Formal visit.  Learn about one of Britain’s oldest learned societies.  View meeting rooms and library and view some of the artefacts  and historical portraits.

The Lambeth Palace Library and site of new library in Palace and Gardens. To include research guides, how collections are managed and organised including digital records, conservation issues, documents of interest and what type of queries they deal with. How they overcome any of the difficulties they have faced.

Call for Papers:  Sustainability and Relevance: the independent library in 2016

Independent libraries occupy a unique place in the world’s cultural life. Rather than seeing independent libraries as niche or elitist, the Financial Times described the UK’s independent libraries as ‘havens of books, conversation and cultural events with histories stretching back centuries.’ The role and function of the independent library is a little-explored area, but growing numbers of scholars and researchers are joining the public in working in and around these institutions. As a space, the independent library generates lively debate around literacy, the role of the state, local and national identity, and cultural value.

The Association of Independent Libraries is therefore delighted to announce the launch of an interdisciplinary conference that will mark developments in the emerging and dynamic field of independent library studies. This new conference will bring together librarians, archivists, researchers, students and academics in a new forum to discuss the independent library’s role in the fields of library and information studies, cultural studies, education, and the humanities. Held in the atmospheric surroundings of Nottingham’s Bromley House Library, this weekend is committed to hearing a variety of perspectives from the UK and beyond.

We welcome contributions that engage with any of the following areas: Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

-       Independent library movements across the world

-       The origins of the independent library

-       Equitable access to independent libraries

-       Collaborative working with Higher Ed: research councils, universities, vice-chancellors

-       The jewels in our crowns: collection case studies

-       The independent library in the community: literature, history, culture, heritage.

-       Innovative working practices and managing change

-       Research students: projects, research, and discoveries.

-       Lifelong learning: readers, interns and volunteers

-       The built environment: caring for our spaces

-       Evaluation of the digital library: social media, online spaces, digitisation.

-       Cataloguing challenges

-       Antiquarian collections

-       Sing out loud: collections that aren’t books

Proposals from anyone in the independent library movement – librarians, academics, volunteers, researchers, students – will be considered. Case studies are welcome. Papers should be limited to twenty minutes. Submissions to independent.libraries@gmail.com by Monday 21st March 2016.

The New York Society Library is excited to announce that City Readers: Digital Historic Collections at the New York Society Library is now available online at cityreaders.nysoclib.org.  City Readers is a database of historic records, books, and readers at the Society Library. Search, browse, and visualization tools support the discovery and analysis of over 100,000 biographic, bibliographic, and transaction records derived from digitized content from the Society Library’s archives, and enriched with detailed metadata. Circulation records from 1789 to 1805, when the Library shared Federal Hall with the first American Congress, have been fully digitized and transcribed, and the data is now available for free on our site. The database is updated daily with more bibliographical information to support complex searches and visualizations; we welcome user contributed information on unidentified books, individuals, and errors in transcribed data.

City Readers was created using Collective Access, an open-source software for managing and publishing museum and archival collections. Our custom configuration will be available soon through their Configuration Library. We hope that more individuals and institutions will use and improve upon our model to develop their own tools for research in the digital humanities, and to share these with the larger community.

Support for the digitization and transcription of the first two charging ledgers and the development of City Readers has been generously provided by an Anonymous Donor, The Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation, Newman’s Own Foundation, and The Peter Jay Sharp Foundation.

The Library and Information History Group are pleased to announce that Calista Williams is the winner of the 2015 James Ollé Award. Calista is a PhD student at the Open University and she will be using the award to carry out research at the National Archives at Kew into why Aberystywth was selected as the location for the National Library of Wales in 1907. 

This free event will provide an overview of Augmented Reality practices (Aurasma) and getting started with Coding. It is aimed at Librarians who are interested in learning about emerging technologies and how to start using them.

This free event considers the importance of continuous professional development, both in preparing for Certification, Chartership and Fellowship, and throughout your career. It is aimed at those who have embarked on the Certification, Chartership or Fellowship process, or who are thinking about it.

Those registered and wanting to know about changes to the Professional Registration process are particularly welcome.

There will also be the opportunity to view some successful portfolio submissions as well as some practical reflective practice exercises.

The title of Nick Poole's talk is

I'm an Internationalist and I hope to lead CILIP into a strong position  in the International Field

The Great Parchment Book blog was started in 2012 to record the progress of the major and ground-breaking partnership project to conserve, digitally reconstruct, transcribe and publish the iconic 17th century parchment document known as the Great Parchment Book of The Honourable The Irish Society, also referred to as the Domesday Book of the Plantation because of its significance to the history of Ulster.

The Great Parchment Book is a 1639 survey of the Londonderry estates managed by the City of London through the Irish Society and the London livery companies. It was damaged in a fire at the City of London Guildhall in 1786 which caused such dramatic shrivelling and fire damage to the manuscript and distortion to the text that it had been completely inaccessible to researchers for over 200 years. Owing to its appearance it has been affectionately referred to at LMA where it is held as the ‘poppadum book’.

The blog records the progress of the project led by LMA, firstly the conservation which aimed to gently flatten the parchment sheets as far as possible to facilitate the digital imaging which followed. LMA’s partners at the Department of Computer Science and the Centre for Digital Humanities at University College London then captured a set of images for each page, generating 3D models from these and developing ground-breaking software which enabled these models to be flattened and browsed virtually. Alongside this, a readable and exploitable version of the text was prepared, comprising a transcription of the manuscript with encoding of appropriate terms using the Textual Encoding Initiative (TEI) to enable comprehensive searching. This culminated in the launch of the dedicated Great Parchment Book website in June 2013 where the images (of the folios both in their original state and digitally flattened) and transcript were made available and which featured as the centrepiece of an exhibition in Derry 2013 to commemorate the 400th anniversary of the building of city’s walls in 1613.

The blog, administered by LMA and now embedded in the website, continues to record the continuing legacy of the project focussing on ways to revolutionise access to archives and manuscripts through the use of new technology and innovation, and linking the Great Parchment Book to other sources for Irish history and thereby facilitating both personal and academic research and knowledge.

Our tips for writing a project blog

The importance of recording the progress of the Great Parchment Book project through a blog was identified right at the start of the discussions about the project. 

There are three main reasons why a blog was identified as important to the project:

• We knew from the very beginning that not many projects carried out in the archive and libraries field involved such a wide range of professions and skills so we thought that it was something new to share with the public and we wanted to share our excitement.
• As is common, many of the grant funders which supported the project required that we shared the outcomes of the project.
• One of the remits of LMA is to engage with the public and other stakeholders as widely as possible.

However, writing a project blog is not something you can do at a drop of a hat and without planning ahead.The structure of the blog needs to be thought out before starting the project you’d like to write about. You also have to think of what could be interesting to potential readers and decide on the most effective way to explain the details of the project.

Writing a project blog is extra work because whatever you are doing or have done in the project needs to be translated or re-processed in order to make it interesting and understandable to a wide audience and this needs to be factored into the project plan and individual work plans. It’s hard work writing a blog!

1.Have a blogger-in-chief

If more than one person is contributing to the blog, especially if elements of the project are being undertaken by partners outside your organisation, or contributions are being made by a number of people, you must have a blogger-in-chief, to take responsibility for the blog as a whole, ensure consistency and exercise editorial control.

2. Write in a simple and accessible way

Initially we were writing for an unknown and potentially wide audience, from professionals in a variety of disciplines to the general public. This meant that the way we explained things had to be interesting to, but understandable by everybody. The challenge is to be able to write without going too much into depth. If you decide to do so, then you have to explain the concept in the simplest, but most engaging way possible.Following on from this, it is important to be clear and not to use jargon or too many technical terms. Where technical terms are used, they need to be explained.

3.Keep it short

Try too not to write too lengthyposts.If the topic we wanted to cover describe was very long we split it into more than one post, especially when describing conservation processes.You can always link to more detailed content elsewhere and this was frequently done when we were referring to the cutting-edge digital techniques and technologies used to virtually reconstruct the Great Parchment Book.

Use titles for posts that areeye-catching, but describe the topic the post covers accurately.

4. Post regularly

Try to post regularly. This was difficult sometimes because the time scale and deadlines of the project did not fit with the regular blog timetable, but we were able to adapt if the events described were not tied to a particular date.

However, when we needed to be timely, we ensured that we kept our subscribers up to date with what was happening, for example events tied to the project, or announcements about awards (European Succeed Award 2014 (for digitisation focussing on textual content):  commendation of merit; The Pilgrim Trust Award for Conservation 2015: shortlisted).

5. Vary what you post

In some posts, we introduced the staff that had worked on the project. This seemed to interest the audience and “personalised” the project.

Particularly with the conservation and imaging aspects of the project, we found it useful to take or use imagesto help to tell the story or to show an interesting detail. Images are the fastest media to convey information to those who are not familiar with that which is being described.With conservation we often had to stage the picture so we could fit into one image all the different elements of the conservation process we were describing to make it more understandable.

6. Provide proper attribution

You must make sure that all content is properly attributed and acknowledged – this is especially the case with images and academic research - and that supporters and other funders are acknowledged too.

Lessons for the future

We have received lots of good feedback about the website and blog, but we have not had so many direct comments and conversations on the blog as we had hoped. We have also found that our number of core subscribers has remained static at just over 100 pretty much since launch in spite of efforts to increase it. This may be because after the first year of the blog, it became embedded into website and those interested in the project know they can just go straight there for information; people link to the website not to the blog now.

We have been able to keep tabs on the usage of the blog and the website (86,000 page views and counting), and look at where visitors are coming to the site from. We have seen from this that many others are linking to the website in their own blogs particularly those relating to conservation and the digital humanities. We also know from the links in and links clicked out, that lots of users are interacting positively with the blog and website and that its reach is much wider that the number of core subscribers or direct comments might suggest.

On the technical side, if we set a blog up again, we’d look at making it more smart phone friendly and link it more to social media (although we do use this to some extent).

The legacy

The blog has provided a detailed and accessible record of the project which is there for all to explore. Right from the start, we used a controlled list of categories to tag posts (eg conservation, digitisation, events). These now provide an invaluable tool for those trying to find out more about the project and many of the areas associated with it, and enabling the story of the distinct elements such as conservation or digitisation for example to be pulled out of the whole.

The risk in blogging about an ongoing project is that you don’t know whether there will be a “Happy Ending”. We were fortunate in that the project had a successful outcome and it has continuing impact and a legacy which we can post about.

Four years on from its beginnings then, the Great Parchment Book blog is still going strong, but has had to adapt.We still report directly on the project and the content of the Great Parchment Book, but we are now trying to explore the connections with other digital projects and technologies revolutionising access to archives and cultural artefacts, and identify synergies with other documents relevant to the story that the Great Parchment Book has to tell.

UK Blog Awards 2016

London Metropolitan Archives’ Great Parchment Book Blog has been nominated in the Arts and Culture category of the UK Blog Awards 2016.

The Public Vote is open until Monday, 25 January 2016 at 9pm and it would be really great if colleagues felt able to support the Great Parchment Book project and the blog by voting as this will enable the blog to progress to the final of the awards.

Vote for the Great Parchment Book blog

On behalf of CILIP Patent & Trade Mark Group (PATMG) - Presenters: Susan Bates, Shell International Ltd and Grayce Shomade, D Young & Co

Accessing the important information contained in patent documents, that was once the sole domain of the professional searcher, has now become increasingly mainstream with the introduction of a number of free patent sources, particularly from the patent offices.  The search engines and interfaces are generally very user-friendly to help the novices, and those who are occasional searchers, to retrieve useful information without too much effort.  Highlighting some key free sources, such as Espacenet (EPO), PatentScope (WIPO) and Google Patents, this webinar will help you better understand the structured nature of the information within a patent document and how it relates to the patent search process, as well as take you through the steps required to carry out different types of effective and efficient patent searches that will enable you to gain an insight into patents held by other parties and their legal status, support patentability opinions and technical assessments.

Please note:  This is a CIPA CPD webinar.  Price:  CIPA members £36, non-CIPA Members £54. To register please contact the CIPA Events Co-ordinator on telephone number: 020 7405 9450

The annual BIALL, CLSIG and SLA Europe Graduate Open Day will be taking place on Wednesday 6th April 2016 at CILIP for all library and information students, trainees and new professionals. 

Join the Patent & Trade Mark Group (PATMG) for an evening seminar looking at how you can get the best out of free patent information sources. 

Presenters: Margaret Rainey (Manager) and Maddy Marley (Senior Information Scientist), Global Patents Department, GSK

The City Business Library www.cityoflondon.gov.uk/cbl , based in the heart of the Square Mile, is a unique public library for business information. It offers free access to a comprehensive collection of business databases and publications, including general start up advice, market research, national and international coverage for statistics, company data and financial and business news.

Group visit to the Poetry Library - the most comprehensive and accessible collection of British modern and contemporary poetry. http://www.poetrylibrary.org.uk/about/ 

No need to book, but an indication of numbers would be helpful.  The event is free.

Youth Libraries Group (YLG) Scotland is hosting a Revalidation Workshop for Librarians. Friday 5th February, 1.45 to 4pm, Room w305, Hamish Wood Building, Glasgow Caledonian University.

UKeiG aims to publish four White Papers each year. The first in the series was published at the end of 2015 and another - on Internet Security - will be published next month. After the three months when UKeiG White Papers are available only to members, the first published - Open Science, Open Data, Open Access... - is now openly available to all on the web site. The abstract reads:

This White Paper gives an overview of developments in openness in Open Science, Open Data, Open Access and Open Monographs.
Open Science is shown to be moving centre-stage, with a rationale of improving efficiency in science; increasing transparency and quality in the research validation process; speeding the transfer of knowledge; increasing knowledge spill-overs to the economy ;addressing global challenges more effectively; and promoting citizens’ engagement in science and research.
Open Data is shown to have undergone a surge in practical development, mirroring the well established repositories for research outputs. The development and application of model policies and of principles is also discussed.
The current major developments in Open Access are discussed in detail, including the identification and mirroring of success factors in funders’ and institutions’ policies and mandates for driving Open Access deposits and the growth in Gold Open Access.
The appearance of publishers and supporting infrastructure for the publication of Open Access scholarly monographs and textbooks is outlined.

White Papers are available at: http://www.cilip.org.uk/uk-einformation-group/ukeig-notices-papers/ukeig-open-access-white-papers

Annual unconference - all welcome.  More details to follow - save the date! 

We are the Irish Genealogical Research Society (IGRS) and are celebrating our 80th year here in London.

Our library used to be housed in a central London church which is now under renovation and so our library has been put in storage. We currently share a space at the Society of Genealogists which is also undergoing a major renovation.

We want to find a new home. We have a strong membership and a healthy budget.

We will pay yearly rent for a lockable office/site for the library.

The IGRS has some 4,000 books & 3,000 manuscripts. We need about 1,000 feet of shelf space.

We had in our previous library 17 x 6 foot tall bookcases plus lower cupboards.

While there is no problem for people to have browsing access to the books during the week, we do need to be able to lock up the manuscripts.

We only need access on Saturdays and research room for say 8-10 people.

We also need access to loos, tea making facilities, wireless/internet access, and be close to public transport.

Please contact Jim Boulden at jiboulden@aol.com if you have a space or know of one. All ideas welcome!

The latest in the UKeiG series of statements, notices and papers is the full text of the CILIP submission to the Joint Committee Inquiry into the Investigatory Powers Bill. UKeiG felt that it was important to promote this to our members as it is concerned that - as has also been suggested in the Guardian article mentioned in the introductory note that precedes the CILIP response - libraries could find themselves targeted under the legislation and forced to hand over users’ confidential personal data tracking their web use. CILIP has highlighted this issue (point 8) and has also expressed concern about the adequacy of the proposed authorisation and overview provisions: a major area of concern is the need for judicial authorisation and oversight, which CILIP feels is essential and should include applications to look at communications data as well as requests for interception.

Click on this link to view the copy of the CILIP response.

The IFLA Library History Special Interest Group and the Library Services to Multicultural Populations Section  invite proposals for papers to be presented at their joint session on  “Libraries and Immigrants: Historical Perspectives”  during the IFLA World Library and Information Congress in Columbus, Ohio, USA, 13-19 August 2016.

Much has been and is being written about current experiences of libraries and immigrants to our lands. But what of past experiences, and of lessons learnt from the history of our libraries as they welcomed early immigrants to our countries and assisted them to settle and enjoy their new lives? In some countries this history would be very long, and we are hoping with the international composition of IFLA, we will hear of historical experiences from around the globe as such activity fits well with the overall theme for the 2016 IFLA Conference: Connections. Collaboration. Community.

CILIP’s CPD Forum brings together the National Offers Group and the Professional Registration Support Network. Together these groups work to provide development opportunities for CILIP members, no matter what stage of their career. The National Offers Group committee has agreed on a new name to describe better its role. The new name is CILIP Professional Development Group.

The key responsibility of the Group is to develop a range of varied and flexible CPD opportunities to enable all CILIP members to progress in their careers. In the first instance four virtual working groups have been set up to focus on the following key areas of development: Leadership; New professionals; Employability; Generic/key skills. If you are interested in joining the Group, please contact the Chair: Gil Young, gil.young@nhs.net.

The Justin Winsor Library History Essay Award is presented by the Library History Round Table of the American Library Association annually to recognize the best essay written in English on library history.  The award is named in honor of the distinguished nineteenth-century librarian, historian, and bibliographer who was also ALA's first president. It consists of a certificate and a $500 cash award, as well as an invitation to have the winner's essay considered for publication in Information & Culture: A Journal of History. If the winning essay is accepted for publication, additional revisions may be required.

Criteria

Manuscripts submitted should not be previously published, previously submitted for publication, or under consideration for publication or another award. To be considered, essays should embody original historical research on a significant topic in library history, be based on primary sources whenever possible, and use good English composition and superior style. The Library History Round Table is particularly interested in works that place the subject within its broader historical, social, cultural, and political context and make interdisciplinary connections with print culture and information studies.   Essays should be organized in a form similar to that of articles published in Information & Culture: A Journal of History, with footnotes, spelling and punctuation conforming to the latest edition of the Chicago Manual of Style. Papers should not exceed thirty-five typewritten, double-spaced pages (plus footnotes and bibliography).

Submissions and Selection

Applicants must send five copies of the manuscript or submit electronically. The name and other information identifying the author should appear only on a separate cover letter. Applications must be received by February 15, 2016.   Receipt will be confirmed within four business days.

Submit manuscripts electronically to:

ors@ala.org

with Subject line: LHRT: Justin Winsor Award Committee

The Library History Round Table (LHRT) of the American Library Association (ALA) seeks papers for its Research Forum at the 2016 ALA Annual Meeting in Orlando, Florida, to be held on 23 - 28 June 2016. The theme of the Forum will be the history of reading in libraries (public, academic, and school). Subjects may include—but are not limited to—historical studies of:po

·      Reading, readers, and gender in libraries

·      Meanings of reading in libraries

·      Reading so-called ‘good’ books (nonfiction and serious literature) vs. reading for pleasure

·      Appropriate and inappropriate books; censoring reading and readers

·      Role of the library in developing a reading canon

·      What did reading in libraries look like for children, women, men, immigrants?

·      What type of material did libraries actually provide, and was it what readers wanted?

·      Developing readers through genre fiction, literacy programs, children’s story hours, books for immigrants  (English or foreign language). 

LHRT welcomes submissions from researchers of all backgrounds, including students, faculty, and practitioners. Proposals are due by midnight (PST) on 31 January 2016.  Each proposal must give the paper title, an abstract (up to 500 words), and the scholar's one-page curriculum vitae. Also, please indicate whether the research is in-progress or completed. It is desirable that the abstract include a problem or thesis, as well as a statement of significance, objectives, methods/primary sources used for the research, and conclusions (or tentative conclusions for works in progress).

From the submissions, the LHRT Research Committee will select several authors to present their completed work at the Forum.  So that the Forum's facilitator may introduce and react to each author, completed papers are due 12 June 2016. The Research Forum will likely occur on Sunday 26 June 2016. All presenters must register to attend the conference. For registration options, see ALA's events and conferences page at http://www.ala.org/.

DEADLINE FOR PROPOSALS: 31 January 2016

DEADLINE FOR COMPLETED PAPERS: 12 June 2016

Please submit proposals and direct inquiries to:

Ellen Pozzi

LHRT Vice-Chair/Research Committee Chair

William Paterson University

pozzie@wpunj.edu