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U Game U Learn, Delft Netherlands. Liveblog

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I will be speaking at U Game, U Learn at GMT+1 on Thursday 23 April 2009 – in a few hours.  This is the second year of a conference that was all about gaming in libraries last year, and this year is more focused on New Media, marketing, libraries and education. It is a joint effort of the local public library, the DOK Library Concept Centre and the academic library at the local univerisity, TUDelft. There should be more cooperation between these kinds of sectors.

My topic is:

What kind of “better than free” is your library?
Kathryn Greenhill looks at new marketing models where “free” services are the basis of making money, and at how libraries can use the same techniques to grow social capital. She examines how libraries can give value to their communities with the “better than free” qualities of trust, immediacy, personalisation, interpretation, authenticity, accessibility, embodiment, patronage and findability.

Door: Kathryn Greenhill


It turned more into a jazz riff on libraries and free, than any serious disucussion of social capital. I’m arguing that the stories that we tell about our library value – which often consists of number of books issued or people counted on door counter – should be expanded to include other values to our community.  There are new marketing models that incorporate elements of no cost to the consumer, where people pay for what they could get for free. We need to look at some of the things that people value in these transactions and see whether we can argue that the library, that provides a “free” service to users, should continue to be funded due to the new values it can bring within a reputation and attention economy.

I will embed the slideshare set here when I have given the talk.

I’m going to be part of the “Battle of the Babes” in the afternoon. No idea what it involves other than four of us women with passionate views arguing over a number of theses about the future of libraries, plus some audience SMS voting. It *may* involve jelly, but I don’t think so.  Erik promises some surprises that it  will top the Storm Troopers from last year’s conference.

I will be recording my live tweets of the sessions via libsmatter and using CoverItLive again:

Librarians Matter blog is back after 3 days offline

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Sorry about the last post – a goodbye and then my blog was unreachable for three days or so while my husband sorted out a rogue database he had added to our shared web hosting account.

The minifigs and I move on from London tomorrow morning, after spending a couple of warm, sunny days riding double-decker buses with Jenny Evans , who was the perfect tour guide and companion.

Next it’s a couple of days in Delft with the ebullient chaos that is the Shanachies, where I hope to liveblog and live tweet the U Game U Learn Symposium. Then I tackle the jigsaw puzzle of trying to fit myself back into my home and work after such a stunningly enjoyable  and professionally rewarding time away.

I was going to claim that I haven’t had jetlag at all this trip, but since I am writing this at 2:30 am, I’m not sure I can do so…

So Long, Thanks. Until we meet again

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I’m off to London in the morning.

Since I arrived in the US on 11 March (38 days ago),  I have been passed from one set of warm welcoming arms to the next.

There have been so many imaginary friends who have stepped straight out the internet to be warm, smart, funny real friends. Often the first time I met people offline, it was with a big mutual hug – and it was totally appropriate. (Ummm…I *hope*).

If I could guarantee not to forget any names, then I would thank people personally who shared a conversation, their thoughts, a meal, their rooms, their homes or so much of their time with me. I hope you all know who you are – thank you. I hope that the connections we have formed can thrive across the world.

I’m deeply grateful to have been given this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

If you can make your way across the world – and it *can* be done – feel free to come and stay with me in Western Australia.

Koha Con 09 Plano Texas

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Today I am in Plano, Texas at a two day conference for the community that uses the Koha Open Source library management system – KohaCon 2009 .

I have set up a CoverItLive session so that I can easily aggregate my tweets for later. This is below.

There is also a conference-wide CoverItLive session as well, KohaCon09 ,  pulling in all tweets with a tag kohacon09 .

Text of Darien Statements on the Library and Librarians.

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Other people have been reproducing the text of the Darien Statements , so I thought I would put it here too.

I’m really enjoying the discussion this on John’s blog and via various posts. I’m even happy that people are disagreeing with some parts, as the idea is to start discussions that we need to have if the Library, libraries and librarians are to flourish in the future.  I’m deliberately giving people space to reply to each other, rather than weighing in with comments in a lot of places.

The Darien Statements on the Library and Librarians
Written and endorsed by John Blyberg, Kathryn Greenhill, and Cindi Trainor

The Purpose of the Library

The purpose of the Library is to preserve the integrity of civilization.

The Library has a moral obligation to adhere to its purpose despite social, economic, environmental, or political influences. The purpose of the Library will never change.

The Library is infinite in its capacity to contain, connect and disseminate knowledge; librarians are human and ephemeral, therefore we must work together to ensure the Library’s permanence.

Individual libraries serve the mission of their parent institution or governing body, but the purpose of the Library overrides that mission when the two come into conflict.

Why we do things will not change, but how we do them will.

A clear understanding of the Library’s purpose, its role, and the role of librarians is essential to the preservation of the Library.

The Role of the Library

The Library:

  • Provides the opportunity for personal enlightenment.
  • Encourages the love of learning.
  • Empowers people to fulfill their civic duty.
  • Facilitates human connections.
  • Preserves and provides materials.
  • Expands capacity for creative expression.
  • Inspires and perpetuates hope.

The Role of Librarians

Librarians:

  • Are stewards of the Library.
  • Connect people with accurate information.
  • Assist people in the creation of their human and information networks.
  • Select, organize and facilitate creation of content.
  • Protect access to content and preserve freedom of information and expression.
  • Anticipate, identify and meet the needs of the Library’s community.

The Preservation of the Library

Our methods need to rapidly change to address the profound impact of information technology on the nature of human connection and the transmission and consumption of knowledge.

If the Library is to fulfill its purpose in the future, librarians must commit to a culture of continuous operational change, accept risk and uncertainty as key properties of the profession, and uphold service to the user as our most valuable directive.

As librarians, we must:

  • Promote openness, kindness, and transparency among libraries and users.
  • Eliminate barriers to cooperation between the Library and any person, institution, or entity within or outside the Library.
  • Choose wisely what to stop doing.
  • Preserve and foster the connections between users and the Library.
  • Harness distributed expertise to serve the needs of the local and global community.
  • Help individuals to learn and to use new tools to create a more robust path to knowledge.
  • Engage in activism on behalf of the Library if its integrity is externally threatened.
  • Endorse procedures only if they guide librarians or users to excellence.
  • Identify and implement the most humane and efficient methods, tools, standards and practices.
  • Adopt technology that keeps data open and free, abandon technology that does not.
  • Be willing and have the expertise to make frequent radical changes.
  • Hire the best people and let them do their job; remove staff who cannot or will not.
  • Trust each other and trust the users.

We have faith that the citizens of our communities will continue to fulfill their civic responsibility by preserving the Library.

Rewarding conference speakers

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For the last few conferences I have attended, I have  found much, much more value hanging about talking to other presenters than in attending the formal sessions. In fact, even when I remember that work is paying for my time to attend, the ROI on this is to me better for my workplace if I learn from this talented bunch of people informally than if I attended the papers.

This worried me at Computers in Libraries 2009 , as I thought it reflected some kind of arrogant know-it-all-ism on my part to skip papers.  I suspect it’s not that I *know* it all, but that I know how to find out at point of need and that I am more likely to use my human networks than to look back at conference notes or handouts to find out.  It does not mean that I am closed to new ideas, as they were flying thick and fast at CIL – both in the sessions (see David Lee King’s Session Summaries ) and outside (see Best Conference Ever … In an Odd Way from Iris Jastram ). As Darlene Fichter wisely told me – yes, sitting in a mob of people in the lobby drinking and chatting – you get to a point where you are at “presenter level”, rather than “delegate level”.

I *know* that I talk about unconferences and how we should be harnessing and accepting the energy and serendipity brought on by the spaces between the sessions.  I wonder, however, whether there might even be room for a more formal addendum to conferences.

John & Ryan answer questions by Cindi Trainor

John & Ryan answer questions by Cindi Trainor

When I was in John and Ryan’s CMS smackdown session on Wednesday, some of the presentation became way too technical for most of the audience. I was sitting there thinking “yes, *this* techie stuff – about Drupal’s hooks and creating separate classification schemas according to content types – is the level I want to engage at”. It made me wonder whether we need at least a “beginners” and an “advanced” track at least one day each.

At a previous conference, someone mentioned that she keeps seeing the same people do the same thing and that she thought that many of the “usual suspects” could do each others’ papers interchangably. For example, there are a whole mob of us who could quite adequately speak on topics like “bringing innovation to your library”, “new tech tools”, “open source software and libraries”, “creating an online digital identity”, “WordPress tips and tricks”, “new media and the future of libraries”. I think that there is a need to bring in good technical ideas for these people from areas outside of librarianship – management, marketing, User Interface design, Human/Computer Interaction, publishing theorists, architects, museums or art galleries.

super useful speaker gift by Amanda Etches-Johnson

super useful speaker gift by Amanda Etches-Johnson

I wonder whether we could replace the Speaker’s Gifts at some of our conferences with sessions just for the presenters. While I appreciate that I was given a copper-coloured stainless steel water bottle of challenging design, I wonder whether it would be more of a reward if the money spent on this was pooled for something to stimulate the presenters’ brains and challenge them. What if as a speaker’s gift, speakers only could attend a good, high-tech level session or track of people from outside of librarianship? If this seems elitist and unfair (and carrying around a copper coloured water bottle isn’t?) then I think it would be a real incentive for new people to step up to the plate and start presenting.

Presenters need mental stimulation too, just like monkeys with fruit stuck in iceblocks at the zoo. (Ryan and Kathryn - Photo by Cindi Trainor)

Presenters need mental stimulation too, just like monkeys with fruit stuck in iceblocks at the zoo. (Ryan and Kathryn - Photo by Cindi Trainor)

On writing the Darien Statements

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John Blyberg, Cindi Trainor and I have just had a week-long three-person unconference about the Future of Libraries.

We started in John’s office in Darien last Friday and have worked in New York, in Arlington Virginia and in Washington DC. We worked on whiteboards, using cameras, recording on an iPhone, on trains, in tapas restaurants, under cherry blossom, via skype, using etherpad, seeking inspiration from minifigs, during conference sessions and even under an ironing board at 2am in the morning.

We worked on “the Thing” until it finally became the “Darien Statements on the Library and Librarians” . It’s our attempt to articulate what the Library is, the role of librarians and what librarians need to do to preserve the Library.

We don’t mention books or buildings once. This wasn’t deliberate. We aimed to make it sound like we were stating the obvious that every librarian knows, without sounding trite.

When we were writing it, I thought of stories of librarians practicing librarianship beyond the day-to-day running of a library. How were these things still librarianship ? Alia Muhammud Baker, the Librarian of Basra who smuggled priceless manuscripts into private homes during bombing in Iraq. The protests by Australian librarians against internet filtering. The New Zealand Librarians and their attempts to influence their government to stop section 92A of their copyright act. The American Library Association’s stand on banning books. ? What were they doing that was so essential to our purpose that they made sure that we will have content to work with in the future ? Why, besides keeping librarians employed, were what they were doing valuable?

A big thank you from the three of us to all the librarians who have been publicly writing and thinking about the future of libraries. We hope we channeled your thoughts with respect.

Cindi also has eloquently posted her thoughts about the process and about openess, On Writing the Darien Statements .

We published it on John’s blog so that there is just one place to link back to. Here it is: Darien Statements on the Library and Librarians .

Computers in Libraries: Wednesday 1 April 2009. Drupal, Joomla, ModEx

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This morning I am just covering one session with CoverItLive and tweeting on @libsmatter.

C301 – CM Tools: Drupal, Joomla, & Rumba
10:30 AM – 11:15 AM
Ryan Deschamps, e-Learning Manager, Halifax Public Libraries
John Blyberg, Head of Technology and Digital Initiatives, Darien Library

What content management system should be your library website champion? John Blyberg and Ryan Deschamps go head-to-head to show you why their favorite content management system (CMS) is the best for developing collaborative library web spaces. Then they will team
up to offer practical advice on how you should choose a CMS, what design challenges you will encounter with each, and what sort of preparations you require to make the big move.

Computers in Libraries: Tuesday 31 March 2009: “Open Track”

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Today I’m covering Track B of the Computers in Libraries Conference, the “Open” track., and talking in the “Unconferences” section.

Topics covered include:

B201 – Open Source Software
10:30 AM – 11:15 AM
Eric Lease Morgan, Head, Digital Access and Information Architecture Department, University Libraries of Notre Dame
Open source software (OSS) that is free to reuse, study, modify, and distribute is quickly being adopted by libraries today. From office productivity suites such as OpenOffice to library-specific applications such as ILS programs, next-gen catalogs, and Firefox extensions, the open source movement has a lot to offer libraries. This session looks at the many types of OSS available and how libraries are making use of them.
B202 – Open Source Browsers
11:30 AM – 12:15 PM
Jessamyn West, Community Technology Librarian, Randolph Technical Career Center
The best part of using an open-source browser such as Firefox is having the ability to create add-ons and extensions to handle a myriad of tasks and applications. From library toolbars, OPAC searches, and right-click context menus, innovative libraries can offer patrons added functionality through these simple Firefox extensions. This session focuses on Firefox and other open source browsers and their possibilities for libraries.
Lunch Break – A Chance to Visit the Exhibits
12:15 PM – 1:30 PM
B203 – Unconferences
1:30 PM – 2:15 PM
Steve Lawson, Humanities Librarian, Colorado College
Stephen Francoeur, Information Services Librarian, Baruch College
John Blyberg, Head of Technology and Digital Initiatives, Darien Library
Kathryn Greenhill, Emerging Technologies Specialist, Murdoch University Library
The latest trend in conferences is to hold an open “camp” or “un”-conference in which the tone is informal and the program is determined by the attendees. Our panelists have all had experience organizing and hosting such events and talk about the process of coordinating a library “camp,” compare them to traditional conferences, and highlight when these camps are most effective.
B204 – Open Source Library Implementations
2:30 PM – 3:15 PM
Karen Kohn, Collection Development Manager, Arcadia University
Eric McCloy, Executive Director, Library and Information Technology, Arcadia University
The speakers discuss getting ready for a Koha implementation and share their learnings from the evaluation and planning stages. From both the librarian and IT perspective, they discuss why they were comfortable moving to open source software for their catalog, the steps mapped out on the road to migration, and how money was freed up for migration by staggering the process and provide good resources for more information.

CoverItLive of the session is below and I will be tweeting it from @libsmatter :