Libraries without Walls 7: Exploring “Anywhere, Anytime” Delivery of Library Services: Proceedings of an International Conference held on 14‐18 September 2007, organised by the Centre for Research in Library and Information Management (CERLIM), Manchester Metropolitan University

Citation

Sibthorpe, J. (2009), "Libraries without Walls 7: Exploring “Anywhere, Anytime” Delivery of Library Services: Proceedings of an International Conference held on 14‐18 September 2007, organised by the Centre for Research in Library and Information Management (CERLIM), Manchester Metropolitan University", Library Management, Vol. 30 No. 3, pp. 216-218. https://doi.org/10.1108/01435120910937438

The seventh Libraries without Walls conference was held as usual at Molivos on the Aegean island of Lesvos. The first conference was held in 1995, when remote delivery of library services was a new preoccupation for the profession, but now “anytime, anywhere” service has become the norm.

A total of 23 speakers from the UK, Europe and developing countries, detailed institutional responses to remote library users. The bulk of the papers concern tertiary library settings, some papers discuss access in remote geographical situations, or services for those people made remote by inadequate technology infrastructure in their countries.

However, the keynote speaker, Professor Christine L. Borgman of the University of California at Los Angeles, highlighted a new area of interest – the need to establish “sustainable institutional models for access to research data” (p. 11)

Currently research data sets are published in a variety of formats, including PDF. “Librarians are in a quandary about their roles with respect to data” (p. 11). This theme is taken up in the paper by Graham Pryor, which outlines Project StORE (Source Output Repositories) in the UK. As libraries are assiduously collecting and working with published academic output, there is concern to make source data available too. Project StORE is sponsored by the Consortium of Research Libraries in the British Isles (CURL) to come up with systems solutions to link research papers with their source data. Research data can take many forms, including images, plots, instrument data, spectra, telemetry and sequences. This emerging area of library research is called “data curation”, and one only has to think of the Human Genome Project to glimpse the scale and complexity facing librarians who wish to grapple with making raw data available to researchers.

Other papers discuss progress in creating university institutional repositories and the varying success they have with encouraging academic staff to submit their work. Still in the tertiary area, there are papers on the creation of renewable learning objects (University of Birmingham, UK) and virtual classrooms (University of Salford, UK). The academic acceptance of library initiatives about information‐related competencies in Europe is treated by Sirje Virkus, who has surveyed the extent to which information literacy competencies programmes are integrated in curricula, and he reports slow progress. A Finnish technique to assist postgraduate students with information retrieval uses dialogue mapping and other mapping methods, including mind mapping.

The LASSIE project in the UK is investigating Web 2.0 social software for collaborative work, and user education for students and talks about how to make virtual libraries more social.

The majority of the conference papers focus on university library services but progress from outside university libraries includes discussion of efforts to provide access to cultural heritage materials. Denmark's Electronic Research Library (DEFF) makes Danish language resources available, while usability testing of the Veria Grid system of Greek cultural heritage items from the Central Public Library of Veria in Thessaloniki is reported in chapter 15.

In sobering contrast to these papers, other papers outline the difficulty librarians have in providing remote services in their countries. Librarians discussed the poor ICT status in Sri Lanka, reaching the unreachable in India (with the Developing Library Network, DELNET) and the African Virtual University, where keen student users of digital resources are undermined by limited bandwidth and inadequate infrastructure.

“Librarians may discover that libraries without walls are actually only libraries with new walls, technologically bounded, legally and administratively restricted”, says Sri Lankan librarian Kamani Perera (p. 182).

However, discussions from this conference show that librarians all around the world are working hard at every level to improve access and facilitate learning outside the walls of their libraries.