library-society-of-the-world

We had coffee with that…

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Nine of us turned up to the Library 2.0 chat at X-Wray on Saturday – me, Con, Hoi, Rachel, Sue, Matthias, Emma, Maeve and Kit. It was a great venue – with yummy food, comfy couches and tables to work on, no stencils in cinnamon on their chai lattes and without background noise so we could hear each other.

We eventually got the wireless working for Matthias’ tablet and spent some time seriously examining the important current trend in librarianship that is lolcats. And lolbrarians. And the automatically generated lolcats images from any RSS feed – like this one from my blog.

lolcats.jpg

Although we were from different sectors – all but school libraries – we had a lot in common. We all had colleagues who didn’t “get” Library2.0 and some who said they did, but only wanted to learn about new tools in work time when the rest of their “real work” was done.

We discussed Library 2.0 learning programs and podcasting. We discussed what would happen if we downloaded the free Open Source podcast creation program, Audacity, in our libraries. There was such a range:

  • one of us was totally locked down from any software not controlled by central IT
  • one had the blessing of IT,
  • one of us thought an “ask for forgiveness not permission” stance would be tolerated
  • one would have to put it to a committee that met every three months to consider what gets added to the Standard Operating Environment – but could probably get an approved but very expensive program installed within a day
  • one who had just come from a restrictive environment almost fell off her chair when the IT at her new job answered a request like this by just giving her admin rights to her PC

We created a page for our bunch on the Library Society of the World wiki.

I’d like to get together again. Sue and Con and I have already been e-muttering about getting together sometime to talk about David Weinberger’s Everything is Miscellaneous. (Here’s a great review buy Karen G Schneider ). Saturday afternoons suit me.

Im in ur sociation takin ova the library world

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If you recognize the leetspeak of the title, then you know about I can has cheezburger? – an anarchic site that captions photos – mainly of cats, but sometimes of walruses, gerbils and invisible things. It’s not all fluffy bunny, sometimes they are in very adult situations.

Twice a year or so, I read something so funny that tears roll down my cheeks, I have an asthma attack and giggles bubble out for the next couple of hours. This was one.

It’s got me thinking about the informality, injokes and creativity I’ve seen online in the last couple of weeks. For me, it’s moving away from blogging, reading blogs and commenting on blogs and into more synchronious collaboration, read/write and re-mixing. If what the young kids have been doing is reaching the olds like me, I wonder what the young’uns are doing now?

The main place I’ve been hanging out is still twitter. I think it’s beginning to get a bit quieter but at its peak, links and lives were flying backward and forward at a very fast pace, and just as the Perth blogging contingent would begin going to bed, the US biblioblabbers would be most lively.

Lolbrarians was a link thrown out by Steve Lawson to twitter that sent everyone off to look at the lolibrarians site, comment and then create their own post. As a mix of erudition and junk culture it is only second to the Shakespeare lolcats.

The Library Society of the World is the best, most efficient, egalitarian and effective alternative to any library association ever. Why? Because we say it is and we are not taking it seriously. After the ALA election results were announced there was the usual malcontent expressed via twitter by people who would love to make a difference but don’t have time…why can’t things be different?, can’t we have another association? Yada yada.

So Joshua Neff put up the wiki. Heaps of people have joined and chosen our positions (I’m Antipodean Antibibliorthodoxist). During the brief blip of collaboration, here’s the policies that were nutted out:

  • No Parliamentary Procedure
  • No one chairs meetings; no one motions; no one seconds. Just change things and see how the rest of us respond.
  • No Elections – Just give yourself a title and we’ll accept you!
  • No Budget Process – If you give someone a donation, they are going to keep it and spend it how they like.
  • No Unnecessary File Types -If the information can be displayed well in HTML, use it! Links to PDF and Word files are frequently unnecessary and inefficient.
  • No Policies – oops. I was just kidding about that first part. Sort of.