A library’s role is not to supress ideas – not matter how dangerous or loony I may believe those ideas to be, nor how wrong I think they are. That is why I support the State Library of Western Australia’s decision to provide a venue for a talk from people of the Anti-Vaccination Network on Tuesday 1 June.

I do not agree with the claim on the Sceptic’s Book of Pooh Pooh that the State Library CEO, Margaret Allen was putting the health of WA children at further risk.. I think they are shooting the messenger.

My tiny, fragile baby boy stopped breathing for over a minute as I was breastfeeding him on the day I took him home from hospital. We had waited for three weeks to take him home after he was born 2 months premature, so it was a huge shock to hear from the doctors that they suspected that he had whooping cough. Tiny babies with whooping cough don’t cough, just turn blue and stop breathing.

After a couple more months in hospital we took him home, but that experience clarified for me – vaccinating our children is a community issue. When a parent decides not to vaccinate they are not making a choice just for their own kids, but for mine as well. There is overwhelming good science supporting the health benefits of vaccination and I think it is a selfish and shallow to not vaccinate.

I have many other personal beliefs. I choose a mainly vegetarian diet for my own health and the health of the planet. I do not believe in an afterlife. I think depictions of violence that permeate our popular culture desensitizes people and begets more violence. I think that anyone who eats beetroot is slightly addled. When I go to work as a librarian, those beliefs come with me – however a key part of my job is providing access to ideas that are in direct conflict to what I believe is right for myself and for my society.

A library’s role is to provide access to information and connect people to that information. We seek to provide a balanced and varied collection, but not to judge the information we are providing, nor the people who are seeking it. This is not because it is almost impossible to please everyone, so libraries are take the easy way out by sitting on the fence and trying to be everyone’s friend.

When I buy a compilation of war comics for the Young Adult section, order ” Delicious Prime Ribs and how to Barbeque Them” for the non-fiction section, accept a donation from the Church of Scientology of one of Ron L Hubbard’s works or put a pamphlet from the Anti-Vaccination Network on the shelves I am doing something very serious and vitally important for our society and its freedom. I am protecting my own and my children’s right to think for ourselves. I am creating a society that trusts its citizens to think critically and make their own decisions with no source of information forbidden.

As a librarian I provide the information, but I do not author it. It is not my message, even if I work my hardest to build a structure where as many people can easily and immediately access that message and then make up their own minds.

If the State Library of Western Australia wanted to give space to the Beetroot Appreciation Society for a public outpouring of all things Beetroot then so be it. I may well organize my fellow Beetroot Abhorrers and ask for similar space to air our opinions. I would hope that people with a brain who attended the Appreciators’ event would use that brain to evaluate the arguments being put on the night. I would appreciate attending their forum and asking tricky questions about the dirt smell and that deep,dark purple ooze. I would be very glad that I lived in a society where there was a venue that protected my right to have ideas outside the mainstream.

I think the free and open discussion of ideas, like the decision whether to vaccinate a child, is a community issue. If a parent doesn’t vaccinate their child, they are putting my child at risk. If I claim the right to stop your ideas from being heard, then I am putting my own right to be heard at risk.

I am not arguing that ideas should be heard without rebuttal, argument, critical thought or judgment. I am arguing that they should be heard and that libraries exist as a vital institution to protect the right for that to happen.

Instead of deflecting the vaccination debate to one about whether loonies should be able to spout their bullshit in a library, it would be far more sensible to start public debate about what happens when as a population we uncritically accept bullshit and do not think for ourselves. This clear and entertaining cartoon showing the Facts of What Happened in the Case of Dr Wakefield (Mr Vaccination-Causes-Autism) by Darryl Cunningham is a great place to start.

Post 3 of the 30 posts in 30 days challenge.

There I was, trying to create a single file of RSS feeds for all the blogs in the 30 in 30 challenge using Yahoo pipes, so people could add them to their feed reader… when Kate Bunker did something a whole lot smarter….

She created a Netvibes page widgets for feeds from all 29 blogs. Now *that* was using her noodle.

Post 2 of the 30 posts in 30 days challenge.

If I didn’t like Plants vs Zombies so much, and if I hadn’t just realized that Margaret Atwood’s last novel was a continuation of the dystopic world of Oryx and Crake, then I may have more to report about my new iPad. Instead of putting it through its paces, I’ve been playing games and using it as an ebook reader. It is an excellent interface for both.

In a couple of days I will post about the different aps I have tried on the iPad and whether I think the device really is “magical and revolutionary” as claimed in the Apple marketing.  Tonight though, a bit about the iPad as an ebook reader.

In Australia there is still only one book sitting forlornly in the iBook store, the free copy of Alice in Wonderland. The reading interface for the iBook ap is made to look like a paper book, complete with spine, pages and page turning action. It’s rather pretty as an object, but a bit too try-hard.

The iPad is the best ebook reading device I have tried. Although I read that it was too heavy to hold comfortably (Looking at the iPad from two angles) , I am fine with it resting in my lap with the print size adjusted accordingly.  Other devices I’ve tried are the Kindle, my desktop PC, my large laptop, my netbook, my iPhone, and even the XO laptop that has a special screen made for reading in bright light. I understand that the matt, low-light screen on eInk readers works well for others, especially those who get headaches reading on a backlit screen. For me, the black flash between pages and slow refresh rate of the Kindle are mildly annoying.  I don’t seem to read in light levels where the eInk is superior to the screen of the iPad. There is an extremely wide viewing angle for the iPad screen and it adjusts adequately to different light levels.  I prefer the energy-saving potential of  eInk, where a single charge lasts up to two weeks. The iPad screen is a perfect size for reading. Compared to my netbook, it is more comfortable to carry from room to room and to drop into my backpack. The netbook’s neoprene case is excellent as a cover for the iPad.

I was the type of kid who read whatever was at hand – cereal boxes, old Readers’ Digests, fold-out operating instructions for transistor radios – rather than have nothing to read at all, so the device (and sometimes even the content) is often secondary to satisfying my desire to have *something* to read. Unlike many librarians and readers, much of my pleasure is in the act of reading for itself, not from the physical act of holding a book, feeling the weight in my hand, stroking the cover or smelling the pages as they turn. I enjoy books as aesthetic objects, but I don’t think I have ever equated reading only with books.

My preferred ebook application on the iPad is the Kindle ap from Amazon. Ethically I disagree with locking up content in the .azw format and making it legally impossible and technically nigh-impossible to read one’s own ebooks in a way other than using Amazon’s application. Practically, I love the one-click delivery of my ebook straight to my device without having to plug into a PC and fiddle about transferring it. Although it is possible to read other content types using the Kindle application, I think the average user will not be bothered and will pay for the convenience of instant and easy delivery. I love the synchronisation between all my devices, so that if I am in line at the supermarket I can whip out my iPhone and carry on reading my novel from where I left off on my iPad in bed the night before. I have tried using the Stanza and Kobo applications as ebook readers, and I don’t see a lot of difference between the three of them for me and the way I read (which is indiscriminately anywhere, anytime).

I downloaded the WIRED magazine application for the iPad, which costs $5 for content of the current print/online issue.The publisher worked with Adobe to create the right platform, with the idea that they “write once, publish everywhere”.  One holds the iPad in portrait mode and uses a finger to scroll horizontally from article (or advert) to the next one. To read an article or section in depth, one swipes upward so that the rest of the article appears from below. Some articles have images that you can touch to see the text below change to describe the item in the image. There is a little video engine that allows one to swipe left to right and see, for example, Mars rotate so you can read little flags on the surface of the planet describing recent Mars missions…or watch a Lego car being built and disassembled. Some advertisements have links out to external sites on the web – which seemed like a good idea at the time I am sure, but really, I’m not going to click out of the application, into the browser and then need to find my place again. It was cute to click on the front cover and see a filmclip previewing Toy Story Three, but all-in-all it felt a bit like it wasn’t there yet. I think there is such a tension between trying to look familiar enough to the reader that they accept this is a magazine, while still pushing the limits of what this new display can do. If they had dropped linearity altogether to really take advantage of the way a reader can swim and flip through the text, if they had not anchored all their film clips and images firmly to a corresponding text story, then I think people would not have felt like they were reading a magazine.

Critics of the iPad application for The Australian complained of too many advertisements and many articles not appearing on the iPad when they were in the printed newspaper. I can’t comment, as I don’t get the print edition. This time, I was set back $5 for a month worth of content delivered daily. Tonight there is an article about rough seas in Wollongong today, a Sunday, so new content is being added on the day they do not publish their print edition.  It looks like I can’t view archives of previous days’ newsitems. There is no Weekend Magazine content at all. There has been no attempt to exploit multimedia with this application, just a few shortcuts in the menu structure so you can go more quickly to the section you want.

I won’t be using my iPad in the bathtub or at the beach, but I think it will be my preferred way of reading fiction from now on. In Australia,  as I have said before, the major impediment to ebooks being widely and well used is neither the  device nor application used. It is content. I had high hopes that Borders’ Kobo store that launched a couple of weeks ago would contain more Australian content and at cheaper prices than  Amazon’s Kindle store. The cautious support from Australian publishers,  like Melbourne University Press’s Louise Adler,  during interviews on the day the Kobo store was launched left me hoping for more than was delivered. Searching the ebook store reveals no Tim Winton, no Patrick White, no Helen Garner, no Peter Carey and just two ebooks by Kate Grenville .

I am very glad that on 9 April the Minister for Innovation announced a Book Industry Strategy Group to ” develop strategies to ensure that the Australian book industry continues to thrive in a global digital environment.”, Charting a High Tech Future for the Book Industry . I am very, very pleased that Barry Jones, recipient of the Australian Library and Information Association’s Redmond Barry Award, will be chairing the group. As an Australian who wants to read Australian content on my iPad today, I am puzzled about why it will take a year for the group to report back.

Oh well, back to snuggle under the doona with my iPad and After the Flood by one of my favourite Canadian authors.

I am saddened to hear of the death today of New Zelander Paul Reynolds, co-director of McGovern Online. He described himself as:

an Auckland based commentator and thinker on the topics of information access and cultural/techno change.

Before stepping down in March this year, he was Adjunct Director of the National Library of New Zealand. Below are his slides from his “valedictory” talk, Living, Learning, Researching in the Cloud .:

I first heard him speak in October 2007 at the State Library of Western Australia, where he spoke about how new online tools could transform libraries. I took a pack of coloured pencils and drew my notes. They are below, Paul Reynolds at the State Library of Western Australia. Two ideas stuck with me from the day. The first is the question

“What is it, when we walk into a library that makes us go: “Aaaah, I’m in a library”? “

– in other words, with all the changes to our buildings and services, what is so essential about what we do that it must be kept and nurtured and instantly recognisable in any library space we create? The other was the quote at the start of this post:

Our tools are in front of our ideas and our bravery

This was said in the last half of 2007,  where new services -and indeed new classes of online tools- seemed to be springing up a the rate of three a week. Many of us were playing and fumbling and trying to make sense of how they worked, how we could use them in our libraries, and what would be the consequences of not jumping on that train before it left the station… Although the goldrush of new services seems to have settled down a bit, it is still worth asking I think – “what is possible, and are we being held back due to common sense or timidity?”…

I saw Paul at several conferences after that. He was a frequent end-of-session question asker. His questions always reflected the bigger picture -not just “how does this fit in a political or organisational context”, but “how does this fit in with a society that claims to be civilised?”. He will be missed in Australia as well as New Zealand.

Library work is great when you can sit in the evening in the middle of 30 totally engaged community members with a glass of wine in one hand and a piece of Lavosh bread with brie in the other. (Well, wineglass of orange juice, but the community members had red or white 🙂 ).

It started with a library member who was decluttering her house and asked us to provide a session on eBay. I spoke to Accredited eBay Trainer – and former librarian – Julie Martin who had done some sessions for University of Western Australia Extension. We decided that she would offer a two hour introductory session about eBay and then follow it by a four hour workshop over two weeks all about selling on eBay.

You know when you take a punt and it turns out much better than you expected? Julie has been like that – full of richly detailed and fascinating stories all about eBay. The friend who sold ticket stubs to a 1966 Beatles Concert in Adelaide for $280, the boy who advertised his “max wicked sick BMX” one that “did boom gnarly stunt tricks & girl got pregnant just watching” , the husband who bought a gift for his wife – only to discover that she was actually the seller….

Our Friends of the Library have been sponsoring the sessions each Thursday night in May. Last week, Julie did a session called “Fun Family Fotos” where she showed people how to find out who was in family pictures and how to preserve and store the pictures. We were able to advertise our newly digitised Community History collection as part of the session. We have branded the sessions as the “Ideas Series” and at each session given out forms to participants, asking them what other speakers and workshops they would like in the new building and whether they would like to join the Friends of the Library. I’m really excited about running a regular “Ideas Series” after we move in August – especially if we get numbers as large as this time – 50 people on the waiting list…

I tweeted the session and fed it into a CoverItLive window so that I can embed it on the library blog tomorrow. I’ve used eBay as a buyer several times, but I found I learned an incredible amount in Julie’s session tonight. Here’s my notes:

I’m excited.

After dropping the kids off, I’m going to Necessity is the mother of (re)invention: the future for libraries at the State Library of Western Australia today. I have heard two of the speakers before. Both were excellent and are why I’m going today.

I saw Dr Varapasad of the National Library Board of Singapore at speak at VALA 2008. I also saw him speak to the excellent  Bridging Worlds conference later that year and had a chance to tour the National Library. I loved the promotional displays with large cardboard cutouts of library staff next to heart shaped pieces of paper where users told their stories about why they <3 their library.

I met Axel Bruns from QUT when we both spoke in the same session at Cultural Connections: MySpace is an ArtSpace:ARLIS/ANZ Biennial Conference in Brisbane in 2008. In fact his talk today, Oureach and Co-curation: engaging with library users is an update of that keynote and the slides have been posted online already.  If you have seen me speak, there is usually a slide in there with a guy with a speech bubble coming out of his mouth talking about the concept of “produsage” – the idea that in order to use and engage with much new media you also need to be a producer in the system. That’s Axel Bruns.

The other speaker is Frank McGuire the founder of Global Learning Village and a member of the Hume Global Learning Village Advisory Board at Hume City.

If I can get wifi access I will tweet is via @libsmatter and pull the tweets into the CoverItLive window below.

If you have not had enough Library Futures, then check out the CoverItLive from the University of Technology Sydney second staff Futures Day. Part one a month a go was wholey staff driven and enough was pushed out via the twitter  to make today an interesting day to watch – I liked the idea of a small bar in the library. You can follow the day via the twitter hashtag #plff2010 or view reports of the day in the CoverItLive session starting at 1pm AEST http://bit.ly/aUcEgU.

UPDATE: The tag for the UTS day is actually #libpd.. The other hashtag is actually for yet ANOTHER future library talk that the UTS staff are giving at the State Library of New South Wales today..

First there was my rather tongue-in-cheek post in June 2008 about how DIY-anarcho-librarianship could be called Libpunk if those educators were going to start spouting off about Edupunk, Steampunk, Edupunk, Libpunk? .  I gave a list of examples of library folk doing it for themselves and not waiting to be handed tools or permission, and because I had to come up with something I defined Libpunk as:

Librarians using non-proprietary products and groupings not based on institutional alliances to practice their craft and communicate their practice.  Open, collaborative enterprises based not on making money, but often on increasing social capital or extending knowledge

Then Amy Buckland offered to make me a Libpunk sticker for my laptop, so the Libpunk Cafe Press store was born. I’ve seen a couple of the products in the wild, like Stephen Francouer in New York’s  messenger bag and Krista Godfrey in Canada’s  laptop ..which made me smile..

Ann Gambles in the UK riffed on Libpunk in a slideshare presentation she did just for fun, Libpunk0.01 .

Then a mob of library school students were a bit excited about the whole idea and started a Libpunk wiki, but there is not a lot on it. And there is this Czech Libpunk wiki page that I have no idea about : )

The idea sat around in its dark shaded bedroom in an adolescent funk for a while, but it’s finding its voice again and morphing (yay!) with the new Libpunk Radio Show that started last week, the Libpunk Friendfeed room and the Libpunk Twitter account.  Sarah Glassmeyer and Kendra K are the energy behind the empowering and snotty upsurge, but they are not alone, with more people joining in during the last week.

If you want to do some do-it-yourself definition of what Libpunk may be, go and enter the Libpunk Essay Competition on the Libpunk.info site – except it’s not really a competition, but like , totally is … and you could even do an interpretive dance instead …anyhow according to the site the aim is to “figure all this shit out”…and whichever way you choose to do it can only be right …but …

Just.get.out.there.and.do.it .  Don’t wait around for someone to tell you it’s OK – poke, prod and dream and make your own path then share…

I’m going to miss Barcamp Perth this weekend, but that is no reason why you should. The venue, Central TAFE is the best unconference space I have been in – central, great facilities and free wifi that just works without you having to jump through hoops or whistle Waltzing Matilda while standing on one foot. The people who turn up to the event are usually very interesting, friendly and enthusiastic – and the event even has its own barista-in-residence.

Here are the essential details:

BarCamp Perth 2010 will be held on April 10, 2010 at the Central Institute of Technology in East Perth.

Setup will be from around 8am, with registration (getting your name badges etc) from 8.30am. We’d like to kick off with a welcome oratory at 9am or just after as we end up delaying the schedule a fair bit otherwise (Matt just loves to rabbit on).

There will be Five Senses Coffee shots being pulled, so there’s certainly something to keep you going if you get there a little early – plus, we’d love your help getting things setup!

Sessions usually run for 30 – 45 minutes. Calls for session topics will go out soon as we’re hoping to have a magically online system this year with some soon to be revealed features.

The list of talks is already looking very interesting. Heads up to Aaron Trenorden from Murdoch University Library who will be presenting about setting up a vanity feed. Aaron has a very down-to-earth presentation style that lets him take details up a notch technically without the listener realising they have learned a lot while they thought they were just enjoying a friendly and casual chat. It will be well worth catching his session. I’m really sorry that I won’t catch the session about Open Source at the Australian Bureau of Statistics too.

• Exploring the Real Time Web by Darcy Laycock
• Arduino-based Live GPS tracking over a Cellular network for my car! by Trent @lathiat Lloyd
• Web Analytics – Collecting insights in your visitor’s interaction. by Tiang Cheng
• Government 2.0 – Open Source at the Australian Bureau of Statistics by Samuel Spencer
• Corporate Jiu-jitsu – The Overlap Between Ground Fighting and Small Business Management by Matt Lambie
• Killing off Accessibility by Gary “@tuna” Barber
• Setting up a vanity feed by Aaron Trenorden
• The Unwritten Rules Of Optimisation by Adrian Chadd
• Why everyone should have a web startup by @richardgiles
• Did you know that perth has a Hackerspace! What is a hackerspace? Introducing the Perth Artifactory! by Trent @lathiat Lloyd
• (responsibility derived from power): What Uncle Ben Knew About Web Application Security by Christian @xntrik Frichot
• Innovation as a discipline by @szo
• Fixing forms: the know-how you never knew you had by Jessica Enders

Frustration is the mother of motivation for me today.

I’m in the final stretches of my thesis and am doing a further literature review.

I wanted a LibX toolbar to make my research quicker and easier, but the library at Curtin University where I am studying hadn’t built one.

LibX is so magically, wonderfully useful to me as a researcher, that I took a couple of hours and used the LibX Edition Builder to create a LibX Toolbar that works for Curtin University Library. It is here, LibX Unendorsed Curtin University, Western Australia

I needed to look carefully at the way the URLs were built for their SFX link resolver, their Ex Libris catalogue, and their authentication server, but once I had that figured out it was just a matter of plugging info into a few blanks and testing, testing, testing.

THE “SO WHAT?” OF LIBX FOR ME

With the LibX toolbar installed in Firefox, if I get to an article from the web on JSTOR or any other publication to which my uni library subscribes, I can just right click on the page, enter my student number and password and get to the full text. I can even click straight through to full text articles from the references in Wikipedia.

LibX also:

• lets me search the library catalogue or federated search straight from the toolbar of my browser, without having to go to the library catalogue page.
• hotlinks ISBNs anywhere on any web page so that when I click on them, it will show the work in my library catalogue.
• inserts an icon when I browse Amazon.com that lets me click to see whether the item is in the library.
• For journal articles mentioned anywhere on a web page, it highlights the identifier, and I can click through to the link resolver (SFX) and go straight through to full text of the article if it is in the library.

I can also drag and drop any text from any page that I am on into the catalogue search box or on to a Google Scholar search box and have it search for that text.

DISCLAIMER

This in no way replaces a thorough, scholarly hard-slog database search, but it does make the casual “presearch” process a lot, lot faster and easier – and makes me a lot more likely to use the resources of my library because the library is in my space instead of me having to go to the library’s space.

I’ve emailed someone at Curtin Library to give them the heads up that I have created it…