I just picked up on this article in the Guardian from a debate on the plagiarism mailing list

http://education.guardian…2255793,00.html

Last week I attended a UC&R meeting in Sheffield themed around university libraries reaching out to their local communities. The first talk, by Andrew Walsh from Huddersfield, was about the INSPIRE programme and the Huddersfield version, Welcome!. Both services help learners to identify libraries and collections which can help with their learning and Andrew described how the Welcome! programme has increased visits to the university library by external users to over 26,000 last year! We also talked about barriers for users and how these might be addressed and how important it is that all library staff are aware of what Inspire is about.

Keeping with the Dublin photos for a while yet : Italian rugby fans in Dublin (before they lost!)

Sheila Webber has put a copy of her slides from this presentation on her blog. I was pleased that she used our model of the 7 ages to introduce her talk, which was about her own perpective of IL as a researcher. She highlighted some of the variation in IL from the researcher’s perspective as being:
the nature of the information, different disciplines, different kinds of information behaviour, the IL of the team vs the IL of the lone scholar, different research approaches and different conceptions of research. One newer conception of IL in e-science is the ability to manipulate data and use appropriate tools, an area which librarians need to engage with more fully.

River Liffey boardwalk, Dublin

Having spent so long in the train system between Durham and Sheffield yesterday [noisy train, late train, no seats, no train], I managed to read nearly all of “The Cult of the Amateur: how today’s internet is killing our culture and assualting our economy” by Andrew Keen. I’d definitely recommend it, though I did feel a bit depressed afterwards. He talks about digital Darwinism, the survival of the loudest and most opinionated, and how with Web 2.0 the distinction between expert and amateur is much more difficult to distinguish. He predicts that if the situation continues, all expert, costly media will be swept away to the point that we’ll no longer have anyone to tell us any facts, so we’ll all be able to make up our own version of reality. In this view, the voice of the information literate minority will become smaller and smaller. There’s a very interesting discussion on issues surrounding Wikipedia too.

Meeting the locals in Dublin

I was fascinated to hear Prof Dermot Diamond’s perceptions of the library role in research. Dermot is the director of the National Centre for Sensor Research at DCU; he focused on KPIs for research and the way in which they rely solely on publishing. Some interesting points:
researchers are becoming very interested in their “H” index (I’ve noticed this here too).
we need to encourage researchers to give more consideration to how their name appears on their first research paper, as this is the start of their publishing history – women changing names, english versions of asian names etc can affect how their research is cited.
while there is an implication that multi-authored papers are less valuable in terms of counting citations, this has to be set against the current trend to encourage multi disciplinary group research and consequent group authoring.

Trinity College, Dublin

Andrew Booth used some statistics from the RIN survey in the first talk of the day to challange us to think about what researchers really want from libraries – is it really an invisible library? I liked his use of the term “information wise” rather than information literate. Andrew also talked about satisficing, a concept we raised in our NRIN paper which is due to be published soon, the idea of a satisfied but inept user. Does this describe a lot of our researchers?

The Dublin Spike (Spire) – described to us by taxi and bus drivers as “the pole in the hole”

Marsh’s Library was built in 1701 and was the first public library in Ireland. The interior hasn’t really changed since and it holds a fascinating collection of rare books and manuscripts. We were shown round by John Keating, who explained the cages, where scholars were locked in with the books to make sure they didn’t steal them. (maybe this is something we should reinstate!)

Inside the library – if you look carefully you might spot the original bell above my head! [photo with permission]

The “cages” [photo from website]

http://www.marshlibrary.i…ie/library.html

Over the next few days I’ll add some posts about some of the individual presentations at this CONUL/SCONUL seminar, which was held in Dublin last week. Jo and I were relieved that speakers like Andrew Booth and Sheila Webber were very complimentary about our book and our 7 ages of research model!

Me testing the local brew at the Guinness factory