I’m Liveblogging the Bridging Worlds Conference using CoverItLive. Updates should appear in the widget below. I have patchy wireless so there are gaps:

No? You sure?

How  about a mini vacuum cleaner powered by your USB port?

….or maybe a roll up flexible keyboard?

That’s just three of the gadgets I discovered at Sim Lim here in Singapore this afternoon. Check out my flickr set for more: Gadgets at Sim Lim Singapore October 2008 .

I’m here to attend Bridging Worlds 2008 Conference:: knowing • learning • sharing run by the National Library Board of Singapore. Just check out the lineup – there are so many excellent library thinkers that I can’t list them all.  I’m sooo excited.

I’m not lonely because my kids each gave me a Lego minifig to keep me company while I’m travelling – on the condition that I let them know via Flickr what the minifigs have been up to…

Check out the comprehensive discussion notes from the sessions at the Library Camp of the West. This unconference was held at the University of Denver last Friday 10 October.

My favourite session? The one where they discussed Impracticle, Unfeasable, Unfundable Ideas. Why shouldn’t we have book ATMs or collaborative weeding (last copy in Georgia) or get IT people in, “so we’re not outsourcing all our most interesting problems” ??? LCOW coffee mug uploaded to Flickr on September 28, 2008 by jokrausdu  

I’m at the Art Librarians’ Conference, MySpace is an ArtSpace in Brisbane.

Me – Second Life as a platform: social space, art space, real space

My keynote was called – to keep with the theme – Second Life as a platform: social space, art space, real space. It involved about 17 minutes of machinima that I created to illustrate my points, so I’m not inserting the slides here as they don’t make too much sense. Basically I talked about:

1. Fly over of Info Island. Machinima

2. What is Second Life, Limitations, Possibilities and Libraries

3. Questions about Real Life concepts raised by a MUVE:

• Identity
• Individuality
• The Body
• Ability and disability
• Having a voice
• “Game” and “play”
• Time
• Location
• Co-presence
• Intellectual property
• Public and private
• Lawfulness
• Consumption
• Visual metaphor
• Representation
• Aesthetics
• Exhibit

4. Art Objects not born digital in Second Life – Sistine Chapel at Vassar island and Machinima of Info Island art gallery and Museum of Music

5. Art Objects born digital in Second Life –  Machinima of Babelswarm, the Australian Arts Council funded project

6. Art in the Space between Real Life and Second Life – Augmented Reality. Excerpt from little movie of Julian Stadon’s SLARIPS installation

7. I finished up with a clip of an art environment built just to make a movie. I didn’t want to spoil the mood afterward, so the last two slides just said “Aaaaaaaah” and “Thank You”. Robbie Dingo’s Watch the Worlds clip is below so you understand what I mean:

Axel Bruns, who was the second keynote speaker has blogged the session, New Impulses for Libraries: Drawing on Second Life and Produsage… so you can check out what a third party thought.

Axel Bruns – All the world’s a library: produsage and user-led curation

Axel’s talk was just what I wanted to hear about. In his book Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life and Beyond: From Production to Produsage  he raises the idea of “produsage”. It’s the idea that in order to use new web sites, you have to produce output.  He showed a great image of peoples’ tracks in the snow – making similar points to Stephen Abram with his “Paths of Intention” slide. People will find their own ways to navigate and organise information and often will join together to create the pathways. Axel talked a lot about tagging and folksomies and what this means to librarianship. He still saw our jobs as important, but pointed out that there is just too much information to control and catalogue, so we are going to have to find different ways. I liked his point about “folk experts” – these are the people who know about the knowledge in their area and how it is organised online – maybe they will become the librarians of the future.His slides are online at his blog All the World’s a Library: Produsage and User-Led Curation (ARLIS 2008)

Kelly McKeon – The “virtual clubhouse” the ARLIS/ANZ website, web 2.0 and our future

This used material from a paper given by Kelly and Ellen Thompson  at the last ALIA conference: M IS FOR MEETING PLACES: THE ARTS LIBRARIES SOCIETY OF AUSTRALIA AND NEW ZEALAND BUILDS A VIRTUAL WEB 2.0 ‘CLUBHOUSE

The ARLIS website was created by students in the Creative Industries Faculty at QUT using drupal. They had three groups of students working on the project and were able to take the idea that most appealed to them. Most universities have units where students who have to complete a task like this for third parties – it’s how we get environments built on Murdoch University Island in Second Life. If you are a library that wants something specific and techie prototyped, you may want to contact the techie faculties at your local uni to see whether you can form a partnership.

Tom Irwin – From Inhouse Index to Online Database

The University of Auckland has maintained a press cuttings index about NZ art and artists since the 1960’s.  They also had n in-house journals index. To talked about the decisions and process to create a database using Inmagic, which is ultimately marketed as a site license at NZ$2500. He talked about the standardisation between the two resources and how they augmented the “Getty Art and Architecture Thesaurus” with some of their own local terms. It raised questions to me about Open Access in light of the recent Brisbane Declaration .

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>..

I’m really enjoying the mix of formal and informal sessions. There have been tours and formal meetings and a gallery exhibition as well as papers.

I have this thing I say when people get worried about opening up our sites to our users to help create content:

If your library is like mine, you allow bottled water the building. There is nothing to stop users from deliberately upending the whole bottle all over a PC and destroying it. But they don’t.”

I wonder about the “nothing to stop them” bit. Maybe the best security is other users of the facility – engaged and passionate users – who would quickly tackle the delinquent water pourer.  There is a lot of literature around new ways that rail stations are being protected – create a  beautiful art space where people come to do other things and take pride in the place created. In these cases security becomes self-regulated. This is what seems to be happening at the State  Library of Queensland.

Walking past the  cafe on the ground floor, I noticed that the chairs seemed too big to drag through the door at night. I asked a staff member and she said that they leave them out after the cafe closes. There are always people around 24/7 using the free wireless. In fact, the backpackers’ tourist buses make stops here so passengers can get off to contact home.  There is no evidence of graffiti either –  although the concrete walls, which remind me of what you might see in an isolated abandoned factory, seem to be screaming for user based tagging of a different kind.

…. 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…

This afternoon, after just two hours or so of sleep, I met with the Management Group of the State Library of Queensland to lead a discussion about Emerging Technologies. I was a little daunted, as this is one of the most innovative libraries in Australia. What could I tell them?

I started with what I really liked about their services and gave them my outsider’s impression of their library. I think that even people who are getting it right sometimes need to be told so. Their beautiful building looks like someone removed the front edifice to open it out to the river. It is a building that must remind the staff daily that their organisation serves their users in non-traditional and creative ways.

The library has as its Mission:

Creatively linking Queenslanders to information, knowledge and each other.

…. and has this as a Key Direction:

…New Technologies – the rapid development of internet services and internet technology provides us with an enhanced ability to deliver library services to a wider audience and to make global and local knowledge more accessible

It is very easy to see how social media fits into this vision – connecting people and information and allowing global interaction.

I covered the elements of Web 2.0 and why I think staff should engage with  Emerging Technologies. I also gave them a few ideas of possible ways to speed up staff engagement with new technologies.

I threw in a bit about the tools that I thought their staff should know about already. If you work to connect information and people, there is no excuse to still not know about:

•  Blogs
• Wikis
• RSS
• Screencasting
• Online Virtual worlds
• Podcasting
• Photo and image sharing
• Folksomies
• Social bookmarking
• Cloud computing
• Gaming and libraries

I also listed My Favourite Things – tools and trends I am watching eagerly to see how they develop and affect our libraries. On my list are:

• Microblogging – twitter, plurk, jaiku, identi.ca
• Lifestreaming – Friendfeed
• Webcams – Vodcasting, Seesmic, 12 Seconds TV
• Mobile Devices – iPhones, PDAs, NetPCs, XO laptops, bluetooth, Kindles
• Sharing – sharing data, sharing effort, APIs, Mesh networks, location sensitivity
• Avatars – MUVEs like Second Life, video animations, voice animations like voki, voice avatars, identity is going to get weird
• Authentication – OpenID and OpenAuth
• Social Operating Systems – social relationships organise information, not subject relationships
• Semantic Web – Information organised by computer so that a natural language enquiry retrieves what you mean, not what you say

I also talked a bit about GeoffreyMoore’s  ideas around the Diffusion of Innovations. This is bubbling about in my brain still, and I hope to write a post with more about this.

I enjoyed the conversation, but that stays in the meeting room. 🙂

Tomorrow I return to talk to State Library of Queensland staff about what I am doing in my job at Murdoch. I’m truly unprepared for this, as they asked me to do it just before I went on holiday. It will be real “fake it till you make it” stuff – interesting and scary because I am usually very well rehearsed.

I’m going on holiday with the family and then will be travelling to Brisbane and Singapore, returning on 20 October.

I’m trying to make a fair wodge of it online-free – because I want to be with my family or I’m too stingy to pay hotel rates for broadband…

Please don’t feel  offended if I don’t reply to your emails or social networking offers of fun. If you need to contact me, please use this email address which I read first: kathryn.on.holidays@gmail.com .

See you on the flip-side.

Back in May 2007, I talked about how the Library Society of the World had recently started and was the:

best, most efficient, egalitarian and effective alternative to any library association ever.

Well, it’s still going strong. It now has a  Meebo Room, a FriendFeed room, a Facebook page, a Flickr group, a LibraryThing group and a LinkedIn group. It has its own etiquette guide, LSW Meebo Room Etiquette: One Woman’s Guide for the Newbie .

 

You can even buy the t-shirt:

So, what is it?

Chadwick Seagraves had a go at describing the LSW last week in his Pecha Kucha presentation at the Allan County Public Library LibraryCamp 2008.  I think this presentation pretty much sums it up – Library Society of the World (the movie) :

Some memes I do. This one has been floating about for the last couple of days and has a Flickr group, Me, Right Now.

The rules:

Instructions: Take a picture of yourself right now. Don’t change your clothes, don’t fix your hair – just take a picture. Post that picture with NO editing. Post these instructions with the picture.

(Yes, I was as surprised as I look. I hadn’t realised that the webcam was set to a 10 second delay and then three shots in a row)

Here’s what I received today from the organising committee of the Australian Law Librarians’ Association, Art of Information. It was a thank you for delivering a presentation about Second Life and libraries, legal educators and law librarians.

The thank you gift was full of win because:

1. I was the first to borrow Shaun Tan’s tales from outer suburbia when it came into our library and I had to read it waaay too quickly because it was immediately recalled. It is a book for savouring.
2. The book is part narrative and part art – very suited to the theme of the conference
3. Shaun Tan until recently lived in Western Australia
4. The metal bookmark is a gum leaf. I love the motif, going so far as to have my wedding ring designed to have intertwined gum leaves around the outside
5. It’s not a bottle of wine. I’d drink wine maybe three times a year and have very little appreciation of it
6. *Every* speaker at the conference received a gift, not just the invited speakers – which is as it should be

Thanks to the organising committee for putting in obvious thought.

I was sorry that I was working so I missed the Opening Address from Robert French, who has recently been appointed Chief Justice of the High Court of Australia. By all accounts it was a very thoroughly researched and thought out speech that dealt with the value of libraries. I was very pleased to finally meet Peter Black from QUT who gave the keynote, as we have been twitter friends for quite a while. He daringly tried doing it Lessig style, which went down very well. He expounded on copyright, defamation and privacy and suggested some legal models that would cope with the challenges brought on by Web 2.0.

I also enjoyed the afternoon session where three librarians spoke of their experience of introducing more order to internal communications and resources using wikis, content management systems and by restructuring the intranet. My “take home” from the session – ensure that you have a champion in senior management owning the project, and try to make it appeal to all members of staff, as both secretaries and practitioners will be using it.