Tom Roper's Weblog

E-books for FE

Over 3,000 e-book titles are to be made available to further education colleges, Anna Vernon, programme manager for the JISC E-books for FE project told a meeting of the London and South East Circle of CoFHE at CILIP headquarters in London today. After an extensive consultation with library and learning resource centre staff in colleges, the contract will go to eBrary. eBrary had the highest number of matches with titles prioritised by colleges, and also offer resources of interest to smaller specialist colleges; Anna illustrated this by reference to a lambing textbook which is part of the deal.

The deal will go live in May and run for five years and it's important that library and learning resource centres embed the e-books in electronic learning environments. The JISC e-books observatory project found that e-books are twice as likely to be used if linked to within VLEs. Our task now is to use them and promote them.

Nathan Newey, Technical Services Manager at the University of East London, presented a case study of UEL's implementation of e-books, using multiple platforms.

Genre/Form Thesaurus for Music

I saw this on Catalogablog

News from the Library of Congress.

In November 2008, the Library of Congress Acquisitions and Bibliographic Access Directorate approved a Timeline and Plan for the Next Five Library of Congress Genre/Form Projects. In accordance with that timeline, the Policy and Standards Division (PSD) is beginning to develop a genre/form thesaurus for music. LC’s Music Division and other interested groups are collaborating with PSD in this effort.

Information about the project, including tentative lists of genre/form terms and terms denoting medium of performance, may be linked to from PSD’s genre/form web page.

[From Genre/Form Thesaurus for Music]

How fascinating, but how complex to try to order the fluctuations of musical fashion. I hope they will find room from thrash-skiffle, the form pioneered by Brighton's Curst Sons

The heroic age of knitting

Among my late mother's effects were a number of knitting patterns. I have scanned some of them; to the modern eye they seem quaint and often comical, but there is a poignant evocation of the 1950s here too. I know there are many knitting bloggers, and I wish to make clear, as they are fierce people with sharp sticks, that I admire them greatly. My mother did try to teach me to knit, but failed. There is a small covetable prize to anyone who can guess correctly how many of these garments I wore as a child. I will tell you for nothing that I wore this balaclava. Please leave answers in the comments.

Road to Rio

I have been invited to give a series of papers on psycholinguistics at a conference in Rio de Janeiro. A splendid opportunity, but it was not meant for me. Someone at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro wrote to me, saying that 'we follow your work here with interest, specially the Theory of Mind and recursion papers'. I'm very flattered; it took but a few seconds to discover a Professor Tom Roeper (note the extra e) at the University of Massachusetts who works in this field. I forwarded the message on to him, copying it to the original sender, and explaining that I was Tom Roper, not Tom Roeper, and that I thought the latter was the man they sought.

I thought no more; some thanks might have been pleasant, from either of the parties, but this is 2009. Then I received an e-mail from the distinguished professor, to me, not to the original sender, complaining that he had not had an attached brochure about the conference (yes he had). I imagined that he had not given the message from Brazil a close reading and that when he did, he would see that he needed to reply to the sender in Rio. In any case, I reasoned, surely the sender in Rio would, when she had my message explaining the mistaken identities, resend her message to the right man. So I did nothing further.

Of course neither the professor nor Rio had done any such thing. Yesterday Professor Roeper e-mailed me, without a copy to the people in Brazil, addressing me as 'Dear Aniela" not a name I have ever used, complaining once more that he had not had the attachment, and telling me that he has to plan other trips and cannot miss too many classes. I have replied once more, in polite but I hope clear terms, pointing out the error, copying to Brazil. I have offered to give them lectures on any aspect of librarianship, classical Greek or marathon running they wish. I hope they will read the message this time.

This is not the first time. DEFRA once offered me £40,000 to do some research on badgers, mistaking me for a Tim Roper who researches in animal behaviour at the University of Sussex. As in this case I sent it on to him, copying to DEFRA, but neither party bothered to thank me, What baffles me is how people can send important messages like this without checking they are sending them to the right person, and then, when their error is pointed out to them, not acknowledge it. I wonder if I could perhaps make a second income out of these misdirected messages

The Flat

I leave Nad Al Sheba well alone. It's hard enough to find winners among British and Irish horses, never mind at events with entries from all over the world. Then again, it's hard to find a winner on the first day of the flat season, with few clues. Nevertheless:
245 Doncaster: Spectait
320 Doncaster: Inxile
355 Doncaster: Flipando

'Against you I will fling myself, unvanquished and unyielding, O Death!'

Sixty-eight years ago tomorrow, almost a human life-span, Virgina Woolf drowned herself in the Ouse. Every morning the train takes me along the Ouse valley, with Rodmell, where she and Leonard lived, on the far side. I often wonder where she entered the water. I have never swum in this section of the river. The best swimming is to be had to the north of Lewes.

There was a place on the Cam, Dead Man's Corner, just where Grantchester Meadows proper starts. I would swim to it with my father from the university sheds, which he thought was about half a mile. Who was the dead man? Another suicide?

More on Rachel Cooke

Demonstrating against library closure in Haringey. We won.

I promised a more detailed response to Rachel Cooke's article on the state of public libraries in the Observer. Here it is. Cooke starts with her childhood library use in Sheffield and revisits the building she enjoyed so much; she discusses new library buildings such as Newcastle, Brighton and Whitechapel, and the closures in the Wirral, Swindon, Warwick, Somerset, Walsall and Richmond. She lists the many minsters who have held the public libraries portfolio at DCMS without offering anything more than words; she tries to speak to the present incumbent, Andy Burnham, but is refused an interview and instead is given ten platitudinous minutes on the telephone with Barbara Follett. She talks to the MLA and to Tim Coates, and to campaigners such as Alan Gibbons, Christopher Hawtree and Shirley Burnham, and finishes in Hillingdon.

The telling absence in the piece is any word from librarians themselves. I don’t accept that this is because, as a commenter on my previous posts claimed, she spoke to them but they refused to be identified. When we fought and won against library cuts in Haringey, we were not so shy; and even if individual staff do fear intimidation by little-Hitler managers and philistine councillors, there are trade unions, CILIP and the Library Campaign, all able to speak out. Librarians are there to serve the public, and we have a professional responsibility to speak out to safeguard and develop the services we provide.

I am not at all surprised at Cooke's account of the evasiveness of ministers. At this stage of this government’s life, even when they do consent to appear in public, they lack any conviction: compare Sion Simon’s interview on the Today programme last week, tackled by John Humphreys over the debacle of the building programme in further education colleges. It was no accident that the same issue of the Observer carried in the magazine Roy Hattersley's account of the last days of the Callaghan government. Meanwhile, though Ed Vaizey the shadow minister, makes polite and plausible noises about public libraries, his party whip themselves up into a cutting frenzy over public spending; it is clear that voting for a different bunch of crooks to run things offers no solution.

The Observer article is decorated with boxes showing the most -borrowed works and authors from public libraries then and now; thy fail to mention that these figures are not wholly reliable, being those used to calculate Public Lending Right payments, and are based on samples, not on loans from every library. But Cooke misses the point: this is part of the problem. Public libraries and librarians lost their way when, responding to cuts, we started to make ourselves like the worst sort of chain bookshop, giving priority to the popular over the need to build well-balanced collections, to provide for the purposive reader and to offer the best as well as the worst. Of course we should provide recreational and trivial books and other resources; they are an important part of peoples’ lives. But, spurred on by exhortations to be more like bookshops, that has become the sole aim of so many public libraries, and that is why so many fail the Andromaque test.

I think libraries, of all tyres, exist to transmit knowledge and culture. I think they do so by collecting, organising and preserving the documentary record of civilisation, so that all can use it, to learn, to create new knowledge themselves, to understand the great achievements of human culture and to enjoy themselves. Education, culture, recreation; there is no reason why public libraries cannot serve all three of these. Some campaigners have, rightly, focused attention on the book and book stocks. There offer an easily quantifiable measure of how far the rot has gone. But libraries have always collected material in many forms: from clay tablets to papyri, or recorded sound and vision in its myriad formats, to say nothing of the explosion of networked information now available, electronic journals, both open access and subscription, databases, datasets and so on.

I love books, I read many, as the sidebar of this blog attests, and they will be the central part of public library collections for many years yet; but there is no reason why provision of books has to be out in opposition to the provision of information in its many other forms. We have the skills to organise and offer them all. Though, on the matter of the book, we should not forget how publishers, in pursuit of cuts in costs, have cheapened the physical object: how acid paper, so-called perfect binding, outsourcing printing to the other side of the world, sacking editors and so on, have cheapened and made ugly what can be such a beautiful thing.

The failings of the conventional wisdoms about how public libraries could improve become clearer, as, in the light of this slump, we start to understand see quite how damaging the thraldom of successive governments to finance capital has been to society and everything useful and valuable we know. As well as being hectored to be more like W H Smiths or Waterstones, we have been badgered to emulate the management practices of the private sector. The mantra that only partnership with the private sector can offer a future, as that sector vanishes in a cloud of fraud, bonuses and extravagant pensions, sound a little thin now. To our shame, many of us collaborated with the enemy. I have often heard people in my profession boast of not caring about whether they managed a library or a supermarket. The shortcomings of many new build public libraries like Brighton lie in their bondage to a PFI agreement

What do we need?

• A moratorium on all library closures and reductions in hours
• Start a national programme to improve public library building stock: make them into places that can serve all the functions of a modern public library There are architects and builders queuing in Job Centres. Bring them back to work to design and build in consultation with library users and those who work in them, library buildings suited to lofty cultural mission
• Every library must have to have the services of at least one professional librarian, to manage a varied stock, develop services, offer help and advice to everyone who comes in
• Revive the specialisms in the profession: music, children's, reference. Discover and develop the new specialisms we need to help library users take advantage of the world of networked information
• Tear up all the PFI agreements. We owe them nothing.
• Give access to the whole library resources of the country through a unified online interface to library catalogues, with the ability to request items from any participating collection and items not yet added to collections
• Make the British Library a truly national library: end its Blairite rhetoric about UK PLC and open up the electronic services to any holder of a British public library ticket. rather than just those at desk
• Emulate the Ptolemies, who were reputed to seize any books brought on ships to Alexandria and have them copied for the Library. Seize all electronic content licenced to any organisation in the country
• Put real impetus into the open access movement.
• End all charges for reservations and inter-library loans.

To establish my credentials, my childhood like Rachel's was shaped by visits to a library, the Cambridge Central Library, then at the rear of the Guildhall, opposite the Corn Exchange. I used first the Children's Library and, when I had exhausted its possibilities, sought and was given permission to use the adult library, though I was officially too young. Here I not only explored to book stock but the well-stocked gramophone library. I spent the first thirteen years of my career as a librarian in public libraries in North London, in Barnet and Haringey. I left Haringey when I found that, rather than being able to contribute to the civilising mission of the institution, I spent all my time on service points explaining to people why they couldn’t have what they wanted,. Haringey was an exemplary library system and pioneered a subject specialist approach and service in depth, but the guts were ripped out of it by rate capping. These days I use three public library systems, Brighton and Hove and East Sussex, where I live, and Wandsworth in London, where I work. I also use the British Library and other specialist libraries form time to time, and in my career have worked in university, hospital, commercial and learned society libraries and for the British Council. I hope that establishes my bona fides.

PS Shirley Burnham asks me to include a link to the Swindon campaign: it's here.

Most highly flavoured gravy

Today, 25 March, is the feast of the annunciation of the Blessed Virgin Mary. May I reassure regular readers that my normal stance of militant atheism has not given way to religious mania, still less to Mariolatry? I continue to strive for the day when all priests, rabbis, mullahs, lamas, shamen and other functionaries of superstition only exist in museums, memory and history.

However, on this day every year my school choir would sing evensong in the chapel of Gonville and Caius College. We would perform the canticles in a setting by the music master, Graham Sudbury, the carol the Angel Gabriel from heaven came, whose refrain, most highly favoured lady has been rendered by choirboys as most highly flavoured gravy for generations, and the hymn Blessed city, heavenly Salem, which, it is fitting to remember in his 350th anniversary year, is to a tune taken from Henry Purcell's anthem, O God, thou art y God.

Afterwards we would be entertained to tea in the Master's parlour. The tenors and basses were separated from the trebles and altos and were rumoured to be given beer, though when my voice broke and, after a brief unsuccessful attempt, influenced by he counter-tenor revival then in train, to sing the alto parts, I found myself among the basses, I found this to be untrue.

Joseph Needham, the scientist and sinologist, was master then, a benevolent presence at the post-evensong feast. I was reminded of this when reading Simon Winchester's life of Needham. He would read one of the lessons, while the other was read by the then headmaster of the school, Anthony Melville, the two of them seated at the rear of the chapel, on either side of the door in curtained pews with many cushions. Melville's thorough-going reactionary stance must have been at odds with Needham's progressive outlook. Indeed it was also at odds with the school's traditions. Two of its most famous old boys were Rajani Palme Dutt, eminence grise of the Communist Party of Great Britain, and Humphrey Jennings, the radical documentary film maker.

Needham was also a keen swimmer, and my father had pointed him and his second wife Lu Gwei-Djen out to me him at the University bathing sheds on the way to Grantchester, and at a bathing place near Horningsea. It seemed to me that Winchester in his book has mistaken the location of the latter. Known as the pit, it was a popular swimming place, an old gravel pit surrounded by hawthorn on land owned by Hugh and Betty Gingell, who kindly let people use it. Needham's remarks on swimming in Cambridge are well worth reading, part of an essay Cambridge Summer in History is on our Side

Later I was to come across Needham through the part he played in the Society for Anglo-Chinese Understanding. At this period, just after the Cultural Revolution, the Cambridge branch was divided more or less equally between those who thought Chinese paper cuts were awfully pretty, and those of us who were interested in what we political lessons we could draw from the Chinese experience.

Needham, Joseph
History is on our side: a contribution to political religion and scientific faith
London: George Allen & Unwin, 1946

Public library closures map

While I compose my detailed commentary on Rachel Cooke's Observer piece, I found Tony Hirst's (@psychemedia) Google map of planned and actual library closures

View Larger Map

Rachel Cooke on public libraries

Rachel Cooke, who has written on the subject before, has a long piece in this morning's Observer Review, I am preparing a more detailed critique, for, much as Ms Cooke is on the side of righteousness, there are some serious gaps, not least that, while she has spoken to, or tried to speak to, government ministers, campaigners for libraries, and self-appointed 'experts' such as Hillingdon's Henry Higgins and Tim 'Waterstones " Coates, she does not quote a single librarian. There may be reasons for this, not least that she may feel that we bear some responsibility for the current crisis, but nevertheless....more soon.