At 4.36am on Saturday 4th September, a magnitude 7 earthquake struck near Christchurch, New Zealand. How it affected the libraries here is an overwhelmingly large topic, but Kathryn Greenhill kindly responded to my plea for some questions to prompt me in writing about it.

1. Do you remember where you were when the earthquake hit?

Hahahaha yeah. I was rolling out of bed and scrambling into the corner that previous idle daydreaming had determined would be the best place to be (later I learned that if one’s in bed one’s safest to stay there with a pillow over one’s head, but my corner was probably second best) and bracing myself there while the house roared and shadows moved in the dark. I think the fastest moving shadow was my cat hiding under the bed. I stayed in my wonderful corner – with a brief excursion to get laptop, radio, and warm clothes – for several hours, as we were getting little aftershocks every few minutes to start with.

2. When did you realize that the library might have a problem and what went through your mind?

It was late morning before I really thought about it, and I think I mostly thought, “Oh God how many books are we going to have to pick up?” That day was strange because in my suburb there was very little damage and people were doing ordinary Saturday lawn mowing, but on the radio we were hearing about the destruction in other suburbs and the CBD. So I didn’t know what things were like at the university, only (from a hasty note plastered on the homepage) that it was closed.

3. Do you remember when you were told what the damage was?

On Sunday my manager phoned us all and passed on what she knew. That was still incomplete of course. The situation was changing on an hourly basis for days, on a daily basis for weeks. The university also put news and photos up on its website.

4. Did you know whether your library had a disaster recovery plan?

Yes, and it had been used in small ways before the quake. With something the scope of the quake it was of course just part of the whole university’s disaster recovery plan.

5. How long before you could go back in and what was it like in the days after the main quake?

We had to wait until it was certified safe. That was almost done when on Wednesday a large aftershock caused more damage and they had to check the buildings again. By this time I was quite desperate to go back and do something. The constant aftershocks made us tired and anxious and I couldn’t concentrate on anything I’d normally do on a surprise involuntary holiday. At one point I saw a photo of workers putting books on shelves and I was devastated to think we wouldn’t have the solace of that physical labour. It didn’t occur to me until we were back on Friday that they were actually taking the books off the shelves, so the shelves could be dismantled to make room for repairs.

6. What was it like to reenter the building?

For me it was overwhelmed by how wonderful it was to catch up with my colleagues and be among people properly again. I spent most of Friday in two branches that hadn’t been much damaged, working on what access and information we could provide users just through the website. It was definitely weird though. That Friday we had to sign in and out, and wear lanyards. Computers had to be tested before we could use them. In one building things had fallen against the inside of a door, jamming it closed, so there was a mighty wielding of power tools.

Just before the end of the day I briefly visited my own branch (EPS Library). By then the rest of my team had tidied up most of the ground floor – we weren’t allowed upstairs yet. When I came back on Monday I had to wipe all the plaster dust off my desk. Windows would develop cracks overnight from little aftershocks. And of course there were no students around those first days, so nothing was as normal.

7. What did the cleanup involve?

Once everything was certified safe, it depended on the library. In EPS Library, some windows had to be replaced. A dozen stacks on level 2 were dismantled so scaffolding could reach the ceiling to replace fallen tiles. More stacks on level 3 were dismantled because they’d been damaged or weakened and needed rebuilding, and we had to shuffle books from stack to stack to make room for that. We had the library open downstairs while this was happening upstairs (we brought extra tables down to jam as much study space in as possible), and the noise of heavy things dropping and shaking the building was occasionally a bit much for aftershock-jangled nerves. I had to go for a sudden long walk one afternoon. But the students were awesome about it.

Once all that was done we got to put the rest of the books back. They’d been piled out of our way — in our beanbag area on level 2 the piles stood taller than I am, and on level 3 they were two piles deep under desks along three walls. Also lining a walkway, and on top of desks, and in various other random places. (Photos on Flickr.) The contractors told us they’d sorted them for us by size, but they were just joking. Any criterion they were sorted by was beyond mortal understanding, though occasionally we found three or even four books together in order of LC number. It was so overwhelming it was easier to just laugh at it all.

Fortunately we knew the ranges that should be on each stack, and someone had the idea to run reports to find out how many books were in each range. The reports weren’t perfect (some item types weren’t included, and of course they made no distinction between a 10-page report and a 1000-page tome) but we could label each bay with a guesstimate of what should be there, and that helped a lot. We all pitched in and hired extra people to help so it only took a few weeks.

We opened up bits of the library space and lending as we finished them. Of course we’d finally got everything back to normal, after six weeks, when Just Another Fecking Aftershock brought down some more ceiling tiles, so yet again we’ve got one room closed to the public and are retrieving books several times a day.

8. Was there much damage?

No structural damage. The floor has a new ridge between two sections, but it was designed to do that in such an event. Windows and ceilings and shelves — all repairable. Surface cracks in all sorts of places. The odd daunting hole in a desk where a ceiling tile punched almost all the way through. (The new tiles are lighter, the new windows are stronger, and the shelves have extra reinforcing.) Only a trolley-load of damaged books. Mostly it was just a giant mess.

9. What was the damage to libraries around the city?

Academic libraries:

• At University of Canterbury, Education, Law and Macmillan Brown were fully operational by the time students were back; EPS is now mostly open. Central Library had ceiling tiles down in the technical services workrooms, windows broken, and some stacks down. Staff are working in other spaces, and services are being provided from Law while Central’s shelves are remade over the summer (plans for Central; full current situation at UC).
• I’m not sure about the full scope of damage at Lincoln University but they have photos on Facebook and I believe they’re now basically back to normal.
• CPIT had minimal mess (blog post) and their staff helped Lincoln with clean-up there.
• Canterbury Medical Library has photos available.

Public libraries:

• Christchurch City Libraries provided extra services through the mobile library while branches were being checked for safety, but all branches are now open again. They’re now hosting the Kete Christchurch : Canterbury Earthquake 2010.
• Outside Christchurch, Selwyn Libraries needed repairs, tidying, and drying soggy carpet (photos) but were operational within several days. The Kaiapoi branch of Waimakariri Libraries is heavily damaged and closed until further notice; two other branches are open and the Christchurch City Mobile Library is making visits to Kaiapoi (more info about books, budgie and goldfish).

The special libraries I’ve heard about generally tended to “messy but tidyable”. Some volunteer libraries have been damaged.

10. What did you learn from the experience?

Drop, cover and hold. Putting together an emergency kit is an excellent way to keep yourself busy in the aftermath of an emergency. A jolt is nearer than a rumble. Blutack is your friend.

A stack can stand on a book for weeks and barely dent the cover. When working in plaster dust, wash hands with water, then with soap, then moisturise (not forgetting the fingernails). If people really want to borrow a book, no amount of yellow “Keep out” tape will stop them — although they can be persuaded not to sit and study directly underneath a precarious ceiling tile.

This event sneaked up on me this year and was almost over before I noticed. 18-24th of October.

“A global event, now in its 4th year, promoting Open Access as a new norm in scholarship and research.” — http://www.openaccessweek.org/

If you missed it too, here are just a few links I found of interest in the closing days.

Did your library celebrate?

The University of Technology Sydney (UTS) Library recently gave students the chance to win $1,000 in the UTS LIB:Flicks 2009 competition.

Students submitted short videos (less than 2min) to promote UTS Library services and resources to new undergraduate students

The winners were announced the other day at a premier event held in the Library and the prizes were: 1st $(1000), 2nd ($600) and 3rd ($200).

Their videos can be seen at http://www.youtube.com/utslibrary or below.

Which video did you like the best?

We’ve had a few posts about repositories lately, and here’s another one. Research repositories are playing a major role in furthering open access to research papers, but of course they are not the only factor in the open access movement.

SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition), Students for FreeCulture, and the Public Library of Science have organised the first ever, Open Access Day to broaden awareness and understanding of Open Access, including recent mandates and emerging policies, within the international higher education community and the general public.

Open Access Day – October 14, 2008

Although there is some inaccuracy, it is good to see reporting on the work Australian universities are undertaking in research repositories and the open access movement.

Access remains an open secret by Bernard Lane | The Australian

If you are wondering about the innacuracy..
Fedora was not developed by the University of Queensland. UQ developed Fez to work on top of Fedora providing a user interface and workflow management to the underlying digital repository.

The Live Search team at Microsoft recently announced that they are winding up their Live Search Books and Live Search Academic projects.

“Given the evolution of the Web and our strategy, we believe the next generation
of search is about the development of an underlying, sustainable business model
for the search engine, consumer, and content partner. For example, this past
Wednesday we announced our strategy to focus on verticals with high commercial
intent, such as travel, and offer users cash back on their purchases from our
advertisers. With Live Search Books and Live Search Academic, we digitized
750,000 books and indexed 80 million journal articles. Based on our experience,
we foresee that the best way for a search engine to make book content available
will be by crawling content repositories created by book publishers and
libraries.” — livesearch.

Live Search : Book search winding down

I haven’t used live search academic for a very long time. And I’m not sure why. I liked the interface and the way results were presented in way suited to academia. It just slipped below my horizon. I do make extensive use of open search plugins. Perhaps if I had added it to my browser search tool I’d still be a regular user.

Microsoft will not be competing with Google in the book digitisation stakes, but it seems they prefer to say that they are not competing with publishers and libraries.

This week the new-look ARROW Discovery Service was launched featuring faceted browsing, tag clouds and access to more statistics such as the most popular authors and institutions.  The ARROW Discovery Service includes metadata records harvested from institutional research repositories across Australia and from the Australasian Digital Thesis Program.

Faceted searching enables results to be refined by institution, subject, resource type, date or creator.

If you are looking for Australian research, the ARROW Discovery Service is a great option to get started. The majority of records do link through to online versions of papers, and email alerts can be set up if you need to monitor research in a topic area. But at this stage I can’t see any sign of RSS feeds.

The service has also made available a search plugin if you want to add this as a search option to your browser search box.

ARROW is seeking feedback including suggestions for improvements. Send an email with “Feedback” in the subject line to arrow(at)nla(dot)gov(dot)au.

The Australian Society of Authors has published a report on Educational Publishing in Australia. The report is based on a survey of educational writers carried out in 2007 and early 2008 and states that since 2000, writers’ conditions have deteriorated due to onerous contractual conditions from a smaller pool of publishers. The impact of digital access to information has not been addressed quickly enough by publishers in the educational market.

The report indicates that “publishers have turned on authors and used their market dominance to force them
to sign over all copyright, write for a one-off, minimal fixed fees rather than
royalties, and forgo their right to additional sources of income such as CAL
payments and Lending Rights payments” in response to their declining profits.

Educational Publishing Report

Educational Publishing in Australia : What’s in it for authors? / Strawberry Hill, NSW. :Australian Society of Authors, 2008. 28p.

Librarians in research and academia are keeping a close eye on changes to Research Assessment under the new Government. Michael Jubb from the UK based Research Information Blog has a post about how the new Excellence in Research for Australia (ERA), replacing the Research Quality Framework (RQF) compares to what’s happening in the UK -

What’s interesting here is the explicit statement that the new system “will assess research quality using a combination of metrics and expert review by committees comprising experienced, internationally-recognised experts”. This is precisely what several organisations, including RCUK, have been urging in the UK. So there is clearly going to be considerable interest in the UK in how the new initiative works out in Australia.

What’s even more interesting is the turnabout from just a couple of ago. Then, when the Research Quality Framework was ramping up, we heard how the UK had abandoned their very similar Research Assessment Exercise in favour of the Research Assessment Framework. It seemed quite likely then that the RQF wouldn’t last, but it’s intriguing that it’s replacement is being looked at closely by the UK which has been looking at metrics and research quality for a few years longer than Australia. How times change!

In today’s Higher Education supplement there are two articles, here and here, dealing with the replacement to the now defunct RQF process. The replacement is called Excellence in Research for Australia, and will be jointly crafted by the Australian Research Council and the Department of Innovation, Industry, Science and Research.  These also relate to the media release that was put out yesterday.

It is good to see some movement again on this issue and will be interesting to watch the process development. Apparently the first issues paper will be released soon after the first meeting of the ARC advisory council, to be held on March 5.

One interesting omission, at least to me, is that there was no mention of the open access requirements that the RQF had. This provision was most interesting to me, and to many librarians, as it was a way of boosting content in open access repositories. It was also a major headache in that we needed to maintain a so called “dark repository” for those things we couldn’t make publicly available due to copyright concerns.

I would hope that an open access provision was part of the new ERA because making research outputs available to a wider section of the community has to be good for research, and the quality of research overall.

The other major issue is the use of metrics. There are really two main issues with metrics that came up as part of the RQF. The first is what metrics can be used for discipline areas that don’t have metrics already established. The other is the source of the metrics data.

There is  also international debate currently under way about the applicability of citation analysis as a research metric. The letter is available here, with a large amount of information available at the Nautilus website.

Interesting times will be ahead this year for librarians and those, like me, working in the research services area.