This week I am in Melbourne at the VALA: Libraries, Technology and the Future conference (6-9 Feb 2012) and then Library Camp Australia on Friday 10 Feb 2012.

I am setting up CoverItLive windows to help me keep a record of what happened and adding each day as a separate post. You might find them useful too.

For the VALA CoverItLive windows, I am pulling in:

• tweets from my @libsmatter Twitter account
• any public tweets that mention “vala2012” or “vala12” (but not  “vala” as it picks up totally irrelevant tweets in Spanish … although it took me until 4pm to work that one out, so there are a lot of bonus tweets in the CiL window for today)

For the Library Camp Australia CoverItLive Windows I am pulling in:

• tweets from my @libsmatter Twitter account
• any public tweets that mention “libcamp0z2012” or “librarycampoz2012” or “libcampoz” or “library camp oz” or “library camp” or “libcampoz12” or “librarycampoz12”

So many posts in the pipeline, so little time, such a large title.

1. New York Public Library

I have a huge unfinished post about visiting the New York Public Library in December , seeing an amazing array of cultural treasures in the 100 years anniversary display and evaluating the reference collection in the reading room. The highlight for me, as an educator of librarians, was the exam for children’s librarians in 1944. It contains questions like:

You are in charge of a Children’s Room that formerly had a staff of four professional children’s librarians. You now have a war emergency staff consisting of yourself, the only professional person; an alert young woman, wife of an army officer, who is a college graduate and taught Junior High School five years ago; a full-time clerk; and a half-time Hunter College girl who is at the library all day Saturday and every afternoon from three to six.Indicate how you would allocate the work, which includes weekly story hours and picture book hours, three class visits a week within the library and a weekly visit to a neighborhood nursery school;

AND

In selecting stories to tell to children with a foreign inheritance what books would you choose for children from:

• Denmark
• Turkey
• Brazil
• Italy
• Czechoslovakia

In naming the source, give title, author or translator, illustrator and publisher.

Click image for large view

2. Espresso Book Machine at Darien Public Library

Visiting Darien Public Library in Connecticut I made the six minute movie below showing the process of printing and binding a complete book from selecting the item on screen to a finished object coming out of the chute. I love the kids in the background narrating every point.

Two things that stood out for me:

1. The machine was staffed as a “concession”, so in the same way as a library cafe may be in the United States. The person who staffed the machine did not work for the library, but was trained by the On Demands Books people.
2. Usage was not very high yet, but there were signs that it was being used not so much for delivery of otherwise out of print or out of stock books, but that the main interest was in library users who wanted to self-publish their own work. In other words, there was a real role for this to encourage creation of content instead of just consumption.

3. Amanda Palmer Ninja Gigs in Public Libraries

Congratulations to Aimee Rhodes from the Melbourne City Library service and Corin Haines from Auckland Libraries for putting their libraries forward to host Ninja Gigs for author Neil Gaiman and singer Amanda Palmer (Melbourne) , and then Amanda’s band, the Boston-based Cabaret-Punk outfit, the Dresden Dolls (Auckland). I blogged last year about the self-distribution model used by Amanda Palmer and why libraries should take notice of this (Who would feel OK asking libraries for money ? ) .

Aimee was very gracious and replied to my questions in an email interview. As soon as I have enough time, I will post it here. I was most interested in fitting this kind of activity into the library’s traditional/future purpose, as I think it is definitely the space we should occupy. In the mean time, here is an account of how it happened from Amanda Palmer’s blog (The most important thing I learned in 2011 by Amanda Fucking Palmer (starts about half way down) , from Aimee’s blog (Amanda Palmer and Neil Gaiman Ninja Gig at City Library )and from Corin’s blog (Dresden Dolls at Auckland Library ).

Added bonus, Mein Herr being performed at Auckland Libraries (uploaded by Kcajamos )

 4. State Library of Western Australia – filtering and adding value with video

A nice start to a project that I hope develops further. State Library of Western Australia staff create small digital stories using their collection of local content, for example the one below – The last tram in Perth .

I hope this saves somebody out there some time.

I just wasted an hour or so of my holiday trying to delete 3200 images from my iphone which were stopping me from taking any more photos (or doing anything else) with it. I had already backed up my images both to iPhoto and the two 1TB disks we are carrying with us – so I just wanted them gone.

Here is one of the pics that I wanted to delete, the sight that greeted us in the hotel lobby for New Year’s Eve. Not for a party, just because the staff were being festive. The place where we are staying has a 4:30-5:30 wine and  cheese session every afternoon, where hotel guests can gather in the lobby and eat sweet and savoury biscuits, cheese and wine (with juice boxes for the kids).

I did not fancy manually clicking on each image and then selecting “delete” from the iPhone. I could not drag them manually into the iPhoto Trash folder from the iPhone. Some sources suggested going into iTunes and syncing the photos to an empty folder created on the computer just for that purpose – but it did not work.

The solution is something called Image Capture – an application that comes with OS X mainly to upload from digital cameras. Plug in iPhone, use Spotlight to find Image Capture, then tell it to sync the device to Image Capture not iPhoto in the app settings. Highlight all the images, then use the red circle with a line through it symbol to delete.

Takes a while – around half an hour or so for 3000 images. I have had time to write this blog post instead of going out cycling across the Golden Gate Bridge, which I would much, much rather do on New Year’s Day. I guess I would have been better off actually deleting images each day when I uploaded instead of waiting for the phone to fill up.

I did much more eating, shopping, cycling and gallery and museum hopping in France and Spain than library-related business.

Our family travel blog, Rainbow Toast

We did manage to get our family travel blog up and running, so if you want to know more about our travels, please pop over to RainbowToast.com .

At the moment we are feeding all our Flickr photos in to it.

We will be writing a bit about our aim to do the entire trip with just carry-on luggage (four people, seven weeks, ten cities and five countries ), and travelling with kids.

We have a calendar on the sidebar where you can see the activities that we did each day. Well, you could if we had filled in each headline with stories and links. We where were aiming to get content added before we told everyone about the site, but realised last night that the trip would be over if we waited until then. So – you can click on each day and see a list of what we did, but clicking through currently brings you most often to a post saying “more content soon”.

Tech specs

It is, of course, WordPress hosted on our own server. I started with a Buddypress installation, thinking that we would run it like a social site with posts from each family member. It soon became obvious that at the end of the day the most we have time or energy to do is to upload our photos.

Theme

My favourite theme, Suffusion. I have applied the Suffusion BuddyPress Pack so that it works for the BuddyPress installation.

Plugins

TravelMap . This lets us make a date-based map of our trip, showing where we have been and where we are yet to travel. We could, if we wanted, to add links to each location, for example to the relevant Flickr set for each one.

Awesome Flickr Gallery This automatically displays all the items in a specified Flickr account or set. We can specify how many images, how many columns and rows and the size of each image. This generates a very small string that we can insert into a page or post. As we upload images to Flickr each night, the travel blog is updated with images on pages for:

• All our trip photos
• Just my daily image photos
• Just photos of the travelling minifigs

So …. I am not sure how much more I will write on this blog about our holiday. If I do not pop back here for a while, please have a wonderful holiday break.

Visiting Portobello Road on a Sunday, the Notting Hill Gate Library was closed. Pity, as it looked fascinating:

On Saturday, we visited Bletchley Park. About 40 minutes by train out of London, this old manor house was the centre of English codebreaking during World War Two. There Alan Turing designed the Bombe and Tommy Flowers created the Colossus  , two machines that were forerunners to today’s programmable computers. It is fitting that the National Museum of Computing is now located there. It is in one of the old codebreakers’ huts, and as a self-funded privately created organisation it is not posh looking:

One of the rooms that fascinated me was dedicated to Powers Samas punchcard computers. In the early weeks of my technology unit, I show students an image from Christchurch City Libraries in 1958 showing some of the first library automation efforts – using Powers Samas punchcards:

Bletchley Park not only has information about the codebreakers, but has a fully reconstructed working Bombe, a model railway exhibition, a cottage full of a collection of children’s toys from 1930’s – 60’s, a wartime post office, several working Enigma crpytographic machines, and even a room dedicated to the exploits of heroic wartime pigeons like William of Orange .

I took a snap of the library in the manor house as the light faded. The whole building felt like a Cluedo set come to life.

Today is my fifth day in London.

We arrived 6:20am on Sunday and by 11am were on a four hour bike tour of London. It is not surprising that both kids fell asleep that night at the Royal Albert Hall where we watched the Classical Spectacular.  They slept through the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, a marching regiment, indoor fireworks, balloons falling from the ceiling, cannons firing to the 1812 Overture, CanCan dancers in the aisle and stirring applause after each number.

The four of us are travelling using carry-on luggage only. We will see whether we succeed with seven weeks’ travel. We are setting up a blog to talk about our travels, post minifig photos and reveal Mr13’s daily “top ten” lists. We’ll be commenting on those daily oddities – like buying seven bananas at Marks and Spencer’s for just 50p – which would cost around $5 back home. When the site is ready, I will post a link here.

What have I seen so far that is librarianly?

1. Good use of QR codes in Imperial College London library.

You have probably heard me get really cross about trendy and pointless uses of QR codes in libraries (like QR codes in email signatures … if someone can explain to me WHY that would ever be useful instead of just posting a link then I would be grateful).

QR codes work well when they link physical objects to something online that increases the utility of the object (either by further information, or something interactive). When my  Australian librarian friend Jenny Evans gave me a tour of the library I saw this very sensible use outside their bookable computer labs:

2. Records in the dragon in the tower

It is apparently traditional to build large sculptures from weapons won in battle – like this giant dragon in the Tower of London built by the Royal Armouries. It contains over 2672 items, including 26 telescopes, two cannons and 15 pollaxes.

If you look closer, however, you will see that it is also celebrating the ten different institutions that have been part of the Tower. This includes the – more peaceable? – Records Office.

The dragon’s limbs are made of scrolls from the Records Office:

3. Art library at the Victoria and Albert Museum

Apparently much of the stock is off-site, but if I ever need an image of the “traditional” research library, then the National Art Library at the Victoria and Albert Museum would be a great candidate.

4. A literacy campaign ( that forgot libraries ?)

As we ride the tube, we see these posters telling us that “Nicky Helps Kids Read”.

At first I thought it was an advert promoting the government’s “Big Society” initiatives, where cost saving measures are replacing professional staff with volunteers, as has been done in Oxfordshire. In June 20 out of 43 libraries in the constituency were set to close,  however it was also planned for six libraries to have all professional staff replaced by volunteers.

Apparently, though, it is promoting a literacy campaign that is being led by one of the local tabloid newspapers, called Get London Reading . Hundreds of volunteers are going in to schools to do one-on-one reading programmes with kids with low literacy levels. Apparently – and this is an outsiders’ view so I would love to be wrong – this is not involving local and school libraries as part of the program. In fact, the British Library has been running a similar programme with staff volunteers for the last eight years. Seems like an opportunity missed by underfunded libraries and the programme organisers – although there have been people pointing out the hypocrisy of government ministers supporting the Get London Reading campaign, while making it harder for kids to read by closing local libraries.

Want to have coffee?

I would love to know what you are doing in your library, where you think libraries are going and library-types of places I could visit.

I am lucky enough to be taking a Big Family Holiday at the end of the year. It is mainly just being mum and wife and enjoying my family’s company, so it is not work … BUT…

If you read this blog, want to talk library, have ideas of library places to visit or would like to catch up and are in or near:

• London
• Paris
• Barcelona
• Orlando, Florida
• Washington DC
• New York City
• SanFrancisco

– let’s do it.

Please feel free to add suggested places to visit in the comments below, or if you want to have coffee then drop me an email: kathryn dot greenhill at gmail dot com , and let’s arrange something.

The nice folk at the  Center for History and New Media at George Mason University  awarded me a  Mellon THATcamp fellowship to help toward my attendance at the Bootcamp part of THATCampCanberra . In return, they asked for  my reflections on what I learned at THATcamp bootcamp and unconference sessions and how I may apply it in the future.

This is a bit longer and ramblier than than my usual posts.

tl:dr version – Chutzpah and determination rather than technical knowledge is more likely to make one a digital humanities expert

Attending bootcamp clarified my thinking around how I can best learn about and apply technological tools in the humanities. To get the most out of any learning event like this, I now realise I need to spend time shortly before or after trying to build or make something with the tools featured. I now feel much more confident about my ability to do this.

While the theoretical information in the bootcamp sessions was useful, I could find out this from researching and reading. What was invaluable was hearing about the creative process of project design and configuring and building the tools, which approaches had been tried and rejected, self-critiques of decisions made and how things could have been done differently – plus hearing the questions asked by others in the session. It was clear that people were not coming to projects as fully-fledged experts, but spent much time researching and problem-solving – and in some cases chutzpah and determination were much more useful qualities than initial technical knowledge. The second was ultimately gained through the first.

I think I pull back from trying these kinds of projects because I feel that I need to already know about the tools, standards and data structures I will need before I even begin. I have spent the last 18 months trying to convince my students that they can be competent learners in unfamiliar technologies if they have confidence and know how to look things up or seek support – something I obviously need to internalise a little more.

To learn, I need to contextualise new tools with what I already know. Sounds obvious, but it was not until I was trying to quietly build my own copy of a LibX toolbar for the National Library in the middle of the session about the NLA Party Infrastructure that I realised how essential this contextualisation is. I thought I was losing focus and was doing the equivalent of doodling. Then I realised that specifying the contextual searches in the LibX toolbar is a way of interrogating and outputting an enquiry to a public API without having to know about much more than how to format the enquiry string. Basil Dewhurst was explaining the query structure for the NLA Party APIs, so this was a quick and dirty way for me to understand how this worked. It also clarified for me that I should go off and play with Yahoo Pipes or equivalent to play with enquiring and outputting from the NLA Party Infrastructure.

During the bootcamp sessions, I became more mindful that some of my questions were about fitting new tools and skills into what I already knew. I understood better why I was asking “how does this relate to…” or “could your use this to…” or “did you think about doing …” I think I will be much more understanding when students go off on what seem to be tangents, or ask questions that I think I had just answered – as they are probably trying to fit new knowledge to a personal context, rather than seeking information.

I attended four sessions at Bootcamp:

Introducing the NLA party Infrastructure: http://thatcampcanberra.org/bootcamp/bootcamp-introducing-the-nla-party-infrastructure/

Mining Trove newspapers http://thatcampcanberra.org/bootcamp/bootcamp-mining-trove-newspapers/

Using the Literature Object Re-Use and Exchange http://thatcampcanberra.org/bootcamp/bootcamp-using-lore/

Using Google Refine for Humanities Datasets http://thatcampcanberra.org/bootcamp/bootcamp-google-refine-for-humanities-datasets/

>>>>>>>>>>>

There are several posts dated 30 September to 10 October  about the subject matter of sessions that I attended, links pushed out and events that happened during THATcamp.

I have a few points to think about and maybe develop further.

1. Events like THATcamp and the Digital Public Sphere work better for me than reading journal articles or attending formal conferences  as a way to understand the knowledge, attitudes, challenges, failure and humour of practitioners and theorists in my research area.
2. I still have not really settled on a research area, but the last few days have crystallised research interests I would like explore… I could observe what really interested me, where I already knew things and the tools and techniques that I was excited to find out about. I just need to sleep on it and do a bit more journalling and drawing to work out exactly what they are.
3. I think I would rather be an educator/maker/builder/person who helps other people  than what my job currently requires me to be – which is an educator/researcher/person who helps other people. I guess I need to find a way for making/building to be classed as research…
4. Why do so many people re-invent beautiful and useful wheels? Seems almost like it is harder to understand what each other are doing than to create from ground up.

I have spent all day sitting under the beautiful windows of the National Library of Australia. Time to catch a flight…

Today I am attending THATcamp Canberra .

The CoverItLive window below is pulling in all tweets from the twitter account @libsmatter and also all tweets tagged #THATcampCBR or  #thatcamp or “that camp canberra”.