Public Libraries Mobilising Advanced NetworksNovember 2002
Editorial
by Rob Davies
PULMAN-XT
by Rob Davies
The PULMAN
Guidelines
By David
Waugh & Mary Rowlatt
Time to talk of many
things:
by Margo
de Groot
PULMAN: The
conference workshop
by Margo
de Groot
What is NAPLE – and do we really need such a thing?
By Jens
Thorhauge
Registry of Distance Education Resources
By Eoin McGrath
The Danish Cooperating Library System
By
Rolf Hapel
Public libraries in Turkey
By Yilmaz Bulent & Bayir Didar
Editorial (top)
The six months since the
last issue of PULMANExpress have been an incredibly busy period for the
participants in the PULMAN Network, as we try to put our aspirations into
practice.
The First Edition of the
PULMAN Guidelines has been completed and is now available on PULMANWeb. We
think a very good start has been made in producing an extensive tool which
public librarians and their partners can use to help develop and deliver new
services in the digital era. But we want to know what you think, so that we can
improve them further in time for our major policy conference in Portugal next
March. The next few months will therefore be a period of open review of the
Guidelines. The article by David Waugh and Mary Rowlatt (Essex) describes ways
in which we would like you to participate in this process.
Promoting
awareness and use of the Guidelines will be a major feature of the PULMAN
national workshop which is taking place in every participating EU member and
candidate country this Autumn. We hope that the workshops will also help to
drive forward the agenda and debate on strategies for public libraries and
local services in general, including those requiring cross-domain and
cross-sectoral co-operation and partnership. Margo de Groot (Eblida) describes
plans and the goals of the national workshops in more detail.
Margo also provides an
update on planning for the PULMAN Policy Conference. We are aiming for a major,
high impact event to demonstrate the role of public libraries in delivering the
e-Europe agenda. We will be seeking as high a level of representation as
possible among policy makers from every country participating in the PULMAN
network and will give you more news of progress in the next issue.
PULMAN’s policy work doesn’t
stop there. PULMAN has given presentations at a number of major conferences
during the last few months including IFLA and EVA London and organised its own
meeting of European-level cross-domain organisations in June. In addition,
PULMAN is in discussion with the NAPLE network (representing national public
library authorities in a number of European countries) about future
co-operation and participated in its conference under the Danish EU Presidency
in Copenhagen in early October. We will pick up the strands and possible
directions of some of this policy work in the next issue of PULMANExpress. In
the meantime, Jens Thorhauge provides an overview of the way in which NAPLE
intends to develop its role and activities.
Eoin McGrath also provides an update on progress with the PULMAN
Registry of Distance Learning Materials
Training attachments took
place during September for 40 public library managers from East and South
Europe. They were held in Centres of Excellence in Demark, Finland, Greece and
Slovenia. Each of the participants is committed to spreading the news about
what they found on their return home. Having been part of the Greek event
myself I can vouch for the impact! More in the next issue.
The PULMAN network was
formally extended by ten new countries in June with the commencement of the
PULMAN-XT support measure, funded under the 8th Call of the IST programme. It
is a great pleasure to bring some of the EU’s important neighbours into the
PULMAN Network. They will carry out ‘mainstream’ PULMAN activities such as
Guidelines translations, national workshops, training attachments …with the
addition of one or two new ideas. More information is provided in my article
below.
Inevitably, we are thinking
in terms of which aspects of the work of PULMAN might provide a suitable basis
for development under IST FP6, for which the workprogramme is now at an
increasingly advanced stage of development. PULMAN was successful in its bid to
organise a workshop at the IST Conference in Copenhagen and in conjunction with
the Cultural Heritage Applications Unit at DG INFSO we invite you to attend
this workshop on "The Business of Heritage - from Local to Global" on
5 November at 16.00. We hope that this event will have a significant impact on
thinking in terms of priorities for FP6. The developing programme for this
event can be seen at http://www.cordis.lu/ist/ka3/digicult/
events.htm -
ECNovember
This issue is completed by
interesting articles on the public library situations in Denmark and Turkey by
Rolf Hapel (Aarhus) and Bulent Yilmaz
(Turkish Librarians’ Association). Remember that you can find updated
information on public libraries in most European countries now in the PULMANWeb
Country Profiles section!
By Rob Davies
MDR Partners
PULMAN Project Manager
Email:
rob.davies@mdrpartners.com
g
PULMAN-XT (top)
The PULMAN Network is
growing! The proposal to extend the PULMAN Network to countries bordering the
European Union and its candidate states, favourably evaluated under the 8th
Call of IST FP5, was contracted on 15 June 2002. With the extension, the PULMAN Network is strategically placed to
stimulate and promote best practice in digital services and practices of public
libraries and cultural organisations at the local and regional level throughout
Europe and in neighbouring countries.
The new countries involved
include Russia (Mayakovsky Public Library, St Petersburg) and Turkey (Turkish
Librarians’ Association) as contracted partners and a number of other countries
represented by Country Co-ordinators
(Albania, Belarus, Bosnia Herzegovina, Croatia, Macedonia, Moldova,
Montenegro, Yugoslavia and Ukraine). Details of individual Country
Co-ordinators are available through PULMANWeb.
PULMAN-XT will run for 14
months and will enable the new countries to benefit from the work of PULMAN in
addition to ambitious new activities. Activities and Plans for the PULMAN
Network Extension Members are to:
ü Translate the PULMAN
Guidelines into their national languages;
ü Participate in the PULMAN
Policy Conference in Portugal, targeted to senior policy makers, practitioners,
and national representatives of public libraries, museums and archives, with an
agenda to build scenarios for future co-operation and cross-sectoral strategies;
ü Nominate participants in a
further range of training workshops on innovative practice for public library
managers to be held in PULMAN Centres of Excellence during the Spring of 2003;
ü Develop research capacity in
the local cultural services sector in each PULMAN-XT country supporting
interest and capability to participate in future EU research programmes (e.g.
IST FP6). A series of seminars will be held during Autumn 2002 in the PULMAN-XT
countries to explain the possibilities for participation in FP6 and to
encourage those active in research and development to consider the
relationships between national programmes, IST and the priorities of the
e-Europe action plan
ü Embark on an ambitious new
programme of institutional mentoring and twinning between public libraries
within the PULMAN-XT ‘region’ and between them and the other PULMAN
countries.
The PULMAN Network members
who are partners in PULMAN and will help to make the ‘bridge’ with PULMAN-XT
are: MDR Partners (UK, Co-ordinator), Helsinki City Library (Finland), Oton
Zupancic Library, (Ljubljana, Slovenia), Veria Public Library (Greece) and
EBLIDA, as a subcontractor.
By Rob Davies
MDR Partners
PULMAN Project Manager
Email:
rob.davies@mdrpartners.com
g
The PULMAN
Guidelines (top)
The
First Edition of the Guidelines is now available. The Guidelines are intended
to point the way to providing services in the digital era for public libraries
working together with other cultural institutions at the local level.
Following
the successful Evaluation Workshop in Helsinki in February this year, which
gave rise to numerous suggestions for improvement and refinement, revised
drafts of the Guidelines in English have been produced by the individual topic
authors from all over Europe. These in turn have been further edited and
revised in order to finalise the First Edition. PULMAN and PULMAN-XT Country Co-ordinators are now organising
translation into more than 25 languages.
The
English versions have already been seen by reviewers appointed by the European
Commission and have been described as "an extremely useful potential
resource to Europe’s public library community, particularly in those regions
where services are developing from a lower base." They already represent a
large input of thought, research, consultation and effort from everybody
involved, but the process of honing them for maximum usefulness will need to
continue.
From
now until mid-December 2002 there will be a review period during which several
further processes will affect the final form of the guidelines:
1.
The country co-ordinators will launch the
Guidelines to policy-makers and practitioners in their countries, especially
through 37 national workshops or seminars which are being arranged under PULMAN
and PULMAN-XT this autumn. The process of analysing the outcomes of the
national workshops is to be carried out by EBLIDA (see article by Margo de
Groot in this issue of PULMANExpress). Issues and comments raised at the workshops
will feed back into the process of further refining the Guidelines.
2.
National language versions of the Guidelines
will also be made available through national websites, linked to PULMANWeb and
comments invited.
3.
We hope the availability of the PULMAN
Guidelines on PULMANWeb (now in Word, zipped and html formats) will stimulate
the whole community of Europe's librarians, curators, archivists and other
parties interested in the delivery of local services, to provide critical
comment and feedback. In particular we would like to know:
ü
Have the Guidelines covered the right topics
and brought out the right issues?
ü
Is the guidance useful?
ü
Are the Guidelines relevant in all countries
where the PULMAN network is active?
ü
Are there examples of good or innovative
practice which we should be highlighting but have not?
4.
Comment will be invited from experts on
specific aspects of the Guidelines.
An
email form is provided on PULMANWeb for readers of the Guidelines to use to
send their comments to the PULMAN editorial team. Or e-mail them direct to rob.davies@mdrpartners.com. We would encourage you
to comment before the end of November 2002. At that point the review will be
finalised in order to allow time for the redrafting work which will be
necessary to prepare the Second Edition of the Guidelines in time for the
Policy Conference in Oeiras, Portugal on the 13/14 March 2002.
Should the Guidelines prove to
be as valuable resource as we hope, it will be important to find a way to keep
them up to date once the PULMAN funding period is over. The management of
PULMAN is currently giving serious consideration as to how this sustainability
can be achieved. We hope to have more news in the next issue of PULMANExpress.
PULMANweb:
http://www.pulmanweb.org/DGMs/DGMs.htm
By David Waugh
& Mary Rowlatt
Essex County
Council
Email:
David.Waugh2@essexcc.gov.uk & maryr@essexcc.gov.uk
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Time to talk of
many things: (top)
The PULMAN national workshops
It is time for the PULMAN national workshops! In
this article, we discuss the idea behind the national workshops. There is also
an overview of the schedule of the national workshops per country. The first
workshops have already taken place and all will be completed by mid-December.
The format and goals of each National Workshop is
flexible. Some are stand-alone events, others have been combined with other
PULMAN activities such as the Training Workshops and others still incorporated
within important national conferences or public library events. Country
Co-ordinators and their national support groups are arranging the type of event
which they feel will work best and address the current situation in their own
country.
The first edition of the PULMAN Guidelines (in
English) on digital public library services is now ready and available through
PULMANWeb. The Guidelines form a powerful tool for identifying key policy
issues, as well as a practical guide to best practice and service
implementation. They are currently being translated into around 25 European
languages. See the article by Mary Rowlatt and David Waugh in this issue of
PULMANExpress. A major purpose of the national workshops is to launch, promote
awareness and use of the Guidelines by policy makers and practitioners.
In some countries, the national workshops present
an important opportunity to move forward the debate on public library
strategies in the age of digital services. Elsewhere - perhaps especially in
countries where it has proven difficult to make this kind of progress to date -
workshop programmes received so far point to a mounting interest in identifying
areas of real co-operation between museums, archives and public libraries at
local level,
The outcomes of the workshops will also be a major
source of content for the PULMAN Policy Conference in Oeiras, Portugal next
March. The temperature at EBLIDA will go up considerably towards the end of
this year when all the workshops will have taken place and our job is to
analyse the twenty-six workshop reports plus eleven more from PULMAN-XT. A
common report format has been sent to Country Co-ordinators to enable an
analysis of the issues which are raised and the activity which is underway.
A table of dates for the National Workshops is
provided below. Contact your Country Co-ordinator for more information.
|
Country |
Date
national workshop |
Belgium |
21 November 2002 |
|
Bulgaria |
2-5 October 2002 |
|
Czech Republic |
3,4 or 5 December 2002 |
Denmark |
14 November |
|
Estonia |
21 November 2002 |
Finland |
23-24 October 2002 |
|
France |
September or November |
|
Germany |
10 or 11 December 2002 |
|
Greece |
19/20 September 2002 |
|
Hungary |
4
October |
|
Ireland |
December 2002 |
|
Italy |
21 October 2002 |
|
Latvia |
10 –11 October |
|
Lithuania |
18 November 2002 |
|
Luxembourg |
Start of October |
|
Netherlands |
26 September 2002 |
|
Norway |
28 October 2002 |
|
Poland |
10-12 October 2002 |
|
Portugal |
18 October 2002 |
|
Romania |
10-12 October 2002 |
|
Slovak Republic |
October |
|
Slovenia |
11 or 18 November 2002 |
|
Spain |
13 December 2002 |
|
Sweden |
7 -8 November 2002 |
|
United Kingdom |
13 December 2002 |
PULMAN-XT National Workshops
|
Country |
Date
national workshop |
|
|
Albania |
22 – 23 October |
|
|
Belarus |
25 – 26 November |
|
Bosnia and Herzegovina |
4 November |
|
|
Croatia |
15/16 November |
|
|
FYROM |
26 November |
|
|
Moldova |
13 – 18 October |
|
|
Montenegro |
23 November |
|
|
Russia |
27 – 29 November |
|
|
Turkey |
16 – 19 November |
|
|
Ukraine |
15 November |
|
|
Yugoslavia |
21 – 22 November |
|
By Margo de
Groot
EBLIDA,
Netherlands
Email: pulman@nblc.nl
http://www.eblida.org
g
PULMAN: The conference workshop (top)
In the last edition of
PULMANExpress, we told you that the PULMAN policy conference will be held in
Oeiras, Portugal. A lot of progress has been made on the policy conference
since the last issue and we are very happy to be able to update you about what
what’s new!
Progress on the programme!
First of all, a date has been decided. The conference will take place on
13 and 14 March 2003, so please mark these dates in your agenda!
An organising committee has been established to plan and assure the quality of the conference programme, involving Teresa Hackett, (EBLIDA), Ana Runkel (Director, Oeiras Public Library and Portugal country co