This is one of those “where were you when…?” moments.

Where was I when Kevin Rudd stood down as Prime Minister so that the party could vote on who would be Prime Minister in the morning?

Making a website for work, dealing with some exciting news that I can’t share yet, thinking about the next library unconference in Western Australia….

… removing my 7 year old son’s contact lenses and telling my other son to close his computer because he was totally engaged in designing a computer game for his Year 7 computing class…discovering that playing Renee and Renato’s 1983 Hit Save Your Love makes children run straight to bed with no complaints …

The way I found out about the news, and tried to find more was:

• reading jokes about a #spill on Twitter and first thinking that there was another oil tanker that had gone over in the sea (stayed 10 mins)
• watching as the rumour solidified, people began citing sources and putting out links to reliable news sources (5 mins)
• checking abc.net.au to see what news was there (last updated 12 minutes before) (3 mins)
• switching on Radio National (ABC again) to hear if there was anything on about it (20 sec)
• checking the live radio stream from the ABC (not much) (10 sec)
• switching on ABC1 on the TV (no – Spics ‘n’ Specs on because I’m in Western Australia – 2 hours and 10 years behind the rest of the country)
• switching to Channel 7 and finally seeing Kev’s resignation speech

Post 25 of the 30 posts in 30 days challenge.

…looks around and says “Is the bar tender here?”

*boom, tish*

Welcome to the bottom of the barrel for post 24 of the 30 posts in 30 days challenge.

Our new library was named a few weeks ago. It will be “The Grove:
Leading, Learning, Living”. There was a lot of public debate in the months leading up to this, after the community rejected the original consultant’s suggestion that it be called “The Very Clever Library”. It is currently the “Cottesloe-Peppermint Grove-Mosman Park Library”, so it will be much easier to answer the phone.

The move is at the start of August. Doors close for a couple of weeks, then open to the public a light, open, welcoming space over twice the size of the current building.

The building houses the library, Child Health Clinic, large Community Meeting Rooms and the Peppermint Grove Shire Offices. Features include solar panels, a thermal maze, storm water reuse, waterless urinals, solar passive orientation, bio filtering and rainwater tanks. Inside will be a cafe, separate children’s storytime room, free wifi, public access computers, four large screens with over 40 cable TV channels and video displays, four spaces for presentations with dataprojectors and screens, a quiet study area, adaptive technology for people with disabilities, community history space, sustainability information, lots and lots of books, dvds, talking books, graphic novels and magazines plus community education classes and friendly, knowledgable welcoming staff.

The slideshow below shows photos from our site visit at the start of June, explaining what will go where. If it doesn’t show on your computer, you can see it here, New building May 2010. The Grove. Leading, learning, living .

Still taking a break from Think Posts in the 30 posts in 30 days challenge…

My old schoolfriend and very soon to be qualified librarian, Jenny, outed me in the comments on my four truths and one lie post.

She was there when the peacock blue ink incident happened.  When I wrote in peacock blue ink in the Mock Exams before the Big Exam, the teacher in question went to the extent of taking several marks off my English Mock Exam for “not being able to follow instructions” and “dashing off work in green ink”.  She taught me a life lesson – that people in authority can be wrong and to think carefully about what they are saying and measure it against what may be an alternative way of looking at things…

Jenny knows I really am shy enough to cross the road or duck into a shop if I am feeling thingie about talking to someone. Co-incidentally Lutie, who doubted that I would do such a thing,  was in a bookshop in Freo today and I walked up to her and said “hi”. 🙂 And in case she was wondering, I don’t think I would ever feel thingie enough about talking to her to not say hi 🙂 🙂

As GirlwithShoes observed, I was also bemused that no-one questioned me as a roller derby queen or being kicked out of a hotel bar.

That leaves the high jump record. I am 158cm and was a much smaller 12 year old.  My primary school friend Julie, who was a tall and athletic youngster, did hold the state high jump record with that height.

Congratulations to Hoi and Ruth who got it right. To the other people who played – thanks for believing that I could have been a High Jump Champion. Just shows that you never know what other people think you are capable of.

Post number 21 of the 30 posts in 30 days challenge.

Just to reassure Ruth  after her comment on yesterday’s post.

In 1991, I was removed by police from a public bar in Swansea, Tasmania, making the front page of the Mercury. I was having a quiet drink with some other women the night after the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission had ruled that the Returned Services League could not legally continue to exclude women from the bar. The RSL President was drunk and belligerent and removing us was how the police kept the peace.

The back story is that the local hairdresser was asked by a couple of female travellers where they could get a meal in the town. When she told them to go to the RSL, they told her that they had tried that, but they had been kicked out of the bar for being women. She told them that that really couldn’t be so and tried to be served there herself. Two or three actions in the Human Rights and Equal Opportunities Commission, and several years,  later she had a ruling that the club had to serve women.

I was invited because I was a member of the Women’s Action Group, a feminist collective that met to do womanly things like get kicked out of bars. I had been in Hobart for just two weeks at the time and gave my mum a fright when I sent a copy of the paper back home. Two months later on International Women’s Day, I was standing in a giant tea cup sculpture made of hay, on the back of a ute parked at Parliament House,  speaking through a megaphone on the topic “Don’t let them tell you it’s over …. “.

I didn’t *deliberately* put my hands behind my back in the photo to make it look like I was handcuffed.  😉

Blog Post 20 the 30 posts in 30 days challenge

I need a break from think posting, so I’m following Hoi’s lead.

Four of these statements about me are true and one is a lie. See if you can guess which one. I’ll tell you tomorrow. Or the next day, honestly.

• I was escorted by police from a hotel bar in the Swansea RSL in Tasmania for disturbing the peace and my photo made the front page of the Hobart Mercury.

• I used to hold the Western Australian State Schoolgirl’s U12 High Jump record, with a height of 1m 42cm.

• I am so shy that I still sometimes cross the road if I see someone I know coming the other way so that I don’t have to talk to them.

• My Year 12 English Teacher told me that I would get marks off in my State Matriculation exam if I used a peacock blue fountain pen, but I proved her wrong by getting 100%.

• If I had more time, I would love to join the local Roller Derby team which trains on Sunday nights 5 minutes from my house.

Here’s another way of looking at the question “how can public library consortia and publishers play nicely together so that our users have free, technically simple access to ebooks?”

I said in my last post that digital content makes it easy to cut out the middle men, with an instant path from supplier to consumer… and suggested that it was not attractive to publishers for libraries to be “middle men” between them and consumers.

But – What if publishers are actually disposible “middle men” between library users and content producers ?

What if we can provide a “try before you buy” distribution channel that benefits authors?

What if we guaranteed eyeballs, clickthroughs and a supportive reading culture directly to authors?

What if authors directly supplied “pay to own” ebook downloads to consumers, while libraries paid authors for temporary access copies for our users?

What if the role of library consortia, set up to provide ebook access,  was partly to support authors  with skills, training, facilities, standardised and open formatting and distribution channels?

What if instead of paying publishers, we dealt directly with authors ?

What if instead of trying to persuade publishers to play nicely with us, we turned to our users and asked them to fund us to help directly support authors – or other digital content creators?

Naive crazytalk maybe. 🙂

For the music industry, Digital Rights Management did not work as a cost-effective, sensible solution to prevent copyright breaches. It frustrated genuine users and did nothing to prevent people determined to pirate music.

Sarah Houghton-Jan (I am a frustrated eBook (non) user), David Lee King (Library eBooks can be Frustrating!) and Kate Davis (advocacy and econtent (i’m also a frustrated ebook user) have all posted today about the difficulties they have as consumers of ebooks from their libraries, and to some extent blamed this on DRM. They cannot easily get the things to work on their devices without a lot of time wasted and…well… frustration. These are people who have been paid by their libraries to know about technologies like ebooks and implement the best services for their users. If they can’t read ebooks on their own devices without a whole lot of kerfuffle, then what hope does the home consumer have?

Paint me purple and call me paranoid if you wish, but I suspect that this lack of easy usage- and not copyright protection- is what is behind strict and ridiculous DRM controls on ebook services available for library subscription. It is not in publishers’ interests for ebooks to be easy to download in libraries. More charitably, there is little incentive for publishers to get this right for the library market. The three bloggers above call for unity and advocacy from libraries to make it easier for us to deliver ebook services to our users. Let’s take this idea to the utopian conclusion for public libraries, and then look at where this leaves publishers.

To me the logical model is for libraries to pool their funds and create a single consortia that purchases and manages access to ebooks (and other eResources while they are at it). Authentication issues could be solved by having a single library card for all users of the system, or – again with consortial funds – adapting a cross-authentication system like Shibboleth so that authentication can happen between disparate local systems and the ebook providers. Let’s not get too giddy, so we’ll just limit this to a state by state effort in Australia (although the national licensing “One Library” model being proposed by the National and State Libraries Australasia looks promising ).

So – now we have probably eight large, cashed-up consortia ready to provide free and user-friendly access to ebooks for library users in Australia. They approach the publishers. What will be in it for the publishers?

Digital content, without a need for physical storage, inventory and delivery,  can cut out the middle men and deliver directly from the supplier to consumer. CD stores, video shops, newsagencies, travel agencies – all businesses with models based on being middle men – are folding or morphing out of recognition if they want to survive. With ebooks, wouldn’t the library consortia be offering to take the role as a “middle man”?  The iBook store, Amazon’s Whispernet – although without decent content yet – are simple for the user and create direct profit for the publisher, so a library interface would  just be complicating the delivery channel, not making it easier for the publisher. If not a role of “middle man”, then is the role that the large library consortia are offering that of competing distribution channel? One where the publisher does not make nearly as much profit per copy consumed?

Isn’t that what we already do with print books? Aren’t libraries undercutting the sales of print books already? Yes. We are. A little more on that later.

What I think we need , if we are going to advocate and work with publishers to create easily accessible ebooks for our users, is reasons why it is in publishers’ interests to provide such a model. This is in a country where publishers argue that they need parallel importation limitations to protect their industry, while much cheaper prices at thebookdepository and Amazon destroy independent booksellers. A country where publishers are not selling ebook versions of print books even to consumers because they are worried about the effect on their profits.

Maybe one of the attractions would be to keep libraries happy because we are clients for print books. I would also  argue that libraries create a culture of reading and of consumption of publisher content. Good libraries support their collections with events, tools and staff that promote and encourage the use of that content. Many of our users could not afford to buy ebooks and (libraries would like to think, but it remains to be proven) would only read them if provided by a library.

Libraries can offer a “try before you buy” service, where an ebook borrowed temporarily creates a market for users to buy their own copies of that work or other works by the same author.  I find the “digital rental” model of journal subscriptions very  challenging – I want my library to own their content outright, not have all back issues disappear when we can no longer afford the subscription…but maybe this is a model that would work for library ebooks. Although there is absolutely no technical reason why an ebook should have a short “loan” period (unlike physical books), or any loan period at all, maybe this is what libraries should ask from publishers. To pay lower rates to provide free short term copies of digital content to our users.

I am not sure that this is enough of an argument to persuade publishers. Apart from altruism, supporting the underprivileged or creating a more robust and democratic society, what arguments do you see to persuade publishers that they should provide affordable ebooks for libraries to lend for free to our users without complicated technical kerfuffle?

This must be post 17  of the  30 posts in 30 days challenge.

Our new library building requires a newly branded website, with room for information about the sustainability features. Our problem? The current simple and elegant site created by a design firm is a little too simple (no site searchbox, no social features) and if we want to make some pretty fundamental changes (like remove a menu item) the firm charges us each time.

The solution? Create our own site using self-hosted WordPress, which long ago stopped being just an excellent blogging platform and now counts as a Content Management System. This is Part One, where we transfer the current site structure and content over to WordPress and have something ready for opening day in the new building. Part Two will be in eight or so months, where we totally restructure the site, re-examine the content and possibly switch over to Drupal.

Our main motivation for using WordPress is to create a site that, once it is set up, is easy to add to and change – with the skills of a regular librarian and the budget of a regular library.

I am busy in the next two weeks working full time on the project.

I am going to use WordPress 3.0 which is due for release today. Kind of risky, but this is the release where single-site WordPress and Multi-site WordPressMU become a single entitity. Just one brand of WordPress. No more “does this great plugin work with WordPress MU? or “Oh, I wish I could create more blogs on this URL”.

There are other advantages. I’ve installed an early release candidate of 3.0 and today I have been playing around with the new option to create custom taxonomies and custom menus. . (There is also an option to  expand beyond pages and posts to add new content types – like “book”  or “podcast” or “cat photo”, but I won’t go into that here)

To match the current structure of the old site,  I have set up my pages with a simple parent/child structure. This lets me have six main dropdown menu options, with child pages underneath. But, there is another way that I want to facet my pages.

I also want a drop-down menu of “How Do I?” questions like How Do I “join the library” or “use the free wifi”. These will point to the pages, but I cannot use categories for this, as they are only allowed for posts. The solution is to create a new heirarchical taxonomy (that I called HowTo) and associate it with the content type, page. This means that:

• All pages will have an option to add a “how to” field
• I can assign the same “how to” to pages under different heirarchies (eg. “Get homework help” to a page under the “Teens” page heirarchy and to a page under the “Kids” page heirarchy)
• The dashboard panel gets a “How to” administration option added on the left sidebar under the “pages” option
• I can create a “”How to” heirarchy to my heart’s content using a dashboard, like this:

This combines beautifully with the “custom menus” options. I will write a bit more about that in a later post. I will also totally rave about the incredibly customizable free WordPress theme that I am using, Suffiusion. including a bit about the way it creates a “for dummies” interface to create custom content types and custom taxonomies.

Post 14 of the  30 posts in 30 days challenge.

Adding my 2c to the “unread by the bed” meme for the 30 posts in 30 days challenge.

Currently reading: Margaret Attwood’s Oryx and Crake on my iPad.

I work in a public library. Good books  follow me home. Most sit in the pile by the bed for a couple of months and then are returned, briefly opened, but unread.

By the bed pile:

Most  seem to be less known works by authors who have had a bestseller.

• The White Tiger, Aravind Adiga
• Tales from Firozsha Bahg, Rohinton Mistry
• My Nine Lives, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala
• Telling Tales, Melissa Katsoulis
  • history of literary hoaxes. I almost bought it as “aeroplane reading” last time I was in Melbourne, but it didn’t look wonderfully marvellous, so I saved my $$
• House of Horrors, Nigel Hawthorne
  • about the guy in Austria who kept his daughter locked away and had a second family of several kids with her. I picked up just any book when I was testing things on the database, forgot to return it and so I’m somehow reading it – sensationalist and voyeuristic
• Moral Disorder, Margaret Attwood
• Island Beneath the Sea, Isabel Allende
• Bleeding Kansas, Sara Paretsky
  • set in Lawrence, Kansas where I spent a couple of weeks last year. Totally separate from the V. I. Washawski series
• Her Fearful Symmetry, Audrey Niffenegger
  • half way through then read a review panning the last third of the book, so have a dilemma – I’m enjoying it so far, do I want to ruin it by completing the story ?

Not next to the bed pile

These ones are on the “library book” shelf and I haven’t picked them up, or they are on their way back and I can’t quite part with them yet.

• The Triumph of the Airheads, Shelley Gare
  • About the decline of public intellectual standards in Australia. Skimmed it already
• The Last Lecture, Randy Pausch
  • Unread. If you haven’t already seen it, please go right now and watch Randy Pausch Last Lecture: Achieving Your Childhood Dreams
• The Beats: A Graphic History, Harvey Pekar et al
• Dear Fatty, Dawn French
• Girl Next Door, Alyssa Brugmart
  • YA title. I try to read one every couple of weeks
• The Almost Moon, Alice Sebold
  • I enjoyed reading “The Lovely Bones”, but the tone of “Lucky” made me feel like throwing the book across the room at times.
• In the Kitchen, Monica Ali
• The Star’s Tennis Balls, Stephen Fry
  • Must get on to this one
• Decca: The Letters of Jessica Mitford, Peter Y Sussman (ed.)
  • I’ve been reading this for the last four years. I left my copy on the plane in Brisbane and am slowly getting through the library copy.
• The Art of Emily the Strange, Rob Reger
  • Totally read and needing return

And there’s more

Probably the same amount again are on the shelf but I didn’t photograph them …. you get the idea from what is here …

Post 13 of the  30 posts in 30 days challenge.