Librarians Matter

I hope this saves somebody out there some time.

I just wasted an hour or so of my holiday trying to delete 3200 images from my iphone which were stopping me from taking any more photos (or doing anything else) with it. I had already backed up my images both to iPhoto and the two 1TB disks we are carrying with us – so I just wanted them gone.

Here is one of the pics that I wanted to delete, the sight that greeted us in the hotel lobby for New Year’s Eve. Not for a party, just because the staff were being festive. The place where we are staying has a 4:30-5:30 wine and  cheese session every afternoon, where hotel guests can gather in the lobby and eat sweet and savoury biscuits, cheese and wine (with juice boxes for the kids).

I did not fancy manually clicking on each image and then selecting “delete” from the iPhone. I could not drag them manually into the iPhoto Trash folder from the iPhone. Some sources suggested going into iTunes and syncing the photos to an empty folder created on the computer just for that purpose – but it did not work.

The solution is something called Image Capture - an application that comes with OS X mainly to upload from digital cameras. Plug in iPhone, use Spotlight to find Image Capture, then tell it to sync the device to Image Capture not iPhoto in the app settings. Highlight all the images, then use the red circle with a line through it symbol to delete.

Takes a while – around half an hour or so for 3000 images. I have had time to write this blog post instead of going out cycling across the Golden Gate Bridge, which I would much, much rather do on New Year’s Day. I guess I would have been better off actually deleting images each day when I uploaded instead of waiting for the phone to fill up.

I did much more eating, shopping, cycling and gallery and museum hopping in France and Spain than library-related business.

Our family travel blog, Rainbow Toast

We did manage to get our family travel blog up and running, so if you want to know more about our travels, please pop over to RainbowToast.com .

At the moment we are feeding all our Flickr photos in to it.

We will be writing a bit about our aim to do the entire trip with just carry-on luggage (four people, seven weeks, ten cities and five countries ), and travelling with kids.

We have a calendar on the sidebar where you can see the activities that we did each day. Well, you could if we had filled in each headline with stories and links. We where were aiming to get content added before we told everyone about the site, but realised last night that the trip would be over if we waited until then. So – you can click on each day and see a list of what we did, but clicking through currently brings you most often to a post saying “more content soon”.

Tech specs

It is, of course, WordPress hosted on our own server. I started with a Buddypress installation, thinking that we would run it like a social site with posts from each family member. It soon became obvious that at the end of the day the most we have time or energy to do is to upload our photos.

Theme

My favourite theme, Suffusion. I have applied the Suffusion BuddyPress Pack so that it works for the BuddyPress installation.

Plugins

TravelMap . This lets us make a date-based map of our trip, showing where we have been and where we are yet to travel. We could, if we wanted, to add links to each location, for example to the relevant Flickr set for each one.

Awesome Flickr Gallery This automatically displays all the items in a specified Flickr account or set. We can specify how many images, how many columns and rows and the size of each image. This generates a very small string that we can insert into a page or post. As we upload images to Flickr each night, the travel blog is updated with images on pages for:

• All our trip photos
• Just my daily image photos
• Just photos of the travelling minifigs

So …. I am not sure how much more I will write on this blog about our holiday. If I do not pop back here for a while, please have a wonderful holiday break.

Visiting Portobello Road on a Sunday, the Notting Hill Gate Library was closed. Pity, as it looked fascinating:

On Saturday, we visited Bletchley Park. About 40 minutes by train out of London, this old manor house was the centre of English codebreaking during World War Two. There Alan Turing designed the Bombe and Tommy Flowers created the Colossus  , two machines that were forerunners to today’s programmable computers. It is fitting that the National Museum of Computing is now located there. It is in one of the old codebreakers’ huts, and as a self-funded privately created organisation it is not posh looking:

One of the rooms that fascinated me was dedicated to Powers Samas punchcard computers. In the early weeks of my technology unit, I show students an image from Christchurch City Libraries in 1958 showing some of the first library automation efforts – using Powers Samas punchcards:

Bletchley Park not only has information about the codebreakers, but has a fully reconstructed working Bombe, a model railway exhibition, a cottage full of a collection of children’s toys from 1930′s – 60′s, a wartime post office, several working Enigma crpytographic machines, and even a room dedicated to the exploits of heroic wartime pigeons like William of Orange .

I took a snap of the library in the manor house as the light faded. The whole building felt like a Cluedo set come to life.

Today is my fifth day in London.

We arrived 6:20am on Sunday and by 11am were on a four hour bike tour of London. It is not surprising that both kids fell asleep that night at the Royal Albert Hall where we watched the Classical Spectacular.  They slept through the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, a marching regiment, indoor fireworks, balloons falling from the ceiling, cannons firing to the 1812 Overture, CanCan dancers in the aisle and stirring applause after each number.

The four of us are travelling using carry-on luggage only. We will see whether we succeed with seven weeks’ travel. We are setting up a blog to talk about our travels, post minifig photos and reveal Mr13′s daily “top ten” lists. We’ll be commenting on those daily oddities – like buying seven bananas at Marks and Spencer’s for just 50p – which would cost around $5 back home. When the site is ready, I will post a link here.

What have I seen so far that is librarianly?

1. Good use of QR codes in Imperial College London library.

You have probably heard me get really cross about trendy and pointless uses of QR codes in libraries (like QR codes in email signatures … if someone can explain to me WHY that would ever be useful instead of just posting a link then I would be grateful).

QR codes work well when they link physical objects to something online that increases the utility of the object (either by further information, or something interactive). When my  Australian librarian friend Jenny Evans gave me a tour of the library I saw this very sensible use outside their bookable computer labs:

2. Records in the dragon in the tower

It is apparently traditional to build large sculptures from weapons won in battle – like this giant dragon in the Tower of London built by the Royal Armouries. It contains over 2672 items, including 26 telescopes, two cannons and 15 pollaxes.

If you look closer, however, you will see that it is also celebrating the ten different institutions that have been part of the Tower. This includes the – more peaceable? – Records Office.

The dragon’s limbs are made of scrolls from the Records Office:

3. Art library at the Victoria and Albert Museum

Apparently much of the stock is off-site, but if I ever need an image of the “traditional” research library, then the National Art Library at the Victoria and Albert Museum would be a great candidate.

4. A literacy campaign ( that forgot libraries ?)

As we ride the tube, we see these posters telling us that “Nicky Helps Kids Read”.

At first I thought it was an advert promoting the government’s “Big Society” initiatives, where cost saving measures are replacing professional staff with volunteers, as has been done in Oxfordshire. In June 20 out of 43 libraries in the constituency were set to close,  however it was also planned for six libraries to have all professional staff replaced by volunteers.

Apparently, though, it is promoting a literacy campaign that is being led by one of the local tabloid newspapers, called Get London Reading . Hundreds of volunteers are going in to schools to do one-on-one reading programmes with kids with low literacy levels. Apparently – and this is an outsiders’ view so I would love to be wrong – this is not involving local and school libraries as part of the program. In fact, the British Library has been running a similar programme with staff volunteers for the last eight years. Seems like an opportunity missed by underfunded libraries and the programme organisers – although there have been people pointing out the hypocrisy of government ministers supporting the Get London Reading campaign, while making it harder for kids to read by closing local libraries.

Want to have coffee?

I would love to know what you are doing in your library, where you think libraries are going and library-types of places I could visit.

I am lucky enough to be taking a Big Family Holiday at the end of the year. It is mainly just being mum and wife and enjoying my family’s company, so it is not work … BUT…

If you read this blog, want to talk library, have ideas of library places to visit or would like to catch up and are in or near:

• London
• Paris
• Barcelona
• Orlando, Florida
• Washington DC
• New York City
• SanFrancisco

- let’s do it.

Please feel free to add suggested places to visit in the comments below, or if you want to have coffee then drop me an email: kathryn dot greenhill at gmail dot com , and let’s arrange something.

The nice folk at the  Center for History and New Media at George Mason University  awarded me a  Mellon THATcamp fellowship to help toward my attendance at the Bootcamp part of THATCampCanberra . In return, they asked for  my reflections on what I learned at THATcamp bootcamp and unconference sessions and how I may apply it in the future.

This is a bit longer and ramblier than than my usual posts.

tl:dr version – Chutzpah and determination rather than technical knowledge is more likely to make one a digital humanities expert

Attending bootcamp clarified my thinking around how I can best learn about and apply technological tools in the humanities. To get the most out of any learning event like this, I now realise I need to spend time shortly before or after trying to build or make something with the tools featured. I now feel much more confident about my ability to do this.

While the theoretical information in the bootcamp sessions was useful, I could find out this from researching and reading. What was invaluable was hearing about the creative process of project design and configuring and building the tools, which approaches had been tried and rejected, self-critiques of decisions made and how things could have been done differently – plus hearing the questions asked by others in the session. It was clear that people were not coming to projects as fully-fledged experts, but spent much time researching and problem-solving – and in some cases chutzpah and determination were much more useful qualities than initial technical knowledge. The second was ultimately gained through the first.

I think I pull back from trying these kinds of projects because I feel that I need to already know about the tools, standards and data structures I will need before I even begin. I have spent the last 18 months trying to convince my students that they can be competent learners in unfamiliar technologies if they have confidence and know how to look things up or seek support – something I obviously need to internalise a little more.

To learn, I need to contextualise new tools with what I already know. Sounds obvious, but it was not until I was trying to quietly build my own copy of a LibX toolbar for the National Library in the middle of the session about the NLA Party Infrastructure that I realised how essential this contextualisation is. I thought I was losing focus and was doing the equivalent of doodling. Then I realised that specifying the contextual searches in the LibX toolbar is a way of interrogating and outputting an enquiry to a public API without having to know about much more than how to format the enquiry string. Basil Dewhurst was explaining the query structure for the NLA Party APIs, so this was a quick and dirty way for me to understand how this worked. It also clarified for me that I should go off and play with Yahoo Pipes or equivalent to play with enquiring and outputting from the NLA Party Infrastructure.

During the bootcamp sessions, I became more mindful that some of my questions were about fitting new tools and skills into what I already knew. I understood better why I was asking “how does this relate to…” or “could your use this to…” or “did you think about doing …” I think I will be much more understanding when students go off on what seem to be tangents, or ask questions that I think I had just answered – as they are probably trying to fit new knowledge to a personal context, rather than seeking information.

I attended four sessions at Bootcamp:

Introducing the NLA party Infrastructure: http://thatcampcanberra.org/bootcamp/bootcamp-introducing-the-nla-party-infrastructure/

Mining Trove newspapers http://thatcampcanberra.org/bootcamp/bootcamp-mining-trove-newspapers/

Using the Literature Object Re-Use and Exchange http://thatcampcanberra.org/bootcamp/bootcamp-using-lore/

Using Google Refine for Humanities Datasets http://thatcampcanberra.org/bootcamp/bootcamp-google-refine-for-humanities-datasets/

>>>>>>>>>>>

There are several posts dated 30 September to 10 October  about the subject matter of sessions that I attended, links pushed out and events that happened during THATcamp.

I have a few points to think about and maybe develop further.

1. Events like THATcamp and the Digital Public Sphere work better for me than reading journal articles or attending formal conferences  as a way to understand the knowledge, attitudes, challenges, failure and humour of practitioners and theorists in my research area.
2. I still have not really settled on a research area, but the last few days have crystallised research interests I would like explore… I could observe what really interested me, where I already knew things and the tools and techniques that I was excited to find out about. I just need to sleep on it and do a bit more journalling and drawing to work out exactly what they are.
3. I think I would rather be an educator/maker/builder/person who helps other people  than what my job currently requires me to be – which is an educator/researcher/person who helps other people. I guess I need to find a way for making/building to be classed as research…
4. Why do so many people re-invent beautiful and useful wheels? Seems almost like it is harder to understand what each other are doing than to create from ground up.

I have spent all day sitting under the beautiful windows of the National Library of Australia. Time to catch a flight…

Today I am attending THATcamp Canberra .

The CoverItLive window below is pulling in all tweets from the twitter account @libsmatter and also all tweets tagged #THATcampCBR or  #thatcamp or “that camp canberra”.

I am so, so lucky and happy. I found out this morning that I have been awarded a Mellon THATcamp fellowship to help toward my attendance at the Bootcamp part of THATCampCanberra at the end of the week. Thank you to the folk at the  Center for History and New Media at George Mason University who administer the Fellowship (and gave the world Zotero, too).

I have put up a couple of proposals for sessions that I am happy to facilitate during the unconference. It is really me saying “this is what I want to learn from you clever folk, please share”, so if I end up going to other sessions, that is just fine. If you read this blog and will not be at THATcamp, but would like to throw some ideas in the mix, feel free to do so in the comments and I will bring them up if the session runs.

Session suggestion 1: Skills to practice and support the Digital Humanities

FORMAT: Facilitated talkfest producing agreed list of specific skills

This may be better as two topics, but many of the skills will be the same.

PART ONE – Improving technological literacy for humanities researchers

What specific skills do humanities researchers need to be sufficiently technologically literate to take advantage of possibilities offered by the digital humanities?

Whose responsibility is it to help them gain these skills?

What model would work to help support researchers to gain these skills? Is there a role for research institutions to provide:

• digital tools sandboxes for researchers
• facilities like the Scholars Lab at UVa
• tech skills clinics in the same model as writing clinics
• support for digital humanities champions and mentors

PART TWO – Preparing professionals to support digital humanities

Information Studies courses at universities claim to be producing graduates who are specialists in metadata, database design, taxonomies and information design. They claim that graduates will be experts in collecting, organising and retrieving digital and physical information.

What specific skills should be taught in Information Studies courses so that graduates can support the digital humanities?

How can libraries and librarians provide better support for digital humanities?

Have librarians and Information Studies departments missed to boat at becoming useful in this arena, or is there still a chance to be usefully involved? If so, what do we need to do?

Session suggestion 2: Sharing the shoeboxes under the bed

The phrase “shoeboxes under the bed” is borrowed from Jo Ransom, the driving force behind Kete Horwhenua and one of my top role models about what it means to be a librarian with both heart and deadly tech skills.

SESSION FORMAT: Facilitated talkfest

This is a tentative exploration of ideas, so if anyone specialises in this, please jump in.

Official government information, historical records and newspaper articles tell part of the story of a community. The digital humanities community is working well to collect and expose this data.

Many communities have “shoeboxes under the bed” containing personal information like family photographs, recipes, memorabilia and artworks. People can be filmed or recorded telling their personal stories. Amateur historians, hobby genealogists, community arts projects, library local history collections, ABC Open are all involved in trying to capture these stories.

“Build it and they will come” models for harvesting this type of data have not proved effective. The internet is littered with beautiful looking sites with great architecture that have no data beyond the initial seeding data that was collected before grant money ran out.

Kete Horowhenua is an example of a successful site collecting many different digital formats and community metadata, harvesting the shoeboxes under the bed.

QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION

What is the best way to create a project to harvest these stories that has community ownership ?

Is there value in creating a model or guidelines to create an easy-to-implement platform for communities that want to harvest their shoeboxes? What features need to be included beside:

• rights management
• remix
• best metadata schema
• conversion to standardised file formats
• exposure to search engines

In a quest to be sparked into ecstatic action toward choosing a PhD topic, I am travelling interstate next week to mix with people who know much more than me about digital culture and about massaging large datasets for cultural good.

Digital Cultural Sphere event

First stop, 6 October is in Sydney to be part of the government consultation on the National Cultural Policy discussion paper. Senator Kate Lundy and Minister Simon Crean are meeting with members of the traditional core arts sectors, creative industries and the cultural sector such as libraries archives and museums. How did I get to be part of it? I just registered at Eventbrite and received support from my workplace to attend. I am not going as an expert, but I am going as a someone who wants to learn as much as I can from the other participants and contribute my point of view if it is useful. Particularly interesting to me are parts of the report that emphasise using new technologies, inclusiveness and telling stories of people in Australia. The event will be livestreamed via video. If you want to contribute feedback or learn more about the discussions taking place around the policy – and I would suggest that this is an important thing for librarians to do – there are many social media avenues available right now and up to the 21 October .

THATCamp Canberra

THATCamp Canberra is a three day unconference for The Humanities And Technology, taking place at the University of Canberra 7-10 October . I have been meaning to blog about it for the last few weeks to encourage as many library types of folk as possible to join in. I know that there are quite a few library folk listed on the page of profiles of the campers, but I would love to see more who would like to work with me on a project to get hands dirty and build a library-y digital data-ish SOMETHING during the weekend.

I will be happy if all I do is learn from the datawonks and codingmavens who care about smooshing cultural data to tell stories. I will be especially happy to attend the Friday bootcamp sessions. Who wouldn’t want to learn about coding and mashing with Paul Hagon or work through an imaginary research project to learn more about Google Refine ?

 I want to fall in love – with a potential research topic

My aim from the week – rather lofty – is to find a PhD topic that I think I can work on for six years part-time and will be happy to have people perceive me to be “expert” in. I know some of the things I am seeking in a topic. I want:

• to make or do or build something new like a tool or crunch a whole lot of data
• NOT to ask a whole bunch of people about their opinions or synthesize and reinterpret only previous research
• something that does not feel like naval gazing
• something that I think will do some good in the world-  like be useful for people in developing countries or provide a foundation or model that will help other people to be useful
• something where the time span – six years – works to my advantage, which suggests some kind of longitudinal study
• something where I get to play with really cool technology that does not become out of date or redundant over the life of the project
• something that forces me to learn some rudimentary coding and love it
• something that somehow fits in with my interests in data remix and preserving community stories and people working together outside traditional organisational structures and acknowledging all voices and letting them be heard and community ownership and community contribution and creativity and fun and …