A new issue of Update means a new back issue pulled screaming from the vaults.  First up November 2015…

I like the Karen McFarlane definition of KM as ‘good IM practices alongside knowledge sharing behaviours’. It helps get past the nagging voice of Tom Wilson in my head whenever I see KM.  I am looking forward to seeing what the NHS Knowledge for Health group working in this area comes up with.

A note of a warning from the Local Government Ombudsman that outsourcing does not remove responsibility for quality of service is interesting in context of a recent article on council insourcing as contracted out services prove inflexible and expensive.  The plans for Gym Libraries in Lambeth is a good example of what can come from this.  This looks like a straightforward reduction in service and commercial land grab.

The puff on two library supply companies merging is seriously lacking in any critical examination of whether this is in fact a good thing for libraries.  There is rather a lot of churnalism style content press release cut and paste in this issue.

Great to read David McMenemy as a much needed counter weight to the “news”. It was really helpful to have something place developments in the profession in the context of developments in politics and society.  In a recent consideration of a team goal I drew up a statement that reflected values around empowerment of people to advance the cause of human knowledge.  This was felt to be hard for people to relate to their day to day work but this article reassures me that we should be grounding our practice in the long term and those things that are true.

An article on reinventing public libraries was interesting on two counts.  The “community driven” future vision sounds to me (as a non public librarian) to be what I would have expected to be the model already (I have had some experience of the work of commonfutures that they mention as it happened in my local library).  I was also interested in the 6 future services they identify.  Open content has real potential – moving beyond the current limited access available via Finch.  The role I would envisage would be in supporting research and access. I was also interested in the combination of MOOCs and widening participation.  This struck me as something with real possibility.  Working with students we can see how important the library is a place that is warm, safe comfortable and equipped for study. There must be a place for more collaboration between education and the public library network.  An obvious example is that my local library is no longer open in the evenings when it would be most useful for students from the local college (as well as those who work away in the day time).

I have to declare an interest in the next article on the Quality and Impact work stream of Knowledge for Healthcare. I contributed as Chair of a task and finish group looking at metrics.  We have prepared a report on principles for good metrics which will hopefully surface soon. As part of the research I prepared a poster for the LHL NHS/HE conference in the autumn. Annoyingly the group members are listed incorrectly – the main folk involved have been Dorothy Curtis, Lorna Wilson, Tracy Pratchett and Richard Parker.  It has been a real challenge working with a group spread across the country. It was striking how much more effective we were after having had a face to face meeting – something I would certainly try to have sooner in future such projects.

Back to the present – March 2016 Update…

The launch of the Cilip Online register of practitioners is announced as set for the 14th of March – not before time. I had an enlightening conversation with a colleague who I would have expected to be all in favour but who had voted against revalidation.  Sadly I think it reflects a need for much greater communication and engagement around the new revalidation process.  The traffic on jiscmail lists on this topic was depressing.

The Yale MeSH Analyzer looks like it could be a nifty tool.

An article on life as an outsourced library chimed with what I just been reading from the November issue.  The experience shared does not seem to me to offer any great advantage from being outsourced other than reducing MoD headcount. Providing a service to other organisations myself under SLA I know how much trickier it is to work with an organisation when you do not fully belong to them – I suspect this is less of an issue for the case discussed but I doubt it helps.

Work on developing data science courses connected to recent involvement I have had with information governance around data and high performance computing. There are major management problems to anticipate and a big role for metadata managers.

The Knowledge for Healthcare update this time is on the major work around Resource Discovery.

The cover article is on IP crime.  The focus seems to be mostly film / music with a side order of small fry ebook theft.  Missing is the storm around Sci-hub which is taking the unlicenced sharing of journal articles to a whole new level. I hope there will be something on this shortly as it raises enormous questions for a swathe of work we do.

Finally – a listicle from Matt Holland – I think a lot of what he says this time could be applicable to my own role where I do not often work at home but do not have a “home” at work either.  I like the idea of “not being strange” I would extend this to say “have some boundaries” – when work follows you home it can be hard to turn off.

An information management themed issue.

An article from Laura Williams on embedded information professionals is encouraging.  I would have liked to have heard more about what she actually gets up to while embedded.  I have a feel for the kinds of things embedded clinical librarians would do and it would have been good to compare with a media role.

The article on scenario planning was a helpful introduction to this activity.  I tend to spend too little time looking ahead. An approach like this may be useful in plotting potential routes forward for my service.

I enjoyed the paper by academic Prof. Clive Holtham as something to chew on with ideas of what our role should include as professionals in a society increasingly focused on a narrow rational business oriented model.

An article on the changes to the RCN Library was a welcome update on the progress of their shift in focus.  Audience engagement is being pursued to broaden the range of activity supported by them and open the RCN more to the public.  Moving from defining and targeting an audience through to engagement is something that is highly applicable.  I know I have key audiences already for maximising the reach of my work but new ways to engage them will be of value.

The case studies on makerspaces and so on were a positive quick read.

Matt Holland is a regular author in Update and his latest listicle on working solo worked for me. In a big team I am far from solo but I have to think like a solo in terms of the scope of the people I work with and the difference to the core audience for the service.

This chimed for me:

In the end there are really only two tasks. Responding to your users better and marketing to your users so they come to you in the future. Everything else is just noise.

I also liked the idea of the need for focus – there are endless projects I could be involved in and could initiate but I won’t finish things that way.

The article on peer review in public libraries had me thinking about how to do a light touch version of this and to what extent it might already be happening in academic libraries.  Certainly there is plenty of history of it in the NHS.

You know the score – still not really catching up with these.

Useful article by Phil Bradley on net neutrality particularly in the light of recent undermining of this in Europe.

Good to hear from @AgentK23 on her trip to the m-libraries conference in Hong Kong. Discussion of WhatsApp usage reflects my experience that it is increasingly being used for group communication by medics. Another case of being where the users are perhaps?

The discussion of her event amplification through live tweeting is a good reminder to the non tweeps of what people are up to when they are tapping away. You still get some anti tweeting / mobile feeling from time to time at conferences.  Great when this is done well – I was sat near @ilk21 at the recent UHMLG Summer Conference (post to follow) and she is great at adding value to what is being said.

Another article on RDA that I dutifully read but cannot say I understood.

I particularly enjoyed the report by Charles Inskip from Digital Libraries 2014. I do not recall seeing much about this at the time and the article really sets the talks in context. Paper books for long term preservation of records!

With the Radical Librarians having gathered in Huddersfield lately I picked out the report of Dave Greene from EFF talking at IFLA.  I like his idea of libraries providing secure private internet connections as part of a wider role for protecting privacy of access to information.