I played with Google Wave a couple of days ago and found the interface confusing and felt a bit lonely, so I moved onto something shinier.

Google Wave basically creates threaded conversations that can have documents and objects embedded within them. The Wave can be replayed, so you can rewind to any point in the conversation and see who said what. If that explanation doesn’t seem clear (and trying to describe it without showing is a bit like trying to dance about architecture) then check out Mashable’s Google Wave: a complete guide .

I had another look today and spoke with a couple of folk and explored together. I was very excited that – with my usual ” *this* button looks fun to press” style – I managed to insert a robot into a conversation. The robot looks for any 13 digit ISBN in the conversation and replaces it with a book cover. I tried inserting it in the Librarians Directory Wave and the Library Society of the World Wave too. It only works with OReilly Media items and it seemed to work in Firefox but not Chrome. Instructions on how to do it are here, Reacting to Wave Conversations and Inserting Wave Gadgets with a Wave Robot .

Yes, there is a Librarian’s Directory Wave and yes, the 117 people on it so far did list themselves in alphabetical order.

I was so excited that I made a one and a half minute screencast showing what I did, Google Wave: how to add a bot .

Holding a “Future’s Day” at your library? Or maybe you just want to point staff to items that will make them sit up and think about how libraries need to change?

These two make me sit up and think.

Legacy Media

Mark Scott, Managing Director of the Australian Broadcasting Commission gave a talk yesterday about Media after Empire . He outlines the changes facing legacy media,  mentions that he has so far not read a workable model for profit making old media companies to continue to make a profit, and talks about what the ABC is doing. It doesn’t take a big leap to apply a lot of what he says to libraries – who traditionally have been the distributors of legacy media objects.

He outlines the changes that the ABC needs to make:

Declaring war on silos and insulated thinking. Being audience, not organisationally-centred. It affects the way we organise ourselves, the way we work together and cooperate, the way we partner with others, the way we need to cede some space, some control to our audiences to remain compelling and relevant. If we are to survive as anything more than a shell – a legacy broadcaster, an empire in decline – this is what we must do.

There is a lot in there about how to change thinking within an organisation that is based on a model that is no longer viable. He suggests that thinking in the same way will not bring any solutions and offers five ideas that approach a solution:

#1: The only media organisations that will survive will be those who know and accept that all the rules have changed….

#2: Successful organisations will be endlessly inquisitive about the new, understanding that no-one knows where the next breakthrough idea or technology will come from…

#3: Successful organisations will be willing to empower their audiences to contribute, to create and to share media. Will cede power to audiences to gain engagement and respect. They will be willing to let other voices to be heard. They will learn how to protect brand integrity whilst entrusting their brand to others…

#4: Part of the protection of media assets will come through diversification, as has been the case with News and The Washington Post. Commercial media have found themselves long in assets greatly threatened by this revolution, like newsprint and free-to-air television, with no other growth story, will remain greatly challenged…

#5: The great challenge on all this is to start within, on areas of culture and behaviours. Recognising your old internal fiefdoms came from another world…

I like his final point:

… the words of John Schaar who said the future is not the place we are going, it is a place we are making. The paths to the future are made not found, and the process of making them changes both us and our final destination.

Social Media

Gary Hayes , Director of LAMP at the Australian Film Television and Radio School has created a Social Media Counter, embedded below. It gives numbers of messages and members of various social networks, and how many have been added since you first started viewing the counter. This would be great to display on one screen during a presentation about social media.

Kate and Frances and Karen all got iPhones this week. With compasses. And video cameras and fancy-pants stuff that my 3G version does not have.

I had fun watching them ooh and aaah over new apps, and seeing how generous people were via Twitter about helping them get set up with new apps.

The old “should I *pay* for apps when I can get so many for free?” discussion was raised. Me? I just compare everything to the cost of a chocolate bar. How many Mars Bars is this app worth? Would it bring me more pleasure than chocolate for longer? If so, I get it.

Below are images of the six pages of apps on my iPhone. Gah – I just counted them for the first time – 87 in all.

If you go to the set on Flickr, Apps on my iPhone October 2009,  you will find notes on most apps describing how I use them and how useful they are to me.

UPDATE 4 hours later:

The most useful apps for me are those that I can sync to the web and my laptop as well, like Remember the Milk, Tripit and Evernote. I also sync my google calendars, but it is not obvious how to do this.

1. STEP 1: Go to here to find out how to set up the google account (by choosing Microsoft Exchange settings ) : Mail, Calendar, & Contacts Setup: Set Up Your iPhone or iPod Touch
2. STEP 2: Go here to nominate which calendars you want to sync: Mail, Calendar, & Contacts Setup: Choose Which Calendars to Sync (We give our kids access to only *some* family calendars on their iPod Touches – they don’t care when the bills are due to be paid…)
3. STEP 3: (Well, if you are me and just want it to be complex…) Sync your work Outlook calendar on your work PC up to Google Calendars, so that it can then be viewed via your synced iPhone using Google Calendar Sync .

My iPhone Apps Pg 1 - use all day every day

My iPhone Apps - Pg - 2 - Used a couple of times a week

My iPhone Apps - Pg 3 - Games to amuse me and the kids

My iPhone Apps - Pg 4 - Yeah, sorta, if I'm in the mood

My iPhone Apps - Pg 5 - The graveyard of retired apps.

My iPhone Apps - Pg 6 - Apps that use the iPhone impressively

I don’t know whether we will be too busy playing to record what we are doing at today’s Library Camp Perth, but I have set up a page with a CoverItLive channel pulling in all tweets and a Ustream Channel pulling in any live video.

The CoverItLive is pulling in all tweets with hashtag “libcampperth09”, plus *all* my tweets from @libsmatter from 9:30 to 4pm today. I am happy to add other authors – if you are interested, just ask via the CoverItLive box or shout out to me via Twitter.

I have put the TwitterFountain here because the Wetpaint Wiki would not take script tags :(.

And here is the CoverItLive window. I’m SO happy that there are so many other people tweeting the session…feel less pressure to be the reporter and can be more a part of it…

I’m lucky enough to have been in Darwin this week giving the opening keynote for the 6th ALIA Top End Symposium: exploring library spaces for learning and e-learning. I flew up a day early and explored Darwin on bicycle. Just beautiful.

I was excited to be asked and would have loved to have stayed for both Friday and Saturday. Diana Richards from the NT Library and her team were great hosts,  but I needed to fly back to Perth for Library Camp on Saturday. I consoled myself with a 20 minute meet up with my friend Sally who lives in Broome during a stopover on the way back. The papers looked very good – and the two that I heard were great.

Two librarians from Batchelor Institute of Indigenous Education spoke about the way they “non-project managed” the transformation of a totally cramped and crowded tiny space into a flexible learning space that allowed culturally sensitive learning for some of their students who had never been exposed to books before, let alone a library. It was a great example of not over thinking a project. When they came to write the paper, they realised that they had very sound professional goals and a framework that they followed – but without the need for anal Gantt charts. Their tag cloud of the skills they brought to the project is a very nice illustration of this:

I have been working on creating a slidecast (audio track with co-ordinated slides) of my talk for the last couple of days, but with patchy wireless I have not finished it. I will publish it here as soon as I do. It was called “Disco balls, waterless urinals and augmented reality: equipping ourselves to create innovative library learning spaces”.

Just before my talk the convenor, Anne Ritchie, asked whether I was OK with putting my mobile number onto a whiteboard at the front and taking questions via text during my presentation. Yep. Good fun. Unfortunately there was a bit of technical trouble with the PC, so I didn’t get to answer the txt question I received, but I said I’d publish the question and answer here. I mentioned Second Life for less than a minute – in the context of libraries helping their communities understand produsage – but that is what the question is about…

What do you do if you are a university library director who steps out of the library on a Friday afternoon to find the pavement riddled with chalked signs saying ” The library closes too early on Fridays”?

An older breed of library director would roll their eyes, feel annoyed, maybe get the paths cleaned….then in the next week a small notice might appear on the website about why the opening hours are as they are….or more typically, in the library newsletter that comes out two months later. Really engaged directors might post something on the library blog.

Jenica Rogers, Director of Libraries, State University of New York at Potsdam got down on her hands and knees with pink chalk and wrote answers, Chalk Notes as a Valid Communication Format . I love it that instead of writing “it’s the budget, stupid!”, she created a cliffhanger for the students and gave herself time to think about it over the weekend.

Jenica is a great role model for a current generation of leaders who are reluctant to move up in to managment. If  you want to read her take on this – and why library management can offer something to the un-greyed part of our profession – check out her earlier post, An attitude problem, where she challenges many of the myths about being a library manager.

Here is the poster that appeared on Tuesday in the library lobby – transparent and inviting collaboration.

friday sidewalk poster image Uploaded to Flickr on September 23, 2009 by Jenica26

Open Source software has many elements – code, design, documentation, licensing …. and something quite different to other software – community governance. This governance is often ad hoc, created by goodwill and what used to quaintly be called a “gentleman’s agreement”. This is fine when it works and everyone is playing nicely in the sandbox.

The Koha Fork

On September 11, Open Source Library Software support company, Liblime, took their bat and ball and went home from the Koha playground. With them they took tens of thousands of dollars worth of development for one client that they will now only allow others to access if they agree to use a hosted version of Liblime Enterprise Koha . Yes, they intend to “eventually” release the code back to the community, but what are other developers meant to do in the meantime? Stop working on bits of Koha that they *suspect* might be in the Liblime version? Keep working as though the extra features – which are desired by many other libraries – still need to be developed?

Liblime are entitled to do this under the GNU GPL license, as hosting does not constitute “distribution” which has certain rights and responsibilities under the license.  There is an Open Source license – an Affero General Public License – that closes this loophole. Unfortunately for Koha the license wasn’t written until 2002 – two years after Koha was gifted to the community by the Horowhenua Library Trust .

Forking is not unprecedented in library Open Source Software. VuFind has several forks and this seems to be the community choice. See Going With and Forking VuFind for more details .This is *not* the first fork of Koha – there is already Koha Plus at Sourceforge, and Australian Company Proscentient Systems has been offering a hosted fork of Koha – Intersearch ILS for over a year.

Liblime however,  own and administer the domain koha.org and have trademarked the name “Koha” in the United States, so they have played a key role in the Koha community up until now. Liblime deny that they are withdrawing from the Koha community, but this is not how the community is viewing it. Jo Ransom, who was instumental in creating Koha in New Zealand in 1999, claims that Liblime Forks Koha . This t-shirt by another prominent Koha community member says a lot:

Marshall Breeding has suggested that a more librarian-focused and formal governance structure modelled on the Kuali Foundation may be a better solution in his Open Letter to the Koha Community. Thomas Brevik has suggested that there may be a role for an organisation like IFLA,  Where goes Koha? Roy Tennant has compared the commercial forking of Koha to that of Redhat Linux, Liblime to the Koha Community: Fork You.  Karen Schneider makes the point that this development highlights the role that Open Source software must play in the future of librarianship, It Takes a Village: Koha and open source leadership .

I do not know how much of the fork was driven by the client who contracted Liblime to create the changes. I think it would be extremely short-sighted to see any economic value in taking a base product created by millions of dollars worth of coding and design expertise, then paying tens of thousands of dollars for extra features but also cutting oneself off from working openly and collaboratively with other coders in future developments.

Being the change you want to see

Liblime’s behaviour has been correct to the letter -but not the spirit -of their Open Source license;  and ultimately likely to do them a lot of economic damage.

The big, bold silver lining to the cloud, however, has been the behaviour of other Open Source Library software support companies in the last week.

Two other major Koha support companies, BibLibre from France and ByWater Solutions have hired Nicole Engard to continue on as documentation manager (“until she drops” according to her announcement, Moving Up and Remaining Open ). Nicole was working as Open Source Evangelist at Liblime until September 11, the same day as the forking announcement.

Instead of pointing out Liblime’s bad behaviour, Equinox–  the main support company for the Evergreen Open Source Library Management System –  released a statement outlining their commitment to their community. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and through my geeky “I find Open Source Library Software fascinating” eyes, this is a beautiful statement about  the spirit of Open Source library software.

The Equinox Promise: An Open Letter to the Evergreen Community

We at Equinox Software feel it is timely to share an evolving document we call the Equinox Promise.

We invite engagement and feedback from everyone, and encourage other vendors to come up with similar statements, or join in on ours.

The Equinox Promise

In 2007, Equinox Software was founded by a group of dedicated people who believe that open source software offers libraries unheralded opportunities to engage in the process of designing the tools they use.

A software company can never speak for the open source communities it serves. But we at Equinox believe we owe our communities a clear statement of our commitments to everyone associated with the Evergreen open source project—whether you are customers of Equinox, Evergreen community members, affiliated vendors, or those who support and champion open source development.

We believe in a transparent, open software development process, and we promise to do everything we can to maintain and improve transparency in every part of that process.

We believe Evergreen code belongs to the Evergreen community, and we promise to continue to expeditiously release all code to publicly-available repositories.

We believe in one single set of code that in the spirit and letter of open source software is free for everyone to download, use, and modify, and we promise that in concert with the community and other development partners, we will work hard to maintain that single code set.

We believe we have a responsibility to the Evergreen community to help keep Evergreen open in every way, and we promise we will never agree to hide code we can share.

We believe that Evergreen deserves community-based stewardship through foundations, user groups, interest groups, conferences, and similar activities, and we promise to encourage that stewardship in every way we can.

We believe that the community is the true voice of Evergreen, and we promise to listen and to share, and to help build and maintain the tools that enable this communication.

I just found a way to use Zotero to save me heaps and heaps of time.

I use a lot of Creative Commons images from Flickr in my presentations.

I usually upload them to slideshare.net, which means I am stringent about attributing the image with a “Media Credits” slide at the end. I have been cutting and pasting the details from Flickr. With the URL, the author/date and the image title all being in different spots, this was three separate transactions that took a couple of minutes per image.

Now Zotero – the Firefox extension that organises citations, saves the day. It recognises when I am browsing a Flickr image and knows how to harvest the data I need. One click adds the citation to my Zotero library,  then I can just drag and drop the title on to my “Media Credits” slide and the entire citation is dropped there, in whichever format I specify.

Here’ s a little video clip I made to show how it works, Using Zotero with Flickr and PowerPoint .

UPDATE: Zotero also can save, store and organise your academic citations on the web. This short clip is worth every one of the three minutes it takes to watch it, Zotero 1.5 Screencast .

This video is not by the original  “Did you know? ” team , which outlined worldwide changes that will affect education –  but is done in the same style. It is all about the convergence of media – Did You Know 4.0 ? It has a US focus, but most of it applies to Australia.

Media has changed, attention has changed, how we communicate has changed – not in a tiny increment but massively and disruptively. I’m concerned that changes I thought would take another 5 years to trickle down will be there in two years. Are our libraries ready?