The challenge was to sort them into groups and explain why you have chosen to arrange them in this way.

We came up with a variety of ways in which they could be arranged – here are some examples.

Grouped by colour:

Grouped by width: one stud, two studs, more:

Grouped by depth: are they flat or built-up?

All of these answers are valid, as they are supported by rational criteria for grouping the objects.

However, notice that as you group items by one characteristic, you separate them by another, e.g. the brown group has some pieces that are flat, but not all the flat pieces are brown.

In a library example, you could put all fiction books together, but an author may have also written drama or poetry, and so not all of their works will be together.  Similarly, grouping books by year of publication separates them by subject.

Ranganathan’s Fourth Law of Library Science is “save the time of the reader”.  In order to meet the needs of library users effectively, each library must decide how it will arrange its stock: which classification system to use.  The best way to arrange your stock is the way in which your users can most easily find what they are looking for.

For example, my library uses the Dewey Decimal Classification system to arrange books by subject.  This is the most helpful for our readers, who are usually studying one subject and expect all of their resources to be located in one place.

In a closed stack library, users request books from the catalogue which are fetched for them by library staff.  A closed stack library may arrange their stock in order of accession number, meaning that items are arranged from oldest to newest, and this makes efficient use of space.  It doesn’t matter that the books aren’t in order by subject; as the library staff member can locate the book accurately by its accession number.

A fiction library may arrange works by author, and a picture book library by colour.  At home, my non-fiction books are arranged in height order, as this is aesthetically pleasing and encourages serendipitous rediscovery of other things when I am looking for something else.

As in the examples above, when you group items by one characteristic, it is inevitable that you will separate them by another.  However, the most important thing is to choose a system that will help your users, and apply it consistently.

Thanks to my colleagues Nora and Louise who told me about the roles of Plato and Aristotle in the philosophical origins of catagorisation.

As an incentive for ensuring their accounts are up-to-date, I’m offering a “little seasonal thank you” (chocolate Santas from M&S or similar).

I hope this publicity will encourage students to update their accounts, call in at the library office to claim their treats and increase the numbers of Likes/followers on our social media sites.

If you’d like to join in, please Like us or follow us!

The speakers were:

Susanna-Assunta Sansone, Team Leader at the Oxford e-Research Centre Susanna on LinkedIn

Edmund Chamberlain, Systems Development Librarian for Cambridge University Library @edchamberlain

Neil Jefferies, R&D Project Manager at Bodleian Digital Library Systems and Services

Alexander Huber, Metadata Co-ordinator at Bodleian Digital Library Systems and Services

I tweeted from the event using the hashtag #bodmetacat.  In the summary below, I have included contributions from others – attributed by their Twitter IDs.

Susanna Sansone: Using metadata for keeping track of scientific research on the web

• Make experiments reusable by sharing the methods and results – use metadata to make them discoverable
• Challenges: volume of info, free text descriptions (natural language), Babel of terminologies, heterogeneous file formats
• Need standards: reporting descriptions, controlled vocabularies, common exchange formats
• Problem of too many standards in bioscience – need harmonisation
• Examples: standards being developed for describing genes, genomes, proteins… (@addedentry “Standards are good – that’s why there are so many of them.”)
• Remits vary, as does degree of interaction with journals, funders, commercial sector. Dynamic but fragile environment
• biosharing.org – coherent, curated and searchable catalogue of data standards, rated by usability and popularity (not quality)
• Simplicity is good, but it is not simple
• @addedentry Sticks and carrots for using standards: funding council requirements versus career benefits of citation & exposure

Ed Chamberlain

• The way libraries used to manage data involved having a lot of control over its creation, consumption, environment, technology
• Closed ecosystem = recipe for success (expensive?)
• Then the Internet happened – challenge to library systems and its authority over data
• Library response so far includes evolution of catalogue & change in interfaces.  Is the OPAC dead?
• Catalogue data now consumed as keywords, faceted, supplemented, transformed, merged, amalgamated
• “The best thing to do with your data will be thought of by someone else” – Rufus Pollock
• discovery.ac.uk “Towards a thriving metadata ecosystem” – JISC initiative to get galleries, libraries, archives and museums sharing data
• @addedentry Cambridge let search engines crawl their catalogue records. Google has now indexed 10% (500,000)
• Linked bibliographic data – Cambridge’s work with Library of Congress, British Library and OCLC
• @addedentry COMET = Cambridge Open Metadata (data.lib.cam.ac.uk) converted catalogue records to RDF
• Who else is experimenting with linked data? Wikipedia, British Library, Europeana, British Museum, The National Archives, Library of Congress, Open University; national libraries in France, Finland, Sweden, Hungary and others – thanks @ostephens for additions to this list
• openbiblio.net Open Bibliography Project
• Creative Commons licences: @addedentry Cambridge using PDDL; Europeana and BNB using CC0; OCLC looking at CC-BY. I understand Oxford is on the way…
• Vendors aim to profit from services based on data rather than data for its own sake?
• Have to learn to be a cataloguer before developing scripts dealing with catalogue data
• No LMS vendor is going forward with MARC21 as internal container for data
• “No one will want to play with us if we cannot learn to share”

Neil Jefferies

• Changing nature of intellectual discourse: artefacts, timescale, interdisciplinary, collaboration
• Digital outputs: shift to born-digital content, publication not necessarily primary outcome, no “thing” to deposit
• @addedentry Metadata is data in its own right – example of historical correspondence networks as a primary source
• Emergent data model – not metadata, this information is important in its own right
• @addedentry Cultures of Knowledge - cf Darwin Correspondence Project at Cambridge
• @ostephens there is no meta, just data
• @addedentry Interest in capturing uncertainty – not removing it – in catalogue records (e.g. disputed authorship)
• @addedentry “Sheer curation”: minimal processing in storing digital objects
• @addedentry “Today’s standards are tomorrow’s legacy issues”

My top tweet of the day:

A short history of remote or off-campus access

Eduserv developed the Athens system for remote access to e-resources.  It worked as a list of usernames and passwords hosted by Eduserv, and it allowed off-campus access without the need for VPN (which would authenticate the user via IP address).  VPN installation is not always easy (Mac users?) or possible (people in internet cafes or other places where they can’t download software onto the computer they’re using), and so was a great leap forward.

However, it was costly: JISC funded Athens access for UK higher education institutions and publishers also had to pay for it to work with their products.  JISC funded the access via Eduserv, but Athens was not a JISC product.

More recently, Shibboleth was developed as an open source software solution for web single sign-on for organisations, so it is free to use for both institutions and publishers.  In July 2008, JISC withdrew funding for Athens and started up their own access management organisation, The UK Access Management Federation.  Athens authentication continues to exist and is available on a subscription basis.

Hardly any US-based publishers (e.g. Highwire) used Athens, so switching to Shibboleth authentication meant that a wider range of resources was available off-campus than ever before.

Shibboleth is the technology that underlies our Oxford SSO (single sign-on) system.

What is EZproxy and how does it work with SSO?

EZproxy is another tool for remote access and it works by mimicking the Oxford IP range (like VPN):

EZproxy helps provide users with remote access to Web-based licensed content offered by libraries. It is middleware that authenticates library users against local authentication systems and provides remote access to licensed content based on the user’s authorization

Many e-journals and databases work with “Shibbolised” EZproxy, in which the proxy server is accessed via SSO.  The user is authenticated via SSO and then access to the proxy server is enabled, allows access to the resource via IP address authentication.  This means that IP-authenticated resources which aren’t SSO-compliant can be accessed off-campus using SSO via Shibbolised EZproxy.

E-resources access and walk-in users

EZproxy doesn’t kick in on-campus, so IP-authenticated resources allow walk-in user access.  In universities, walk-in users are visiting scholars or people with reader access who are not members of the University, and do not have SSO accounts.

Some publishers (usually in the legal or business fields) do not want to allow walk-in user access to their resources, so they require SSO authentication even on-campus.  Shibboleth access is secure and also gives them log files of user activity, so they can trace anyone they suspect of breaking the terms of their licence, for example by systematic downloading of their content.

Usernames and passwords

A few publishers still rely on username and password authentication based on usernames that they issue.  Typically, these are legal databases whose business model involves selling access to a few people at a variety of institutions in the commercial sector, and so they are not set up for other authentication methods.

These usernames and passwords are then stored on an SSO-protected website, such as Weblearn, our university’s virtual learning environment.

Other advantages of SSO over Athens

SSO provides more up-to-date authentication, as it retrieves user information from the identity provider each time access is requested.  The usernames and passwords hosted by Eduserv were only updated every month or so, so someone who had previously been a member of the University would often still be able to access resources for some time after they left.  SSO permissions can be finely tuned so that a student will lose their e-resources access immediately after finishing their course, but retain SSO access to their email until several months later.  Users are more aware of the value of their SSO, since it lets them in to so many services, and are less likely to share (or sell) it to other (non-University) people.  This had been a problem in the past with Athens usernames and passwords.

How Shibboleth works

The aim of a single sign-on system is to be able to access multiple resources with a single identity.  A variety of service providers (SPs, such as e-resources publishers) can sign up to work with Shibboleth, and a range of identity providers (IdPs, such as universities) can have users’ accounts verified by Shibboleth:

Shibboleth acts as a mediator between the services and the users (with different identities, affiliations and levels of permissions).  Therefore, when you access ScienceDirect via SSO, Shibboleth checks who you are and details about the service you are trying to access.  If it can identify you as a member of the University of Oxford and verify that the University has a current subscription to ScienceDirect, it will allow you access.

To reward you for reading this far, here’s a gory story about where the term shibboleth comes from.

What are e-resources?

E-resources are also known as electronic resources and there are two main types: e-journals (or electronic journals) and databases.

Many e-journals are digital copies of print journal articles, but increasingly e-journal articles are published without a print analogue.

There are several kinds of databases

• Bibliographic – this type of database is a collection of references to published literature.  It functions in a similar way to a library catalogue, but indexes details of articles rather than books
• A&I (abstracting and indexing) – in addition to bibliographic details, this type of database also contains abstracts of the individual articles
• Full text – a database which includes the full text of all the articles it has indexed
• Data/statistics – a collection of numbers and facts which you can query in order to extract a particular dataset.  A database in the purest sense of the word.
• Images – a database containing a searchable index of images and the images themselves

What does full text mean?  Full text refers to an e-resources that makes available online the whole contents of journal articles, not just the abstract or citation.  Full text articles are often subscription resources, requiring an individual or institutional account for access.

What is an abstract?  An abstract is a summary of a journal article, often published at the beginning of the article.

What is a platform? A platform is a website which hosts content or programs.  Examples include JSTOR and ISI Web of Knowledge (which hosts a number of databases including, confusingly, Web of Science).

What is SFX?  SFX is an OpenURL link resolver, which works by compiling a list of all the journals to which an institution (such as a university) is subscribed and linking to that content.  Primarily, it functions to allow you to search an institution’s subscriptions to see if you can access a particular e-journal, and which years are included in the subscription.  At Oxford University, SFX is locally branded as OU eJournals and is one of a number of resources whose contents are searchable via SOLO.

What is MetaLib?  MetaLib is a search system which allows you to search for resources, link to them, and (in some cases) search within them.  This is not possible for all resources, as they need to be compliant with a protocol called Z39.50 in order to be searchable.  At Oxford University, MetaLib is locally branded as OxLIP+ and is one of a number of resources whose contents are searchable via SOLO.

What is a paywall?  A paywall is a barrier to a website which requires you to authenticate to view the content.  Usually, this requires a paid subscription.  An important implication of this is that any content behind a paywall is not indexable by search engines and therefore will not appear in the search results.  Not everything on the Internet is known to Google.

There are several methods of authentication

Internet Protocol (IP) – the IP address of your computer identifies where you are in the world, and is also used by sites like BBC iPlayer which use your IP address to check which country you are in.  If you are using the university’s computing facilities on campus, the computer you’re using will have an IP address within the university’s main range, which is detected by the e-resource you are trying to reach and access will be granted.  Working “off-campus” means that you are off the university network, perhaps using your own laptop in a university library or working from your own home.  This means that your computer’s IP address is not within the institution’s IP range and you will need a different method of access.  VPN software is commonly used to solve this issue and it works by extending the institution’s network to your computer, thereby bringing it into its IP range.

Want to find out your IP address?  Just go to whatismyipaddress.com

Single sign-on (SSO) – logging in via SSO identifies you as a member of an institution (such as a university) and therefore allows you access.  A great advantage of SSO login is that your authentication can be pushed from one site to another via your browser, so you don’t have to keep logging in when you go to a different subscription site that accepts SSO authentication.

Username and password – the old school method.  Nowadays, this only really applies to a small number of really expensive resources, where tight budgets or low demand mean that a several-user subscription than whole-campus access has been purchased.  There may only be (for example) 5 usernames and passwords for the resource, and if all 5 are in use, you will need to wait until someone has logged out so that you can use that ID to log in afresh.

Also good to know

What is a session identifier?  Session IDs or tokens are commonly used in online shopping sites and data/statistics databases.  These types of sites combine a variety of information to produce the page you are viewing, rather than retrieving a pre-prepared HTML page.  The session ID is used to track the individual user’s actions during the course of their session on the site.  Your shopping cart contents or dataset only exists because you have selected and combined certain elements during the session, which will time out after an order is finalised, or the user logs out, or after a period of inactivity.

URLs which contain “session” or “sid” indicate a session ID, and are not persistent.  If you are attempting to link to a resource, check the URL: if it contains a session ID, the URL will not work when someone tries to follow it later on because the session will have timed out.

Some e-resources have embargoes which are periods during which access is not allowed (usually to protect the publishers’ interests, or in JSTOR’s words “protect the economic sustainability of our content providers”).  There are several types of embargo:

• A rolling or moving wall – a fixed period of months or years.   For example, most journals in JSTOR have an embargo of 3 or 5 years, and as a new issue is published, its equivalent from 3 or 5 years before will become available on JSTOR.
• An annual cycle – for example, all content before 1^st January of this year is available.  This will add another year to the archive on 1^st January of each year
• A fixed date – for example, only content before 2005 is available

If you’re carrying out research in your subject area, make sure you don’t rely exclusively on resources with embargoes, as you will be missing current and recent material.

E-resources and copyright – keep your use legal!

Most e-resources publishers have a ‘fair dealing’ arrangement which allows you to print or save one article per journal issue.  Downloading an article happens when you view the article on screen, not just if you save it.  Please be aware that systematic downloading is not permitted under fair dealing arrangements and may compromise your institution’s access to the resource.  Also, remember that your access to e-resources is for your own research and learning only, and you may not email pdfs or other downloaded documents to anyone outside your institution.

See also: E-Resources – less frequently asked questions for the next part of the story…

• Bodleian Libraries (including the Bodleian Library)
• Faculty and Departmental libraries
• College libraries

Each library has its own rules, opening hours and lending practices.  This guide will give you a brief overview.  For specific enquiries, please read the relevant library’s homepage (where you will also find their contact details).

1. Which libraries may I use?

If you are a member of the University, you may usually access your own College library, your departmental/faculty library and the Bodleian Library.  Your registration at the Bodleian Library is normally automated, but you may need to register when you first visit one of the other libraries.

As well as providing resources for learning and research in different subject areas, different libraries also have a variety of study spaces which you can explore and find out where you work best.

2. Where are the libraries?

Please refer to this map of all the libraries of the University of Oxford

3. When are my libraries open and how can I contact them?

Start with this list of all the libraries at the University of Oxford which links to information about them and their websites (where applicable).  Please follow these links to find the opening hours and contact details for each library.

4. What if I have a disability?

The Bodleian Libraries have compiled information about library access and accessibility resources such as assistive technology for visitors with a disability.  Other libraries may have such information on their websites (please see 3 above) or you may contact them directly to enquire.

5. How do I find library material?

SOLO is the search interface to the library catalogues used by most of the libraries at the University.  Please refer to this guide to SOLO for help with searching the interface.

6. How many books may I borrow?

It depends on the individual library, and some libraries at Oxford are reference only and do not allow anyone to borrow from them.  You can see all the items you have on loan from libraries which use SOLO via the ‘My Account’ option on SOLO.  Help is also available in the guide to SOLO, under the “Renewals & your account” tab.

Whether and how you are allowed to renew an item will depend on the individual library. If online renewals are allowed you can carry these out whenever you see the option to login to ‘your account’ on SOLO.

7. What about fines?

All Oxford libraries set their own fines and fine rules. The best way to avoid them is to make sure you know the rules and get your books back on time!  Many libraries will send you automatic reminders via email.

8. How do I photocopy?

All libraries will have different procedures for photocopying .The Bodleian Libraries have a system called PCAS and here is a guide to the PCAS copying system.

Don’t forget that it is your responsibility to make sure you stay within the law when making copies.  Please see the Bodleian Libraries’ copyright FAQ for further information.

9. How do I find e-resources?

E-resources can be found by searching on SOLO.  They are also listed on OxLIP+ (for databases) and OU eJournals (for e-journals).

10. How do I get connected to the internet?

Access to the University’s wireless networks (OWL and eduroam) is available in many of the libraries in the University.  Here is a list of Bodleian Libraries reading rooms with wireless access.

I was fortunate that the timing of cpd23 coincided neatly with preparing my CILIP Chartership portfolio.  As well as my blog posts, my portfolio was the major outcome of my reflective practice this summer/winter (depending on your hemisphere).

Thoughts about the cpd23 journey

It was loooooooong. Not just completing each Thing, but just reading the instructions each week came to be a bit of a task in itself.  If you’re planning a 23 Things programme of any sort, I advise keeping the posts for each Thing short and sweet, and give clear actions at the end of each one.

Focus on reflection.  I found this difficult, but I know/hope it’s good for me.  If you haven’t yet done a personal SWOT analysis, try this guide from Mindtools to help you get started.

I will definitely keep blogging!  Thanks for reading

Summary of posts for each cpd23 Thing

21, 22 Applying for jobs and volunteering to get experience

20 Library careers: routes in and what does this type of work actually involve?

19 Integration, integration, integration

18 Presenting: podcasts, screencasts and the like

17 Presenting with Prezi

16 Library advocacy

15 Events: attending, presenting at and organising

14 Comparison of reference management tools

13 Google Docs, Wikis and Dropbox

12 Thing 12: short and sweet for catch-up week

10, 11 Librarianship as a career

8, 9 Getting organised: Google Calendar and Evernote

7 My involvement in professional organisations

6 Online networks

5 Minutes and agendas

4 Current awareness using social media

3 Monitoring my personal brand on the web

1, 2 Starting out with 23 Things for Continuing Professional Development

Thing 21 is all about promoting yourself in job applications and at interview. Although I have quite a lot of experience of these processes, I found that I wasn’t comfortable with the idea of publishing these details on the web (as laid out in the Thing 21 instructions).

Recently, I had a similar experience with my Chartership portfolio.  When you submit your portfolio for assessement, you are asked if you are willing to make your document available for others to see.  I opted out of that because I felt that some parts of my portfolio, especially my personal SWOT analysis, were things I wanted to keep private (or at least limit the audience to just my assessors!).

However, I promise that I am doing things like constantly revising my CV and I hope this will satisfy the requirements for this Thing!

Thing 22 encourages us to consider the value of volunteering to get experience.  At this stage of my career, I think this has evolved from volunteering to do library work without pay to offering to take on further professional duties such as serving on committees and working groups.

I am currently involved in committees such as the Oxford Libraries’ Web 2.0 Working Party, an Aleph working party which is involved in fine-tuning some circulation settings on our new ILS following its launch in July, the Committee of College Librarians and the University of Oxford LGBT Steering Group.

I like being involved in groups and activities that broaden my professional awareness beyond the horizons of my own workplace. I think this is especially important in a federal organisation such as the University of Oxford.

I participated in the Library Routes project in 2009:

Library Routes – How I became a librarian

I have taken part in the Library “Day in the Life” project twice.  Many people blog, tweet or otherwise record their day in terms of how long they spent answering emails etc, but I wanted to take a difference approach in which I blogged about a specific aspect of my job each day.

Round 5, July 2010

Welcome to Laura’s Dark Archive! - in which I launched this blog, described my current role and explained my route into working in libraries

In print or on screen? Investigating the reading habits of undergraduates using photo-interviews - the summary of a presentation I had attended

Library Day in the Life round 5, day 1 - on the theme of  ”what else do librarians do all day?”

Visit from another college librarian - explaining the context of the library I work in and the importance of professional networking with colleagues from other libraries

Collection management - outlining the balance between acquisitions coming into the library and the need to weed the collections

Project Management - describing the various projects I had on the go in the library that summer and how their timescales fitted together

“Chips and Mash” Mashed Libraries event, Huddersfield, 30th July 2010 - summarising an event I had attended

Round 6 – January 2011

Gather ye data while ye may - to highlight the importance of data gathering and monitoring

Library Committee - explaining the formal meetings I have each term in which library policies and procedures are ratified or changed

One-to-one meetings - to highlight the importance of my role as a manager within my job

Knowledge capture - explaining the importance of shared information in any team

Philip Pullman adds his voice to the campaign to defend public libraries - libraries in the news

Top tips for getting things done - some advice for how to work efficiently

Thoughts

I don’t think my path into librarianship was unusual: there is quite a lot of cross-pollination between careers in libraries and education – but I find that I am unusual in having a background in science.

If you’re considering a career in libraries, try to offer as wide a range of skills as you can.  Customer service is important, as are numeracy and skills in strategy, analysis and planning.  Being a manager of other people is a part of most jobs above a certain grade level, and it’s a great opportunity for your own development too.  I would like to see more people coming into the profession with a positive attitude to one day being a manager.