This afternoon I will be standing in for Alyson Kosina from VALA to welcome attendees at the VALA-CAVAL 30 year anniversary event .Very, very happy to be doing this.

Here is a description of the event:

Lizanne Payne:
The Future of Library Collections: Access and Stewardship in a Networked World

Over the past 25 years, the library collections landscape has been totally reshaped by digital information and global networks. As this seismic shift continues, libraries are being challenged to balance the costs and benefits of maintaining print collections at the local level, and are moving increasingly toward shared management of print materials among neighboring institutions. We are on the cusp of a great opportunity: libraries could provide lasting benefits to scholarship and economies to their institutions by proactively developing a distributed print repository network on a regional, national or global scale.

Karen Schneider:
The Nature of Open: How Open Source and Web 2.0 Bring Us Back to the Roots of Librarianship. Karen will demonstrate how the trends toward open source and Web 2.0 go full circle to some of the more extraordinary events in the history of librarianship. These include involvement in the Social Work movement of the early 20th century, libraries’ roles in the rise of popular reading, early library automation projects and the librarian-led innovation that came out of these efforts, and then on to Web 2.0 and open source.

I hope to use my wireless modem and CoverITLive. We shall see if it works.

I made this little clip of question time in Lawrence Lessig’s keynote at the LIANZA conference. No powerpoints. No fancy fonts. Just plain talking, Lawrence Lessig: literacies, takedowns, trusting google .

The questions were:

1. How are new literacies being affected by copyright laws?

2. What are the likely effects of the takedown provisions in the new New Zealand copyright laws?

3. Do you trust google?

In the last minute of the clip, he has some interesting things to say about librarians’ ethics.

Sorry, this isn’t actually a serious post – although I am very interested in the plans to bring in registration for New Zealand librarians.

I think number one  registration criteria for Australian librarians should be ability to sing publicly. LIANZA is a very relaxed conference, without a lot of fussy ceremony. I’m becoming convinced that this is caused by the major difference between this and an Australian library conference – the presence of public singing.

This morning, after the award of LIANZA fellowships, the audience spontaneously broke into song when the awardees were all on stage. I learned that this was probably the LIANZA waiata , or song.

Tonight at the Masquerade Ball, we were treated to an impromptu performance of “I was made for loving librarians” by three vendors dress as the folk from KISS. During the dancing, one of the librarians was handed the microphone by the lead singer of the live band, and performed part of Roberta Flack’s  Where is the love? . This was not feeble karaoke, this was full-on, gutsy professional belting.

Midnight – a librarian from Manukau took to the stage with a performance of Phil Collins’ “Against All Odds”, then George Michael’s Faith and finally Stevie Wonder’s Superstition. Again these were polished and professional. The evening finished with a song – happy birthday to Mirla Edmonson sung in both Maori and English.

LIANZA 2008 has continued to be an open, warm and intellectually stimulating conference.

I liveblogged the sessions I attended on CoverItLive, so there is much more detail here (keynotes) and here (individual sessions). Did I mention that the conference committee have provided free wifi iin return for liveblogging? Thank you very, very much for this. A nice win/win situation.

Here are the main ideas that took my fancy today:

1. Keynote – Professor Mason Durie. Talked about transformational leadership and the need for people to be Future Makers (proactive) rather than Future Takers (reactive). He talked about 5 contexts in which future leadership will take place and gave a New Zealand perspective on these:

• Demographic transitions
• Changes to Technology
• Information Avalanche
• Economic Transitions
• Globalisation

Leadership for tomorrow will require leaders who can look outside their own institutions and make connections and community. He talked of many leaders and I saw a common theme – these were all people who could make links with business for economic support or community groups for social support. Professor Durie suggested that maybe leadership will become a separate career in the future – people with qualities needed for future leadership are hired  specifically to lead, rather than getting people who have been in the organisation for a long time and have risen to the top.

2. Charlotte Clements and Timothy Greig talked about two Instant Messaging projects set up among four universities. They had teams evaluating chat reference – one looking at proprietary purpose-built library reference software and one looking at Open Source solutions. They chose to test QuestionPoint (OCLC) and VRL plus (sirsi dynix) from the vendor based software and look at Psi, Trillian and Meebo for the  Open Source. Eventually they decided to implement meebo – straight away – without a trial. No stats on the usage yet.

The second project involved creating a “toolkit”, with instructions for libraries to implement  in-house instant messaging. Libraries could then adapt it for their users. They chose Pidgin as the chat aggregator – providing an individual account for all staff. They used  Meebo widget for embedding chat in web pages. There was a wiki with instructions and links to downloads.

The brave, brave souls then did a live demo of what a student and staff member would see during an interaction using the setup.

3. Dylan Horrocks session on which comics people should stock in their libraries was just that – cover after cover of really engaging commentary of what each comic was and why it was inportant. The list is in my CoverItLive stream and really, really worth checking out.

4. Keitha Booth gave a very intellectually rigorous paper about Open Government information and Andrew Matangi, one of the originators of NZ Creative Commons, talked about Creative Commons in NZ . Keitha looked at the role of librarians in opening up tax-payer and rate-payer funded information. Although it is data, not collections, we have a role in knowing how to free this up and make it accessible to, and on behalf of, our organisations.  There are a lot of links to useful references and websites in Keitha’s paper. They are really worth following up.

I am sure I will have much more to say tomorrow about Creative Commons after Lawrence Lessig’s keynote (insert intellectual fanboi swoon here).

5. The last session, a keynote from Sydneysider, Mark McCrindle talked about the learning styles of different generations. He’s a presenter who knows his stuff – very few slides and stood in the middle of the stage. After the “hard stuff” that  made us think, he interspersed a funny anecdote or newspaper clipping to  lighten things up before the next major point.

He made the point that we need to use many factors when making predicitons – if you look at the growth rate in Elvis impersonators since 1977, you could feasibly predict that 80% of the world population will be Elvis impersonators by 2018. It was a very information rich presentation – worth checking the liveblog. One of the major take-homes for me was that changes in technology, work  etc mixes up the lifestages- with 20 year olds voting conservative and grannies wearing jeans and going to uni, we cannot necessarily make predictions about someone based on their generation. It is not just GenY people who want to be entertained and stimulated and create their own content online.

Tomorrow I give my workshop about creating scripted objects to go in Second Life libraries (for people without geek superpowers) and Con and I give our session on unconferences.  Add in Lawrence Lessig, a cruise around Auckland harbour and a masquerade ball at night and I think I have another fabbo day to look forward to.

Today I sang with a group of people and felt timeless. Tonight I sang with a group of people and felt like I was 15 years old.

Today I danced with a group of people and felt like the space and energy was different and more exciting than I had expected. Tonight I danced with a group of people and as they waved their arms back and forth, I felt like I had finally made it to the Countdown studio.

If you’d asked me two days ago whether I would have done any of that today, I would have politely suggested it was very unlikely, while making a note to file you under “slightly deranged but nice”.

The opening ceremony for the LIANZA conference  was spine-tinglingly beautiful. As an outsider mob, we were welcome to the space of  the traditional occupiers of the land. The music of the women calling to each other across the air bridge was one of those unexpected moments where what you expect to be boring and straight-forward is suddenly tinged with poignancy and clarity. Con has described this Powhiri in her account of the day.  As part of the ceremony, the visitors and hosts sang together.

The dancing bit came a later during Dr Diane Mara’s presentation, Invisible Knowledge, Virtual Journeys and Real Communities . Her very personal account of the stories of Pacific people in New Zealand finished with a sequence of slides of Pacific Women graduates from Dr Mara’s Faculty. During this, Dr Mara played music and encouraged the audience to dance. It was like we were dancing in celebration of the women graduates. I *want* more confernces where people sing and dance together on the first day. And the second day. And all others.

The second lot of singing and dancing came tonight at the Auckland Zoo. I was disappointed that I had to miss the Paul Young and Tony Hadley concert in Perth on Friday night, because I was flying to New Zealand. Almost as soon as I stepped off the plane, I saw that they were appearing at the Zoo here.

Paul Young’s voice sounded as though it had almost given out, but he did the whole pop- star, spikey-haircut-with-slight-mullet, dance-about thing that kept the crowd very pleased. Tony Hadley – ex Spandau Ballet –  was a revelation. He has probably the best live singing voice I have ever heard – super power ballard strength. The highlight of my evening was his version of Queen’s “Somebody to Love”.

Nice to be woken up a bit and shaken about by the unexpected.

I’m liveblogging the next three days of this conference using CoverItLive. The programme is here.

The window below has the conference keynotes over the next few  days. I am sharing liveblogging with Deborah Fitchett, so at other times, Deborah will have her own steam and I  will too.

I will edit this post a little later with links and more sensible information…

But for now….here’s the first speaker …Dylan Horrocks …Comics Laureate to the conference 🙂 talking about : The rise and rise of the graphic novel: comics as a literary form.

And here is the stream for me.

Here are the sessions that Deborah is attending. Here is the stream from Kris .

Here are the keynote sessions for the other days (more added as they happen):
Monday 3 November Keynote Sessions.

After my suggestion on twitter today, Peta got creative and made this badge, Net Education, Not Censorship .It’s released under Creative Commons without any need for attribution.

 

It’s going straight to the sidebar.

 

By the way, if you tune into ABC Radio National’s Media Report tomorrow (Thursday 29 October, 8:30am), you can hear Senator Conroy *and* Mark Pesce talk about the filtering debate. 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.

Mark Newton, who works for an ISP, has written a letter as a private citizen to his local member of federal parliament about Senator Stephen Conroy’s proposal to apply mandatory (opt-out only)  “clean feed” filters to the internet in Australia.

It is a well thought out, well researched letter that Mark has made available in the public domain. It is here and well worth reading in full: Mark Newton’s letter to Kate Ellis about Internet filtering and censorship .

His main points are:

• The government has not demonstrated a need for an online censorship system
• The government has not demonstrated that mandatory online censorship is technologically feasible
• The government has not demonstrated that online censorship is effective
• The government has failed to consider the unintended consequences arising from the policy
• Senator Conroy has invalidated the government’s claim for a mandate by lying to the Australian public about the scope of the policy

If you want to find out more, you can check out the No Clean Feed pages set up by the Australian Electronic Frontiers Federation or the Somebody Think of the Children blog.  According to the No Clean Feed page, here is the current state of play:

The Government is keeping its cards close to its chest on the plan. However, we know that ISP-level filtering has been ALP policy for some time and is still being zealously pursued by the Minister. What has been confirmed so far:

• Filtering will be mandatory in all homes and schools across the country.¹
• The clean feed will censor material that is “harmful and inappropriate” for children.²
• The filter will require a massive expansion of the ACMA’s blacklist of prohibited content.³
• The Government wants to use dynamic filters of questionable accuracy that slow the internet down by an average of 30%.⁴
• The filtering will target legal as well as illegal material.⁵
• $44m has been budgeted for the implementation of this scheme so far.⁶
• The clean-feed for children will be opt-out, but a second filter will be mandatory for all Internet users.⁷
• A live pilot deployment is going ahead in the near future.

What we don’t know is just as important.

• What age level is the country’s Internet to be made appropriate for? 15? 10? 5 years old?
• Who decides what material is “appropriate” for Australians to see? How are lists of “illegal” material compiled?
• Who will maintain the blacklist of prohibited sites?
• How can sites mistakenly added to the list be removed?

There are a few things you can do if , like me, you think that it is contradictory to spend heaps of money on a filter that cannot work technically and  is likely to slow down ‘net speeds – while also professing a policy to *increase* broadband speed.  You can contact your local member of parliament, look at some of the suggested actions on the No Clean Feed pages  or sign the online petition about it (8977 signatures so far around 9pm Mon 27 October 2008).

Last time I looked, the professional association for librarians in Australia, ALIA, had sent 10 questions about internet censorship to Stephen Conroy’s office for answering, back on 9 January 2008. I probably just missed it, but I don’t remember seeing the responses published anywhere on the ALIA web site, and can’t find it now.

I’m a very bad searcher tonight, as I can also no longer find the news item on the ALIA home page from 10 October where ALIA announced that Senator Conroy would be opening Information Online 2009 .  It’s not on the Information Online 2009 conference site, it’s not in my RSS feed anymore either … and I would have thought I’d imagined it if it wasn’t for the archived feed at INEZHA.com . Here’s hoping that the idea of someone with policies like Senator Conroy addressing a group of librarians at a technology conference…..just fades away too …

I loved my eeePC 700 with Xandros Linux– so portable, so easy, so cute –  but I had problems with re-installing the VPN client I need to access the work wireless.

I loved my husband’s eeePC 701 with Windows XP – no probs with VPN or viewing my work email via webmail (that only really works on Internet Explorer)….so I stole it for a few months…. but every time XP had an update I’d lose all available memory as it just bloated…and some applications demanded that I manually re-size the screen …driving me ‘nanas.

Two weeks ago I bought an eeePC 1000H. I really love it so far. It is a bit bigger physically than the eeePC 701, but with 80G of storage I can store my photos on it and make backups of presentations when I travel, and it works just fine with the cult of Microsoft that is my workplace. Apparently it runs Vista just fine. I can even run Second Life on it – slow but enough to do an emergency repair or talk to a friend.

It is actually faster to do most things than the eeePC 1000 which has a 16G SSD drive – contrary to what one would think. It is a *totally* different beastie to the eeePC 1000HD – which has a slower processor. Check out the eeePC specification comparison table in Wikipedia if you want to know more.

Image below :Eee PC 1000H and Eee PC 901 20G   Uploaded to Flickr on October 17, 2008 by Josh Bancroft

The deal clincher for me was the battery life – a claimed 6-7hrs when not using wireless. I do not get quite as good times as I paid $50 to a man in a small booth in Sim Lim square in Singapore to upgrade the RAM from 1G to 2G while I waited.

I have also enjoyed using bluetooth for the first time. I can download photos from my phone and save backup files from my work laptop with absoluter ease.

The only problem I had with it was that it seemed like the internal microphone was not working. The mike would not pick up my voice when I was recording a movie with the webcam. Many posts to forums talk about people sending their 1000H back to ASUS as broken, but it turns out that there is a simple fix.  Turns out there is a really odd manufacturer’s setting to do with making the mike  just record one zone To fix it, go to the Realtec HD Audio manager on the taskbar, Microphone tab, and disabled the Beam Forming and Echo Cancellation

Some folk have been really excited by the fact that you can install Mac OS X on it …but the bit of geekery that thrills me is the multi-touch touchpad.

Pootling about on the day I bought it, I found this article from Laptop Magazine July 2008 about how to upgrade the firmware so that the touchpad does magical things, Eee PC 1000H Updated with New Multi-Touch. Apparently ASUS had not officially approved this, so you needed to download the software here from Elantech, the Taiwanese manufacturer. The website *is* all in Chinese, but I somehow managed to do it. Check out this video below to see all the hoops it will jump through, Multi-Touch on the Eee PC 1000H.

I really love the way I can  put two fingers on the pad and they slowly pull them apart diagonally and it makes my screen zoom larger or smaller. I have set it so that if I pull down with three fingers, it does the same as tapping [alt] [tab] and then I slide my hand sideways sideways to select the window I want. The touchscreen seems to work best with google’s web browser Chrome – so this is my browser of  choice for *reading* now. For editing or publishing I still use Firefox, as Chrome is just flakey.

It is easily the best $535 I’ve spent in a very long time.

I had the best time at the  Bridging Worlds conference. The speakers were excellent and gave a worldwide perspective. The food and venue was fantastic. The small number of participants – around 250 –  made it easy to navigate and access. The backchannel and “unconference” elements of it – twitter, chatting in the breaks and general playfulness of a few delegates – made it the best conference I have ever attended.

The sessions were all videod and most presenters wrote a full paper to accompany their session. These will be available soon – keep watching the Bridging Worlds blog. You can also view the slide sets, collated at slideshare.net: BridgingWorlds 2008 .

Here are some ideas I came home with:

• We need to share – our data and our co-operative efforts.

• Standards – data storage, web application, metadata – are vitally important to our work. We need to know what applies in our area and work to ensure they are developed sensibly and used well.

• 3. The GLAM sector – Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums – is converging. Libraries play an essential role in preserving, collating and providing access to these collections.

• 4. We can stop debating and trying to find definitions of Library 2.0 now. A participative, user-focused, web-enabled, Open and Transparent library can exist; whatever we want to call it. It does exist in places and we need the technical and visionary skills to facilitate it if our profession can survive.

• 5. The physical library can be a Third Place- somewhere that is not home, not work, but a gathering place where citizens feel pride of ownership and “at home”.

• 6. The online library is often a Second Place. Users come to our resources after they have first tried google, and they need more depth or organisation..

• 7. Not everyone is using Web 2.0 tools – it varies a lot within library staff and library user populations.

• 8. Unintended consequences often happen when we use Web 2.0 tools – many of them full of benefits for which we did not plan.

• 9. Digital preservation is an essential service to our community. Sometimes it is easier and cheaper in staff time to just save everything in a domain, rather than be selective.

• 10. True leaders of libraries are humble, down to earth and have grasped the implications of global and technological changes. (Naming names – Penny Carnaby (National Library of New Zealand) and Dr N Varaprasad (National Library Board Singapore) – both extremely impressive and very human and nice).

• 11. Sometimes the best move is for the librarian to step back and allow users to interact with our data and each other via widgets and re-purposed library spaces.

• 12. What practical means are we taking to ensure that if google, flickr or youtube collapsed tomorrow our archives and services are isolated from this?

• 13. A quote from Peter Godwin’s  Information Literacy and Web 2.0: is it just hype presentation: “We want to change their habits rather than just develop their skills”.

• Play can be incorporated to enhance a serious enterprises, like the SMARTlab‘s style of teaching PhD students (including a facility shaped like a pirate ship) or a conference presentation where you aim to mention as many animal legs as possible and SMASH the competition. (Oh Hai Cindi, Brian and Liddy).

• Lots of world-class speakers would be happy to come to Australia and just need an invitation to do so…

There was much more, I am sure…but after going non-stop for four days – including walking Little India, the Night Safari, shopping at Mustafa, buying rather too much Lego for the kids, drinking cocktails at The Raffles two nights in a row, and a three hour wallow in the kitch splendour that is Tiger Balm Gardens – I’m going to catch up on some sleep.

I’ll leave you with some images of Tiger Balm Gardens from my set of 60 photos, including a set of the Ten Courts of Hell. Check out what happens in the afterlife if you deface books.