Mandating School Libraries: but what will they look like?

A high-profile group of children's authors, publishers, teachers and librarians is calling on the government to make school libraries statutory. Signatories to a petition to Number 10 include Philip Pullman, Horrid Henry creator Francesca Simon and former children's laureate Michael Rosen, as well as the general secretary of the National Union of Teachers Christine Blower, Dave Prentis, general secretary of Unison, top children's publishers and the directors of a raft of youth library associations.

This is, of course, a logical idea - but what should a library - any library - look like in the future? Is there, for example, another petition from the same type of high-profile group demanding a radical rethink about the way that "digital literacy" is taught.

The petition itself – which calls on the government "to accept in principle that it will make school libraries, run by properly qualified staff, statutory" – will run until December, but by the end of the summer school term Gibbons hopes to have consolidated the support of the book world and to have started soliciting support from community figures, faith groups and celebrities within the wider community.

Properly qualified staff meaning someone who can find a book on Google Book Search? Who can explain issues of trust and verification when using, say, Wikipedia? Someone versed in the narrative genius of many computer games? Someone who is, at least, thinking about Kindles and E-Readers; about marketing the case for reading printed texts over the competing stories found online? Someone who knows where textual resources reside in the digital domain. I'm sure the "celebrities within the wider community" will be able to help here. From the Guardian.

Libraries & Twitter

"Librarians as a group are very spread out around the country, and they are really seizing on Twitter as a great way to network and spread information among themselves. They are also trying it out to give information about author events and closing times to their users," said Benedicte Page, libraries expert at the Bookseller. From Milton Keynes (@mklibraries) to Devon (@devonlibraries), Plymouth (@plymlibraries) to Newcastle (@toonlibraries), over 40 UK libraries are now using Twitter, and a "Twitter for librarians" course will be held by the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals (CILIP) in September to encourage more to take it up.

From the Guardian.

Moving the Library to the Mobile

We increasingly have a ‘mesh’ of entry points: PC and phone, of course, but also DVRs, cameras, navigation systems, and consoles. We increasingly use a range of shared network level ‘cloud’ services: for search, for social networking, for content and information, for communication. Providing service in this environment is very different than in one where the model assumes a personal desktop or laptop as the place where resources are accessed and used and the institutional Web site as the place where they are delivered.

A couple of thoughts from a long and thoughtful piece by Lorcan Dempsey that sets out some of the issues for the library of the future.

As a growing proportion of library use is network–based, the library becomes visible and usable through the network services provided. On the network, there are only services. So, the perception of quality of reference or of the value of particular collections, for example, will depend for many people on the quality of the network services which make them visible, and the extent to which they can be integrated into personal learning environments. Increasingly, this requires us to emphasize the network as an integral design principle in library service development, rather than thinking of it as an add–on. The provision of RSS feeds is a case in point. Thinking about how something might appear on a mobile device is another.

From First Monday.

The new economics of book digitisation

Some librarians privately expressed fears that Google might charge high prices for subscriptions to the book database as it grows. Although nonprofit groups like the Open Content Alliance are building their own digital collections, no other significant private-sector competitors are in the business. In May, Microsoft ended its book scanning project, effectively leaving Google as a monopoly corporate player.

David Drummond, Google’s chief legal officer, said the company wanted to push the book database to as many libraries as possible. “If the price gets too high,” he said, “we are simply not going to have libraries that can afford to purchase it.”

From the NYT.

Ye New Meedia: older news than we thought

If you learn about the world primarily from newspapers, the Folger Shakespeare Library's exhibition documenting the birth of journalism in the Renaissance will be a wistful affair. It's like looking at baby pictures of a distinguished old relative who is now on life support. Look how vibrant, how youthful, how full of vinegar the old man was. Once upon a time, before the plummeting circulation, the shrinking ad revenue and the highly leveraged corporate owners.

But if you get your news primarily from the Internet, there's nothing sad here at all. New media is new media, whether it's scurrilous pamphlets distributed by hand, or partisan Web sites that spread their happy mischief through the wireless ether. The forms, the tone, the types of personalities who gravitated to journalism when it was new seem fantastically familiar in our own anarchic and newly democratized age of the World Wide Web.

From the Washington Post.

Libraries: it's getting tougher still

Dave Prentis said: "The library service is nearing a crisis point after suffering years of funding cuts, deskilling of the workforce and recent threats of outsourcing.

"Although more people visited their local library last year than went to the cinema or a football match, the numbers are declining and so we also need to concentrate on attracting new readers.

From today's Telegraph.

Google, Libraries & Commodifiction, same old, same old

Everyone's terrified of trashing Google, mainly because of the company's astonishing power in the marketplace, and because it has already digitized 7 million books that libraries want access to. "There's no Google-bashing," insists Maura Marx, executive director of the new Commons. "We need to ensure that there is a viable alternative and that access to knowledge remains open and does not become commodified."

From Boston.com.

The universal library - and legal too

Launched jointly by the 12-university consortium known as the Committee on Institutional Cooperation (CIC) and the 11 university libraries of the University of California system, the HathiTrust leverages the time-honored commitment to preservation and access to information that university libraries have valued for centuries. UC’s participation will be coordinated by the California Digital Library (CDL), which brings its deep and innovative experience in digital curation and online scholarship to the HathiTrust.

HathiTrust - a "shared digital future."


And a commentary from John Wilkin's blog:

In short, HathiTrust is an effort born of libraries, working to bring the lasting contributions of libraries to bear on the growing body of digital materials available to students and researchers. Much has been said and written about the silo effect of digital libraries, the way that our early technological efforts balkanized content and failed to capitalize on economies of scale. With the creation of HathiTrust, many of the world's great research libraries will work together to create a single, comprehensive library without walls. Our partners will work to coordinate their investments both in curating content and in building services, to create a whole greater than the sum of its parts.

November 20: Europe's cultural heritage gets connected

Europeana – the European digital library, museum and archive – is a 2-year project that began in July 2007. It will produce a prototype website giving users direct access to some 2 million digital objects, including film material, photos, paintings, sounds, maps, manuscripts, books, newspapers and archival papers. The prototype will be launched in November 2008 by Viviane Reding, European Commissioner for Information Society and Media.

The digital content will be selected from that which is already digitised and available in Europe’s museums, libraries, archives and audio-visual collections. The prototype aims to have representative content from all four of these cultural heritage domains, and also to have a broad range of content from across Europe.

The interface will be multilingual. Initially, this may mean that it is available in French, English and German, but the intention is to develop the number of languages available following the launch.

I mean...wow!

Here's one for Librarians Everywhere

Isn't this a potential privacy nightmare for libraries? Will Google compile personally identifiable information (via a login to Google Docs or some other service) of terminal users? Will Google collect search and usage data from these library terminals to "improve" searches? Will such data be open for study by the publishers? Scholars? How long will Google retain such data, if it compiles it at all?

Siva Vaidhyanathan from the "Googlization of Everything" blog looks at last week's Google Book Search Settlement.

Building the Music Archive - a new history

This is (part one) of a really interesting series of articles about music collections, and technology - by Martin Belam.

When you used to talk about 'volume control' in the sense of music, it was associated with how loudly you could annoy your parents or neighbours. Nowadays it is more likely to refer to the sheer volume of digital media in your possession.

At the end of March 2007 I had 15,741 tracks in the iTunes library on my PC, of which I had played 4,084 at least once. That represents 25.9% of the titles, or just a shade over a quarter of the tracks. Meaning that, according to iTunes, I had never listened to around three-quarters of my collection.

I'd taken the time to rate 2,680 tracks. Yet, again, according to iTunes, of the tracks that I had rated, I had never played 38% of them.

Rating has become the new "volume control" for music consumption. With a library that large, rating songs allows us to narrow down what we actually want to hear, rather than what we simply want to have.

For the whole 12 part series in PDF, go here.

Scholars & Libraries & Blogs & Trust

While the library community appreciates institutional networks, academics feel closer to their own disciplinary networks. In my interviews, faculty members told me that at the heart of their reaction are concerns about quality (which is an essential criterion for scholarly outputs) and potential copyright infringements. Several faculty members I talked with during my study expressed the need to stay closer to their special communities through networking and information sharing both for professional development and for building reputation. Also, many of them expressed their preference for posting articles on their own Web sites rather than institutional repositories.

The Journal of Electronic Publishing.

Search you can trust? (With Added Librarians)

With this latest launch, they’re expanding their focus on relevance by engaging with librarians to manually compile lists of “trusted” sites for particular categories. They say that “Google (and others like Google) don’t make the distinction of what is credible (or quality) what is not.” They note Sir Tim Berners-Lee’s recent comments when launching the World Wide Web Foundation that new systems are needed that give trustworthiness labels to web sites that have been proven to be reliable sources.

SearchEngineLand explains.


Hakia explains its "trusted results scheme".


Hakia itself for a test.

A search engine with librarian backed verification? Sounds good. But can any search engine compete with Google?

Or is that a too era-centric question?

How to Review a Forger?

But these aren’t petty or victimless crimes– they are not only crimes against literature and culture, they are also crimes against the very people, businesses, and institutions dedicated to discovering, documenting, promoting, protecting, and preserving for all time the valuable and often irreplaceable artifacts of our civilization.

A research expert on a literary forger.