School librarians might be interested in enquiries on CILIPS involvement in the current campaign in England, Wales and Northern Ireland. CILIP in Scotland Council discussed this item and also with SLIC.

As many of you know the situation in Scotland is somewhat different.  All secondary schools have a requirement to provide a school library and the COSLA School Library standards which are still active make clear recommendations for the employment of a professionally qualified librarian. Self evaluation tools for schools and supporting documents for  HMIE all reflect the positive input from the appointment of professional librarians. This is certainly not the case in other parts of the UK. Fiona Hyslop, Cabinet Secretary for Lifelong Learning recognised the role of the school librarian at Scottish Learning Festival in September, in particular their role in information literacy. The forthcoming National Youth Information Framework being developed by Young Scot and SLIC will further strengthen this role. The recently published Building the Curriculum for Excellence 4, also recognises the valuable contribution school librarians make in the development of literacy skills.

Over 90% of schools commit to this requirement and the two authorities which don’t are committed to working towards this as posts become vacant. There is however still a threat that posts will become term time. We are trying to deal with these on an issue by issue basis, not always with success it has to be said. Unhappily the public sector across the UK is facing huge challenges and even those services with statutory requirements are facing potential reductions in services, which could have a devastating effect.

In 1999 we had an unsuccessful Scottish Parliament hearing of the case for statutory posts. The current landscape and feedback indicates that this would not be any more successful now than it was then.

Therefore CILIPS and SLIC are happy to encourage support for English colleagues and will keep a watching brief on progress and evaluate the impact of self evaluation and ACE on school services, with a view to considering future political lobbying in the future.

The new self evaluation framework is being launched on 1^st December and a letter will go to all Head Teachers, HMIE and Quality Officers in Education Departments highlighting the requirements and positives of professional posts.

This one day CILIPS practitioners Conference, ably chaired by Evelyn Kilmurry, Partnership and Information Manager, Edinburgh City Libraries, was the idea of Margaret Forrest, CILIPS President 2009, who worked with CILIPS and JISC staff to put the programme together.

Over 50 delegates gathered in the fabulous setting of the Mitchell Library to consider how recent legislative and policy developments have encouraged a growing emphasis on community engagement and more involvement with groups affected by issues relating to race, disability, gender, age, sexual orientation and religion or belief.

First up were Marion Huckle and Ayub Khan of CILIP who discussed diversification of the workforce and the positive action employee scheme, Encompass introduced by our professional association.
Following a lively question and answer session we heard from Paul McCloskey, from Edinburgh City Libraries on what constitutes good inclusive practice in libraries. Issues of particular relevance to ‘inclusive services’ include cultural diversity, digital exclusion, freedom of information, joined-up provision, licence restrictions, lifelong learning, strategic alliances, the 24-hour society and virtual environments. Paul discussed various initiatives in Edinburgh including the Reading Champions Project, services to prisons and Bookbus.
Then it was time to consider the effect on higher education of the Government policy of encouraging growing numbers of overseas students in our universities. As the number of international students and staff rise within the UK higher education sector, institutions are becoming increasingly reliant on them for their income and academic development. In an enlightening presentation, Professor Andrea Nolan discussed this issue in the strategic context of globalisation and with particular reference to Glasgow University, her own institution.

Over lunch delegates had the opportunity to discuss the issues raised in the morning sessions and engage with exhibitors from Dolphin, The Scottish Information Literacy Project , Humanware and Common Knowledge Twenty of us also took a tour of the Mitchell Library Resource Unit for the Visually Impaired to learn more about the services on offer there from Ann Hamilton and her team.

In the afternoon John Kelly from JISCLegal guided everyone through the Equalities Bill, which aims to roll all the previous legislation up in one Act as well as abolish the mandatory retirement age.

This was followed by a marvellous exposition from Margaret McKay of JISC RSC Scotland SW JISC RSC Scotland SW on the award winning AccessApps initiative which provides portable solutions to support writing, reading and planning as well as sensory, cognitive and physical difficulties.

In the final part of the day we learned that there is good clinical evidence to show that books can be just as effective as other forms of therapy – and with the advantage of having no side effects. Claire Scott from East Renfrewshire Libraries discussed the Healthy Reading scheme which gives people access to high-quality psychological self-help materials in a partnership approach between libraries and health trusts. Claire Elliot from Renfrewshire Action on Mental Health explained how her organisation made use of the reading recommendations with their clients in a supportive and safe environment.

CILIPS President, Margaret Forrest, in her closing remarks, spoke for everyone when she emphasised how enjoyable and enlightening the day had been.

All the presentations can be accessed at: http://www.slideshare.net/scottishlibraries

The morning of Friday the 13th of November saw the Ask Scotland Development day at the Mitchell library. The day was a chance to outline the overall strategy of implementing the service and was also an opportunity for the first group of librarians involved in Ask Scotland to ask questions about it and give their own thoughts.

Elaine Fulton, Director of SLIC, started the day with a brief introduction to the day and the ideas behind Ask Scotland. Library services need to do more to keep themselves relevant in an age where increasingly the perception is that the first place to gather information is Google and Wikipedia. Library services need to align themselves more closely with the needs of a generation that tends to expect to receive information immediately and also not to discriminate between formats.

This introduced Senior Information Officer, Gillian Hanlon’s, presentation about the Ask Scotland service. Developments in the web (commonly described as “web 2.0″) allow people to access and discuss information in a variety of ways. People can share information via social networks or even contribute to the knowledge held online via a variety of services such as wikipedia or youtube. Furthermore this desire amongst people to contribute as well as consume can lead to the development of other services, such as the free to use Ask A Citizen service which allows volunteers to answer questions about their country.

This, to detractors, would seem to make libraries an anachronism. However, library services have much to offer to web users that goes beyond what they can find when making searches at online repositories or via online search engines. Scottish library services have much to offer even now; as a community they have great reserves of professional knowledge and also a great deal of esoteric knowledge which is less likely to turn up easily in a Google search.

Many people have an interest in, for example, genealogy or local history. Queries about these topics are where local library services can shine. Indeed, when it came to discussing the kinds of question that are frequently received at reference desks it seems clear that these kinds of query are frequently received by reference librarians. When one considers both those that have moved within Scotland and the wider Scottish diaspora, it would seem that the ability for anybody anywhere to make enquiries on Scottish matters is a positive step for Scottish libraries.

After the presentations the day moved on to a discussion amongst those that are already making use of Ask Scotland and what they have found so far and what they’d hope to see. Also considered were future developments of Ask Scotland (including frequently asked questions, how this can feed into ongoing digitisation projects, and the implementation of new services, such as online chat.)

Overall the day was a positive one and we hope to see Ask Scotland go from strength to strength! Thoughts or questions about the service and any ideas for improving it are always welcome, too.

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.