Reinventing the wheel

I noticed an advert on the TV during the summer, and while watching it, I found myself becoming increasingly more irritated by its content as it went on. Then, not long after that, I saw another advert along the same lines, for the same group. I was reminded of my reaction to viewing those adverts last weekend, when I attended Library Camp Glasgow. One of the sessions I took part in covered advocacy, and what can we do to better promote the profession. The existence of these adverts is evidence of, to me, why we need to continue to work hard to show the wider public that “librarian” does not (and never has) equal “timid person who stamps books and says shhhh a lot”.

So, this is one of the adverts that so annoyed me, for Barclays Digital Eagles:

https://youtube.googleapis.com/v/7hG6c_mz6JQ&source=uds

Now, I’m not disputing the fact that the concept is great: Barclays are funding people specifically to assist those who don’t have the skills needed to make full use of the internet, and the many opportunities it offers. This is an excellent thing to be doing, and will certainly help those that most need support to get online. It’s fabulous, and a great thing for Barclays to fund!

But this is where I get frustrated with the initiative. Did nobody at Barclays realise that an infrastructure to support these activities, and experienced staff were already available…in public libraries? Is there such a low awareness of what public libraries offer that not one single person involved in this campaign at any point stopped to think “Hey, you know what? Rather than reinventing the wheel…why don’t we provide the funding to public libraries to allow them to have a dedicated information skills member of staff to be a Digital Eagle? We’d still get the excellent PR of our name being associated with something that’s being done for the good of others, but we wouldn’t have the problems of creating a whole new system, and having to make space in our branches for this initiative.”

Nope. This idea didn’t occur to anyone, apparently.

I can understand that there’s probably an element of a corporate desire to get people into the Barclays branches, in order to eventually persuade them to become Barclays customers, but surely the conversion rate of “came in to be shown how to use a computer” to “being suddenly inspired to switch bank accounts” must be so low that the cost of the areas being used for Digital Eagles activities must far outweigh the commercial benefit?

The coverage and reach of this service certainly isn’t anywhere near as good as the public library service – if I wanted to go to one of their “Tea and Teach” sessions, I’d need to go to…Aberdeen. That’s the only place in Scotland that provides this service. There was an event there on the 6th of November, held between 10am and 3pm, which as a working adult, means that the Digital Eagles service and support is totally unavailable to me. Yet if I wanted to pick up computer skills via a public library, I could go to Edinburgh City Libraries, and use their Adult Learner facilities, which include an online computer skills programme. Library staff would be on hand during evenings and the weekend to assist me to get access to these resources, so I could fit in access around my working life. Unfortunately, the public library staff available to help me don’t have the time or resources to give the more intensive support I’d need as a person with minimal or no computer skills. Surely this is where the Digital Eagles should be: where people are already going, looking for help? The public library is where the public are used to coming for assistance with a wide range of information needs, and although library staff are not there to teach information skills, they nonetheless do end up squeezing them into their days, as an unpaid, unofficial additional responsibility. It would have been far more effective, in both cost and PR terms, to have given the funding used for the Digital Eagles programme to local authorities, ring fenced to be used to fund equivalent roles, in public libraries.

So Barclays: your Digital Eagles are a good idea, but wouldn’t they be an even better idea if they were in libraries?

Fighting for access

This is a follow up to my post on Open Access in May.

A few times recently in work, I’ve been asked if there’s a publicly accessible version of an academic article available. This wasn’t because we wanted to get a hold of a copy of the articles: we already had them through our subscription services, and the solicitors had read them. What the solicitors were wanting was a free, public version of the article, which they could direct clients and other contacts to, saying “read this, it’s important/relevant/well written”. They wanted to highlight that the content of the article was useful, and that the author was a reliable and authoritative source.

Sadly, I wasn’t able to get a hold of a copy of any of these articles, because the authors hadn’t deposited a copy of their work into their institutional repositories. That meant that the solicitors couldn’t direct their clients and contacts to read the useful materials written by those authors, and the authors missed the opportunity for their work to be publicised more widely, and for their name to be associated with peer approval.

So please, authors: if you write it, deposit it! Open Access is for YOUR benefit just as much as ours!

Taking the fun out of LinkedIn

I think it’s almost standard now that most types of professionals these days have a LinkedIn profile. It effectively works as an online CV, allowing contacts to easily review your skills and experience, and lets you gather many disparate facts about you into one place, such as your non-work skills and experience.

One element of the LinkedIn offering is that colleagues and contacts can “endorse” your skills, allowing you to build up a list of your abilities that have been verified by others. On the face of it, this is a handy option – people who know you and your skills are able to vouch for you, and allow others to get an unbiased view of what you can actually do. Skills would be selected from a pre-approved range of options. It all sounds sensible, and useful.

However, the reality was a little different in practice. It turned out, those pre-defined options were actually quite wide ranging. And in some cases, somewhat odd. I’ve attached a screenshot of the current endorsements I have, that are waiting for me to approve them before they go on my profile (endorsements for a skill you’ve not been endorsed for previously seem to have to be approved by you before they’ll show on your profile…thankfully). As you can see, there are some very strange skills you can be endorsed for, albeit they’re relevant in their sector. And there are some very strange skills, full stop.

Personally, I’m proudest of my “Murder” endorsement. I could tell you how I got it….but then I’d have to kill you….although “Breathing” is a close second favourite.
The endorsements above are the result of an endorsement war that myself and a few friends launched when we realised that there were such odd options available. We went all out to find silly skills, and endorse each other for them, and laughed ourselves silly when we found a new, obscure skill for each other.

So, in the end, the Skills section of LinkedIn became so easy to mess with that those endorsements were irrelevant. And it appears that at some point recently, LinkedIn realised that. This week, I went to endorse a new contact for “Library”. This is my favourite pointless endorsement, as it’s a skill that looks like it’s real, but in reality it’s utter nonsense. Imagine the conversation:

“What are you good at, I was going to endorse you for your skills on LinkedIn, but I wanted to be sure they were ones you agreed you had a strength in. It suggests I endorse you for Library. Are you good at Library?”
“Oh yes, I Library really good. Of all the people who can Library, I am the best at Library, I can assure you. When my peers think of others in the profession who can Library, their thoughts immediately turn to me as an outstanding Library-er.”

So, needless to say, I wanted others to know that she was good at Library. But…it’s GONE! As are the other fun endorsements. No more Murder. No more Cucumber. No more Breathing.

Dagnammit, LinkedIn went and took the only fun bit out of having an online CV!