Librarians Matter

….made up of scraps I had lying around that you might enjoy…eclecticism ahead…

1. Public libraries and the future

• Role of public libraries in supporting and promoting digital participation – from the British Museums, Libraries and Archives council , examining the role of the public library in the “Digital Britain” Strategy.
• The bookends scenarios: Alternative futures for the New South Wales Public Network in NSW in 2030 . Four possible scenarios are discussed – Silent Spring, Buildings Learn, Neuromancers and Fahrenheit 451 – based on matrix of the degree to which libraries and their content are valued and how orderly or chaotic society is.  The longer post I had about this is just not going to be finished, but Jo Ransom has written two great responses to it that are worth reading – Thinking about the bookends report , and Bookends scenario .

2. Digital preservation guides for small libraries

• Preservation guidelines – from the Digital New Zealand site, updated 8 March 2010. Has some great tips about backup formats and procedures.
• Creating and keeping your digital treasures – from the State Library of Western Australia, update 10 January 2010.  Written for a non-technical audience, it outlines the minimum file format and quality standards for material archived by the library .

3. ebooks

• Books in the age of the iPad .  by Craig Mod. March 2010. Beautitfully illustrated and laid out, this article distinguishes between “formless content” which can go digital without any loss and “definite content” that relies on its container for complete enjoyment of the work.  It discusses the future potential and advantage for both.
• Web standards for e-books by Joe Clark  at A List Apart . 9 March 2010 . Explains why ebooks have so many typos in their layout – partly due to publishers scanning in print versions rather than working from the original digital files, partly due to digital layouts that work fine when the item is printed but not so well when it is interpreted by ebook readers. It outlines a way that authoring using standardised HTML would make it all so.much.better. Check out the epub Zen Garden that shows how you should make your e-book reader do the work to change the layout, not the original text.

4.New Australian library Friendfeed room

• Ozlib – chitterchatter for Australian Library folk. A couple of my twitter friends were starting with Friendfeed, so I have created a Friendfeed room for Australian Libraries. Friendfeed allows a longer, threaded conversation that is different from Twitter – and also lets you feed your content from other sources into your account. If you are on Friendfeed, or thinking of joining then feel free,  pop into the Ozlib room and join in.

5. Bypass ahead – why DRM could be driving users away from our library materials

• You’ve probably seen this cartoon, based on screenshots made by Brad Colbow, when he tried to download an audiobook using the Cleveland Public Library’s Overdrive service, Why DRM doesn’t work or how to download an audiobook from the Cleveland Public Library .  I was pointed toward it by folks in my Twitter stream after I tweeted that I was in a session about e-books and public libraries where the speaker had suggested that bittorrenting wasn’t a viable alternative for many ebooks because the quality wasn’t any good…ummm..no.  I suggest that librarians who want to understand this issue learn how to use something like Vuze to download (legal!!!) content, then compare it to the products vendors are trying to sell us.

I have been flat out like a lizard drinking  since VALA2010, preparing presentations for a forthcoming seminar and finally looking at my thesis for the first time since October…

Normal blogging will return here after June, but until then, you’ll read posts like this – either a shameless plug or derivative text stolen shared from other bloggers. This one is both….

<begin text from Michelle’s post> < begin shameless plug>

It is with great delight that I will be presenting “Libraries 2.0: using Web 2.0 and new media to revolutionise your library or information centre“, with my Libraries Interact co-blogger, colleague and friend, Michelle McLean from Connecting Librarian .

So, if you:

• have a good-sized training budget (which many of you I know don’t)
• are wanting to learn more about using Web 2.0 in your library
• would like to see a couple of engaging library presenters at work
• can attend a two day seminar at the end of March
• and either live in Melbourne or could get the package deal to get here for two days,

then we would love to have you join us and other attendees, for what we are planning will be a learning, collaborating, questioning, informative and hopefully also a bit entertaining two days.

</end of shameless plug> </end of text copied almost word-for-word from Michelle’s post >

Here is the brochure about the event, which even includes an hour by hour outline of what we will cover. We have included 12 different exercises for participants during the two days, some involving moving and one with the chance to pretend to be your boss or maybe a teenager…

Using Web 2.0 and new media to revolutionise your library or information centre

I finally uploaded a couple of movies that I took at VALA2010 – and I promise this is the last VALA conference post I will make….

1.
VALA2010 LINTy / Twittery / bloggy dinner at Berth, Docklands 8 February 2010

**WARNING** Volume is LOUD….

2. Open Source and Libraries: Kathryn Greenhill

**WARNING** Volume is kind of soft…

Thanks very much to Michelle McLean for being impromptu camera person while she also tried to tweet and take notes during my introductory “L Plate” session on 8 February, Open Source Software and Libraries.

The slides that go with this video are at: Open Source Software and Libraries .

Second best use of Bert Newton in a library presentation this year…

This is from the team at University of Technology Sydney who used it in their presentation to accompany their VALA Paper A new vision for university libraries: towards 2015 (may need login). Enjoy.

Abstract

At UTS, plans for a new library building to open in 2015 are fuelling a re-imagining of our library. We are moving towards a new sustainable, client focussed and innovative library that will find its physical expression in a new library building, but is envisioned as being situated equally in the physical and digital environments. In this paper, we aim to describe our vision of the future by revealing some of the plans and projects already underway at UTS Library, and also by speculating a bit on our future – and perhaps yours.

Library of the future in plain English

My main takeaway from VALA2010 is that I am at a spot in my life at the moment where what is happening to me domestically is more important than what is happening in library technology. I’ve been trying to blog about it since January and I keep writing that kind of TL;DR post that just makes the author look like a self-absorbed sook…

Anyhow, here are my main takeaways. I’ve tried not to repeat too many of Mal Booth’s list that he pushed out on twitter, to be subject of a later blog post I believe…

I don’t know everything that all libraries are doing, so if I don’t mention it here, feel free to jump in the comments…

1. Publishing, broadcasting, libraries, museums, galleries are converging as content user and content producer turn into the same person, use digital techniques and focus on the local. If libraries don’t better define what we do and form partnerships, we’ll get lost in the squeeze.

2. Linked Data is sexeh, sexeh, sexeh. Libraries connect information and people. Where are the Australian library efforts to get our authoritative data as nodes in the Linking Open Data project? (Since I first blogged about this in April 2008, it looks like Library of Congress is doing something about this also the German National Library has put their person authority data in Wikipedia, thus making it a node via DBpedia . In Australia, libraries putting images on Flickr is a fine start, but should we be adding to the list of Austalian Open Government datasets a bit more?)

3. Data mining and human metadata need to both play nicely in the sandbox .We provide information to suit the subject bias of our parent organisation. This has traditionally been by human effort assigning individual metadata to items. Where are the libraries that are creating data analysis tools like OpenCalais with algorithms that spit out subject headings to suit the humanities or sciences in the same way OpenCalias focuses on businesses – and are they opening these tools to all?.

4. There are “rockstar programmers”. Although I concluded in my VALA travel scholar paper that a “rock star organisation” – innovative, open, progressive – was more likely the reason OSS was written by libraries, VALA showcased the efforts of rockstar programmers too. Paul Hagon doing facial recognition or colour analysis over the National Library of Australia’s photos, Luke Dearnley at the Powerhouse Museum using OpenCalais to analyse the content of their collections then link to Worldcat to get person authorities … It’s obvious these guys had that “2am idea” and just got in and did it – and had support of their organisations. Hey guys, it’s hyperbolic, but wear the rockstar title with pride and for good…

5. Twitter encourages childish behaviour at conferences And there should be more of it…

6. I am incredibly lucky. Altruism of VALA allowed me to follow my passion and travel. I was surrounded for a week by my libpunk mentors who chatted, connected, collaborated and sparked ideas and speculations that none of us could have done alone. Some senior members of the profession for whomI have absolute admiration took time out to let me know that they like what I am doing and encourage me. How can I give back?

7. My job status seems to matter to me. Without the identity of Emerging Technologies Specialist at a university, I felt like every time I introduced myself I had to justify where I was in my career right now and the choices I made.  I know that to get balance and honour what I value, I could not stay where I was but I’m still teary (get a grip!) seeing that my old position is now advertised as permanent and at a higher salary than I was paid – not because of the status, but because of all the fun things I got to do.  Repeat after me: for new things to come in, you need to let go of the old…Aum …

8. Libraryland tribes need to connect and talk more. I felt like there were several conferences going on – the one attended by the twitterati, the one attended by senior managers who wanted to talk to vendors, the one attended by the under 30’s and new grads. …and more…This is not new, but with social technologies it is more possible to share points of view while events are happening. From tweets of people like  @ellenforsyth and @katclancy I stepped a bit out of the twitter echo-chamber. Can we create more space for the voices from  under-30’s, school and public libraries at conferences like this?

9. If you don’t engage me in your presentation, you lose me . Possibly I’m a victim of the brain changes that Susan Greenfield is warning us against and I just want to live in a world of “yuk” and “wow” without deep thought…but at a technology conference that is partly concerned about information transfer, there were some good examples of people not getting it. Maybe we need to peer-review presenters as well as their written papers? Get them to send in an audition tape? I don’t necessarily want flashy attention grabbing, although I was happy with James Bond, time travelling students, animated researcher avatars, slinkies, and movies of augmented reality. Marshall Breeding showed how you can be engaging just by clarity of thought. Please do:

• Tell me at the start what your presentation is about and where you will go with it – that one minute makes a big difference to how well I understand
• Enjoy yourself
• Refrain from reading your paper if you are not going to make contact with the audience as well
• Accept my sympathy if you were one of the speakers who was a victim of techfail when you tried to use multi-media
• Fish out just the key points and repeat them, rather than try to cram your entire 6000 word paper  into the 20 minutes or so…
• Practice, practice, practice…and then practice some more – think of it as equivalent to proofreading your written paper
• Make eye contact with the audience, ask us how we are going and whether we are understanding. If it’s a hands-on session, please have room for shared tinkering

10 Alyson Kosina and her team of volunteers should be bottled and declared Living Treasures. It’s clear from the papers this year that for library technology to work, we need to adapt nimbly and understand new trends. The VALA2010 committee illustrated this in the way they embraced social media and introduced new elements like the bootcamp sessions and the panel discussions – all this on top of locating the conference in a brand new untested venue and the usual hard slog of peer review and keeping delegates and speakers happy. I’m convinced that David Feighan did not wear a tie because there were five robotic copies of him zipping about doing all the VALA business that needed doing, and the tie would have obstructed the control panel…

I hope that as a profession we have the good sense to collectively put in the effort to keep VALA evolving and existing, even when Alyson retires – as she is threatening to do….hopefully with a VALA paper about her experiences before she bows out ?...

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So, I know that you went to a totally different VALA2010 to me…maybe you were there in person and went to totally different sessions, maybe you followed on the Twitter stream from home, maybe you think Twitter created a dreadful digital divide in the conference – what was *your* experience?

Today I gave my Big Paper, the one I’ve known I’ve had to do since November 2008, the one that enabled me to go on the seven weeks’ overseas Trip of a Lifetime. I think I have lived with it for so long that I had gone beyond being nervous – which I made me feel a bit uncomfortable, because I think that nervous feeling makes me strive harder…

The title: Taking matters into our own hands: influencing factors and concerning factors for libraries that developed their own Open Source Software .

I was planning to Ustream it, but I think the wifi in the conf venue will be flakey. If it is not, try http://www.ustream.tv/channel/kathrynarium around 10:30am Australian Eastern Standard Time.

For the paper, I interviewed managers who supported, and developers who coded:

• Scriblio
• SOPAC2
• Evergreen
• Koha
• VuFind
• Blacklight

These were bold, adventurous folk who went out on a limb and created something for the rest of us. They were the type of people that it was exciting to just be in the same room with.

I also interviewed six librarians who were involved in specifying the Open Library Project.

I wanted to find out three things:
1. Why they developed their Open Source Software?
2. What were the risks?
3. How can what they learned be used by libraries thinking of adopting Open Source Software?

To keep it standardised, I took out of the formal literature a bunch of reasons given for libraries to develop/adopt OSS and another bunch of risks. I then asked my participants whether these reasons claimed to be influential actually were – and whether there were other factors.

I will put up a link to my paper when it becomes available. After VALA has finished I will write a post explaining the 10 things that are valuable for libraries thinking of adopting software. I will be submitting a more detailed version – with more quotes from the interviewees – as my Masters’ Thesis in June this year.

For now, here are my slides from today:

I’m creating this post before going to sleep after dancing the night away at the VALA dinner.

Not much to say, except come to my presentation tomorrow. Or Sue and Con’s . Or Michelle’s. They are all good. And all on at the same time.

I’m looking forward to Marshall Breeding’s keynote this morning:

Blending evolution with revolution: a new cycle of library automation spins on

Based on his ongoing research and analysis of the product, technology, and business trends of the library automation industry, Marshall Breeding will give his perspective on the current state of the field and what libraries can expect over the next few years. While some companies will continue a stable and evolutionary path, others articulate more dramatic changes in their strategies. Open source ILS options have already repainted the landscape, with new community source projects underway that promise additional change. The industry drives forward on two fronts, one focusing on automating internal library processes and the other providing new ways for users to discovery and access library collections. Major tech trends such as the rapid rise in smart mobile devices, the shift from local computing to platform-as-a-service cloud computing bring new mandates of change that demand new directions of innovation. These cycles all turn within an economic climate that presents great challenges in the levels of resources that libraries can bring to the table.

I snuck into his “L Plate” session about Discovery Layers and from the back of the room, I watched the heads nodding in agreement as he very strongly critiqued the web interface that many librarians accept for (and even want to inflict on)  their users. Marshall’s understated and reasonable delivery is so persuasive that I could imagine that some of those heads nodding were the same ones that had been arguing against the “dumbing down” of their library catalogues for years…

There are vendor presentations this morning, then it’s all National Library Innovation for me in the afternoon:

Warwick Cathro and Susan Collier, National Library of Australia, ACT Developing Trove: the policy and technical challenges

Paul Hagon, National Library Of Australia, ACT Everything I know about cataloguing I learned from watching James Bond . Paul has suggested that he will go some way toward answering my “how do we persuade our funders to let us keep making excellent metadata?” question yesterday. Even if he doesn’t I hope for a reprise of his Beyonce Interpretive Dance from Thursday, after all Kim Tari has done her speaker’s Interpretive Dance twice.

Contrary to Dave Pattern’s suggestion, I believe that Marshall Breeding will neither be doing an Interpretive Dance nor wearing a pink tutu.

Here’s my CoverItLive session for today:

…or something like that.

I had three props to bring to my workshop about Open Source and libraries today – a bag of spaghetti, a jar of Paul Newman’s Spaghetti Sauce and a jar of “fake” Nonna’s sauce, which was actually Coles sauce with the label removed. About 30 minutes before Bootcamp started, I managed to smash one bottle in my bag when it hit the concrete on the ramp to my hotel. That’s what I get for trying to fake community-made sauce with an off-the-shelf version…

Here’s the Open Sauce Video:

Today I may be attending just two bootcamps and two keynotes, or I may be attending papers – I am unsure.

Keynotes are:

Karen Calhoun, OCLC, USA The emergent library: new lands, new eyes and Thomas Tague, Thomson Reuters, USANext up? The linked content economy .

The workshops would be these:

Video: Negotiating the Online and Mobile Space Facilitators: Simon Goodrich and Al Cossar, Portable Film Festival, Melbourne, Victoria  and Semantic Web APIs Facilitator: Thomas (Tom) Tague, OpenCalais, USA.

I don’t fancy trying to do a video workshop if the wifi is as flakey as it was today – or if it sucks up my entire quota of 250MB for $33 … VALA has worked hard this afternoon to get the wifi upgraded, so hopefully it will improve.

Here is my CoverItLive session for today, which will go live around 9am Australian Eastern Standard Time.

Today as a precursor to the VALA2010 conference, I ran an “L-Plates” introductory session about Open Source Software and Libraries. I still give my Travel Scholar paper on Thursday, Taking matters into our own hands: influencing factors and concerning factors for libraries that developed their own Open Source Software .

As promised, the slides for the L Plates session are below, Open Source Software and Libraries. It involved dry spaghetti and a jar of Paul Newman’s Own Tomato sauce – but didn’t quite match Paul Hagon’s Beyonce interpretive dance during his API and Mashups session.

My food-but-no-dancing session defined Open Source and outlined how it fits in with library philosophies and practice in order to help library staff make informed decisions about Open Source software for their libraries.

It includes:

1. Definition of Open Source

2. Open Source as a licence

3. Open Source as software development method

4. Widely used Open Source Software

5. Who is using Open Source Software?

6. Library Specific Open Source Software

7. Barriers and benefits for Open Source Software

I am recording what I see during the VALA 2010 conference by using CoverItLive. It gives me an archive to follow up long after the tweets collected have vanished. Feel free to look here or follow @libsmatter on Twitter to see how it unfolds.

A team of librariesinteract.info writers and friends are covering the sessions during the conference also using CoverItLive. VALA announced tonight that they will also be doing this officially on their new site.

Tomorrow, Monday 8 February, I will be attending the OCLC Mashathon all day. In the lunch break I will be presenting an “L Plates” introductory session about Open Source Software and Libraries . I will be posting the slides of the session here.

Here is my CoverItLive session, which I hope will contain something by tomorrow.

Yesterday was Australia Day.

A couple of people wrote cracking posts reflecting on whether Senator Conroy’s proposed mandatory Internet filtering made them feel better about being Australian.

Kay Smoljak,   proprietor of Clever Starfish , is Not a proud Aussie . Sue Hutley, from the Australian Library and Information Association thinks about The internet and being Aussie – on Australia Day.

Both posts contain many pointers about what you can do. Some ideas:

• Join the Great Australian Blackout 25 – 29 January
• Read the Electronic Frontiers Association’s 10 things you can do to help
• Contact ALIA  (advocacy@alia.org.au) to make a contribution to ALIA’s submission to the Minister
• Make a submission to the Refused Classification materials review by 12 February 2010
• Download ACMA’s  Cybersmart guide for library staff

It’s Library Day in A Life Round 4, where a number of librarians document what their day was like. I did the first round on 29 July 2008, Meme: What’s a Librarian’s Day Like?.

I’ve spent last week trying to find time to complete a post called “Whatever Happened to ….Me?”, where I reflect on why things have gone so quiet on this blog.

The process reminded me of the blog post that I half wrote for Library Day in a Life Round 3 on 28 July 2009 – but didn’t publish because it seemed so banal. It was the day I resigned from my job at Murdoch University – and had a lot of to-ing and fro-ing and being a mum …dropping between writing/speaking commitments, motherly duties, meetings at the university, preparing for my new job, with some chicken husbandry thrown in.

Makes a good backdrop if I ever finish the other blog post that I have in the pipeline…

Here’s what I wrote then:

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28 July 2009

Again, I’m documenting an atypical day for librarydayinthelife (link)

Today I resigned from my job as Emerging Technology Specialist at Murdoch University.

It went something like this…

6:30am – Sound of duck quacking wakes me. Switch off iPhone alarm.

Via comments on Twitter and Friendfeed, discover that presentation in Washington DC that included a video clip of me (and based around my post about why learning about emerging technology is part of every librarian’s job) went well – and the audience actually liked it.

Via email discover that the final report of the Open Library Project – that I interned on at the University of Kansas in April – has finally been released.

7:00am – Check on chickens that we bought yesterday. They are still alive and happy in their enclosure in the garden.

Wake Mr6 gently, as he was off school all last week and hope that he is well enough to go in today. He is.

7:30am – Eat breakfast with children – “I don’t *care* if your uniform is not on and you have not packed your lunch – it’s breakfast time, you can do that afterward”.

8:00am Husband and boys leave.

8:15am Check work email. Respond to an email enquiry about accommodation for upcoming speaking trip to Darwin in October. Promise to send through requested bio and photo tomorrow – when I will be able to mention my new job

8:35am Phone Shire of Peppermint Grove to make sure I have right forms for accepting job.

8:49am Boss emails to say can’t meet at 11am, can we make it 11:30 – erk….will have to squeeze appointments because I want to tell her in person that I am resigning, not by phone or email…

8:55am Feed cat. Phone dentist about toothache. He suggests antibiotics and we book appointment for next week.

8:59am Discover cat has poo-ed in garage right behind my car. Curse cat while cleaning up mess.

9:00am Beautician for fortnightly de-forestration of my face. Curse my Mediterranean genes once  again.

9:30am Pop in to collect another employment form from home. Notice new egg in chicken cage.

10:00am Drop off forms at Shire of Peppermint Grove. Discover that superannuation fund has both a “Client number” and a “Member number”, and that I have only given one and need both.

11:00am Get to work. Feel nervous. Drop in on co-worker to let her know unofficially that I am resigning. She usually works in our joint-use academic/public library so understands my yearning to be back in public libraries, but we will both be sad to end our working relationship.

11:30am Break news to Library Director, who only started last Monday. “I’m going to be Special Services Librarian and the Grove Library in Peppermint Grove”. They are building an amazing new library with fantastic environmentally sustainable design features and I will get to help design the new service there”. “Yes, it is permanent and just two days, so I can write my thesis and help Mr11 with his transition to High School, which may be tough for him”. Actually wasn’t quite so succinct and eloquent, but was what I meant…

12:00pm To Family Doctor for Pre-Employment Medical. Takes over an hour, but at least now I have antibiotics for my toothache and know that my heart feels like it is a normal size…

1:30pm Bad Mother does not have time to pack lunchbox for boys after school so buys each a chocolate muffin as she picks up her own lunch at the bakery.

2pm Drop in at house to dump heavy backpack. Find two crows jumping on the chicken’s cage and taunting the poor birds. Growl at them and threaten to throw things.

2:30pm Appointment back at work with Head of IT who pays half my salary. Tell him I am leaving and show him the website for  the Grove library.

2:50pm Walking out of head of IT’s office when husband phones. He has Mr6’s bad cold and keeps going to sleep whenever he sits down. Shall he pick up the kids on the way home? Tell him to go straight home.

3:00pm With both bosses now informed in person, email official pre-written  resignation letter via my iPhone from University carpark.

3:20pm Pick up Mr6. Accept Barbie-themed birthday party invitation.

3:30pm Pick up Mr11

3:35pm In car, get Mr11 to plan what homework he will do when, while he changes his clothes and eats muffin without removing seatbelt.

4:00pm Drop Mr11 at drama lesson

4:15pm Unpack Mr6’s bag and discover four or five notices that need either to be replied to or put into family calendar – and double checked against clashes with other events.

4:30pm Start making dinner

4:50pm Drive to pick up Mr11 from drama lesson

5:20pm Continue making dinner while husband sleeps feverishly on couch, Mr6 plays Lego Star Wars on the Wii and Mr11 does homework with help from me every so often.

5:45pm Dinner on table.

6:15 pm

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I’m not sure what I did in the evening. I would bet that it was Twittering, Blogging and some professional reading and writing…

This week’s “I work outside libraries, people listen to me and I think  libraries can be cool” comment is from Seth Godin’s post today, The future of the library . I’m reproducing the whole lot:

What should libraries do to become relevant in the digital age?

They can’t survive as community-funded repositories for books that individuals don’t want to own (or for reference books we can’t afford to own.) More librarians are telling me (unhappily) that the number one thing they deliver to their patrons is free DVD rentals. That’s not a long-term strategy, nor is it particularly an uplifting use of our tax dollars.

Here’s my proposal: train people to take intellectual initiative.

Once again, the net turns things upside down. The information is free now. No need to pool tax money to buy reference books. What we need to spend the money on are leaders, sherpas and teachers who will push everyone from kids to seniors to get very aggressive in finding and using information and in connecting with and leading others.

It’s interesting to look at the post by Robin Cicchetti that inspired Seth’s post, 2010 . She muses about what will keep her school library “central and indispensible”.  Her answers are below in dot point, but it is worth reading her entire post where she elaborates :

1. Transform the “library” into a “learning commons.”
2. Stop paper training students. Push information out to students digitally and also teach them the critical skills of finding and evaluating it for themselves.
3. Be a leading voice in bringing new ideas to your community as a tool for evaluating current practice.
4. Advocate for the diversification of formats.
5. Treasure and promote curiosity and creativity in our students.