Posts Please tell me – What are you doing well professionally or in your library ?
This post was started on Thursday and finished on Friday, so I will count it as a post for both days 
This one was inspired by Teresa Bennet’s post about Sparkling with Confidence and by Jeff Cruz’ post today on the ALIA Sydney blog , Open Access vs. Cultural Protocols: Indigenous Knowledge Management …. so inspiring in fact that instead of going straight to sleep after turning in for the night, I have fired up my laptop while snuggling under the covers.
Brown, G. (2011). Trumpets. Retrieved from http://www.flickr.com/photos/gsbrown99/5777438271/
Teresa went to an event last week where Rachel Green was a guest speaker. One of her takeaways was that by sharing our strengths we can contribute, so doing this is not negative or boasting…and then today…
Jeff discussed the protocols around access to indigenous knowledge and looked at how curation agencies can sensitively respect this with their digitized information – arguing that indiscriminate Open Access to information applied without cultural sensitivity is not useful. I don’t think anyone would disagree. I also do not think that Open Access ever meant Open Slather …
It is a very useful discussion – made even more useful for something that is happening in my workplace by the mention of the Mukurtu project . This is a method for providing tiered access to indigenous information according to who is enquiring and whether they have a cultural right to access the information. It provides both a metadata schema to store information about the cultural status of a digital object, as well as rights of access. It will be downloadable for people who want to tinker with it in Spring 2011 , but I can see from the site that it looks like basically a Drupal installation with a particular set of plugins and pre-configuration… which makes it both very flexible and very easy to adapt and use…
As I sent a link to this to someone else who may be interested, it occurred to me that I only found out about this due to the #blogjune project. The post only existed due to #blogjune. What we have is not only a bunch of librarians blogging about their cats and food and things that scare them, but an outburst of professional conversation as well … Already there have been some excellent professional posts on the Sydney ALIA blog – props to Katrina and co. for arranging this – but also:
- Sophie has shared about Mobile Learning and the Future of Information Literacy
- Kate in Brisbane about how she is using Buddypress in her teaching ,
- Kate in Melbourne has shared her handout for the Free Online Tools workshop she taught
- Michael has shared how he shelves the graphic novels in his libary collection by title instead of author
- Penny has shared a prezi about elearning in her library (what I liked about this one is that it was aimed at senior managment, so it gave a nice example of how to sell our services as well …)
I know that everyone does not have a cool prezi up their sleeves … but I would like to know, would love to hear more library bloggers sharing their strengths – boasting even, I don’t mind. I will bet that something that you do well professionally that you think is rather ordinary actually would be mindblowing to other library folk.
I am constantly impressed when I go to conferences at the everyday projects that libraries are doing, but often we do not get to hear about. One of the most memorable was from a couple of librarians at Batchelor College in Darwin talking about how they “non project managed” the transformation of a cluttered space into a flexible and culturally sensitive learning space. I am not necessarily thinking of clever Library Week events – it could be something very simple.
BAH-BOW!
I’ll start. I should leave this tomorrow, but it is a really simple thing. When I was at the Grove, we had self-checkout PCs that used to make an high pitched alert sound when a user did something wrong like try to issue an item already on loan to someone else. People constantly ignored it and staff were not wonderful at hearing the sound either. At a staff meeting after brainstorming, we decided to try the “wrong answer” noise from the old game show, Family Feud. Luckily the Bah-Bow! sound could be downloaded from the Internet Archive , so we did so, made that the new alert sound for the self check units and suddenly users were paying attention when the selfcheck needed their attention…
… so #blogjune bloggers, what is a strength that you have professionally or do well in your library?
Post number 9 and 10 for #blogjune 2011
[...] Kathryn Greenhill asks what people are doing well professionally/in their libraries [...]