Library Camp UK 2012

Posted on October 29, 2012 by Frank

The creative energy unleashed by an unconference is a wonderful thing. I attended LibCamp2012 recently and was surprised that a disparate bunch of people can self-assemble such a varied and interesting programme, all in one day.

I went to the first LibCamp last year. It grew out of something called GovCamp, a local government unconference. The public librarians who had attended GovCamp thought that a library version might work well, so they organised LibCamp2011 in Birmingham. That went very well and inspired several local libcamps (I went to the Brunel libcamp in January). The 2012 event, also in Birmingham, attracted a similar mix of people from public, academic and other libraries – about 200 attendees.

The energy comes from the immediacy, the informality and the level of participation in discussion, cross-fertilised by the broad cross-section of types of libraries represented. The sessions are interactive. Rather than a long lecture followed by a few questions, the sessions I attended comprised a short exposition followed by an extensive round-table discussion, where we shared our experiences. I think the unconference is second cousin to the blog: a home for half-baked ideas (in the nicest possible way) and lively comments.  Talking of baking, LibCamp also has a fully-baked component in the shape of cakes brought along by delegates.

The programme was eclectic, assembled by means of a pitching session at the beginning of the day (and a wiki for idea-sharing in advance of the event). I didn’t hear most of the pitches as one of the organisers thrust a camera into my hands and instructed me to take photos. I didn’t cope very well with the unfamiliar camera and I suspect they all came out poorly composed and blurry. Luckily the battery ran out so I was able to hand the camera back after a few minutes.

This is the post-it note version of the programme:

And this was a readable (but incomplete) version circulated later:

With five parallel sessions at any one time there was a good deal of choice. One session on how to cope with swearing attracted some interest and there was apparently some disagreement in the session on What is a Library for? The five sessions I attended were less dramatic, but thought-provoking nevertheless.

The session on Living libraries, as pioneered by Malmo public library in Sweden, was fascinating. It was led by someone Anna Brynolf, who had lived for some years in Sweden.  The idea of “lending” living people was envisaged as a way to lessen differences between cultures – you  could confront your prejudice about a particular group by “borrowing” and talking to someone from that group for 45 minutes. For instance, you could meet with someone who was an animal rights activist, or a Muslim, or a vegan, and talk to them about their beliefs or experiences. The idea started at a music festival in Denmark but it developed further in Sweden and has since spread elsewhere. One person at the session told us she had worked in a library in Dublin that had a similar project.  Someone tweeting about the session discovered that in the UK it had also been done at the WOMAD festival, and at Anglia Ruskin University. The Human Library website has more background about the idea and mentions projects in various countries around the world:

The Human Library enables groups to break stereotypes by challenging the most common prejudices in a positive and humorous manner. It is a concrete, easily transferable and affordable way of promoting tolerance and understanding.

Another unusual library was described in a session by someone hoping to establish the UK’s first tool library. He explained that there are several of these in the USA and a handful elsewhere. One of the earliest established is in Berkeley, which is where he had come across the concept. Now living in Dudley he decided to set up a tool library there. He has funding and some space and we gave him a few more ideas about how the library might be set up.

My favourite session was on roaming libraries, presented by the remarkable and brilliant Itinerant Poetry Librarian, aka Sara Wingate Gray. I think she was keen to encourage us to discuss roaming libraries more broadly. She mentioned the Mile High Ref Desk, which provides library services to passengers on airline flights, and Radical Reference, which is “dedicated to information activism to foster a more egalitarian society”. However I found her descriptions of her own project much more interesting and was happy just to hear her talk about that.  Sara has taken The Itinerant Poetry Library (TIPL) to more than 20 cities in the USA and Europe. She sets it up in bars or coffee shops, registers readers and then lets them borrow poetry books. If you want to know more about TIPL, there is a nice article about it in Varsity. There is an element of performance to TIPL which gave me food for thought. I have been doing some background reading on science busking which also involves a significant degree of performance, and attention-grabbing. Perhaps we need a new breed of librarian to grab people’s attention and thrust books under their noses.

The most hard-core session I attended was on classification. The session leader set out the dichotomy between the philosophical approach (the right class mark) and the pragmatic approach (the right classmark for my library) to classification. I always assume that most libraries use sensible classification schemes – the major schemes like Library of Congress or Dewey. A quick survey of the room revealed a wide range of schemes in use, from major global schemes, to very old (obsolete) schemes, hybrid schemes, multiple schemes, and weird local schemes. Someone commented that library users did not all understand what classification was for and were pleasantly surprised to find that books on a similar subject were all in the same place on the shelf.  But some academics complained vociferously if ‘their’ books were (as they saw it) classified wrongly. On the plus side, we heard reports that reclassification could be effective, increasing the number of library users who could find books.

The most interesting question raised was whether classification was necessary at all for electronic resources. The answer must surely be “No”, since classification is all about physical books on the shelf. That set me thinking about the benefits of browsing at the shelf, and wondering whether there could be a way to create a life-size electronic shelf search/browse that combined the advantages of the old and new technologies. It would be a giant vertical touch-sensitive screen in the Library that allowed you to search and view full-text content, and mark items that you wanted to read later.

I will draw a modest veil over the session on iPads in libraries that I co-facilitated with Sarah Barker but I think it went down well. There was less sharing of experiences than I had hoped for, perhaps because it is still not that common for libraries to lend iPads.

The session on mental health in libraries was remarkable for the way that people shared their experiences, good and bad, very openly.  Not much of the discussion was specific to libraries, but applied to the workplace more generally. The most useful thing I learned was that an organisation called Mental Health First Aid offers free training in “how to recognise the signs and symptoms of common mental health issues, provide help on a first aid basis and effectively signpost towards support services”. A number of people in the session said the courses were very good.

So, that was my Library Camp UK 2012. I enjoyed the day – it went very quickly.  I would have liked to have gone to more sessions, but I enjoyed those I did attend. It was a shame that the venue’s wifi was not up to scratch but that meant I listened and talked more freely instead of trying to tweet all the time so perhaps it was for the best.  For me the benefit was in hearing a wide range of ideas from well outside my comfort zone, from people I wouldn’t otherwise meet as we are in different parts of the library world.

Note: thanks to Andrew Preater for giving me Anna Brynolf’s namE, as the leader of the living libraries session.

Posted in Libraries and librarians | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

The joys of a Wikipedia edit-a-thon

Posted on October 23, 2012 by Frank

Last week the Royal Society held a Wikipedia edit-a-thon to try and help redress the gender imbalance in Wikipedia’s coverage of biographies of scientists.

Twenty volunteers gathered in the library of the Royal Society for a few hours to learn how to create Wikipedia articles and then to research and write brief entries for a number of women scientists. Some people also took part online. The organisers had prepared a list of scientists who needed articles to be created, or expanded.

I attended a workshop last year to learn the basics of Wikipedia editing, but I did not follow through, despite my good intentions. The Edit-a-thon was a good prompt to have another go. I was unable to attend the event, so I thought I would participate remotely and have a go at creating a few entries. But, as usual, things got busy at work and I ended up with just over an hour to devote to the task, late on Friday afternoon. I had identified a few women scientists from the Institute who were not in Wikipedia and proposed to work on them. I had previously written something about them for internal consumption, but I quickly realised that was not good enough for Wikipedia – I needed sourced, verifiable statements and that was going to take a bit longer.

In the end I managed to start one short entry, for Janet Niven, and I made an addition to the entry for Rosalind Pitt-Rivers. I am aiming to cover some more of the Institute’s women scientists over the next few months, as I prepare for an internal poster exhibition about them in March 2013 (for International Women’s Day). Another participant in the event helpfully created an article about Rosa Beddington, who was also on my list.

Someone commented on Twitter that the great thing about Wikipedia is that other people help out and improve the articles that you write. I know my effort was very small, and needs a good deal more work. Someone helped by tidying up my references a little.  Also, the Wikipedia system reminded me to insert inline citations properly. The editing system seems more sophisticated than I remembered, and there is a useful tool for adding references now.

I probably should have done some revision before starting.  The organisers recommended reading a background article published two years ago in PLOS Computational Biology, and Wikipedia’s own tutorial. But my time ran out and I wanted to get in and do something, so I took the risk of plunging in and relying on what I remembered from the workshop last year. The article wizard was helpful too, reminding me of the need to establish ‘notability’.

Overall it was a bit of an ordeal – trying to do something well but in a short space of time. I think my next attempt will be better and I am assured that it does get easier as you get used to the ways of Wikipedia.

Nature News has a couple of items about the Edit-a-thon:

Posted in History, Writing | Tagged | 4 Comments

Authorship

Posted on October 5, 2012 by Frank

From time to time I have to go into our store to hunt through old (pre-war) reprints of medical research articles and I am always struck by the prevalence of single authorship in articles of that period. Single authorship in research articles is a rarity these days, and even review articles may have three or four authors. According to the National Library of Medicine, in 1950 the average number of authors per paper in Medline was 1.5; in 2011 it was 5. Pre-1975 the maximum number of authors on a paper in Medline was 37; by 2011 the maximum number was 3,172.

I think this is partly because research support staff have higher status (and probably more skills) nowadays than they did 60 years ago.  They are more likely to assert their rights when it comes to authorship credit. But it also reflects the fact that research has become more of a team effort, and those teams are getting larger.

What does it mean to be in the author list, or to put it another way, how do you qualify to be listed as an author? This is something I have been pondering as I have taken part in a working group charged with drawing up local guidelines, to try and ensure consistent practice across all labs at the Institute.

My contribution was to review what other guidelines say. The MRC recently published an updated version of its Good research practice: Principles and guidelines.  On authorship, it says:

Authorship should include all individuals who have made a substantial intellectual contribution and all authors are expected to take public responsibility for their contribution to the work. The MRC endorses the guidance of the Committee on Publication Ethics and the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE). The MRC endorses the ICMJE guidelines on authorship and contributorship; the practice of ‘honorary authorship’ is not acceptable. All contributions to the research must be clearly acknowledged and appropriate permissions sought for the use of the work of others. No person who fulfils the criteria for authorship should be excluded.

As I worked through guidelines from other bodies and from various journals I found that pretty well all of them also refer to the ICMJE guidelines.  These seem to encapsulate all that needs to be said on authorship. This was a relief as it meant I didn’t need to digest 94 different sets of guidelines, just one or two. (Wikipedia lists some authorship guidelines in other disciplines).

The ICMJE first drew up its “Uniform requirements for manuscripts submitted to biomedical journals” in 1978. Editors representing 19 medical journals drew up the guidelines, largely concerned with the structure and appearance of the articles, and practical issues (e.g. “Mail manuscripts in a heavy paper envelope, enclosing the manuscript and figures in cardboard, if necessary, to prevent bending of photographs during mail handling.”).  These guidelines (called the URM for short) were revised every few years. Their rules on formatting of bibliographies were very useful as we moved into the era of citation software in the 1980s and 1990s. The guidelines are now followed by a large number of journals.

Authorship was barely mentioned in the 1978 guidelines. In their history of the first 25 years of the URM, Edward Huth and Kathleen Case say:

The first and second editions of the URM mentioned authorship only briefly: “Acknowledge only persons who have made substantive contributions to the study.” By the third edition (1988) enough scandals had surfaced to lead the committee to define legitimate authorship in more detail. The key statement was, “Each author should have participated sufficiently in the work to take public responsibility for the content”, a criterion based on the view of Richard Hewitt, director of the Section of Publications of Mayo Clinic. This key statement was followed by more-specific criteria. In 1991, a statement was issued to cover
order of authorship.

The essence of the current ICMJE authorship guidelines are straightforward:

  • Authorship credit should be based on
    1. Substantial contributions to conception and design, acquisition of data, or analysis and interpretation of data;
    2. Drafting the article or revising it critically for important intellectual content;
    3. Final approval of the version to be published.

    Authors should meet conditions 1, 2, and 3.

  • All persons designated as authors should qualify for authorship, and all those who qualify should be listed.
  • Each author should have participated sufficiently in the work to take public responsibility for appropriate portions of the content.

In practice there is a good deal of subjective judgement involved in assessing who should or should not be listed as an author, so our local working group came up with a series of examples to aid the decision making process, listing the kinds of contributions that would or would not qualify for authorship, or acknowledgement.

These local guidelines have been endorsed by the Institute Director and have been disseminated to all staff. No doubt, just like the ICMJE guidelines, it will be necessary to keep them under review as research changes and author lists become still longer.

One area that we didn’t touch on is the issue that Jenny highlighted recently about the criteria for inclusion of the lab head, and their position as senior author.  I have seen examples of papers where the lab head does not appear in the author list, but on most papers that I see the lab head is listed as an author and is the corresponding author, taking responsibility for the programme of research that they have devised and continue to direct.

Jenny’s post appeared after we had finalised our guidelines, but we may consider that issue in a later revision, if it turns out that things are not as cosy here as I naively assume.

Posted in Authorship | 7 Comments

In defence of reviews

Posted on October 4, 2012 by Frank

Doug Kell, chief executive of the BBSRC, published an enormous review article in 2009 on iron chelation and disease. The review had 2,469 references. (D. B. Kell BMC Med. Genom. 2, 2; 2009). I’m not sure what the record for a single article is, but that is certainly a large number of references to have read and digested for a review.

It is not surprising, therefore, to find Doug Kell speaking up in favour of review articles in a brief letter in this week’s Nature. He highlights a comment in a recent news piece in Nature which was critical of a new bibliometric tool because it included review articles:

Review articles, which may not add much to the research, count the same as original research papers, which contribute a great deal.

Well, you can understand what they are saying.  A typical review article may be a useful round-up, but it does not usually report new knowledge. Kell’s mega-review is in a different league, and it is not surprising that he should defend the role of the review article in research. He points out that reviews turn facts into understanding:

A research paper usually provides just one or two new facts, whereas reviews synthesize our understanding more broadly and make it more concrete… some reviews summarize thousands of papers.

Open Access policies (at least, those of MRC and Wellcome) also seem to regard review articles as less valuable than original research articles.  While MRC-funded and Wellcome-funded authors must deposit all primary research articles into PubMedCentral within six months of publication, they are not obliged to do the same for review articles. I think such a requirement might cause some problems as often reviews are commissioned specifically. But I wonder whether we will at some point want to extend the OA umbrella to review articles?

Posted in Journal publishing | Tagged | 4 Comments

Not quite a book prize

Posted on September 14, 2012 by Frank

It is the season for scientific prizes – this month already we have had the K. J. Zülch Prize, the Perkin medal, the Keio medical science prize, the Balzan prizes, the Golden Goose awards and the Lasker prizes. Science writing honours are underway too – the Max Perutz essay prize was awarded this week, with the Wellcome science writing prize due next week and the Wellcome science book prize next month.

I was interested to see that one of this year’s Lasker prizewinners was Tom Maniatis, and that the citation explicitly mentions his hugely influential book Molecular Cloning.

Maniatis created the quintessential Molecular Cloning manual—based on his own pioneering work—and thus spread revolutionary technologies into a multitude of laboratories across the world.

Of course this is a different kind of writing from that recognised by the award of essay or book prizes.  Writing a laboratory manual is more like writing a scientific paper than writing a textbook or popular science book, I suspect. It is a task requiring clarity and distillation rather than creative inspiration. Still, a book is a book, and it is good to see a major science prize being awarded at least in part for the effort put into the creation of a book.  The Lasker citation relates the history of the book’s creation:

In 1979, James Watson asked Maniatis to bring his techniques to the community by teaching a course at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory—and Maniatis generously agreed. Its tremendous success spurred Maniatis and postdoctoral fellow Edward Fritsch to turn the course manual into a book. With Joseph Sambrook, they did so. … Their Molecular Cloning manual, first published in 1982, sold 62,000 copies and that number jumped to 95,000 in the second edition.

David Crotty a wrote nice appreciation of the influence of Maniatis (as the book became known) on the 25th anniversary of its publication, in 2007:

It opened a door for many researchers into the world of recombinant DNA technology and played a significant role in spreading these approaches through the scientific community.

He mentions a couple of early reviews of the work:

George McCorkle happily proclaims in American Scientist, “In our laboratory, mirabile dictu, the procedures in this manual nearly always work.”  In TIBS, Hugh Pelham went so far as to title his TIBS review “Cloning Without Tears.”

Crotty also refers to the book’s nickname – “The Bible“, and reports that this was used as far back as 1984, just two years after the book was first published. Achieving that kind of classic status in just two years is not bad going.

As the book went through successive editions the author order was changed to put Joe Sambrook as first author, reflecting the extent of his input. Recently the book has gone into a fourth edition, with Michael Green as the first-named author and Sambrook as co-author. I daresay people will still refer to it as Maniatis though.

I recently ordered a copy and am not looking forward to cataloguing it – all those names and nicknames and past authors make it a bit of a nightmare.

Posted in Books | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

Another way to measure your research impact

Posted on September 14, 2012 by Frank

The h-index attempts to reduce a researcher’s output to a single number: your h-index is the number of papers you’ve published, N, that have been cited at least N times. It seems like a broader measure than pure citation counts but is by no means a perfect measure. It is seen as mostly confirming past successes and it is variable between different subjects. Much has been written about it since it was first devised in 2005, and various attempts have been made to improve it.

A paper in this week’s Nature announces a new variant - the future h-index. This is designed to predict what your h-index will be a few years in the future, taking into account some additional factors. It seems interesting but still flawed.

Appearing in such a high-profile venue as Nature has given this new metric some prominence, and there has been much comment already (e.g. see this piece in The Scientist). On Twitter Noah Fierer commented:

In case you were wondering – secret to high H-index = lots of papers in high profile journals.

Hardly a surprising finding. The Chronicle of Higher Education has some further thoughtful comments on the new tool.

Konrad Kording, one of the authors of the paper in Nature, said that their future h-index has “proved more than twice as accurate as the h-index for predicting the future success of researchers in the life sciences”.

But Jorge Hirsch, the inventor of the original h-index is not impressed. The Chronicle reports

he said the factors added to his h-index appeared to have little meaningful effect. He suggested the additional factors had been devised by “optimizing the coefficients” for a particular set of authors covered by the paper. He said the predictive powers would not hold up for a wider set of test cases.

That echoes my thought.  Publication patterns and citation practices vary between fields, so basing a general formula on researchers in one particular field is not realistic. The article mentions factors such as the quality of training and the standing of one’s PhD adviser (and I would add one’s postdoc supervisor and later mentors) but none of these factors are included in the new index as they apparently have only a small effect.

But, hey, everyone knows that these magic numbers are basically just that – a data reduction too far. As Stephen Curry said on Twitter:

scientists invent a new way to screw themselves over

So I think Wired magazine has the best idea:

while neither one’s h-index nor the predictions of this equation are destiny, playing with this formula certainly is fun.

You can try the formula for yourself.

Posted in Bibliometrics etc | 4 Comments

Running, motivation and toys

Posted on September 6, 2012 by Frank

Mo Farah, double gold medal-winning distance runner, showed us this summer how important strategy is to winning a race. He runs the race from the back of the pack and then over the last 500m or so accelerates to the front to take first place. I decided to try the same tactic recently, running in Alexandra Park (home to Alexandra Palace).  I had no problem in running most of my race at the back but haven’t quite mastered the second ingredient, of acceleration to the front. I ended up second-from-last, though I did come second in my age bracket (there were only two of us).

This was a 5k race last Saturday morning and was my first experience of a parkrun. These are free weekly runs held across the UK, at 9am every Saturday morning. They are run over a carefully measured course, and are timed races. Once you have registered with parkrun then you can turn up to any event with your individual barcode and run. Some technical jiggery-pokery puts the results up on the parkrun website – you can see the results for the AllyPally run that I did here. It also calculates things like your PB and your “age grade” (how well the runner has done relative to their age and sex). You can see a summary of all your results too.

I first noticed parkrun on Facebook.  A couple of my friends (notably Dr. B.D. from Yarm, and Mr. T.R. from Seaford) would post status updates  like “Ran a 5K PB of 21:42 in parkrun”. For some time I just thought they had been for a run in a park but after a year or so I finally twigged that parkrun, despite the lack of an initial capital, was in fact a proper name. I quickly registered on the website and printed out my barcode, and finally last Saturday got around to running with the group.

There is nothing new about organised running groups of course – there are many groups across the country – Run England has a directory including many beginners groups. Many of these require to join and pay a fee, though.  The beauty of parkrun is that it is free but highly organised. It started as a single event back in 2004 in Bushy Park. Three years later it spread to Wimbledon and Banstead, and then spread more widely. There are now nearly 140 parkrun events taking place each week in the UK, with another dozen or so overseas. Regular running clubs see parkrun as complementary – people may start with parkrun and then join a more formal running club as they become hooked on running.

I have run on-and-off for several years; never really seriously (though I have done a few marathons) but just for some exercise and for the pleasure of doing it. Ten years ago I started to get knee troubles and have done less running – fewer runs and shorter runs – which becomes a downward spiral. As I run less I become less fit (and more fat) which makes it harder to run, so I run less. I can break out of the spiral but need some external motivating factor to help me.  Often that motivation comes from someone asking me if I want to go for a run -  the place where I work is surrounded by lovely footpaths and fields so quite a few people go running at lunchtime.

I have just started using an app on my phone to record each run I do. Runkeeper uses GPS to record the route, and also tracks the time and running speed, plus altitude.  The app then exports this to the Runkeeper website, where you can view the whole run on a map and see how you performed. I think it is quite fun. I first noticed it because someone I follow on Twitter for his science policy tweets (Dr. S.H of Swindon) started tweeting about runs he had completed with Runkeeper. I had previously mapped out routes on sites like Mapometer or MapMyRun but I find Runkeeper better because of the phone app tie-in. More Android apps are listed here and I see that there is also an iPhone app for parkrun.

I think the parkrun could be another motivation for me – 9am every Saturday morning – with the added benefit of seeing how my 5k performance progresses over time. And if (when) my time starts to improve I can even share (boast about) it on Facebook.

 

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , | 6 Comments

A look back at the future

Posted on August 23, 2012 by Frank

I am indebted to Dr R.A.C. for bringing to my attention a spoof exam paper drawn up by J.B.S. Haldane. Originally published in the journal Brighter Biochemistry (“the illustrated journal of the Biochemical Laboratory, Cambridge”), the paper was republished in Trends in Biochemical Sciences in 1981. I had not come across Brighter Biochemistry before but it sounds like it would have been an entertaining read.

For the 1931 issue J.B.S. Haldane, then a Reader in the department of Biochemistry at Cambridge, looked into his crystal ball and produced an examination paper for 1956. Some of it is a bit obscure (well, to me anyway), some of it sounds quite far-fetched, but I have a suspicion that some of it would be answerable – though probably not in 1956.

Here are some of the questions.

Write down the structural formula of human type C oxyhaemoglobin, and briefly summarise the evidence on which it is based.  (Structural formulae should be written stereoscopically. A stereoscope is provided.)

“Enzyme action is only intelligible in terms of wave mechanics.” (Meldrum). Discuss this statement.

“Taxonomy must in future be based on biochemistry.” (Haldane). How have the confers been reclassified on the basis of their terpenes?

Describe briefly the biochemical functions of each of the 17 genes concerned in chlorophyll production in Zea Mays.

Contrast the function of glutathione in (a) yeast, (b) cabbage leaf, (c) mammalian liver, (d) mammalian erythrocytes.

“The beginning of consciousness in the developing hen’s egg can be placed with certainty on the 19th day.” (Needham and Holmes). Describe the substances which determine the appearance of this function, and the analytical methods employed for their detection.

Contrast the immune bodies developed by man in response to (a) Taenia, (b) cobra venom, (c) Pneumocossus type III. What points regarding their composition are still doubtful?

Contrast the structure of the receptors for adrenaline and acetyl-choline in heart muscle.

How good were Haldane’s predictions of the state of biochemical knowledge in 1956?

Posted in History, Uncategorized | Tagged , , | 3 Comments

A snapshot of our collection – history

Posted on July 31, 2012 by Frank

Earlier this month I hosted a meeting of CHILL. It is a group of independent health libraries which meets three times a year in the premises of one or other of the members. The meetings are an opportunity to share experiences, organize joint activities and to see different libraries.  CHILL brings together a diverse range of health libraries and information services so it can be interesting to visit other members. We have been members since the group started in 1997 but have played host only once, so I thought it was time to invite them up to north London again. I also wanted to show off our newly refurbished library space.

I gave a short talk about the current Library service and later on gave a short tour of the Library. Although the Main Library has changed quite a bit recently, with 70% of the shelving removed, it still inspires awe.  The sense of space, the subtle art deco features and the fantastic view combine to make it something special. But I wanted more than just “awe” so I put out a display of some items of historical interest from our collections. Because I had only just come back from holiday this was a bit of a rushed job. I looked mainly for items related to certain people and subjects that were particularly relevant to the Institute’s history. I also included some documents that I thought were interesting by reason of their uniqueness or obscurity.

Henry Dale was the first Director of the Institute. The book Adventures in physiology is a collection of 30 of his research papers from 1906 to 1938. The collection was first published in 1953, with a foreword by the great man himself. Dale explains that he made the selection as a balance “between an author’s fancy and a reader’s probable interest” and therefore decided to focus on two main strands: i) the actions of adrenaline and acetylcholine and the transmission of nerve impulses; ii) the actions of histamine and its role in the response of organisms to chemical, immunological or physical assaults. In his foreword Dale also comments on the role that accidental observations played in his career.

With my mind on Dale, I spotted an interesting historical book – The war of the soups and the sparks by Elliot Valenstein. The book “tells the saga of the dispute between the pharmacologists, who had uncovered evidence that nerves communicate by releasing chemicals, and the neurophysiologists, who remained committed to electrical explanations”. Dale was one of the leading protagonists in this saga.

We have a large archive of papers from Dale’s time as Director but to sift through these to find something to display would have taken me too long. Instead I hit upon a letter to Dale from William Bragg, under a Royal Society letterhead. Dated 24 Oct 1940, the letter informed him that he had been unanimously proposed for the office of President.

Biological standardisation was another strong interest of Dale’s (see here for a brief history of the field). He was one of the first to see the need for accurate assays of biological substances used therapeutically, and the Division of Biological Standards was established here in 1923. Years later it became a separate institute – NIBSC – but the archives of the first 50-odd years are still held in our collection. I displayed a box from those archives that contained papers relating to the First International Conference on Biological Standardisation, held in Edinburgh in 1923 under the auspices of the League of Nations Health Organisation.

Walter Morley Fletcher was the first Secretary of the Medical Research Committee and did as much as any other man to define the MRC (see my earlier post about him).  He was therefore also a key figure in creating NIMR.  His pamphlet Medical research: the tree and the fruit is the text of the Fifth annual Norman Lockyer lecture, given in 1929 under the auspices of the British Science Guild. Lockyer founded the Guild in 1905 and it merged with the British Association for the Advancement of Science in 1936. Fletcher’s lecture dealt with the history of medical research. He points out that in the three centuries between the accession of Henry VIII and the accession of Queen Victoria whereas great strides were made in anatomy and physiology, there was relatively little progress in practical medicine. It seems that “bridging the valley of death” is not a new problem! Fletcher goes on to describe the rapid progress of scientific knowledge since the accession of Queen Victoria. I fear he gets a little carried away here, saying “As to the art of surgery itself, it is difficult to imagine that it has any further advance to make”. But he later says, speaking of the fight against infectious diseases, “to rest satisfied with our present achievements would be …foolish” and “only the growth of scientific knowledge can bring success”.

After Fletcher’s death a substantial Memorial Fund was collected to be used for a memorial at the new Institute then being built at Mill Hill. In 1936 a memorial ceremony was held, with addresses by George Trevelyan and Frederick Gowland Hopkins. A memorial booklet reprinted these speeches, and included the names of the 500 subscribers to the Memorial Fund, so I included this booklet in my display.

Edward Mellanby was Fletcher’s successor as head of the MRC, serving from 1933-1949. I have it in mind to write more about him one day as he seems like an interesting figure. In my display I included a print of his portrait, and his Royal Society biographical memoir. Photographs and portraits are so important as a way of connecting with figures from the past, making them seem more human than any assemblage of words can. The Royal Society memoirs do a pretty good job though.

I chose a small book by Charles Sherrington (1857-1952) thinking that it was an early popular book about neuroscience, since he was an eminent (Nobel prizewinning) neuroscientist. However, on closer inspection I discovered that Life’s unfolding (1943), part of the Thinker’s Library, is a work of philosophy. The book comprises three chapters of a slightly earlier work called Man on his nature and harks back to the writings of a 16th century physician-philosopher, Jean Fernel. See this editorial for a brief description of the book. I rather like the series title Thinker’s Library. The ever-reliable Wikipedia has a complete listing of titles in the series.

Still in philosophical vein I moved on to Peter Medawar – possibly NIMR’s most charismatic Director and one of the most influential. He was a brilliant thinker and writer about science and the philosophy of science. I selected his short book The Limits of Science (1984). In the preface he explains that he purposely made it a short book because “I have long thought that nearly all books are much too long” and “As a student … I was nearly put off philosophy altogether by the extreme length, leaden prose and general air of joyless learning”. This book is anything but joyless – as you read you feel that someone is talking to you, so straightforward and direct is his style (see review).

Another philosophical book fell into my hands as I prowled the shelves, this one by Harold Himsworth: Scientific knowledge and philosophic thought (1986). It is also a short book and, though it does not have the light touch of Medawar’s style, is quite readable (see review). Himsworth took over from Edward Mellanby as chief of the MRC, serving from 1949-1968, and steering it through a period when biomedical research began  a great expansion. The book has a foreword by James Watson, who was of course at the MRC Cambridge laboratory in 1953 when he and Crick published their famous paper on the structure of DNA.

As we are preparing for the centenary of the Medical Research Council in 2013, I was interested to find a special issue that the British Medical Journal put out in 1963 to celebrate the MRC silver jubilee. It included a brief history of the MRC by Landsborough Thomson, a look at the past 50 years of medical research by Henry Dale, a look at the future by George Pickering, and a lovely selection of photographs of some of the key figures in the MRC’s first 50 years. But the thing that most struck me about the issue is … the adverts! I don’t know why but they really convey a sense of 1963.

The MRC was born out of a desire to conquer tuberculosis. Infectious disease more broadly has been a major strand of research at the Institute since its earliest days. Influenza has a special association with the Institute – the WHO Influenza Centre is hosted here and the virus was first isolated here, using ferrets. We have a copy of a cartoon entitled Yoicks and tally ho! which portrays a rather fanciful depiction of a flu virus being hunted by ferrets hotly pursued by a collection of M.D.s on horseback.

Another big research effort was into the common cold. The Common Cold Unit was initially a part of the Institute, under David Tyrrell’s leadership. When it closed down most of their archive came to us.  There are boxes and boxes containing the results of different trials, but there are also scrapbooks that contain letters from trial volunteers, photographs and ephemera. I selected to display the scrapbook dated 1981-3.

Tropical diseases were important research subjects from the earliest years of the Institute. I picked out a copy of Ronald Ross’ classic book Malarial fever (1902) and a report on Malaria in the Andamans (1912), one of a series called Scientific Memoirs by Officers of the Medical and Sanitary Departments of the Government of India.

Historians of science start to salivate when they see our report collection. We have an impressive range of early 20th century medical research reports from around the world. I chose some suitably exotic reports:

  • Annual Report of the Medical laboratory, Dar es Salaam (1926)
  • Bulletins of the Institute for Medical research, Federated Malay States (1927-9)
  • Medical Research In The Colonies (1928-30)

We also have a set of the British Intelligence Objectives Sub-committee (BIOS) reports. These were essentially the result of a plunder by the Allies of intellectual property from German industry following World War 2.

The MRC was once a notable publisher in its own right. As well as its own Annual Reports, which contain wonderfully detailed summaries of biomedical research news and very informative overviews of particular fields, it published the Special Report Series. This series was commonly known as the ‘green reports’ due to the colour of the covers of the reports. Special Reports were issued when it was wanted to disseminate research results through an official distribution, e.g. during the First World War several Special Reports dealt with medical topics relating to the war effort. Later they were used for research results that were too long to fit into a journal article. Between 1915 and 1971, when they ceased to be published, 310 reports were issued. I displayed the first volume of our bound set, containing reports nos. 1-10 which were issued between 1915 and 1918. These covered topics including the incidence of Phthisis, meningitis, dysentery, heart disease, atropine, and infant mortality. A more grisly report series was MRC statistical reports on war wounds (1918-20). This emphasises again how much of the very early activity of the MRC was devoted to supporting the war effort. I hope to return to the subject of MRC as a publisher in a later post.

When weeding our books last year I noticed several titles from a monograph series published by the Rockefeller Institute.  NIMR was modelled on the Rockefeller, which had been founded just a few years before, and it was interesting to see this series in our collection.  I displayed a couple of early titles: Tumors of animals (1910) and Botulism (1918).

However interesting the reports and monographs are, though, they are not unique. Somebody, somewhere has probably got a copy of most of the published items that the Library holds. The archive holdings, on the other hand, are unique. The information about our past scientists is a bit variable, but can be fascinating. When you open a file that you know has not been looked at in 50 years, you really feel like an explorer and I can see why people get hooked on historical research.  I have previously written about parasitologist Frank Hawking so I displayed his file. He was at the Institute from 1940-1970. The other file I displayed was that of Major George Dunkin, who was here rather earlier. He was a veterinarian who worked with Patrick Laidlaw in the 1920s and 1930s on canine distemper virus.

This was not intended as a full guided tour to the collection, more of a drunken pubcrawl through it, to show something of its nature and take a few sips of history. I wish I had a better knowledge of the collection, but there just isn’t time. We hope to do some work on assessing the importance of the collection over the next couple of years.

Posted in History, Libraries and librarians | 2 Comments

PLOS shift

Posted on July 26, 2012 by Frank

Camel case (the practice of writing words with some inner uppercase letters) is one of my pet hates, as it demands sufficient finger dexterity to make sure you hit the shift key at just the right point in the middle of the word. Prime offenders are brands such as EndNote, iPad and PowerPoint. A reverse example is the open access publisher PLoS (Public Library of Science).

Imagine my delight therefore to learn that PLoS will henceforth be know as PLOS. As part of a design refresh it has amended its logo, adopted a new colour scheme for the different journals, and abandoned that inner lower case ‘o’ -

to address community feedback regarding the difficulty with consistent pronunciation and writing our organization’s name.

I can’t help noticing that the name in the logo still looks more like “PLoS” than “PLOS”, but never mind. I am very grateful for the shift (geddit?).

Posted in Journal publishing | 11 Comments