Tom Roper's Weblog

Jean Shaw awarded 2005 Barnard prize

This is more or less what I will say when awarding the Barnard prize to Jean Shaw. It may not be precisely in the form it will be delivered but I dislike reading speeches as much as I dislike hearing someone else stumble through a prepared text.

"CILIP’s Health Libraries Group awards the Cyril Barnard prize every three years to honour the memory of Cyril Barnard, and to recognise an exceptional and sustained contribution to health librarianship. Cyril Barnard was one of the giants of medical librarianship as we then thought of it, in the last century. Apart from the work he did at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, in this year of the ICML, it is worth remembering that he was intimately involved in international work, playing, with the late Leslie Morton, a major role in the London Congress that was the first international gathering of medical librarians in  1953.  He also will be know to many as the developed of the Barnard classification; earlier in my career I had the honour to run one of the libraries using the Barnard scheme, the Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons."

"But to return to Cyril Barnard’s international role; it make it especially apposite that this year’s Barnard prize should go to Jean Shaw, whose name is synonymous with international work in our profession. The threat of avian influenza reminds us that agents of disease do not pay much attention to national boundaries; neither therefore should those who contribute to the treatment of the sick be so limited. Jean retired, if that is the right word, in 1995 at the end of a very distinguished career as the first medical school librarian at Leicester; she immediately threw herself into the affairs of EAHIL, being the longest serving editor of its newsletter."

"Jean became Research Officer for PHI, Partnerships in Health Information, about three years after its foundation. Jean led PHI in building partnerships and links with health information professionals in developing countries, to show the breadth of PHI's work, the latest newsletter mentions projects in Chechnya, Tanzania and Sierra Leone; under her leadership, PHI has grown in strength and influence, thanks to over ten years commitment on her part. HLG is proud to be associated with PHI and particularly pleased to learn that a Programmes Officer is to be appointed. Our manifesto defines raising awareness of international health information issues as one of our core activities, and our relationship with PHI is central to that."

"These connections aside, the central reason for awarding this prize to Jean is the example she sets us of what the information professional should be; she has pioneered, she has developed new organisations and her contribution to the profession has been delivered modestly unselfishly and to great effect throughout her life."

Online

I'm off to Online today, among other things to present the HLG Barnard prize to Jean Shaw, of which more later. There doesn't seem to be the blogging interest in Online that there has been in other library conferences with a technical focus. UKEIG have a conference blog, Information Today are covering it and Information World Review ran a preview. But a technorati search doesn't turn up very much else: ten posts in last 81 days.

Evidence Based Library Journal

There's a new open access evidence based library journal due to launch early next year: Evidence Based Library and Information Practice

Free Access to Library, Information Science & Technology Abstracts (LISTA)

Free Access to Library, Information Science & Technology Abstracts (LISTA): now available thanks to EBSCO

BCS Thought Leadership Debate - Open Access

The British Computer Society held a Thought Leadership Debate on Open Access
Here's their paper

Breaking boundaries: parallel session B: arts and humanities in the curriculum

A workshop on medical arts and humanities led by Sarah Gull of Cambridge:
The medical humanities cover a spectrum of activities, from the practice of the arts and humanities by those trained in medicine to more theoretical scholarship. Many of us participating in the workshop were from humanities backgrounds.
We were split into groups and asked three questions:

1. Which parts of the curriculum are susceptible to an arts and humanities approach?
It's hard to identify any part of the curriculum that could not benefit but among those thought most suitable for this sort of approach were ethics, clinical skills teaching, and communication skills. Writing is an important but neglected skill for doctors, and clinical skills generally can be enhanced by the practice of the arts

2. What are the constraints?
Time, we will answered, and other resources, and the packed curriculum (though introducing an arts and humanities approach need not necessarily require more time. merely adjustment), lack of leadership, money (though there are various funding sources: the Arts and Humanities Research Council,  the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts, NESTA, the Wellcome, the Nuffield Trust), scepticism from colleagues. How to assess work could be problematic (and whether it should be; there was a definite feeling that work needed to be assessed for reluctant students to think it important). The different jargons and argots spoken by different disciplines could be a barrier

3. What is to be done?
Persuade the sceptics, do more scholarship (sceptical colleagues may be persuaded by the growth of a corpus of methodologically-rigourous medical humanities literature), broaden selection and admissions procedures, enlist the support of the GMC, stress the advantages of MH teaching, how it can equip doctors for lifelong learning and dealing with change, complexity and uncertainty.The ability to have exchange with scholars in different subjects is a defining characteristic of a university, so the fact that undergraduate medical education takes place in higher education is an advantage.

I cannot finish the account of this workshop without mentioning the knitted gastrointestinal tract that Suzanne Hardy showed us, an excellent example of the integration of the arts and medicine . There's knitted DNA too

Terrorism Bill in the Badger

The work CILIP's doing on the Terrorism Bill is cropping up in unexpected places. The University of Sussex Student Union's paper the Badger (not online I fear) covers it quite well, including comments from Debby Shorley, though they mangled the URL for CILIP's pages on it, which should be: http://www.cilip.org.uk/professionalguidance/terrorismbill

CILIP's Presidential election

Voting closes today. It's been interesting: there's been much more campaigning than usual, not surprising in a three way contest, the first time veer in the history of CILIP and possibly in its predecessor organisations too.
I hope that future elections will be more open: one candidate in particular, Ian Snowley, has used discussions on e-mail lists and his weblog to set out his ideas for the presidency. I hope this will become the norm.

The count is on Varsity match day, so I am hoping for a double, that is wins for Ian and Cambridge

 

The Royal Society position statement on OA

The Royal Society, publishers of the world's first scientific journal, issued a position statement on Open Access

Librarything

I'm struck by something I've noticed on LibraryThing. I now have 594 books up in LibraryThing, but looking at how many I share with other users, there's only 44 . This seems rather few, though I have by no means added anything like the majority of my collection.
There are clear differences in the ways individuals collect books for their personal collections, and the way institutional libraries collect. Should I draft a personal collection development policy? Perhaps not, it might curb the pleasantly serendipitous purchases I sometimes make in bookshops. Granted Librarything users are atypical, but I would have expected my personal library to have more in common with others.