why the new BL e-books announcement is important

It seems to me an obvious but oddly under-invested-in truththat the nicer something is to engage with, the greater the number of people who will engage with it. e-Books have suffered perennially from under-engagement - in the academic library, we've scratched our heads as e-journal usage stats go off the chart, but people continue to reserve physical books and wait for them to come back from loan, rather than consult the e-book online. e-Books haven't traditionally been that nice to engage with. They often lack some of the utility of e-journals and simply don't work as well, plus they suffer from the way we take in information these days. e-Journals are perfect for power-browsing for certain targeted pieces of information, but books still seem like a greater undertaking that doesn't suit on-screen reading. Plus, e-books suffer from comparisons withthe real paper thing: people 'love the smell / feel / look' of books, and can be left cold by the somewhat impersonal e-book, with it's dark size 12 Arial font on a plain white screen.

We're only 5 weeks into 2010 and already some barriers to e-book usability, engageability, seem to be dropping like dominoes - the very barriers which prevent a full-scale embracing of the format. Preceded by the Kindle and Nook, which invested in the format and unshackled the reader from the computer screen, the iPad has launched with its iBook store. There have been an enormous number of articles comparing the relative merits of the platforms and I don't want to rehash them here: suffice to say, the Kindle is better for long bouts of reading (having electronic ink as opposed to a back-lit screen) but really the iPad is sexier in every other way. It costs much the same as a Kindle, you can enjoy the touch-screen page turning experience, and, in any case, you can download the Kindle app for it... e-Books have become more pleasant to engage with at a stroke. They look nicer (full colour, for a start), they are now tactile to a certain extent, and the iBook store looks really tidy. Little things, like the attractive looking virtual 'shelf' with colour renditions of your purchased books on, make a big difference. If Apple has proved anything, it is that they can take existing concepts and make them so much more engaging that they suddenly seem vital to own - remember, there were loads of MP3 players around before the iPodcame along and changed the method of engagement, creating a Hoover-with-vacuum-cleaners-like synonymity (is that a word?) with the medium.

Lots of people have argued that the iPad doesn't do all that it should do, that it is a let-down, the lack of multi-tasking limits it and so on. But this is the first iteration. It'll get better. Most people who've used one say they struggle to convey just how nice the things are to hold and to interact with, so once we've had a go we'll all want one. And by the time the all-improved second or third generation versions come out, they'll be irresistible - or if they are resistible, it's because an iPad inspired rival does the same job even better. So what if it doesn't have a camera? It will do eventually, and in the meantime it'll change the way we engage with content. Either way, it's all good news for e-books.

People are often polarised about new technology - either it's 'THE FUTURE IS HERE RIGHT NOW' or it's 'this will never catch on'. In reality, it is often a mixture of both. The iPad won't completely revolutionise the world, but it's the latest significant step in an ongoing process of change. I think it's probably a very significant step, because Apple traditionally find ways to make people engage withthe same old content in new and exciting ways that somehow render the old ones a little too dull to bother with.

So, how does this all relate to the BL's e-books announcement? The British Library have announced they are shortly to offer free e-books, of out-0f-copyright works, staring in the Spring. You can read more about it here. The way in which they are digitising is significant, for a number of reasons. The difference between the BL's new e-book scheme and many existing digitisation projects is that the BL is physically digitising its own original 18th and 19thcentury texts. So rather than a version of Pride & Prejudice that looks not entirely unlike this blog post does, it'll be scanned from the original copy, with all that implies - original typeface, original illustrations, perhaps even yellower paper... As mentioned above, I think a lot of people have a problem with e-books because they are nothing like the physical experience of reading a proper book. It's not a problem to anyone born this century - they'll happily read anything in on a screen because it is convenient, just in the same way that we accept the fact that MP3 is a rubbish file-format and doesn't sound as good as vinyl, because that too is convenient - but for the rest of us the legacy of the printed word is very powerful. So the BL's digitisation of the whole object, rather than just the contents of the object - their decision to reproduce the original book, rather than just gives us the words - is yet another step towards engaging the e-book sceptics. 2 months ago, your e-book choice consisted largely of reading Austen (or whatever) on a slightly dated looking big white device with keys on it, and no colour on the screen, and just the words of the original migrated to the new format. As of the Spring, you'll be able to read facsimiles of the original first edition in full colour on a device which costs much the same as the ugly white thing, looks and feels fantastic, and allows you to listen to music, surf the net, edit Word docs and watch TV when you're finished! That's a big change in a small amount of time - e-books have gone from rather grey and utilitarian to attractive and tactile. And I think that'll make a big change to the way people engage with them. Which is great!

This ties in with some of the issues we're thinking about with the LIFE-SHARE Project I'm working on. With digital preservation, it may not be enough to just preserve the content of something - when migrating format, we need to preserve everything about the object so it really can be a surrogate copy; the contents pages and appendices and printing notes and the type-set and the blank pages before and after the main body of the text, all that stuff. In years to come, I think people will thank the BL for faithfully reproducing the old books, and giving readers who like the new technology a more authentic reading experience...

- thewikiman

new professionals conference, 2010

On the 26th of Feb, at 5pm, the Call for Papers for 2010's New Professionals Conference closes. Get a proposal in! It's well worth it.

The New Professionals Conference is organised by CILIP's Career Development Group, and is aimed primarily at people relatively fresh to the profession but there is value in attending for almost anyone. If you've joined the profession either through work or study in the last five years, you can submit a paper to the panel - first-time presenters, current LIS students, and individuals from diverse backgrounds are especially encouraged, but don't be put off if you don't fall into any of those latter three categories. The theme this year is Proving your worth in challenging times - I think everyone can agree that's an important topic - and it takes place in Sheffield, on July the 5th. (If you're from outside the UK that shouldn't put you off either - last year Nicolás Robinson García came over from Spain and gave a fantastic presentation.)  You can find the full details of the theme, the prizes, and how to submit your proposal on the CDG website.

I thought I'd also include my own proposal from last year here, just to calm the nerves of anyone fretting over theirs...  What I said was (roughly) this:

Why are we still defined by our building? Ned Potter

People still have negative perceptions of librarians. I am guilty of pandering to this – when people ask me what I do, I try to avoid saying the word ‘library’ as long as possible. I say I am the Digitisation Coordinator for Leeds University, then I say I work centrally, and if pushed I’ll say I’m based in the library...

Of course, I know there is nothing wrong with library-work, but many of my contemporaries don’t agree. They are particularly sceptical about the idea of doing a Masters in Information Management: “What? What are you studying exactly..? Surely all you have to do is buy books, put them on the shelves, and say ‘Ssshh’!”

Things are changing - information Professionals at Universities are increasingly young, necessarily dynamic, and play a far bigger role in Learning and Teaching than the average customer realises. The academic Library often drives the new technologies in Higher Education, and leads the way forward regarding content-delivery. Yet still people imagine the staff to be the archetypal dour, severe, and socially awkward librarian.

We can respond in one of two ways. Embrace our building, and prove people wrong about ‘librarians’. Or cast off the old and outmoded associations completely, and ditch the word ‘library’ that lingers in most of our job titles; with the changes and advances in what we do, why should we be defined by the building we do it in? Many of us spend more time in the virtual library than in the physical one as it is. And yet it’s hard to imagine any attempt to overhaul our image that isn’t crass or completely self-defeating  - where do we go from here?

This paper is about how the profession is changing, and how public perception is struggling to keep up. It’s also about setting the record straight.

Now the first thing to notice is that it is not a very formal proposal. (In fact it's not really that good a proposal... but it did the job of getting me through the door, and then I had time to develop my ideas properly.) I deliberately decided to be colloquial on the grounds that, if accepted, I'd end up being fairly colloquial in the actual presentation. So don't feel you need to put together something very dry and serious, if that's not ultimately what you're aiming for. Second thing is that it is basically an abstract, rather than a proposal as such - I'm not saying 'I would like to look into a, b and c, in order to show that x is happening' or whatever - I just wanted to give a feeling for what I had to say. Ultimately you are trying to give the panel a flavour of what you'll deliver, rather than necessarily trying to convince them of the merits of your proposal as such. (I can say this with a bit of authority; I am helping organise the Conference this year, so I'll be looking at the proposals as they come in.) Third thing to notice is that, for anyone who reads this blog regularly, you can see the seeds are clearly being sown there for hobby-horses I've been riding ever since! (Probably mixing my metaphors a bit too much there...)

There was a moment, when the urbane and handsome Chris Rhodes got back to me to say they'd accepted my proposal, when I thought: "Oh God, I actually have to write a paper now, what have I done..?" But actually it was a really enjoyable experience - I really enjoyed doing the research, I enjoyed the process of writing it up, and I enjoyed ultimately presenting it in front of the 100+ delegates that were there. The next issue of the CDG journal Impact will feature a shortened version of the final result; you can wade through the full paper here (.pdf)...

The last thing I'd like to stress is that although as it happens my presentation went well, all the good things that came out of the conference for me had little to do withthe success of the paper. Just going to the Conference was the biggest thing - I met a load of really interesting people who I still keep in touch withand collaborate with, and I saw some very useful presentations (one of which is, as I've said previously, the reason I'm writing this blog now). It was a Conference full of energy, questions, discourse and above all enthusiasm for tackling the issues we face as new professionals. Moreover it really introduced me to the whole world of thinking about and interacting with the wider profession - actually being a 'reflective practitioner', that phrase we hear so often and perhaps sometimes only pay lip-service to. It's all the stuff that comes from attending and presenting at events that makes this a vocation, it's what makes me check my new emails via my phone on the weekend, because there's so much exciting stuff going on other than just my 9-to-5 job... So I would thoroughly recommend giving it a go.

Finally, in the course of writing this I've received some useful pointers for potential applicants from Mr Rhodes, and he is the man you'll ultimately need to submit your proposal to. He says:

• The most important thing to remember is that the proposal should be brief and snappy.  Last year we had about 40 proposals and had to narrow them down to 9 accepted ones.  So your proposal has to not be overly complicated if we are to take in and remember your salient points.
• It’s a good idea to include a provisional title, which again, should be memorable and tackle an issue that is going to catch our eye, or approach an issue from an original viewpoint.
• There is no need at this stage to worry about references or any of the formal trappings of academic papers.
• It is also worth remembering that if you get selected then we will give you guidelines of elaborating on your proposal, so the very basic, bare-bones of what will become your papers are all that are required at this stage (but obviously there needs to be enough there to make us think you could create a full paper from it).

So there you go! As we get nearer the time there'll be more discussions about the Conference on Twitter, using the hashtag #npc2010, so do chime in if you have any questions.

Get proposing. Do it now! It'll be ace.

- thewikiman

about dismantling the echo-chamber...

As the #echolib debate goes on, I have a confession to make. When I first appropriated the phrase echo-chamber to try and kick off this whole discussion, I was quite selective in how I interpreted it... So the part of the Wikipedia definition which describes the echo-chamber as '...any situation in which information, ideas or beliefs are amplified or reinforced by transmission inside an enclosed" space' - that suits my purposes perfectly. But the bit about '...like-minded people then repeat, overhear, and repeat again (often in an exaggerated or otherwise distorted form) until most people assume that some extreme variation of the story is true' - that bit I didn't really apply to our situation in the library community. I don't mean to suggest that we're kidding ourselves about stuff, and that by only listening to similarly minded peers we're blind (or rather deaf) to dissonant voices. I should have made that clear earlier, and Andy's post - Dismantling the echo-chamber - on his Agnostic, Maybe blog has brought home the need for clarification. I wrote a veeeery long comment in response to the Andy's post - it was so long, I decided to release it as a blog post all of its own, so here it is.

Perhaps a better analogy for my particular take on the echo-chamber would be the library blogging community on one side of a mirror, firing all sorts of brilliant and important ideas towards the mirror. For the most part, the ideas bounce back into the same group of already-forward-thinking people - whereas those on the other side of the mirror (ie the wider library community, and the people who are entirely indifferent to us and what we do) are only receiving the very small percentage of ideas that get 'through' the mirror.

So an ASCII representation might look like this, where > is an idea, and | is the mirror:

[like-minded library bloggers] >>>>>>>><<<< | > > > [everyone else]

Hmmm... :) Anyway, point is: many more ideas are fired at the mirror and bounce back, than get through. Like the dam picture at the top - there's a hell of a lot more water contained the other side of the dam than is escaping through the pipe.

I love that Andy follows blogs he doesn't agree with (see his original post), that's a truly reflective practitioner! He's absolutely right, it is good to know what detractors are thinking, and it does help focus your potential responses and defences. I find that just by virtue of choosing a 2.0ish medium of communication, many library bloggers seem to be people who think along similar lines to me, and vice versa, anyway. Not on a detail level, but a meta-level. I'd be interested in who anyone else's 'team of rivals' is. But it's a great principle, and I will try and adopt it.

Incidentally, about this whole thing, I think there's a curve of interest in libraries which corresponds to how and where we should devote our energies. So on the far left there's the actively hostile - it isn't worth trying to 'convert' them or otherwise try and force people into libraries who have no need for the services we provide. (But we should defend ourselves with well-honed arguments if they publicly attack...) Then at the other end on the right there's the library super-fans - we should be harnessing their advocacy, but not putting too much effort into telling them how wonderful we are, because they already know. Then there's the people in the middle - currently indifferent, but if they knew what we could really do for them in 2010, their informed opinion might be that we are a resource they should utilise. Those are the people who are beyond the echo-chamber, and who we should be trying to reach.

- thewikiman

I'm Ned Potter - here's 3 days in my life

Oh hi! I blog under the nom-de-2.0 of thewikiman, but actually my real name is Ned Potter, and I'm an Information Professional. This is my contribution to the Library Day in the Life Project; Day in the Life offers an opportunity to increase awareness of, and potentially change public perception of, what we really do these days, and how and where we do it. Communicating that kind of information doesn't work well within the confines of anonymity. As such I want to take full ownership of this post, of my job, and of these three days in my library life. So. I work for the University of Leeds Library - I used to run the service which offered digitisation to support learning & teaching, but this year I've been seconded to the LIFE-SHARE Project. This is what I looked like about five minutes ago, when I took a photo of myself outside my house, using my phone:

I've made it black & white to make it look moody, rather than just a picture of someone looking entirely expressionless, but you get the idea. If you follow the link later, you'll see a picture of my wife; she's much better looking than I am. :)

Day 1: internal communication

On the train to London by a painful 7am - off to JISC headquarters for a workshop on communicating effectively with internal stakeholders. As JISC provide so much funding for the LIFE-SHARE Project on which I am working (see the website, the blog, and the very embryonic Twitter account), they want to ensure that the libraries and their wider Universities involved (Leeds, Sheffield and York) actually know about what is going on and take an active interest in the project. Embedding these things properly is something I am all for; too many interesting projects fail to become integrated with the whole, and are forgotten about 6 months after completion.

A lady is asleep over the plug-socket on the train, so I cannot plug in ancient Laptop which can hold less charge than is required to boot up Windows. But an email from Joel Kerry is interesting enough that I labour through the process of replying with my iPhone! We're discussing a workshop I'm running at the CILIP Yorkshire & Humberside Member's Day in April. It was originally going to be called Marketing the Profession or some such, but with all the #echolib discussions it seems like a really good opportunity to talk about moving beyond the echo-chamber. Turns out Joel had thought the same thing (he's the Events Coordinator for the region) and, more spookily, had also had the same idea that had been forming in my mind of getting a certain fellow professional involved in presenting too... She's currently away in sunnier climes but I'll ambush her with it when she gets back.

Arrive at JISC - never been before, it's in an absolutely prime location just opposite the South Bank complex, and a very plush premises indeed. I meet the lovely Ben Showers for the first time (he's looking after all the projects in the e-Content funding strand which ours resides in) and settle down for what turns out to be an INTENSE day of marketing stuff, led by the dynamic, excellent, and unrelenting Rosemary Stamp. It is serious stuff - we even had to work during our lunch... But, it was really useful, full of marketing information which makes you think "that's so obvious and yet I am not doing it - why!?" and featuring a nice package to take away with you and reuse. I'll probably have to devote an entire blog post at a later date covering all that we learned, but basically it was a very productive day. I also saw one of my best friends on the platform of King's Cross - this always seems to happen. I think Londoners just hang around waiting for the rest of us to come down to them so we can stumble into them in public places.

On the way home the plug-socket is free, and I finally write an article about Library Routes for ALISS Quarterly. They approached me and Woodsiegirl earlier in the month about contributing something to the journal, and it was decided that I should handle this one; hopefully I've covered all the important points. My laptop (as well as having precisely no battery life) has this brilliant thing where there's several thick, immovable white lines down the middle of the screen, so you can't read one word in ten that you've written. Makes for good times writing articles on a train, I can tell you.

Day 2: presentations

I'm working from home this morning as we have a presentation for LIFE-SHARE in York  in the afternoon (part of the embedding process) and as I live in York, there's no point in commuting to Leeds for half a day. This is where I am working - I took the pic using the Hipstamatic app to try and make it look more interesting that it really is:

If you look very closely, you'll see that this picture of my home office-space has my PC in it which has Lauren Pressley's Day in the Life post showing on the monitor which has a picture of HER office in it - pretty meta, no? Also, if ever there was a visual metaphor for the way in which my work / fun balance has shifted in recent years, it's the sad site of my work-related cup of coffee sitting on one of my turntables - SAD TIMES.

I haven't had a chance to write any slides for the presentation yet, so this morning is all about getting something good down quickly. My part is about the Leeds and Sheffield case-studies - digitisation to support collection management, and digitisation for preservation and access respectively. I decide that less is more and go with only two slides in total (only having a few slides has worked well for me before) but I write a bunch of notes to go with them and try to memorise them. With memorising presentations, it's all or nothing for me - I either have to not look down at my notes at all, or I have to check them all the time even though I can remember what's coming. Otherwise I inevitably end up in the dreaded situation of staring down at my notes, trying to find where I've already done up to, as a long, agonising silence descends on the room...

Interesting email exchange with Bobbi Newman after she blogged on the subject of the echo-chamber - really glad she's got involved with this meme. We both noticed with some awe that David Lee King, who left a comment on Bobbi's post, has 6000 subscribers to his blog. Wow. I guess there's different levels of echo-chamber...

After lunch I walk up to the University, meet up with my fellow Project Officer and my boss, and we go over our presentation and refine certain things. Then we go to a room in the lovely Borthwick Institute and deliver our presentation - it seems to go well, and we're repeating it to a larger audience on Friday morning. I found myself doing it from memory and therefore not able to look down at my notes even though I had them there - God knows how much of it I forgot to actually say out loud.

Day 3: minute by minute

Hilariously, I get up ridiculously early to watch a Webinar about preservation, having worked out the difference between EST and GMT in the wrong direction. Come back later, the screen tells me. It doesn't need to add: it's 7am, what are you doing, this doesn't start till 9pm your time, you fool. But I bet that's what it's thinking.

I take the opportunity to work on the minutes for the inaugural LIFE-SHARE meeting which took place the previous Friday. We Project Officers have to minute these meetings, and they are huge - nearly 20 people are on the Advisory Group (there are people from JISC, JISC Digital Media, Leeds, Sheffield, York, the British Library, and the ULCC) and go on for two hours plus lunch, so I was mightily relieved to have borrowed a laptop from the Systems Team to write everything down on. My handwriting is so appalling that by the end of two hours of solid scribbling, nothing at all would have been recognisable as words. It was a really productive meeting though.

Once I later get to work I carry on working on them - it takes absolutely ages to do, as pretty much all that was said is pertinent in some way. Here is the LIFE-SHARE office in all its splendour (that thing pinned to the board is a GANNT Chart I made which maps out the entire 15 months of the Project, with special shapes for the bits I have to do myself...):

After a quick lunch with the even-lovelier-than-Ben-Showers Mrs Wikiman, I have my probation meeting with my boss. I've worked here for 4 years but whenever you change grade you have 6 months probation, so we go through objectives and all that stuff. It's easy to do with LIFE-SHARE as all the objectives are clearly laid out in the Project documentation; much more straightforward than in my previous role, where we'd be searching for meaningful objectives beyond the standard "continue to deliver an excellent service" etc. Project work is very focused - you have certain objectives that need to be accomplished by a certain time, and you just juggle them and do them until they're done. I enjoy that.

I then spend about a million hours putting all the hyperlinks into this post, and get ready to click 'Publish'. I will sadly be back online at 9pm, to attend the bloody webinar that I thought was this morning...

- thewikiman