Tom Roper's Weblog

The last Umbrella post

Some final reflections on Umbrella:
The blogging experience: there didn't seem to be many of us, but I think if we're to start to use some of the modern tools that can enrich conferences (cf Brian Kelly) the infrastructure needs to be better (and the weird charging systems for wifi needs attention; not only did we have to pay though the service was supposed to be sponsored by 7 Side, one wondered what, if anything, they paid, and what for), but the vouchers expired after twenty-four hours. And the Ibis where I stayed offered nothing but a dial-up line. There are venues that are better equipped to support a modern conference; perhaps we should go to them.
Social aspects: librarians at play are a fearsome sight. The Manchester Art Gallery was a gorgeous place for the President's reception and the Friday night dinner
UMIST: really is unattractive.
Manchester itself is an interesting city; it makes attempts at sophistication but doesn't always manage it. I had an excellent lunch at an Italian restaurant one day, very good food, generally good service, though the waiters did rush me a little, but that's the price one pays for eating on one's own, but the company...!
I went into a bar for a drink before the presidential reception; the bar was reasonable though the young man who served me was gauche. But on the bar was leaflet advertising a singer who would appear there the following evening. She was described as a jazz singer, which I very much doubt, but the leaflet went on to tell the reader that she had sung at Wayne Rooney's 18th birthday party, something I would keep very quiet about if it was on my cv.
The programme was generally good, though I did wonder how some papers made it. In keeping with the idea that we need to make our research more rigourous, perhaps a more formal process would help: a call for abstracts, scrutiny by a properly qualified and constituted scientific programme committee, publication of the proceedings and so on. Devolving the programme to groups makes for very uneven quality.

Effective libraries vital to make poverty history

The text of the resolution is out, with a press release on the CILIP site

'Whereas library and information services underpin information, literacy and the learning process; and whereas literacy and learning underpin all our aspirations, locally and globally, for ourselves, our communities and our economies including equality, social justice and the eradication of poverty; therefore be it resolved that this conference declares its support for the Make Poverty History campaign and calls on the UK government to recognise and promote the role of libraries in sustainable economic development.'

Final parallel session: Bill Summerskill on evidence-based practice

Bill Summerskill of the Lancet woke us up by showing us Marat in his bath, his point being that in revolutions such as the evidence-based practice revolution that has been raging for ten years now, there are casualties. Bill had written an article in the issues of the Lancet published that day:
Summerskill, W
Literature searches: look before you leap
Lancet 2005; 366:13-14
(free registration required to see full text). The article generated some discussion on lis-medical and Andrew Booth has recorded on his Scharrlatan blog arguments he used in a telephone conversation with Bill which the latter mentioned in his talk.
Bill was keen that the audience should not take notes, but think about what he was saying, so this account is fragmentary (he was happy to send copies of his presentation to attenders, though). He drew attention to the similarities between the Sicily statement "health care professionals must be able to gain, assess, apply and integrate new knowledge and have the ability to adapt to changing circumstances throughout their professional life" and Tomorrow's Doctors. which says graduates must "be able to gain, assess, apply and integrate new knowledge and have the ability to adapt to changing circumstances throughout their professional life", but the revolutionary content of Sicily is that evidence-based medicine is dead, long live evidence-based practice...in other  words it is not the property of any one profession. It now needs an infrastructure to support it, and he asked us though think about the part librarians could play in that infrastructure. A central problem is that there is insufficient evidence on the impact of health libraries and librarian's interventions. I had been sceptical about the frequently-repeated received idea that the profession's research skills could be better; I thought that we were being unnecessarily modest, as so often. But Bill said that articles submitted to the Lancet by librarians are insufficiently methodologically sound.
This made for lively debate.

Saturday morning: first parallel session: Clinical Academies

After an another agreeable evening at the Art Gallery, the first morning session of the final day was on Clinical Academies, a new initiative in the West Country. My account will not be entirely objective as I was chairing the session. I also presented Vicky Sergeant with her iPod, which she won as first prize in the HLG draw.
The paper was a joint presentation by Barry Howarth, Academy Manager and Sharon Hadley, Effective Practice Facilitator. There's a network of academies in that part of the world, in Bath, North Bristol, Gloucester, Swindon, Taunton and the one Barry and Sharon work at, in Weston-super-Mare. Each takes fifty to sixty medical students from the University of Bristol, and around a hundred nursing students from the University of the West Of England, as well as other health professions. Barry spoke on the structure and planning of the academy, while Sharon talked about library implications. They're in the process of building an electronic learning environment, the virtual academy. The audience were interested in how they managed the interface between higher education and NHS networks, and it seems they use a Citrix thin client, just as we do at BSMS.

Second plenary: Michael Gorman on changing times, enduring values

And so to Michael Gorman's address to the plenary: he said nothing about blogs, so I did not have to leap from my seat or demonstrate my ability to engage with complex texts.
He was witty and forthright, and took us through the values of the profession, as he expounded them in his book Our Enduring Values available, he reminded us more than once, from all good bookshops.
The values are:
1. Stewardship
2. Service
3. Intellectual freedom
4. Equity of access
5. Privacy
6. Literacy and learning
7. Rationalism
8. Democracy
And he added a ninth, the public good.
His remarks on intellectual freedom apparently upset some of the fundies present at Umbrella (a fine US coinage, short for fundamentalist). He referred to a crisis of confidence in the profession, both in the US and here, and to the US Patriot Act. It's impossible to give the flavour of his presentation here, but the applause came long and loud, and indeed frequently as he was presented with a honorary FCLIP at the end.

Friday afternoon

I took myself to a session organised by the Multimedia and Information Technology Group, where Caroline Williams, director of the Resource Discovery Network spoke on the theme e-perspectives. It was a highly interactive session, with Caroline asking us to answer a series of questions: I got only right, the number of iPods sold prior to 2005, 10 million, if you want to know; later she had us imagine future libraries.
A couple of points form a very wide-ranging presentation: she speculated that the music industry model of selling increasingly small units (for example the iTunes store) might spread to other forms of publishing and that users would increasingly want to make their own collections of e-content, the course pack reinvented for the digital age. She referred to the success of the SOSIG blog at the time of the general election (it seems their recent Socail Sciences Online week was less successful).
She referred (as did others during the course of Umbrella) to the interview with Lynne Brindley and Penelope Lively on the Today programme

Friday afternoon: text of the motion

This is most of the motion carried at the Friday afternoon plenary. I missed some bits which were only on the screen for a while and my notes of others are unclear , but they should be on the CILIP website soon:
Whereas library and information services underpin information literacy and the learning process and whereas literacy and [illegible] aspirations, globally and locally for ourselves, our communities and our services [...]this conference declares our support for Make Poverty History and calls on the UK government to recognise and promote the role of libraries in sustainable economic development.
I'm not too keen on the whereases, but this is the way international organisations speak, apparently.

Friday morning: making poverty history

I chose the evidence-based practice stream for my first session this morning,and was rewarded with two excellent presentations, one by Josephine Kavanagh of the wittily-named EPPI-Centre on systematic reviews in education and related social policy areas, and Maggie Haines, who gave an extraordinarily wide-ranging paper on applying evidence-based practice in higher education. It was billed as a case-study, but was actually far more.
After coffee things became even more exciting, with Ross Shimmon, former General Secretary of IFLA reporting on the Byzantine politicking of the preparations for the World Summit on the Information Society, and IFLA's role in lobbying. In the discussion someone suggested that a motion should be put to the plenary this afternoon to make the link between information and the eradication of poverty, and Bob McKee and I both started scribbling at the same time. It was just like being in a compositing meeting at an NUS conference c 1974.
I'll give the text of the motion once the final version appears, but it will say something like "noting popular support for Make Poverty History and the contribution of library and information services can make to eradicating poverty, we call on the British government to use its influence in international fora to ensure that the role of libraries is acknowledged".

Proposal to make BMJ online free fails

A proposal to make the BMJ online free failed at their conference in Manchester. With hindsight we should have made better use of the happy accidents of the BMA and CILIP being in the same city at the same time.

Awards ceremony

The day ended with the awards ceremony, including the presentation of the new ACLIPs, the first to qualify under the new Framework of Qualifications. I've already mentioned the Tony Strix award. Lesley Glaister was an excellent after-dinner speaker, and spoke of her experiences as a library-user, as well as reading a short passage form one of her books set in a library.
The only observation I'd make is that it seemed strange that part of the ceremony should be devoted to the Public Libraries Group's buildings award: we were told the nominations, which include Brighton's fantastic Jubilee Library, (and see here for the photo) but then told that we were not permitted to vote on them, unless we were PLG members. Not terribly inclusive, I thought. Librarians from other sectors will use public libraries and have views on their design.