July 2020: Vable's current awareness round-up

We are now half way through 2020 and I'm going to say nothing about the type of year it has been. All I'm going to say is I've enjoyed creating new content for the Vable site and hope you enjoy brushing up on your library management skills. 

Since April and the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, I have explored themes around communication. The frustrations we can face, the importance of branding, how we can improve our training and inductions, and cope with an increasing onslaught of information. 

Librarians are trained to work effectively in a climate of ambiguity!

In the library and information world, who could have predicted a few months ago that organisations would be pushed to change so rapidly; the genie is out of the bottle. Even if ‘eventually’ is now, it isn’t too late to prepare because I suspect that we have a long way to go; the effects of this pandemic will be prolonged and far reaching. As one historian wrote recently,

Law librarians and the importance of training

May your training room be full!

In this article I want to highlight the vital role that UK legal information professionals play annually each September. My team can testify to the fact that late summer is a busy time. Those of us involved in legal private practice are preparing for a new intake of trainee lawyers. Depending on the size of the client firm, this can be from 5-20+ new starters, so there is much to do. 

Virtual teams and collaborative working #BIALL2017

I've now completed my first full week of truly remote working so am reasonably well equipped to comment on and consolidate the notes taken from the various relevant sessions. As usual BIALL had ensured that although there were topic overlaps, a different perspective was given by each expert. Eleanor Windsor from LibSource presented on 'Managing a successful virtual team', whilst the entire Vinge law firm library team came in to offer insight on working together in different offices. And finally a duo from the University of Law talked about collaborative working to reduce pressure on library services.

#PaintingParadise: The Art of the Garden at the Queen's Gallery, London

From the natural open space of Green Park to the ordered splendour of Russell Square, it is hard to avoid London's parks and gardens. Open to all and offering different atmospheres to please all tastes, they ensure the sanity of tourists and locals alike, as well as inspiration to the most jaded of writers. When I saw the underground poster for the Queen's Gallery's exhibition 'Painting Paradise: The art of the garden', I was unconsciously lured by the well dressed young man's relaxed pose under a tree. Now I've seen that exquisitely tiny painting in its gold frame, I understand my response; it's spring. The sap is rising and simply put, sex sells, and sex is to be found in many of the painted gardens on show.

Richard Susskind Lecture: The Future of Litigation and Dispute Resolution

Richard Susskind has been making predictions about the legal profession for some years now. However when you’re closely involved with the practice of law on a day to day basis, as many of us are, it is hard to see the dramatic changes that have taken place. This is especially true if you’re in one of the middling sort of law firms. The firms in the extreme size brackets have probably seen the most change; high street firms with funding issues and larger firms with the push for outsourcing, diversification and international growth. All of this has been well covered in the legal press so Susskind has turned his thoughts to the future of litigation, specifically.

Musings on #3DPrinting

Art? Furniture? Protected?

There is no doubt that 3D printing will become ubiquitous as the technology improves and associated costs come down. It has the potential to change the world in many ways; from medical supplies and delivery, technology and repairs, fashion and wearables, to the protection of the environmental through resource efficient manufacturing. However if we were to use children as a gauge for future trends, then the present incorporation of 3D printing into the toy industry will ensure that even the youngest will be aware of 3D printing’s creative possibilities.

Dresden Conference: Chimeric Blobs, biological art, or where I go off script

The penultimate talk which I want to cover here marks the descent into something much darker than death and memory; the creation of life. Paradoxically, what should be the most joyous occasion is in an artistic/scientific context, the most troublesome. I can understand that the 16th century natural philosophers attempted to recreate the natural spark of life, and much has been said about this. With ingredients ranging from blood, semen and horse manure, I wasn't sure that the creation and display of modern artificial life would be as distasteful as some of the early modern alchemical recipes.

Helen Gregory's 'Curious instances and chimeric blobs: Disrupting definitions of natural history specimens through contemporary art practice' opened with a discussion about what constitutes a natural history specimen. From the historical wet and dry specimens, which served their purpose adequately, to new technology meaning that objects can be cryogenically frozen. Scientific and laboratory collections have inevitably moved away from their 19th century ancestors and, like some of the samples, evolved beyond all recognition.

Wearable Technology: The Impact on Society and Privacy

What do I know about wearable tech? What do I know about my own privacy settings on the tech that I carry about with me? How much of my personal data am I unwittingly giving away to large corporations through apps, GPS, internet searches? With these questions in mind I attended the panel discussion organised by the Halsbury Law Exchange. I was there in a couple of capacities; partly as representative of my firm and partly as an interested consumer.

Twenty Years as a Law Librarian - Technology

Not a computer pic

It’s not just the internet that has been around for ages. Turns out I have too. I have been mining my LA/CILIP Professional Development Report (1999) for insight into what has changed (or not) in the information profession. In this first piece I focus on technology, but I will be reviewing communication methods, taking a look at changing training requirements, and comparing the state of the profession - then and now.

It was 1998. I’d just come off the standalone Lexis terminal after finding a case for a lawyer. He’d been grateful for my speedy search technique not because he needed it quickly, but because spending longer than 10 seconds on there meant a hefty fee. I was pleased that I’d found an unreported case and it had made me think about doing my job without a networked computer.

I asked the experienced library manager I worked with, 'what was librarianship like when you first qualified?’ Her response was ‘cards, cards and more catalogue cards'. She had been in the profession since the late 1970s and the changes she’d seen fascinated me. I am now in the same position as she was. I have been in (law) librarianship full time since 1995, and chartered in 1999. It is now 2014 and the past twenty years have seen incredible developments.

The basics have not changed. We are still employed to find the right information, at the right time, and at the right price. Our libraries and the way our users access information have changed beyond technological recognition. We may have different job titles and work in areas which may not previously have come under ‘library and information’ but the areas I am looking at remain constant, even if the details change. Technology is all encompassing in our role so I have picked out a few naïve gems from my report.

Leonhard Danner; Designer, Engineer, Inventor

Leonhard Danner of Nuremberg (V&A)

There is something curiously and inevitably contrary about the figure of Leonhard Danner, the sixteenth century Nuremberger engineer/inventor. A tireless figure who we can only imagine through the machines he left behind, the scope of which indicates the breadth of his expertise, imagination, whilst channelling the vision of princely patrons. Biographical details of his life are scant and unreliable; as befits a successful, wealthy, gentleman engineer we know roughly what he looked like but his date of birth is either 1497 or 1507. What we do know is that by 1585, married to his second wife Dorothea, he died a wealthy citizen, enjoying for a brief time an Imperial Privilege derived from timber.