Today I am at the V Congreso Nacional de Bibliotecas Públicas at the Laboral University in Gijon, Spain, where I am on a “Round Table” panel where we will be discussing the public library as a hero in the digital age. As you can see from the link below, I am using my “Deeply local at the library” video. There is a live video stream of the proceedings.

Here is the Spanish description of the participants and topics:

Reflexiones sobre el valor de la biblioteca pública en la sociedad digital

Eppo Van Nispen Tot Sevenaer, Director Ejecutivo de United Promotion for Books (CPNB) (Holanda)

Kathryn Greenhill, Profesora asociada de Biblioteconomía y Documentación, Curtin University of Technology, Perth (Australia)

• Vídeo de su intervención

Martin Palmer, Director de las Bibliotecas del Condado de Essex (Reino Unido)

Daniel Cassany, Profesor titular en la Universidad Pompeu Fabra de Barcelona

• Ficha C.V.
• Intervención completa

Régis Dutremée, Jefe del departamento Biblioteca Digital, Biblioteca Pública de Información, Centro Georges Pompidou (Francia)

• Ficha C.V.
• Resumen de su intervención
• Intervención completa

Modera: M. Ramona Domínguez Sanjurjo, Directora de la Biblioteca Pública del Estado en Salamanca

• Ficha C.V.

I am tweeting the conference from @libsmatter .  The hashtag is #vcnbp . Here is the CoverItLive window of my tweets.

It’s a no brainer. Public libraries must help their communities to tell their stories digitally. I agree with Jo Ransom from the Horowhenua Library Trust.

She was a driving force behind Kete, a digital collaboration engine for her community.

I interviewed her via Skype in October for my talk for the V Congreso Nacional de Bibliotecas Públicas on 4 November 2010 .

Jo talks about the impact of Kete on her community. Please watch and be inspired by how we can change lives.

Today I gave my keynote talk for the V Congreso Nacional de Bibliotecas Públicas, Hacking the Public Library.

The presentation included four very short videos with four people working on library hacking projects talking about hacking and what libraries can learn from them. I also made some eight minute versions of the same people talking also about their library hacking projects and the role of public libraries in creating digital content with their users.

You can see all the videos on this page of my blog Keynote for V Congreso Nacional de Bibliotecas Públicas- movies, slides and written paper.

Here is the abstract:

HACKING THE PUBLIC LIBRARY: from print curators to digital content creators.

Public library staff worldwide are embracing the spirit of hackerdom by taking matters into their own hands and creating their own digital platforms, tools and content to better connect people and information. Libraries are creating online environments that connect the stories of their local communities. They are creating social layers in their catalogues. They are exposing their data to remix and repurposing.

Hacking is a nimble, creative act of using existing elements to better serve a new purpose. Hacking includes the following practices – finding new uses and combinations for existing elements; exhibiting high technical skill and going beyond expectations; playing creatively; building freely on the efforts of others; and, finally, working collaboratively in community

In this keynote, Kathryn Greenhill examines what public librarians can learn from four of our colleagues who are already hacking the public library, and how these hacking principles can be used to repurpose our public libraries as we move from curation and access of content to collaborations with our local communities to produce local digital content.

Here is my slideset:

Today I am at the V Congreso Nacional de Bibliotecas Públicas at the Laboral University in Gijon, Spain, where I am speaking about “Hacking the Public Library” in about half an hour. There is a live video stream of the proceedings.

I am tweeting the conference from @libsmatter .  The hashtag is #vcnbp . Here is the CoverItLive window of my tweets.

Today I am at the V Congreso Nacional de Bibliotecas Públicas at the Laboral University in Gijon, Spain, where I am speaking tomorrow and the next day.

I am tweeting the conference from @libsmatter .  The hashtag is #vcnbp . Here is the CoverItLive window of my tweets after the first half of the day.

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.

Uploaded to Flickr Bryan Rosengrant April 10, 2010

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.