aurora

Looking to the future…

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Bits of me are back from the Aurora Leadership Institute.

I’ve been learning from some people with deep personal power – participants, facilitators and mentors alike. If I could buy some more processing space in my head and heart to deal with it all quickly, I would. The really big insights and actions are still on their way down the mountain from Thredbo, and I’m sure I’ll catch up with them in the next lifetime or so.

While I’ve been off gazing into the future, it looks like there’s been some interesting developments in library blogland.

  • My esteemed colleague, Carolyn, has left MPOW, taking 13 years of IT and organizational knowledge with her. Not good. But – she’s sharing some of that with us all via her new blog, Red Dirt Librarian. Good. With a first post ending in “let’s share”, and a second one describing Models for Managing IT in Libraries, I think all she needs is a few comments and she’ll be hooked.
  • If you can’t get to Jessamyn West’s sessions next Friday 2 March, and you’re feeling all library mentorish – you could catch up with her that night at a Graduate Mentoring Program social event at 6pm at Hotel Northbridge (cnr Lake & Brisbane St,Northbridge).
  • Looks like planning for a library unconference in Western Australia is beginning to speed up.
  • The CEO of SIRSI/Dynix resigned.
  • Roy Tennant and John Blyberg made an open plea to ILS vendors – and their customers – to embrace change and survive. Richard Wallis from Talis responded.
  • While we all joke about Web3.0, this article from the Lifeboat Foundation uses the term to try to engage with what a more intelligent web would be like – The third generation web is coming. Q. What does Web3.0 have in common with Web2.0? A. Dumb name – significant concepts.

Whewwwww! And I’m only about a third through catching up with my email and RSS feeds.

If I owe you an email or a comment from while I’ve been away – it’s coming – I’m just defusing my head for a bit first.

Getting Ready For Canberra

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If our kids tell you that they’ve been fed nothing but baked beans for too many dinners in the next few months…I’m afraid they’ll be telling the truth.

Their parents are preoccupied with the serious business of Getting Ready For Canberra.

The Co-Pilot flies over at Easter because his Fremantle-based choir, Voicemale, will be performing at the National Folk Festival. Their set is around the theme “A New Agenda”. They are thinking of their all-male blokey group singing “Sisters are Doing it for Themselves“. As I write this, there is the “thump, thump,thump” of someone keeping time upstairs as he arranges “Brass in Pocket“. So lots of singing and practice and co-ordination for him until April.

ozflylib.jpg

Me..well, I’m busy making movies and taking snapshots in Second Life. I’ll be in Canberra for something else in early February. To calm my nerves and kill some time, I emailed Matthew Stuckings at the National Library to ask whether I could meet someone to chat about what we’ve been doing with the Australian Libraries Building in Second Life.

Well…they were interested, and now I’ll be giving a public talk about Second Life as part of their “Digital Culture” series, on Wednesday February 14th 12:30pm – 1:30pm in the Library Theatre.

If it was on any other topic, I’d be really daunted. I was daunted..but I decided to do it partly because it’s a really invigorating topic for me…and I know enough about it to talk for an hour (half an hour plus questions!)..and I’d love to see people’s faces as they experience SL for the first time. And… an hour after it was suggested to me, I read Ivan Chew’s post about “chickening out” of being on blogTV.SG.

In my talk, I’ll be pointing out that Second Life provides new chances to collaborate. It’s been illustrated by the four or five generous Second Life Librarians who have shared with me their power point slides they used for live presentations. If anyone reading this has any ideas of what I should include or what they think people would want to know, feel free to contact me.

I’m doing a practice run at MPOW on February 9th for WA academic librarians. I hope to do a live demo for both talks, but am getting together lots of movies and snapshots as backup for both. (Hence my new toy).

The talk is titled “Flying Librarians of Oz: What’s all the fuss about Second Life and what’s it got to do with libraries?“. More info on the NLA Events page. (Now, if I’ve used Cite Bite properly, that link should go to the page, then magically jump down to a yellow highlighted heading, “Digital Culture Talk.)

TODAY’S HIPPIE CARD: Content

Power of one….

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People with enthusiasm, who embrace what they do with joy and encourage others, can change the lives of hundreds of people…far more than most committees do. Here’s a few of them…

Fig 1. Enthuse, embrace, learn, play.


Enthuser 1 – LORI BELL
Lori always seems to be online when I visit Second Life. She was showing librarians around Info Island 10am Western Australian time this morning, yet when I just emailed her (about 9pm my time), she replied straight away. She’s getting out of bed at 3am her time to show us around as part of our LINTy party.

She is co-ordinating countless projects in Second Life, creates a Real Life buzz around her project and is a hub around which many folk are empowered to try out skills in Second Life. She’s part of a team but she works many extra hours and brings extra ooomph to it.

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Enthuser 2 – WARREN HORTON
Director General of the National Library of Australia, 1985 – 1999. I’ve been doing a bit of reading about Aurora and discovered that the foundation is self funded due to a legacy he left on his death in 2003. He believed in empowering future librarians, and was deeply involved in Aurora’s inception and running until he died.

I’ve been reading how he scrutinized the applications and took delight in matching applicants with mentors. He was affectionately called the “Grand Poo-bah” by participants and mentors when he joined in each 5 day live-in course. He let down his guard and talked frankly about some of his best and worst decisions. He had an extensive knowledge of who was where in the library world, and apparently a talent for suggesting who should be where.


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Enthuser 3 – RICHARD RENNIE
Richard runs the Fremantle Light and Sound Museum. He’s not a librarian, but a passionate ex-science teacher who won the Premier’s Award for Science Communication 2006, He single-handedly runs his collection as a volunteer, in a small room in our local museum..and always seems to be there when we visit. He lets us play with his stuff collected over 40 years, talks to us about it and we leave thinking about it for days afterward.

The last few times we visited, we

  • Played “Pong” on an old tele-tennis machine hooked up to a portable black and white TV
  • Ran our fingers along a string dangling from a christmas card and heard it play a tune due to the friction of our fingers over the special bumps in the string
  • Used a magnet to distort the picture on an old black and white TV set
  • Wore special red and blue specs and goggled at Michael Jackson and Dr Who in 3D
  • Placed our $50 notes under ultraviolet light to reveal the anticounterfeiting marks on it
  • Used a typewriter – a highight for Mr4 who now wants to get one.
  • Debated whether the baffles on a gramaphone really made the sound quality better
  • Looked through periscopes and kaleidoscopes and stroboscopes.


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Enthuser 4 – REG BOLTON
I’ve previously blogged about Reg Bolton. He packed an entire circus into his suitcase and inspired and taught thousands of children that they had the power to amaze. He had a few “circus swear words” that he banned from his Big Top

“No, Can’t, Impossible, Embarrasing, Difficult”


TODAY’S HIPPIE CARD: Face the situation.

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I’m going to Aurora.

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February 2007. Threadbo Alpine Village. 5 days. 31 other potential leaders. 2 Facilitators. Mentors from the top of the field. No idea what it will involve.Thrilled.

From the background on the Aurora Leadership Institute home page:

The Institute’s mission is to assist future leaders in the library and associated cultural and information industry to maximise their leadership skills and potential. We want to position leaders to be proactive and effective voices in a dynamic and sophisticated information environment.

This is done through a combination of experiential learning, group and individual exercises, and by working with a strong team of senior and experienced Australian and New Zealand mentors. The Institute programme includes exploration of leadership concepts including vision, risk taking, creativity, communication, and styles of leadership. It is a demanding, challenging and exciting experience.

MPOW and the two librarians who recommended me have been really supportive in the whole process. If you’re reading this – thanks.

I had a single motivation to apply. Peta‘s post on LINT which was, a rather straightforward call for applicants. When someone asked a question about what it involved, 10 people immediately jumped in and basically said “go for it…the best preparation is not to expect anything…it’s gruelling but you’ll use what you learn for the rest of your career“.

To apply, I needed to frame what I do, and what I want to do, as leadership. I’d seen leaders as charismatic and determined sorts who make other people’s decisions for them and then somehow convince them that this is what they really wanted to do. Always surrounded by flunkies and constantly watching their backs because they’ll be challenged by someone else who wants to be the leader. That’s just not for me.

But..if leadership can be keeping a central focus on what the library user wants and sharing and enthusing and encouraging and networking and learning and facilitating, then I’ll take that on.

The only down side is that it’s two weeks after both kids start at a new school. One is going to kindy for the first time, the other starting mainstream school after being in a special educational program. When I talked the application over with my mother-in-law she told me that my boys would see a mum who was following her dreams and fulfilled by what she was doing. Wow! I’d only been stressing out and hadn’t seen it quite so positively.

What I’ll actually be doing is so mysterious that the naughty little girl in me is imagining Masonic kinds of rituals involving binding books in buckram while reciting Dewey. And finding out that LCSH actually has a sacred narrative meaning authored by Da Vinci. And maybe that Canberra really was designed using spiritual mathematics , and the National Library is a key point in it all.

This blog will be a great place for me to reflect and track my path in all of this.

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