Tom Roper's Weblog

So farewell then....

...Mick Farren, 1943-2013. I still have two of his vinyl albums, Mona, which he made after the Deviants split up, and Ptoof! the first, under the original name of the Social Deviants. They're shelved in an alcove and the cats love to sit on them. At Kent University, we once persuaded the university radio station to play one of the tracks from Mona, an incoherent monologue by a hapless young man in prison whose punch line, 'all they give you to eat, man, is potatoes,' became something of a catch phrase among our set.

His musical-cum-political journalism was the point; I tried, under the tutelage of Big Mick Carver, to like his fiction, mostly sub-Moorcockian fantasy, but found it hard going. His writing for the NME, though, was the reason we would forgo food, drink and even drugs to find the money for a weekly copy. 

Poetry from the Crypt 2013

I'm planning the 2013 Poetry from the Crypt event. At the moment I know the following:

• it will be in Seaford, in the Crypt
• it will be part of Seaford Live 2013, which runs from 6-15 September
• there will be guest readers and an open-mic session
• there will be wine

More details will appear as I know them. If anyone's interested in reading, do get in touch; e-mail me on tom.roperATgmail.com.

I saw this excellent advice on reading at open mic sessions on Josephine Corcoran's blog: Poetry Open-Mic Tips

CILIP's governance review: update

I see that, in my last post on this, I mentioned that I had e-mailed the President and Chair of Council. I should make it clear that, after chasing them,  I have had a reply, from the latter. However, I am not permitted to tell you what it says. 

Update, 2 August 2013: there is now a statement in Update and on the website. Detailed analysis will follow in a post this weekend, but there's no satisfactory explanation for the six month delay, and no detail of the proposals. Apparently there will be  'sharing of key elements of change', whatever that means, in October.

The mystery of the vanishing CILIP governance review, or kittens in Aeschylus

One thing leads, as so often, to another, and my recent involvement in the CILIP rebranding brouhaha led me to think about how our professional association is run, and how might it be possible to bring a little openness and democracy into it. Yes, I know I ought to blog about kittens, or classical literature, or better still, kittens in Aeschylus, but indulge me for a little longer. 

CILIP has been running a governance review since 2010. There's a webpage at http://www.cilip.org.uk/about-us/governance/pages/governance-review.aspx, last updated on 23 October 2012.In the minutes of the March 2013 Council meeting you may read the following,

C2013/05 Governance Review Report

Council discussed and agreed proposals from the Governance Review Board. Thanks were recorded to the Governance Review Project Board, in particular to the external members, Mark Taylor of the Museums Association and Andy Stephens of the British Library, for their contribution.

I find it hard to read that as meaning anything other than that the review reported to Council and Council endorsed its proposals. But, four months having passed, search for those proposals on CILIP's website, or in the pages of Update, and you will search in vain. What does it say? I asked the ever-helpful @CILIPInfo, and we had the following conversation

So I've e-mailed the Chair of Council and the President. I'll post again when they reply. 

The General Meeting or whither CILIP?

The result was announced by Phil Bradley this afternoon: for the motion to halt the rebranding, 752 members, against 804, with 16 abstentions. At the time of writing, the Elections Panel report isn't yet on the CILIP website, but a press release is. 

The motion commanded the overwhelming support of the people at the meeting, just under a hundred. The 52 vote majority was achieved with the proxy votes of those not present. I understand why we have proxy votes; a meeting at lunchtime on a working day in central London is not easy to attend. There's no doubt though, that the information members saw in advance of the meeting was heavily biased in favour of the majority Council position, although I asked for the chance to put the case for the motion.

I'm very grateful to everyone who spoke, who came to the meeting, who voted and who supported the original requisition. 

What now? W(h)ither CILIP? 

• the question of how the membership's voice can be heard in the organisation needs to be resolved. The current position is very unsatisfactory; even if the motion had passed, there was, it was claimed, no obligation on Council to comply with it. 
• Council desperately needs to be more open in the way it conducts its business and the way it works with members. The Council blog hasn't been updated for a year. Most council papers are hidden from view than are available to members, and more business is conducted in camera than is healthy.
• we need better guidance about bias in communication with the membership in these situations
• the points made by campaigners such as Shirley Burnham need to be listened to. Why is CILIP perceived to have nothing to say about Lincolnshire or Herefordshire?
• some people are talking about resigning. Please don't. Stay in the organisation; it can be made better, more open, more democratic and above all, more of a force in the wider world. On today's evidence it will be a hard and painful to get there, but there are enough people who care about the organisation to achieve it

For what it's worth, here's my speech, the draft version, not quite as delivered: General Meeting speech [pdf]

CILIP Rebranding: whereof one cannot speak….

These tweets from Ian Anstice, proprietor of the estimable Public Library News, appeared today, after he had done battle with the voluntarists at Umbrella. I think Annie Mauger (CEO of CILIP) probably planted them in the hope of wider circulation. I offer them without comment. 

1: Annie Mauger has just told me that the new name that #CILIP Council has chosen for the organisation will include the word "library"

— Ian Anstice (@publiclibnews) July 3, 2013

2: Annie continues that no one will get chance to see name unless motion defeated in upcoming vote. Name going through legal trademarking.

— Ian Anstice (@publiclibnews) July 3, 2013

3. New name for organisation will then be revealed and/or voted on by AGM on September 21st. (Not clear which - sorry, was a short chat)

— Ian Anstice (@publiclibnews) July 3, 2013

The rebranding CILIP survey: a critique

CILIP published the rebranding survey results, or a summary of them. What follows is a critique, and I acknowledge the help of others who've contributed analysis on social media, but the responsibility for this is mine and mine alone. There were two surveys, one on the rebrand, and a second on renaming. 

General

• they don't say how long the surveys ran for, nor give the questions asked. We have no statement of aims, or the research question the survey was designed to answer
• for the first survey, they had 3,928 respondents, whom they divide into members, activists and non-members, but the first two categories are not mutually exclusive. And the percentages don't add up 68%+6%+21%=95%. What happened to the other 5%?
• for the second, on naming, they had 1,142 responses. We're not told how many were members or non-members
• it's unclear how multiple responses from the same respondent were prevented
• clearly there's been some rounding going on, but inconsistently, and sometimes incorrectly

The rating scales:

• the scales are fundamentally flawed; in scales of this sort, the middle option is neutral. Describing this as OK, which is too close to Well, is a serious error; a usual way to describe this middle option, number 3 on a 1-5 scale would be neither positive nor negative. Not only this, the reporters try to claim all the middle preferences as positives
• rating scales are in any case often criticised for their openness to biases, central tendency bias, acquiescence bias and social desirability bias

The second survey on naming

• a better and clearer way [if you wanted people to understand the survey, rather than use it to make propaganda] to present this data would have been to use weightings
• the presentation of the data my be appropriate for an ad-hoc meeting at Ridgmount Street, but is seriously inadequate as a basis for decision making

To quote one of those who looked at the data on Twitter, 'I just get the feeling it was thrown together, because it wasn't intended to be published, badly presented, misleading and even inaccurate'.

What we need now is the anonymised raw data. Will CILIP release it? I have asked. 

So, taking the traditional critical appraisal questions for a qualitative study, my answers are as follows:

Was the research design appropriate to address the aims of the research? Not as it stands; a survey was a reasonable approach, but not this one

Was the recruitment strategy appropriate to the aims of the research? No idea, it isn't stated.

Were the data collected in a way that addressed the research issue? Again, can't tell, we know very little about how the data were collected

Has the relationship between researcher and participants been adequately considered? We have no indication whatsoever that this was thought about. We have only the sketchiest information about the researchers, to the effect that they are a from by the name of Spencer Dubois

Have ethical issues been taken into consideration?  We don't know. At least the survey is anonymised, and we can guess that those who took part gave informed consent

Was the data analysis sufficiently rigorous? Vide supra

Is there a clear statement of the findings? Absolutely not

How valuable is the research? Not at all; there's no context given, no way the reader can asses what, if anything, the results mean

In a week's time...

…the results of the vote on the motion at the general meeting will be known. Today, CILIP council met, though you wouldn't have known it. The only evidence on social media was a picture a Council member posted on Facebook. Time was when there was a CILIP Council blog, and a member would write a report for members after every meeting. It's still there, but the last entry is over a year old, for the Council meeting of 18 June 2012. Since then there have been four Council meetings, including that of 1 July, and not a word.

The meeting papers on the CILIP website (members only) say that rebranding was discussed at around 12.30, but there were no papers. The Project Initiation Document (PID to the project cognoscenti) was agreed at the March meeting of Council, but under reserved business, so not available to members. The only mention of rebranding that members can see, therefore, is on the agenda.

I still have no response to my request for an opportunity to correct the bias in the e-mail message to members, which tried to urge people to vote against the motion. I've asked for the same opportunity to be extended to me, as was to John Dolan. I've also asked, in a discussion on LinkedIn, for the full anonymised data from the survey to be made available. The tone of the council members who've been given the task of defending the rebrand on LinkedIn is somewhat desperate. The defence consists of homilies about change, as if the members were all lazy library assistants moaning about an innovation, or defensive accounts of how much work they do. Let me say I don't doubt the good faith of Council members one bit; the issue here is that the rebranding is not what CILIP should spend its money on now.

To remind people, if you're a CILIP member, you can register to attend the meeting, or vote by proxy.