JISC , the UK based body that researches the innovative use of ICT in Higher Education education and research, has released an interesting 10 minute video discussing the future of academic libraries, JISC – Libraries of the Future . They are just finishing their year-long research programme about Libraries of the Future .

Libraries as bee-hives? Google as a partner? Librarians as network administrators as much as information specialists? Librarians “entrepreneurial, engaged and outward looking”? Investing thousands of pounds in change management programs?

(“Bring it on”, I say …)

Registrations for the 100 places will open at the end of August.

We want to keep things fresh, so are trying a Saturday this year. We understand that some people can only make it during work hours, but there are some people who are unable to come during work hours too.

 In keeping with the unconference ideas of “whoever comes is the right person”, and “whatever happens is the only thing that could have”, we are experimenting to see what happens with the combination of a weekend and a new venue.

We still are deciding on a theme, catering, sponsors, catering, start and finish times and more.

If you would like to sponsor the event, please contact Hoi Ng ( HNg@vicpark.wa.gov.au ) 

Feel free to come along to the planning meeting, or to offer ideas via the google group: http://groups.google.com/group/unconfwalib .

The Cluetrain Manifesto turns ten this year. The 95 Theses are still relevant today.

I’ve been thinking about Cluetrain and how professional library associations should – or can- cope with the multiplicity of tools and fora discussing what they are doing.

I wonder whether the authors of the Cluetrain Manifesto would have thought that 10 years later organisations – and many of us individuals – would be looking at the changes to media and communication and scratching our heads saying “What happened, how did it get so fast and how do we use it now? “. Here are a few of the Cluetrain theses that I think are most relevant:

3. Conversations among human beings sound human. They are conducted in a human voice.
4. Whether delivering information, opinions, perspectives, dissenting arguments or humorous asides, the human voice is typically open, natural, uncontrived.
5 .People recognize each other as such from the sound of this voice.
6 .The Internet is enabling conversations among human beings that were simply not possible in the era of mass media.

…..

38. Human communities are based on discourse—on human speech about human concerns.
39. The community of discourse is the market.
40. Companies that do not belong to a community of discourse will die.
41. Companies make a religion of security, but this is largely a red herring. Most are protecting less against competitors than against their own market and workforce.

….

64. We want access to your corporate information, to your plans and strategies, your best thinking, your genuine knowledge. We will not settle for the 4-color brochure, for web sites chock-a-block with eye candy but lacking any substance.

…

94. To traditional corporations, networked conversations may appear confused, may sound confusing. But we are organizing faster than they are. We have better tools, more new ideas, no rules to slow us down.
95. We are waking up and linking to each other. We are watching. But we are not waiting.

I would add to this that the people who are talking about your organisation are those who care – passionately –  about what you do. They are taking time to gather with each other, talk about what you do and maybe – in fact probably – they would welcome the human voice from your organisation.

Can – and should – library professional organisations monitor all places where their members may be discussing what they do? Can – and should – organisations choose to continue the conversation via other media, rather than where their members are having discussions?

CILIP ATwitter in the UK

CILIP started me thinking about all this on 18 February when  Bob McKee, CILIP’s Chief Executive declared categorically that there was no place for a CILIP Twitter account, All of a Twitter .

There’s some twittering at present about whether CILIP has (or should have) any “official” presence on various lists or micro blog sites.

The simple answer, of course, is no. In terms of “official” activity, cyber life is just like real like – if it happens in a CILIP-sanctioned space, it’s official; if it happens down the pub or in someone else’s space, it isn’t.

Phil Bradley took Bob to task, CILIP – Epic Fail . I won’t repeat his excellently argued response, but one of the points he made was that the conversation on Twitter about CILIP was actually two weeks before, and the lag in the response was highly inappropriate.

ALIA from Australia in a hyperconnected world

As the Australian Library and Information Association has discovered this week, 24 hours is a long time in a hyperconnected world.

As best I can find, the announcement that IFLA is moving from Brisbane to Sweden in 2010 was made around 4:30pm AEST on Wednesday 8th.  (UPDATE 8:30pm 13 July 2009: Sue Hutley from ALIA has contacted me to clarify that the first email to members was sent at 6:30pm AEST, not 4:30pm) By midnight, discussions on Twitter among Australian librarians had spilled out onto a blog post at Libraries Interact about organising an alternative event during this time, IFLA 2010 .

The first official response  to the call for a different event came on ALIA’s board blog around 3ish the next day…. via Jan Richards the ALIA President,IFLA 2010. In this, she asks that:

True to the Australian spirit of “lets’ move on” the lists and emails are alive “where do we go from here?” “can we now have a biennial?” and innovative ideas for professional development and networking. As we have only lived with IFLA’s decision for less than 48 hours we still have a great deal to work through and I would urge you to be patient. The National Committee will meet again by teleconference next week to discuss future options and the ALIA Board has earmarked this as a priority item. In the interim let’s stay focused and resist the temptation to organise a plethora of unrelated events.

In other words – “we are discussing it among ourselves, not in public and will let you know when we know more”. Fair enough.

That would have been a very reasonable position three years ago. Is it today? I don’t know, but I suspect that if this happened in a year’s time, then it would definitely not be.

I think that ALIA  – and other library professional associations – can learn a few things from how this was handled:

1. It would have been very useful to have a media strategy during a crisis to be present online on Twitter, email lists etc other than speaking in “press release” style communication.  A strategy to telephone some members directly about what they were saying on email lists, rather than engaging with them on the lists may not have been the best one. Easy for me to say – I guess the office did not have staffing enough to do this and was handling a lot all of a sudden … but I think this will be a greater priority in the future. The time it took to telephone one or two members may have been better channeled toward communicating on email lists, blogs or Twitter.

2. While it was a good move to comment on the blog post at Libraries Interact and offer to communicate, giving out a phone number and offering to talk one to one was probably not the way that people on that forum prefer to communicate. It would also have inspired more confidence in the association’s ability to technically handle new media if someone from ALIA office had directly posted the comment, not got someone else to post it on their behalf.

3. Not allowing comments on the ALIA Board Blog forces the online conversation elsewhere. Much harder to monitor . Much harder for supporters to show support. I think that in the future, providing public online space for members to discuss the organisiations’ decisions will  be a requisite function of a professional organisation.

When asked via Twitter why there were no comments allowed on the Board Blog, @ALIANational answered that the reason was “apparently technical”. That sounds really, really odd to me. A procedural, administrative decision or a  skills-based decision maybe. Given that it looks like a WordPress blog with a modified Kubrick theme, all they would need to do technically is change one setting under Setttings > Discussion….. or to change the setting on the individual blog post to allow comments… which overrides the “Discussion” setting  anyhow.

ALA and ALASecrets2009 in Chicago, USA

Hiring Jenny Levine was one of the smartest ways that the ALA has tried to cope with issues raised by Cluetrain.  Check out the member’s online space, ALAConnect for an example of how a good Drupal installation integrated with iMIS can work to provide online space for communication between members and each other, and the organisation. Jenny’s efforts to evangelise and make people feel at home there are just as important as the technical setup.

The most bizarre and entertaining example of how new media can challenge a library professional association is happening right now at the American Library Association Conference.

I’m not sure there is anything ALA can or should do right now, but association members are chatting very publicly about an event being held by the association – and in a very different voice to that which the organisation uses.

Like bored schoolkids a few people set up an @ALASecrets account on Twitter. They gave out the password and told people to post. Look at a Twitter search for ALASecrets and you will see what I mean. The most re-tweeted post?

#ala2009 has confirmed what have suspected for years. Librarians mostly function on sex, alcohol and wifi. Everything else is meh

Someone among librarians – those protectors against censorship of information – took exception to the fun, logged in with the password then changed the password to something else and made the account a protected (non-public) one.

Within a couple of hours, the concept was back and censor-proof. Now an email to s53gyb@twittermail.com will post directly to a new account, ALASecrets2009 . There are a few other ways to post, as detailed in this post , ALA Secrets , at the not all bits blog.

.

…We are organizing faster than they are. We have better tools, more new ideas, no rules to slow us down…. We are waking up and linking to each other. We are watching. But we are not waiting….

I was invited to present to the Educational Technology Committee at MPOW about emerging technologies likely to affect education. Here is the slideset to accompany my 30 minute presentation, Emerging Technologies: background, tools and challenges for Higher Education .

FURTHER READING

• The Horizon Report: Australia-New Zealand 2008 (released December 2008)
• The Horizon Report 2009 (January 2009)
• The Horizon Report K-12 2009 (March 2009)
• Amy Butterworth, “Higher Education in a Web 2.0 World,” . JISC
• “Apprehending the Future: Emerging Technologies, from Science Fiction to Campus Reality (EDUCAUSE Review) | EDUCAUSE,” .
• Luckin et al KS3 and KS4 learners’ use of Web 2.0 technologies in and out of School – Summary
• Xanthe O’Donnell, Great expectations of ICT: How Higher Education institutions are measuring up

LIBRARY WEB2.0 LEARNING PROGRAMME FOR STAFF AND STUDENTS

Web 2.0 Easier, faster, friendlier

The 14 Things that we cover:

It would be a really, really inspired idea to take discarded library  books to the local train station during Library Week and give them to local commuters to read on their journey.

It was genius, however, for the team at Rosanna Library in Melbourne to do some guerrilla indoctrination of Ranganathan’s First Law: “Books are for use” . They added to each item a Bookcrossing tag, so that commuters could register the book on the website and track its progress around the world as they gave it away to the next reader.

Chris MacKenzie, CEO of Yarra Plenty Regional Library ( one of the most innovative public library systems in Australia ) tells the story further in her blog, Bookcrossing at Rosanna Railway Station .

Andrea, the Branch Manager at Rosanna sent me this email on Friday:

“We have just finished a very successful Library Week activity at Rosanna railway station.

We set up a table at the station for four mornings this week between 8am and 10am. Joyce handed out library publicity and offered commuters a free withdrawn book – adult fiction or paperback – each one with a BookCrossing tag and a registration number.

The idea is that readers register their title on the BookCrossing website then read it and pass it on to a friend or leave it somewhere to be picked up by the next reader, who also registers on the website. The website tracks the book’s progress around Melbourne or Australia or even overseas and we can also check out the readers’ comments about the books (and the “friendly librarian at Rosanna station”).

The feedback from both commuters and Connex staff has been extremely positive – Connex have asked if we can do this again during the next school holidays but some commuters have already asked if we could do this once a week.

Commuters were happy – not just to get something for free but they were intrigued by the BookCrossing idea and pleasantly surprised to see friendly library staff out and about early on a cold morning at the station. Perhaps having a book to read on the train and switch off was also a more inviting prospect than reading the daily news. We have been checking the website and it appears that many commuters have logged on to BookCrossing as soon as they got to work and registered.”

In my second last post, Getting Deeply Local at our libraries, I suggested that libraries should focus on their deep human knowledge of their local communities and local data to provide services that cannot be provided by generic suppliers like  Wikipedia or a supermarket offering bestselling books. In the post before this, Like a Virgin , I gave the example of the German National Library’s Personennamendatei project working with Wikipedia to put their locally collected authoritative personal name data into Wikipedia.de .

What Wikipedia has that libraries do not is reach. It is the seventh most visited site in the world. Information there is far more likely to be found by the world – and probably our local communities – than on any of our library web sites.

Here lies a quandry to me. If we want our local data to be more accessible, then populating larger, more accessed sites with greater reach will be the best service to our communities. But if we do this, and the data does not have Brand Library written all over it, how do we make sure our libraries continue to be paid to do this?

Look at the Big Diary online service offered by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. I found out about it while watching Sunday’s the Einstein Factor. The tagline is:

An independent listing of events from around Australia. Explore, join up and contribute.”

The events  in the city where I live, Fremantle, in the next seven days are less comprehensive and quite different to our local library’s community information service, Freinfo. But – which one has a more intuitive user interface and more awareness among Fremantle citizens? Today? In 12 months’ time?

This is not a criticism of Fre-info or the Fremantle City Library who do an excellent job and are well-regarded by our community. Fre-info is a service that plays to one of our potential strengths – collecting local data for our local communities.

So what does a service like Fremantle City Library do? Does it populate the Big Diary with its clean, authorative data? Would that provide a better service to their community? It would probably be more findable and promote Fremantle to the rest of Australia more effectively. But would ratepayers then go to the Big Diary, not Fre-info? Does this matter? How would they justify continuing to fund a service that is now less used?

What does an academic library do when it has local clean data in a reusable form that would enhance entries in Wikipedia about local geography, or climate ? Is a Special Library doing the best thing to maintain funding if it actively shows users how to set up the library link resolver in Google Scholar – when there are so many more relevant resources available from the library web site?

I don’t know. I do know that libraries that want to both serve their communities best, and survive to do so, will have to come up with some answers.

This two minute video explains so simply and so well the changes that networked information brings , and some humane, engaging options for libraries that repurpose themselves: What is the future of the library? from Guy Adam Ailion

Found via Library Bytes .

In April I was at an event where I used the phrase get deeply local to describe a key strategy for  libraries that want to survive. It was picked up by a couple of   other speakers there, so I thought I would elaborate.

In a world of generic best sellers available in supermarkets, music and video downloadable by bittorrent and university libraries getting best bang for buck with large “one size fits all” journal database subscriptions , I think that to best way to serve our communities libraries need to shift our resources toward a greater focus on the deeply local.

deep #1 Uploaded to Flickr on February 28, 2008 by slimmer_jimmer

I think our strengths over large ubiquitous sites like Amazon, Google and Wikipedia are – or should be:

• our deep, human knowledge of the people in our community who use us
• our deep, human knowledge of people in our community who do not use us
• our deep, human  knowledge of the specific information resources needed by our community
• our deep, human  knowledge of how our community wants to find and discover information
• our deep, human knowledge of locally produced information
• our human ability to provide many different services to the same individual by our knowledge of them as people
• our human ability to anticipate desires and to delight our local community
• our buildings as a social hub for our local community

The Deep Uploaded to Flickr on May 26, 2009 by eNil

With this knowledge, we have the ability to:

• connect people in our community with each other
• connect our community to local information
• connect our users to the outside world of information
• put local information where our community can best access it
• provide tools for remix of local information
• help our local communities to organise, publish and make findable their own local information
• connect our local information to the world for those outside our communities

http://remix.digitalnz.org/

There are many methods to do this.  Some examples of  things that Google, Amazon and Wikipedia cannot do what we can do – and that maybe we should give more resources – are:

• Institutional repositories of publications in academic libraries
• Digitization projects for ephemera and special collections held by libraries
• Local history projects
• Community information
• Homework clubs
• Homebound services
• Events designed to be intergenerational – like a grandparents vs children’s wii tournament
• Job clubs that help locals support each other in finding information and upgrading skills to find jobs
• Partnerships with other local groups or institutions, like the Health Bags in Topeka Shawnee County Public Library in partnership with a local hospital.
• Online initiatives to promote local discussion of reading, like the Yarra Plenty Reads blog or the Mosman Readers Ning
• Projects like Kete Horowhenua that allows community members to create an online repository of locally produced content important to the community
• Providing remix sites where users worldwide can mashup local data, like Digital New Zealand’s Memory Maker and Widget Gallery .

A  job transformed

My friend Peta Hopkins has been working for the last 18 months or so as the project manager for the new  Bond University web site that launched yesterday.

When Peta first told me that she had gone from library systems to secondment for this job I thought – “Yay Peta, I’m glad you can do that – I’d find that overwhelming”.

A few niggles in the last week have me thinking that, like Peta, within the next 10 years most librarians will be working outside physical libraries by necessity. I hope that if it is in other professions, then this is by choice. I hope that libraries can change our service models quickly enough that we still have the option of working in libraries.

Physical media in rapid decline

Jeff Trzeciak from McMaster University points in his blog to an article in the New York Times about the closing of the  last Virgin Megastore in New York City.  The quote that resonates with me is from Gartner’s  Michael McGuire :

“The Titanic that is physical media started slowly sinking in 2000. Certainly this is a traumatic event for those who worked there, but it’s an expected product of the digital transition.”

The article details hundreds of other recorded music stores that closed in the last five years. This bugs me. Several times in the last year I have heard library leaders proclaiming how many branches libraries have across our countries and how much book stock we have.

It makes me think of a quote attributed Rupert Murdoch – who is someone who knows about the effects of the decline of physical media:

The world is changing very fast. Big will not beat small anymore. It will be the fast beating the slow.

How to have fun in the NYPL Uploaded to Flickr on March 29, 2009 by cindiann

Being fast

We have big, but do we have fast? Are we nimble enough, changing quickly enough to deliver services in a way that can compete with other content providers that deliver access faster and more conveniently? Are our buildings  located, staffed and open hours that suit users who increasingly are their own mobile hub of content access?

Are our libraries staffed by people who realise that the Titanic that is physical media is sinking – or will they be traumatised like the record store staff if libraries are bypassed ? Are libraries – who are also dependent on moving physical stock – likely to face a similar decline? Our stock  issues look healthy enough now, but let us not forget that in the year 2000, 785 million albums were sold in the US. Today it is half this.

Can our role as a central social hub save us, or will be left lamenting like the Virgin store employee:

It does matter because it was also a social gathering space, and that’s one thing that buying music online lacks.

Being as fast as our competitors

In his latest post, David Lee King looks at current alternatives to libraries : Who are your competitors? He covers alternative sources for books, movies, music, gaming and reference – and lists some of the convenient services that may be competing – services that I think understand the strength of “fast”. He offers some suggested tactics, including focusing on customer needs, turning non-users into users, rearranging our stock to be more findable and working on the digital experience of the library.

A comment from Karen Wanamaker about academic libraries is worth reproducing:

Academic libraries have many of the same competitors as public libraries for the social aspect of the library. For the academic role, we have a huge competitor with the Web and such things as Google Scholar and Wikipedia.

We need to focus on educating students about WHEN to use the Websites for information and when to stick with online resources such as the databases we provide or refer to print materials. We also need to lure them into the building and educate them (AND the faculty) about our services. It is a waste of time and money to offer so many services and resources and not publicize them to the patrons so that they know to make use of them

I don’t agree that services like Wikipedia and Google Scholar are necessarily our competitors. If we are *really* about ensuring our communities have access to the best information, then we can work with Wikipedia and Google Scholar without selling out. The German National Library’s Personennamendatei project is a good example. It puts authoritative personal name data into Wikipedia.de .

But – and this is important – we need to do just what Karen suggests and ensure that when we tell our patrons about these resources, we publicize our role in strengthening them. And ensure that they tell our funding bodies. Or that we tell our funding bodies. Or somebody does.

Staying around

We need to ask whether we want to be known as:

a great place for physical objects in a format that was substantially replaced in the 2010’s .

I’m not saying this will come to pass. We are not record stores and have a different business model. But if we all want to be working in libraries in ten years time, then I think that we do need to:

• be asking what will happen if books are no longer physical objects best centrally stored and loaned through a library
• identify our competitors
• identify and play to our strengths that go beyond our physical buildings and collections
• ensure that we have staff with skills that can deliver in those areas
• move fast
• publicise and market these strengths to maintain continued funding.

For Open Day at our university, the library is putting tag clouds on doors in the Learning Common. The cloud describes what goes on behind the door.

A very nice idea – which was not mine.

Here’s my first attempt at describing what happens behind my door, generated using Wordle.net . Have I forgotten anything?

What would yours look like?