News and Views from the Information & Advice Team and Policy & Advocacy Unit...

Serendipity, Twitter and #Chartership

2010-03-12T15:31:00Z

People often say that one of the best things about Twitter (and other social media) is the way in which their use can result in wonderful serendipitous (don't you just love that word?) moments when people who've never met make a connection and end up creating something new. Well that happened today to me.

Today I met my chartership mentor for the first time. On it's own this is hardly a momentous occasion worthy of a blog post, but a series of other fortuitous events have combined with this to create something that I thought was quite interesting, something that demonstrates how useful and unique twitter can be to the people who use it. People who think Twitter is a waste of time need to take note here.

Here's what happened..

Around lunchtime I spotted this tweet by a guy called @aekins who I follow as I was monitoring the usual CILIP-related comments that has become a daily routine for me:

Funny, I thought, I'm doing the same, then a few moments later I spotted this from @guernseylibrary:

OK i thought, I want in on this, so I tweeted this:

Anyway to cut a long story short, in less than an hour we'd agreed to use #chartership in our tweets so that we could identify one another and create a sort of network of people working towards chartership. Furthermore the exchange prompted me to comment on a CILIP member's blog and then engage in a very fruitful email exchange where I was able to share some advice and experiences that I think she found very useful.

So while it's early days still, it seems that the members of this #chartership motivator club will mostly encourage one another to do work on our portfolios, promote events that would be suitable for inclusion in our portfolios and generally collectively remind ourselves of that constant need to do whatever it is we seem to be so good at putting off!

A most agreeable end to the week :-)

Cloud storage requirements for information professionals

2010-03-09T14:02:00Z

The Department of Information Studies (DIS) at Aberystwyth University is currently running a research project looking into cloud storage requirements for information professionals. The project is funded by the Society of Archivists and the final report will be presented at their annual conference in September 2010.

The aim of the project is to address some of the issues arising from storing electronic information in a virtual environment (the cloud) which is not directly controlled by the originating organisation on their servers but outside the firewall through an external cloud provider (for a detailed definition of cloud computing see http://csrc.nist.gov/groups/SNS/cloud-computing/) . They aim to produce a set of legal, operational and security related considerations for information professionals in the form of a toolkit that should be taken into account when moving data into a cloud environment for primarily access and computational reason.

In order to fully consider the range of concerns of information professionals about storing data in the cloud such as the confidentiality, integrity and availability of data and compliance with access legislation such as DP and FOI, they would like to consult the community in the form of a short questionnaire. It is outside the scope of this small project to consider preservation issue of information stored in the cloud but they hope to look at that area in the future.

DIS would be grateful for all information professionals whose organisations already store information in the cloud or whose organisations are planning to do so to complete the following questionnaire and maybe agree to be contacted for further investigation at a later stage. They would also be grateful if members of the information profession could forward the questionnaire to other colleagues in their organisation (legal or IT) who have responsibility for managing data in the cloud.

This research project is seen as an introductory study that seeks to provide practitioners with a basis for a more structured discussion of the impact of cloud computing on records and information management processes and they are looking for active input from the information community.

The survey is available at http://www.survey.bris.ac.uk/aber/soacloud and will close on 21st March 2010.

Should you have any further questions regarding the research project or this survey, please do not hesitate to contact either Nicole Schulz or Kirsten Ferguson-Boucher (see below):

Nicole Schulz
Teaching Fellow
Department of Information Studies
Aberystwyth University
Llanbadarn Fawr
Aberystwyth SY23 3AS
Tel: +44 (0)1970 622151
Email: nis@aber.ac.uk

Kirsten Ferguson-Boucher
Lecturer in Archives and Records Management
Department of Information Studies
Aberystwyth University
Llanbadarn Fawr
Aberystwyth SY23 3AS
Tel: +44 (0)1970 622069
Email: knb@aber.ac.uk

Do books have a future?

2010-03-08T13:24:00Z

Those of you who read our previous post about The Oxford Companion to the Book which we added to the information centre, might be interested to know about a podcast featuring the co-editor of the text which was published recently too.

The podcast features Professor Henry Woudhuysen, Dean of UCL Arts and Humanities talking about the Oxford Companion to the Book, as well as UCL's Professor Iain Stevenson who describes his new title Book Makers: British Publishing in the Twentieth Century - published by the British Library on March 22nd. The podcast also features Iain discussing the future of the book in terms of recent events in the areas of digitisation, including the rise in popularity of Amazon's Kindle, the launch of the Apple iPad and e-books more generally.

Which leads me to the main reason for this post. Professor Iain Stevenson will be hosting the free UCL Lunch Hour Lecture on the future of the book on Thursday March 11th (1:15-1:55pm) entitled 'Do Books have a Future?' Naturally a few of us from CILIP will be attending (being fortunate enough to be just a few minutes walk away) so if you happen to be at CILIP HQ or nearby on Thursday then perhaps you'd like to join us? Meet us in the foyer at 1pm if you do.

Finally if you can't make it - the lecture will be available to view both live and shortly afterwards too. No excuses then...

The battle of Britain's libraries

2010-03-08T10:28:00Z

Ahead of next week's publication of the Library Review, today's Guardian carries a four page article about public libraries. Stuart Jeffries considers if "coffee shops, gigs, free cinema tickets, flashy architecture" is the future of our libraries?

His piece includes an interview with Mike Whitby, Birmingham city council's leader, who suggests that the city's new library, which is currently under construction, should be re-named "a palazzo of human thought" as it is "more than just a library". After all, according to Margaret Hodge, "libraries need to move with the times to stay part of the times". An interesting - and in parts provocative - read.

See the G2 supplement in The Guardian, 8 March 2010, pp17-20, or read it online at:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/mar/07/future-british-libraries-margaret-hodge

Submit your nomination for the world’s largest children’s and youth literature prize

2010-03-03T13:10:00Z

Astrid Lindgren is best known as being the creator of 'the lovable imp' Pippi Longstocking, but she also created characters such as Karlsson-on-the-roof and The Six Bullerby Children and it's probably fair to say that she is one of the best-loved children's authors of all time. Which meant that I was quite surprised to discover that Astrid's Pippi Longstocking character was the subject of criticism around the time of publication, with some people seeming to think that she was a rather poor example of a role model for children - wow! I wonder what those people would make of Grand Theft Auto!

Anyway Astrid's retort that people should "Love children, and their behaviour will take care of itself" strikes me as being a rather good philosophy.

Sadly Astrid Lindgren died aged 94 in 2002, but her books continue to be read by children all over the world and following her death the Government of Sweden established The Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award. The award itself is for is five million Swedish kronor (more than £450,000), making it the world’s largest prize for children’s and young people’s literature and the second largest literary prize in the world, and this year CILIP has been invited to nominate four candidates. It should be noted that the prize differs from other awards in that it is open not just to authors, illustrators and storytellers but also to individuals, organisations and institutions that have carried out exceptional work to promote reading on the part of children and young people. Past winners include Philip Pullman and the Tamer Institute for Community Education - an organisation working with Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza.

CILIP members are therefore invited to nominate, and details about how to do this can be found here.