Library Futures - at State Library of Western Australia and UTS

I’m excited.

After dropping the kids off, I’m going to Necessity is the mother of (re)invention: the future for libraries at the State Library of Western Australia today. I have heard two of the speakers before. Both were excellent and are why I’m going today.

I saw Dr Varapasad of the National Library Board of Singapore at speak at VALA 2008. I also saw him speak to the excellent  Bridging Worlds conference later that year and had a chance to tour the National Library. I loved the promotional displays with large cardboard cutouts of library staff next to heart shaped pieces of paper where users told their stories about why they <3 their library.

Singapore National Library Uploaded to Flickr on October 29, 2008 by jblyberg

I met Axel Bruns from QUT when we both spoke in the same session at Cultural Connections: MySpace is an ArtSpace:ARLIS/ANZ Biennial Conference in Brisbane in 2008. In fact his talk today, Oureach and Co-curation: engaging with library users is an update of that keynote and the slides have been posted online already.  If you have seen me speak, there is usually a slide in there with a guy with a speech bubble coming out of his mouth talking about the concept of “produsage” – the idea that in order to use and engage with much new media you also need to be a producer in the system. That’s Axel Bruns.

The other speaker is Frank McGuire the founder of Global Learning Village and a member of the Hume Global Learning Village Advisory Board at Hume City.

If I can get wifi access I will tweet is via @libsmatter and pull the tweets into the CoverItLive window below.

If you have not had enough Library Futures, then check out the CoverItLive from the University of Technology Sydney second staff Futures Day. Part one a month a go was wholey staff driven and enough was pushed out via the twitter  to make today an interesting day to watch – I liked the idea of a small bar in the library. You can follow the day via the twitter hashtag #plff2010 or view reports of the day in the CoverItLive session starting at 1pm AEST http://bit.ly/aUcEgU.

UPDATE: The tag for the UTS day is actually #libpd.. The other hashtag is actually for yet ANOTHER future library talk that the UTS staff are giving at the State Library of New South Wales today..

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