Attending the WESLINE Conference in the U.K.

by Sarah Wenzel (sgwenzel@uchicago.edu)

In early September, I had the opportunity to attend the WESLINE conference in London. WESLINE is an organization similar to WESS for librarians in the UK. This year, the theme of the conference was the social sciences. Our UK colleagues were most welcoming and hospitable (not to mention forgiving of jet-lag), and I was grateful for the chance to learn about work being done outside of my usual purview (both geographically and subject-wise), as well as for information shared about academic libraries and for a fascinating tour of the British Library, including the (in)famous basement.

David Lowe opened the conference with an overview of some of the challenges and opportunities facing academic librarians, all of which sounded familiar to me. It was interesting to find many of the same issues confronting academic libraries in both the UK and the US. He mentioned frozen budgets, the impact of electronic resources (especially in the sciences) on traditional print budgets, and the increasing call to justify subscription renewals based on the number of hits. In this climate, collaboration and cooperation are ever more important.

The first speaker was Dr. Martin Swales, a professor well-known to WESLINE members. He is a member of the British Academy’s working group to address the crisis in modern languages in the UK. The theme of his talk was “languages matters” (in both noun and verb forms). He spoke energetically and compellingly on the need to study foreign languages and the many benefits of doing so. Swales outlined some of the issues that he sees with university-level language training, and interestingly to this American ear, he advocated requiring a foreign language as part of undergraduate coursework, as do many American liberal arts colleges and universities. (I am less sanguine that such a requirement would solve even some of the fundamental issues he raises, as I have not found it to be terribly effective in this country.) In March 2009, there will be a one-day flagship conference to address the issues.

I spoke on the Center for Research Libraries (CRL) and the Global Resource Network (GRN) products, in particular GNARP (German-North American), LARRP (Latin American), and CIFNAL (French-North American). My talk was followed by afternoon tea, which I think should be required at all conferences.

The last panel of the day was given by three librarians of the British Library’s Social Sciences Collections and Research Team, who support a separate social sciences reading room: Ian Cooke, Gill Ridgley, and Jerry Jenkins. As I understand it, this team is part of a new organizational structure at the BL, highlighting a move from geographic-oriented collecting to one that is subject-based, which is seen as more aligned to the way users approach topics. In all, the BL has 38 discipline-based content teams and eight format-based content teams. The Social Sciences Collections and Research Team is charged with developing and exploiting the collection, promoting access and discovery of material, and promoting itself both within the BL and to the public.

Research on scholars’ needs performed by the team discovered that their patrons are from many different sectors, e.g., universities, non-governmental organizations, government bodies, and international agencies. Patrons are primarily interested in researching topics after 1945 and usually can work in more than one language. They tend to rely on a small set of resources they consider “reliable,” which differs from one researcher to another (but happily usually include libraries). They exhibit frustration with complexity, e.g., e-journals that come from many different publishers. Their answers about why they didn’t use the BL indicated several reasons: less than 75% cited time pressures, 90% wanted more remote access, less than 70% wanted improved online searching, and 60% were unsure of the range of collections or services provided.

From this topic, the presentation moved to a description of the European Documentation Center in the BL, which was founded in 1963 to address the needs of researchers studying European integration and European studies. Jenkins is interested in exploring the concept of a data map of available online resources, which is something that interests me greatly. The day finished with the annual meetings of the French and German Studies Library Groups, followed by a reception sponsored by Taylor & Francis, and culminating in the conference dinner.

Tuesday we had our tour of the British Library, including the aforementioned basement (French revolutionary pamphlets!). Some in the group toured the library of the London School of Economics. After lunch, there were presentations from social scientists researching various European topics:

Professor Jeremy MacClancy (Oxford Brookes University)

‘An Anthropology of Basque Nationalism’

Emmanuel Godin (University of Portsmouth)

‘The Extreme Right in Europe’

Dr. Daniel Hough (University of Sussex)

‘Political Corruption in Germany’

Dr. Simon Parker (University of York)

‘Italy – A European Paradox?’

Two interesting sessions followed afternoon tea. Anne Wordon, of the University of Portsmouth Library, spoke about supporting teaching and research in the social sciences. She is a faculty librarian in a new university library, supporting research and teaching in languages and area studies, political and international relations, sociology and social policy, education, journalism, history, and English literature. At this university, there is a required “study skills” course for first-year students, which includes a section on the library. Wordon gave several examples of how she tailors her sessions to the characteristics of the students in the programs, the style of their research, and the requirements of their faculty. The library has developed an interactive “referencing guide” (bibliographic citations). This guide has proved to be very popular, with over 200,000 hits in the last academic year, not all from the University of Portsmouth. I thought the university had an interesting approach to correct citation style, which is universally required as a matter of policy. Students are marked down for incorrect citations in a uniform matter.

In the second year, students who will write dissertations are required to take a unit on research, in which the library again plays a role. Another program the library offers that I thought an excellent idea is offering a library refresher for students back from their year abroad. Wordon also discussed trends in student behavior, e.g., the increased popularity of e-books and the use of e-journals. She noted something that I’ve observed anecdotally, which is that there is very little awareness of Google Scholar.

Wordon concluded by discussing the Modern and Contemporary France Index, which was started 24 years ago in the back of the journal Modern and Contemporary France. This index, which covers articles in 33 journals about France since 1789, has been produced in collaboration with Grace Hudson at the University of Bradford. The Index is moving online, and there are opportunities for collaboration and a call for indexers (indexing is done entirely with volunteer labor). I have a copy of information about accessing the Index, including a list of subject headings, should anyone wish to see it. Interested indexers may contact Anne Wordon directly (anne.worden@port.ac.uk).

Intute as a resource for West European politics was the subject of Heather Dawson’s presentation. She is one of the librarians behind Intute, a site I find quite valuable. She showed us the EuroStudies   page and noted that the site now includes many different types of resources, such as blogs from think tanks, maps, and YouTube videos from governments. Although there are individual subject editors, they abide by centralized content policies, and keywords are drawn from a controlled vocabulary. There are regular editing and reviewing procedures. It is possible to integrate Intute into your own web pages (see http://intute.ac.uk/integration and http://intute.ac.uk/support.html for details).

Attending the WESLINE conference was very valuable for me not only for the formal presentations, instructive as they were, but also for the informal exchange of opinions and ideas that took place there.

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