-religious belief in The Singularity, I do agree that the human body is imperfect and that augmenting humans using technology can be of great benefit: “Our version 1.0 biological bodies are likewise frail and subject to a myriad of failure modes, not to mention the cumbersome maintenance rituals they require. While human intelligence is sometimes capable of soaring in its creativity and expressiveness, much human thought is derivative, petty, and circumscribed.”

Some argue that digital natives suffer from their attachment to technology. In the wake of horrendous riots across England last week, the Government has discussed the negative influence of social media technology and its potential for organising riots and disorder. In his book, The Shallows, Nicholas Carr discusses the negative impact of the Internet on human neurology (in brief: dwindling ability to concentrate; a generation of ADHD sufferers). Rather than interpreting this change as a kid of decay, the authors of Born Digital see it as an adaptive change necessitated by a changing information environment. Digital natives are simply adapting to survive in an environment of ‘information overload’. For example: in a world where the information can be found with a couple of keystrokes, what non-trivial benefit is there to memorising the kings and queens of England? Einstein said: “[I do not] carry such information in my mind since it is readily available in books. ...The value of a college education is not the learning of many facts but the training of the mind to think.”

We’re likely to see even more changes in the way that people, particularly young people, use technology. Rather than restricting the technology, we have to learn to adapt like digital natives have and will continue to do.

EDIT: A few hours after posting this, Deb Elzie tweeted about this research by the Open University which suggests that there are no 'digital natives' and that there is no clear break between the technology usage of different generations. In which case, anyone has the potential ability to use technology in the intuitive way that is the hallmark of the digital native: rather than being a matter of age, it's a matter of experience. So-called 'digital nativity' lies in shared characteristics and technological affinity rather than arbitrary age limits: there's no reason why people born before 1980 shouldn't be able to use technology as well as people born after. There is another interesting piece on digital natives here by Simeon Oriko.

Addendum - A bit more openness

2011-08-09T09:06:00.000+01:00

My last post was on the virtues of an open Web within institutions. I was going to touch on the value of openness and sharing information for people and institutions – governments, organisations, etc. – but it didn’t seem to fit. Which is a shame because one of my favourite sections of Dave Eggers’ A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius is on this very subject. It’s about overprotectiveness of personal information and asks what is wrong with sharing information? Online or offline, what does it matter how much of one’s life or one’s thoughts are shared? Why should we greedily hoard the personal details of our lives? Why shouldn’t we share everything? Giving out information and being open – within reason – loses us nothing.

What am I giving you? I am giving you nothing. I am giving you things that God knows, everyone knows… It seems like you know something, but you still know nothing. I tell you and it evaporates. I don’t care—how could I care? I tell you how many people I have slept with (thirty-two), or how my parents left this world, and what have I really given you? Nothing. I can tell you the names of my friends, their phone numbers, but what do you have? You have nothing. They all granted permission. Why is that? Because you have nothing, you have some phone numbers. It seems precious for one, two seconds. You have what I can afford to give. You are a panhandler, begging for anything, and I am the man walking briskly by, tossing a quarter or so into your paper cup. I can afford to give you this. This does not break me. I give you virtually everything I have. I give you all of the best things I have, and while these things are things that I like, memories that I treasure, good or bad, like the pictures of my family on my walls I can show them to you without diminishing them. I can afford to give you everything. We gasp at the wretches on afternoon shows who reveal their hideous secrets in front of millions of similarly wretched viewers, and yet.. .what have we taken from them, what have they given us? Nothing. We know that Janine had sex with her daughter’s boyfriend, but...then what? We will die and we will have protected... what? Protected from all the world that, what, we do this or that, that our arms have made these movements and our mouths these sounds? Please. We feel that to reveal embarrassing or private things, like, say, masturbatory habits (for me, about once a day, usually in the shower), we have given someone something, that, like a primitive person fearing that a photographer will steal his soul, we identify our secrets, our pasts and their blotches, with our identity, that revealing our habits or losses or deeds somehow makes one less of oneself. But it’s just the opposite, more is more is more—more bleeding, more giving. These things, details, stories, whatever, are like the skin shed by snakes, who leave theirs for anyone to see. What does he care where it is, who sees it, this snake, and his skin? He leaves it where he molts. Hours, days or months later, we come across a snake’s long-shed skin and we know something of the snake, we know that it’s of this approximate girth and that approximate length, but we know very little else. Do we know where the snake is now? What the snake is thinking now? No. By now the snake could be wearing fur; the snake could be selling pencils in Hanoi. The skin is no longer his, he wore it because it grew from him, but then it dried and slipped off and he and everyone could look at it.

The virtues of openness

2011-08-08T10:00:00.002+01:00

Over the past year, we’ve seen the growth of groups like WikiLeaks, Anonymous, and LulzSec: these are groups bound together not by proximity or community but by the members’ shared values, in particular the value of openness. WikiLeaks published information that the group believes should be out in the open – the actions of those who represent the public: governments, militaries, and government representatives. Though Anonymous and LulzSec ostensibly hack and DDoS attack websites “for the lulz”, the groups actually have strong values concerning who and why they hack: as part of Operation AntiSec, attacks on SOCA and the US Department of Homeland Security were justified because of these governments’ efforts to “dominate and control our Internet ocean.”

The actions of these groups are reactions – albeit, extreme reactions – to lack of openness on the Web. Although the Web is an amazing expanse of shared information, efforts to ‘dominate and control it’ are routine. The most extreme case is China’s Golden Shield Project – the ‘Great Firewall of China’ – which restricts access to the Web for the Chinese people. National and local governments worldwide keep information closed off from the public and, in the case of WikiLeaks and the diplomatic cables, can take websites down to prevent access to information.

For people in the West, the most everyday form of censorship occurs in work or school. Many employers and education institutions use software to block websites: to erect walls across the Web. The most frequently blocked websites are usually social networking websites – Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. – which employers and educators perceive as wastes of time. But there are other, more surprising banned websites: Stephen Abrams recently shared these lists.

Thanks to Alice Halsey for this image idea

In an educational environment, lack of openness can have a detrimental effect. From a library perspective, restricting Web access seriously restricts the research that students can do. As well as the quantity of research sources, lack of access can also impact the quality. When teaching information literacy, it’s important to get students to use the references and further links at the bottom of Wikipedia articles: in an environment where Wikipedia is available but the referenced material is blocked, it’s difficult to verify sources and ensure accurate information.

In employment, blocks on social networking websites can be equally detrimental. It’s true that time spent playing FarmVille or chatting on Facebook can be wasted time but social networking also has the potential for great professional development. Openness in a work context comes down to trusting your employees to do the right thing. Twitter, for example, can keep someone connected to a disparate community of like-minded people, can link to useful resources and ideas, and can provide a support and professional development network with projects like CPD23. Blocking social networking and indeed any other websites treats employees and students like children: it’s detrimental to their effectiveness in the workplace and to their engagement in an organisation. It’s interesting to note that none of the top 100 best companies to work for block social media websites.

In Education and the Social Order, Bertrand Russell talks about how infants instinctively “rage at any constriction of the limbs.” This instinct, he says, “is the basis of the love of freedom.” Russell says that constraint without reason leads to rage and rage leads to destruction. Conversely freedom and openness lead to fulfilment and happiness.

Humans desire openness: the freedom to access the shared inheritance of human information. A lack of openness – in terms of the Web or knowledge or whatever – is inimical to human creativity and this is why groups like Anonymous and LulzSec step up to defend openness so vociferously. Creativity requires access to a range of perspectives, dissemination of ideas, communication between individuals, collaboration between groups. These are all things that the Web can enable but which the blocking of websites prevents. Like fish growing to the size of their physical environments, human minds grow to the size of their mental environment. As far as possible, we should avoid restricting our mental environments and stop censorship of news, books, and websites.

Things 10 and 11 - Masters, Charterers, and Mentors

2011-08-03T09:02:00.001+01:00

Things 10 and 11 are about the past and the future: how did you into librarianship, where do you intend to go, and whose help do you need to get there?

I am a ‘baby librarian’: I’ve only been in The Profession for two years and I’ve only had a full-time library job for one year. Nevertheless, there is a story as to how I got this point and it contains Thing 10’s concepts-of-the-week, graduate traineeships, Masters degrees, and Chartership. So gather around, friends, and I’ll tell you a tale...

During my undergraduate degree in philosophy, I thought that in our illogical and ruthless capitalist society, work was something that one had to do to earn money to buy food and shelter. I had never had a job that I enjoyed doing and so I made the generalisation that I would not enjoy any jobs. I took the Stephen King approach to employment: after university, I would spend years toiling in the drudgery of employment before I could finally make a living writing short stories, novels, etc. My drudgery of choice was law: I did work shadowing at solicitors’ firms, I filled in applications for law traineeships, and I got accepted at BPP to study a Graduate Diploma in Law. It was to be a dull but profitable life.

For various complicated reasons which I can only half-remember, I also applied for a graduate traineeship at Manchester Metropolitan University library. The interview was in July: a week before I’d been to my undergraduate graduation; two months later I was due to start law school. On the morning of the interview, as the previous graduate trainees explained the job and talked about librarianship, I experienced a road-to-Damascus style moment of enlightenment. This was a job that I wanted to do. I would actually enjoy doing this job. I could get the money necessary for my survival and do something that I enjoyed. I didn’t have to play the self-sacrificing artist. I could be a librarian.

It was a moment of beautiful, librarianly revelation.

Since I had no idea what librarianship involved, I quite deservedly didn’t get the job. But I knew that I couldn’t go to law school. While BPP pressed me to finalise my registration, I quickly applied for MMU’s CILIP-accredited Masters course in Library and Information Management to start in September (and applied for other library jobs just in case). In retrospect, it seems stupid and irresponsible to reroute my life because of an intuition from a single morning’s interview for a job that I didn’t get. But - and I hate myself for admitting this - sometimes you have to be Kirk rather than Spock.

And it all worked out. I got accepted onto the MA, had a wonderful year studying librarianship with some wonderful people, took a number of part-time jobs including a couple at MMU library, and, in May 2010, interviewed for an Assistant Librarian position at an Army library. While at the Army college, I’ve written some articles for publication, I’ve got involved in public library campaigning, and I’ve spoken at some conferences.

A particularly intimate mentor/mentee relationship

What do I want do now? Now that I’ve got some practical experience of working in libraries, I want to work in Higher Education: either in a university library or anywhere else I can support academic research. Once I’ve found this ideal job, I’d like to start the process of Chartership. This would involve getting a Chartership mentor and, as per Thing 11, at this point in my career, I feel like I could really benefit from the focus that a professional mentor could provide. As I continue to meet people, work, and write, I’ll be keeping my eye out for potential mentors. Also, as I’ve mentioned before, I’ve given some thought to PhD research though I have only the haziest ideas about research topic.

My plan for the immediate future is to keep an eye out for the theoretical ‘dream job’, to look for a mentor who could help me develop, and to get involved in more stuff in different areas of The Profession including getting more involved with CILIP as the organisation adjusts into its restructuring.

A poem on metaphysics

2011-07-31T11:19:00.002+01:00

    O science metaphysical
    And very very quizzical
You only make this maze of life the mazier;
    For boasting to illuminate
    Such riddles dark as Will and Fate
You muddle them to hazier and hazier.

    The cause of every action
    You expound with satisfaction;
Through the mind in all its corners and recesses
    You say that you have travelled,
    And all problems unravelled
And axioms you call your learned guesses.

    Right and wrong you've so dissected,
    And their fragments so connected,
That which we follow doesn't seem to matter;
    But the cobwebs you have wrought,
    And the silly flies they have caught,
It needs no broom miraculous to shatter.

    You know no more that I,
    What is laughter, tear, or sigh,
Or love, or hate, or anger, or compassion;
    Metaphysics, then, adieu,
    Without you I can do,
And I think you'll very soon be out of fashion.

Written in 1897 by Lady Russell, grandmother and guardian of Bertrand Russell, as quoted in Earl Russell's (Bertrand Russell's elder brother, Frank) My Life and Adventure, London: Cassell & Co. Ltd., 1923.

A DREaM of consilience

2011-07-22T11:00:00.002+01:00

It’s been said that intelligence is the ability to make connections: to see why one event leads to another; to see how ideas link to others; to understand the impact one’s actions have on the world and other people. Academic research is all about making connections whether in the form of combining ideas in Hegelian dialectic or discovering the correlations between discrete bits of data. On Tuesday, I attended the LIS DREaM Project (Developing Research Excellence and Methods) Launch Conference in London and discovered one of its key themes to be the idea of connections: connections between people in the form of academic collaboration and connections between subjects in the form of cross-disciplinary research and consilience.

Connections between people

Bringing people together

Connecting people and creating networks was the main purpose of the event. In her introduction, Hazel Hall explained that the DREaM Project’s aim is to build a formal UK-wide network of LIS researchers working together to improve LIS research. She used the word ‘cadre’ to describe this network of committed individuals (“professional revolutionaries”) and explained how DREaM and the LIS Research Coalition would bring this cadre together through events and online networks.

These intra-discipline connections are important but the real emphasis of the conference was on making connections outside of one’s comfort zone. In his brilliant keynote speech, Blaise Cronin defined the comfort zone of LIS research by presenting an overview of the current state of the field. One concern is the danger of ‘cookie-cutter research’: doing research for the sake of doing research. This results in unoriginal and redundant studies particularly in the United States where a condition of an academic librarian’s tenure is churning out a certain amount of research. Academic research can also be further hampered by the tendency to work exclusively with people that one is familiar with. This may seem oxymoronic (‘how could you work with someone who you aren’t familiar with?’) but Blaise framed it in terms of the Allen curve: the phenomenon whereby one is more likely to work with people to whom one is in close proximity which shows that ideological similarities, shared research interests, or intellectual compatibility are less important to likelihood of collaboration than sitting in the same office.

Collaborating with people across disciplinary boundaries is one way to escape the comfort zone as well as the ‘echo chamber’ of LIS research. A theme of the breakout sessions was building connections through cross-disciplinary collaboration. One session gave the benefits of cross-disciplinary collaboration – new ideas, wider dissemination, new outputs, the building of trust – while Gunilla Widén’s discussed the importance of bridging the gap between theoreticians and practitioners, in LIS and in other disciplines. Cross-disciplinary collaboration can lead to exciting, original projects like Gina Czarnecki and Sara Rankin’s Palaces project: they are an artist and scientist respectively who are building a palace out of milk-teeth to highlight the potential use of medical waste in stem cell research. Gina and Sara talked about how collaboration often starts from shared beliefs such as the two’s shared belief in stem cell research. When people discover beliefs and ideas that cross disciplinary boundaries, working together across boundaries makes sense.

Connections between subjects

Barriers to research?

This leads to the second kind of connection: connections between subjects. Exploring outside the intellectual bounds of a single discipline is as important in escaping the comfort zone as collaborating with other people. Research can be hampered by the drawing of boundaries and cultural divides between subjects. Blaise used Freud’s phrase “the narcissism of minor differences” to explain the tiny ideological differences that lead to the kind of perceived cultural chasms that C. P. Snow talked about it in The Two Cultures. Academic territoriality and what Dylan Evans called ‘serial monogamy of subject’ is a poor way to conduct research: intellectual freedom requires skirting across subject boundaries and following lines of enquiry wherever they may lead. Dr. Evans demonstrates this through his career as a ‘philosopher psychologist’ / ‘psychologist philosopher’. His career path through linguistics, psychology, philosophy, and robotics shows the importance of flirting across disciplines. He provided a wonderful example of the kind of experimental philosopher that I envisioned in my undergraduate dissertation and I’m pleased that this kind of cross-disciplinary work is being practiced.

I went to the LIS DREaM conference for several reasons: because I can’t resist a clever acronym; because I’m considering PhD research; and, most importantly, because of my interest in consilience. Both of my dissertations were meta-research investigating how research is done and both were framed around the idea of consilience. I’ve written about consilience before – here, here, and lately in this essay I wrote for the British Wittgenstein Society. Consilience is the thesis that everything is connected and that making connections across all disciplines is the best way of describing the universe. The map of all links between all subjects creates a rhizomatic web at the centre of which “the world will somehow come clearer and we will grasp the true strangeness of the universe. And the strangeness will all prove to be connected and make sense.” (E. O. Wilson, Consilience: the unity of knowledge) Consilience is thus the ultimate form of cross-disciplinary collaboration.

At one point during the breakout sessions, Biddy Fisher said that making lateral connections is the specialist skill of librarians. We make connections, we house materials spanning subjects, we classify, we create thesauri, and we use metadata to link items. Professor Cronin provides a good example. He may be the finest example I’ve ever met of the ‘librarian as polymath’: his talk drew on an astonishing breadth of knowledge and brought out dozens of fascinating interconnections between ideas. In order to provide a support service, librarians learn a little about a lot. I believe that support services like academic libraries and digital libraries have a great role to play in making these connections and fostering consilience (for more on this Consilience-Library Theory, please see Chapter 2 of my MA dissertation). Connections – between people and subjects – are important in academic research and therefore librarians with the ability to make connections are important to academic research. Hopefully as the DREaM Project continues, these connections will continue to reveal their importance.

Everything is connected

Thing 6 - Online networks

2011-07-18T14:17:00.006+01:00

Thing 6 is all about social networks and online networking *. Social networking and the growth of online communities are uniquely new. We are now able to connect with and regularly communicate with people from across the world in an easier way than has ever been available before.

The time is close at hand when the scattered members of civilized communities will be as closely united, so far as instant telephonic communication is concerned, as the various members of the body now are by the nervous system.
'The Future of the Telephone', Scientific American, 1880.

Whether, as broadsheet writers would have us believe, social networks like Twitter have the power to democratise the repressed or foster revolutions **, they have certainly brought about new modes of behaviour, new psychological norms, and new codes of social etiquette (netiquette). It’s particularly interesting to look at how the implied intimacy and the control features of different networks affect their use and popularity.

Intimacy...

Google+ is a recent example of new norms in a new social network. In Google+, users group their contacts in different ‘circles’ depending on which social group the user perceives the contact belonging to: I currently have ‘Friends’, ‘Family’, and ‘Library Peeps’ (http://gplus.to/SimonXIX). Now the attractive thing about circles is that only the user can see his/her circles so they provide a way of organising people without the publicity of, for example, Twitter lists. The user can then control which posts or status updates are shared with which circles. This allows a level of controlled detachment (or indeed controlled intimacy) that I find quite appealing and it demonstrates something about how the intimacy of a network affects how it is used.

My experience with social networking began with Facebook (well, technically it began with MySpace but I think it’s best to ignore those years, don’t you?). Facebook is perhaps the most intimate of the ‘big wig’ online networks: profiles tend to use real names, non-avatar photos, and to input a lot of personal information. And so Facebook tends to be used for connecting with friends, voyeuristically following the lives of people I didn’t like in school, and setting up in-person events. In other words, it’s to communicate with people I know quite well.

By contrast, Twitter and LinkedIn have different levels of intimacy between contacts. I was attracted to Twitter by the new etiquette whereby one can ‘follow’ someone without that person feeling behoved to ‘follow’ one back. Twitter is less personal, more anonymous, and leads to connecting with a wider range of people without necessarily feeling any particularly close connection with those people. It allows more control over how close people get: unlike on Facebook, it requires effort to build up intimacy on Twitter. This control over one’s own connections is very appealing and perhaps contributes to the network’s popularity. It also contributes to its use as a general, profersonal communications tool. LinkedIn by design implies a certain amount of professional detachment but compared to Twitter offers less control over the amount of information a contact sees: this informs its use for employment purposes and for serious CILIP-y discussions.

So the intimacy implied in a network *** and perhaps more importantly the control that the user can exercise over this intimacy contributes massively to the use of that network and/or its popularity. If I can make an unfounded conjecture: part of the reason that LinkedIn is not as popular as other online networks is because it doesn’t offer much intimacy between contacts and promotes a professional demeanour that it’s unappealing to affect in one’s spare time.

...and control of personal space

Control is very important psychologically: in the form of safety/security, it’s the second level from the bottom in Maslow’s hierarchy of human needs. I did give some thought as to whether meeting someone online offers more or less control over intimacy than meeting someone in real-life: I think the most I can say is that the two experiences are different. But I think as norms and netiquette continue to change, these will affect all our interactions with other people. Google+ seems to be a useful social network because it allows the controlled detachment (excluding people without feeling awkward) of Twitter, the employment profiling of LinkedIn, and, if you want it, the intimacy of Facebook.

I have been a lucky man. To feel the intimacy of brothers is a marvellous thing in life. To feel the love of people whom we love is a fire that feeds our life. But to feel the affection that comes from those whom we do not know, from those unknown to us, who are watching over our sleep and solitude, over our dangers and our weaknesses – that is something still greater and more beautiful because it widens out the boundaries of our being, and unites all living things.
Pablo Neruda quoted in The Gift by Lewis Hyde.

* Justification: In some sense, I’m hijacking Thing 6 to write about something that I’ve been thinking about writing about anyway. A central theme is my networks, what I use them for and why. So it’s all good.

** Mini-rant: Personally I think it’s rather patronising to suggest that movements like the Arab Spring could only come about through the application of Western technology. It strikes me as an insidious form of Western imperialism.

*** Mini-discussion-point: Intimacy is also implied by language. In descending order of implied intimacy: Facebook ‘friends’, Twitter ‘followers’, LinkedIn ‘connections’.

My two year librariversary

2011-07-08T08:46:00.001+01:00

Two years ago today, I decided to become a librarian. This milestone seems to invite a self-reflective post about what I’ve done, what I’ve learned, and where I’m going in Year Three. And so, WARNING: this post offers no useful insights into anything except myself. It’s an onanistic exercise that I don’t expect will offer anything to anyone. Normal service will be resumed shortly.

What did I do in Year Two?

Borges' Library of Babel. My favourite short story.

Finished my dissertation and thereby gained my Masters degree
Got a Distinction in aforementioned Masters degree
Moved into my own flat and lived on my own for the first time
Survived a year in my first professional post
(Survived a week living on an Army base as part of my training!)
Took over as Acting Manager (managing a whole friggin’ library)
Had two articles published on The Guardian’s Comment is Free
Had an article published in CILIP Update
Became a member of Voices for the Library
Campaigned for North Yorkshire’s libraries (met MPs, talked at community meetings, helped out local campaign groups)
Did several interviews for BBC Radio
Presented at the CILIP Library and Information History Group Conference
Helped to run a stall at the Hay Festival
Co-presented a workshop at the New Professionals Conference
Met dozens of awesome library folk and other tweeters

It feels great to have accomplished so much but it’s also overwhelming. If someone had told me one year ago that I was going to do all the things listed above, I would never have believed them. In a self-congratulatory, egocentric way, I’m amazed that I’ve been able to do all those things. In particular, the campaigning, the activism, and the interacting with people (so many people!) are things that I never would have believed I could do.

Part of this is to do with self-definition and self-identity. It’s only since I decided to become a librarian two years ago that I’ve really put my skills to use. But my identity – the Simon I see in my head – was forged in the wilderness years of 16-22 when I came to define myself as a gawky, socially-inept, eternally-confused philosophy student who had vague dreams of making a living by writing but who otherwise had no place in a world of materialism and banality. This was a childish expression of individuality and egoism: the youthful belief that one is unique and that no-one else could possibly feel the same way about reality. Nevertheless, that is the identity that was created and that I still project onto myself today. And so, the point I’m trying laboriously to make, is that the Simon in my head – Simon the geek, Simon the philosopher, Simon the (dare I say) loser – doesn’t match the Simon who is the progenitor of the accomplishments listed above – Simon the librarian, Simon the activist, Simon the (dare I say) success.

So along with the sense of pride at the accomplishments of Year Two, there’s a strange cognitive dissonance whereby, on a logical level, I have evidence of what I’m capable of but on an emotional level, I don’t feel capable to have done those things. Mingled with all this, there’s the odd recurring fear that in my transition from Simon-the-loser to Simon-the-success something valuable has been lost: some indefinable quality – perhaps innocence, perhaps potential – that has been lost as I have ‘regenerated’.

The big eye-opener lesson of last year therefore is that I am more capable than I ever thought. What now? Where am I going and what am I doing? This kind of self-reflection is also kind of terrifying. It feels like the bar has now been set for what I can achieve and there’s a certain amount of egocentric internal pressure to either match or surpass the accomplishments of Year Two.

As my writing about digital libraries suggests, I’d like to find a job working with digital libraries, repositories, or electronic collection management, ideally in an academic library where my work can help academic research. I want to continue writing: about library-related stuff and it would also be nice to pick up my fiction writing which has somewhat fallen by the wayside. I want to continue my library activism: I was nervous when I first joined Voices for the Library but it’s become one of the most rewarding aspects of my career.

Broadly speaking, I want to continue doing what I’m doing. I love librarianship and I’m happy working at it. Immediately after that graduate trainee interview two years ago today, I knew that this was what I wanted to do and I readjusted the course of my life to do it but I never expected it to be so rewarding and so fulfilling. A profession that lets me help people, that allows me to meet inspiring people, that gives me access to amazing books and amazing technology, that gives me the opportunity to write and have people read what I write, that lets me be logical, organised, and pedantic. Who could ask for more than that?

On to Year Three...

Thing 4 - Current awareness

2011-07-05T09:36:00.000+01:00

Thing 4 for CPD23 is about current awareness and particularly about a few tools to help LIS workers keep up-to-date with the voluminous happenings from across the vast hinterland of the Web.

Twitter

I already use Twitter! I’ve used Twitter since March 2010 and loved it since about April 2010. It’s become the cornerstone of my current awareness tools and indeed my web presence / personal brand (see Thing 3). It’s the main way I communicate with other people in The Profession and, along with my email, is one of the essential things to check whenever I get on the internet. I use the Twitter client Hootsuite which provides a decent layout showing the regular timeline, your @ mentions, and any lists that you may follow. In order to keep my list of followees down to a minimum, I group people into lists: new Twitter users can also follow these lists. There’s the annoyingly generic Library-and-Info-Pros which contains anyone working in a library and information job (for use of the word ‘pro’ in this context, see Thing 1); Library-and-Info-Pros-2 is a continuation of that list since Twitter lists can only contain 500 people; and there’s Met-in-Real-Life which is a substitute for my memory. Some essential tweeters to follow are: CILIPinfo, theREALwikiman, WordShore, PhilBradley, Girlinthe, ScrewyDecimal, ijclark, walkyouhome, and of course UKpling. There are also many more and the lists Annie_Bob (another essential followee) has put together are very useful.

A simple explanation of RSS feeds

RSS

I already use RSS! I use Google Reader to manage my subscriptions to blogs: instead of trawling all over the Web trying to remember my favourite blogs, Reader makes it possible to skim through the latest posts in a ten-minute break at work. You can see every item that I’ve ‘shared’ here: it’s usually library or technology related stuff or occasional comics about Batman. Reader also makes it possible to ‘follow’ me so you automatically pick up anything I share and I can see anything you share: some of the best stuff I read on Reader comes from the delightful Adrienne Cooper who is a prolific sharer.

Pushnote

Prior to Thing 4, I had never heard of nor used Pushnote. I used to use StumbleUpon which I think is a similar website recommendation engine but I had to turn off the toolbar since it became too great a temptation to press the Stumble button and zoom around the Web like I'd engaged the Infinite Improbability Drive. Pushnote uses star rankings and comments: people you know can rank websites and share them. I've never been a fan of arbitrary ranking systems - value is subjective and qualitative - but Tim Berners-Lee is a proponent of 'ranking the Web'. I'm having a go at using Pushnote and seeing what other tweeters and CPD23 people suggest. If it becomes as big a distraction as StumbleUpon became, it will have done its job.

Thing 3 - Personal branding

2011-06-27T10:14:00.004+01:00

Thing 3 for CPD23 is about personal branding. Nowadays it seems like everyone is selling themselves individually: the job market is such that few people feel tied to organisations beyond their contractual obligations and so are ‘working for themselves’ even when in a nice full-time job role.

Jo’s post about Thing 3 uses the word ‘profersonal’ which is the perfect word that I never knew to describe my approach to my Web persona. I’ve never been particularly concerned with ‘hiding’ aspects of my life or my personality so in general I’m very open on this blog, on Twitter, and in person. There are some restrictions imposed by my job which is why I usually tweet and blog about library advocacy and digital libraries rather than military librarianship. The personality I project through these various mediums is probably a melange of the personal and the professional: this may be because I see no distinction and of course sometimes worry that libraries have taken over my whole life!

Delivering a workshop to eager new professionals.

One of the tasks for Thing 3 is to Google yourself and, I’ll be honest, I’ve done this before. I’m somewhat proud of how I’ve pushed myself up the Google rankings over the past year and personally it provides a tangible record that I am achieving something sitting in front of the computer for hours: my Dad may not ‘get’ personal branding and social networking and stuff but being the top Google result for my name is something he can understand and point to as an achievement of his son. Primarily thanks to The Guardian, the first 5 results for ‘simon barron’ are me and 6 out of the 10 results on the first page are me. I’m a little disappointed that my blog is the 20th result: I see it as a hub of my online presence and so wish it were a little higher. The answer may be to change the name or at least the tagline, both of which I’ve stubbornly refused to do in the past.

Over the past few months, I’ve been trying to extend my personal brand. I’ve been very jealous of Lauren Smith’s unique visual style that she extends to her work: the olde-timey cartoon bookshelves that form the background of her blog which she uses in a load of other ways in her various projects (she's written about this visual style here). My blog doesn’t have much of a visual style (it’s purposefully minimal) but lately I have been using the cloudy-blotchy-grey background as headers and footers on conference proposals and cover letters. It’s a start but I really need to work on some graphic that represents me (see Jo Alcock’s penguin, Ned Potter’s wiki-man logo). I was also impressed with Katie Birkwood’s redesign of her blog and I’d like to add some ‘about’-type pages to my own at some point.

As a start, I’ve changed the picture on the left of this blog and on my LinkedIn profile using one of the excellent pictures from Sarah Ison’s photos of the New Professionals Conference. This exercise has made me realise that aside from my name and the whole XIX thing, there’s nothing much that is memorable about my online presence and this is something I clearly need to work on.

What does 'professional' mean?: CILIP New Professionals Conference 2011

2011-06-22T08:32:00.003+01:00

On Monday I attended the CILIP Career Development Group New Professionals Conference in Manchester. The theme was ‘Professionalism and Activism in a Time of Downturn’. With so many threats to the library and information profession at the moment, it’s important that information workers build on the qualities that make us valuable: among these, professionalism and the enthusiasm to get active. Having met so many professional and enthusiastic library folk at the conference, I believe we’ll be able to face whatever future lies ahead for the profession.

For me, the conference tackled the mysterious word ‘professionalism’. What is ‘professionalism’? What does it mean to call oneself a library and information professional? Who are ‘new’ professionals? Do these distinctions mean anything to people outside the library community – outside the echo chamber?

People within the profession tend to use the term ‘librarian’ exclusively for people in a professional post or who have The Qualification. When I’ve discussed this issue with people in the past, it’s always been my view that ‘librarian’ is just a label and I tend to apply it to anyone who works in a library or information context. This is partly because I think this is how users see library staff and because I think that having specific and esoteric labels for ourselves can appear alienating to users and others outside of the profession. Sam Wiggins and Laura Williams tackled this issue in their presentation about people’s perceptions of what makes an information professional. I was pleased by their conclusion: that being a professional is mostly a matter of attitude. Professionalism is in one’s conduct, is in getting involved with libraries and librarianship, is in how one stands in relation to the rest of the profession, and is in holding to an ethical code. In the words of Batman, “it’s what you do that defines you” rather than what qualifications, experience, or labels you have.

This definition of ‘professional’ works both ways: someone without The Qualification can be a professional and equally someone with The Qualification in a ‘librarian’ post might not be a ‘professional’. Some people – including myself – can get complacent once they’ve qualified and got a ‘professional post’. Part of the professional attitude of a librarian is the continual development of skills and knowledge: this can be done in the workplace as demonstrated by the outreach projects in Katie Birkwood and Naomi Herbert’s award-winning presentation; as part of university studies as discussed in Ka-Ming Pang and Jo Norwood’s presentation; or outside work through the kind of volunteer activism that Alice Halsey and I discussed in our workshop.

The conference also provided a handy way for me to work on my CPD. Helen Murphy gave a presentation on the 23 Things for Professional Development project. I’d heard of CPD23 and thought it was a great thing for people to get involved in but, rather arrogantly, I’d not considered that I needed it. The conference taught me that professionalism isn’t about resting on my laurels: it’s about working to continually develop myself and build up my skills/knowledge. Helen told us that we don’t have to do this in work: we can do it outside an organisation in the informal structure of CPD23. So hopefully it isn’t breaking the rules to make this my Thing One blog post.

Developing yourself is only one part of professionalism though: being a professional means being part of a community and accepting responsibilities beyond yourself. Conferences are always fantastic for meeting new people and it was great to meet so many tweeters and other library folk. Isolation is something I feel acutely in a small military library surrounded by people with completely different cultural frames of reference (my casual references to pop culture are wasted!). As I mentioned in our workshop, being part of the Voices for the Library team has been really important for keeping me connected to other librarians and, in all likelihood, to prevent me from burning out on my own. This was touched upon in Megan Wiley’s presentation on librarians in careers services and the issue of communities in LIS was a major part of Rachel Bickley’s presentation on encouraging dialogue between new professionals and experienced professionals. Rachel talked about crossing the boundaries of technology and experience to bring these two communities together. She also raised the very real concern that new professionals can be cliquey. It worries me that people might see the new professionals on Twitter or in LISNPN as ‘exclusive’ and ‘insular’ and it presents a concern for the professionalism of the community: Michael Cook has written about this here.

As Alice Halsey and I discussed in our workshop about activism for new professionals, professionalism doesn’t have to be confined to the workplace or the classroom. We discussed how and why library and information workers should get involved in advocating libraries and actively campaigning for them. We owe big thanks to our wonderful enthusiastic workshop participants and to the organisers for asking us to come and for bringing everything together. Copies of the guides to library campaigning that we gave out can be found here and here and if anyone has any questions about getting involved or wants to help out, please contact us or anyone at Voices for the Library.

In a time of downturn, professionals stick together. Through events like Monday’s, we come together, we help one another, and we all leave as better people.

What other people thought

Laura Steel at Palely Loitering
Rachel Bickley at Rachel's Big Adventure

Rachel Smith at missrachelsmith
Annie Johnson at The Hobbit Hole
Jo Norwood at Rise of the Inforgs
Samantha Halford at Twinset & Purls
'StEvelin' on Succentorship without Sneers
My fantastic workshop partner, Alice Halsey at Alice in Libraryland

On the polarising of debate

2011-06-15T08:42:00.004+01:00

Yesterday morning, I was on BBC Radio York as part of the ongoing debate about North Yorkshire’s library service (which debate, in short, involves a new report whereby the mobile libraries and eight library buildings are under threat). For the first time, I wasn’t interviewed alone. I was alongside another guest, Conservative councillor Chris Metcalfe, the Executive Member for library services. It was a engineered situation with two people who hold polarised opinions on an issue discussing that issue and in the situation I felt a certain internal pressure to conform to radio/TV debates that I’ve heard/seen in the past: I should take a contrary position to Cllr. Metcalfe’s answers, I should interrupt to ‘come back on that last point’. I felt like I had to act as I expect others to act in that kind of media debate situation. Despite feeling that I should be conforming to a stereotype, I sat quietly and spoke only when I was questioned: I’m always happy to speak for libraries but I don’t think I played the part of ‘media pundit’ very well.

We’re familiar with this binary representation of opinion in everything from politics to religion. Humans have simplified ideas for centuries but the binary polarisation seems to have increased over the past year or so. For any debate on any issue in any media, two talking heads are wheeled out, each on opposite sides representing opposite opinions. TV and radio current affairs programmes routinely enlist one person to speak for one extreme and one person to speak for another, generating conflict and antagonism between the two. The writer Graham Linehan wrote about a recent appearance on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme where he alleges that a debate was artificially generated about a topic as innocuous as a script adaptation. Middle-ground is not tolerated in the media.

Where polarised political debates go to die.

And then, because it’s the media’s job to represent real-life, we believe that the polarised opinions we see/hear/read are the only opinions and that they are therefore our opinions. And so the binary representation becomes reality, further perpetuated by a two-party political system and a tendency for humans to simplify complex ideas (a tendency which predates the media: they aren’t entirely to blame). The perceived opposing sides become mirror images. In March, I went on a protest in London; two months later, there was an opposing protest in London. The only way to balance the mirror image was for one side to match the other. These opposing protests generated an astounding degree of vitriol on Twitter with both sides shouting down and insulting the other while generating very little actual debate on the serious economic issues underlying both protests. Instead of acknowledging that the other side were genuine human beings with genuine concerns about the economy, people belittled and insulted and pretended that the other side were irremediably ‘different’.

We need reminding that this binary division of opinions is an inaccurate simplification. Rather than facing up to complex issues with all their convoluted philosophical ramifications, geopolitical assumptions, and accompanying belief systems, it’s easier to adopt a Yes-No frame of mind where everything is divided into simple propositions of affirmation and negation.

‘Women on the front-line!’: ‘No women on the front-line!’

‘NHS reforms!’: ‘No NHS reforms!’

‘Wikileaks is bad!’: ‘Wikileaks is good!’

Truth usually lies somewhere in the middle of black and white. My philosophical outlook is a hodge-podge of various theories and ideas lodged together in what I believe to be a coherent and consistent way. This may change as I learn new things. Humans don’t have to be stubbornly binary: I believe in political freedom for the individual à la John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty but sometimes – only sometimes – I ponder the merits of a conservative benevolent dictatorship à la Plato’s Republic. We can change our minds when new information comes along, we can be unsure, we can vacillate between shifting ideologies, we can pick up elements from the different sides of political discourse and settle in between.

The collective human mindscape is awash with colour: a landscape of shades and distinctions between the binary masses of black and white; a panoply of ideology shifting and flowing as people change their minds, discover contradictory opinions, hold contradictory opinions, make tiny and glacial shifts in attitude that accumulate into continent-sized changes in belief systems. Journeys into opinion, belief, and philosophy aren’t about setting up camp in the first place that looks comfortable: they are about exploring one place and then picking up to find new places; they are about exploring the Forests of Ideas, the Valleys of Facts, and the sweeping terrains of distinctiveness that characterise the massive and beautiful landscape of human thought.

There are colours between black and white.

Politics is not a Venn diagram with two circles that barely meet: it’s a swirling kaleidoscope of ideas and thoughts and feelings, many of which do not settle into neat camps of the left/right distinction. When we think and debate with one another in a binary way, we ignore the elegant complexity of the world around us and we forget that truth is usually somewhere around the middle.

CILIP Library and Information History Group Conference

2011-05-30T12:14:00.001+01:00

Last Tuesday, I went to the CILIP Library and Information History Group Conference at University College London. The topic was ‘Libraries under Threat’: a topic that affects more or less everyone in library and information work in one way or another and a topic that, as a member of Voices for the Library, is very important to me. To go with the term ‘threat’, the underlying theme of the conference seemed to be conflict: not between the delegates who were all excellent and lovely people but between less tangible things. Between the past and the future; between the old tradition of books, annotation, marginalia and the new tradition of digitisation; between historical libraries / collections and destruction in the name of progress.

The Hurd Library: a library under threat

Threat necessarily involves conflict. When two sides – organisations, ideologues – have opposing views, one or both will likely feel threatened by the other. Throughout the conference, we were given examples of conflicts with libraries on one side and other bodies on the other. These included physical bodies and conflicts like the Hurd Library’s conflict with those who would sell the Hartlebury Castle that contains it and the University of London Library which faced a very real conflict with German bombers during the Second World War. There were also abstract conflicts – conflicts of philosophy and ideology – such as the Supreme Court Library in Melbourne which is threatened due to the restrictive legal rules that underlie its creation and the newspaper / serial collections of the UK which are threatened by funding problems and changing attitudes to the importance of the press.

One of the most interesting conflicts discussed was the conflict highlighted by Professor Andrew Stauffer of The University of Virginia. Prof. Stauffer discussed the importance of unique books for academic research into topics such as literature and poetry. He used the example of the popular 19th Century American poet Felicia Hemans and how research can be conducted into the lives of people of that period using the annotations and marginalia found in different copies of Hemans’ books. One book contained a fragmentary narrative of a young woman and her lost love told through the medium of notes in the margins of a book of poetry. The conflict is with today’s practices of digitisation: libraries and organisations like Google Books tend to digitise one copy of a work and so all the unique attributes of different versions of the same book are left undigitised and unpreserved. This is a conflict between new methods of storing / presenting information and the age-old methods of historical research. Zdenĕk Uhlíř of the National Library of the Czech Republic provided almost a counterpoint by telling the story of a successful digitisation project and what digitisation is really about.

This highlights something that was discussed later in the conference: the conflict between what we as information providers want to do and what the users want us to do. This is a conflict at the heart of library and information provision. It may be cost-effective and exciting to digitise a wealth of material but close collaboration with scholars and researchers is required to ensure that we do this in a way that still enables them to work. The relationship between information workers and users is an important issue for libraries under threat. It’s also a complicated issue that unfortunately we weren’t able to discuss in full.

Paul Otlet, founder of the Mundaneum

It’s perhaps appropriate that, in a conference discussing conflict, I was filled with internal conflict. I was delivering my first ever conference presentation and though I’d written it weeks in advance and practiced it over half a dozen times, public speaking always makes me nervous. My presentation was about Paul Otlet’s failed bibliographic project and library, the Mundaneum. It prompted some interesting discussion (partly about the user/librarian relationship highlighted above) and everyone was very friendly and receptive. To learn more, my presentation is here and my script is here.

(As an aside: I followed Bethan Ruddock’s advice and used my Kindle for my presentation script. It worked perfectly and would be great for anyone who uses notes when delivering a presentation. It saves messing about with paper, reprinting the script when you make changes, and you can adjust the text format to suit you on the day.)

All in all, it was an excellent conference: it’s always good to be part of discussion and sharing of ideas with other information professionals. Thanks and congratulations to the Library and Information History Group for organising it and for University College London for hosting. Afterwards I nipped off to see, in contrast to a conference on history, the futuristic Out of this World science-fiction exhibition at the British Library. It’s a really well put-together collection of books, periodicals, and cool stuff and I recommend it to everyone whether you enjoy science-fiction or not: you may discover that you already like it more than you think.

For more information on the conference, check out Katharine Schopflin’s excellent and comprehensive report available here.

North Yorkshire libraries saved

2011-05-10T18:31:00.003+01:00

At the end of last year, North Yorkshire County Council announced massive cuts to the county’s library service and the prospect of closures on a scale which was among the worst of any council in the country. On Friday, it was announced that these plans for North Yorkshire’s libraries have been scrapped.

After Save Our Libraries Day on February 5th, the plans were amended to include only libraries outside market towns and to look at creating volunteer-run libraries. Now, in a move which will be fairer and will save well-used libraries, the cuts to the service are being spread across the county’s 42 libraries and will hopefully mean no closures at all. This result is down to the efforts of campaigners across the county who, particularly at the start of this year, made massive efforts to persuade the council to listen to the public.

Easingwold Library. A wonderful library saved from closure.

It’s a great victory and personally I’m very pleased that, unlike other councils, the North Yorkshire councillors have listened to what the people wanted. But this is only one victory in the ongoing national effort to save threatened public libraries across the country: please look at this Guardian blog post for a great summary of the national situation. Have a look at Voices for the Library’s ‘what you can do’ page and email or write to your (possibly newly elected) councillors if your area's libraries are affected by proposed closures.

Four things Kindle can help you to do

2011-05-09T12:31:00.003+01:00

In December, I hoped that my new Kindle would become for my books what my iPod is for my music. Although the Kindle has become a device that I take everywhere and use everyday, it’s less for reading and more for the other things that the Kindle can do. For Kindle users and potential Kindle purchasers, here are four things that the Kindle can help you to do.

Reading

The Kindle is primarily designed to be a reading device and it does this very well. As Bethan Ruddock wrote,

The Kindle... is magic. The enchanted book which is a different story every time you read it; the magic box filled with 1001 stories: this is primal, fairy-tale magic. It’s the sort of thing you can understand at a gut, rather than intellectual, level.

Beth’s blog post gives a lot of great tips on enhancing reading on the Kindle: I’d particularly recommend the Magic Catalog of Project Gutenberg which enables instant download of thousands of public domain ebooks and the SendToReader button which can send full webpages from your PC browser to your Kindle.

Browsing

On the Kindle with 3G, the ‘experimental web browser’ is one its best features: a perfectly functional browser which can be used to access the web for free anywhere. It’s great for checking email or Twitter while travelling or for quickly looking something up while lounging on the sofa.

Here are a couple of tips for enhancing browsing on the Kindle. First, use mobile versions of sites where possible. The Guardian website takes ages to load on the Kindle and sometimes crashes the browser: the mobile Guardian website has the same content and loads in a couple of seconds. I recommend the mobile versions of Google, Gmail, Twitter, and Google Reader. Second, use bookmarks. Typing a URL on the tiny Kindle keyboard can be difficult so it’s easier to set bookmarks for all the sites you’re likely to visit.

Exploring / geocaching

Since I moved to a rural area last year, I’ve done a lot more geocaching in my free time. I’ve also been travelling a lot more for work, for CPD, and for Voices for the Library stuff. In the middle of a strange place, the ability to quickly pull up a map of anywhere can be a lifesaver. KindleMap.net offers a version of the Google Maps API optimised for use on the Kindle: it can bring up a map, load a StreetView, or give you directions to anywhere. Wikitravel, the free collaborative travel-guide, is also a great site for finding local landmarks, places to visit, or getting background on an area. For geocaching specifically, the full Geocaching website works fine or, if signal strength is low, the WAP version serves the purpose.

Gaming

From the Kindle’s Home screen, if you press Alt + Shift + M, you can access a version of Minesweeper. Then press G to access a Noughts and Crosses game (comparable in difficulty to playing against the supercomputer from WarGames). In the US, it’s also possible to download a couple of word games: Shuffled Row and Every Word. For UK Kindle-owners, if you go on the Manage Kindle page on the Amazon website and change your location to the US, you can download them and then switch back to the UK (I haven’t tried this so take with a pinch of salt).

Assorted tips

If you explore the capabilities of the device, you will discover that the Kindle has other hidden abilities. A few extra useful tips:

Use Alt and the top row of letters to type numbers without using the Sym menu.

Press Alt + Shift + G from any screen to take a screenshot. It’s also possible – though complicated – to change the screensaver images.

Use shortcuts. There are a series of @ commands that you can use in the search bar of the Home screen to quickly access things. There's a list here.

Change the font to make reading easier. I’ve read a lot more on the Kindle since I switched from the default ‘regular’ font to the ‘sans serif’ font. Change the text settings until you reach an optimum comfort level for your eyes.

'First they came for the public libraries...' Thoughts on professional duty

2011-05-03T13:21:00.001+01:00

The CILIP Career Development Group New Professionals Conference is a key library event for young librarians and information workers and this year it looks like there will be loads of great presentations. Laura (@theatregrad) and Sam (@shw34) will be presenting on what makes an information professional; Katie Birkwood (@girlinthe) and rarelysited will be presenting on special collections outreach and community engagement; Helen Murphy (@lemurph) will be presenting too.

My proposal was not accepted so, for the sake of posterity, here it is. I wrote it just before I read Laura Woods’ blog post on a similar theme. For the full paper, I had vague ideas about examining how public library closures impact other information sectors, talking a little about the work of Voices for the Library, discussing Kant’s moral philosophy (his concept of moral duty and the categorical imperative), and generally arguing that keeping silent in these difficult times is the wrong thing for library workers to do. Hopefully I would have made it a little less preachy than this proposal comes across:

“First they came for the public libraries and I didn’t speak out...”
Is library activism a professional duty?

Public libraries face serious threats: closure, funding cuts, and deprofessionalisation in favour of volunteer-run libraries. In these difficult times, should each sector take care of itself or do professionals from other information sectors have a duty to come to the aid of their colleagues in the public sector?

Fragmentation of the profession became a talking point this year: in a discussion on the CILIP LinkedIn Group forum Mark Field wrote, “The information professions are highly networked but poorly integrated.” It makes sense for non-public library professionals – those working in academic, legal, health, or private sectors – to maintain their distance from public libraries which are suffering from increased scrutiny and political battles for survival. Is it logical to integrate fragmented sectors and risk painting all libraries with the same brush?

On the other hand, it can be argued that being part of a professional body means supporting one another. It means sharing the difficulties in the bad times as well as sharing help in the good times. Part of the founding ethos of the library campaign group, Voices for the Library, is that librarians from a range of sectors should speak out on behalf of public library staff who may be prevented from speaking against their council employers.

The CILIP Code of Professional Practice states that library and information professionals should “Act in ways that promote the profession positively, both to their colleagues and to the public at large.” I argue that in desperate times ‘promotion’ extends to activism on behalf of libraries and that for professionals of all sectors – including new professionals – entry into the profession confers a duty to fight, to the extent one is able to do so, alongside one’s colleagues.

Review - The Pale King

2011-04-18T11:54:00.000+01:00

The Pale King is David Foster Wallace’s last novel – the unfinished manuscript he left when he committed suicide in 2008. Considering Wallace’s works’ postmodernism, inaccessibility, and defiance of any kind of analysis, the cliché among reviewers has not been to prune the novel for clues as to the ‘why’ of his death but rather to clichédly refer to the amorphous ‘some’ who will ‘doubtless look through the novel for clues’. All we can really say is that, like Infinite Jest before it, The Pale King is the product of an incredible mind (which deference to the indefinable classification ‘genius’, Wallace himself would probably have hated but is true nonetheless: as Wallace [the author and the character] says in the book, Telling the truth is, of course, a great deal trickier than most regular people understand).

The novel ostensibly tells the story of an IRS tax office in Peoria, Illinois: the core appears to be the story of David Wallace entering this strange bureaucratic environment but considerably more pages are given to introducing the various individuals who work in the office, many of whom exhibit strange paranormal behaviour (a strange bit of supernaturalism like the scene with the ghost in Infinite Jest). But the ‘story’, as it were, doesn’t matter: partly because it’s left unfinished and partly because you don’t read a David Foster Wallace novel for the narrative – you read it for his writing: his beautiful, complex, penetrating, revealing writing.

So the novel as it stands involves the creation of a world: maybe there was a story to be told in this world but either deliberately or because of the author's death, that story is left untold. The notes and asides at the end of the book provide hints that Wallace plotted grand themes or narratives to appear in what would probably have been the second half of the book: the convergence of supernatural IRS examiners, the replacement of humans with machines, and escaping the cage of boredom through simple awareness of life in its beautiful minutiae (see his This is Water speech).

The book is about boredom but it’s not boring. At least it’s not boring to me and I feel the need to say that because Wallace’s writing feels intensely personal: as if he’s describing some feeling utterly unique to me that no-one – including myself – has ever articulated before – or even could articulate as clearly as he does. There are long stretches that should, by rights, be mind-numbingly tedious and dull to read but that instead drift by hypnotically (see §25 which describes tax-return examiners turning pages). In §46, examiner Meredith Rand tells another examiner Shane Drinion how she met her husband: this section is kind of a microcosm of the book with Rand talking about how her husband (ie. Wallace) told her (ie. the reader) such intensely personal things and seemed to know her so well that she couldn’t help but be attracted. There’s a passage that seems to describe The Pale King’s (and to some extent, Infinite Jest’s) style perfectly:

‘Boring isn’t a very good term. Certain parts you tend to repeat, or say over again only in a slightly different way. These parts add no new information, so these parts require more work to pay attention to, alth-’

‘Like what parts? What is it that you think I keep telling over and over?’

‘I wouldn’t call it boring, though. It’s more that attending to these parts requires work, although it wouldn’t be fair to call that effort unpleasant. It’s that listening to these parts that do add new information or insights, these parts compel attention in a way that doesn’t require effort.’

Eventually, like the novel, Rand’s story drops off somewhere in the middle with no narrative resolution.

Ultimately, the novel ends up feeling like a series of separate but interlinked vignettes: wonderful short pieces with an underlying set of themes but no narrative as such. Some of my personal favourite sections included the 100 page-long §22 where ‘Irrelevant’ Chris Fogle gives his life-story and the intensely personal, life-changing event that turned him into an IRS worker; §19 which is a high-level discussion about civics and changing attitudes to individualism and citizenship (We don’t think of ourselves as citizens – parts of something larger to which we have profound responsibilities. We think of ourselves as citizens when it comes to our rights and privileges, but not our responsibilities.); §37 which includes this exchange:

‘Do you suppose it’s so much easier to make conversation with someone you already know well than with someone you don’t know at all primarily because of all the previously exchanged information and shared experiences between two people who know each other well, or because maybe it’s only with people we already know well and know know us well that we don’t go through the awkward mental process of subjecting everything we think of saying or bringing up as a topic of light conversation to a self-conscious critical analysis and evaluation that manages to make anything we think of proposing to say to the other person seem dull or stupid or banal or on the other hand maybe overly intimate or tension-producing?’

‘…’

‘…’

‘What did you say your name was again?’

Unlike The Guardian’s reviewer, I also enjoyed the sections where David Wallace apparently talked directly to the reader. These are metafictional vignettes where the line between author and character is blurred as the author/character David Wallace enters the Peoria IRS office. In an interview with Wallace's widow, Tim Adams writes that Wallace’s work was “writing for young men too clever for their own good, by a youngish man way, way too clever for his.” Maybe (actually yes, definitely. Just look at this review with its brackets within brackets and its semicolons all over the place: pretentious, stylistic bullshit [And then consider the added pretentiousness of this faux self-analysis {And this one}]). But during these brief metafictional portions of the book, it felt as if Wallace – the writer too clever for himself – was talking directly to this young man one last time.

The memoir-relevant point here is that I learned, in my time with the Service, something about dullness, information, and irrelevant complexity. About negotiating boredom as one would a terrain, its levels and forests and endless wastes. Learned about it extensively, exquisitely, in my interrupted year. And now ever since that time have noticed, at work and in recreation and time with friends and even the intimacies of family life, that living people do not speak much of the dull. Of those parts of life that are and must be dull. Why this silence? Maybe it’s because the subject is, in and of itself, dull… only then we’re again right back where we started, which is tedious and irksome. There may, though, I opine, be more to it… as in vastly more, right here before us all, hidden by virtue of its size.

Felix Frankfurter and the world in which we live

2011-04-02T11:47:00.000+01:00

In 1938, Franklin D. Roosevelt sought to appoint the poet Achibald MacLeish to the position of Librarian of Congress, head of the United State's national library. There was opposition to this appointment from the ALA largely because MacLeish was not a professional librarian. Roosevelt sought advice from his friend Supreme Court justice Felix Frankfurter. As part of his advisory reply, Frankfurter wrote words that still resonate today. They are well worth reading (these words and this story come from Patience and Fortitude by Nicholas A. Basbanes):

In the world in which we live it is no longer agreed that the common culture is a common treasure. In the world in which we live it is no longer agreed that the greatest glory and final justification of human history is the life of the human mind.

To many men and many governments the life of the human mind is a danger to be feared more than any other danger, and the Word which cannot be purchased, cannot be falsified, and cannot be killed is the enemy most hunted for and hated. It is not necessary to speak of the burning of the books in Germany, or of the victorious lie in Spain, or of the terror of the creative spirit in Russia, or of the hunting and hounding of those in this country who insist that certain truths be told and who will not be silent. These things are commonplaces. They are commonplaces to such a point that they no longer shock us into anger. Indeed it is the essential character of our time that the triumph of the lie, the mutilation of culture, and the persecution of the Word no longer shock us into anger.

The Library of Congress reading room

Libraries, bias, and the BBC

2011-03-31T09:51:00.005+01:00

Yesterday morning, author Zadie Smith appeared on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme delivering a speech about the value of public libraries. By the afternoon, The Telegraph had published an article criticising the BBC for showing bias: the critics include an anonymous Twitter user, an anonymous BBC insider, and the TaxPayers’ Alliance. The BBC is accused of allowing Ms. Smith’s comments to become a “party political broadcast” (The Telegraph presents this quote without attribution). I’d like to argue that the accusations of bias reveal more about the political motivations of the accusers than the BBC and that because of this they are ultimately self-defeating.

Libraries are not a central Government issue. As one of The Telegraph’s bloggers points out (after the main article, The Telegraph published two blog posts about Zadie Smith’s library speech), closure of libraries is an issue for local government rather than central Government. Library advocates are challenging Conservative-run councils and Labour-run councils: if, four years ago, the Labour Party had presided over library closures, Voices for the Library would have been set up four years ago. Library activists are not in opposition to the Government or any political party: they are in opposition to anyone who would close functional library services. Criticism of the Government was not the core of Zadie Smith’s message and although it is true that she made a mistake in equating central Government with library closures, the critics make a bigger mistake in going along with this equation.

By labelling the speech as a “party political broadcast”, the critics conflate ‘closure of libraries’ with ‘the Coalition Government’. Some comments on the Telegraph article go as far as to say it represented a bias not only away from the Conservatives but a bias towards Labour. Libraries are not party political: there is no party that included the closure of libraries in its manifesto. The accusations of political bias therefore implicitly establish the Conservative Party as anti-libraries and the Labour Party as pro-libraries: this is a position that I’m sure the Conservative Party would be publicly keen to reject or at least distance themselves from.

Since libraries are neither an issue for the Cabinet nor a party political issue, there is no political bias in broadcasting a defence of them. The BBC also broadcasts defenders of other institutions and beliefs: these are permitted because they are not party political issues. Brian Cox can discuss science for an hour because the issue is not party political. The same is true of libraries and the implication that a pro-library speech is necessarily anti-Coalition is a dangerous precedent.

I have argued that a pro-library position shows no political bias and that the allegations of the TaxPayers’ Alliance et al are unfounded. However it is possible to ignore the apolitical pro-library core of Zadie Smith’s message and to believe that her surface accusations against the Big Society were motivated by political belief. In this case her comments would have been biased but the BBC almost immediately corrected this by broadcasting Shaun Bailey’s anti-library comments defending the Big Society concept. Shaun Bailey’s comments have attracted less popular support or commentary because of the mistakes involved: he based his argument on library statistics and didn’t present any actual figures; he mistakenly argued that library usage is in decline; he falsely implied both that ‘everyone has the Internet’ and ‘everything is available on the Internet’. Shaun Bailey argued – quite rightly – that library closures are a council decision and that in the case of well-used library services, councils would be loath to close them because of the political backlash: his mistake here is ignoring the obvious political backlash that has accompanied closure announcements – including Save Libraries Day, petitions attracting thousands of signatures, and a march for public services which over half a million people attended. Despite this backlash, councils such as Gloucestershire are continuing with library closures thus demonstrating that the Big society, intended to give power to local communities, is incompatible with local authority funding cuts which are taking power away from local communities.

Librarians and the March for the Alternative

2011-03-23T13:03:00.000Z

This coming Saturday (26th March), I will be going to London to take part in the March for the Alternative.

There are hundreds of reasons to march: because you don't approve of the economic policies of the Coalition Government; because you value Britain's public services and don't want to see them destroyed; because you believe in affordable university education, the arts, public libraries, the NHS, council services, public toilets, or the other things that make this country work. Polly Toynbee gives the reasons more eloquently in her Guardian column here.

I am marching because I believe we need to draw the line here. As citizens, it is our duty to inform the Government when they are doing things that we do not want them to do. The Government is passing through policies which were not in either party's manifesto. The Government has received no public mandate to enact these cuts and destroy institutions that the public values. The poor are suffering - or will soon be suffering - disproportionately and I believe that promises of 'fairness' should be kept. The Government works for us and we need to make sure that this fact is never, ever forgot.

I intend to meet some friends down there and I know that lots of librarians – based in London and travelling in from around the UK – will be there. If anyone is interested in meeting and marching together, I will be meeting people below Cleopatra’s Needle on Victoria Embankment from about 1030. The march begins at 1100 and the staging point is only a short walk away. Hopefully it won't be too crowded there but watch out for my tweets on the day just in case. It is my hope that I will be able to meet some of the great people I've previously only talked to online and that together we can stand as a Coalition of Librarians.

See you there

The National Digital Library - a personal quartet

2011-03-21T07:28:00.001Z

This month I’m honoured to be featured in CILIP Update with an article arguing that the UK needs to develop a National Digital Library. My thanks go to the editor, Elspeth Hyams, for accepting the piece.

I’ve been fascinated by digital libraries since I entered the field of librarianship. During my Masters degree, I volunteered in a cataloguing role at e-space, Manchester Metropolitan’s online digital repository. I went on to write my dissertation on the subject of developing a supremely large-scale digital library: a concept I referred to as the ‘Memex Digital Library’ but which I discovered already existed as the concept of a National Digital Library – a term I came across after reading Robert Darnton’s New York Review of Books article after dissertation hand-in.

NDL as Total Library

The attraction of the National Digital Library concept is that we now have the technology to create what was previously only an ideal: the Total Library. The Total Library would be a record of all human knowledge: collecting every record of human thought and creativity; establishing the connections between books, articles, and miscellanea; providing every person with the same access to the universal pool of collective thought; a way to turn the Platonic realm of ideas into reality. The Library of Alexandria – though not total even by the standards of the time – has come to embody this ideal. Today our strongest physical contenders are the legal deposit libraries like the British Library or Oxford University’s Bodleian Library.

But physical libraries are inherently limited in their scope. In 1933, Vannevar Bush wrote:

The library, to which our professor probably turned, was enormous. Long banks of shelves contained tons of books, and yet it was supposed to be a working library and not a museum. He had to pore over cards, thumb pages, and delve by the hour. It was time-wasting and exasperating indeed… The idea that one might have the contents of a thousand volumes located in a couple of cubic feet in a desk, so that by depressing a few keys one could have a given paper instantly projected before him, was regarded as the wildest sort of fancy.

Bush's vision of the Memex

Bush went on to work on this analog precursor to the digital library and is one of several people in the 20th Century to have fallen short of the ideal because of the technical limitations of the time. Bush attempted to create the Memex: a device which would store and, crucially, link together all human records. Through this, he aimed to solve the problem of the “growing mountain of research results” which faces the cross-disciplinary academic researcher. Paul Otlet also strived towards the Total Library with his creation of the Mundaneum: a library/museum which would contain everything with no arbitrary limits on its collections. I studied both Otlet and Bush as part of my dissertation research and in May I will be giving a short presentation on Otlet’s Mundaneum at the CILIP Library and Information History Group Conference in London.

Now we actually have the technology for developing a National Digital Library which could come closer than ever to the Total Library ideal. Digital storage, tools for creating connections, widespread access to electronic materials, and usable interfaces are common and given time, money, and resources, it is possible to create a digital repository of every textual artefact in the country.

NDL as map

The rhizome: an analogue for the web of human knowledge

My dissertation research consisted of two parts: a survey of library folk which showed that people are generally amenable to the idea and a vast majority foresee supremely large-scale digital libraries developing in the next 10-15 years; and a feature analysis which showed that the technology and features required for a NDL are available. I focused particularly on semantic digital libraries, Google Books, and the work of Mimas: their work with Autonomy software to make connections between items and their work on visualising these connections (check out the 3D interactive visualisation feature of UK Institutional Repository Search and imagine it on a larger scale providing a visualisation of every document in the UK: a perfect map of human knowledge; a visualisation of the Platonic Heaven.

NDL as Ark

There’s a metaphor that I’m regularly coming across in my reading: the library as an Ark. Lloyd E. Cotsen, benefactor of Princeton University’s Cotsen Children’s Library refers to the collection as an Ark. In a 1938 pamphlet for the Mundaneum, Otlet wrote:

And now falls the deluge: wars, crises, revolutions. Men are torn from their great temple as it is itself torn from the soil in which lay its foundations. To save what is essential from it, an ark is necessary, the Navis Mundaneum.

The Ark is a striking but pessimistic metaphor. Although it evokes the completeness – the ‘totalness’ – of ‘two of every living thing’, it also implies protection from danger and isolationism. I’m not fond of it but the metaphor is disturbingly apt: at a time when we actually have the technology for the National Digital Library, the UK is shutting libraries and reducing funding to arts and humanities projects. This is partly why I campaign for public libraries as part of Voices for the Library.

As I explain in the Update article, information is in danger of being lost forever. The National Digital Library would be a noble endeavour at any time but especially now when we seemingly need an Ark to duplicate and digitally preserve the artefacts of human knowledge.

NDL as dream

Unlike the scholars of Alexandria, unlike Bush, unlike Otlet, we can make the Total Library: to make our information accessible and usable in fantastic new ways, to protect it from destruction, and to present it for the education of all humanity. The dream of the National Digital Library resonates with me more deeply than any other idea I’ve ever come across: partly for its logical completeness and partly because I believe it would solve the problem I studied in my undergraduate dissertation (that’s another story for another time). For me, the idea represents – in the words of Leonard Cohen – “the course from chaos to art”: from the disorder of the panoply of books to the art of absolute rhizomatic connection. I would love to spend my career conducting further research into digital libraries or to work in digital libraries, cataloguing, or academic collection management. Until I can do that, I will keep arguing and promoting the NDL idea in the hope of reaching someone, somewhere, with the power and the resources to make it happen.

The NDL can provide a map of the labyrinth

On the value of Twitter

2011-03-18T17:27:00.000Z

Last Thursday (March 10th) was my one year Twitterversary. I have been active on Twitter for a whole year and, though I could wax lyrical about its professional benefits and its importance as a medium, I have a short analogy for those who would say that Twitter is a waste of time.

A book is a waste of time. If all you do is look at the cover, a book is a complete waste of time. But if you open it up, if you read the words and discover the meanings, if you take notes and engage with the ideas, if you grow to feel for the characters and the people inside, if you involve yourself in the palace of words inside it, then there isn’t a book on Earth that is a waste of time.

With Twitter – like a book – the more you give, the more you get.

The psychology of books

2011-03-09T09:00:00.005Z

Books can be viewed as ‘objects’ or as ‘containers’. The first viewpoint sees books primarily as physical artefacts: objects that should be preserved and made available. The second claims that the physicality of books is incidental: that their main purpose is to be containers of information. This means that ebooks – a book without a physical component – are just as effective in this purpose. These represent two extremes on a spectrum and so the possibility is not excluded that one may appreciate the beauty of books while also believing that their primary purpose is to provide information.

The position that a person occupies on this book-value spectrum determines their behaviour towards books. I’ll illustrate this with an anecdote from work.


The original Alice's Adventures Underground. A very beautiful book.

Last week, my library launched a book sale: partially to coincide with World Book Day and mostly because we had excess stock. After announcing the sale via email and a poster campaign, we immediately had an influx of users who only came in to look at the book sale and buy books. This included people who regularly use the library, people who don’t come in often, and – most interestingly – people who had never used the library before. I found it fascinating that people were so eager to buy old books even when surrounded by newer books that they could borrow for free (with no late fees). Buying a book seemed to have more value for some of these people than borrowing a book.

Librarians buy books and librarians cherish books. But in my experience, librarians also tend to be heavy library users. Personally, I find that borrowing a book has the same value as buying a book. Before I resort to buying a book, I will search the libraries of which I am a member. I will check to see if I can get the information or entertainment required for free before I’m willing to pay for it and – except in limited cases – I would rather borrow a book than buy it.

So on the one hand, we have people who would rather buy books than borrow them. On the other, we have people (including many librarians) who would rather borrow a book than buy it. These behaviours in relation to books seem to link to the values expressed at the beginning of this post: those who would rather buy a book view books as objects – artefacts to be owned and kept – whereas those who would rather borrow a book view them as containers of information – once the information/entertainment has been gained, the book can be passed on or shared with others from a central repository.

Part of the remit of librarians is therefore to change people’s psychology about books to change their behaviour towards books. If we move people from the ‘object’ end of the spectrum to the ‘container’ end, we thus encourage them to view libraries as repositories of information / knowledge / entertainment-experiences rather than repositories of physical books. This psychological shift is being helped by the rise of ebooks and digital commodities: these are ‘container’ mediums which exist for the purpose of passing along information. As someone who believes that librarians are the custodians of knowledge rather than the custodians of books, I would argue that this is a way libraries can evolve and survive in the long-term (50+ years).

This leads into the topic of the role of libraries in the 21st Century: more has been written about this than I can encapsulate in a blog post. There are some great pieces on this topic: a Tame The Web post by Justin Hoenke, a The Unlibrary post by Chris Meade, and Phil Bradley’s seminal piece on the subject of librarians and booksellers.

World Book Week

2011-02-24T10:41:00.010Z

Next Thursday (3rd March) is World Book Day. Then Saturday 5th March is World Book Night. Though Lauren’s latest blog post reveals that the two are (surprisingly) unrelated events, both are very worthwhile and are great opportunities to get acquainted (or reacquainted) with perhaps the greatest invention in the world – the book.

The following information is provided by Natasha Worswick of Book Aid International:

World Book Day is on Thursday 3rd March this year and it’s basically an opportunity for people to celebrate the education, imagination and information that books provide us all with. There are a whole host of events and activities you can get involved with, whatever your age. They include Meet Talk Give, a fun, easy fundraising activity for reading groups and libraries as well as initiatives for toddlers and school age children.

So where's the best place to start finding out more? Take a look at Book Aid International's blog for a start. You'll find all sorts of fun stuff, competitions and more.

You'll also find details there of just why World Book Day matters so much. Book Aid International is one of the charities that benefits from the day and it enables them to make a massive difference. They depend on people’s support to bring books, and all that they represent, to communities in sub-Saharan Africa and the Occupied Territories of Palestine. Check out some of the videos, and you'll see for yourself just what amazing work they do.

I really hope you'll think that World Book Day is worthy of your support. It's a chance to have some fun, and Book Aid International is a really worthy cause for all book lovers.

So that’s all good. I’ll be making a display at work to liven up the library and perhaps get our users to appreciate the role of books in peoples’ lives.

Then Saturday 5th March is World Book Night when thousands of people will be giving out hundreds of thousands of books to people all over the country. There has been some controversy about it but I think that distributing books for free is a worthy idea – if only as a one-off – and it might make people remember that books are available for free at any public library. My dad is very excited to be giving out copies of Muriel Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.

It’s going to be an exciting week for bibliophiles.

Dramatic North Yorkshire campaign progress

2011-02-21T09:00:00.005Z

After my last post, everything that I wrote quickly (and annoyingly) became irrelevant: last week saw dramatic changes to the plans for North Yorkshire’s libraries. On the 16th of February, the Conservative leader of the council, Cllr. John Weighell, made this statement after a budget meeting:

It is very gratifying in a way that people value our library service so much. The consultation on libraries hasn’t finished. We will not end up in a situation where we are… as part of the consultation… it will be a very different end result to what is being consulted upon. I can’t go too much further in saying exactly how but we will certainly look to spread the pain much more widely than the consultation said and we will look to make other savings rather than closing libraries. What I’m personally looking for is to have libraries operating in at least all the market towns with some volunteer help to the professional staff not just leaving volunteers to run a library and forgetting about them but to work together with the professional library staff and volunteers throughout all our libraries that we can possibly keep open. And by that I mean the market towns primarily.

You can hear him saying those words and me reacting to them on BBC iPlayer here. The market town libraries currently under threat are: Bedale, Bentham, Boroughbridge, Easingwold, Helmsley, Ingleton, Kirkbymoorside, and Leyburn. The revised plans mean that North Yorkshire would retain 26 libraries out of the current 42 (62% of the region’s libraries). Therefore the council still plans to close, merge, or volunteer-run 16 libraries.

On the 18th, it was reported that the Council have set up a £650,000 fund to buy more time for planning the future of the library service. It is implied that the fund is intended to keep libraries open while preparations are made for handing them over to volunteers or part-volunteer, part-professional staff.

From a larger perspective, the week saw good news for Doncaster as the 14 threatened libraries were given a 12-month reprieve and the council backed away from their previous plans. However there was bad news in Gloucestershire where the council blatantly ignored the will of the people by voting through the library cuts and in Surrey where the council revealed their plans for the library service. On the 19th, the Yorkshire Post reported that Yorkshire as a broad region faces the loss of a fifth of its libraries with 65 currently under threat. The total for the UK now stands at 526 libraries under threat.

The North Yorkshire news should be treated as a victory: the council is backing down from its previously hard-line stance and is, unlike Gloucestershire Council, listening to its people. However this battle in the ‘Great Library War’ is not yet over. It seems the council is now pushing volunteer-run libraries: these are no substitute for libraries run by professional staff and while it isn’t clear what level of volunteer support the council expects, we must be wary of the plans set out. The libraries have a 12-month reprieve during which time we may become complacent. We need to keep up the good work and remind councillors again and again that we value our libraries. If we do this, we’ll be able to save our libraries like others have saved our forests.

There is a public meeting tonight on Harrogate-area libraries (Starbeck and Bilton) at St. Andrew’s Church in Starbeck at 1730. If you can make it to show your support, please come along.

Further North Yorkshire campaign progress

2011-02-16T13:35:00.006Z

The consultation period on North Yorkshire libraries ends in little over a week. The situation is developing rapidly and the council’s reactions are beginning to become apparent. For more information, please see the Save North Yorkshire Libraries site put together by Kirkbymoorside town councillor, Martin Brampton.

The county has seen a number of successful events where the public have clearly demonstrated their opposition to the plans: Bentham Library staged a read-in which attracted support from playwright Alan Bennett; hundreds of people protested at Bilton Library and marched through Pateley Bridge; people across the county have been starting petitions and collecting signatures. On Save Our Libraries Day, hundreds of people attended the read-in at Easingwold Library (local author Tim Hopgood has some great photos here) . Footage from the read-in was shown on BBC News all day and I was interviewed on BBC Radio York about the impact of the event. As Beverley Knights of the Friends of Easingwold Library campaign said, “It’s the Big Society biting back”: communities telling government exactly what they want rather than being told what they should want.

In light of this clear opposition to the plans for the library service, the council have begun to respond. On February 4th, it was reported that the library service will be given a reprieve of a year before any closures take place: this is partly to respond to the public backlash and partly to finalise plans for creating volunteer-run libraries. In fact, the council’s position has moved from threats of closure to advocacy of volunteer-run libraries. This morning the council released this statement by Cllr. Chris Metcalfe – the Conservative councillor in charge of adult and library services. The statement shows the council’s intention to develop libraries run by volunteers from the local community. Though it mentions “positive discussions... with local communities”, there is no mention of the widespread opposition to the plans, the events on February 5th, or the planned amount of professional staff.

Although an open volunteer-run library is better than a closed library, it needs to be understood that a library service run by volunteers is not an adequate replacement for a professional service. Fellow Voices member, Ian Clark, wrote this article for ORG Zine on why librarians cannot be replaced by volunteers (in a similar vein, I wrote this article for ORG Zine on the origins of Voices for the Library). Ian has also written on the money that councils are holding back for ‘Big Society projects’. Instead of destroying a professional library service, councils should be looking to save money by examining wastage and cutting administrative budgets.

Voices for the Library recently published data which reveals the overall success of North Yorkshire’s libraries and the specific success of many libraries previously earmarked for closure (we have Friends of Easingwold Library to thank for the Freedom of Information request which made this data available). It also demonstrates that the library closures will disproportionately affect vulnerable people across the county. Last July, North Yorkshire County Council produced this slideshow about turning libraries into volunteer-run libraries. Among the problems it discusses are that volunteer libraries take longer than expected to set up, have much-reduced opening hours (North Stainley Village Hall open only 6 core hours a week), have high ICT costs, and require a team of enthusiastic volunteers and supporters.

North Yorkshire deserves a professional library service. Isolated rural communities deserve the links to information and communication that local libraries provide. David Cameron wants libraries to “wake up to the world of new technology” and this means appointing staff trained in the use of new technology rather than volunteers who may not have appropriate IT experience or the budget to develop new library technologies. Please continue to support your local libraries, send your stories and comments to the Voices for the Library team, write to your local councillors and MPs, and attend public meetings (on Monday, I will be attending a public meeting in Starbeck which the council has refused to attend). Keep supporting your libraries and – like in Northamptonshire – we can make the council change its plans.

The poverty of nations

2011-02-10T13:35:00.003Z

There’s a contradiction at the heart of the Coalition Government’s attitude towards capital. More than ever, we are told that money is a core value and simultaneously individuals are told to value money less.

The money contradiction

On the one hand, massive cuts are being made to save money. Libraries, hospitals, leisure centres, Post Offices, and miscellaneous front-line services are taking cuts and being closed because the national debt apparently must be reduced. Last week, it was reported that rural public transport links are to be cut because they are making a loss and being subsidised by profit-making urban transport links. The implication is that money is a more important concept than others: education, knowledge, communication, security, and leisure are all superseded by the need to generate money. Profit stands above any other metric as a measure of success. If something is unprofitable, we are told, it is unsuccessful.

On the other hand, the Coalition’s flagship idea – the Big Society – requires its practitioners to show detachment from money and a keen desire to engage in non-profitable pursuits. The Big Society aims to get communities to take over public services which are currently run by local or central government. In this spirit, people are being told to volunteer more, to give their time and skills freely, and to help their communities by working for nothing with few resources.

The Big Society concept was dealt two blows last week

The issue of bankers’ bonuses has become a battleground for this kind of debate about capital. On the one hand, we are told that bankers deserve their bonuses because they have valuable skills that deserve monetary compensation. On the other hand, Big Society volunteers are told that they should put their valuable skills to work for free. The difference lies in the skills: a banker is skilled at making money by manipulating existing systems; a childcare worker is skilled at raising and educating children. Again, this indicates that monetary gain is the value most prized by society.

Debating and defining

This cognitive dissonance and this widening gulf between those who value money and those who don’t prevents proper debate and real argument. Increasingly it seems, debates involve parties arguing past one another: this is a generalisation but it generally involves liberals on one hand arguing for values beyond money and conservatives on the other arguing that money and profit need to be preserved. One of the core lessons of philosophy is that to debate properly one must first define one’s terms: our current political and ideological debate is hampered by the different parties using different definitions and different value-judgements about money.

The value (or lack thereof) of money

This part is my opinion and involves, as mentioned above, a liberal defining his terms by arguing for values beyond money. In my opinion, society is unbalanced by the extreme valuing of money.

Images like this alter our perception
of what 'success' is

The latter half of the 20th Century in the West has seen the acquisition of money become the driving force of many individuals. Part of this due to aspirational television and other media coverage raising our lifestyle expectations. Part of it is due to the continued unabated success of those who seek extreme wealth – including those who do so immorally or illegally. We’ve now reached a point where all political debate comes down to money, all argument is reduced to cost/benefit analysis, and all values are subservient to the pursuit of self-interest encoded in the capitalist terms of money.

As Philip Pullman pointed out in his brilliant speech on public libraries and market fundamentalism, there are other values besides money. There is knowledge, education, learning, the pursuit of intelligence, community, charity, sharing, togetherness, friendship, sentimentality. Money is valued so highly because our whole system of living is based on it but we shouldn’t forget that it needn’t be this way. We needn’t allow every discussion to be degraded to discussion of profit and loss. As the example closest to my heart, libraries are valuable because they enable learning and knowledge: if they cost money, so what? If profitable enterprises subsidise them, so what?

Hidden within the heart of the Big Society concept is a good idea: the idea of working together and rising above monetary concerns for the good of community. This idea sounds like socialism but the policy the Coalition is pushing is traditional Conservative ideology. The good idea at the core is hidden by ideological actions: shrinking the state, cutting public sector budgets to reduce the deficit, and shifting responsibility for state-run services onto individuals and communities. I believe that a large state should support communities and values beyond money: the Big Society idea argues that a small state should generate money and leave communities to support themselves.

There are things in this world that should be preserved precisely because they transcend monetary concerns.

Save Our Libraries Day - Yorkshire

2011-02-02T09:06:00.006Z

Saturday will be an important day. On Saturday, people across the UK will voice their displeasure at the proposed closure of over 400 libraries. Saturday February 5th is to be Save Our Libraries Day: there will be events, protests, and read-ins held in hundreds of libraries. Please see the CILIP website for information on what you can do and see the National Save Libraries event on Facebook to find where your nearest event is.

Due to the high number of closures proposed for the area, Yorkshire is hosting many events. On January 21st, the Harrogate Advertiser launched its campaign to keep North Yorkshire libraries open. On January 27th, 700 people attended a meeting in Great Ayton to discuss the proposed closure of their local library. On January 29th, I attended a successful read-in in Doncaster: watch this video to get an idea of what’ll be happening this Saturday.

The following libraries are holding read-ins in North Yorkshire:

Bentham Library - 10.00-13.00

Colburn Library - 11.00 onwards

Easingwold Library - 9.30-11.30 - with authors Mike Pannett and G.P. Taylor

Great Ayton Library - 9.30-12.30
Pateley Bridge Library - Meet at 10.00 to march to the 'super-mobile'

The following libraries are holding read-ins in South Yorkshire (more information here):

Cantley Library - 10.00-13.00

Bawtry Library - 10.00-13.00 - with author Helena Pielichaty

Sprotbrough Library - 11.00-12.00 - with authors Richard Benson and Kate le Vann

Moorends Library - 11.00-13.00

Rossington Library - 11.00-12.00

Carcroft Library - 11.00-12.00
Sheffield Central Library - 11.00 onwards

There won’t be any read-ins in York because York City Council has vowed to safeguard all 14 of the city's libraries. Council leader, Andrew Waller, said quite rightly that “…there are alternatives to closing libraries which I am sure people would rather we pursued.”

On Saturday, I will be attending the Easingwold Library read-in. Easingwold Library has come to represent the main problems with the proposed cuts for North Yorkshire. Firstly, data soon to be made available by Voices for the Library shows that Easingwold Library has seen a consistent year-on-year increase in visits and is by no measure an unsuccessful library. Secondly, the people of Easingwold strongly oppose the closure: when a community fights against the councillors who represent them, something is dreadfully wrong. Next week, people will meet at a public consultation to discuss Easingwold Library’s fate. It’s important that people who care about North Yorkshire libraries attend.

Although Saturday will be a major turning point, it will not be the end of the campaigns to save libraries. For more information on what you can do to continue support of the UK’s public libraries, please visit the Voices for the Library website.

And if you haven’t seen them already, be inspired by Phil Bradley’s amazing retro-style save libraries posters. It’s this kind of brilliant creativity that libraries generate and nurture.

My favourite. Ask yourself, what will you do?

Bonus Library Day in the Life

2011-01-27T14:50:00.002Z

This is a bonus post for the Library Day in the Life project Round 6 where librarians across the world record their daily activities. On January 26th, our hero travelled down to London to meet his fellow Voices for the Library campaigners...

Yesterday was the first ever face-to-face meeting of the Voices for the Library team. I made the epic journey down to London – centre of arts, culture and, apparently, librarianship – to meet the team I’ve been working with for the past three months.

The day before was filled with nervousness. ‘What if they don’t like me?’ ‘What if they decide to chuck me out?’ ‘What if I miss my train?’ ‘What if my elaborately detailed travel plans go wrong?’ And – because my northern prejudice told me that London is a hotbed of crime and debauchery – ‘what if someone steals my laptop / Kindle / wallet / keys / train tickets / etc.’ Eventually after an evening of backing up my important documents – just in case! – I experienced that sort of pre-Christmas excited anxiety that prevents one from sleeping.


The British Library. Shame I didn't get chance to go in.

My worries were all in vain. The trains were on time and I made it to London with time to spare. Though I felt like such a tourist wandering London’s streets with my mouth agape, I was very excited to see such landmarks as The British Library, King’s Cross Station, and a Waterstones which actually had a good selection of Alberto Manguel’s essay collections.

My crazy punctuality meant that I arrived first, pacing nervously and trying to get Twitter up on my Kindle to vent my anxiety. But when the other Voices arrived, we fell into the routine of people who’ve known each other forever. The meeting was fabulously productive – kept in check by the wonderful Chairperson Bethan – with a mountainous pile of treats brought by my colleagues. The minutes will be publicly available on our website soon.

Overall, it meant a lot to know that these people are working this hard: that we’re all on the same page; that we all want the same thing; and that we’re willing to work together for as long as it takes and as long as we’re able. It really is amazing that this group of librarians – not even public librarians – has come together to defend these institutions and provide a voice for the people who care about libraries. I’ve said before that the next few months will be the most difficult but now I know that the Voices team will be more than able to face it and hopefully save a good many libraries.

The day was a huge success. Right up until the point I fainted…

Apparently even when meeting some of the top library campaigners in the country and doing exciting things, it’s important to keep your body hydrated. I can now say that not only will the Voices team work to help libraries, they’ll also help an idiot who forgets to drink all day and then keels over in the pub. And apparently, rather than being a hotbed of crime, London is populated by rather nice people who will provide food and aid to the aforementioned idiot.

So it was a wonderful day. I feel so privileged to be part of this team and I’m not sure why I deserve the opportunity to work with these great people. There’s exciting things coming up on the Voices for the Library website and in library campaigns across the country especially on Saturday 5th February – the scheduled Save Libraries Day! Please get involved if you haven’t done so, keep fighting for your libraries if you have, and feel free to contact any of the Voices for the Library team for more information – I can guarantee that every single one of them cares what you have to say.

Library Day in the Life Round 6

2011-01-24T18:11:00.003Z

This is a post for the Library Day in the Life project Round 6 where librarians across the world record their daily activities. I am currently working as the Assistant Librarian for an Army library and this was my January 24th...

SitRep:

Things have changed since the last Library Day in the Life. In September, I moved into a flat much closer to work. Cutting the heavy commute out of my day has given me more energy and allowed me to focus on my job. I also completed my Masters dissertation and no longer have to stretch myself between two roles as library student and librarian. In November, I joined Voices for the Library: balancing this library campaigning role with my work role has been a considerable challenge. In December, my manager took an unforeseen leave of absence leaving me in charge as Acting Manager.

Morning:

I entered the base at 0800 and collected the newspapers before heading to the library. There was a relic from my childhood in my tray: a soldier had brought back a VHS tape over the weekend with the tape mangled in the mechanism and the assistant on duty had left it for me to untangle. Using the skills developed over a childhood of watching videos to death, I untangled the tape and returned it to its 15 brothers: the proud few VHS tapes left in the library.

The first hour was hectic. The photocopier needed toner and three teaching groups were vying for control of the library. While a library assistant went to get more toner, I organised the soldiers: one group in the PC room and two sharing ‘the Goldfish Bowl’ (the informal name for the heavily-windowed library study room).

With the library as quiet as it was likely to get, I spent an hour or so designing the newsletter. The newsletter is a major promotional tool for the library and is disseminated across the base. It tells users what new books and DVDs are available, gives new soldiers an introduction to the library service, and this issue reveals the winners of last term’s short story competition.

At 1015, I began my first shift on the issue desk. Assorted tasks: fetching old newspapers from the store room, issuing books, and helping a class scan, enlarge and print some maps. Between enquiries, I worked on a planning report. We intend to update the library website so I’m putting all my plans, ideas, and research into one document to present to my manager. The difficulty is reigning in my elaborate plans to cater for our 16-17 year old audience.

Lunch:

I divided my lunch hour between reading (Wittgenstein’s Mistress by David Markson) and checking my email, Twitter, and Google Reader. Since I joined Voices for the Library, I’ve been checking my email more often: a few weeks ago I missed a media opportunity for BBC Radio and I’ve been kicking myself ever since. Communication is the crux of the pro-library campaign so it’s important to stay connected even if the sight of a bursting email inbox can be overwhelming.

Afternoon:

While most people were still on their lunch breaks, I took advantage of the quiet to straighten the library and sort out the shelves (Guinness World Records does not belong in the Travel section!). I’m in charge of ‘biographies’ and I noticed that one of the display biographies – a biography on Osama bin Laden – is missing. It hadn’t been checked out so I spent some time searching for bin Laden. Like the man himself, the book's whereabouts are unknown.

At 1500, I had a quick meeting after which I took my place at the issue desk for my second shift of the day. The library is generally quieter in the afternoon so between book issues and pleas for IT assistance, I worked on timetabling the induction sessions for the new recruits: these take place in a couple of weeks so at the moment I’m timetabling them, arranging who will do them, and ensuring we have sufficient materials. Today it involved contacting the rogue teachers who haven’t booked their classes in yet. During my stint on the desk, some education staff came over because they’d noticed my quote in the Harrogate Advertiser. I used this opportunity to get on my soapbox and talk about the plight of the UK’s library service.

Evening:

I arrived home at 1700 and, because I was starving, made myself a spaghetti carbonara. Plans for the rest of the evening include: ironing; I’m Sorry I Haven’t A Clue; preparation for the first Voices for the Library face-to-face meeting on Wednesday; University Challenge; Mass Effect; sleep.

Life, Narrative and Everything

2011-01-21T10:54:00.001Z

Stories are imbedded into the fabric of human lives: stories explain things, communicate information, and entertain us. Even our lives seem to the follow the course of traditional stories with events often seen to fall into neat narrative structures. Is this a delusion – the mind imposing order where none exists – does the universe follow narrative convention? Do we impose narratives on existence or does existence impose narratives on us?

According to Christopher Booker, there are seven basic plots: all stories fall into one of these seven categories. In his book, The Hero With a Thousand Faces, Joseph Campbell goes further and examines the monomyth: the single narrative structure which forms the core of all myths, legends, and traditional stories (particularly children’s stories). In today’s post-postmodern society, we are familiar with traditional narratives and narrative conventions. We see/hear them hundreds of times a day in newspapers, books, movies, TV shows, the news, and in conversations.

Take for example, the following conventions: the underdog triumphing over insurmountable odds; the vain and greedy brought down; the son who surpasses the father; x goes to y and learns valuable lesson before returning enriched to z (the core of Campbell’s monomyth); the dramatic climax where all seems bleakest and suddenly the intractable knot is undone.

We see all these conventions in stories of various kinds. Do they also impose themselves on real life? Consider World War II. The underdog of the Allies triumphing over the seemingly unbeatable and indisputably in-the-wrong Axis war machine. The Allies suffering numerous defeats only to succeed with a ramshackle but heroic operation (D-Day) when things seemed bleakest. To give some examples from my own life, I’ve recently had to take over as acting manager for a while in my library. This feels like the ‘death of the mentor’ trope which can be seen in Dumbledore, Gandalf, Obi-Wan, Merlin, and others. As part of Voices for the Library, I’m currently campaigning against savage library cuts across the country. This feels like the underdog trope: the plucky band of Rebels against the might of the Empire where principle eventually triumphs over power.

The real question is whether real life determines narrative convention or whether narrative convention determines real life. On the one hand, our ancestors may have observed that events follow set patterns and then created narratives to match those patterns. On the other, it may be that our minds – and hopefully this is a wide-ranging phenomenon and not the sign of my own mental defectiveness – are suffused with pop culture and narrative from an early age and that the imposing of understandable narratives onto the chaotic flux of real life is an attempt to comprehend the universe.

This comes down to the age-old dichotomy ‘consequence vs. coincidence’. The universe can either be a meaningful story unfolding across unimaginable distances of space and time or the universe can be a meaningless void of base matter which once upon a time happened to coalesce into beings with the consciousness to contemplate themselves. The unfortunate consequence of the latter explanation is that we become people filled with enough manic self-interest to imagine the rest of the world as narrative swirling around us: the stars of our own private comedies/tragedies.

North Yorkshire library campaign progress

2011-01-16T13:54:00.002Z

Since I last posted, the national campaign to protect the UK's public libraries has made significant progress. In a real demonstration of support from library users across the UK, the #savelibraries hashtag on Twitter went from obscurity to worldwide trending status within a matter of hours as thousands of people gave reasons why libraries are brilliant. In Somerset, library campaigners are pursuing legal action against the county council and are actively seeking a public inquiry into the proposed library cuts across the UK. In London, Boris Johnson is seeking to set up a trust run by Team London to save libraries from closure. In Gloucestershire, the ever-excellent Friends of Gloucestershire Libraries are making excellent progress and the situation was highlighted in The Guardian by Joanna Trollope. Across the country, more and more people are pledging to protect their libraries and - though they shouldn't have to do so - fighting against their own councils for their public services.

The informal campaign to Save North Yorkshire Libraries has also been making progress and capturing media attention. The Yorkshire Post ran this piece on library closures damaging isolated rural communities. John Harris from The Guardian put out a video of his tour of North Yorkshire libraries highlighting the situation and showing that community-run libraries like Hudswell village library may be great socialist enterprises but they are no replacement for a council-run library service with trained staff. Easingwold Library featured in a BBC Look North segment which talked to library users who valued the library. MP for Harrogate and Knaresborough, Andrew Jones, has come out strongly in support of North Yorkshire libraries and in particular Bilton and Starbeck libraries: I encourage Harrogate residents to sign the petitions Mr. Jones has made available.

Fellow Voices for the Library team member, Lauren Smith, did sterling work appearing on BBC Radio York on Monday and BBC Radio Tees on Thursday (at the 1:37:00 mark). Later that morning, I appeared on BBC Radio York (at the 1:38:30 mark) making myself sweaty, shaky, and nervous for North Yorkshire.

Over the next few weeks, pro-library campaigns, local and national, will continue to progress. In February, we will face country-wide read-ins on the 5th of February and we’ll see consultations come to an end. We’re making progress but the hardest days are still ahead. Please visit the Voices for the Library website, if you value your library please submit a story or pledge your support, use the closures map to find local campaigns, and follow the Voices for the Library Twitter feed for all the latest developments. For North Yorkshire residents, please see my last post for details of how you can help.

Save North Yorkshire libraries

2011-01-04T10:44:00.016Z

North Yorkshire County is receiving some of the worst public library cuts of any county in the UK. The Council proposes to close 24 libraries out of the 42 currently open and take 10 mobile libraries off the road to be replaced by two “super-mobiles”. Under the council’s plans, North Yorkshire will lose 57% of its libraries. This is comparable in scale to the library cuts in Gloucestershire, Doncaster, Leeds, Dorset, and Somerset.

The libraries marked for closure are:

This video from John Harris at The Guardian highlights the situation in North Yorkshire.

North Yorkshire is the largest county in England in terms of land area. This makes its libraries all the more important: local libraries provide books and Internet access to people who can’t travel long distances across the county to one of the 18 “core libraries”. Helmsley Library, though marked for closure, was the council’s Library of the Year 2010 with a 30% increase in visitor numbers. North Yorkshire County Council has received only a 2.05% reduction in its spending power and not the 28% that the Council claim: the 28% figure refers to the estimated total budget cut across the UK’s councils given in George Osborne’s Comprehensive Spending Review prior to actual council budget cuts being announced. Under the current plans, North Yorkshire residents lose 28% of their library budget and 57% of their local libraries.

If you have any interest in saving North Yorkshire’s and the UK’s public libraries, the time to act is now. Here are a few things you can do:

North Yorkshire residents can take part in the council’s online consultation on library services available at this link.

Email or write to your local councillor. A full list of North Yorkshire councillors is available here. Cllr. John Weighell of Bedale is Leader of the Council. Cllr. Chris Metcalfe of Tadcaster is the Executive Member for adult and library services.

The most important thing to do is to connect with other people: to find others who believe as you believe and who may already be working hard towards saving libraries in your area. Have a look at the Voices for the Library website for information and contact the team if you can help. Take a look at Public Libraries News for information on the libraries marked for closure in your community. This map provides a list of library closures across the UK:

View Public Library Closures in the UK in a larger map

Connect with other people in your area by joining a local campaign. There are several active campaigns for libraries in North Yorkshire (and if anyone knows of any more, please let me know):

Friends of Easingwold Library – Facebook page and blog

Save Eastfield Library – Facebook page

Bentham Library campaign – Blog

Details of a petition to save Barlby Library here

Details of MP Andrew Jones' support here

Petition to save Bilton Library here

Petition to save Starbeck Library here

Take part in Alan Gibbons’ day of co-ordinated protest at your local library. On Saturday 5th of February, people across the country will gather for read-ins at libraries across the UK. More information on read-ins here and here.

Maybe we were complacent over the last few years. Maybe we failed to appreciate our libraries properly. Maybe the councils failed to support them. Maybe libraries failed to keep up with commercial developments or user demands. None of those maybes matter right now. What matters is that our free, open, cultural, and uniquely British public library system is under threat and that this year we need to show our support by working to save it. I’ll be doing so in North Yorkshire: I hope you will be doing the same in your area.

First impressions review - Amazon Kindle

2010-12-30T13:41:00.006Z

Semi-relevant preliminary spiel:

I love my iPod. Since I got my first iPod (Wikipedia informs me that it was a ‘classic’ fourth generation black & white), I’ve never thought about getting a different portable music device. I love my iPod because I don’t think about it: I automatically slip it in my bag or my pocket when I’m going somewhere; I use it quickly and reflexively; it just does the job it’s meant to do.

Since e-readers first became available, I’ve wanted an iPod for ebooks (disclaimer: this is not the iPad for reasons too numerous to enumerate). It would be a single device that does its job smoothly and blends into the background of your life. The Kindle – received this Christmas – is a damn sight closer to that imaginary device than the Sony Reader (all subsequent comments are directed towards the PRS-505).

First impressions:

In terms of design, the Kindle is nicer to hold than the Reader. The Kindle’s plastic isn’t as cold as the Reader’s metal, the corners are nicely rounded, and it’s slightly lighter. The button placement is better as well with the ‘turn pages’ buttons larger and more naturally placed. The Kindle also has more memory (3GB) than the Reader (256MB without an SD card: newer models have more).

The randomly generated screensavers automatically make it look like
you keep a picture of John Steinbeck next to your bed

The Kindle is also better for reading: the contrast is by default better and has the advantage of being adjustable; various aspects of the text itself can be changed (which makes sense for digital text) including size, font, line spacing, and words per line. All this makes the Kindle much better for people who have difficulty with text ie. people with reading difficulties or poor vision.

Interactivity:

Reading, particularly non-fiction, is more complex than simply looking at words on a page and the Kindle allows for increased levels of interactivity with the text. Rather than passively reading, it allows the user to highlight, make notes, share highlights on Twitter, check a word in one of the two dictionaries included, or look up a Web address from the text.

Another advantage – a decisive one for non-smartphone owners like me – is the free Web access. I got – or rather, Santa got me – the 3G model because it allows much wider wireless coverage for access to the Web through the experimental browser. It’s slow, clunky, black & white but it’s free and massively increases my ability to access the Web.

Advice:

The Kindle store is good: wireless access to books is a plus and the prices are mostly reasonable. New Kindle owners will discover a wealth of free titles – public domain works and such – but these tend to be poor quality, poorly formatted files: despite the added effort, it’s better to use a reliable source like Project Gutenberg or the Google ebookstore’s public domain PDFs. It seemed appropriate that my first Kindle book should be The Case for Books by Robert Darnton which downloaded easily and is functioning perfectly well.

If you don’t do so already, use Calibre to manage your ebooks. Putting personal documents and non-Amazon ebooks on the Kindle without software is a fiddly process. Calibre is easier, allows for more consistent metadata, and automatically converts non-compatible formats (ePub) to compatible formats (MOBI, PDF, RTF, etc.). This won’t work with DRMed files and so means that public library ebooks are unavailable for the Kindle which is unfortunate: it doesn’t mean I won’t use my public library (free ebooks!) but it means I’ll have to read them off another device/PC.

I didn’t get a cover for my Kindle. I asked Santa for one but I was either naughty or Santa reads Slashdot and got linked to the same articles as I did. Turns out that covers either break your Kindle or cost half the price of the device itself. I’ve ordered this which ought to allow Kindle transportation at a fraction of the cost.

Summary:

Ideally this device should become as indispensible as my iPod. I asked my Twitter followers if I should write a Kindle review now or after the honeymoon period and a lot of people suggested that I do both. Expect a longer-term Kindle review in 2011.

Five lessons from 2010

2010-12-23T10:31:00.007Z

Several people (Laura Woods, Andy Woodworth, Bobbi Newman) have written about the lessons they learned in 2010. This seems like a cathartic, end-of-year reflection exercise and it’s good to give some closure to a truly great year. So here are my five lessons from 2010.

Lesson 1: United we stand, divided we fall

Prior to this year, I’ve never really worked as part of a team (which was annoying because every goddamn job specification has TEAMWORK in big bold letters). My first job was in a bank entering data more or less on my own. My first degree was in philosophy – the epitome of ruminating quietly on your own. This year I’ve worked with other people: group projects for my Masters, as part of my various job roles, and now as part of a team spread across the country. I was so flattered to be asked to join the Voices for the Library team and I’m so happy to be working with this Justice League-like team of super-librarians (even though it makes me feel like Robin). Though I’m still finding my feet, it’s taught me a lot about working with other people and together we can accomplish much more than one individual ever could.

Lesson 2: Everybody lies

This refers to two institutions: the government and the media. I’m sure this lesson will elicit a hearty ‘Duh!’ from many but for me it’s been a revelation to learn just how much the truth is distorted and hidden from the public. WikiLeaks is revealing and has revealed an insane amount of information that governments have kept from the public. The leader of the Liberal Democrats lied to students and his party's supporters. Tabloid Watch and Minority Thought are now two of my favourite blogs on Google Reader showing how much the media lies and distorts stories for their own ends.

Personally, I uncovered a mass media lie when I discovered Twitter. Before this year, I blindly accepted the media’s portrayal of Twitter: a site where narcissists broadcast banal pronouncements about what food they’re eating. When I finally joined, I discovered this to be a lie and it quickly became my defining communication medium for 2010. Without Twitter, I would not know half as much about what’s going on in the library community, I would not have attended any professional events, I would not have written my Guardian piece, and I would not have half as many professional contacts and, dare I say, friends.

Lesson 3: The fundamental interconnectedness of all things

This year I wrote my Masters dissertation. At 18000 words, it’s the longest thing I’ve ever written and – though still awaiting its result – I’m proud of it. It seems astounding that a dissertation ostensibly about library and information management – a very niche subject – allowed me to bring together everything I’ve ever been really interested in. I was able to bring together my undergraduate dissertation, my love of Alberto Manguel, Borges, and Wittgenstein, my interest in digital libraries, my belief in consilience, my interest in The Semantic Web, my strange devotion to Google, my obsession with labyrinths and mazes, my unwavering belief in logic; everything. It felt like a culmination: as if without realising, I’d been preparing to write it for years. This has reinforced my belief in consilience and the fundamental holism of existence.

Lesson 4: Feel the fear and do it anyway

I owe this one to Katie Fraser.

From Indexed: http://thisisindexed.com/

This year I’ve been scared a lot. And yet that’s made it one of the best years ever. I worked as IT Support, scared that I wouldn’t be able to fix any computer problems: turns out I’m (comparatively) good with computers. I got a professional job working with the military which forced me to move away from home: turns out the military are good people and I love living on my own. I sent off short stories and articles despite being terrified of rejection: turns out the lasting glow of success far outweighs the momentary sting of rejection. If you’re never scared, you’re never going to learn to cope with the things that scare you and you’re never going to improve yourself.

Lesson 5: Ask not what _____ can do for you but what you can do for _____

This comic represents how institutions actually are: in need of support from people who use them. If you take from an institution without giving anything back, then you’re not valuing that institution. When people complain about CILIP, they often say that it doesn’t provide anything for them. Like most things in life, you get out of it what you put into it. The same applies to public libraries: if you don’t use libraries – if you don’t give – then you can’t get anything from them.

Public libraries are facing a crisis and the next few months will be critical. All librarians have a part to play in ensuring the survival of our institutions: institutions that help people, that empower communities, that provide an intellectual bulwark against the advance of acceptable mediocrity. Over the next few months, we need people to campaign for public libraries and we need to support and connect campaigns across the country to present a united front rather than a community torn apart by division or blame. This is a time to show councils and Government that we value our libraries and won’t go gentle into that good night.

New Year's resolutions

So what next? Apart from my job, a few projects I'm working on for next year, and continued work for Voices for the Library, 2011 is wide open. Chartership is the next major career progression but there's no rush and technically I don't even have my Masters yet. I'll wait and see what 2011 brings.

The male librarian gift guide

2010-12-16T13:06:00.013Z

Once again Christmas unexpectedly descends on the country. For families across the country and indeed the world, the obvious question is raised: what do you buy for the librarian in your life? That friendly / grumpy (delete as applicable) person who finds you stuff and uses words like 'literacy', 'interoperability' and 'OPAC'. The delightful Ms. Jaffne has written a gift guide for female librarians and, digusted at this rampant exclusionism, I have penned this gift guide for the lesser-spotted male librarian.

All male librarians (or indeed shambrarians) look like this. They are brooding, fragile, poetic creatures bringing order out of chaos, ingesting too much science-fiction stuff, and looking vaguely foppish while doing it. So what does one buy for this frail, geeky individual? An iPad or a Kindle is too risky (they could start frothing at the mouth and ranting about the sanctity of the physical book). Better to choose something from this ~~tacky~~ awesome list.

Male librarians wear clothes reluctantly: as long as the clothes are made of fabric which doesn't fall apart, they aren't too picky. Go to any library conference and gaze in awe at the mismatched suits, radiant ties, occasional jeans, and shoes held together with tape. In general, anything that makes him feel more like Sherlock Holmes will be fine no matter how outdated it may be. To keep their shirts from falling apart, male librarians wear cufflinks (stylish book-related cufflinks) and ties. If your male librarian has a strong opinion about the books versus computers debate (and believe me, if he does, you will know about it), let him proclaim that allegiance proudly with either a book tie or a computer tie. Don't forget, he works in an emasculating profession and needs constant reassurance of his manliness so make him feel more authoritarian with this hardcore jacket.

(May not be representative of male librarians)

If your male librarian uses the term 'militant librarian' a lot, talks about 'echo chambers' and fancies himself as some kind of informationy Robin Hood, this bag will make him feel like Che Guevara and Julian Assange all rolled into one. Of course he'll need some badges to go on that bag: they can stick it to Google or enforce the grumpy reluctant librarian stereotype. Many young librarians spend much time on Twitter causing their language skills to slowly atrophy and so will feel right at home with this text speak badge or any of these Twitter T-shirts (Twi-shirts?).

Everyone knows that librarians love books (why else would they become librarians, right?) so what about a guide to the murky world of libraries? There's a good chance your male librarian likes comic books (if you're unsure about this, ask him whether he prefers Marvel or DC. If his answer is anything other than 'I don't know' or if he uses the term 'graphic novel', comic books are a good choice). Unshelved is a good source of comedy that only a minority of the population understand or there is always James Turner's seminal treatise on the subject of male librarians, Rex Libris.

Finally, you could always play it safe and buy a tiny effigy of the ultimate male librarian - the template from which we are all wrought - Giles from Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

From Penny Arcade

Merry Christmas to all library staff; male, female and everything in between. Have a good holiday season and steel yourself for the deluge of books to be returned in the first week of January.

New media and the right to debate

2010-12-06T12:11:00.001Z

Recently I was involved in an online altercation with Tony Horne, a radio broadcaster from North-East England, which served to highlight a shift in my generation’s understanding of media interaction. It started here, continued with Ian Clark’s reply here, and went on to this blog post here. In his final piece on the subject, Mr Horne wrote “Another [Twitter user] called Simon demanded I reply to his tweet. Why would I do that? I had my say, you had your right of reply.”

For the record, I did not ‘demand’ a reply. I asked Mr Horne via Twitter whether he wanted to reply or not. My exact words were: “Do you plan to respond? Were you trying to generate hits or start an actual debate?” which I’ll admit reads as more hostile than I intended it. He declined my debate invitation and seemed to misunderstand me so I sent “My aim is to engage in debate: an exchange of views to reach a conclusion. This can't be done without back and forth response.” There was no further reply.

For a time, I was mystified by Mr Horne’s refusal to engage with his readers or enter into a debate. I couldn’t grasp why someone would write something and then not reply to contrary arguments. As far as I could see, he had no reason not to reply: he clearly had the courage of his convictions, he was online at the time when pro-library comments were dropping thick and fast, he definitely believed what he had written. Why not reply directly?

Then I realised it comes down to the words “I had my say...” These words indicate a different understanding of media interaction to the one I hold. Essentially, Mr Horne did not view our interaction as an active debate: for him, media interaction consists in a creator giving his opinions and the reader passively taking them in. My generation and generations younger than me have always had the right to debate and this is because of the difference between new media and old media.

On the Web, the creation of content involves subsequent discussion. You write, record, or visualise what you believe and then you either defend it or allow it to be picked to pieces. Everything one puts on the Web can be actively debated: in comments – blogs, YouTube, newspaper websites – or on Twitter, Facebook, email, etc. Reading and reacting to content is as active a process as creating the content. When our right to reply is blocked, we create new avenues for reply. It’s become common practice for librarians to debate with detractors in the comments of news articles concerning public libraries and encouraging and engaging in informed debate is one of the primary roles of Voices for the Library. In new media, creators stand behind what they say, respond to arguments they hadn’t considered, and, hopefully, change their minds a little to accommodate the diverse opinions of other people.

In old media, the creation of content is the entirety of the interaction. Creators wrote articles, published them, and left the consumption to the reader. Once they ‘had their say’ that was the end of it. Maybe a dissenting letter would be published in the paper or read on the air but the initial creator wasn’t expected to respond. There was no debate because the means required to have a debate were not available. This seems to be the case with Mr Horne: in the recent past, he broadcast or wrote his opinions and people passively consumed them. He didn’t reply to our arguments in the comments because his understanding of media interaction is different from that of a generation raised on new media.

This new understanding of interaction is even influencing the ‘real world’. In the past few months, there has been a rise in protests against the Coalition Government’s decisions: students in particular have been taking to the streets to protest what they see as injustices – injustices to themselves in the case of tuition fee rises and EMA cuts and injustices to the country in the case of corporate tax avoidance. Young people feel that they have the right to debate and with no outlet, no system in place to accommodate active debate with the Government, they protest in the streets.

The generation now coming-of-age has a new understanding of media interaction: the understanding that people debate about what they believe and respond when someone argues against them. Simply ‘having your say’ and letting it lie is not sufficient anymore. In this new paradigm, you either respond to your detractors or lose the argument.

Power to the people - New Professionals Information Day 2010

2010-11-24T15:31:00.008Z

Yesterday I attended the New Professionals Information Day in Newcastle City Library, a day wonderfully organised by the CILIP Membership Support Unit and the Career Development Group. The most important thing I learnt, about the profession and about myself, was the central role that people play in librarianship.

The fabulous Newcastle City Library

The nucleus of the day was the keynote session with speeches from Maxine Miller and Phil Bradley and an underlying theme to both presentations was the power of the people. Maxine spoke about diversity in libraries, the trials and tribulations of a library career, and the power of individual people to stand up and say “This is me.” It was intimate, touching, and personal and, because they were very different presentations, it complemented Phil’s in an interesting way. Phil spoke about empowering library users: a subject touched upon in this piece. Librarians do not make and maintain warehouses full of dusty books: we provide information services to people and engaging with those people is the most important part of our jobs. Our role is to make available the knowledge necessary to empower people – teachers, lawyers, doctors, soldiers, researchers, the public. People and knowledge – more specifically the power that grows from the combination of those two – are the cornerstones of librarianship.

In the workshops and the seminars, the point was raised repeatedly that librarianship is a people profession. Sure, you get to work with books, write stuff if you want to, use the latest technology, but fundamentally libraries are about the people inside and outside them. Sibylla Parkhill’s session on stakeholder expectations drove home the point that libraries have a variety of interested parties: from senior management to library members; from library staff to outside agents. Librarians have to able to interact and communicate with all these people of different levels.

And it’s not just the people we deal with in our work environments: there are also our professional contacts and the people we meet on the journey. For me, these are people that make this such a valuable profession. Events like yesterday are vital for removing the blinkers: working in my tiny library makes me forget that there are other people like me out there; people with the same concerns, the same ideas, and thankfully in many cases the same sense of humour. Maybe it’s because I’ve been working in the profession longer or maybe – heaven forefend! – I’m actually becoming an adult but I felt a lot more comfortable interacting with other new professionals than at the New Professionals Conference in July (fun though it was). In fact, I got so involved with other people and networking that I actually gave up my precious first class train seat to sit and talk libraries with a group of other new professionals on the train home (first class was only £1 extra so it’s no great loss).

A room of blurry new professionals

Overall, the day represented a development in my understanding of the profession and myself. It’s a lot clearer to me now what modern librarianship is about and particularly what we as new professionals can make it. The books, the technology, the creativity, and even the information are all subservient to the people who suffuse this noble profession. A year ago, I would have told you that I wanted to be a librarian to get away from people: to live a quiet life surrounded by books and computers and logical organisation. I was wrong. That’s not what librarianship is and – though it’s a surprise to me – that’s not who I am either. I want to work with people and I want to help people access information. NPID2010 helped me to acknowledge that.

Postscript: On a personal note, the strangest thing about the whole day was people knowing who I was before I introduced myself: from Twitter, from my Guardian piece or because I have a more extensive online presence now. I found it to be a very unusual but not unpleasant sensation.

What other people thought:

Library Helen's Blog
Random musings of a librarian, almost

Why can't librarians defend libraries?

2010-11-22T12:06:00.003Z

Recently Johanna Anderson (@Jo_Bo_Anderson) of Voices for the Library has been campaigning to save Gloucestershire public libraries from massive cuts. Despite her amazing work some have argued that because she is a librarian her campaigning is fuelled by self-interest. The reasoning goes that because she benefits from the continued existence of libraries, her campaigning is less ‘pure’ or less valid. This argument is often raised against librarians defending libraries and is fallacious and irritating for several reasons.

Ad hominem

Most importantly from a logical perspective (and what other perspective really matters?), the argument is a standard ad hominem fallacy. It attacks the arguer instead of the argument: it therefore misses the point of critical reasoning and is invalid. As Wikipedia (bad information literacy here: do as I say not as I do!) states “a disposition to make a certain argument does not make the argument false”. If we taught children critical thinking and logic in schools then the standard of debate in this country would be much higher but that’s another issue for another time.

Benefit

The implicit rule expressed by the ‘no-librarians-campaigning’ argument seems to be that if a person benefits from an institution then a person cannot campaign for that institution. But a major reason – perhaps THE major reason – that people campaign to defend institutions is the benefits that they bestow. I benefit from the BBC and will therefore defend it. I benefit from the NHS and will therefore defend it. I benefit from the public library service and will therefore defend it. We defend institutions because we benefit from them and to say that one cannot argue from a position of benefit is ridiculous.

Expertise

Isn’t a defence of libraries more effective coming from an expert in libraries than from someone who knows little about libraries? A librarian, a library assistant, a shambrarian, or anyone who works in libraries knows about libraries and is therefore in a privileged position to assess their benefits. More so than a member of the public, a librarian sees who uses libraries, how libraries are used, and knows why they should be protected. Campaigning as a librarian should be an advantage not a disadvantage.

Edit: 'someone who knows little about libraries' previously linked to Tim Coates' Good Library Blog. It's been pointed out quite rightly that this is an ad hominem jibe. Whether someone is or is not a librarian, they have equal cause to campaign for libraries. Maybe if I'd learnt more critical thinking in school...

Truth

It has even been suggested that Johanna hide the fact that she is a librarian. Misrepresenting yourself or your beliefs to win an argument is not winning the argument at all. Lying to win does not make you a winner.

And so...

People are free to argue against public libraries in various ways. They can present statistics and graphs: campaigners will counter and defend. They can present ideological differences: campaigners will point out flaws in the logic and differences of opinion. But arguing against the people who defend libraries because they are passionate enough to have devoted their lives to libraries is an argument that can never win.

Supplement to: Borrowing ebooks beyond a library's walls

2010-11-08T12:03:00.001Z

Yesterday The Guardian’s Comment is Free published an article by me about ebooks, libraries, and the digital economy. Everything I wanted to say about the Publishers Association decision is in the article so this post is sort of like the deleted scenes: the ideas I rejected while writing the article; some are terrible, some are (hopefully) mildly interesting.

When The Guardian agreed to read a draft, I panic-read Lawrence Lessig’s Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy in three days because I was afraid my meagre understanding of digital copyright would be an embarrassment. As it happens, the article contains very little about copyright, intellectual property, or the law. This doesn’t mean that reading the book was a waste of time (but it’s not as good as Free Culture).

Neil Gaiman’s recent All Hallows Read was going to be used as an example of communities sharing books. It didn’t really fit as it wasn’t related to ebooks or libraries but it’s still a cool idea and worth a read.

This Atlantic article about National Digital Libraries by David Rothman of TeleRead would have been perfect to link to but I read it an hour after I emailed the completed draft.

At one point, I seriously considered quoting The Kinks’ ‘The Village Green Preservation Society’. A friend once told me that the song reminded her of being a librarian. The specific quote would have been “Preserving the old ways from being abused. Protecting the new ways for me and for you” and would have served as a poetic reminder of what libraries do. It would also have been a bad idea.

The final paragraph – the paragraph that no-one in the comments has mentioned – is my favourite. It’s the paragraph where I shoehorn in my dissertation ideas about large-scale digital libraries and graphic visualisation of subject links using data and metadata.

I’d like to use this space to thank my library tweeps for reading the article, retweeting it, commenting on it, and being so kind about it. It means a lot to have people read what you’ve written, enjoy it, and get passionate enough to agree/disagree with it. Thank you.

Review - Infinite Jest

2010-10-21T15:28:00.005+01:00

Reviewing David Foster Wallace’s masterpiece, Infinite Jest, is impossible. As Dave Egger’s says in the foreword, the novel cannot be analysed; cannot be broken down into component parts. The whole is more than the sum of its parts. It shouldn’t work – overlong storylines that seem to go nowhere, no overarching plot, characters heading towards confrontations that never happen, insane technical minutiae about drugs and medications, long stretches where nothing much happens, and a language/vocabulary all its own. But the novel does work and it’s clear that the writer was a genius: as Eggers says, “At no time while reading Infinite Jest are you unaware that this is a work of complete obsession, of a stretching of the mind of a young writer to the point of, we assume, near madness.”

Infinite Jest is a reflection of life. This is alluded to in the Eschaton section with the meta-debate about maps and territories. As such, everyone who reads Infinite Jest will have a different interpretation. It can be about drugs, addiction, the American Dream, entertainment, the pursuit of happiness, solipsism, language, or tennis. Some claim that the book is structured like a Sierpinski Gasket.

For me, Infinite Jest is about freedom. This is centred around Isaiah Berlin’s two concepts of liberty (or at least an idea very similar to it). Running through the book like a spine there is a discussion between a Canadian agent and an American agent that takes place on the side of a cliff over an entire night. At one point, Marathe – the Canadian – says:

“Again passing over the important. This appetite to choose death by pleasure if it is available to choose – this appetite of your people unable to choose appetites, this is the death… someone sometime let you forget how to choose, and what. Someone let your peoples forget it was the only thing of importance, choosing… Someone taught that temples are for fanatics only and took away the temples and promised there was no need for temples. And now there is no shelter. And no map for finding the shelter of a temple. And you all stumble about in the dark, this confusion of permissions. The without-end pursuit of happiness of which someone let you forget the old things which made happiness possible.”

Allowing someone to do whatever they want to do is ‘negative’ freedom according to Berlin and Marathe. ‘Positive’ freedom consists in discipline: in the education and maturity to independently choose what is important. America, in its pursuit of the former kind of freedom, has created a nation of children: people who would, of their own volition, watch a film so entertaining it would kill them. ; people who would solve the problem of waste by catapulting garbage into New England rather than reform their lives.

The ‘positive’ kind of freedom is more existential: it is the discipline to make the right choice for you and the ability to free yourself from cages of which you weren’t (or aren’t) aware. These invisible cages may be social but are more often psychological. They are arbitrary limits on our behaviour or our actions that we impose without even realising we’re doing it. The crux of this point comes in Lyle’s conversation with LaMont Chu about LaMont’s “increasingly crippling obsession with tennis fame.”

“The first photograph, the first magazine, the gratified surge, the seeing themselves as others see them, the hagiography of image, perhaps. Perhaps the first time: enjoyment. After that, do you trust me, trust me: they do not feel what you burn for… After the first photograph has been in a magazine, the famous men do not enjoy their photographs in magazines so much as they fear that their photographs will cease to appear in magazines. They are trapped, just as you are… LaMont, the world is very old. You have been snared by something untrue. You are deluded. But this is good news. You have been snared by the delusion that envy has a reciprocal. You assume that there is a flip-side to your painful envy of Michael Chang: namely Michael Chang’s enjoyable feeling of being-envied-by-LaMont-Chu. No such animal.’ ‘Animal?’ ‘You burn with hunger for food that does not exist.’

In particular, the book focuses on the invisible cage of irony. Wallace knew that his readers were postmodern, literary-types: the kind of post-university twenty-something young elites who reject the world’s values by adopting a veneer of irony; by layering every action with self-reference, self-deprecation, and a meta-appreciation of the ‘narrative’ of life. The teenagers of the Enfield Tennis Academy represent this attitude of intelligence and youth: they come up with ironic nicknames for one another, they have long discussions about life and philosophy, they play complex physical and psychological games. The antithesis of this attitude walks among them: the disabled and ‘immature’ Mario.

“It is increasingly hard to find valid art that is about stuff that is real in this way. The older Mario gets, the more confused he gets about the fact that everyone at E.T.A. over the age of about Kent Blott finds stuff that’s really real uncomfortable and they get embarrassed. It’s like there’s some rule that real stuff can only get mentioned if everybody rolls their eyes or laughs in a way that isn’t happy.”

By the end of Infinite Jest readers are at least aware, if not free, of the cage of irony around them. The novel promotes sincerity and real engagement with the world – with addiction, with drugs, with loneliness, with solipsism – rather than the ironic detachment characteristic of most educated twenty-somethings. The difficulty is remembering that the cage is there after the book has ended.

Anything I can write about this novel is surplus to the volumes that have already been written: the Infinite Summer website offers a window to this immense scholarship. I only wrote this so that I could re-inhabit the book again because, over 2 months after finishing it, I still think about it. And a book with that kind of power deserves a few words.