What are libraries for?

At some time or another over the last decade or so, probably every librarian in the world has asked themselves what the purpose of libraries is, in an internet-equipped world where all the information and literature of the world is available (at least in our imagination) with speed, ease and convenience at our own desk or in our own palm.

A photograph of a medieval library, in a recent article in the Cambridge Alumnus Magazine (Issue 71, pp 28-33), reminded me of how much things have changed. When that library was built, books were so scarce that there was no need for bookshelves: each book had its own reading desk, to which it was chained. There was no question of borrowing books; to read a particular book, you had to travel to a particular library and sit down at a particular desk. There was no presumption that a library's purpose was to make books available; in fact, Umberto Eco in The Name of the Rose only required a slight imaginative twist to conceive of a monastic library actually designed to prevent would-be readers from accessing the books therein.

The huge libraries of the nineteenth and twentieth century were designed in a period in which it seemed an achievable ambition to gather all human knowledge, or a pretty good approximation to it, within the compass of four walls and a very large number of bookshelves. My old university's library was one of the handful in the country designated as "copyright libraries" (the British Library, formerly the British Museum, being the most famous) legally entitled to claim a free copy of every book and periodical published in the UK - a right that even before the advent of the internet was becoming increasingly difficult to exercise.

Now public libraries are re-branding themselves as information resource centres, and librarians spend as much or more time with digital materials as with printed books. At the Open University, where I currently work, and where only a tiny fraction of its students are able to visit the Library in person, the shift to online resources is a natural complement to our distance learning - though it does make the Library building a curiously empty space, with the librarians hidden behind Staff Only doors and the reading desks inhabited by a handful of African research students in need of somewhere to work.

So it was a joy to visit the new Library of Birmingham: a building conceived and designed not just to replace the old Birmingham City Library but to create a new role for itself. No public library is going to compete with the digital resources of the internet, but it can do something which the online environment can't: it can provide a physical space which is a nice place to be. And that the Library of Birmingham has done beautifully. Visiting it on a Sunday afternoon, with my wife and an old friend now a Librarian at the Barber Institute of Fine Arts, we were struck by the number of families enjoying the building: browsing, exploring, having a good time.

From the outside, the building looks like a gold and silver jewellery box, but inside nothing is box-like: the internal walls all seem to be curved, running around like a snail's shell. The only obvious straight lines are the escalators, slicing across the central atrium at jaunty angles. Riding them up to the top of the building is like going on a non-scary theme park ride: vaut le voyage just for the pan-optical views alone. The books are arranged so as to be meaningful and convenient to users, rather than librarians and catalogues: there are books for browsing, the one (mainly fiction) most likely to be borrowed; there are books for finding things out (mainly non-fiction), arranged in radial shelves; and there are books purely for reference (such as the Statutes of England), which most users will never consult but look great on the shelves in their identical bindings and are located where they can best be decorative, as a sort of literary wallpaper.

At the top of the building is an observation deck, with large red sofas in which to relax and look out across the cityscape. There's also the Shakespeare memorial room: an elegant Elizabethan-style wood-panelled room, transported from the original library where it was built in 1882. A stone panel from 1887 cryptically connects the Library to its nineteenth century past and remoter medieval history. There's even a (well-signposted) secret garden. On the ground floor is a cafe, where we rounded out our happy afternoon with tea and cakes.

One of the tests of a library is what unexpected discoveries you make there. My unexpected and unlooked-for discovery, from a facing-out display in the non-fiction section, was a book called Writing for New Media - modern in this context meaning 1998,but still deeply relevant and inspirational in several intriguing chapters on the grammar of interactivity. (I've since ordered the book and will no doubt be posting about it soon.) May all the users of this great new library enjoy, as we did, happy afternoons and serendipitous discoveries.

Why kids learn to use technology quickly

Here's an interesting take on the well-known phenomenon of small children using complex pieces of technology with ease. And it's so obvious that I'm surprised it never occurred to me before, nor have I seen it in any other writing about young people and technology.

I saw it in a passing comment by technology journalist Alex Wiltshire. He was talking about Minecraft, which in case you don't know is a hugely popular game, played either solo or co-operatively online by children as well as adults, though the game was not specifically designed for them. As he observes: "When it first came out everyone was confused as the developer gave little or no guidance. It didn't specifically say you had to cut down a tree to get some wood, whereas games that are produced by big companies give instructions – the last thing they want is for people not to understand how to play. With Minecraft, which had an indie developer, the player had to work things out for themselves."

And here's the key bit. "Because you learn so much when you're young, kids are used to the idea of a world they don't fully understand, so they're comfortable with having to find things out for themselves."

Now this is quite an unexpected way of looking at the phenomenon. We tend to think of kids as having some sort of special technical ability, ascribing it an essentialist explanation such as them being "digital natives" or their brains being wired differently. But of course, as he says, for children >everything< is strange and unknown, and given that kids are able to figure out adults and the rules by which they operate - far more complex than any technology, and far more critical to a child's survival - it should not be surprising that they can cope with a multi-channel television service or an iPad.

This perspective also reminds us that, though we adults may envy kids' facility with technology, it comes at a price: that of living in a world which they don't fully understand and which many things are strange and potentially threatening.

References

Marc Prensky, (2001) "Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants Part 1", On the Horizon, 9 (5), pp 1-6.

Diana G. Oblinger and James L. Oblinger (eds), Educating the Net Generation (Educause, 2005)

David White (2009), "Not ‘Natives’ & ‘Immigrants’ but ‘Visitors’ & ‘Residents’", TALL blog

David S. White and Alison Le Cornu (2011), "Visitors and Residents: A New Typology for Online Engagement" First Monday, 16 (9).

Seen and heard: March 2014

A Bestiary of Jewels - a remarkable artwork created by the jeweller Kevin Coates, consisting of a series of broaches and necklaces mounted in imitation book pages, each one of which is themed around a person and an animal (for example, Flaubert and a parrot, Montaigne and a cat, Charles Ludwig Dodgson and a dodo). Unfortunately the film of the opening of its exhibition at the Ashmolean is not very good, but it does at least show some of the objects, which are actually quite wise as well as witty…

Syberia – iPad version. (See review of original, and "making of" video.) My initial excitement an iPad version of one of my favourite games was tempered by the discovery that (1) the iPad interface doesn't work as well with the gameplay (instead of hotspots becoming visible on mouse rollover, you're only able to have their either On or Off - On and all the surprises and hidden objects aren't surprising or hidden, but Off and you can't see where you're able to move and explore); (2) some of the animation sequences have been shortened (why? how much money can it really have saved?); and (3) it's only the first chapter of the game, the first of four locations. I won't be recommending it to all my friends.

The Last Express - by contrast, this is a really super conversion of a 1997 game, set on the Orient Express in the months before the Great War. There's a tremendous feeling of being in an early Hitchcock movie (The 39 Steps or The Lady Vanishes), as you discover the friend who'd summoned you to join him murdered in his compartment (your first task is to avoid getting arrested for his murder), and you slowly investigate the other travellers on the train (a German "businessman", an Austrian celebrity violinist, a French engineer and his family on their way to an oilfield in the Middle East, a bohemian Frenchwoman and the Englishwoman she''s persuaded to come on a romantic getaway, an elderly Russian count and his daughter, and a posse of Sebian nationalists). Fantastic rotoscoped animation conveys character and response, with very smooth transitions from first-person to third-person view as they character you play enters a cut-scene. A time-based adventure too; characters move between the cars (for example, to have dinner) and you need to be in the right place to overhear the right conversations. Definitely a classic. (See the iOS version trailer, the original trailer, and the Adventure Gamers review.)

Oh Do Shut Up Dear! The Public Voice of Women - London Review of Books lecture by Mary Beard. A proper, old-fashioned lecture; why don't we have more of them on telly? Especially when they're as good as this. Beard, as is well-known, has direct experience of the disturbing and disturbed ways in which men try to get women not to speak in the public sphere, and the classical knowledge to trace it back to the Odyssey where it's presented as part of the adolescent Telemachus' coming of age. But her argument goes beyond her own, or other women's, experience. "We should ... try to bring to the surface the kinds of question we tend to shelve about how we speak in public, why and whose voice fits. What we need is some old fashioned consciousness-raising about what we mean by the voice of authority and how we’ve come to construct it."

Serenade to Music, by Ralph Vaughan Williams – performed by Milton Keynes Sinfonia and Polymnia (in which I sing). Stunning RVW harmonic textures, with words from Shakeapeare’s Merchant of Venice, including this passage expressing his mistrust of anyone who did’nt “get” music: “The man that hath no music in himself, nor is not mov’d with concord of sweet sounds, is fit for treasons, stratagems and spoils;… let no such man be trusted.” Which when you think about it is pretty much the same as Trevor Chaplin’s verdict on the people who can and can't hear the music in Alan Plater’s Beiderbecke Connection (about which I've blogged previously).

The Americans, series 2 - the return of our favourite KGB agents. Now that Philip and Elizabeth’s marriage has stabilized, after he saved her from death at the hands of the FBI in the last season’s final episode, the domestic drama for this season is proving to be the effect of their espionage on the children – especially their far-too-savvy teenage daughter, who is understandably curious about what Mom and Dad get up to at night.

Turks and Caicos - very watchable political thriller by David Hare, with Bill Nighey rivetingly compelling and full of presence as the honest and decent ex-MI5 man seeking obscurity in the titular islands.

W1A - does one laugh or does one cry? For anyone who works in a large organisation, the idiocies of the fictional BBC's PR and senior management are all too familiar, and to see the absurdities blown up on screen is at least a reassurance to us that we're not crazy.

Sacred Body - experiential workshop at Turvey Monastery. A very good day with pschyotherapists Katarina Gadjanski and Hannah Russill, moving back and forth between the triple foci of mind, body and emotion. Leaving behind the dualism of Western philosophy and Pauline theoogy, as Thich Nhat Hanh says: "Only by cultivating a mindful body and an embodied mind can we be fully alive" (Peace of Mind: Becoming Fully Present).

Cuttings: March 2014

If religion exists to make raids into what is unsayable, musicians penetrate further than most - Giles Fraser's "Loose Cannon" column. “The best theologians are musicians. And Christianity is always better sung than said. To the extent that all religion exists to make raids into what is unsayable, the musicians penetrate further than most…. All of which is why it is such a mistake that the church is selling off its best family silver by increasingly cutting its cathedral choirs….This isn't something that ought to be a concern simply for the religious. When the National Gallery seeks to save a painting for the nation, Richard Dawkins doesn't protest that it's a painting of St John or a depiction of the crucifixion – or, at least, I don't think he does. Even those who don't do God generally get the value of cathedral choirs. Let's protect them.”

Hidden hatred: What makes people assassinate their own character online, sometimes driving themselves to suicide? - article in The Independent, referenced in Mind Hacks blog. “Why would anyone post dozens of fake messages of abuse about themselves on a social media website?... In the pantheon of attention-seeking disorders, self-trolling has much in common with self-harming and self-starving….As a therapist, I think we're confronted by people in severe distress feeling insecurely attached to parents, guardians and peers. As a result, mental processing remains juvenile whatever their biological stage. Their sense of personal identity seems fluid, fragile or miscalculated (one reason to denounce yourself in public is to conduct a rather risky opinion poll). Fantasy becomes reality – it's notable that some of the American students in the study came to believe that they'd been trolled for real just because their own words in print said that they had.”

Writing Hyperlinks: Salient, Descriptive, Start with Keyword - article from the Nielsen / Norman Group. “Improve page scannability by using links that are easily noticeable and understandable. First, don’t make users hunt around the page in search for clickable elements. Second, don’t force users to read the text surrounding a link to determine where it leads. This is both time consuming and frustrating. Helpful links are visually distinct from the body text and specific to the page or document that they refer to.”

The perils of feedback - Oliver Burkeman's "This column will change your life" column. “Too many managers muddle three types of feedback, write Stone and Heen: appreciation (praise for accomplishments), coaching (tips for improvement) and evaluation (rating someone's performance, especially relative to others). At the least, they argue, companies using formal reviews should separate those three into different sessions. “

The truth about lobbying: 10 ways big business controls government - article in The Guardian by Tamasin Cave and Andy Rowell. 1. Control the ground. 2. Spin the media. 3. Engineer a following. 4. Buy in credibility. 5. Sponsor a thinktank. 6. Consult your critics. 7. Neutralise the opposition. 8. Control the web. 9. Open the door. 10. And finally…

There and Back Again: A Packet’s Tale. How Does the Internet Work? - video referenced in John Naughten’s Memex 1.1 blog. “The video lets you ride shotgun with a packet of data—one of trillions involved in the trillions of Internet interactions that happen every second. Look deep beneath the surface of the most basic Internet transaction, and follow the packet as it flows from your fingertips, through circuits, wires, and cables, to a host server, and then back again, all in less than a second. “

What's so funny about peace, love and Starship? - Dave Eggers article in The Guardian. “I tried to think of a time when I'd seen so many people so happy all at once.... Most of what we do is wrong, we have to admit this – most of what we do is utterly wrong. We make colossal blunders, then small corrections, then more mistakes, more small corrections. Sometimes we learn, usually we don't. But then every so often we create a little joy. Every so often someone creates a perfect pop song, and then people can come and hear it being played, even in an Native American casino built on land stolen and restolen over and over again, by a band far past its creative prime, simply because if they do, before we are too old to do so, before we all die, before the United States crumbles in on itself, people will forget all our mistakes, national and personal, for a second or two, and will dance our ugly selves stupid."

Visions of the future

As part of the Guardian’s Generation Y series, four authors wrote short-short SF stories about the media of the future. All were dystopian, and interestingly two of the four focused on the issue of personalization (as distinct from customization, see below), taken to the extreme: where you can view only the online content which has been deemed suitable for you, not by some Big Brother central state but the commercial forces of advertising and profiling.

In “News hacking is the new glue sniffing” by Laurie Penny, teenagers gather in a seedy dive to read the news: “not only the news that’s been tailored to their age, interests and background, but any news” - for example, that Tottenham has been under military occupation for two months, which is blocked if you have a London login. They hack the internet service to create open logins, which is a risky pursuit; “companies can and do sue users for loss of potential advertising revenue”.

In “Paper” by James Smythe, a man on the underground is reading his own (digital) Paper, which is feeding him news and gossip about the Oscars ceremony and trying to get him to buy a suit similar to the one worn by one of the actors. He sees a woman reading about an unfolding war on her own Paper, but he can find no trace of it in his own (although he finds “war” occurring in the names of TV shows and films, and a story about a fight between two women on a reality TV show). A message comes up: “Based on your social profile, we have predicted that these will not be interesting to you. Would you like to know more about best actor at last night’s Oscars?”

Generation Y, it seems, has no truck with the happy hippy utopian vision of the internet as a free space for (hedonistically) sexual expression or (politically) democratic protest. Some of us old ‘uns never believed it anyway, but the younger generation sees perhaps more clearly – despite, or perhaps because, being more immersed in online social media – that the digital world replicates all the power structures and social tensions of the physical, though amplified and on a larger scale. Let’s be careful out there, as they used to say in Hill Street Blues.

Note

“Personalisation” and “customisation” are similar and the words are often used interchangeably, but there’s an important distinction. In usual usage, “customisation” is what you, the user, do to select the things you want; for example, you can “customise” the Toolbar in Microsoft Office so that it contains the icons you want to see most frequently. “Personalisation” is the system choosing what to put in front of you, based on what it knows (or thinks it knows) about your and what you want; targeted advertising or, more benignly, Amazon recommendations, are personalisation.

Why do people do postgraduate courses?

I saw a surprising statistic the other day: about the study motivation of postgraduate students. They were given a choice of saying that their motivation was (a) mainly employment / career, (b) mainly personal development, or (c) employment / career and personal development equally important.

Now the result needs to be taken with a large barrel of salt. The main focus of the investigation was something else entirely (about website resources for postgraduate students), and the number of responses was low (42 out of a sample of 300). But there's no obvious non-randomness to the respondents, and the results are (I think) still surprising. These were:

• Employment / career and personal development equally important: 18
• Mainly personal development: 14
• Mainly employment / career: 3

Now would you have guessed that only 3 respondents would say that their motivation was "mainly employment / career"? For several years now, since the UK's new funding regime for HE introduced much higher fees, my university (like others) has been striving to focus courses, qualifications and student support on career advancement, and presumably higher income - on the assumption that that is what will most motivate students and justify their investment in their study. But now I'm starting to doubt this. How can "personal development" really mean so much to postgraduate students that they are prepared to pay so many of thousands of pounds in fees?

Here's a dark thought. Postgraduate students, at least at my university, are overwhelmingly in mid-career, already engaged in professional practice, and one change which has affected professionals in all disciplines over the past decade or so is the increasing buraucratisation of their working lives. Tight performance management, inflexible reporting systems, and management by targets and strategic cascade have all combined to make professional work more like that of a white collar production line, so that it's harder for professionals to keep in touch with the reasons why they entered the profession in the first place. Those who think of themselves as creative in their professional practice find this particularly difficult (as this Dilbert cartoon about management obstruction of creativity illustrates).

Under such circumstances, what does a professional do? Leave and do something else? But usually there are mortgages to pay and children to feed. And most of the time the reasons for doing the job are still visible and salvageable - but they need support outside of anything which the workplace itself provides.

And perhaps that is where postgraduate study comes in: supporting "personal development" in the sense of reaffirming the professional's identity as someone who is good at their calling, who shares core values and standards with other co-professionals, and is more concerned about perfecting their practice than advancement in a management hierarchy, which will usually mean doing less of what they love and doing more of what they hate. So the return on investment for postgraduate study may be not so much about career advancement but career sustenance: not enabling students to get a better job, but to live with the one they have.

Seen and heard: February 2014

Articles and postings

• Dear Mr Gove: here is a manifesto for your education reforms – Michael Rosen’s "Letter from a Curious Parent" column in The Guardian, 4 February 2014. “I would like to offer you and your party a manifesto to help you push on with your education reforms…. . 2. We won't wait for schools or local authorities to decide if schools wish to be academies or not. We will abolish all power that local authorities have over education, apart from dealing with excluded pupils and pupils with special needs. The role of local authority education will be to absorb the pupils who the academies don't want to educate. This will enable academies to improve their exam results, while offering employment opportunities to retired army personnel…. 4. Once all schools are academies, these will continue to be overseen by the secretary of state. To assist him, he will commission firms to compete for the Regional Management of Academies, running the five areas of England. We expect to see reliable market leaders coming from the banking sector, football ownership and security firms with a strong ex-army presence on their boards…. 6. We are aiming for all schools to be above average by the second week of the next government.
• What the Dunning-Kruger effect is and isn’t – [citation needed] [sic!] blog, referenced in Mind Hacks blog. “For reasons I’m not really clear on, the Dunning-Kruger effect seems to be experiencing something of a renaissance over the past few months; it’s everywhere in the blogosphere and media…. the findings reported by Kruger and Dunning are often interpreted to suggest that the less competent people are, the more competent they think they are…. [In fact] the bias is definitively not that incompetent people think they’re better than competent people. Rather, it’s that incompetent people think they’re much better than they actually are. But they typically still don’t think they’re quite as good as people who, you know, actually are good.”  
• Finished that ebook yet? Hang on, sorry, it keeps updating – John Naughton's Observer column 8.2.14 (referenced in his Memex1.1 blog). “A Kindle book, in contrast to a printed work, can be fluid, malleable – fungible almost. In the print world, we are accustomed to the idea of discrete editions of a text. But an ebook [can] have a new edition every month, or indeed every week. For fast-changing subjects (such as information technology) that might be very helpful – in which case the argument for physically printing such texts looks increasingly shaky. It will be amazing if, in 10 years' time, undergraduates will still be lugging round the astonishingly heavy textbooks that weigh down the rucksacks of today's students. For authors, the fact that it will technically be possible continually to update their books may be a mixed blessing. After all, one of the consolations of traditional authorship is that when a book is published, it's finished.”
• Heroin, addiction and free will – Mind Hacks blog. “The death of Phillip Seymour Hoffman has sparked some strong and seemingly contradictory responses. What these reactions show is that many people find it hard to think of addiction as being anything except either a choice or a loss of free will. The fact that addiction could involve an active choice to take drugs but still be utterly irresistible seems difficult for most people to fathom.”
• The Reciprocity Principle: Give Before You Take in Web Design – online article from Nielsen Norman Group. “The reciprocity principle says that people respond in kind to nice behavior. If you want your users to trust you with their information and come back to you repeatedly, plant the reciprocity seed by being nice to them upfront and minimizing their interaction cost. Ask as little of your users as possible. On the web and elsewhere, start by giving before taking, and people will reciprocate.”

Shows and events, books and games

The Monuments Men - film drama about the US Army team charged with locating and rescuing Nazi-looted art treasures during World War II. Nice statement about the importance of art and culture even (especially?) in wartime, and people's willingness to risk (and occasionally give) their lives to protect it. Mirroring the on-screen drama, George Clooney has assembled and directed a crack ensemble cast, including Matt Damon, Hugh Bonneville, Bill Murray, Cate Blanchette, and Jean Dujardin.

To The Moon - unusual adventure game, low on puzzles and high on narrative, in which two "memory-retrieval specialists" attend the bedside of a dying man to run through his life memories and reconstruct them so that he fulfils his desire: to go to the moon.

The Beiderbecke Connection - the final drama from my Christmas present box set, which I never watched to its conclusion when first transmitted in 1988. A beautiful ending, with Trevor and Jill driving off into the sunset with their firstborn, having shared with us the secret of living in a mixed-up world - the trick being to listen to the music, which for Trevor (and scriptwriter Alan Plater) means his beloved jazz. "You do know how to listen don't you?" says Jill. "You put your ears together and..." Shhhh.

Treasures in MK – fun exhibition at Milton Keynes Gallery, of curious and historic artworks and objects from collections near the city, including a couple of Dürers, a set of Hogarths, a beautiful but smug looking Jacobean lady, some plaster busts and cartoons of the Beatles, and an Aston Martin DB4.