I’ve been off installing drupal, tweaking it, adding themes and throwing a few modules at it so I can use it for notes and thoughts as I study this year. I’ll post about it later.

A couple of times I’ve sat down to blog and I have a couple of posts in draft that may never see light of day – “Fake! Will Ern Outlast Susan?” and “Hot Tubs, Kevin Kelly and FOAF”.

I’ll get my blogging mojo back soon, but for now I’m doing an easy blog post and adding my 7c to the Seven Things Meme, since Jude tagged me. Terribly lazily I’m just responding directly to her seven things.

1. English is my only language. I am in awe of students who come to the reference desk embarrassed about their poor English – they are surviving in another country using a second or third language. No *way* could I do that…but I feel that I might sound all gushy if I say that to them.

2. My first car was yellow Mazda 808. I worked all summer thinning apples in an orchard to pay for half. The other half was raised when I told my parents I was buying a motorbike – and they suddenly wanted to go halves in a car for me.

3. Addictions– chocolate and wifi and if I buy any more, I will have to add sensible but funky shoes to the list.

4. My achivements as a pimply teenagerwere being Head Girl of my High School, getting a bursary to go to a posh private school and scoring 100% in English in my uni matriculation exam in year 12. Girly swot.

5.I like singing by myself. Others prefer it if I sing by myself too.

6. My star sign is Pisces. Well, I thought it was until this site, True Star Sign, totally redefined me last year as an Aquarius.

7. I love getting up early in the morning if I get enough sleep the night before – but my body clock is set to be a definite night owl. My brain really only starts thinking well about 9pm at night – which strangely enough is about the time the kids are in bed for the night.

Tagging.  I will take John Connell’s warning to heart:

I would ask anyone thinking of kicking such a meme off to ponder the effects of the exponential before they start. This meme, for instance, asks each person tagged to tag seven others – what this means is that, assuming the first round involves the single person who starts the ball rolling, and also, for the sake of argument, assuming that each blogger can only be tagged once, after just 5 rounds of the meme, some 2801 bloggers will have been tagged; after 10 rounds, the figure reaches 47,079,208

But then I’ll try seven of my Australian Library Twitter Friends that I haven’t tagged for anything else yet…

• Anne Holmes
• Kate Davis
• Carolyn McDonald
• Warren Cheetham
• Jo Beazley
• Teresa Bennett
• Jenelle Cleary

2009 starts in an hour’s time.

In no order, here are some of my library / techie / bloggy highlights from the past year.

I was going to include a list of events I’ve enjoyed this year – but most of them are in this blog already.

I was also going to do a list of cool people I met this year, but that just sounded all name-droppy.  I am grateful to have met so many people that I previously admired from afar – or met for the first time and now admire…If I’ve hung out with you, or even just stood shyly in the same room as you trying to think of something to say – thanks for all I’ve learned from you.

A handful of thank-yous for 2008

1.  Con for being a fabulous co-conspirator in many schemes.
2. The Thali members for their hospitality when I have landed in their cities.
3. The people at MPOW who encouraged me to aim higher than I would have otherwise.
4. The Perth library unconference unorganisers – the most organised unorganisers ever.
5. Organisations who have asked me to present at their events. I’ve loved going to new places and hearing from new people about a corner of libraryland I didn’t know about before. (and each time I was terrified that the organisation would discover I had nothing interesting to say, and then because I didn’t want to let them down, I discovered that I *did* have something to say…)
6. My family for giving me space and stability
7. People who have engaged with what I am writing here – either by reading, commenting or continuing the conversation elsewhere.

Tools I tried in 2008 and am still using:

1.  Google Chrome
2. ASUS eeePC 1000H
3. Logitech WAVE wireless keyboard and mouse combo
4. Ubiquity Firefox extension
5. Twhirl
6. FriendFeed
7. Zotero – toes in the water with this, as I don’t like using portable Firefox on a USB stick to keep my references all in one spot.

Work I’ve admired in 2008:

1. What John Blyberg did. Finished and released SOPAC2 into the wild, but also his talk in Singapore at Bridging Worlds helped me understand how the idea of User Experience should permeate both a library’s online and offline presence.

2. What Dave Pattern did: Often made me laugh in delight at his creative use of data visualisation…but  I’ve been very impressed with his release of anonymised circulation and recommendation data  under Open Data Commons/CC0 license. And his recent resurrection of his “Hot stuff” in the biblioblogosphere. Check it out to see the most popular new term today.

3. What Stephen Abram did: I wasn’t at the Australian Library and Information Association Conference in Alice Springs mid-year , but I’ve heard second-hand about this bloke who set a cat among the pigeons when he “said to us that if we aren’t keeping up-to-date then we should get out of his profession”.

3. The OLE project:  Having the vision to apply for a $475,700 grant from the The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation   to create a design document for an Open Source Integrated Library Management System aimed at research libraries.

4. National Library of Australia :  They are continuing to respond quickly to the changing information environment, with innovations like the full text Australian Newspaper Index , the launch of the Open Source VuFind front end to the library catalogue in May and their Library Labs wiki .

5. National Library of New Zealand: The leadership by the organisation in the New Zealand Digital Strategy and projects such as DigitalNZ – designed to make New Zealand content easier to find, share and use. 

6. National  and State Libraries of Australasia:  The  Re-imagining Library Services Strategic Plan   is a great blueprint for the way that state and national libraries can work together to create a consistent experience for our users.

What I’ll be keeping an eye on in 2009

1. Second Life – If it’s so useful to libraries and education, why are there so few mature widely-used projects there? If it’s so useless for libraries and educational organisations, why are they still there and why are some of the smartest people I know still putting in time and energy after several years?

2. The crazy, dumb scheme to filter Australia’s internet access.

3.  Twitter. Despite predictions that “it will go mainstream this year”, I still think that you need to have the right personality type to use it well. I’d be interested in whether the service can scale or make money if numbers swell

4. Library responses to the economic crisis. Will our role as storehouse for print objects be further challenged as our buildings become a meeting place for people with less money for outings – and as we need to decide whether to spend our more limited budgets on more print or on more digital collections.

What I want to find out about in 2009

1. E-books – my list is here
2. Drupal. I want to create a test-installation to store notes and references when I study next year.
3. Skills and organisational change needed before libraries can adopt Open Source systems.
4. I want to install Koha, Evergreen, SOPAC2 , Vufind and a bunch of other Open Source applications on a portable hard drive so I can understand how they work.
5. APIs. Application Programming Interfaces – the way data can be sucked in and out of applications, and remixed and repurposed. 
6. Yahoo Pipes. I want to try doing more than just translating this blog’s feed into French, then German and then back into English.
7. Write a simple WordPress plugin. I’m told that they are simple to write and I want to understand how to do it.

Pre-booked in 2009

I’m going to be busy next year. I’m practising saying “N-O”, but please ask me about that exciting opportunity/event/dinner out/chance to chat. I will probably try “N-O” on you, but it’s nice to be asked.

I have enrolled to do an extra six months of study to convert my current qualification into a Masters of Information Management. I’ll be writing a thesis only – all about what I find out on my travels on the VALA Scholarship between mid- March and the end of April.

I’m also committed to a few presentations already:

• 6 March 2009 LocLib Conference. (session time TBA) Perth, Western Australia. Session on lifestreaming, podcasting, vodcasting, machinima, microblogging, screencasting, slidecasting.
• 31 March 2009  Unconferences . 1:30 – 2:15pm Panel with John Blyberg, Steve Lawson and Stephen Francouer . Computers in Libraries Arlington, Virginia, United States of America
• 3-6 May 2009 (session time TBA) Reasons why emerging technologies are  part of every librarians’ job Educause Australasia 2009
• 3-6 May 2009 (session time TBA) Personal Learning Environments for Librarians Panel discussion with Con Wiebrands, Peta Hopkins and Penny Coutas . Educause Australasia 2009

I have just upgraded to WordPress 2.7 from WordPress 2.3.1 . Yes, I let that many upgrades pass me by.

I had to totally change the themes and the plugins.

If the new theme is giving you problems, like slow loading time or strange formatting,  please email me directly or leave a comment. I checked it in many different browsers using browsershots.org but maybe something odd slipped through.

I’d like to know if there is anything that I can change that would make it easier for you to read and/or use my content.

GIVING IN

I’ve accepted that many people aren’t going to take up RSS feeds as quickly as I want them to, so I have added an option for people to subscribe to my blog via email.

THEMES

After checking all sorts of places, particularly the list of themes compatible with WordPress 2.7 at wordpress.org , I decided on Vigilance Theme by Jestro. I loved the flexibility, but not the really yukky blockquotes formatting.  Acting on the instructions that came with the theme, I downloaded a child theme and my husband very nicely customised the CSS to remove the strange blockquote formatting.

I would prefer that the sidebar was narrower, and that the width was fluid rather than fixed. I changed this in my last theme, and I may give it a go later when I have more time.

It looks a bit busy on the sidebar. I think some of the info could go on a large footer widgetbox.

PLUGINS

Many of the plugins I had been using were made obsolete by 2.7. Two that I find essential still:

1. Get Recent Comments . This outputs the text of recent comments as a widget in the sidebar – excluding trackbacks. The default WordPress “Recent Comments” widget just shows who commented on which post, but not what they said.

2. WP-Print . This lets you print just a page or a post with sensible, readable formatting, plus a list of links inserted as footnotes.  You need to add a line of code to some  .php files to make this work.

I hope this will be my last post until the New Year.

If I don’t catch up with you before then, I’d just like to thank you for reading Librarians Matter this year – and for the many, many people who have connected with me in many different ways as a result of this.

Please have a happy and safe holiday season and I’ll be in touch next year.

I don’t quite know *what* to make of this, so I’ll just give you the evidence and you can make the call. Meme or no meme?

1. National Library of Australia staff Christmas party, Thriller  uploaded to YouTube 17 December 2008 by wwwnlagovau

2. Pb Holiday Parade Library Bookcart Thriller  uploaded to YouTube 14 December 2008 by  isidoreus

3. ALA 2008 Book Cart Drill Team: “Thriller” uploaded to YouTube 7 July 2008 by queenamidala18

4. Thriller Library Style  uploaded to YouTube 23 August 2008 by Daveman267

5. Summer Reading promoWorthington Libraries – Just Read It!  uploaded to YouTube 6 May 2008 by
worthingtonlibraries

6.  Read It – Michael Jackson Beat It Parody by SearchKindly.org  uploaded to YouTube 7 January 2008 by  SearchKindly

A surface computer.

Giggling and goofing at work while they learn.

The knowledge that they are going to delight their users.

Darien Library’s John Blyberg explains the how and why. I *want* my kids to visit a library where they can pop a book on a lit up table and then see a video of storytime for that book.

….but maybe I’m just passionate ….

Like Scott Adams, author of Dilbert says in his post Inspiration and Passion and Whatnot

People often ask me where I got my inspiration for one thing or another. Or what possessed me to do something. Or why I have a passion for a particular project. The assumption behind those questions, I think, is that if one could find out where such causes originate, it would be possible to pick a promising field of endeavor then activate the inspiration to spark higher levels of achievement.

But it doesn’t work that way. In my experience, I do the project I can’t stop myself from doing. Passion is the thing you can’t control, by definition. It’s the same with inspiration. At any given time there are dozens of projects that I think make sense, but sooner or later one bubbles to the top on its own, logic ignored, and takes over my schedule.

OK, it’s that time of the year again. Here is the first line of the first  post for each month, and – just for variation’s sake – the last line of the last post for each month ….oh except December…. but I’m sure you won’t mind…

JANUARY

• First line:  What do these people have in common?
• Last line: Thanks Corey.

FEBRUARY

• First line: I’m enjoying the Beyond the Hype Symposium so far.
• Last line: With just 10 in the course, I’m planning to tailor it specifically to whatever the participants want, so if you have registered, please feel free to contact me and tell me what you’d like covered.

MARCH

• First line: Chris Anderson wrote about the Long Tail in Wired magazine in 2004 , encapsulating in economic terms one of Ranganathan’s laws of library science “Every book its reader” .
• Last line:  Anyhow, here’s the slideshows.

APRIL

• First line: It’s 1973 and you’re not sure whether to make burnt orange curtains or sunshine yellow ones to go with your lime green kitchen benchtops.
• Last Line: REGISTRATION: Add your name to the wiki

MAY

• First Line: Steven Bell asked this question in a post to ACRLog on 4 May, What’s your signature statement ?
•  Last line:There is some strong language.

JUNE

• First line:Morgan Wilson started it with his discussion of how to reconcile one’s personal ethics with the system and practices that one supports professionally, Living with myself as a law firm librarian .
• Last line:Here’s an embed of it:

JULY

• First line:Registrations for the second WA Library Unconference are now open.
• Last line:I’m not going to tag anyone specifically, but most of the “day of a librarian” posts have been from the US, and I’d love to know how other librarians’ days are in Australia.

AUGUST

• First line:The last two Saturday nights in our household, we’ve output the laptop to our large TV screen and watched internet content.
• Last line:This presentation will show how the broader/narrower relationships in a thesaurus structure can be the basis for a classification scheme and hence support a site navigation structure.

SEPTEMBER

•  First line:It’s been September 1st here in Western Australia for 23 hours and I’ve been w.a.i.t.i.n.g all day for John Blyberg to wake up and climb down the chimney of libraryland and deliver an early Christmas present.
• Last line:See you on the flip-side.

OCTOBER

• First line:…. If you think what they are already doing is very good, tell them so…then ask them whether they would like to do it differently…
•  Last line:Mark Pesce is one of the keynote speakers for the New Librarians’ Symposium, coming up on 5 and 6  December –  to which I will *not* be going, but would dearly love to.

NOVEMBER

•  First line:I’m liveblogging the next three days of this conference using CoverItLive
• Last line:I only get to do this because I have a very supportive family and workplace – so a big thank you to them, particularly my husband Stewart and my boss, Margaret Jones.

DECEMBER

• First line:Around Australia, there will be rallies on Saturday 13 December 2008 against the government’s proposal to censor filter the internet.

Yup – buried down in a page that announces changes that will happen to the ABS website  is this small notice:

Creative Commons

Creative Commons provides a spectrum of licensing for the use of intellectual property between full copyright and public domain – in essence ‘some rights reserved’. The ABS is poised to introduce Creative Commons licensing for the majority of its web content.

The relevant Creative Commons logo (which will link to the Attribution 2.5 Australia Licence) will be included at the bottom of every page on the ABS website.

And, yes – you are right …you did read correctly… This information is being released via an Attribution only license. You will soon be able to go forth and remix, repurpose and reuse material created by the ABS. You can even make huge amounts of money by re-selling the information if you can work out how to – just as long as you cite the source of your data.

At the recent LIANZA conference I was very impressed with a paper given by Kietha Booth about how librarians within taxpayer and ratepayer funded organisations should work to help their organisations release their data in free, accessible and re-mixable formats. I’m very, very happy to see this happening in Australia. Should be more of it, I say.

(Thanks to Kate M for giving me the heads up on this one ).

BOOKS AS BRAND

If you’ve been to any library conference in the last three years,  then you will have heard the finding from the OCLC 2005 Perceptions of Libraries and Information Resources report that surveyed Internet users worldwide:

“Books” is the library brand. There is no runner-up.

I think it would hardly be different today. I wish it was.

Our first duty is to our current users – users who, on the whole, cherish books and respect us for our loving organisation and custodianship of these. But, if we want to have clients in 25 years time – and exist in 25 years time –  then we need to position ourselves to serve future clients too.

Day 106 – I am a l ibrarian . Uploaded to Flickr on January 10, 2007 by cindiann

BOOK LOVERS vs READERS

In a post on Boing Boing dated 2 December, guest author Clay Shirky writes about the future business models that publishers should consider, To Publish Without Perishing (Clay Shirky guestblog post) . He takes issue with James Gleick’s recent article in the New York Times How to Publish Without Perishing .

Gleick suggests that some items – encyclopedias, telephone books – are better in online format. He argues that: “It is significant that one says book lover and music lover and art lover but not record lover or CD lover or, conversely, text lover”. He sees the recent Authors Guild vs. Google decision as a gift of unlimited longevity, even for the most modest titles, and continues:

What should an old-fashioned book publisher do with this gift? Forget about cost-cutting and the mass market. Don’t aim for instant blockbuster successes. You won’t win on quick distribution, and you won’t win on price. Cyberspace has that covered.

Go back to an old-fashioned idea: that a book, printed in ink on durable paper, acid-free for longevity, is a thing of beauty. Make it as well as you can. People want to cherish it.

Clay Shirky describes Gleick’s essay as ” so well written, so cleanly expressed, and so spectacularly wrong “.

There are book lovers, yes, but there are also readers, a much larger group. By Gleick’s logic, all of us who are just readers, everyone who buys paperbacks or trades books after we’ve read them, everyone who prints PDFs or owns a Kindle, falls out of his imagined future market. Publishers should forsake mere readers, and become purveyors of Commemorative Text Objects. It’s the Franklin Mint business model, now with 1000% more words!

In the same way the internet has forced newspapers into a ‘news vs. paper’ moment, the publishing world is in a ‘readers vs. book lovers’ moment. In this environment, the single most important choice anyone in publishing has to make is this: “How many generations do I want to be in business?” Because hawking Ye Olde Codices to aging connoisseurs is a one-generation business.

Businesses don’t survive in the long term because old people persist in old behaviors; they survive because young people renew old behaviors, and all the behaviors young people are renewing cluster around reading, while they are adopting almost none of the behaviors tied to cherishing physical containers, whether for the written word or anything else. Can you imagine a 25-year-old telling a publisher “To get my business, you should stick to a single, analog format? Oh, and could you make it heavy, bulky, and unsearchable? Thanks.” (emphasis mine).

SHIFT OF PERSPECTIVE?

Now, I’m not going to take sides between Gleick and Shirky. I am going to make an observation about academic libraries.  The people who make our funding decisions – senior university administrators and academics – tend to be from a generation of book-lovers. The people who make our acquisitions decisions – our senior librarians – tend to be from a generation of book-lovers.

Personally, “book” is so associated with “library” that it will take a very mindful, deliberate and very foreign-feeling shift in perspective for me to be able to consider “library” without it being based on “book”. For the students I serve today, and will serve within five years, there is no such shift needed to decouple “book” from “reading”. And if libraries are about reading, information and connecting people, then it probably is a shift I need to make if I am going to help libraries survive for at least the rest of my career.

Espresso Book Machine – University of Michigan

NEW MODELS ?

More than one prominent library speaker starts their presentations with statistics showing that book sales are increasing. According to a very comprehensive article from the New York Magazine on 14 September 2008 about the future of publishing, The End ,  the statistics for the United States are that :

Sales at the five big publishers were up 0.5 percent in the first half of this year, bookstore sales tanked in June, and a full-year decline is expected.

The discussion at the end that mentions alternative book distribution models is well-worth reading. They particularly discuss Amazon’s Kindle and its current economic model (don’t make much money, but offer sweet deals to publishers to encourage them to license to this format) and touch on print-on-demand models ( like the Espresso Book Machine).

WHAT TO DO?

On my own “to do” list?

1. Find out more about new publishing models and licensing structures.
2. Find out more about reading-dedicated devices – kindles and illiads and Sony readers and screen technologies that make it easy to read in bright sunlight.
3. Find out more about the “reading” functions on converged devices (like the iPhone and mobile phones). Is it really possible to comfortably read a whole book on one?
4. Educate myself more about Digital Rights Management and which e-books can be read with which e-book reader software on which machines.
5. Investigate models for academic texts that involve library-provided materials that can be read off-line.
6. Find out more about what the University of Michigan Library is doing with their Espresso Book Machine.
7. Think even harder about “last copy storage” projects  and whether they make sense for Australian academic libraries.
8. Think about preservation / archive vs accessibility issues with e-books.
9. Ask some people under 30 what they think about books vs e-formats.  (If you are under 30, please let me know in the comments ).
10. Try reading a fiction e-book from start to finish. (I have bought two that use the Mobipocket, and have been irritated that I can’t flip the screen to portrait so I can hold my eee 1000h like a “real” book. Fuddy Duddy me. )

For the past five years, Educause and the New Media Consortium have issued the Horizon Report which outlines six technologies likely to impact on research, teaching and creative expression in Education within the next few years. There is a wiki on the site where you can give input about whether they got it right in previous years.

This year, they have created an edition for Australian and New Zealand higher education.

You can read the entire report here, 2008 Horizon Report – Australian and New Zealand Edition.

The technologies identified as likely to have impact are:

Time to adoption – One Year or Less

• Virtual Worlds and Other Immersive Digital Environments (like Second Life)
• Cloud-based applications (like gmail, google docs, delicious)

Time to adoption – Two to Three Years

• Geolocation (devices automatically marking when/where data was collected to create hyperlocal applications)
• Alternative Input Devices (like Nintendo wii, iPhone, interactive whiteboards)

Time to adoption Four to Five Years

• Deep tagging (embedded metadata added to particular parts of an entire work)
• Next-generation mobile (iPhone on steroids)