As ever, John Blyberg is right on the money, Library 2.0 Debased .
… we cannot expect to retrofit our libraries with tomorrow’s technology. The true pursuit of Library 2.0 involves a thorough recalibration of process, policy, physical spaces, staffing, and technology so that any hand-offs in the patron’s library experience are truly seamless.
That’s me! As of 1 January 2008.
Actually, the contract says “Librarian – Emerging Technologies” – but we’re still sorting that bit out…
I’m still at Murdoch University and based in the library. The position is funded 50% by the library and 50% by central IT, and covers more than just the library.
While we were writing the position description, in an act of amazing synchronicity, Laura Cohen posted about Libraries and Campus Collaboration – suggesting libraries shouldn’t forge ahead of their campuses with Web 2.0 initiatives, but work with them if at all possible:
…both the campus and the library will be transforming themselves to deal with the revolution in the social Web in general, and social scholarship in particular. Trust me: sooner or later, these issues will be at the forefront of our concerns.
Librarians should be preparing for this now. Assuming that we’ve educated ourselves aggressively (major assumption), we should be carving out a plan. We should be identifying and making contact with scholars on our campuses who are early adopters. We need to be exploring how we can learn from and support these individuals. They’ll have ideas, we’ll have ideas. We need to be working together to forge the library’s role in a scholarly world that will be changing our professional culture in the next decade.
The official main duties of my new position are to:
“ work with the Learning Technologies Steering Group to research, evaluate, develop, communicate, and train library staff and the campus community in new technological tools likely to affect information provision and Teaching and Learning in higher education “.
I report to the chair of the Learning Technologies Steering Group . The LTSG is a University Committee that looks at existing systems like WebCt and Turnitin, but is also the group where Web2.0 types of technologies are examined for pedagogical use. They are the mob that supported our proposal to set up Murdoch University Island in Second Life. It’s made up of people from the Library, Teaching and Learning, the IT department, Academic staff and students.
The current chair of the LTSG is our Library Director. I was really happy when she suggested that we think of the position as a “Learning Common” position. My office is in the remodelled part of the library right near the First Year Experience Co-ordinator, and the help desk for the Teaching and Learning Centre, the campus Print shop and the library reference desk. The focus is very much on interacting and hands on support, rather than writing dry reports.
I still get to do things like the 23 Things and the Library Emerging Technologies Group…but my first assignment for the LTSG ? Examine how and when it is sensible for the university to self-host blogs and wikis.
While I’m over the moon about it, I have a lot to learn about evaluating software, and general educational techie tools. I also have to get over the “I’m just a girl with very few programming skills, what would I know?” idea I have about myself sometimes when I’m in a room with men who control funding.
Thanks to everyone who sent me their job descriptions and the couple of people who looked over the position.
If you’d like a copy of the job description and selection criteria, please email me at: k dot greenhill at murdoch dot edu dot au .
I had a few questions that I would have liked to ask Minister Conroy the day that he announced a mandatory “cleanfeed” of the internet- meaning that citizens would receive a restricted feed unless they formally contacted their ISP, Internet Filtering to become mandatory in Australia.
Now the Australian Library and Information Association has actually asked the Minister a number of questions about it. I look forward to the Minister’s response.
ALIA’s questions below:
1. What does “clean feed” mean?
Is there a definition of the term? Does it have the common meaning people understand? Does it mean what the UK and Canadian proponents mean?
2. What exactly will be filtered out?
Is there a definition or is this yet to be developed? The current language is vague and alarming – “inappropriate content”, for example. We know child pornography and “violence” will be filtered out; what other “undesirable” content? Will the filter cover websites, chat rooms, blogs, game sites – or just some of these?
3. What rules will be used?
How will the filtered-out content relate to the Guidelines for the Classification of Publications (2005) and the National Classification Code? Will it be the same as “refused classification” material? Or will it also include X, 18 and 15 rated material or some combination?
4. Will the list of blacklisted sites be made publicly available?
The current list of sites which are banned is not made public. This makes it very difficult to argue that a mistake has been made.
5. Who will decide which specific sites are to be filtered out in the “clean feed”?
Will this be an administrative decision? Will it include any transparency requirements? Will there be any kind of appeal from decisions?
6. Who will know who has opted out of the clean feed?
Will there be any privacy provisions? What will they be?
7. How can we be sure this is not the thin end of a wedge?
What kinds of guarantee will Australians have that a policy which may initially have a narrow scope (e.g. child pornography) will not later be widened (e.g. to support and advocacy of terrorism). Will there be scope to extend the policy by administrative decision, or only by legislation?
8. Do Australians want internet filters?
In 2007 the then Government sent a brochure offering free filters to 8 million Australian households. We understand that only a very small percentage chose to take up this offer. Can we conclude that 98% of Australian households see no need for filters? What evidence is there to the contrary?
9. What happens next?
What process will be followed in Government plans to “work with the industry to ensure the filters do not affect the speed of the internet?” Is this a commitment to no loss of internet speed or response time? Is there a timeline?
10. What will it cost us?
What will the policy cost to implement – not just cost to government (though we want to know that), but cost to Australian internet users, industry and education.
What do these people have in common?
On 1st January 2008 their works passed from copyright protected into the public domain. There are many, many more on this great list Public Domain Day from Copyright Watch.ca .
Expect an upsurge of cheap Babar clothing and lunchboxes this year. ..but only with images up to the time Jean’s still-very-much-alive son, Laurent, took over.
Over at librariesinteract.info, I’ve just posted about Ten Library 2.0 Resolutions for 2008.
The resolutions are below, but you’ll need to hop over to the original post to read my pointers about how to achieve them.
I hope next year is peaceful, bright and shiny for you.
I like living in a country where we have a Federal Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy.
I don’t like it when he announces that soon it will become mandatory for Internet Service Providers to provide filtered feeds, as reported by the ABC today- Conroy announces mandatory internet filters to protect children:
Telecommunications Minister Stephen Conroy says new measures are being put in place to provide greater protection to children from online pornography and violent websites.
Senator Conroy says it will be mandatory for all internet service providers to provide clean feeds, or ISP filtering, to houses and schools that are free of pornography and inappropriate material.
First question to Mr Conroy: How will you do it – technically? What do you have that is unhackable that will only trap kiddie porn and violence and not other sites ? Who gets to decide what is filtered?
Second question to Mr Conroy: Where do I find more information about it? Given that it affects online communities and your job is to understand the digital economy- shouldn’t you make the information available online, not just rely on traditional media such as the Sunday Times (Onus on providers to clean up web content )?
On Monday 31st December at 3pm Western Australian time, there wasn’t a whisper of it on:
UPDATE 1 January 2008: Just to clarify – although there is information available about mandatory filtering when it was ALP policy (as reported in my blog here and here ) , there is none about the “new measures being put in place”. The Minister was implying that it is moving beyond policy – but his online channels were silent about this bit.
Advance notice – this post contains adult concepts and the phrase “photocopy their bums”. If you want sweetness and light instead, the Happy Little Elves are over here.
“New Media Douchebags” is not my choice of term….nor one I endorse…. but it’s been rattling around in my head ever since October when I saw Kelly Stewart‘s parody on the Common Craft videos and up-themselves new media types, New Media Douchebags in Plain English. It’s also been posted to YouTube (clip below) by persons unknown: New media douchebags . I mentally ticked the “I am a NMD” box when I realised that I knew most of the services listed at the end of the clip.
Yesterday I raved about the general fabulousness of new media – or at least explained how it can have impact on librarians. Today I saw something that confirmed my prejudice that a species that uses the office copiers to photocopy their bums, will do the equivalent with new media tools. The prevalence of vampires and zombies and the bl**dy SuperFunWall on Facebook kind of had me convinced already.
About 4am UK time, mid afternoon in Australia, there was a mass migration of a mob of bored twitterfolk to watch a self-broadcast show on Ustream.tv . The attraction? A very, very drunk host who was singing about “Naked Time”, and who then stripped and hung freely before the audience’s eyes. Either it was a deliberate bid for publicity by the host or he’s really, really embarrassed right now…I’d rather not mention the host’s name or web company if either is the case. If you really want to see an excerpt , check out this Techcruch post.
Ustream.tv streams output from a webcam to the users’ screen with a chat room at the side, where viewers can converse about the content. There is also a telephone number that callers can phone to interact live with the host.
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OK – so my first geeky kind of thought was – “wow! this would be great for education”, then it was”is this guy’s hair green?”, then “isn’t this kind of a waste of bandwidth”, then “hey, some twerpy spammer is pushing the same URL into the chat box over and over”, then “people are discussing this as if it is an unusual occurrence on the internet – what about all those porn sites legislators are constantly in a moral panic about?”, and finally “this just proves the whole mob of us watching are NMDs”.
It reminded me of the dystopia created in Ben Elton’s latest book, Blind Faith . Characters with Second Life kinds of names (Caitlin Happymeal, Princess Lovebud, Caramel Magnum Moonbeam) are compelled by social, religious and governmental pressure to “tube” their entire lives. The most intimate moments are expected to be broadcast, with neighbours cheering on participants and offering suggestions. Family disputes are aired for congregational judgement in a cross between the Jerry Springer show and a baptist revival meeting. The story arc deliberately follows Orwell’s 1984, much the same way as Zadie Smith’s On Beauty follows Forster’s Howard’s End.
It’s probably this type of thing that made local Perth-ite, Myles Eftos, throw up his hands in despair and first propose mass Facebook suicide pact and then go on to create the Original Social Network.
UPDATE 29 December 2007: It was actually the other Perth webby Miles who created The Original Social Network – Miles Burke .
Collaboration using new media isn’t just what we have always done, only faster. It is different.
For librarians, this affects how we can collaborate with each other, but also our role in archiving and retrieving content.
OUR OWN COLLABORATION
We can form consensus and influence each other as ideas are being formed. The truly joint effort continues further in the collaboration process than before. The formal co-ordination and “getting a first draft” role, which was generally performed by just one person, can be done by many people working together simultaneously.
If you look at the work involved creating a report, for example, the stages are pretty much:
When librarians who couldn’t get face to face collaborated in the past, the collaboration usually happened at the “Work out what will be said” stage and the “Review, tweak,edit,add citations” stage. The “say it” bit often happened in isolation – with someone writing up something for others to review. There may have been a bit of bouncing back and forth during the writing, but generally it was done in isolation.
With tools like wikis, twitter and Seesmic, the collaboration happens also at the “say it” stage. For example, I’ve been watching a (rather silly but fun) discussion of slogans for the Library Society of the World. The conversation is moving from the Meebo chat room, through twitter and on to the wiki. There is a lot of “working out what will be said” work going on. Should someone want to rise above the frippery and turn it into something more formal, much more of the “say it” work is already done.
We also get to see each other’s raw ideas much earlier. I used to look at conference papers if I wanted to see the most recent professional thinking – as they tended to be more recent than journal articles. Now I look to blogs for liveblogging of library events, slides from presentations and ideas that are germinating. Twitter, meebo etc, gives me access to much more immediate professional thinking (and a lot of fun noise also, of course).
TRACKING IT
New media collaboration will also affect our ability to archive and retrieve important information for others.
Two things to think about:
1. The assasination of Benizar Bhutto was reported on Twitter far earlier than it reached the mainstream media. As Dennis Howlett points out at ZDNet, communication like this will have the ability to influence world markets in the future, as news of disasters, political unrest or corporate crises spread much faster than we are used to. Benazir Bhutto assassinated: Twitter’s utility
2. Seesmic takes it up a notch. This is more or less twitter using webcams. It is currently in alpha testing. Like twitter only makes sense when you are using it with friends. Basically people make teeny tiny videos, often in response to previous videos, that all patch together in real time to form a conversation. Other video sources can be fed in, for example YouTube clips…so right now there are quite a few excerpts from news broadcasts talking about the Bhutto assassination.
If you do not have a seesmic account, then you can still see individual videos, although not the responses or the context. Here’s an example I made before Christmas, Watching seesmic evolve .
Twitter, being text-based, can be searched via keywords. Conversations on seesmic often have just a video title, with little clue to the content. It will probably have tags as the service evolves. Although sometimes semi-private, this is still a form of publishing…how do libraries handle something like this?
Our immediate family celebrates Christmas on 24th, so the kids can open their presents and we can have a cruisy day hanging out and playing .. before they get torn away the next day to visit the rellies.
Our home-made tradition is to swim at the nearby beach, then collect our Christmas order from Abhi’s Bread. This year is was sultana and polenta turtles, almond croissants, fruit and nut bread, spelt fruit mince pies, sunflower and rye sourdough and gingerbread people. We then cook up some mushrooms, cut up a fruit like mango, watermelon, nectarine, peaches, cherries and grapes…and guts ourselves to bloating. We leave the food out for people to nibble all day.
We then exchange presents and play all day.
(This year the family enrolled in the wii Big Brain Academy, sang silly songs to the Spicks and Specks interactive quiz DVD and are about to play Cadoo…and I’ll get into the wii MySims when the kids are in bed. Everyone else in the family has a new camera, so keep taking photos of me as I write this )
Last year I made a Happy Holidays clip. This year I’ll just say the same thing – happy holidays and please keep blogging, twittering, seesmicing, talking, IMing, unconferencing and collaborating like last year. ..I so love hearing what everyone has to say. I’m off work until 14th January, so may take a break here, too.
I wanted to reprint here a poem that I loved when it was in our textbooks at school. It’s called The Computer’s First Christmas Card by Edwin Morgan, but is copyright protected. Check out the link…it’s sweet and quirky.
Library 2.0 Initiatives in Academic Libraries is a book that was published by the Association for College and Research Libraries a couple of hours ago. How do I know? I was notified by the editor, Laura Cohen, because I co-authored a chapter in it.
I’m falling-off-my-chair excited!
It’s actually a bit more than a book. Laura negotiated at the start of the project to create a hybrid book / wiki. The wiki component, Library 2.0 Initiatives in Academic Libraries , updates the initiatives described for two years after publication.
Margaret Jones, Jean McKay and I wrote about some initiatives taking place at Murdoch University Library. Our over all theme is that we hadn’t even heard of Library 2.0 until most of them had happened – but our parent institutions’ ethos of multidisciplinary participation, equity and experimentation matched Library 2.0 values. Our chapter is called Chat, Commons and Collaboration: inadvertently Library 2.0 in Western Australia .
The wiki pages for our chapter, Chapter 2, are about 90% complete and choc full of photos, a google map showing the location of our library, a few slidesets and a couple of YouTube clips…plus some “what happened after” text. Thanks to David Free for adding the plugins. You can even subscribe to the RSS feed for changes to the wiki.
If you want to know “what happened before”…pop over to ALA Editions and buy the book. I managed to pick up a copy for the library via Blackwells Collection manager, but the Australian supplier is Inbooks .
The initiatives we discuss are:
Other chapters are:
Chapter 1: Discovering Places to Serve Patrons in the Long Tail
Chapter 2: Chat, Commons, and Collaboration: Inadvertently Library 2.0 in Western Australia
Chapter 3: Yale: Taking the Library to Users in the Online University Environment
Chapter 4: Delivering Targeted Library Resources into a Blackboard Framework
Chapter 5: Adapting an Open Source, Scholarly Web 2.0 System for Findability in Library Collections
Chapter 6: Push and Pull of the OPAC
Chapter 7: UThink: Library Hosted Blogs for a University-Wide Community
Chapter 8: Discussing Student Engagement: An Information Literacy Course Blog
Chapter 9: Building Library 2.0 into Information Literacy: A Case Study
Chapter 10: IMplementing IM @ Reference: The GW Experience
Chapter 11: Taking the Library to Users: Experimenting with Facebook as an Outreach Tool
Chapter 12: YouTube University: Using XML, Web Services, and Online Video Services to Serve University and Library Video Content