Paul McCloskey from Edinburgh City Libraries and Information Services started the Innovation and Development Showcase with a presentation on the extraordinary Paul Hamlyn Foundation-funded Reading Champions Project. Colm Linnane produced some inspirational case studies about the impact of the initiative on the lives of looked-after children and young people. It was heartening to see the success recognised by Children and Families and Services for Communities as they worked together to secure 3 years funding for the post. The report of the independent evaluator will be published in early 2010.

Next up was the SLIC-funded Virtual Enquiry Service at Carnegie College and Napier University. There’s a lot of help guidance on the website, including software comparative data and guidelines for setting up services. It was disappointing to hear that the survey of 130 establishments found that there are not as many virtual reference services in operation as you might think and that staff resistance is a major barrier to the development of services.

LLUK’s Marian Healy talked about their role in workforce development. The 2008 National Occupational Standards, in her view, were not what the sector need and she will follow up to see what can be done to take matters forward. SLIC is supporting the case for introducing Modern Apprenticeships into the sector and that means that suitable NOS are vital, as they are the building blocks for the new SVQs, essential to Modern Apprenticeships.

SLIC Director Elaine Fulton gave an update on progress with the Ask Scotland virtual reference service for Scottish queries. She encouraged organisations and individuals to get involved by contacting Gillian Hanlon at SLIC g.hanlon@slainte.org.uk.

Finally, Liz Moffat of Stirling Council returned to the theme of social inclusion with her presentation about the work of the Paul Hamlyn Foundation-funded Reader-in-Residence projects at HMP Cornton Vale. Two other prisons are involved HMP Perth and Polmont Young Offenders Institution. Richard Smith discussed some of the reading based activities he’s introduced at Cornton Vale and the feedback from the readers. These are truly inspirational projects with a huge impact on the self esteem, skills and confidence of those involved.

The presentations are available from http://www.slideshare.net/scottishlibraries.

CILIPS Council met yesterday in the Mitchell Library, Glasgow. This was the first of our new style, inclusive meetings with old-style committees replaced by lively discussion groups.

Council discussed the CILIP Encompass proposals and, mindful of forthcoming legislation, endorsed the plans to include a presentation about Encompass at the forthcoming CILIPS Equalities and Diversity training event. Director Elaine Fulton stressed that sending staff to training events on equalities/diversity issues was one way for Council’s to demonstrate compliance with statutory obligations under race Relations legislation.

Site of the CILIPS Council meeting and new venue for this year's CILIPS Annual Conference.

In recognition of her innovative work, Liz McGettigan, Libraries and Information Services Manager at Edinburgh City Libraries and Information Services was elected as Junior Vice President 2010 and she will go on to become CILIPS President in 2012. Alistair Campbell stands down as Honorary Treasurer of CILIPS in December 2009 and his successor was confirmed as Audrey Walker of Turcan Connell and, previously, CILIPS representative to the CILIP Policy Forum. Sheila Miller of Stirling Council follows Audrey to be CILIPS nominee to the CILIP Branch/Group forum the successor forum to the CILIP Policy Forum.

Gillian Hanlon, Senior Information Officer (Acting) at SLIC reported on developments with Slainte and e-services. Her work on developing web 2.0 guidelines will be published shortly and, as a result of IFLA, she will be involved in the development of international guidelines for web 2.0. This all comes from research, testing and feedback from members so very much a team effort.

CILIP and CILIPS, as part of the devolved nations agenda, have been developing a framework agreement. The document now includes a section for CILIP in England with a collective voice via the English Branch Forum. CILIPS endorsed the document and this will now go forward to CILIP Council, with a view to embedding it into CILIP regulations, together with an underpinning schedule.

Bob McKee, CILIP CEO, trialed a professional discussion with the working title ‘The Big Conversation’ with CILIPS members. He asked members to get involved in discussions about the activities of professional bodies, the need to change traditional mechanisms for member engagement and to respond to changing needs. Professional bodies are often heavy on print, qualifications and regulation but the landscape has changed focus to competences, a generation of uploaders and an imperative to be far more flexible in responding to needs.

Following on from this debate, CILIPS Council passed a paper on printed communications overhauling the ‘Information Scotland’ journal from the end of the year to a fully online journal, supported by a printed news supplement and RSS feeds. In similarly radical mood, the Council agreed to hold the 2010 CILIPS Conference at the Mitchell Library which offers greater potential for flexible packages, a city centre location and wifi connectivity. The dates will be7th-9th June 2010 and details will be circulated via Slainte.

SLIC passed on to CILIPS members that the self evaluations toolkits for further education colleges and schools will be published before the end of the year with a range of web-based resources. The FE toolkit will be launched on 4th December 2009 at the SLIC FE Conference and the date for the schools toolkit is still be finalised. SLIC’s Innovation and Development Showcase will be held on 3rd November and members were encouraged to attend. Details on www.slainte.org.uk.

At the end of the meeting Margaret Forrest gave her Presidential Report with her highlights being attendance at CILIP Cymru, the Irish Joint Conference, the Twin Cities Conference and CILIPS Conference. She also attended reading promotion launches, visited services and went to a number of ‘Meet the President’ or Meet the Members events (as she preferred to say).

The Council meeting was followed by the presentation of Honorary Membership to Mairi Anderson, Napier University; Alan Hasson, Scottish Borders Council; Marion McLarty, formerly North Ayrshire Council; and Michael Roberts, University of Strathclyde.

On Thursday 22nd October the 9th Annual E-Books Conference was held at the Mitchell Library in Glasgow. This event felt timely due to the recent increase in dedicated mass-market e-book readers available on the market and the proliferation of large screen smart ‘phones, such as the iphone.

The first presentation, for which Colin Galloway kindly stepped in to present as Linda Bennett was unfortunately unavailable due to illness, gave an overview of the changes that the book market is currently undergoing.

Liam Earney, of JISC, presented on the JISC national e-books observatory project which aims to explore the way that e-books are used and the impacts that they have. The study was carried as the demand amongst academic librarians for unlimited concurrent and perpetual access to e-texts for their students creates concern amongst publishers that their future revenues will be destroyed as students purchase fewer of the “core” textbooks.

David Pattern of Huddersfield University Library rounded things off before lunch with a lively presentation on OPAC 2 and beyond which looked at how library professionals can seek to make their online catalogues more in tune with their users experience of the web by simplfying the front end and adding more web 2.0 type tools to enhance their experience and increase the access to the data held by libraries. This has to be a priority if e-books are to constitute a higher proportion of a libraries stock in the future as, without the physical prescence, if they are not easily available to students, they are effectively invisible.

After lunch, representatives of suppliers (Springer, Dawson and OCLC) discussed what they are doing to make e-books more available to users and some interesting experiments with different payment models which could, hopefully, increase access to information for users.

To round the afternoon off, Dan Franklin, Digital Editor of Canongate gave a thought-provoking presentation on the future of e-publishing, with specific reference to the ability of digital devices to provide a multi-media experience, which is undoubtedly more exciting than simply replicating the printed word on an electronic screen. This was highlighted with the demonstration of writer and musician Nick Cave’s new novel, which is available in print, electronically and as an iphone app.

Update: Slideshows from this event are now available in the scottishlibraries slideshare account.

As part of the IFLA Conference in Milan, a focus group meeting was held on Monday 24 Aug to discuss virtual reference projects and initiatives taking place in libraries across the world. The meeting was hosted by OCLC, who developed the QuestionPoint virtual reference system that powers our AskScotland service.

The AskScotland pilot service was launched in June during the CILIPS Conference at Peebles and we’re now preparing to move into the next phase. I attended the meeting with SLIC/CILIPS Director, Elaine Fulton, so that we could share our experiences with colleagues and learn about virtual reference implementations elsewhere.

A broad range of library services was represented, including many national collaborations similar to AskScotland; the national libraries of Sweden and the Czech Republic, for example, co-ordinate services involving both public and academic libraries.

A central focus of the meeting was the marketing and promotion of virtual reference services. We were particularly interested in this topic as effective marketing will important in bringing AskScotland to a wider audience.

A fantastic example of advertising came from the New Jersey public library service, where a commercial for the QandANJ service was broadcast during the MTV Music Awards 2007. They also made a subsequent video, both of which are now on YouTube.

Other examples ranged from the use of printed promotional material (newspaper adverts, posters, leaflets etc) to establishing a presence at book fairs or high profile cultural events. All of these methods are worth considering as part of the ongoing development of AskScotland; we are particularly interested in exploring the YouTube option, however, as it would be low cost and could have a high impact on exposure. Watch this space!

In the lead up to the International Federation of Library Associations (IFLA) World Library and Information Conference (WLIC), which opens in Milan on Sun 23 Aug, a number of pre-conference satellite meetings have been held across Italy, with a few others taking place in other European destinations.

I attended the IFLA Information Technology Section’s event, titled Emerging trends in technology: libraries between Web2.0, semantic web and search technology, which was held in Florence 19-20 Aug. The topic of this meeting fits in well with my work at SLIC, and I was especially interested to find out about developments and initiatives related to the adoption of new technologies in libraries in different parts of the world.

Due to problems with my flight, I missed the first part of the programme but was glad that many of the issues that had been covered were consolidated through the talk show (panel discussion) that took place on day two. The slides from the whole meeting will also be made available so I look forward to browsing the talks that I missed.

On day two, the presentations covered: the European Library’s work on developing a schema for the integration of web applications and services infrastructure; the ongoing development of OCLC’s WorldCat in line with emerging technologies and a discussion of ontologies and folksonomies.

There was also a particularly interesting presentation by Anne Christensen of Hamburg State University Library on next generation catalogues and users’ expectations. Anne discussed her experience of implementing the beluga project in Hamburg and provided some fascinating insights from user feedback.

The day ended with my own presentation on Web2.0 in Scottish libraries, which focused on CILIPS and SLIC’s engagement with Web2.0, including the forthcoming Web2.0 guidelines. Following my talk, I discovered that the IFLA Information Technology section had been considering developing international Web2.0 guidelines and I was invited to contribute to this process. I was pleased to learn that Scotland is leading the way in this type of work and look forward to being involved in the international collaboration.

CILIPS, as an early adopter of microblogging, developed a Twitter presence as part of our research into how Web 2.0 tools might support member engagement and also be incorporated into workflows – activity which in turn is supporting our efforts to lead discussion on the usefulness to our membership of emergent technologies. What we want to encourage is use of Twitter as a professional and service development tool.

With more than 1.78 million people signed up for use, Twitter has become one of the most popular sites on the Internet. In recognition of its role as a communication force, CILIP in Scotland is offering a special half day course in Glasgow this September to help library professionals get up and running with this technology. See our events calendar  for more information and to book.

After attending Mash Oop North (#mashlib09) in Huddersfield last week, I’ve been playing around with some of the tools and services mentioned at the event. One service that appealed to my imagination was Dipity, which was shown by Brian Kelly in his Enthusiastic Amateurs session. I particularly liked the example of its use in creating a visualisation of media release effectiveness for the University of Aberdeen and thought this could be used for the Slainte Media Centre.

To help me get to grips with Dipity, I’ve already created a simple timeline based on all the Web2.0 services we use, which I’ve embedded within Slainte News. Although links to our Web2.0 service accounts are included in the footer at the bottom of the page, the timeline brings all of the content together in a visually appealing way that might open it up to increased use.

A slight problem with Dipity is advertising, which isn’t displayed on the small timeline embedded in our website but will appear if you switch to the full view. To get rid of this you need a Pro account which costs $99.95 per month and would be too expensive for our purposes. Since no adverts appear on our website, we’re going to proceed with this experiment and monitor its impact on Web2.0 service use stats.

Another service I’ve been experimenting with is Yahoo Pipes, which is a “composition tool to aggregate, manipulate, and mashup content from around the web.” When I first heard about what this could do it occurred to me that it would be a good way to aggregate the news output from all libraries in Scotland to create a comprehensive and frequently updated current awareness service for librarians. This work would, however, be dependent on the libraries or wider institutions (i.e. local authorities, universities, colleges etc) having RSS feeds set up for news items…

Of the 32 Scottish local authorities only 13 had RSS feeds set up on their news content or press releases (as at 13/07/2009). Through a contact on Twitter (James Coltham or @prettysimple) I found a source that reported 24% of UK councils have RSS feeds (see Mash the State). This means that the Scottish figure is considerably higher than the UK average, at around 40%.

In the higher education sector, I found that just three of Scotland’s 14 universities had no RSS feeds evident on their website news content (as at 14/07/2009) (note that there are a further 6 HE institutions in Scotland which have still to be reviewed). There was some variation in how the 11 HE library news feeds were organised; some appeared on news at institutional level, others were on library news (sometimes in the form of a blog) and some universities had both library and institutional level news feeds. From a practical perspective, this meant that I had to create two strands within the Yahoo Pipe: one with a ‘library’ filter set up on the institutional level news and an unfiltered one for the content coming from a library specific feed.

The output of this, titled Scottish Libraries Newsfeed, has now been embedded in the Scottish Libraries NetVibes page and can be re-used or re-purposed by others interested in the content.

However, some difficulties with mashing data in this way are evident. Firstly, it’s clear that the info in many of the feeds has not been created with a view to being used elsewhere so it can be difficult to tell which library service the item is about (i.e. it’s assumed that you are accessing content on a particular library’s website/blog and so would know what’s meant by “the library”). This can make it difficult to pick out items of interest so it would be useful if the source were to appear (in the Pipe’s list view perhaps).

The layout seems to mirror the order in which feeds were added to the Pipe but I suppose this is just a short-term issue since new items will appear according to when they are added to the parent RSS feeds, thus mixing it up a bit.

There’s also a lot of  stylistic variation since some of the content is coming from institutional press offices and other items have been created for blogs and are more informal. This variation would of course increase if the scope was extended to cover Twitter feeds too, with formal press releases appearing alongside 140 character tweets. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing as I think all of these different sources would add a richness of perspective – giving a more comprehensive and rounded overview of what’s happening in Scottish library services.

It may be the case, however, that too much input (i.e. too many feeds being drawn from too many sources) would make this unwieldy rather than a useful national aggregation. If this becomes the case then the pipe could be broken down into individual sector pipes. In the meantime, I think it’s worth trying a cross-sector approach, both to offer a single source of news about all libraries (that use RSS feeds!) and to facilitate sharing ideas across sectors.

So the next step will be to add feeds from FE libraries, the outstanding 6 HE institutions and the National Library of Scotland. It would be ideal to extend this to other sectors but there are obviously time constraints associated with going through individual school websites, for example, so we may have to look at different ways of getting this information for other library sectors.

In the longer term, we hope to use the output from the feeds to improve the SLIC/CILIPS news output delivered via Slainte news. This currently depends on user submissions combined with staff searching so the Yahoo pipe will certainly be a useful internal tool.

On the warmest day of the year in Edinburgh so far the hottest ticket in town gained admission to this sell out event at the National Library of Scotland where the key themes of the day were communication and engagement.

While some sectors have experienced enthusiastic uptake of social networking technology the public library service has been slow to engage.  Not so Edinburgh City whose head of service Liz McGettigan spoke passionately about how the service had seized on Web 2.0 to engage with users, exploit the collective intelligence of user communities  and  build the foundations for the library of the future.

Phil Bradley advocated  use of weblogs and Flickr as well as Librarything to enhance communication and engagement but stressed that ‘it’s the activity, not the tools’ which is important.

Jason Campbell of JISClegal highlighted the law surrounding Web 2.0 for library and information service staff in his usual entertaining style while sharing insights and anecdotes gleaned from his work with the tertiary education sector.

Gillian Hanlon  introduced important work being undertaken at SLIC to create national guidelines for library services which will support the implementation of Web 2.0 services across the Scottish information landscape.   She discussed CILIP’s use of liveblogging and Twitter during our recent annual Conference at Peebles to open up the Conference and engage in new ways. Finally, Dave Errington from TALIS  took everyone on a nostalgic trip down  memory lane as he discussed the effects of disruptive technology.

Delegates came away from the Conference with the key message that Web 2.0 is integral to community engagement and should be a part of library core services.

At last week’s CILIPS Annual Conference, we tried a new approach to ‘amplifying’ the event using Web2.0 services and, in particular, liveblogging. For some time now we’ve been using SlideShare and flickr to amplify events but wanted to experiment with taking this further, following on from the #cilip2 and #CILIP-CYMRU09 events.

The main strategy was to offer a liveblog of the event, both to allow discussion between physical delegates and to offer coverage to those not attending in person (virtual delegates). For further discussion of the rationale and preparations see previous post. This involved a member of the SLIC/CILIPS information team blogging as scottishlibraries (or @scotlibraries on twitter), with other staff members and delegates also contributing via twitter (using the #cilips09 hashtag).

As a first attempt at trying out wider conference amplification, #cilips09 was an overwhelmingly positive experience; there were considerable contributions from both physical and virtual delegates and the functionality of the CoverItLive (CiL) liveblogging service was impressive. Using CiL offered two main advantages: easy embedding of the stream within the Slainte website and the potential for contributions from people who don’t use twitter. CiL also allows for twitter integration, using particular hashtags or user ids, or a combination of both.

However, we have taken away several learning points that would be built into future events of this type. Firstly, following the #cilips09 tag on CiL was effective; however, some users from our pool of blogging volunteers expressed concerns at their twitter id being tracked (since all posts would be included in the stream rather than just those with the #cilips09 tag). We, therefore, decided against this and would be inclined to restrict this practice to staff members in the future; if the hashtag is used consistently there will be no loss in terms of output.

In the early phase of the event we posted directly using the CiL interface (using the id “scottishlibraries”), however, this excluded our twitter followers since CiL posts do not feed back into twitter in any way. Thus, we switched to using twitter and the @scotlibraries id during the course of the event. This presented some challenges:
• Change of ids may have been confusing for followers, which could have been avoided if the CiL account was set up to match the twitter id in the first place
• Increased effort in maintaining the stream, since CiL still had to be monitored to allow comments (there is no option to allow all comments from all users but up to 25 readers can be marked as “allow all”) and to make use of the additional functionality, such as displaying images and polls.

In terms of taking this forward in the future, it is important to CILIPS, as a membership based organisation, that we are inclusive in our approach, thus it’s desirable to retain the potential for contribution from ‘non-twitterers’. The ‘packaged’ approach offered by CiL also has major appeal – bringing together text, photo and video that can be displayed in your own web space, where users (or members) are likely to visit, is certainly attractive. It may also be the case that constant conference coverage could annoy the average twitter follower so this is, perhaps, another benefit of CiL packaging. On balance, then, we would be inclined to use CiL as the main blogging channel in the future, perhaps with the occasional twitter post to alert followers to the activity.

In more general terms, the main overall difficulty was the low bandwidth at the venue which restricted uploads. The keynote sessions were recorded professionally, with the intention of streaming via CiL afterwards but this was not feasible given the bandwidth available. This is something that could be rectified in the future by using a different location, and we would welcome any feedback on this prospect. In the event, the file type turned out to be unsupported in CiL anyway. Greater testing and researching of CiL functionalities prior to the event could perhaps have prevented this. A further consideration for the future would be for the organisation (CILIPS) to buy the hardware required for amplification rather than depending on an external contractor.

In the future, we would also consider a more structured approach to co-ordinating liveblogging volunteers to complement the work of the CILIPS/SLIC information team (just two of us!). For example, appealing for volunteers to look after specific tasks such as taking photographs or making audio recordings. We had initially hoped this would be the case but the arrangement fell through due to intellectual property concerns being raised by the library institution involved. This may be less of a problem if the volunteers were drawn from individual delegates or CILIPS members rather than at institutional level.

The multi-strand nature of the conference could also have been confusing for virtual delegates, since quite different simultaneous sessions were being discussed with the #cilips09 tag. Brian Kelly of UKOLN has suggested using further session identifiers (#1, #2 and #3 for example) to add clarity. A numerical form would certainly seem the best option given the 140 character limit that applies in twitter. (See Brian’s post on #cilips09).

A final thought for the future is the potential impact of such amplification on physical delegates; will significant numbers be put off attending in person if they have access to liveblogs, presentations slides and video/audio coverage? Or will such tools make attending conferences more appealing by creating more meaningful professional networks?

The CILIP in Scotland (CILIPS) annual conference takes place at Peebles Hotel Hydro next week (Mon 1-Wed 3 Jun). This year we’re keen to try out new things, taking advantage of new technologies to make sure the conference has broader appeal and offers more scope for delegate contributions and interaction. This includes new features such as podcasting, vodcasting and liveblogging, which we hope delegates will be keen to take part in.

Following the success of the #cilip2 session, where librarians all over the UK (and beyond) used twitter to contribute to a London based discussion on CILIP’s use of Web2.0, we wanted to experiment with this approach in a wider conference context.

Through twitter, we made contact with Brian Kelly of UKOLN, who was a speaker at #cilip2 and offered valuable advice in how to go about the process of conference amplification. The first step was to assign, and use, an appropriate hashtag. In the interests of clarity and brevity, we opted for #cilips09 and have been using this in pre-conference publicity. It already seems to have caught on as a couple of our followers who will be attending the conference have now used the tag.

From observing the #cilip2 event, it was clear that prior publicity (through email lists as well as twitter and blogs) had played an important part in getting people twittering and using the assigned tag so we felt it was important to introduce the tag early on, even before proper publicity about amplification plans was distributed.
The first phase of publicising this activity has been directed at those attending the conference in person; using both email and twitter (and this blog) to alert delegates to what’s going on and to introduce the #cilips09 tag. The next step will be to promote the conference amplification to those who aren’t attending in person.

We will be using Cover It Live (CiL) embedded within the Slainte homepage to offer a good central focus for amplification; we’d previously been planning on hosting blogging, video, audio and photos separately but CiL, as recommended by Brain Kelly, is a very convenient way of drawing all output together. A further benefit is that delegates (physical or virtual) don’t have to have twitter accounts to submit comments via CiL. The fact that it’s embedded into our website will, hopefully, have broader appeal and perhaps attract people who don’t use social networking or Web2.0 services.

It will be interesting to see how many delegates will contribute to the liveblogging and what kind of contributions or participation comes from those who are not at the conference in person – only time will tell!

If you are attending conference and would be interested in liveblogging on the day, please remember to use the #cilips09 hashtag. Livebloggers will be offered free wifi access at the venue so please get in touch so that log-in details can be set up. And if you’re not attending, you can follow what’s going on from Slainte or by following the #cilips09 tag.