And finally...

With one last glance at Torquay we caught a taxi to the station, where we joined a large group of delegates and publishers on the train platform.

It had been a thought-provoking and useful conference, with many interesting speakers, informative updates and ideas (& freebies!) to bring back. The plenaries on usage statistics would be helpful to feed into the value-for-money work for our electronic resources. How to apply some of the techniques to survey users needs also rode high in my mind as I boarded the train. As ever, being able to exchange views with other librarians, and meet with major publishers and vendors to raise queries or receive updates was of considerable value.

The next conference date has already been set - 30 March to 1 April 2009 - and given the success of this years conference I can imagine is already in a few online calendars.
Karina

Concluding thoughts

These were three really intense days, but also enjoyable. I came away with many ideas, especially from the briefing sessions - are we splitting our time between dealing with electronic and print materials efficiently? Do we need to revise any processes to reflect the continuing move towards electronic delivery? Are we pushing our suppliers as hard as we should when it comes to getting access, or other queries? It was also interesting to find out how other libraries dealt with queries - going either to the agent or the publisher; maybe we should be contacting the publisher first sometimes?
The conference was also a useful time to look around the exhibition stands to see what new features and products publishers and suppliers were making. I was given a demonstration of the Syndetic Solutions enhancements to the library catalogue which is currently being trialled, which shows book covers next to records, and if data is provided will give a summary or table of contents of the book.
All in all an excellent and worthwhile few days.

Kathryn

Final session: Feels free. Jim Griffin, OneHouse LLC

As the final session it was fitting that this was a broad view of publishing and thoughts for the future. Sharing ideas has changed the world. Gutenberg’s press was the first way that information could be shared worldwide and now the digital revolution is developing this. The music industry has been the first industry to be really effected by digital changes - essentially it is now voluntary whether or not to pay for music. It is a choice that we make but the industry can not survive being paid effectively on tips for very long. Equally access to material shouldn’t be restricted by ability to pay - and this tradition used by libraries should continue.

In both music and publishing content is at risk to technology - some of this risk may be good, some bad. We will increasingly become wireless and we are just at the beginning of the changes in technology. The future is Just in Time delivery of what we want - warehouses are signs of inefficiency and the delivery of content, or information will become more important than the distribution.

Although we think the world is changing now the change form analogue to digital is not as big as the changes in the 1920s with the move to the use of electricity - in the music industry acoustic became electric, audiences became worldwide with the introduction of television and radio, yet the first public performance licences were created in 1847 - therefore creating standards.
The Web 2.0 is creating relationships which never end - the feminisation of knowledge; not just delivering an item to the user, but continually creating relationships.

"We will have done the right thing when our information feels free without being free."

Karina and Kathryn

Breakout session 4b: Knowing your users: research you can do. Judi Briden. University of Rochester, River Campus Libraries.

This was an interesting workshop which described the results of a grant-funded project carrying out evidence-based research looking at library facility work practices. There were several surveys which centred around how students write papers to understand how the library is used to prepare their work.

Surveys used a small sample size (less than 15 students) and included retrospective interviews using poster boards (“Tell us about a paper you’ve done and the steps you carried out”) photo surveys, videoing students in their accommodation, evening interviews in the students union, mapping diaries (providing students a campus map and asked them to mark their route & times on it) and workshops to design library web pages and designing a library space.

The results? Students worked on papers in chunks with days and weeks in between and ask family and friends for help, are highly scheduled, highly mobile and only bring laptops onto campus when they are in one place for a long time (usually in the library at night). They thought Google searches included the library, evaluated resources - just not in the ways that librarians recommended! - and equated librarians with printed books.

The library itself offers a refuge from distractions & is critical to their success. The space should be flexible enough to meet a variety of needs, comfortable, offer appropriate technology and staff support with a one-staff service point for both circulation and enquiries.

What are we doing differently? The library now has a 24/7 collaborative space with a night owl reference service at “paper crunch” times. It runs a parents’ breakfast at orientation and are experimenting with library instruction to engage more with students. They are collaborating more closely with study advice & IT and redesigning their website to support customisation and personalisation (similar to MySpace). This is going live in the Autumn.

The conclusion was to try it! Encourage widespread staff participation but start small to develop staff skills & confidence. Also key was not getting bogged down in bureaucracy to start user surveys and to be aware that this is a learning curve and you won’t get things right from the start.

A full report is available from http://www.ala.org/ala/acrl/acrlpubs/downloadables/Foster-Gibbons_cmpd.pdf

Karina

Breakout session 4a: Getting (slightly) technical – an introduction to linking

As it was described as only slightly technical I had hoped my final briefing session on linking would be a relatively easy way to finish off the conference. However, I was wrong. Ross gave a brief description of how the internet works which can be written on the back of a beer mat, and he had the beer mat to prove it. He went on to describe static links, predictable links and other linking mechanisms including how link resolvers such as WebBridge uses an open URL and query to match to resources available.

Kathryn

Wednesday 9 April 2008 - morning sessions

The final plenary sessions were set to provide a thought - provoking ending to the UKSG conference.

Web 3.0: how to help users stop reading the web and get on with their work. Geoffrey Bilder, CrossRef described the impact of the internet as comparable to the invention of the print press, which represented enormous change and an explosion in content. As with the printing press, users find the original web (Web 1.0) still isn’t easy to read. Web 2.0 makes this easier - essentially Web 2.0 is a read and write web offering guidance to researchers regarding what to pay attention to. Blogs are being used academically (as well as socially); Wikis are used to produce collaborative academic writing and web bookmarks can also be used to show what people are reading - e.g. citeulike. This creates a trust network and acts as a very powerful way of sharing information as well as providing academics with a real time bibliography.

The next generation of the web, Web 3.0, doesn’t just allow users to read and write but also to compute and identify. Rather than read all the data, you can treat the web as a database, use robots to find out what to pay attention to and use metadata to identify things of interest. RDF (Resource description framework) is a protocol of semantic web which helps treat the web as a database, structuring how the information is described which in turn allows it to be queried like a database. While we are constantly developing better ways to collect important bits of information - indexes, glossaries, etc were used with books - there now needs to be better ways to extract important bits of information from the web.

Semantic open data in scientific publications (Peter Murray-Rust, University of Cambridge)

Ditching PowerPoint under the belief that it “destroys information” this presentation was carried out solely using live HTML to emphasise the point that HTML was created for publishing information.

Key to science publishing is the need to access scientific data, however scientific data can be made inaccessible during the process of publication (either not published, or not easily searchable as with PDFs) or hidden behind firewalls or copyright. As well as the full text he urged that we should publish data.

Information that is available needs to be reprocessed to make it useful or analysed to get at the embedded facts. Nick Day has created a Crystal Eye robot to find crystallography on the web, which is freely available but not well structured. However wide scale data mining is limited by copyright restrictions.

Text mining is a consequence of the semantic web. Robots can select subjects, summarise large documents, provide graphical information or data very quickly but are legally restricted. With semantic authoring the author tags work with metadata during writing which then aids locating information by other researchers.

A keen advocate of Open Access movement, the speaker believes we need to open data to be able to recreate the science.

Dealing with disruptive innovation (Richard Withey, Digital Media Consultant)

This speaker used newspapers as an indicator of digital consumer changes. There are close to 30 billion web pages but a lot of growth is yet to come. In terms of web penetration the big markets are now in Asia and other emerging economies and the the web is not expected to be dominated by the English language.

Online is second only to TV; 60% of households in the UK have broadband and young users spend 4-5 hours a day using it. The projected growth in advertising is huge - the market is now bigger than for direct mail, newspapers and now regional newspapers - and it's predicted that online advertising will overtake TV advertising by 2009. We now have fragmentation, disintermediation and personalisation and some predict a dim future for traditional media in the online space.

The bulk of newspaper revenue money comes from adverts - up to two-thirds. Only the biggest newspapers could survive on cover price alone. One way of increasing circulation has been through giveaways - CDs or DVDs, but do these still work?

Social networks are being targeted as the next advertising media. Google aims to give the user everything they want, but newspapers can’t make much money from new media, they need to learn from other media sources - music, TV and other broadcast media have found new distribution formats. Newspapers have always enjoyed a revenue stream split between advertising & circulation, leading to a virtuous circle of self interest which largely excludes the consumer. The new supply chain is consumer driven.

Karina & Kathryn

Tuesday 8 April - Evening

Tuesday evening was the ‘Mostly Red’ conference dinner where we were encouraged to wear something red with the promise of a prize for the most impressive. As they had promised the Swets team made a big effort each wore a red t-shirt with a letter printed on it, when lined up in order this spelt out Swets Simplifies, they completed the look with a red cowboy hat. The end result looked like a very unusual hen party and they spent much of the night ensuring they didn’t spell any inappropriate words with their t-shirts! In then end the prize went to a man who had clearly understood ‘Mostly red’ as ‘mostly read’ and adorned his outfit with pages of the Sun, Mirror and Star.
A band - Joey and the Lips followed the conference dinner but after a late one on Monday night I left Karina to the disco and shared a taxi with the Swets team back to the hotel.

Kathryn

Breakout session 3b: UK Research Reserve: Phase 1 outcomes and future development

The UKRR aims, with the British Library, to coordinate, store and permanently retain research material (with emphasis on journals) across UK Higher Education. The project has two phases. Phase I (Jan 2006 – June 2008) aims to develop a prototype of the collection and services using 6 early adopters and aims to de-duplicate 17.6km. Phase 2 aims, if funding is secured, to open up to all libraries who will be charged for joining the agreement.

Imperial College is the lead HEI in Phase I joined by Birmingham, Cardiff, Liverpool, St. Andrews & Southampton universities. They are required to select low use journals, set their own criteria, shelf check & measure, consult and advocate UKRR to their own academics. There is a formal undertaking by project partners not to dispose of material in UKRR. Three copies of the journal will be kept across the UK with the BL providing the access copy and intentions to dispose are recorded centrally. If disposal reduces the number of copies to less than three the third library has the opportunity to retain or pass to another library. A toolkit providing guidelines about selecting titles and how titles are withdrawn by individual libraries is being produced. A critical part of the project is to gain support from the library community and an Advocacy toolkit has been prepared for libraries to use within their institutions with additional guidance provided by the UKRR team.

The UKRR project team expect to bid to HEFCE for £7m by the end of March 2008 for Phase II of the project. In subscribing to UKRR libraries will be able to apply for de-duplication funds - for every metre disposed of the library gets approximately £26. However libraries must a) dispose of material in an environmentally sound way, or can use the funds to shift journals to developing countries and b) be prepared to check the ISSN, titles, title change, publisher and imprint if there is no ISSN. In addition BL needs to know the journals to dispose of, the volumes held and what libraries wish to withdraw.

The project group will know in July 2008 whether the Phase II bid has been accepted and expect the project to begin in September 2008.
Karina

Breakout session 3a: SUSHI: a beginner’s guide to NISO’s Standardized Usage Statistics Harvesting Initiative

My briefing session on Tuesday afternoon was a guide to SUSHI. Oliver Pesch began by discussing the importance of usage statistics and how the COUNTER initiative had ensured that statistics would be reliable so that they could be used for making informed collection development decisions. The SUSHI project aims to save time by automatically harvesting statistics rather than the reports needing to be downloaded. Pesch ended by reminding the audience that although statistics were useful they are only a way of highlighting the need for further investigation and should not be used blindly - that little used database may be vital to the researcher bringing in large grants.
Kathryn

Tuesday 8th April - Afternoon sessions

Large scale digitisation was the theme of the plenary sessions on Tuesday afternoon - Dan Jones discussed the digitisation projects at the National Archives at Kew, including the 1911 census which is hoped to be available online in 2009. Jean Sykes gave an overview of the £22 million JISC digitisation projects, including the UK theses project by the British Library which Hull has sent a number of theses to for digitisation. Both speakers felt that large scale digitisation was the best way to preserve historical documents, images and sounds making them accessible for a much wider audience than previously may have used them. Unfortunately without huge amounts of funding we can only scratch the surface of what could be preserved.
Kathryn

Breakout session 2b: The changing face of library automation and open source solutions & trends. Ken Chad, Ken Chad consulting.

My original choice, Journal selection at the title level with Jill Taylor-Roe had been cancelled so I attended this session based upon the conference guide - the aim being to discuss whether Library Management Systems (LMS) could evolve to compete and even thrive in the new global information landscape.

First it was important to recognise that libraries function is big business, however libraries are in competition with Google, Amazon, AbeBooks & LibraryThing.

The LMS market has matured over 25 years and not much differentiates all LMS nowadays. A consequence of the mature market is LMS changing ownership and private equity will allow investment when there is opportunity to do so. Consolidation is occurring on a large scale & LMS are not making big profits, consequently LMS are underdeveloped.

In addition they are facing technological developments - web2.0, semanticweb, google, facebook, changing user behaviours, global web based standards which enable interoperability and decoupling of products and OpenAccess which is creating new business models. Surprisingly 80% of Radiohead fans are paying for their latest free album. Also some restaurants are allowing customers to charge according to what they feel the meal is worth - a “what is this worth to you?” business model emerging.

Open Source (OS) is a way to find viable solutions and offers free software which can be changed, however changes have to be passed on and licensing denies anyone the right to exclusively exploit a work.

The benefits of OSS are bug fixing, security, customisation, avoiding vendor lock-in, mitigation of vendor/product collapse and being part of a community. There are also companies now available to support and develop OS library systems. OS isn’t competitive for a complete LMS and difficulties exist with the procurement process; libraries would normally issue a tender & view demonstrations but this doesn’t apply to free software (although libraries may need to tender for OSS support).

What is the impact of OS on library market? Koha, Evergreen, Emilda, Openbiblio, PMB are OS solutions, and Unesco have a portal for OS. Some conventional LMS vendors are delivering OS.

Are libraries using OS to replace LMS? A librarian from Addis Ababa said he was using OS called Koha for their LMS and has a small team maintaining it. The Royal Homeopathic hospital is also using OSS costing £7k including hardware and have a contract with a support agency. Imperial college are offering Olivia freely (Online Virtual Information Assistant) which Bradford university has customised to create "Lollipop".

Is OS right for you? Think of OS as a tool allowing somebody to build solutions. The message to vendors was stark: it is difficult to adjust business models to compete with OSS.
Karina

Breakout session 2a: Adapting workflows to acquisitions of e-resources

My second briefing session was led by two periodicals librarians from Sweden. They had realised that dealing with print journals was taking up a disproportionate amount of time – 96% of was spent on electronic materials but only 45% of staff time which needed to be increased to deal with increasing electronic access problems. The focus on customer queries about access also meant that communication from publishers and agents wasn't given high priority which meant that information about access and title changes got missed, compounding the problems.
The situation was resolved by defining workflows for each process - Decisions, Purchasing, and Making Available for both print and e-resources and providing on-going workshops and staff training in all areas. Currently the print resources take up 32% of time and e-resources 68%, still not in line with the budget but it was felt that print takes longer to deal with, although in many cases it is more straightforward.
The session made me consider how we worked at Hull - is our time balanced between print and e-journals? It was also interesting to find out how frequently suppliers were contacted about problems - every four days initially. Maybe we should be pushing our suppliers harder.
Kathryn

Tuesday 8 April - morning sessions

The morning sessions represented UKSG at its best, concentrating on the theme of usage but with different aspects covered by all speakers.

The MESUR project: in search of usage-based impact metrics. (Herbert van der Sompfel, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Research Library)
MESUR is the first scientific approach to usage data & first scientific exploration of a new paradigm for scholarly assessment providing the infrastructure for future research about usage. MESUR is investigating lots of metrics. In order to construct usage metrics scenarios replicating how a user would use articles were set up and researchers constructed a network map of this usage. In May the project will release a java applet - the MESUR explorer prototype to visualise this map. Interpretations of the usage map reveals that users read widely, and that usage is linked to citations, but when they cite the stick to their disciplines. A citation-based map offers a less rich network with less connections and less disciplines.
While there are a lot of challenges to measuring usage, it is clear with the vast quantities of data available that this is a complex area but the final statement made clear the enthusiasm for the subject:

"Usage data totally rocks!"

The information-seeking behaviour of the virtual scholar: from use to users (David Nicholas, University College London)
Expanding upon the theme of user behaviour not usage, this speaker described The Virtual scholar project which addresses the concern regarding the disconnect when you measure usage but not user behaviour - “the user is king”.

With more information than ever we are able to investigate digital information footprints - which pages are viewed, for how long, what was viewed, when and repeated visits. This research has noted that there is a high demand for scholarly data/products and while Open Access articles may not be heavily used in the UK they are being heavily accessed by others, especially Asia, reflecting the good information brand UK research has. It is however more difficult to determine brands for authors, societies or publishers. The research has yielded interesting results: students constitute the biggest users but half the visits to publishers sites are made by robots (estimated to be about 50%) who mimic human information-seeking behaviour to gain entry.

To mimic human behaviour robots should a) be promiscuous- 40% of people don’t go back to the page b) bounce - view 1.3 pages from thousands and dip in and out of pages; difference between ages, students bounce more, scholars bounce less. c) flick ie channel hopping d) view- don’t look at article more than 2 minutes; if it’s a long article then we read the abstract & put away until it is not read - something I’m sure many could identify with! e) power-browse through titles at a huge rate of knots -spending more time reading short articles than long ones f) navigate - spend half the time navigating to content (The journey is much more fun than getting there). There are age differences and gender differences between searchers; older users tend to come back to the document, women are likely to return to read articles they have stored and even national differences.

The speaker used the adage that we are all librarians now, in fact we are eshoppers. An article from The Guardian was cited as reflecting this new information seeking behaviour - disciplined reading and studying is imploding - which raises the question, what do we think is good or bad information seeking? We need to show that good information seeking behaviour leads to good outcome. Access provision is not enough and he urges libraries to define best practice in terms of information-seeking behaviour.

Use & abuse of usage measures (Ian Bannerman, Taylor & Francis)
This session explored the reliability of usage date and referred to usage of Taylor & Francis journals to illustrate points. We assume usage data is consistent, credible & compatible & that usage would be a meaningful indicator of something. COUNTER was launched in 2002 to make usage credible. The release 3 of COUNTER is getting to grips with robots and data mining but weren’t felt to go far enough. Most known robots won’t get past access control to subscribed content but the unknown robots (such as crawlers within universities) distort the numbers and COUNTER 3 is not able to exclude these. However a point later from the floor was made that academics build robots in response to not being able to download information responsibly from publisher sites. Publishers need to improve accessibility and readability of content.

To test whether usage is being monitored a journalist found it possible to download thousands of articles and no alarm bells were raised by the publisher. The speaker also used the example of one article downloaded 6372 times (once every 9 seconds) by a Russian institution. COUNTER would regard this behaviour as a double-click & seen this usage as one hit but if the usage hadn’t triggered the double-click rule…There is a danger that measuring literature changes the literature ie the observer effect. Impact factors are also open to abuse, eg If the impact factor is published in December then authors can increase cites by publishing earlier in the year, or by encouraging fellow colleagues to download their article.

Can usage data can address the question of comparing like with like? There is a need to improve guidelines on detecting and blocking robots, carry out further research into factors influencing article downloads and librarians were urged to be cautious when interpreting usage data.

Monday 7 April - evening

The UKSG theme for Monday evening was Around the World, but Karina and I had been invited by the Emerald Publishing Group to celebrate the launch of the Emerald Backfiles on a yacht in Torquay harbour. About 40 delegates met at the harbour to be led along wooden pathways to the Grand Lady. Unfortunately as there were so many of us the yacht didn’t sail but we enjoyed a champagne welcome, buffet, and a lovely cake with thankfully little pressure to show interest in the purchase of the Backfiles. After a few drinks we carefully made our way back to land and the conference venue in time for the legendary UKSG quiz. Joining a team of other academic librarians and a couple of subscription agents we did rather badly coming about 36 out of 39 teams. The disco followed, though Karina commented that it was a little strange to continue to have the screen of conference sponsors showing above the dance floor. Yes, our dancing was sponsored by Elsevier and others.
Kathryn

Monday 7 April - afternoon sessions

Publishing & communication of Chinese scholarly journals. Ruoxi Li, Chongqing Normal University
This session helped gain an understanding of research output and publishing in China. Research output has exploded in the last ten years, and from 2006 China has seen an increase in Chinese published research with 400,000 STM papers published domestically. Universities play a major role in STM research in China with 60% of national labs set up in universities and each university publishing its own journals. However there is no peer review & most journals aren’t in English, at best only abstracts are available in English.

The Open Access archives initiative aims to open & widen access to Chinese scholarly journals and has resulted in several projects, mainly Sciencepaper online - a non-profit making institutional repository which accepts pre-prints and PaperOpen an open access search engine which collates open access papers from across the world. More than 40,000 papers have been indexed and loaded into a beta version. There will be 6 million papers indexed from July 2008. http://www.paperopen.cn/

Elsevier & Springer have initiated some projects to cooperate with some Chinese university journals & help contribute to language improvement and overseas distribution.

Unfortunately the next speaker Ananda T Byrappa (due to speak about Research information services in enterprises: a case study of General Electric) was unavailable. I used this opportunity to go round the exhibition stands and catch up with some publishers.

Karina

Breakout session 1b: Managing research outputs - embedding repositories into the institutional research process. Bill Hubbard, SHERPA, Nottingham Uni

Having found my way into the bowels of the Riviera centre I was looking forward to updating myself about institutional repositories. With a number of institutional repositories (IR’s) gathering content and beginning to become embedded within the institutional process, this session looked at how repositories are developing, the content they are expanding to include and how institutions are responding to the challenges arising from funder mandates, publishers option and information management needs. IR’s have expanded research intentions, supporting researchers, their needs, the research process, as well as expanding to include a range of resources, such as etheses, book chapters, monographs, research data, grey research literature and non-research literature. We may see a resurgence of university presses as university publications can be deposited. In order to embed IR’s it’s important capitalise upon the support the Open Access movement has amongst researchers. Tying IR’s in with other resources (feedback from Elsevier suggests that researchers want to integrate IR’s with abstracts & indexes and catalogues) and recognising that IR’s can act as an anti-plagiarism tool can engender support using the example that the sources of information for the Iraq dossier would not have been identified had the plagiarised articles not been publicly available. In terms of a business model, IR’s are often run by the library, they use free software and up to 1.5 FTE to run the IR, requiring cataloguers to retrain to catalogue metadata and subject librarians to act as advocates. In terms of the future to aid global federated searching the feeling was that there should be sufficient breakdown at subject level of the content within the IR. IR’s are a global phenomenon but with 80% of repositories being institutional there is a need to embed IR’s or risk affecting the IR movement as a whole.

Additional links
ePrints http://www.eprints.org/ provides guides and information to support IR’s, including RoMeo which lists publishers who allow articles to be deposited in IR’s, Juliet is a database of funding mandates and OpenDoor is a quality controlled resource listing Open Access repositories around the world.
Karina

Breakout session 1a: Agents, publishers and added value: how do libraries view the performance of subscription agents and journal publishers?

I was excited about attending my first briefing session as one of the speakers was Rick Anderson who I had heard at UKSG a few years ago talking about the abolition of the check-in process at the University of Nevada - an interesting talk but scary thought for those working with printed periodicals.
This session looked at the results of a survey carried out to investigate levels of satisfaction from publishers and subscription agents by academic libraries in the US. It was found that subscription agents generally provided a better service than publishers, but on resoling access queries for electronic subscriptions publishers fared well. There was some debate in the audience about whether the agent or the publisher would be the first point of contact to resolve issues, with many going direct to the publisher. At Hull we tend to work through the agent, and I wondered if maybe we should try to resolve issues through the publisher if the agent doesn’t quickly resolve problems. It was also highlighted that whereas in print periodicals a missing issue would be a missing for only one library missing electronic content may affect 1000 of libraries worldwide.
Kathryn

Monday 7th April - Morning Sessions

After registration on Monday morning and a quick look around the exhibition area the conference opened with three plenary sessions.
James Gray of Ingram Digital Group discussed the digital supply chain, many publishers were now moving to a print on demand service to avoid the need for large warehouses. The Ingram Group owns Lightening Source, a print on demand company which prints 1.5million books per month, yet the average print run is less than two copies. Future developments include the plan to store all formats of a book together digitally, so there could be a PDF version, an audio version and a print on demand version, and able to be delivered to different devices.
Muir Gray discussed the deficiency of the peer review process in the field of medical research. He has found that medical trials which produce a greater effect are more likely to be published, than those producing negative effects, whether this is due to influence by publishers, sponsors of research or authors themselves is unknown but medical practitioners need to have balanced systematic reviews which the Equator project http://www.equator-network.org/ aims to achieve.
Kevin Guthrie from Ithaka compared the serials publishing industry to the newspaper industry - that initially both used new media to their advantage. Now they were in danger of being left behind by the internet and there is a need to evolve in order to survive, although the scholarly publishing industry has the advantage that authors use the system in order for promotion and the peer review process.
He suggested that we should think local - local newspapers can provide coverage of local events and adverts for local businesses, what can a local library uniquely provide?
Kathryn

Sunday 6th April

Karina and I had arrived in Torquay late afternoon on Sunday - it’s quite a journey from Hull. After checking into the Hotel we made our way to the conference venue where a hot buffet was provided for those arriving early. This gave us the chance to find that it was an enjoyable 15 minute walk along the coast and through the park from our hotel and we agreed that as long as it wasn’t raining this is how we would get to the venue in the morning. Arriving back to the hotel later we found that Swets Information Services, one of our major suppliers was also staying there and we had a good chat in the bar with a number of their team who promised they would be doing something memorable for the ‘mostly red’ themed conference dinner on Tuesday evening.
Kathryn