I am not spending as much time as I would like to at Library Camp Perth 2010 today – arriving late and leaving early.

So I can keep track and read back later, I have set up

• a TwapperKeeper archive http://twapperkeeper.com/hashtag/lcp2010 ,
• and a CoverItLive window pulling in the #lcp2010 hashtag, embedded below:

I’m just back from a great night out, and found this waiting for me when I returned home:

It’s from my friend and craftbrarian, Jo Beazley, in Queensland. Thank you!

I enjoyed a night of chilli tofu and chat with fellow librarian bloggers, Con and snail … as well as our friend Gaby and Con’s husband, Mike.

Gaby and Con had been to an ALIA event where six workers in academic libraries talked about what their jobs involved. I was all ready to go to the event too…but all week my head was buried in trying to find images of MIT hackers and reading about free software in preparation for a presentation in a couple of weeks… so I almost missed the fact that Richard Stallman was talking at the same time. Almost, but thankfully not quite.

Mike, snail and I could not quite agree whether Richard Stallman was an icon or a guru of the Free Software movement. He wrote the GNU operating system which is an integral part of Linux distributions. He would prefer it to be termed GNU/Linux. He decided in 1983 that he would write a free software version of an operating system or die trying (of old age). Without a free operating system computer users would never be free of proprietary software for their computing.

Stallman’s basic argument is that software created by users that can be shared in a community is democratic and that proprietary software is not. This is Free software as in freedom, not as in without cost. He differentiates between Open Source software, which is a term that focuses on technical convenience and Free Software which he sees as a human rights issue.  He argues that software should fit the four freedoms:

• The freedom to run the program, for any purpose (freedom 0).
• The freedom to study how the program works, and change it to make it do what you wish (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
• The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor (freedom 2).
• The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others (freedom 3). By doing this you can give the whole community a chance to benefit from your changes. Access to the source code is a precondition for this.

Stallman has very clearly articulated his beliefs at the gnu.org site. He is good-humoured, incredibly logical, unkempt and has a passionate conviction that what he is doing is important and that the message should not be diluted or compromised.

I set up a CoverItLive window to catch my tweets from the event. It is embedded below. I understand that he does the same talk each time he does it, but as someone who had not seen him talk before I thoroughly enjoyed the delivery and the message – even if I often was annoyed at the stretches of logic he was making to justify a belief about liberty.

My favourite Stallmanisms for the evening were:

“Attacking ships is bad. Sharing software is not. Don’t call them by the same term, piracy”

“Amazon Kindle is a way of burning books. It means we need to end our friendships with others who read”

“Gnu is the most humorous word in the English language. Each time you write it you put a G at the start that you don’t say. It’s a joke. Not necessarily a good one. You pronounce the operating system  G-nooooo because we have been using it for 18 years, so it is no longer Gnu/new”

“Hacking is “playful cleverness”

“If I am the father of Open Source Software, then it was conceived via artificial insemination using stolen sperm.”

“vi vi vi is the editor of the Beast. To use it is not a sin. It is a penance.”

“it is every citizen’s duty to poke Big Brother in the eye”

I am very very glad that someone like Richard Stallman exists.

Here is the CoverItLive record of the event.

I work preparing students for an industry where many will administer financial resources to connect people with the content they need – at no further individual cost to the user. That’s my bias. But I don’t think it blinds me to what looks like a stunningly bad business decision by a massive online content sharing site, Scribd. I’d love it if someone could explain why the behaviour below is useful to their business.

I don’t want to pay-per-download to a site that is not sharing any of that profit with the content creator.

Scribd is a site where you can upload documents and then share them. The documents can be embedded in your webpage and people can download the documents if you let them.

To me there are a few assets that a massive content sharing site needs for it to work:

• technical excellence – reliable, fast hosting and great site usability
• legal terms and conditions to protect the site and users
• a way of making money
• excellent content that people want to share
• an easy way to facilitate sharing
• good will of the users
• critical mass of creators and users

Wolfgang Reinhardt , Steve Wheeler and Martin Ebner have uploaded their “twettiquette” paper Scribd. It is just the guide I need for students when we all try out Twitter together next week.

Reinhardt, W., Wheeler, S., & Ebner, M. (2010). All I need to know about Twitter in Education I Learned in Kindergarten. Presented at the World Computing Congress 2010, Brisbane, Queensland, Australia.

There is a .pdf download option on Scribd. I clicked it and was told that the paper (just uploaded last week) had become part of the “Scribd Archive”. To access it I would have to either pay $9 for a monthly membership to the site or upload my own document to the site. The money goes to the site, not the authors. The authors are not informed when their document has been added to the archive.

Now, this is the site’s legal and technical perogative. I am sure that the terms of service made anyone who joined the site aware of this possibility. I am not claiming that they cannot do it – just pointing out that it is meanspirited and looks like a terrible business decision.

The site needs user goodwill. As a creator, learning about this practice means I will not ever upload my content to Scribd. Especially when there are other sites, like slideshare.net, that allow me to upload documents where others can download for free. As a user – doubly so with bells on. The site needs great content. Not just content. I am not sure how saying “upload anything and we will let you download this work” encourages great content. I very, very nearly uploaded a .pdf saying “Getting me to upload this makes your site suck”, but that would be meanspirited… which seems to fit the culture of the site, actually.

When I chose not to take this option, later that day I had not one, but two!, emails from the site offering me a 7 day free membership trial… and including the link to the document that I could now download. I just needed to give them my credit card details and then I could stop monthly payments whenever I wanted. Ummm… no….. way.

I vented my frustration via Twitter. Being the  ESP-like magical service that it is, within five minutes one of the paper’s authors had let me know that they were unaware about the charge. Within 10 minutes a second author had uploaded a copy to slideshare.net, where you can download it today: http://www.slideshare.net/wolfgang.reinhardt/all-i-need-to-know-about-twitter-in-education-i-learned-in-kindergarten .

… which brings me to libraries …

… and institutional repositories …

…. and journal subscriptions…

If academic authors and readers *really* wanted easy access to pre-publication conference papers like this, wouldn’t it be a great idea if we all pooled our resources and asked our universities to put somone in charge of building a site where academics could easily upload and share their articles?  A massive content sharing site that was funded by universities so that it didn’t have to charge users per download or ask them to upload crap in exchange? Libraries are trying. They have institutional repositories. This is not working. They have a low profile on campuses, are rather hard to use and none of them talk easily to each other.

At the VALA 2008 conference , Andy Powell now Research Programme Director atEduserv rather jokingly suggested that slideshare.net was an excellent example of how a repository could be – easy to use, great content, allows easy embeds and very findable on google. I wonder if the time has come to stop laughing and look at models like the Flickr Commons , where cultural organisations use Flickr’s expertise as a content management and sharing site to expose their image collections. Of course, the images are also securely archived at the home site as well. Maybe, just maybe, it is time we looked at all the money, energy and librarian-hours of frustration that has been spent on trying to build institutional repositories that do not work … and threw some of those resources at trying to work out how we can partner with a massive content site that already has the engine, sharing and data exposure model right.

And then there is access to the material once it gets to a journal… Iris  Jastram has written a corker of an article for ACRLog , The Age of Big Access . She was comfortable living in what she had been told was “the Age of Google” , but now that she has realised that we are living in the “Age of Big Access” – where academics give away their content to journals,  and then their libraries cannot afford subscriptions to allow institutional access, and she is not sure where she now fits in as an instructional librarian.  Barbara Fister has described very eloquently how the “Age of Big Access” has created a “black market” of journal articles between scholars when libraries cannot afford them –  The Great Disconnect: Scholars without libraries .

Yesterday I got all hot and bothered because a site wanted to charge me to download another scholar’s work that the scholar had provided for no payment. I wonder whether instead of getting mad about Scribd, there are bigger targets out there ? Liberation Bibliography anyone ?

Here are three snippets that caught my eye today:

1. Perth Library Camp

The fourth annual Western Australian Library unconference is imminent and if you love libraries, lively discussion, questions, thinking, playing and connecting, it is the best event for to this each year.

Registrations opened today for the event on Monday 25 October at new and fabulous Grove Library. To be a participant – there are *NO* spectators – haul your browser off to the registration page ASAP. There are just 100 places and they fill fast. What do you want to know about or share with equally engaged information professionals? Think of something and add it to the Sessions page, or volunteer for the all important jobs on the day .

To find out more about library unconferences, see the front page of the Library Camp Perth page , or check out my accounts of previous years:

• Library 2.0 on the Loose unconference(2007)
• Library 2.0 and Beyond: Getting our hands dirty library unconference (2008)
• Community dreaming at Library Camp Perth 2009

2. Embedding a chapter of a Kindle Book in a website

Yep – Kindle for the web now allows you to embed the first chapter of a Kindle book into any website. Like this one below.

Very interestingly, I could copy the embed code from the sample (Karen McQuestion’s Easily Amused ) on Amazon’s page about  Kindle for the web , but when I looked at the page for this book  in the Australian Kindle store, there was no “Read First Chapter Free” button. In fact, I could not find a single Kindle book available for purchase in Australia that had this fuctionality. I hope to be wrong about this, so if you have found one, please let me know.

What does this do for our idea of the “location” of content ? If you mix and match two or three first chapters on a webpage like a collage from Tristan Tzara , then are your creating a whole new work by juxtaposing. (No, of course not, but are we opening the way for “pick n mix” pages of embedded content from a number of sources …ooooh…like an online university course reader …. ). As I keep pointing out, our limits with this kind of creation are commercial (copyright, regional, authorship, paywalls), not technical .

3. What every information service should have

My former co-worker, and extremely clever lady, Carolyn McDonald listed today on her whiteboard what her new job entails as Manager , Technology Innovation, Information Services  at Bond University . Not every information service can afford to have a single person dedicated to doing these things, but I think every information service should have a plan for someone to be doing this, and to encourage and develop staff who see these things as important – as not all staff do.

If you have not yet tried the free, open source citation managing software, Zotero, last night’s announcement should be enough to push you over the edge to give it a go – especially if you were put off by the fact that it works as a plugin for the Firefox browser.

Zotero Everywhere, announced last night, means that Zotero can now be will soon be able to be used with Chrome, IE and Safari or as a standalone desktop client. UPDATE: Thanks to Owen Stephens for pointing out that these developments are slated to happen “soon”.

Why should you try Zotero ?

• It costs no money. You are not dependent on your employee-provided site licence to let you access it, so if you leave – like graduate or change sectors – you do not suddenly start having to pay to keep accessing your citations.
• Upgrades are free, easy and painless.
• It harvests metadata from journal articles, webpages, Flickr images, YouTube videos with one click and stores them in an easily searchable database where you can tag, annote and create collections
• It works with content behind paywalls as well as free and open content
• It stores a snapshot of the saved item – webpage, pdf, whatever, and then THE CONTENTS of that item is indexed and searchable as well as the reference
• You can drag and drop citations from your library into a wordprocessor, blog post, slide show and instantly have correctly formatted citations
• Using the WORD plugin, you can insert an in-text citation with one click, and then press the “create bibliography” button and it harvests all your citations and creates a complete reference list
• It comes with several citation formats and you can specify the output if what you want is not there
• You can synchronise your citations to the web. This feature saved my vegetarian bacon when the harddisk of my laptop died two weeks before I had to hand in my Masters thesis. Instead of panicking, I just plugged in my netbook, synced my Zotero library to my browser and continued on.
• You can share citations publicly and with groups
• Because if we all band together and support these kinds of tools and help them to grow and be better, then we are responsibly saving our organisations money and getting closer to giving our users what will work best for them.

If you want to look at my favourite how-to guide, check out the Zotero Research LibGuide from Jason Puckett at Georgia State University – the man who is writing the book on Zotero – literally. I look forward to reading it but I guess he is busy writing a new chapter right now 🙂

Here’s a hoky little screencast that Kate Freedman and I made about Zotero , Thing 13 : Zotero: Webcam Conversation, for the Murdoch University Library Web 2.0 Easier, Faster Friendlier program in 2009.

UPDATE: If you want to know how Zotero compares to EndNote and Refworks, check out the table created by the University of Wisconsin – Madison or, of course, the Wikipedia entry on Comparison of Reference Management Software .

Thanks to the committee of the ALIA WA Library Technicians Group for inviting me to talk about ebooks and do a Futures Dreaming session at the Falcon eLibrary yesterday. It was great to mix with library technicians and to see the beautiful, beautiful community space that is the Falcon eLibrary and Community Centre. I loved the public “wet area” just opposite the circulation desk where library staff were getting seriously sticky by creating paper rocks for a display – lots of chance for mess and creativity in the library space – just what we need:

For those of you who were watching me tweet out the session about the history of Library Technicians in Australia , the speaker was Dr Judy Clayden from Edith Cowan University . Much of the talk was based on her PhD entitled “Contesting identity, power and status in feminized occupations: an historical case study of library paraprofessionals in Australia“.

Ebooks are becoming for me a bit like Second Life was a few years ago. I am interested in them  and think they are significant and we need to cope with the changes they bring, but I talk about them mainly because people have asked me to talk about them – so I do more research and find out more – and then people ask me to talk about them even  more. So far this year I have done four sessions on ebooks and declined another three…

I *love, love, love* doing the Futures Dreaming sessions. They are all so different each time, but the energy flow and the laughter is fantastic each time and all I need to do is channel the energy and point to make sure everyone gets to speak their piece. The trickiest job in the room is the scribe at the whiteboard who is capturing the meaning and the mood of what everyone is saying. Sarah did a great job yesterday, thank you. I have put the whiteboard images up at Flickr in a set, but have also added the whiteboards of the past two Futures Dreaming sessions I have facilitated.

Common threads are beginning to emerge. These are not necessarily practical ideas, but over and over the same things are being said. From all these sessions it is apparent that we urgently need more IT  and marketing skills in our libraries. If we could have just one library card for all Australian libraries and get rid of due back dates many, many library folk would be happier. There is a desire for closer collaboration with our users and an ability to provide resources like all online databases via superfast broadband. Buildings are seen as better if they are greener, more beautiful and purpose designed with little wasted space and lots of room for collaboration. Library systems that work better and are less complicated are also a common theme.

There are always a few absolute gems in these sessions. My favourite “out of the blue” ideas yesterday were the abolishment of all bottom shelves (yes!!) , the forrest in the centre of the circular library (why not ?) and providing expertise and a platform to organise and connect information sources held by other parts of the community like community groups (yes, yes, yes!)…. oh and the TARDIS that could be used as a store room 🙂 🙂

The questions that we worked with yesterday were:

• What impractical and expensive things would you do in your library if you had unlimited time, money and resources?
• What do we need to stop doing
• …and then smack bang in the middle of the session a new question poked its head out and would not be ignored…OK then –
• What do we need to start demanding?????

WHAT IMPRACTICAL AND EXPENSIVE THINGS WOULD YOU DO IN YOUR LIBRARY IF YOU HAD UNLIMITED TIME, MONEY AND RESOURCES ?

* Beautiful spaces
* Reference and communication by webcam, multimedia with users from their own homes
* Thumbprints instead of library cards
* Authors reading their own works in the library
* Technology “space” in the library
* Staff dedicated to showing people about technology and learning about it
* Networking with community
* Fast internet – super fast internet
* Online creation and collaboration with users
* Bigger buildings, custom made
* Automatic returns, sorting, reshelving machine
* Everybody feeling comfortable
* No more bottom shelves
* Climate controlled buildings with no more evaporative air conditioning
* More technology and multimedia
* Role with the community to help organise and provide a platform for organising their own collections (eg. small library collections owned by community groups )
* More computers
* Faster internet
* Own IT section
* Better communication with IT in parent organisation
* More staffing for IT department in parent organisation
* Working better with the rest of parent organisiation
* More time with our customers
* Detailed cataloguing on large print, better metadata to find materials better
* RFID that works
* Share resources with the community and create a distributed local collection between library and other information sources in the community
* A time machine for when people want to find out about the past
* Circular library with a park in the middle
* Beautiful gardens as part of the building
* No limit on amount of printouts
* Send reservations to the clients instead of them having to pick it up – and in whatever format they wanted
* No compactuses
* A tardis to use for storage space
* Marketing skills internally and externally
* Sensible space
* No wasted space in the library and excellent design

WHAT DO WE NEED TO STOP DOING ?

* Vertical Files
* Being policemen and enforcing so many rules
* Return Dates
* Unnecessary processing
* Overprocessing
* Traditional shelving
* Individual cards for each library
* Restrictions on social media for our users

WHAT DO WE NEED TO START DEMANDING ?

First time I have asked this question in one of these sessions, but it suddenly seemed to be the right thing to be discussing.

* Resources sold by publishers ready to go on library shelves with not more processing
* Full metadata records supplied by publishers with items
– costs
– spine labels as well
* RFID tags that work and do not need to be reconfigured and just work
* More training so we can do things better
* More training when technology systems supplied
* Technology that you can use that does not need training
* Technology packages sensibly configured
* Universal library funding
* State Library not offloading so many jobs to public libraries
* Union catalogue that also shows holdings
* One library card
– do away with the universal card and use a thumbprint or iris recognition
* Ebooks that can be lent and that just work for our users
* Funding for ebooks
* Space for front facing books
* Interactive OPACS
* Common database licensing via a consortium of all libraries
* Better copyright laws to allow better access to content for our users
* Better social media access in our libraries
* A stop to repetitive circulation tasks

On Thursday I am doing a guest lecture for students in Web Publishing 206. I am talking about the different identities I have online and why I do my digital presence that way .

I started it as a regular post, ran out of time, so have just added some links at the bottom that I want to use during the session.

POTTED HISTORY

I began using the Internet in 1989 but apart from personal contributions to newsgroups I did not create an online presence until 1996 when I published a raw HTML document on Murdoch University’s servers called: Authoring web pages using skills you already have as a librarian after I gave a presentation at an Internet Fair held by our professional organisation.

In 1997, our son’s birth announcement in the newspaper included a link to a webpage that we created to show pictures of his progress in hospital as a premature baby. I was also very active on a web based forum for mothers who were expecting babies in February 1998 at parentsplace.com. At the time, I couldn’t mention to other people the friendship, support and network that we built because there would be just to much to explain – like what the internet was and how relationships could be rich or real.

SIREXKAT

I posted to Parentsplace as sirex . My cat, Nougat , is a Cornish Rex with Siamese markings, which is called a Sirex . (See A post about my cat if you must 🙂 )

I forgot my login one day, and had to create a new one – Sirexkat .

…..

And that’s as far as I got with prose, so here are the links that I will be using today:

IDENTITIES

Blogging:

My personal/professional blog: Librarians Matter. I blog to be a node in a conversation and to contribute my bit so that others keep contributing their bits that I so love to interact with.

My professional “CV” that uses a blog” KathrynGreenhill.com

My professional group blog: Libraries Interact

I use the blogging platform, WordPress, as a tool to create many different web presences for many different purposes.

Twitter accounts:

My *nonpublic* Twitter account for my informal Personal Learning Network: sirexkat.

My public Twitter account that is associated with my blog, rather than me as a person – for feeds from Librarians Matter, conference and event blogging and links that would otherwise go on my blog, libsmatter .

An explanation of the difference between the two accounts: Twitter identities @libsmatter and @sirexkathryn

My “working for Curtin University” Twitter account: infoventurer

My “here’s where you will find me” Twitter account from when I worked at Murdoch University. It was featured in a widget on the sidebar of my work blog: whereskathryn

My “output from group blog” shared Twitter account: libsinteract

I use the Tweetdeck Twitter client to manage these.

It is not difficult for me. Just like you wear different clothes at work and talk to your boss in a different way to how you talk to your kids, I find it easy to slip into the appropriate “channel” – in fact I would feel uncomfortable mixing them up.

Elsewhere online

Flickr

FriendFeed

Delicious

Slideshare

YouTube – sirexkat and infoventurer

HOW I GET THINGS FOR MY BLOG.

It took me 6 months of blogging before I knew what the tagline should say.

I am very aware of how people are getting to my blog and who is being part of the conversation. I use Sitemeter and check it daily.

About sharing limits on my blog: Drawing the veil …

A workshop I did at Podcamp Australia in 2007 Blog fodder – what do I put in? . A movie showing me describing Ellyssa Kroski’s categorization of different types of blog posts , Lego trainset 111 – Happy Halloween

Pirate Hat. Wear one tomorrow. In a library. Make a record. Put it online. Tag it as instructed in the links below.

No particular reason. (The fact that 19 September every year is Talk Like a Pirate Day *must* be purely coincidental )

But if you want an explanation, see Mal Booth’s Wear Pirate Hats in Your Library on Wednesday! or Ruth Baxter’s And now for some fun – with pirate hats .