On Tuesday 9th June, Bournemouth University library was awarded the Times Higher Education (THE) Outstanding Library Team Award. After receiving the award in the evening at the London Hilton Hotel on Park Lane, the winners rushed back to Bournemouth to host SCONUL’s three day conference, which proved to be a second success for the team. During the conference, Chris Spencer, Bournemouth University’s Library Procurement Librarian, discussed with me the reasons for their success. As this announcement outlines, the library has led the way in its introduction of flexible learning spaces with innovative and popular features such as Techno Booths, illustrating Bournemouth’s strength of aligning education with technology. The library balances this focus on learning with a proven commitment to the research community, as the development of BURO, one of the UK’s largest online research repositories, demonstrates.
I was fortunate enough to get the chance to record a podcasting with three members of the library team to discuss their submission to the Outstanding Library Team Award, and it can be accessed here.

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In this podcast, I talk with Martin Lewis, Director of Library Services and University Librarian at the University of Sheffield. We talk about the shortlisting of his team for the Times Higher Education Supplement Outstanding Library Team Award, 2009. Martin describes features of Information Commons (see photo) that have proven particularly popular in the university since its opening two years ago, and we go on to look at developments and plans in place to build on this success. We also discuss the importance of responding actively to feedback from students and working closely with academics. This ensures that the library service meets the evolving needs of University of Sheffield’s two core businesses - learning and teaching on the one hand, and research on the other - and staff within this outstanding library team develop and grow in this dynamic environment.

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In this podcast, I talk with members of the library team of Bournemouth University, which has been shortlisted for the Times Higher Education Supplement Outstanding Library Team Award, 2009. We look behind some of the innovations of this library service, such as the Techno Booths (see photo) which have proven so popular across the university. We discuss how Bournemouth University library’s impressive operational efficiencies have been achieved. And we also explore the thinking behind Bournemouth University library’s success. It’s striking, for example, how the library staff are constantly reaching outward, developing strong relationships and partnerships beyond the library walls, and indeed, beyond the university itself in some cases. Underpinning all this of course is the importance of team work. This is, after all, the award for an outstanding library team. It’s appropriate therefore, that I be joined by not one but three members of the library team, namely:
David Ball - University Librarian
Chris Spencer - Library Procurement Librarian
Jill Beard - Deputy University Librarian

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To find out about OCLC’s move in to providing hosted, Web-scale, Software as a Service functionality for managing libraries, who better to ask than the person responsible for the programme.

Andrew Pace, Executive Director, Networked Library Services has been working on this for the last fifteen months, and as you can hear from our conversation is pleased that he can now talk openly about it.

Our wide ranging conversation takes us from the epiphany moment when Andrew announced he wanted to be a librarian through to the strategic, and architectural decisions behind this significant OCLC initiative.  

Andrew’s answers to my questions add depth and background to the brief details so far released in his blog posts and OCLC’s press releases.

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I first interviewed Peter Brantley, in the Talking with Talis series, in July 2007 about his role in the Digital Library Federation and its place in the world of digital libraries.

In this conversation we look back over the last couple of years at the DLF and then forward in to his new challenge and opportunity at the Internet Archive.

We go on to discuss his thoughts and plans to make it easy to identify books and  information and their locations in a way that is currently not possible with the processes and protocols we use today.

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‡biblios.net  - Is a free service for librarians to create, edit, and share bibliographic records backed by an equally free and open store of over 30 million library records available for all to access, search and download.

LibLime CEO Josh Ferraro joins me in conversation as he launches ‡biblios.net at ALA Midwinter in Denver. 

We explore how this is a really free and open service that has been made possible, not only by technology and open source software, but also by the availability of open data licensing in the form of Open Data Commons.  Josh also explains how the core software behind ‡biblios.net is itself open source.

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My guests for this Talking with Talis podcast demonstrate a great example of how openly sharing data will stimulate innovation.

Last month, Huddersfield University’s Dave Pattern announced that he was sharing usage data derived from circulation transactions held in their Library Management System

I’m very proud to announce that Library Services at the University of Huddersfield has just done something that would have perhaps been unthinkable a few years ago: we’ve just released a major portion of our book circulation and recommendation data under an Open Data Commons/CC0 licence. In total, there’s data for over 80,000 titles derived from a pool of just under 3 million circulation transactions spanning a 13 year period.

Within a matter of days Patrick Murray-John from Mary Washington University had taken a copy of that data, transformed the data to RDF and published it in a Semantic Web form.

In this conversation we explore the motivations behind Dave’s work and the benefits to the sharing process of the Open Data Commons license he chose to release the data under.   Patrick then takes us through how he worked with the data and demonstrated how simple it was to produce and RDF version.

We then explore how the principles demonstrated by their work could be expanded upon to add wide value to the library scene from recommender systems to a sales aid for Universities trying to attract students.

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Tony Hirst, of the Open University Department of Communications and Systems, was recognised at the Online Information Conference 2008 for his work promoting new technologies in education by being presented with a commendation in the IWR Information Professional of the Year Award.

The award took place at the end of the first day of the Online Information Conference 2008.  Earlier in the day Tony delivered a presentation entitled “Course Analytics – using Google Analytics to understand student behaviour in an online Open University course”

I caught up with Tony just after his award  and we retired to a side room to discuss what he had learnt from work with Google Analytics.

Picture of Tony published on Flickr by MrGluSniffer

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Internet Development Specialist and Strategy Guide for the American Library Association, and prolific blogger as The Shifted Librarian, Jenny Levine’s views challenge librarians to look to the future and engage with new technology, the web, and gaming.

In this thoughtful conversation, Online Information Conference Key Speaker, Jenny explores the way libraries should be more open to experimentation, despite the concerns of spending other people’s money to deliver a better service to those people.   Much can be learnt from the wider web about simplicity and planning for a changing environment.  

Jenny also throws out the challenge to those attending the conference for specific questions or topics they would like her to cover in her presentation to get in touch.

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I am joined in this Talking with Talis conversation by two well known OCLC names – Vice President WorldCat and Metadata Services, Karen Calhoun and Senior Programme Officer, Roy Tennant.

There has been much coverage on Panlibus and several other blogs, about the way the recently updated Record Use Policy was announced, the elements of the policy, and its ramifications for the wider library community.

Apart from the need to update and replace the current 21 year old Guidelines, the professed objectives of the new policy is to clarify and increase the possibilities for the sharing and transfer of OCLC records.  From the noise in the blogosphere, it is clear that many do not share that understanding.

Karen published an extensive post on Metalogue providing some background to the policy and its announcement.  I was delighted to share this extensive conversation with Karen and Roy to explore in more depth the intention, details and ramifications of this new policy, due to be implemented in February 2009.

In the conversation, my own questions were supplemented by some submitted by Talking with Talis listeners.  Thank you to those who took the time email me with those suggestions.

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