Information Scotland The Journal of the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals in Scotland ISSN 1743-5471 Issue contents | Journal contents | About the online edition of the journal August 2003 Volume 1 (4)

Conference report

A brolly good time

Graeme Hawley gets excited about cataloguing and llamas at the conference that has everything covered.

Umbrella 2003, 3 to 5 July, Umist, Manchester.

If IFLA is the World Cup of Librarianship, then Umbrella is the FA Cup. When the only drawback is deciding which of the clashing sessions you want to attend, and the apex is a toss between a three course meal on a steam train past fields of llamas, and discussing libraries and globalization issues, you know that you have come to something really fantastic. Once again, it was reaffirming to see this profession of professions engage so enthusiastically with such a variety of issues.

First on my agenda was a visit to the National Library of the Blind (NLB) at Stockport. Despite the fantastic efforts made by Pat Beech at raising the profile on the NLB over recent months, only an actual visit can truly do justice to its general brilliance. I was immensely impressed by the commitment of the staff, ingenuity of the technology, and industry of the whole operation.

The NLB is 121 years old and is entirely dependent on charity. They exist primarily to provide information and recreational resources for the 2 million visually impaired people in the UK. Working in partnership with other libraries and organizations they aim to inspire public and private institutions to do more to provide for visually impaired users.

Assessing, developing and promoting accessible e-resources for visually impaired people is a key aim. Technology such as 'Jaws' - as the mouse or keypad navigates a web page, the screen text is read out - is used alongside books in Braille. The NLB gains 800 to 1,000 new Braille titles each year; 250 of these are produced in house. The NLB has 17 copies of the first four Harry Potters, and received the first installments of the 17-volume Braille version of the Chalice of Doom, or whatever it is, in record time.

Reader development is also key. A really user friendly website was created, and training to over 100 public libraries during the 'Touch of...' project. This project gathers literature into 10 different literary moods. For each mood, a publication was issued which gave reviews and extracts from 10 different Braille items. It was the first time that Braille readers had the opportunity to browse books and pick out ones that they fancied, a great development in empowering the visually impaired user.

Next came a visit to the Rylands Library, which as you read this has now closed until 2006 for upgrading. There are two sides to this: profile raising, and building works. The Rylands Library is very much a product of Manchester's industrial history. The library was established by the third wife of the late John Rylands, the cotton magnate, who inherited £3.5 million, a staggering amount for the late nineteenth century. Mrs. Rylands spent £2 million on the library, its building and collections reflecting the Nonconformist beliefs of John Rylands. It has the biggest collection of Methodist works in the world, owns the St. John's Fragment from 125AD, and has both a 42 and a 36 line edition of the Gutenberg Bible, which is gilding the Congregationalist's lily in anyone's book. Evidently, it has an impressive past to draw on, but what of its future?

The motivation, apart from refurbishment, is the desire to welcome more people, the opportunity to showcase even more of the treasures, in more interactive ways, and the chance to establish Rylands in the minds of the public as the best library in the north of England. The Rylands Library currently has approximately 30,000 users a year. After the re-launch, it expects to attract 90-100,000 visitors.

This Rylands presentation got me thinking; profile raising is about setting fires in people's imaginations and souls, so that they go off and tell people how splendid such and such a thing is. And it seems to have worked, because the short summary of the Rylands Library is - it is splendid. The plans are well considered, and are both sympathetic to the past and relevant for the future.

For my first official session of Umbrella I choose the CIG (Cataloguing and Indexing) AGM. We are treated to a very entertaining account by John Scott Cree of his life as a cataloguer. He poses the questions: 'Why bother with classification when keywords are better for information retrieval?' and 'With full-text retrieval, what is the role of cataloguing?' He then discusses these questions through an analysis about the merits of LCSH and whether Americanized, intellectual language is the most appropriate language to index in. To a generation raised on Internet browsing, the finer points of grammar and spelling are cumbersome obstacles. John then gave an excellent example, the gist of which was that on a list of top search terms recently, 'genealogy' came surprisingly low; 'geneology' was, of course, third in the list.

The new CIG mission statement is short and to the point: 'To promote best practice in the organization and retrieval of knowledge'. But one member felt that the word metadata should feature in the statement, a view shared by several others in the audience. But I stayed silent because of the guilt of cataloguing heresy. And my heresy is this. I don't understand the point of the word 'metadata'.

It is usually defined as 'data about data'. In terms of how the word is used, 'datadata' would be just as good, For, if we are honest with ourselves, then surely we have to concede that it is nonsense, and 'profession-indulgent', 'user-hostile' nonsense at that. If we describe a MARC record as metadata, then we are saying that the MARC record is data about data, when in actual fact the MARC record is data about... a book. Now, only if we really want to alienate our users do we need to refer to books, magazines, websites, etc., as data. In a session subtitled 'Empowering the end-user' perhaps a good start would be if we tried to speak the same language.

The following morning in a session about FRBR, I felt another dose of heresy coming on. The British Library, like most other libraries, is faced with the problem of having to catalogue an ever-increasing volume of material with diminishing resources. The outcome of this equation is typically a squeeze on the quality of records. Cataloguers are naturally averse to this, and consider the quality of the catalogue record to be too important to sacrifice. But how can we tell how good a catalogue record is? Hence the project to find hard, evidence-based quantifiable statistics that link the quality of catalogue records to the appropriateness to the end user.

There had been something bugging me about this project from the start, and that was the use of FRBR as the measure of a good 'user-appropriate' record. How many end-users search on ISBN tags? FRBR, like metadata, is a theoretical thing, and I worry that it is perhaps unnecessarily complicated. I certainly am not convinced that it represents the end-user perspective. However, the ability to provide hard statistical evidence to prove that why we do what we do in the way we do is important, is absolutely critical, and the British Library project is a good attempt at doing this.

Another CIG event, 'FRBR - User tasks and cataloguing data' was presented by Mike Heany on behalf of Mr. Tom 'FRBR' Delsey himself. This session looked at the challenges posed by cataloging e-resources. Unlike traditional book stock, the description of an e-resource and the resource itself are usually at the same location - the computer terminal, and are separated only by a mouse click. Library users have become accustomed to particular access points, such as authors, titles, publishers, and subject headings. E-resources such as web sites do not always lend themselves easily to this manner of description. Websites are also fluid and live. Identifying and acquiring the correct 'edition' could be difficult or even impossible. It is these differences that challenge our current cataloguing practices.

And so for my third and final heresy: e-resources, and websites in particular, are different to books, so why are we trying to treat them the same. For me, the Internet is part of the throwaway culture we live in. It is instant and transient.

In 'Including the excluded' John Vincent starts by discussing his preferred term, which is social justice, the term favoured in Scotland. Then he outlined some guidelines as to what libraries could actually do. Services need to be targeted, but incorporated into the main service delivery of the library. It's no good having five computers, and then getting 15 more and assuming therefore that everyone is catered for now. John was also keen to stress that libraries could achieve far more through partnership. Make sure that social exclusion/inclusion programmes are sustainable and long term, and must relate to local community needs. Finally, staff training and support must be honest and open. Many staff may have prejudices that they were perhaps unaware of, and these need to be explored before programmes can begin.

Kath Reynolds from Stoke-on-Trent and Staffordshire Libraries described the programme of outreach activities to introduce the library to the travelling community. Kath quickly realized that they could not expect the travelers to change their whole cultural ethos to fit in with library regulations, and would therefore have to change the libraries approach to service delivery, if they really were sincere about social inclusion. So, membership rules, proof of address, and similar administrative barriers were relaxed. It proved very difficult at first, and the concept of borrowing and returning wasn't especially popular, but over time, both 'sides' began to understand each other better, and now the service is used by an increasing number of people from this community.

Over the course of the day I had been getting increasingly excited about the evening social event. I had chosen to go on the East Lancashire Steam Train, during which a three-course meal would be served. So, we get to Bury, and there it is, steaming away. Now, there's no easy way to describe what eating a three-course meal of soup, chicken, and profiteroles on a steam train was like, but I'll have a go. We paused on a viaduct whilst they served the soup, looking over a lovely valley and converted mill. The service was super, the atmosphere unique. At some point in the journey we passed a field of llamas, and everyone said "Are they llamas?". It took at least two hours to creep through the countryside to the train's destination of Rawtenstall. When it arrived there, all the men went to look at the engine, and the women talked about the weather and school libraries. Everyone seemed to have had an excellent time.

UMIST-bound, the coach stopped at the Crowne Plaza to disgorge would-be disco-goers. A man sitting in front with a beard and glasses said that he could think of nothing worse than dancing librarians, adding in a barely audible voice, "It's the macabre".

On the last day of Umbrella, I'm a little sad, and there are some macabre looking librarians mooching around; too much disco. My penultimate choice of sessions is on family literacy. A joint presentation about the Greenwich and Bexley public library literacy schemes provides a very useful insight into working in partnership and of how much groundwork is done behind the scenes before anything could actually be offered to the user.

Next up was Sheffield's LEA. Sheffield was terribly affected by the economic slump in the 1980s and the decline of heavy industry. Those in the unemployment culture saw the future as bleak and jobless. A cycle of poor education and illiteracy was threatening, and retraining, education and family learning programmes were seen as the best solution.

The key has been partnership. Attempts have been (successfully) made to get everyone involved in things like family learning days. 'Everyone' includes librarians, teachers, MPs, CAB, local community figures, family outreach workers, clubs, societies, national bodies, parents, grannies, brothers and sisters, local businesses, etc. The informal schemes were the perfect missing link between total absence from the education system, and getting back into the learning and skills accredited programmes. This is where libraries can shine: in making up the ground between the efforts and coverage of other institutions.

All too soon it was time for the last session, and this was a case where I had saved the best until last. It was by far the most intimate session, with only eight of us including the speaker, Ruth Rikowski. A debate was quickly underway, on the subject of 'Libraries: international tradable commodities or public services'. I felt part of a covert group, an illicit number, 'the Rikowski Eight'.

Ruth talked to us about the origins of the World Trade Organization (WTO), GATT (General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade) and GATS (similar agreements affecting services), and how their remit was the liberalization of trade and services, the guarantee of free trade and the removal of protectionism. I learnt that governments could nominate any service for liberalization, releasing it into the sphere of private ownership and competitive tendering.

We don't like to think that our elected governments quietly abdicated our decision-making processes to faceless spectres who place free trade above everything, including ecological and ethical concerns. But we are going to have to, because the clandestine GATS is creeping ever nearer our territory. I am not saying that some of our public services are not in need of improvement. But they should be improved within the realm of public ownership.

The liberalization of service provision is a one-way system. Once a service has been privatized, GATS/WTO forbids it from being re-integrated into the public sphere. Instant Library may be doing a good job at Haringay, but when their contract ends, the service will once again be open for tendering. Imagine, for example, if a company with extreme political or commercial interests were in charge of a library, and how they could alter book selection policies to reflect their agenda, or even who used the library and how.

Surely all of these fears must be conjecture, and many decades away? Hardly; the mechanisms are already in place. Best Value stresses the importance of a mix of private, public corporate and charity involvement. When the People's Network money runs out, it will likely be the private sector that maintains and upgrades it. Surely society belongs to the public, not to the highest bidder.

And with that, Umbrella finishes. I take a stroll along to Canal Street and want to shake my fist at the sky, but I sit on a bench watching the busy Saturday afternoon activity. In amongst the mobile phone brigade, pub lunch crowds, and high street shoppers, there is a drag queen, sitting reading a book, and smoking a cigarette, having a private moment in a public place, socially including himself through the power of literature. It seemed a perfectly apt end to an enjoyable and enlightening conference.

Graham Hawley is Cataloguer, National Library of Scotland.

Information Scotland Vol. 1 (4) August 2003

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