Michael Mace was morning keynote speaker for the second day of the ALIA Information Online conference.

He was involved with ebook platforms and readers ten years ago. He covered the reasons why they did not fly then. He suggested that circumstances are different in 2010 and we need to be prepared now for the huge changes they will bring.

I interviewed him after his keynote. I asked him to elaborate on his vision for ebooks that are not tied into the print metaphor and the role that librarians can play there. There is background audio that can be a little distracting.

Michael Mace talks about the future of ebooks …

Hey – yesterday’s CoverItLive window has today’s date – not to worry.

Here is my CoverItLive for today:

While I have wifi, I am tweeting the sessions I attend at the ALIA Information Online Conference via my public Twitter account, libsmatter .

I am pulling the tweets into a CoverItLive window that is embedded in my blog, but won’t show up in the RSS feed.

We love to talk, talk, talk in libraries.

This post was going to be “11 conversations we need to continue in libraries in 2011” in a nod to Dave Lanke’s post The Librarian Militant, The Librarian Triumphant. He posits librarianship as not a building or a collection but “a conversation you are having” – that we must keep fresh and responsive.

Dave also calls for imagination within the profession.  I’m taking up that challenge. Wouldn’t it be great if we had the answers now to some of the hoary issues of 2011, without the talkfest? So – I’m taking a punt and providing answers. Even more, I’m suggesting what we should do if I am right. My answers are based on reading, experience and have an element of tongue in cheek where that approach flounders.

I was aiming to publish the whole lot as one post – but it started to get long, and maybe posting what I have written so far will spur me on to complete the others. I know the other eight issues and the answers, but need to write my explanations. I wonder whether the big issues and discussions I have identified are the same as the ones you would identify??

ISSUE ONE: Will libraries, museums, archives, public broadcasters and art galleries converge?

ANSWER:

Yes.

Restricted funding, commonality of purpose and overlap of access methods will mean that strong, converged memory and collecting conglomerates will form from individual institutions within the next two years.

Three projects illustrate this convergence of purpose but there are many more. The British Library is crowdsourcing the recording of English speakers worldwide reading the “Mr Tickle” story to track the evolution of English. The Poetry Archive is a wholly online charitable resource dedicated to recording poets reading their own works . The British Broadcasting Corporation curates and makes available online a series of archival collections of audio, video and documents from writers, poets and historic leaders.

SO:

Start the conversation with other collecting and memory institutions now. Apply for joint funding, create joint projects, run the same event across a number of institutions that allows users to appreciate the variety of approaches (for example a history of a newsroom with artifacts at a museum, secondary and descriptive material at a library and historical recordings from the newsroom archives all unified through a single online presence).

ISSUE TWO: How do we force publishers to give us ebook content that includes works that our users want and that they find easy to download to their chosen device?

ANSWER:

They will not.

It is not in their commercial interests to do so. They are just not that into us.

SO:

We need to lobby publishers and come up with very compelling reasons why library copies of ebooks will be “gateway drugs” resulting in significantly more content sales. We need to prove to our users any claims we make that it is cheaper and easier to use library ebooks than privately-purchased one-click wirelessly delivered content. Or we could save our energy and find untapped sources of content created by our local users and work together to create a single publishing platform and rights-management tool to allow easy creation and access to local content.

ISSUE THREE: Gartner claimed in April 2007 that by the end of 2011, 80% of our users would have avatars in a virtual world.  What happened?

ANSWER:

Avatars will come, but not for about three years and not in the form that we expect.

The move will come gradually via changes to the platform of an existing social network like Facebook or Twitter, resulting in established profiles interacting in a 3D-like space. Changes to input devices also may result in a more 3D-like and embodied metaphor for information access – see the nascent Kinect games as an example of how our online interactions can be more related and controlled by what we do in 3D space.

Avatars may also manifest as a metadata layer over real people in real space and time, with augmented reality and smart phones allowing the reading about and interacting with social data about people just by pointing a device at them. The “virtual world” may be one made of data that slips over the “real world”, rather than being accessed on an individual computer. All that tagging of people in images uploaded to Facebook, Picasa and Flickr that hundreds of thousands of us do daily? Just ripe for harvesting to create a facial recognition app that allows you to add a personal data layer over real people in a crowd.
SO:

Learn what you can about providing information in an environment where the metaphor for access is no longer a 2D flat printed page, but spatial relationships. Think about the implications of an environment where data and information becomes a platforms for users to clamber about interacting with each other. Think about the implications of an environment where the internet of things has morphed so that “things” includes people…

IN 11 ANSWERS FOR LIBRARIES  IN 2011 PART TWO AND PART THREE: Print, clouds, fish, politics … and more….

For the last six months I had been promising my eight year old son that I would show him how to make rainbow flowers.

On New Year’s Eve we spied the perfect flowers – eight white chrysanthemums – in a bunch at the local deli. Here is a little movie showing what we did, how the flowers changed over a couple of hours and how they looked after 24 hours. We used the Open Source time-lapse photography program, Gawker .

How to make rainbow flowers

Someone asked me to join a daily photo group in 2009. I got as far as 281 photos, and found it a surprisingly confronting and interesting activity. By looking at how I presented myself in a still image each day, it changed the way I thought about how I interacted with other people in real life.

I’m trying it again in 2011 and am really interested in seeing what other people make of the exercise…

If you’d like to play along with the Daily Image 2011 group, please join me by going to the group page on Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/groups/dailyimage2011/

HERE IS SOME MORE INFORMATION

WHAT?
One photo/video/drawing each day with yourself in it, uploaded to Flickr.

HOW?

You do not have to create the image, but you do need to be in it somewhere – hand, slight image in mirror, photo of self on PC screen in background…

If you don’t manage one photo per day, feel free to add what you can when you can… but only one photo from each day.

WHY?

I got as far as 281 photos doing this in 2009 and was really confronted by the choices I had to make about how I presented myself. Did I always want to show myself as a healthy, cheery sort of person? How much of the ugly and everyday was I prepared to show?

I discovered that – contrary to my comfort level – photos with myself smiling really *did* look better. This freaked me out, as I always thought that forcing myself to smile looked worse than showing something “genuine”. This flowed on to my everyday life where I started smiling at other people more…

There is a Daily Image 2011  group pool RSS feed. There is also a Twitter account that is feeding out each image as it is added: Daily Image 2011 Twitter Feed.

How would you answer these questions:

1. How long ago did you look at your RSS reader?
2. How often do you do so?
3. Why has this changed from 2 years ago, if at all ?

I was idly wondering whether there is still a point to setting an exercise in my library tech unit that gets students to subscribe and watch a few RSS feeds. I send out the message above on three of my Twitter accounts and obviously touched a nerve – around thirty people responded. (Not everyone answered each bit of the question).

My prediction? Twitter had turned RSS readers into roadkill. No-one was looking at RSS any more and anyhow, no-one is blogging any more.

Nope. 20 out of 33 check their RSS reader at least daily. Yes, around a third (31%) reported looking at the readers less than 2 years ago. 24% reported no change, but 27% reported an increase.

I know the people who responded and I guess that about 1/3 of those who were looking more did not really use RSS a couple of years ago.

Many of the comments attribute the way they use Twitter to a decrease or to a change in RSS reading patterns. Some now read more, but by skimming headlines. Others use RSS for “newspaper style” in-depth reading and Twitter for the more shallow quick links. Generally people reported RSS reading as a more social activity than two years ago – either obtaining new feeds via Twitter, pushing out a lot of links from their readers to Twitter, or just sharing via their RSS reader. Changes  – of circumstances, jobs, interests and the patterns of blogging for the feeds they had followed –  all were reported to change RSS reading habits.

So – the RSS exercise stays on the course, but maybe I should consider emphasising the sharing possibilities that using an RSS reader can involve?

The comment I most enjoyed, however, came from one of my followers immediately AFTER he had answered my question. His comment:

I just sent the best out of context tweet ever.

… because he had just tweeted:

@libsmatter 1 hr ago, many times a day, more than I did 2 yrs ago because now I have a smart phone

Oh dear. I then read back over some of the other responses, equally out of context. I’m sorry…. I laughed….

(AND A BONUS FOR THE COMMENT BOX BELOW – DID YOU READ THIS POST VIA RSS READER OR FROM A TWITTER LINK… ?)

MARKING

Shhh… go away… I’m marking….not meant to be here…you didn’t see me …

CONFRONTED

My first semester marking student assignments is confronting. By the end of next semester I should have a lot of tricks and shortcuts, but at the moment I am still learning where the corners are in this job, let alone when and how they can be cut. Marking is making me look very hard at:

• my own ethics
• my own writing style
• my preconceived opinions
• how I manage my time
• what I believe students deserve in terms of my attention and time
• what I believe is authoritative information
• what I think students need to know – both information and as skills in communication
• what the profession is likely to want from students
• and what the university is likely to expect of me

HARVARD

Now, when the minifigs visited Harvard University last year, they did not see Mark Zuckerburg, founder of Facebook. He had moved on by then, and they were looking at minifig concerns like tiny doors and Sesame Street sweatshirts.

But – if you want some intellectual stimulation from two of the Harvard minds that I admire most, please get yourself a cuppa, pull up an easy chair and take some time of sheer pleasure to enjoy the lucidity and careful writing of Lawrence Lessig and Zadie Smith .

In an interesting pastiche of popular culture, web culture and careful consideration about knowledge-making, both have independently written reviews of Alan Sorkin’s The Social Network movie about Facebook . They both were at Harvard in those years and are reflecting on this and much more.

Ever cutting and subtle, Lessig starts with:

In 2004, a Harvard undergraduate got an idea (yes, that is ambiguous) for a new kind of social network.

…and continues in the same vein.

Zadie Smith ends with:

…The Social Network is not a cruel portrait of any particular real-world person called “Mark Zuckerberg.” It’s a cruel portrait of us: 500 million sentient people entrapped in the recent careless thoughts of a Harvard sophomore.

…and between the two of them there is much richness and delight to be had…

I’m back from Spain, France and Singapore with a bump… ready to get into marking student assignments solidly for two weeks. I had a wonderful time – learning, eating, talking, laughing, visiting, cycling, flying, shopping and generally saying “oh wow!”. Many, many thanks to the Spanish Ministry of Culture for inviting me and to all the wonderfully clever, interesting and accommodating folk that I met on the way.

I hope to provide more reflection on the conference and some of the places I visited, but it will need to wait.

The minifigs enjoyed themselves too. Each time I travel, my sons give me a couple of Lego minifigs to photograph in interesting places. You can see their previous travels around Australia, New Zealand, the United States, the Netherlands and in London here in this Flickr set,  Minifigs go travelling . They are not the only minifig world travellers – Jo-Jo and Frikke from Denmark also saw the world – on their own….

The chef inspected croissants at Charles De Gaulle airport as we passed through Paris, so that by the time we reached Gijon in Northern Spain he had them almost perfected:

The minifigs came with us on our “Gaudi Day” in Barcelona, as we explored the architect’s apartment block, La Pedrera and what is now a public park, Parc Guell:

The minfigs visited the Louvre in Paris:

They had great fun in the retrospective of video games over the last 30 years, Museogames, held at the Musee des arts et metiers in Paris:

I am not sure that they enjoyed almost being eaten in Singapore on the way home, but they should be used to it because it also happened two years before.