Pliny the Librarian

Pliny has moved to WordPress

2006-05-03T10:02:00.000+02:00

The blog Pliny the Librarian continues at WordPress, where you also find my Norwegian language blog Plinius. Earlier posts from Blogger (21 items) have been copied to WordPress - and indexed for easy retrieval.

Questions about Canada

2006-04-05T21:41:00.000+02:00

Questions about Canada posted on an International Tourism Website. Obviously the answers are jokes, ...

Q:I have never seen it warm on Canadian TV, so how do the plants grow? (UK)

A:We import all plants fully grown and then just sit around and watch them die.

Q:Will I be able to see Polar Bears in the street? (USA)

A:Depends on how much you’ve been drinking.

Q:I want to walk from Vancouver to Toronto - can I follow the Railroad tracks? (Sweden)

A:Sure, it’s only Four thousand miles, take lots of water with you.

Q:Is it safe to run around in the bushes in Canada? (Sweden)

A:So it’s true what they say about Swedes.

Q:Are there any ATM’s (cash machines) in Canada? Can you send me a list of them in Toronto, Vancouver, Edmonton and Halifax? (UK)

A:What did your last slave die of?

Q:Can you give me some information about hippo racing in Canada? (USA)

A: A-fri-ca is the big triangle shaped continent south of Europe. Ca-na-da is that big country to your North…oh forget it. Sure,
the hippo racing is every Tuesday night in Calgary. Come naked.

Q:Which direction is North in Canada? (USA)

A:Face south and then turn 180 degrees. Contact us when you get here and we’ll send the rest of the directions.

Q:Can I bring cutlery into Canada? (UK)

A:Why? Just use your fingers like we do.

Q:Can you send me the Vienna Boys’ Choir schedule? (USA)

A:Aus-tri-a is that quaint little country bordering Ger-man-y, which is…oh forget it. Sure, the Vienna Boys Choir plays every
Tuesday night in Vancouver and in Calgary, straight after the hippo races. Come naked.

Q:Are there supermarkets in Toronto and is milk available all year round? (Germany)

A:No, we are a peaceful civilization of Vegans. Milk is illegal.

Q:Will I be able to speak English most places I go? (USA)

A:Yes, but you will have to learn it first.

Source

Greek metals

2005-12-02T21:32:00.000+01:00

Early in December I go with my mother - a retired librarian - for a pre-Christmas vacation in Cyprus. The Norwegian winter is very bracing. Several municipalities are now sponsoring rest and recreation visits in the Mediterranean for retired (or disabled) people who would rather stay warm. We join one of these groups.

Greece is great. I fell in love with the country from the first - in 1963. The sea and the light, the pride and vigor of ordinary people, the creative energy, the language, the temple ruins at Cape Sounion.

I never had a chance to stay long. The longest period was four weeks of language study in Thessaloniki - and that was twentyfive years ago. I have seen bits of Crete and Corfu and tiny Seriphos in the Cyclades, but never Cyprus.

This big island in the east was a trading centre even in the Bronze Age, 1500 years BC - a millennium before Pericles, the Akropolis and battle of Salamis. Bronze consists of copper and tin. The alloy is harder and much more useful than pure copper. Cyprus was a big producer of copper - the word means the Cyprian metal.

Achilles, Odysseus and Hector belong to heroic, pre-classical Greece - and fight with swords of bronze. Classical Greece belongs to the Iron Age. The Greek foot soldiers - the hoplites of the fifth century BC that bested the Persians at Marathon- used iron weapons.

Our significant metals are different - light aluminimium, dangerous uranium and infinitely versatile silisium. I look forward to copper.

Words for nerds

2005-11-27T12:44:00.000+01:00

Men who read are more attractive, I said yesterday. But they should not visibly read Harry Potter or similar stuff.

Today I found a list of top "geek novels" compiled by Jack Schofield, journalist and Guardian blogger, on the basis of reader recommendations. My source: Lorcan Dempsey' s great blog on library innovation:

The top fifteen were

1. The HitchHiker's Guide to the Galaxy -- Douglas Adams 85% (102)
2. Nineteen Eighty-Four -- George Orwell 79% (92)
3. Brave New World -- Aldous Huxley 69% (77)
4. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? -- Philip Dick 64% (67)
5. Neuromancer -- William Gibson 59% (66)
6. Dune -- Frank Herbert 53% (54)
7. I, Robot -- Isaac Asimov 52% (54)
8. Foundation -- Isaac Asimov 47% (47)
9. The Colour of Magic -- Terry Pratchett 46% (46)
10. Microserfs -- Douglas Coupland 43% (44)
11. Snow Crash -- Neal Stephenson 37% (37)
12. Watchmen -- Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons 38% (37)
13. Cryptonomicon -- Neal Stephenson 36% (36)
14. Consider Phlebas -- Iain M Banks 34% (35)
15. Stranger in a Strange Land -- Robert Heinlein 33% (33)

I must admit that I have read all of them - except Pratchett (too cute) and Banks (very British SF). And all of Harry Potter as well. No hope, then.

Men who read are more attractive

2005-11-26T22:13:00.000+01:00

Men who read stand a better chance of attracting women according to a study. Women claim they are more likely to be seduced by a well-read man.

85% of women questioned in a NOP survey for the publisher Penguin said they would be more attracted to a man who talked about literature. But women would be inclined to judge men by the type of books they read. On this rating, reading Harry Potter scored very badly.

(The Times, 7 June 2004)

Source

I knew it! Casanova, of course, became a librarian in Bohemia - at the age of sixty. Pity about Potter though. What type of books should we read?

A new name for the road

2005-11-19T20:36:00.000+01:00

Eternity is in love with the productions of time
Blake

Today I changed the name of this blog - from Pliny the Younger to Pliny the Librarian. So far, this has been a very occasional blog - with just a few items connected with international incidents in my professional life: a happy trip to Rumania and CIMEC - a fast fandango with the Oslo IFLA. And then silence.

In the meantime, I have grown slightly older and much, much wiser. My other blog, under the name of Plinius, is in Norwegian. I write about the library scene, at home and abroad, for my colleagues, students, friends and anybody else who cares to listen. The mainstay of Plinius is a short article or essay every Sunday - and additional items when I feel like it.

Now the energy level is increasing. IFLA has come and gone - without changing much, as far as I can se. But Web 2.0 is crashing into the Norwegian library scene like a rogue elephant in a vegetable market.

As we start to adapt and adopt, we should engage more with the world scene. Broken English is our global lingua franca. To write is to think: how can I know what I mean unless I read what I have written.

Blogging is social. The world is bigger than Norway. I like to travel. Libraries are ubiquitous. It all adds up: I should write more often in English. Pumping iron tones the body. Pushing ideas tunes the mind. That, at least, is my great white hope.

I aim at once a week. Long er short does not matter. Regularity does.

Ave atque vale

Pliny the Librarian

IFLA 2005: Blog reports from Oslo

2005-09-18T12:25:00.000+02:00

The king was dressed in a simple business suit
and looked like a typical business man.

Evolving libraries

The great event is past. IFLA has visited Oslo. The circus came from Buenos Aires - and moves on to Seoul, Durban and Quebec. It is time to reflect. What does IFLA "mean"?

As a sociologist, I am curious about IFLA as an institution. The IFLA conferences are important evenyts in the world of librarianship. IFLA itself is deeply committed to a global view of library services.

Since libraries must borrow from each other, the library community is necessarily a networked community. IFLA supports all basic human values. It works closely with UNESCO - and gives librarians an arena where they can combine technical collaboration with concrete efforts to build a decent world.

IFLA is also a complex organization. The organizational structure has grown from within, into a thorny thicket of bodies and responsiilities. From the outside it is hard to understand and hard to penetrate.

Commercial firms are streamlined by the market. Public institutions are supervised by cost-cutting governments. Voluntary organizations must modernize themselves.

IFLA has definitely started the process. But it has a long road ahead. The world outside is moving towards flexible, networked, spirited ways of communicating. To remain relevant and fresh, libraries and library organizations must do the same.

For this, blogging is a most appropriate tool.

Personal blogs about IFLA 2005

IN ENGLISH

025.431: The Dewey blog. Everything you always wanted to know about the Dewey Decimal Classification® system but were afraid to ask ...
ASC Online. A weblog of Information Science & Technology education and mentoring for LIS graduates.
The Bog Standard Blog. The Bog Standard Blog of Stuart and Michele in Merseyside. Home to notes, updates, pictures, and general rants for friends and family. Welcome!
Exlibris OLKGAL. The secret and not-so-secret mutterings, chatterings and grumblings
The FRBR Blog. Work, expression, manifestation, item … blog. [FRBR = Functional requirements for bibliographical records]
Rambling Librarian :: Incidental Thoughts of a Singapore Liblogarian. I'm a librarian from Singapore. The postings are library-related (mostly). I tend to ramble (my wife would agree). As with things in life, my thoughts are incidental (i.e. insignificant). DISCLAIMER - Views expressed here are strictly my own and do not represent the official stand of my employer. But you know that already.
The Log of a Librarian. We are the managers of world´s memory, a memory made of paper, ink and plastic, a labile memory which needs organizers. This is not a forum, but the diary of an Argentinian Librarian, where a professional (but primarily a human being) will express his search of an identity and a dream, living in a painful reality. Some ideas are here... I invite all of you to share them with me. [Spanish original: Bitácora de un Bibliotecario].

IN NORWEGIAN AND OTHER WORLD LANGUAGES

Bitácora de un Bibliotecario. Más que un estereotipo... Más que un auxiliar... Más que una oscura profesión poco reconocida... Somos los gestores de la memoria del mundo, una memoria hecha de papel, tinta y plástico, una memoria lábil e infinita que necesita organizadores... No se trata de una lista, sino del diario en el cual un profesional -pero, sobre todo, un ser humano- reflejará su búsqueda de una identidad y un sueño, en una realidad que duele. Algunas ideas van aqui... Los invito a compartirlas. [English version: The Log of a Librarian].
Eirikblogg. [Bloggen til Eirik Stillingen]
Oitenta e Cinco. Entries in English as well as in Portuguese.
Tribune Libre. Ce blog reflétera tout aussi bien mon humeur du jour que mes multiples questions concernant mon parcours professionnel [Not on hit list].
Vestærn. Forum for bibliotekene i Vestfold. Utgitt av NBF Vestfold og Vestfold fylkesbibliotek.

The inside dope

In civilized social life, we always operate at two levels: the outer and the inner, appearance and the "real works". The sociologist Goffman speaks about front-stage and back-stage. To understand people, organizations and societies we must learn to see beyond the surface.

That does not mean discounting the surface. Appearances are real, significant and worthy of attention. The formal speeches on the lighted scene and the informal negotiations in the "smoke-filled back-room" are both components of political decision making.

We understand society when we understand the interplay between front and back, light and shadow. Formal institutions and informal networks are both parts of the Great Game.

Formal structures and processes are surrounded by a constant flow of informality: talk and whispers, gossip and chatter, jokes and outbursts, stories and interpretations. The moralist sees empty talk. The anthropologist sees community at work.

We constantly test and transmit the things we see and hear. This is a necessary process. Great events must be taken in and digested. Communities depend on gossip like individuals depend on dreams.

The blog medium - like letters and diaries - spans the gap between formal and informal social life. The blog, however, is inherently public. Diaries and letters stay within the private sphere unless they are deliberately released to the general public.

Googles blog index, at http://blogsearch.google.com/, allows us to access the world of blogs. Blogs have always been indexed by Big Mama Google. But a search tool that only covers the blogosphere makes such searches more convenient. We can, more easily than before, catch the personal, informal and spontaneous response of people to events.

Who went to IFLA 2005 in Oslo?

2005-08-15T13:41:00.000+02:00

By July 25, 2.200 participants had been registered for the IFLA meeting in Oslo. In Berlin 2003, ten percent registered late, so we may perhaps end up with 2.400 to 2.500 delegates. With a couple of hundred volunteers and an unknown number of accompanying persons, with exhibition people and assorted staff, the gathering as a whole must involve more than three thousand people.

The delegate to the right is shown with a box of "Mother's flatbrød" - a thin, wafer-like crispbread, which we often eat with cured meats and sour cream. Yummy!

IFLA is a world wide association and the IFLA conferences are world wide gatherings. At the same time, it is very clear that the countries and regions of the world are very uneqally respresented at the IFLA meetings.

Part of the imbalance is due to the unequal size of the library communities in different countries. The more developed countries also have more libraries and more librarins - per one million inhabitants. As countries develop, that disparity will gradually disappear. And IFLA' s support of library development in less developed countries is, in fact, a contribution to their social, cultural and economic progress.

But from discussions with library colleagues it is also clear that the cost of participation has a great impact on recruitment to IFLA. Going to IFLA usually involves a week long trip to a big city several thousand kilometers away.

The venues surrounding Oslo are Glasgow (2002), Berlin (2003), Buenos Aires (2004), Seoul (2006), Durban (2007) and Quebec (2008). Such a trip can easily cost 2.000 euros or 2.200 US dollars, which in many countries is equivalent to the annual salary of a librarian.

These stark economic facts mean that many IFLA delegates need the support of strong institutions at home, or special travel grants, in order to participate. IFLA organizers generally work very hard to make travel support available. In 2005, 75 official scholarships have been granted. Many others have got grants from their home countries or elsewhere.

To make IFLA truly representative, it is clearly important that such efforts continue. At the same time, the IFLA organization could probably lower the practical barriers to participation by a fuller use of web based communication, by lower membership fees for small libraries and by a greater emphasis on regional meetings. Having annual rather than biannual or triannual meetings also impose high costs on those who want to participate in the ongoing work of IFLA.

The composition of the meeting

The delegates in the picture come from small public libraries in Norway (left) and Lithuania (right).

In 2003, in Berlin, I started to look at the social composition of the IFLA delegates, from a sociological point of view. Which countries and regions do they come from? What library types and organizations do they represent? The (informal) data from Berlin are available on the web - at Who goes to IFLA?

In Oslo, the list of participants was distributed yesterday, Sunday August 14. Here I report on a first count of representation by region.

The statistics are preliminary, since participants registered after July 25 are not included. But I do not expect big changes at the regional level. In Berlin, the list of participants by July 15, 2003, covered ninety percent of the delegates.

Participation rates

In Oslo 2005, as in Berlin 2003, there were three distinct levels of IFLA participation. Oceania (with Australia and New Zealand), Europe and North America (= United States + Canada) come at the top, with 100-160 participants per 100 million inhabitants. There are also great differences within Europe, which are not discussed here.

The second group is constituted by Sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East, Latin America and East and Central Asia, with rates between 9 and 18 per 100M. The countries in South and South East Asia have the lowest rates, with about three delegates per 100 million inhabitants.

The meeting

At the IFLA meeting in Oslo, eighty percent of the participants (registered by July 25) come from the "high participation group", or the countries in Europe, North America and Oceania. Seventeen percent come from the "middle group": Sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East, Latin America and East and Central Asia. Two percent come from South and South East Asia.

From Berlin to Oslo

In Buenos Aires, the geographical composition was surely different from that in Berlin, with a much stronger Latin American representation. In a broad regional perspective, the venues of Berlin and Oslo are rather similar. Differences in participation rates probably have other causes than location as such.

In a separate Table we have summarized the change from Berlin to Oslo. Changes of less than ten percent are treated as "constant". Compared with Berlin, South East Asia, East and Central Asia, Latin America and the Middle East are down. South Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa, Oceania and - in particular - North America are up. Why this is so, is anybody' s guess.

I hope to study the IFLA participation data more deeply in the future. Since the statistics may be of interest to others in other contexts, however, I make them available in a rather unprocessed form.

Norwegian library journals

2005-08-12T10:14:00.000+02:00

Three national journals

Norwegian librarians are served by three national journals: Bok og bibliotek [Book and Library], Bibliotekforum [Library Forum] and Bibliotekaren [The Librarian]. These are practice oriented rather than academic publications. They include news and reports from the field, but no peer-reviewed articles. They are eagerly read by the Norwegian library community, which is small enough - around five thousand persons - for everybody to taken a direct interest in everbody else.

Bok og bibliotek is published by the Norwegian Archive, Library and Museum Authority, Bibliotekforum by the Norwegian Library Association and Bibliotekaren by Bibliotekarforbundet [choose English], which is the main library trade union. In connection with IFLA 2005, the latter two have published bilingual issues, which are available at the conference venue.

Research publication

Academic library research represents a new development in Norway. A substantial investment in research only took place in the mid-1990`s. At that time, three things happened:

a five year program of library research was initiated with funding from central library authorities, and channelled through the Norwegian Research Council
the library college in Oslo - which had a few hundred students - was merged with about twenty other teaching institutions in Oslo to form a large, professional college with about ten thousand students.
a Norwegian journal of library research [Norsk tidsskrift for bibliotekforskning] was started

The new journal was edited at the young and innovative Institute for Documentation Science and Library Studies in Tromsø. It was published for eight years (1994-2001), but finally had to close for lack of funding. The journal accepted contributions in English as well as in the three Scandinavian languages (Norwegian, Swedish, Danish): see a listing of their articles in English.

The journal published many research reports and had a clear academic purpose. But it was not a fully academic journal based on peer review and strict quality control. This was hardly possible within the Norwegian library community. Our academic library community is still small.

The total number of full-time library teachers in the country is about forty - too few to sustain a full scale research journal on their own. It functioned, however, as a useful training ground as well as a publication outlet for essays and research report. We still miss it.

More

For additional information on Norwegian library studies in English, see the entries in the Frida data base and the Norwegian contributions to IFLA 2005.

I would also like to recommend the very useful dictionary of library terms (PDF) in Norwegian and English just published by the Norwegian Archive, Library and Museum Authority. The Authority is often abbreviated to ABM in Norwegian - for Arkiv, Bibliotek and Museum. You may read brief summaries in English of some of their publications on the web.

But in English - may we call you NALMA?

Library and information studies in Norway 04-05

2005-08-01T21:15:00.000+02:00

What's the buzz?

Tell me what's happening! For the benefit of IFLA participants we have collected information about current Norwegian research in library and information science. The bibliographic entries have been extracted from the database Frida. Only materials in English are included.

Frida is meant to cover all research output from the institutions of higher education that participate. At the moment Frida is used by Oslo University College and by four of Norway' s five universities: Oslo, Bergen, Trondheim and Tromsø. The fifth, Stavanger, only received university status this year.

Library studies

Norway's biggest library school, with about thirty staff members, is part of the Faculty of Journalism, Library and Information Science at Oslo University College. The school offers a three year bachelor and a two year master programme. The University of Tromsø has a Department of Documentation Studies, with a staff of eight, which also provides training in librarianship. Data oriented information management can be studied at the University of Trondheim.

Frida is a new, and very interesting, system for quality controlled author based registration of research publications and other types of research outputs. The driving force behind Frida is the new result based financing system for universities and colleges. The institutions now have to document what they do in order to get their proper share of government funding.

Frida became operational in 2004 and the user interface has not yet been translated into English. But those who want to try it out are welcome to visit the advanced search page, where you can specify language [språk] and institution/department [enhet].

Current research

The entries in my little survey comprise all registered publications and lectures (academic and popular) in English for the years 2004 and 2005:

from the school of librarianship in Oslo
from the Department of Documentation Studies in Tromsø
from the three teachers of Information Management in Trondheim

With Frida available, such a survey can be made in a few hours. Note that the list is incomplete. Many publications from 2005 have probably not been registered yet. But tracing additional publications to fill in the holes could easily take a full working week.

I publish the list as it stands. It works as a rough snapshot of current research. Eighty percent of a sausage is better than none.

Navigation page for IFLA 2005

2005-07-27T14:37:00.000+02:00

This page contains links to materials in English.

Blogging. From April 2005 I have used Pliny to write occasional news and comments in English. Before April I published similar items on my regular web site. The archive goes back to 2002. See: 2005 - 2004 - 2003 - 2002.

Teaching materials. At Oslo University College I teach courses in four main areas:

library management and organization
quantitative and qualitative methods
web publishing and web supported teaching
web-based reference work

These courses are in Norwegian. I have developed teaching materials in English for a course on Digital reference services, which has been given several times in Cracow, Poland. See also a selection of links about digital libraries (bilingual).

Public library policy

There is a brief intruction in English to the Special interest group on public library policy under the Norwegian Library Association. I work as their volunteer web editor.

Projects. My main research project 2004-2007 is GOBI: Good to know! A sociological analysis of Norwegian question-and-answer services. It is financed by a senior scholarship from Oslo University College. The project continues and extends What do people ask?

I am also doing work on library statistics, on development strategies for the library sector - as well as a small study of IFLA participation: Who goes to IFLA?. Some research interests and professional experiences are listed here.

Publications. Publications in English: Bibliography 1994-2005.

Complexity, nostalgia and open source.

2005-05-13T19:32:00.000+02:00

Interesting article on self-organizing productive networks in the May issue of First Monday.
Rave review of Steven Webers book on Open Source by Rob Vega, User Services Librarian, Valparaiso University:

- Steven Weber’s The Success of Open Source is a remarkable synthesis of political science, economics, law, sociology, and the history of technology, to name but some of the fields his impressive monograph encompasses. His excellent work is perhaps the best multi–disciplinary analysis (of any phenomenon) I have read.

The Success of Open Source. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2004. cloth, 312 p., ISBN 0–674–01292–5, US$29.95. Harvard University Press: http://www.hup.harvard.edu/

Another item for summer reading ....

I was also happy to see an article on the 1984 Interdoc meeting in Velletri, south of Rome. Of fond memories. I was one of the HURIDOCS people and brought a small portable with all of 32 K memory.

(Vellatri is a typo).

Verba volent, scripta manent

2005-04-22T22:20:00.000+02:00

Spoken words blow with the wind - but what is written will remain.

Below I give links to texts in English that touch upon the topics we discussed during the visit to Rumania:

Enter the dragon. From print to web in library education. In Festschrift for Wanda Pindel, Jagiellonian University of Cracow, 2004.
Wide enough for libraries? The library function in a web-based world. Paper for the conference Professional Information on the Internet, Cracow, 2004.
Digital reference services. Teaching materials. Cracow 2004.
Why is quality control so hard? Reference studies and reference quality in public libraries : the case of Norway. IFLA, Berlin, 2003.
Why do you ask? Reference statistics for library planning. IFLA, Glasgow, 2002. Loooong ...
A poem lovely as a tree? Virtual reference questions in Norwegian public libraries. Conference paper 2001 - published 2005.
Sink, swim or surf: The future of reference work in Norwegian public libraries. Conference paper 1997.

After the visit2 in 1972-73 I wrote one scientific article (in English), a small essay on Rumanian history and culture (in Norwegian) and a short review of a Rumanian book in one of our national newspapers:

Høivik, Tord. The Development of Romania: A Cohort Study, Journal of Peace Research, nr. 4, 1974.
- . Rumanian essay (Rumensk essay). Samtiden.
- . The year 2000 once again (År 2000 en gang til). Dagbladet, 1972. Review of Mircea Malita. Cronica anului 2000 (Editura Politica, Bucuresti 1969).

The future of digital reference services

2005-04-22T17:53:00.000+02:00

Lecture at the Biblioteca Centrala Universitara, Bucharest, Friday April 22, 1000.

Digital reference services are services that use digital tools (e-mail, web forms, chat, SMS) to communicate with users that search for information. In a wider sense the concept also includes digital systems - such as user-oriented web pages, interactive data bases, sites with advanced language technology - that allow users to carry out more advanced information searches on their own.

The lecture covers - briefly - the following topics:

Important trends in the development of digital reference services, illustrated with concrete cases: time line, Finland, Norway.
The growth of reference services beyond the library sector: homework support (Ask Dr. Math), expert services (Ask a philosopher), open market (Google answers).
How to manage and safeguard the quality of digital reference services: communication with customers (Slavic Reference Service), internal organisation (VRD quality points 6-11), resource basis (business models).

The main conclusion is: reference services are developing into a competitive - and complex - information market. Since libraries do not charge for their services, they face a dilemma:

Should they announce their reference services to the world - like Trondheim Public Library
Or should they hide them?

For further exploration

List of topics
Web and print resources
Statistics: Tord Hoivik (2003) Why do you ask? Reference statistics for library planning, Performance measurement and metrics, vol. 4, no. 1, pp. 28-37.
Questia ...

The invitation

BCU Bucuresti si CIMEC organizeaza vineri, 22 aprilie 2003, 10:00 in sala Dan Simonescu de la BCU Bucuresti, seminarul cu tema: "The future of digital reference services", in prezenta prof. Tord Hoivik (Universitatea din Oslo) - il puteti vedea la: http://home.hio.no/~tord/.

Seminarul care se va desfasura in limba engleza, dar - pentru cei mai timizi - intrebarile in romana vor fi traduse in engleza.

Va avea, in mare, urmatorul format:

a) circa 30 min. expunerea prof Hoivik;
b) circa 15 min. demonstratii pe web;
c) circa 15 min. discutii;
pauza
d) discutii libere.

Sunt invitati nu doar bibliotecarii specializati in referinte! Dar: fiindca numarul de locuri in sala este limitat, cei interesati sunt rugati sa-si anunte intentia de participare la d-na Cristina Stoica (cristef@bcub.ro).

Pentru a va face - anticipat - o idee despre ceea ce prof. Hoivik va expune, vedeti: http://home.hio.no/~tord/06und/engdr/index.htm

The future of librarianship - and academic libraries

2005-04-22T15:35:00.000+02:00

Before the seminar on digital reference services we had a small discussion about the future of librarianship.

We all agreed that librarianship needs a stronger theoretical foundation. The central issue we discussed was: must this basis be scientific in the traditional academic sense (library science) - or can we develop alternative ways of integrating theory and practice?

I have argued for the latter in Why is quality control so hard?. IFLA Library Theory and Research Section, Berlin 2003. Also available in PDF (IFLA web site) . You can read an important analysis of theory-building in practical disciplines in Donald Schon' s book The Reflective Practitioner: Foundation of Teamwork & Leadership - and there is a convenient summary available on the web.

Jan Erik Roed - university librarian at the University of Oslo, says:

The university library now consists of four components:

The teaching library
The electronic library
The publishing library
The traditional, paper-based library

We must have more of the first three. This means we must have less of the traditional, paper-based library.

Tord Hoivik writes:

A universe of texts

The great majority of subjects in higher education are based on written documents and verbal discussion. In the humanities and social sciences, students work in a textual universe. They listen to lectures that expound the canon - and learn the canonical methods of research. They work with textbooks and classical texts. And they contribute texts of their own - for the benefit of their teachers, their fellow students and their final grades. In the sciences, field trips and lab work are added. But science students continue to read and write.

A visible role in learning

This will continue in the digital environment. This means that texts and documents remain relevant for undergraduate learning. But undergraduate libraries are in the same position as school libraries: they must attach themselves firmly to teaching and learning activities in order to survive. A great tradition is not enough. In the future, libraries for students will only be financed if they provide a visible contribution to learning.

Why use the library?

Undergraduate students go to standardized lectures and carry out standardized exercises. Student behavior is largely shaped by the teachers. The average student aims at an acceptable grade. She hopes to achieve it with a modicum of effort. She will only use the library if it pays to use the library. And this is normally decided by the teacher.

Cooperate with teachers

But university teachers are acrobats. They will only cooperate with librarians if they must. Every day they juggle the demands from classes, colleagues and conferences. They are seldom interested in libraries as such. They will only include libraries in their juggling act if the benefit is evident.

Libraries must cooperate with teachers in designing digital learning environments. This is a new and difficult task for both professions. At the moment I suspect teachers are more uncomfortable with digital resources.

Graduate students

Undergraduates can be handled as a group. In graduate and further education, students work in smaller groups and go to fewer lectures than their younger peers. They study the more advanced literature in their professional fields and are expected to write papers and theses based on independent work. Some of their projects will involve original data collection, and some of their reports will include original research.

These students require a great variety of written sources. In a couple of decades, nearly all the relevant documents are likely to be on the web. But they will need good retrieval tools in order to find the documents they require. The lecturer is normally a specialist in the field and will select the curriculum on the basis of her personal knowledge of the literature. But the library can provide useful support by organizing easy web access to all the readings - and by providing correct and updated bibliographical data.

Personal service

At the graduate level, libraries must offer individual service. In 9 cases out of 10 the students will be under pressure to complete their work in time. In contact with the library they will need rapid, competent and highly specific service.

Source: Tord Hoivik.
Wide enough for libraries? The library function in a web-based world

Public libraries in knowledge societies: the Norwegian experience

2005-04-20T20:54:00.000+02:00

The Norwegian knowledge manifesto

The full manifesto is about three pages in print. The ten points below is a brief summary.

Norway is moving from a welfare state to a knowledge based society
Broad access to education is necessay for a knowledge based economy
Values are created by people that are competent, knowledgable and culturally aware
The knowledge society must be realized locally
Public libraries need new ideas and new tasks
Local communities need a place that can provide learning, knowledge and culture in a free and open setting
Public libraries support the ties that link people and places
Culture gives meaning to wealth
An investment in public libraries is an investment in future productivity and welfare
Library development is a knowledge policy for local communities.

The campaign

Our national campaign The public library in the knowledge society was launched with a press conference at the Norwegian Parliament on January 19, 2005. Several distinguished members of parliament with a commitment to cultural affairs participated and gave their strong support to the campaign manifesto.

The campaign is associated with the multi-year ALA and IFLA campaign "@t your library".

Challenges

During the last few years Norwegian public libraries have experienced many new challenges. Regular lending of books is stagnant - even though more and more people have higher education. Competition in the mass market for books is increasing. Books that sell well are now relatively cheap. Bookstores on the web - inside and outside Norway (Amazon!) - provide a wide range of books at decent prices.

Why should we use taxes to pay for books that people can afford to buy?

Digital developments make our users much more self-sufficient with respect to information. Most children use Google as a matter of course.

Why should we finance reference services when people manage reasonably well by themselves?

Our national Law on Public Libraries, which regulates the public library system. is under pressure. The law does oblige every municipality to provide a public library. But it does not specify any minimum level of service. Market thinking is influencing the public sector. The municipalities, which finance public libraries through local taxes, are gradually given more leeway - and some want to reduce services to a minimum. Some politicians are already asking whether we will need public libraries in the future.

At the national level, libraries, museums and archives have been asked to work more closely together. The two government organizations that used to coordinate library activities - for public and professional libraries respectively, have been merged with the corresponding bodies for museums and archives into a "cultural memory" authority.

Many librarians are soft-spoken, careful and somewhat inhibited. Do we have to get involved in politics? These days people from the museum sector are often more outspoken and more innovative. The whole concept of what a museum is and what an exhibition should do is visibly changing.

Public librarians need to learn visibility from museum people. Good exhibitions are created by exhibitionists!

In the National Library Association, public libraries, on the one hand, and academic libraries, on the other, used to work closely together. In the last couple of years, however, all libraries in higher education have been caught up in the Bologna process.

The great reform in European higher education has been very good for libraries involved in teaching. They are becoming active, student oriented teaching institutions ("learning centres") rather than research libraries with (at best) reading rooms for students. But their strategic focus is now Higher Education rather than Cultural Memory.

The "library sector" is dividing into a dynamic learning sector, on the one hand, and a more traditional public library sector, on the other. School libraries can go either way. If they get solid support, they become learning centers. If they are treated as static book collections, students will invade the public libraries instead.

Reinventing public libraries

The general public, by the way, is seldom interested in the difference between library sectors. Many Norwegian students are not aware of the distinction between a university library and a public library. If the "book place" can help them with their reading list, that is all they ask. And the students are right. Libraries are service institutions first of all. Libraries are what libraries do.

You may ask if the Norwegian experiences are relevant for Rumania. The economic and material conditions are, of course, different. In Norway, we envy Denmark and - especially - Finland. In Rumania, you may well envy all the Nordic countries.

Within Europe, there are major inequalities between East and West, and between South and North. It is frustrating to see the possibilities - and not being able to realize them.

But at a deeper level our library systems - and our lives - are caught up in the same massive historical processes:

the change from industrial to knowledge based economies;
a massive investment in higher education;
the move from paper to digital media;
the rapid unification of Europe - and the beginning unification of the world.

The world is also becoming a single society - but it will hardly turn into a proper state before 2100 ....

The changes since I last visited Rumania - in the mid-seventies - are overwhelming. And if I come back thirty years from now, Rumania and Norway and Europe will be different places alltogether.

In a thirty year perspective, we will all face the same challenge: how to recreate a traditional 20th century institution for life and growth in a global, digital, mobile, market-oriented knowledge-based society.

Facing change

We do not believe libraries can be reinvented from above. The forceful methods of Peter the Great and Mustafa Kemal Ataturk are not available anymore - I am afraid. Important cultural institutions - schools, universities, churches, newspapers, libraries - depend on the dedicated work of professionals. They will only change deeply if people change deeply.

Most professionals are conservative at work. Professionals are trained to see themselves as inheritors and continuators - and sometimes forget that the traditions they adhere to were created by reformers and innovators.

Library history is full of battles. The very concept of lending - letting books out of the library - was once revolutionary. Dewey was a crank and open shelves a scandal. But that was a long time ago. Public libraries have been technologically stable for a long time.

Today, of course, the quiet river of librarianship is not so quiet anymore. The Nile is approaching a cataract.

All libraries have to take digital technologies seriously. Today, I read, four million Rumanians use the web every month. This means that more or less everybody will be on the web in ten, or even five, years.

Every cultural institution needs to step back and ask itself: what will that mean for us - in a few years?

Cell phones are spreading by themselves. And a cell phone is not really a phone anymore, but a small portable computer. People will basically be on the web all the time. Commercial firms offer a growing range of phone based services.

And every cultural institution needs to step back and ask itself: what will that mean for us?

Digital technology as such develops at a steady pace - as indicated by Moore`s law. We can predict fairly well the basic technological capacities in 2010 and 2015. It is much harder to predict the rates of response in different social sectors.

Some will make a fast and easy transit from paper to screen. Some will struggle and protest. But in the end - thirty years from now - the differences will not matter, I suspect. Every profession - from lawyers to librarians - and every social institution - from museums to municipal governments - will live in a profoundly digital and web-oriented world.

We take electricity, phones and radios - and their social consequences - for granted. Our children will be as digital as we are electrical. Strategic planning means to prepare for the next genneration.

Twelve strategies for change in libraries - and most other places

Involve people from different professions: marketing, design, computers, politics - as well as librarians
Present cases from abroad - using relevant countries: Finland, Portugal, Netherlands, Norway ...
Develop and present cases from your own country
Combine support from above and support from the grassroots (or intermediate level)
Feed the eagles: give the doers with a vision space enough to develop strong wings
Focus on users and their experiences in libraries
Develop and present relevant library statistics
Tell exciting stories about libraries
Combine vision, strategy and tactics
Work inward (towards librararians) and outward (towards users, voters, politicians) at the same time
Walk the talk. That means:: use new media and new models of communications when you discuss new media and new models of communication.
Postpone discussions about money - but not forever ...

History

In September 2003 a few practising public librarians decided to set up a small working group on public library policy. At the (biannual) national meeting of the Norwegian Library Association in March 2004, the organisation accepted our proposal to create a Special Interest Group on Public Library Policy.

The new SIG is organised as a network and uses the WWW for most of its activities (I am the web editor). We run an active web site and communicate with our members through a mailing list.

In early 2005 the interim board organized a web based election of a regular board with seven members. The candidates presented themselves through web pages. Voting was also carried out on the web. Each member of the group received a PIN code from the NLA, selected candidates from a web form and "signed" with the PIN code.

@your library

http://www.ifla.org/@yourlibrary/campaign.htm.
The Campaign for the World's Libraries. From IFLA
@your library. Home page for the US campaign.

The Library White Paper

A new Library White Paper is currently being prepared by the Norwegian Archive, Library and Museum Authority, acting on behalf of The Ministry of Culture and Church Affairs. The main objective is to create a strategy document that will serve as the basis for a fundamental revision of the library sector as a whole.

Scenario thinking is an important part of the process. The Norwegian Library Association is involved on a consultative basis, but the Authority has the final word - and heated debates on basic principles are likely in the autumn.

External links

Norwegian Library Association. For information in English, choose About us
Norwegian Archive, Library and Museum Authority: English

Back in Bucharest

2005-04-20T07:44:00.000+02:00

The last time I visited Rumania, in 1977, I went as a peace researcher. At that time, the political climate was growing colder, after the relatively open years around 1970. Europe was in decline.

- À la fin tu es las de ce monde ancien

Bergère ô tour Eiffel le troupeau des ponts bêle ce matin

Tu en as assez de vivre dans l'antiquité grecque et romaine

Ici même les automobiles ont l'air d'être anciennes.

Apollinaire

Seventy years after Roosevelt our continent is getting a New Deal. Old man Europe was split by an iron curtain after WW2. Now it is visibly starting to cohere.

This time, I am here as a librarian. And I am not at all tired of l'antiquité grecque et romaine. Two weeks ago, at the central bus station in Florence, I saw the morning bus from Italy to Romania pulling out of its bay. Western businessmen are pouring into Bucharest - a new capitalist frontier. Romanian artists, programmers and ordinary workers are percolating westwards. They will come back - with time. Migrations belong to the longue duree (Braudel).

The making of the modern world-system (Wallerstein) started with guns, colonies and exploitation. Today, it is the flow of people that ties societies together.

Pliny the blog

2005-04-19T09:22:00.000+02:00

This blog in English is a parallell site to my Norwegian blog Plinius. I started it during a visit to Bucharest in order to publish in English from abroad.

You will also find library comments in English at my regular web site Post scriptum, which is hosted by my home institution, Oslo University College.

The younger Pliny was the nephew of Plinius (the older). He lived in the early Roman Empire, around 100 AD. He is best known for his colletion of literary letters (Epistolae) - which includes a set of letters exchanged with emperor Trajan, while Pliny served as an imperial delegate in Bithynia.

Read more about Pliny the Younger in Wikipedia.