Librarians Matter

It would be a really, really inspired idea to take discarded library  books to the local train station during Library Week and give them to local commuters to read on their journey.

It was genius, however, for the team at Rosanna Library in Melbourne to do some guerrilla indoctrination of Ranganathan’s First Law: “Books are for use” . They added to each item a Bookcrossing tag, so that commuters could register the book on the website and track its progress around the world as they gave it away to the next reader.

Chris MacKenzie, CEO of Yarra Plenty Regional Library ( one of the most innovative public library systems in Australia ) tells the story further in her blog, Bookcrossing at Rosanna Railway Station .

Andrea, the Branch Manager at Rosanna sent me this email on Friday:

“We have just finished a very successful Library Week activity at Rosanna railway station.

We set up a table at the station for four mornings this week between 8am and 10am. Joyce handed out library publicity and offered commuters a free withdrawn book – adult fiction or paperback – each one with a BookCrossing tag and a registration number.

The idea is that readers register their title on the BookCrossing website then read it and pass it on to a friend or leave it somewhere to be picked up by the next reader, who also registers on the website. The website tracks the book’s progress around Melbourne or Australia or even overseas and we can also check out the readers’ comments about the books (and the “friendly librarian at Rosanna station”).

The feedback from both commuters and Connex staff has been extremely positive – Connex have asked if we can do this again during the next school holidays but some commuters have already asked if we could do this once a week.

Commuters were happy – not just to get something for free but they were intrigued by the BookCrossing idea and pleasantly surprised to see friendly library staff out and about early on a cold morning at the station. Perhaps having a book to read on the train and switch off was also a more inviting prospect than reading the daily news. We have been checking the website and it appears that many commuters have logged on to BookCrossing as soon as they got to work and registered.”

In my second last post, Getting Deeply Local at our libraries, I suggested that libraries should focus on their deep human knowledge of their local communities and local data to provide services that cannot be provided by generic suppliers like  Wikipedia or a supermarket offering bestselling books. In the post before this, Like a Virgin , I gave the example of the German National Library’s Personennamendatei project working with Wikipedia to put their locally collected authoritative personal name data into Wikipedia.de .

What Wikipedia has that libraries do not is reach. It is the seventh most visited site in the world. Information there is far more likely to be found by the world – and probably our local communities – than on any of our library web sites.

Here lies a quandry to me. If we want our local data to be more accessible, then populating larger, more accessed sites with greater reach will be the best service to our communities. But if we do this, and the data does not have Brand Library written all over it, how do we make sure our libraries continue to be paid to do this?

Look at the Big Diary online service offered by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. I found out about it while watching Sunday’s the Einstein Factor. The tagline is:

An independent listing of events from around Australia. Explore, join up and contribute.”

The events  in the city where I live, Fremantle, in the next seven days are less comprehensive and quite different to our local library’s community information service, Freinfo. But – which one has a more intuitive user interface and more awareness among Fremantle citizens? Today? In 12 months’ time?

This is not a criticism of Fre-info or the Fremantle City Library who do an excellent job and are well-regarded by our community. Fre-info is a service that plays to one of our potential strengths – collecting local data for our local communities.

So what does a service like Fremantle City Library do? Does it populate the Big Diary with its clean, authorative data? Would that provide a better service to their community? It would probably be more findable and promote Fremantle to the rest of Australia more effectively. But would ratepayers then go to the Big Diary, not Fre-info? Does this matter? How would they justify continuing to fund a service that is now less used?

What does an academic library do when it has local clean data in a reusable form that would enhance entries in Wikipedia about local geography, or climate ? Is a Special Library doing the best thing to maintain funding if it actively shows users how to set up the library link resolver in Google Scholar – when there are so many more relevant resources available from the library web site?

I don’t know. I do know that libraries that want to both serve their communities best, and survive to do so, will have to come up with some answers.

This two minute video explains so simply and so well the changes that networked information brings , and some humane, engaging options for libraries that repurpose themselves: What is the future of the library? from Guy Adam Ailion

Found via Library Bytes .

In April I was at an event where I used the phrase get deeply local to describe a key strategy for  libraries that want to survive. It was picked up by a couple of   other speakers there, so I thought I would elaborate.

In a world of generic best sellers available in supermarkets, music and video downloadable by bittorrent and university libraries getting best bang for buck with large “one size fits all” journal database subscriptions , I think that to best way to serve our communities libraries need to shift our resources toward a greater focus on the deeply local.

deep #1 Uploaded to Flickr on February 28, 2008 by slimmer_jimmer

I think our strengths over large ubiquitous sites like Amazon, Google and Wikipedia are – or should be:

• our deep, human knowledge of the people in our community who use us
• our deep, human knowledge of people in our community who do not use us
• our deep, human  knowledge of the specific information resources needed by our community
• our deep, human  knowledge of how our community wants to find and discover information
• our deep, human knowledge of locally produced information
• our human ability to provide many different services to the same individual by our knowledge of them as people
• our human ability to anticipate desires and to delight our local community
• our buildings as a social hub for our local community

The Deep Uploaded to Flickr on May 26, 2009 by eNil

With this knowledge, we have the ability to:

• connect people in our community with each other
• connect our community to local information
• connect our users to the outside world of information
• put local information where our community can best access it
• provide tools for remix of local information
• help our local communities to organise, publish and make findable their own local information
• connect our local information to the world for those outside our communities

http://remix.digitalnz.org/

There are many methods to do this.  Some examples of  things that Google, Amazon and Wikipedia cannot do what we can do – and that maybe we should give more resources – are:

• Institutional repositories of publications in academic libraries
• Digitization projects for ephemera and special collections held by libraries
• Local history projects
• Community information
• Homework clubs
• Homebound services
• Events designed to be intergenerational – like a grandparents vs children’s wii tournament
• Job clubs that help locals support each other in finding information and upgrading skills to find jobs
• Partnerships with other local groups or institutions, like the Health Bags in Topeka Shawnee County Public Library in partnership with a local hospital.
• Online initiatives to promote local discussion of reading, like the Yarra Plenty Reads blog or the Mosman Readers Ning
• Projects like Kete Horowhenua that allows community members to create an online repository of locally produced content important to the community
• Providing remix sites where users worldwide can mashup local data, like Digital New Zealand’s Memory Maker and Widget Gallery .

A  job transformed

My friend Peta Hopkins has been working for the last 18 months or so as the project manager for the new  Bond University web site that launched yesterday.

When Peta first told me that she had gone from library systems to secondment for this job I thought – “Yay Peta, I’m glad you can do that – I’d find that overwhelming”.

A few niggles in the last week have me thinking that, like Peta, within the next 10 years most librarians will be working outside physical libraries by necessity. I hope that if it is in other professions, then this is by choice. I hope that libraries can change our service models quickly enough that we still have the option of working in libraries.

Physical media in rapid decline

Jeff Trzeciak from McMaster University points in his blog to an article in the New York Times about the closing of the  last Virgin Megastore in New York City.  The quote that resonates with me is from Gartner’s  Michael McGuire :

“The Titanic that is physical media started slowly sinking in 2000. Certainly this is a traumatic event for those who worked there, but it’s an expected product of the digital transition.”

The article details hundreds of other recorded music stores that closed in the last five years. This bugs me. Several times in the last year I have heard library leaders proclaiming how many branches libraries have across our countries and how much book stock we have.

It makes me think of a quote attributed Rupert Murdoch – who is someone who knows about the effects of the decline of physical media:

The world is changing very fast. Big will not beat small anymore. It will be the fast beating the slow.

How to have fun in the NYPL Uploaded to Flickr on March 29, 2009 by cindiann

Being fast

We have big, but do we have fast? Are we nimble enough, changing quickly enough to deliver services in a way that can compete with other content providers that deliver access faster and more conveniently? Are our buildings  located, staffed and open hours that suit users who increasingly are their own mobile hub of content access?

Are our libraries staffed by people who realise that the Titanic that is physical media is sinking – or will they be traumatised like the record store staff if libraries are bypassed ? Are libraries – who are also dependent on moving physical stock – likely to face a similar decline? Our stock  issues look healthy enough now, but let us not forget that in the year 2000, 785 million albums were sold in the US. Today it is half this.

Can our role as a central social hub save us, or will be left lamenting like the Virgin store employee:

It does matter because it was also a social gathering space, and that’s one thing that buying music online lacks.

Being as fast as our competitors

In his latest post, David Lee King looks at current alternatives to libraries : Who are your competitors? He covers alternative sources for books, movies, music, gaming and reference – and lists some of the convenient services that may be competing – services that I think understand the strength of “fast”. He offers some suggested tactics, including focusing on customer needs, turning non-users into users, rearranging our stock to be more findable and working on the digital experience of the library.

A comment from Karen Wanamaker about academic libraries is worth reproducing:

Academic libraries have many of the same competitors as public libraries for the social aspect of the library. For the academic role, we have a huge competitor with the Web and such things as Google Scholar and Wikipedia.

We need to focus on educating students about WHEN to use the Websites for information and when to stick with online resources such as the databases we provide or refer to print materials. We also need to lure them into the building and educate them (AND the faculty) about our services. It is a waste of time and money to offer so many services and resources and not publicize them to the patrons so that they know to make use of them

I don’t agree that services like Wikipedia and Google Scholar are necessarily our competitors. If we are *really* about ensuring our communities have access to the best information, then we can work with Wikipedia and Google Scholar without selling out. The German National Library’s Personennamendatei project is a good example. It puts authoritative personal name data into Wikipedia.de .

But – and this is important – we need to do just what Karen suggests and ensure that when we tell our patrons about these resources, we publicize our role in strengthening them. And ensure that they tell our funding bodies. Or that we tell our funding bodies. Or somebody does.

Staying around

We need to ask whether we want to be known as:

a great place for physical objects in a format that was substantially replaced in the 2010’s .

I’m not saying this will come to pass. We are not record stores and have a different business model. But if we all want to be working in libraries in ten years time, then I think that we do need to:

• be asking what will happen if books are no longer physical objects best centrally stored and loaned through a library
• identify our competitors
• identify and play to our strengths that go beyond our physical buildings and collections
• ensure that we have staff with skills that can deliver in those areas
• move fast
• publicise and market these strengths to maintain continued funding.

For Open Day at our university, the library is putting tag clouds on doors in the Learning Common. The cloud describes what goes on behind the door.

A very nice idea – which was not mine.

Here’s my first attempt at describing what happens behind my door, generated using Wordle.net . Have I forgotten anything?

What would yours look like?

Perth Barcamp 3 has been announced. The registration page is open . Off you go…

It is on Saturday 18 July 2009, Central TAFE, East Perth.

I learned so much at the first Perth Barcamp in 2007, What do you do at an unconference ? Perth barcamp 2007 , and wouldn’t want to miss this one for anything.

It would be great to have a librarian/educator contingent like we did last time.

I am happy to facilitate a session about anything that people want to pool their knowledge about. I’m really happy to co-facilitate with someone who has never done anything like this before – barcamps and unconferences are really the best places to put your toe in the water. Just email me.

I’m interested in someone doing a start to finish demo of how you can use an API to suck data out of a web app and then repurpose it – *not* using Yahoo Pipes. Come to think of it, something about how to use Yahoo Pipes well would be cool too.

We are hoping to use the same venue for the next Perth Library Unconference on a Saturday in early October, so this is a chance to get a sneak preview of  how well the venue works.

Oh my goodness! I was replying to a request for comments about using PowerPoint on a post by Lori Reed, Sleep  by PowerPoint. As it got longer, I realised that I have a philosophy of using PowerPoint – how embarrassing…

PowerPoint is just one element

I think PowerPoint works well if you think of yourself as a “performance artist” and try to work out how best to use your body, voice, interaction with the audience *and* PowerPoint together. An image of aboriginal  women in the Northern Territory in front of a library PC can add depth to a description of the Knowledge Centres there.

PowerPoint should be like a dance partner, not like a master to which you the presenter are secondary.

I’m there to talk with the audience, not a screen, nor a PC nor a bit of paper. I bring along my own wireless mouse, ask for a lapel mike and try to walk around in a way that feels natural…rather than tethering myself behind to a lectern or a screen. I try to make eye contact with audience members, plan questions that I can ask them (even if it is just a “hands up if you…”, or “does everyone know what x means?”), try to acknowledge points made by earlier speakers and to adapt what I am saying to the level of the audience as I go.

I can’t remember or tell jokes, so don’t try. I try to talk slowly and calmly, but am more often – shall we say – “energetic”…

Every slide should complement the words and actions – and there should never, ever be anything on a slide that is not clear to the audience. My pet hate is slides crammed with words where only one small point is read out. Secondary peeve is lengthy slides that are completely read out…

Something to take home?

If you want your audience  to have handouts, create handouts, but I don’t think that you slidedeck should be that.  Most of my slidedecks are almost impossible to understand without me there interacting with them – unless I add an audiotrack to them at slideshare, which I often do.

What people don’t see in my slidedecks at slideshare is that any text slide has a plain animated clickthrough for each dot point. So, as I mention each point then – and only  then – it appears on the screen. This is to emphasise the main, take-home points.

I use words in my slides  mainly to signify “chapters” in the talk – and try to make them plain colour on plain background and in the largest type possible – so they become images in themselves.

Any slide that has a number of images on it also has a rapid clickthrough for each image, so the audience gets to see the picture build.

For a 45 minute talk I will have up to 190 slides, about 80% images, with around 300 mouse clicks.

I often drop into PowerPoint slides a screencast or video clips if I am doing a technical demo – as it fits a tight time budget and is insurance against a live failure. Sometimes I goto a live demo, but know the backup option is there.

PowerPoint for a good start

I try to start each slidedeck with something that vaguely surprises the audience, to get their attention from the go-get. PowerPoint can do this well.

I have started a presentation with the words “Let’s Fly”, and shown an animation of flying through a Second Life Library.  My last presentation started with  a picture of my kids and a denial that I am learning about new technologies because of my job, but instead so I can keep up with them.  See Kathy Sierra’s Better Beginnings: how to start a presentation, book, article …. for more ideas.

I always have a “on the menu today” kind of slide early on, which outlines the chapters of the presentation. This reassures me that if I totally forget what I was going to say, at least it is there to remind me early on – and ensures that the audience knows where we are going.

Keeping audience attention

A good speaker can mesmerise me without PowerPoint – like Eric Lease Morgan, who can talk without slides and give out a one page handout summarising his talk at the start. For the rest of us – there is PowerPoint.

I think of the images on my slides as the place where my audience’s attention can go if they need a break from my words or their delivery. They may as well look at my slides than around the audience or doodle on their notepad. And the slide image should be searing a point into the audience’s brain

I use a *lot* of images in my slides.  This is partly because they are my cue-cards, and I need a lot of prompting.

I usually choose images from my own collection, via a Creative Commons search on Flickr, or rarely from everystockphoto.  Often I will have themes to them, like the monkey images that I used in Five Social Software Sites that Libraries Shouldn’t Ignore , or the cats in “But I don’t have time … and they don’t get it” . I do this to make it easier to quickly narrow down images – and I like the challenge and the visual jokes that can appear from these.

Flowing

I never write down what I will say, but I do practise, practise, practise the complete run through at least 3-4 times before presenting it. By that time I have cut most of the gabbly crap and refined my words into sensible sentences that fit the time frame.

I do try to keep to my abstract. As Paul Genoni says, it is a contract with the audience about what you will say.

As I build the slides, choosing images or film clips, I will often decide exactly what I will say then…so that when I have my slidedeck complete, I more or less know what I will say.

The night before a presentation, I will open up Audacity and record what I will say. This gives me an audio track to add to the slidedeck later – and it forces me to hear what the audience will hear the next day.

Technical issues

If I am using video, I try to use my own PC, to ensure that there is no problem with a missing or odd codec on the host PC.

I back up to thumb drive, DropBox and put a copy on my bluehost site.

I upload a copy of the slidedeck to slideshare the night before and make it private until after the talk. I tell the audience it will be there, so they are welcome to take notes but don’t have to.

I print out a copy of my slidedeck using a 9 slide handout view – so that if the power fails I have that. I plan what I will do if there are technical hitches, and I cannot present with PowerPoint.

These simple keyboard commands are lifesavers:

• F5 to start slideshow
• slidenumber<enter> to jump to a slide
• B – display a black screen (B returns to slideshow again)
• W – display a white screen (W returns to slideshow again)

Thats about it.

In dreaded single slide dotpoints:

• use PowerPoint as just one complementary element with voice,content, body, interaction
• be there for the audience, not the screen
• hand out any handouts, don’t use the slidedeck that you show
• use what is special about PowerPoint to create a great start
• use screencast and video slides to tighten demos
• use chapters and “today’s menu” slides to give structure
• use PowerPoint to give your audience something interesting to look at if they don’t want to look at you
• practise, practise, practise, practise the whole thing out loud with clickthroughs in real time
• try recording your audio and play back to ensure the PowerPoint complements it.
• have electronic and paper backups and know what you would do if you could not access your PowerPoint.

I like this promotion for Australian Library & Information Week from Mosman Library – Mosman Library vs that search engine. Great idea and very well executed…but can’t we all be friends ?

Simple message in this blog post.

Go and read  Stephen Collins‘ keynote Public Engagement. Public Empowerment.

Many of the issues he raises are at the heart of what libraries that want to survive should engage with – Open Data; helping the citizenry to be informed and powerful; understanding hyperconnectivity; engaging in real conversation and connections with our users. Just a small excerpt:

In a hyperconnected world, our ability to readopt these denser forms of association, made sustainable by tools such as social networks, become reality. We become the true global village, as much the neighbor to the bloke next door as some geographically remote but by association, close, neighbor with whom we share an interest.

Our families and governing structures no longer inhabit a nearby, day or two’s ride from our wattle and daub huts. Rather, we live in a 24×7x365, always-on world where our village truly is global. In a world where we can be and are increasingly, we face the very real risk of political, social and cultural hyperisolation if we fail to participate as individuals and as part of society.

Already, we see this happening in our own lives as we increasingly turn to trusted sources for information, turning our back in growing numbers on the formal media which has yet to catch up with this engaged super-community. We empower ourselves to make better, more informed decisions and to take action on those decisions.

It is from this morning’s  GOVIS 2009 – User Centred Government: More than meets the eye – a conference in New Zealand about Government and Web2.0.

If you are in Canberra, you can hear him speak on 26 May 2009 at the National Library Technicians Day event at Functions at Reid CIT (I think that is the right event- his acidlabs site says that he is speaking in Canberra for NLTD, and this is the only similar event I can find on the ALIA site).

Last Friday, I was awarded the  Jean Arnot Memorial Fellowship for my paper Why Learning about emerging technologies is part of every librarian’s job (WORD doc).

The fellowship is awarded to a female librarian or female student of librarianship for an outstanding original paper of no more than 5000 words on any aspect of librarianship.

The award is administered by the State Library of New South Wales and describes Jean’s legacy thus:

Jean Fleming Arnot, MBE, FLAA, a former staff member of the State Library of New South Wales, who retired as head cataloguer in 1968 after a distinguished career of over 47 years of service. Miss Arnot was active in women’s organisations and a pioneer in the campaign for equal pay.

The Jean Arnot Memorial Fellowship is funded by a generous donation from the National Council of Women of New South Wales Incorporated and the Australian Federation of Business and Professional Women’s Associations Incorporated as a memorial to Miss Arnot and her achievements.

Equal Pay for Equal Work

Jean Arnot began as an apprentice librarian at the Public Library of New South Wales (as it was then known)  in 1921. She retired in 1968, the year that I was born. For 42 years – just over how long I have been alive – she was paid less than men in the organisation, even those in less senior positions.   In 1952, for example, when Jean Arnot was Head Cataloguer at the Public Library, she was paid 1009 pounds p.a. Her deputy, Mr Bolt, was paid 1101 pounds p.a ( NSW Office of Equal Opportunity in Public Employment (1998) Pay Equity Case Study: Librarians and Geologists. OEOPE, Sydney p31 cited in the Schmidmaier  article below) . It was only the last 5 years of her career that she received equal pay.

Although women within Miss Arnot’s organisation eventually received the same payment as men within the organisation, this did not mean that professionals in this female dominated workplace were paid the same as professionals in male dominated workplaces. I have no idea whether Jean Arnot’s example was an inspiration for those who pushed for what became the  Pay Equity Enquiry 1996 – 1998, but her efforts surely  paved the way. It was not until 28 March 2002 that a decision was handed down in the NSW Industrial Relations Commission that librarians in the State Public Service should be paid the same as other professions. The practical result of this was pay rises of up to 25% for librarians. That’s just seven years ago. I agree with Dagmar Schmidmaier , who was CEO of the State Library of New South Wales during this period:

librarians need to be absolutely vigilant and take advantage of all opportunities to ensure that the undervaluation of their profession does not occur again.

For more on Jean Arnot and the New South Wales pay equity case please see Dagmar Schmidmaier  and Anne Doherty’s paper presented at the World Library and Information Congress:  71th (sic) IFLA General Conference and Coucil,  Pay equity for the library profession: a State Library of New South Wales perspective.

…or maybe not…

Librarians need to know about authoritative sources of information. Librarians need to teach other people how to evaluate the reliability of resources.

Nothing new there.

What is new is how widely distributed the sources can be and how important context can be to their authoritativeness – and how much librarians need to understand about these new contexts.

Three examples of the need to understand context crossed my desktop this week.

EXAMPLE ONE: Twitter is evil

Swine flu: Twitter’s power to misinform .  Evgeny Morozov, Foreign Policy, net.effect. 25/04/09. In Evgeny Morozov’s opinion Twitter is noisy and full of misinformation about Swine Flu and likely to scare people who will encourage others to panic.

I can’t quote the article due to possible copyright restrictions.

Instead, here’s a cartoon from xkcd, Swine Flu .

EXAMPLE TWO: Elsevier is evil.

Elsevier published fake medical journals: Elsevier published six ‘fake’ Australian medical journals on behalf of pharma companies Kate McDonald, Australian Life Scientist, 08/05/2009 .  The Australasian Journal of [insert term here] will no longer be taken quite so seriously now that Elsevier has revealed that the Australasian Journal of Bone and Joint Medicine was actually funded by pharmaceutical company Merck, contained only reprints or summaries of articles from other Elsevier journals that contained positive references to two of the company’s products and only had advertisements for the same two products.

I can’t quote the article due to possible copyright restrictions.

Instead, here is a link to a great conversation  from a mob of librarians on Friendfeed.It starts with a comment from Steve Lawson and continues with over eighty comments that range over the deficits of academic journals in general, I think the LSW needs to get Elsevier to publish the Australasian Journal of Library Science.

Oh, and a cartoon from Organisation Monkey, Australasian Journal of Bone and Joint Medicine

EXAMPLE THREE – Wikipedia is evil

Student’s Wikipedia hoax quote used worldwide in newspaper obituaries Genevieve Carbery , Irish Times, 06/05/09.  When composer Maurice Jarre died at the end of March 2009, newspapers around the world carried a beautiful quote from him: ““One could say my life itself has been one long soundtrack. Music was my life, music brought me to life, and music is how I will be remembered long after I leave this life. When I die there will be a final waltz playing in my head, that only I can hear,””. The source? Wikipedia. The problem? A 22 year old student had placed the quote in Jarre’s Wikipedia page the night of Jarre’s death, and kept adding it even though Wikipedia’s editors deleted it several times.

I can’t quote the article due to possible copyright restrictions.

Instead, here is a quote from the discussion page for the Wikipedia entry for Maurice Jarre: ” Although I may agree it’s something of a rude experiment have a bit of proportion. This is not equivalent to getting someone arrested or poisoning their Tylenol. It’s more like doodling on a library book or at most streaking at the Oscars.–T. Anthony (talk) 05:38, 8 May 2009 (UTC) “

What conclusions can we draw from these articles?

1. Twitter, Elsevier and Wikipedia should be legally stopped before they can do any more damage?

2. There is no context in which Twitter, Elsevier and Wikipedia will be a reliable or useful information source?

3. Librarians don’t need understand the many different ways  Twitter can be used, the funding patterns of academic journals nor how references are quality controlled in Wikipedia?

Nope. Librarians need to understand how information on Twitter, in academic journals and Wikipedia  is created, distributed, re-used, re-purposed and the criteria for sensible evaluation.

This afternoon, I am presenting a paper at Educause Australasia 2009 called Why Learning About Emerging Technologies is Part of Every Librarian’s Job .

The slides are rather cryptic in places as there are a lot of images. I recorded audio while I was practicing last night, so when I get time, I will turn this into a slidecast.

You can download the accompanying, peer-reviewed paper from my site here, Why Learning about emerging technologies is part of every librarian’s job (WORD doc). (The conference papers were not available online at the conference site when I made this post).

This morning, Penny Coutas, Peta Hopkins, Con Wiebrands and myself were on the panel for a symposium called Personal Learning Environments: What Works for Librarians.

We ran the session as a discussion. We started out asking the participants what they wanted to find out in the session. This is a technique that Con and I first used at LIANZA as a way to show people how an unconference may work – but it actually looks useful for conference presentations in general.

We focused on going where the participants wanted to go, so we didn’t cover all of the material in our slides (below). Penny Coutas is the clever clogs who made them pretty and found the cartoons on most slides. We also created a wiki where each of us listed the tools that we use everyday, plus a number of unusual tools that we rely on, PLEs: what works for librarians . I found reading everyone else’s favourites just fascinating.

I am attending Educause Australasia 2009 : Innovate, Collaborate & Sustain here in Perth from Monday 4 May – Monday 6 May.

Although there is a closed social networking site provided by the conference organisers, I don’t think I will use it, for many of the reasons that Peta Hopkins gives here in her post about Preparing for edaust09 . Peta is right when she talks about a “subversive back channel”. For me, often the most enriching comments via social networking come from someone several time-zones away who is watching remotely. I can almost see the point of a closed chat channel for attendees, but I’m puzzled about why we have to log in to a walled garden to find the tag being used for the conference or to see tweets and photos that use the conference tag.

If you are interested in seeing the public tweets and Flickr photos that have been tagged with the conference tag, edaust09, I have set up a TwitterFountain in this post. It updates every three minutes.

Peta and I (and maybe a few others) are feeding our live tweets from 8am – 6pm each day from @petahopkins and @libsmatter into three CoverItLive sessions.  I’ve embedded them over at LibrariesInteract.info, as we are officially reporting for librariesinteract.info, Educause Australasia Conference 2009 – Librariesinteract.info reporting. It updates in real time and anyone can make comments or ask questions.

I will be presenting two sessions for the conference, both on Tuesday 5 May.

Personal Learning Environments: What Works for Librarians Tuesday 5 May, 10:00am to 11am, Meeting Room 8:

Educational Institutions no longer provide all the tools required for librarians to keep up to date with new technologies, collaborate with colleagues and share professional knowledge. Journal articles, conferences and formal coursework are no longer the primary methods of keeping up to date.

In this panel discussion, Kathryn Greenhill and Penny Coutas from Murdoch University, Peta Hopkins from Bond University and Constance Wiebrands from Curtin University discuss the online tools they use daily to create their own Personal Learning Environment. They describe how some of these tools work, what suits their daily workflow and may even vigorously defend the merits of their personal favourites.

Why Learning About Emerging Technologies is Part of Every Librarian’s Job Tuesday 5 May 4:00pm – 4:30pm, Meeting Room 6

In the last two years, several libraries have conducted formal learning programmes to familiarise staff with emerging technologies. Learning about new technologies should not begin and end with a formal learning programme, but should become part of every librarian’s job.

As staff learn about disruptive new web tools, then it is likely that the workplace will change to become a more flexible and nimble environment – reflecting the rapid change and flexibility that is happening online. Managers should be prepared for this, and for resistance to this change.

There are several objections staff raise when asked to make time for learning about new technologies in their already overcrowded day. Anyone implementing a staff learning programme needs to listen to these objections with respect and try to address these concerns.

If library staff understand why they should learn about emerging technologies, then they are more likely to find time to do so. This paper outlines twenty one reasons why learning about emerging technologies is part of every librarian’s job.

The paper concludes by offering some techniques for motivated staff to find time to learn about new technologies – either in a formal programme or as personal and professional development