• More than 95% of all the respondents maintained a Web site;
• Apart from email, instant messaging is the most used (46%) tool for internal communications amongst Digital SMEs;
• Over 40% of Digital SMEs use Skype for communicating with clients and suppliers;
• Digital SMEs are active in their use of Web services such as Facebook, LinkedIn and blogs as tools for marketing their services;
• Digital SMEs are approximately 4 times as likely to use blogs and wikis for communicating with clients and suppliers than the group, All SMEs.

You can download a PDF copy (600kb) of the executive summary from the link below:

http://www.coldlime.com/SMEWebSurveyJul08.pdf

We were not the only LIHG members contributing, Peter Hoare, formerly the Librarian of the University of Nottingham spoke about libraries for the English visitors to Florence and Sarah Bromage from the Sapphire Project based at Napier University in Edinburgh spoke about her work on the Wayzgoose Project.

yes, it can only be … University Challenge. This year we are very pleased that a team from Brighton University has made it through to the televised stages of the competition. Filiming will take place in Manchester in June. And, what is a quiz team without a librarian? One of our current MA Information Studies students, Beth Hewitt, has been selected for the University of Brighton’s team. Beth (pictured) says: ‘Having already demonstrated enough knowledge of Botticelli, swill buckets and Paris Hilton to have passed the auditions ,the team will be going to Manchester on the 21st June to take part in filming. It’s been an ambition of mine to go on the show for a long time so it is incredibly exciting to be finally doing it. It is also terrifying(!) I’m just hoping all those years of pub quizzes will finally pay off…’

We wish Beth, and the other team members (Stephen Blenkin (Captain), Ben Jordan and Jolyon Dales) the very best of luck.

For the Web 2.0 session on Thursday I made a short presentation (download slides HERE) and then sat on a panel with Sue Hill of Sue Hill Recruitment. Sue’s presentation was particularly interesting as she confessed to knowing next to nothing about Web 2.0 several weeks before but had become very interested in it while doing research for the session. She informed us that her company would be experimenting with blogs, RSS feeds etc over the coming months and using them to help share knowledge internally as well as promote their services externally.

On Friday morning I gave a presentation titled “The Future of Information Work: developing university courses” (download slides HERE). This was based on my experiences of working in the development of new courses at our university as well as my broader observations about possible future directions for the provision of university courses and the profession in general.

BIALL is certainly a dynamic group of library and information professionals and I hope to keep in touch with some of the people I met there.

To quote my own article:

‘Practitioners, why don’t you ask researchers to help you find solutions in the same way you might ask a colleague? Can you really afford not to engage with research and the wider debates and demand to be treated as a professional?

Researchers, what is wrong with seeking out practitioners in the same way you seek out fellow researchers to discuss your research and test ideas? Can you really afford not to disseminate your ideas and research results as widely as possible?

National organisations, we need a co-ordinated research policy and strategy, which emphasises relevance to practitioners as one of the criteria for funding research, and sends out a key message to the profession and the wider world: without a thriving research culture, we will not become a thriving profession. ‘

This is not to say that there are not some excellent examples of good practice out there - some academics are highly committed to multiple forms of dissemination, and some practitioners not only find time to research, but ensure they publish it too. Organisations like the Library and Information Research Group (of which I have been a committee member since 2001) do a lot of good work in promoting academic/practitioner partnerships and research in all its forms (for example, the student prize for best dissertation, and the LIRG Research Award). However, what emerged (again) at the SINTO Member’s Day was the lack of co-ordinated, national leadership in this area. This issue is being taken forward by LIRG and a number of other organisations. This is a continuation of the discussions initiated by the British Library, at the seminar they organised in November 2007, papers from which were published in a Special edition of LIRG’s open access journal, Library and Information Research.

The other keynote speaker was Ian Rowlands, from UCL, one of the researchers on the JISC/BL study into the ‘Google generation’. What particularly struck me from Ian’s talk was the finding from a market research study that (contrary to popular rhetoric, though in line with similar results emerging from a variety of research) only 20% of this generation are ‘wired up’, with 60% designated as ‘average Jo/es’, and another 20% have already become ‘digital dissidents’ (possibly in reaction to their ‘Crackberry’ - first time I’d heard the phrase - parents). This seems to me to be highly significant, and a potential warning for those developing services and policy on the back of the rhetoric, rather than the research.

Which brings me full circle, to the need for research to support library theory, policy, and practice. It’s nice to see that the Public Library Group conference, currently hotly debating issues of leadership and governance, has apparently highlighted the need for research and evidence to support practice, according to the Out of the Stacks blogger, Abigail Luthmann, who won a sponsored place to the conference this year, and is a former graduate of our MA Information Studies degree (shameless plug!).

The Members day was rounded up nicely by two excellent presentations on current research - firstly, by Lix Brewster who has just won the SINTO Bob Usherwood Prize, awarded to a student at the University of Sheffield, for the ‘postgraduate dissertation that makes a significant contribution to improving professional practice or understanding related to co-operation and partnership working across sectors in the SINTO area’. This is another good example of promoting practice-focused research. Liz won the prize for her work, Medicine for the Soul: bibliotherapy and the public library. The study investigates the experience of bibliotherapy in the public library from the staff perspective. A PDF file of this dissertation is available from Sheffield University’s database of student dissertations. Bob himself (who always showed exemplary practice in disseminating his own research and has been a long-standing contributor and champion of this issue) was chairing the day. Secondly, two enthusiastic and committed information advisors from Sheffield Hallam’s Learning Centre presented the results of their work introducing information literacy skills to first year undergraduates - and promptly got badgered by Bob and myself about when and where they were intending to publish it…

To round up the day, a panel discussion attempted to debate some of the issues raised - not terribly successfully, but there was definite support for national leadership in this area. As happens so often, I did not feel terribly inspired or confident about an imminent change of culture, but I did leave Sheffield cheerful (as I always do when I get out of the office and chat to colleagues about research), and with an emerging research idea…

Today saw the official opening of the National Chess Library at University Centre Hastings (UCH). The collection was officially opened by Charles Clarke, MP, whose father, Sir Richard Clarke, donated his private collection of chess books to the British Chess Federation (now the English Chess Federation), to start the National Chess Library.

Part of the afternoon’s events included the presentation of the Special Libraries Association (SLA) Europe award for the best student dissertation to Francess Warrell, who undertook research for her Masters dissertation into marketing of the collection. Frances completed her MA Information Studies at the University of Brighton last year, and has gone on to take up a post at the National Art Library at the Victoria and Albert Museum (see posting April 15th).

Frances is pictured below, with her dissertation supervisor, Dr. Nicola Smith, who teaches on the MAIS course in Brighton and is leading the Community History strand on the Joint Honours programme offered by UCH which will run for the first time this September (currently available as Joint Honours with Sociology or Joint Honours with English Literature). Details of all courses available at UCH are available here.

Also pictured below, (flourishing their wands and playing with a Harry Potter chess set), are Margaret Wallis, Head of Co-ordination and Development at UCH, and Sarah Eatwell, UCH Information Services Manager.

One of our undergraduate library students, Ellen Waters, was one of the students highly commended in the 2008 essay competition, “What makes a good lecturer?” hosted by the Higher Education Academy - Subject Centre for Information and Computer Sciences. As well as suggesting the above requirements, Ellen’s essay provided a very well written and informative reflection on the good (and poor) experiences she has had during her three years here. Other aspects she identifies include: ‘the ability to make their subject interesting and memorable; the ability to relate the subject to current issues; and lecturers need to ensure their presentation skills, and preferably their presentations, are attention-grabbing and memorable.’

Details on the winners and the competition can be found at the HEA-ICS website here.

Ellen has just finished her degree with us and has already secured a job as a Property Information Officer. We wish her the best of luck, and thank her for all her contributions as a student with us.

I’d not been to York for about 10 years and the visit also gave me the opportunity for a bit of bookshop browsing. If you’re thinking of visiting York I can recommend the Bar Convent as a very pleasant, central and inexpensive place to stay.

The LIHG have a new chair, Toni Weller and it’s Toni’s aim and that of the rest of us on the committee to raise awareness of library and information history and increase the membership of the LIHG. It’s with this in mind that several us are participating at the forthcoming SHARP (Society for the History of Readership and Publishing) Conference at Oxford Brooks University in June. I’m part of a panel with Toni and Lauren Christos from the FFlorida International University. The conference theme is Teaching and Text and my paper is Librarians and the intellectual ministry: public librarians as public educators, 1890-1925. Toni will be speaking on the use of etiquette books by the aspirant middle classes and Lauren on the role of travelling libraries in the American West. Other LIHG members will contributing papers on travel guides and the social life of Edinburgh printers. 

 The SLA Europe are currently sponsoring a number of student awards at LIS departments around the UK; this is the second year the prize has been awarded. Last year’s winner, Ben Bose (see posting from May 2007) has gone on to work with a local company, icrossing (formerly spannerworks).

For more information visit:

http://www.brighton.ac.uk/cmis/news/2008/mar6-pgdropin.php

For a map of how to find our campus visit:

http://www.brighton.ac.uk/cmis/maps/moulsecoomb.php?PageId=603

I hope you are able to come and see us.