My main takeaway from VALA2010 is that I am at a spot in my life at the moment where what is happening to me domestically is more important than what is happening in library technology. I’ve been trying to blog about it since January and I keep writing that kind of TL;DR post that just makes the author look like a self-absorbed sook…
Anyhow, here are my main takeaways. I’ve tried not to repeat too many of Mal Booth’s list that he pushed out on twitter, to be subject of a later blog post I believe…
I don’t know everything that all libraries are doing, so if I don’t mention it here, feel free to jump in the comments…
1. Publishing, broadcasting, libraries, museums, galleries are converging as content user and content producer turn into the same person, use digital techniques and focus on the local. If libraries don’t better define what we do and form partnerships, we’ll get lost in the squeeze.
2. Linked Data is sexeh, sexeh, sexeh. Libraries connect information and people. Where are the Australian library efforts to get our authoritative data as nodes in the Linking Open Data project? (Since I first blogged about this in April 2008, it looks like Library of Congress is doing something about this also the German National Library has put their person authority data in Wikipedia, thus making it a node via DBpedia . In Australia, libraries putting images on Flickr is a fine start, but should we be adding to the list of Austalian Open Government datasets a bit more?)
3. Data mining and human metadata need to both play nicely in the sandbox .We provide information to suit the subject bias of our parent organisation. This has traditionally been by human effort assigning individual metadata to items. Where are the libraries that are creating data analysis tools like OpenCalais with algorithms that spit out subject headings to suit the humanities or sciences in the same way OpenCalias focuses on businesses – and are they opening these tools to all?.
4. There are “rockstar programmers”. Although I concluded in my VALA travel scholar paper that a “rock star organisation” – innovative, open, progressive – was more likely the reason OSS was written by libraries, VALA showcased the efforts of rockstar programmers too. Paul Hagon doing facial recognition or colour analysis over the National Library of Australia’s photos, Luke Dearnley at the Powerhouse Museum using OpenCalais to analyse the content of their collections then link to Worldcat to get person authorities … It’s obvious these guys had that “2am idea” and just got in and did it – and had support of their organisations. Hey guys, it’s hyperbolic, but wear the rockstar title with pride and for good…
5. Twitter encourages childish behaviour at conferences And there should be more of it…
@malbooth Uploaded on February 11, 2010 by haikugirlOz
6. I am incredibly lucky. Altruism of VALA allowed me to follow my passion and travel. I was surrounded for a week by my libpunk mentors who chatted, connected, collaborated and sparked ideas and speculations that none of us could have done alone. Some senior members of the profession for whomI have absolute admiration took time out to let me know that they like what I am doing and encourage me. How can I give back?
7. My job status seems to matter to me. Without the identity of Emerging Technologies Specialist at a university, I felt like every time I introduced myself I had to justify where I was in my career right now and the choices I made. I know that to get balance and honour what I value, I could not stay where I was but I’m still teary (get a grip!) seeing that my old position is now advertised as permanent and at a higher salary than I was paid – not because of the status, but because of all the fun things I got to do. Repeat after me: for new things to come in, you need to let go of the old…Aum …
8. Libraryland tribes need to connect and talk more. I felt like there were several conferences going on – the one attended by the twitterati, the one attended by senior managers who wanted to talk to vendors, the one attended by the under 30’s and new grads. …and more…This is not new, but with social technologies it is more possible to share points of view while events are happening. From tweets of people like @ellenforsyth and @katclancy I stepped a bit out of the twitter echo-chamber. Can we create more space for the voices from under-30’s, school and public libraries at conferences like this?
9. If you don’t engage me in your presentation, you lose me . Possibly I’m a victim of the brain changes that Susan Greenfield is warning us against and I just want to live in a world of “yuk” and “wow” without deep thought…but at a technology conference that is partly concerned about information transfer, there were some good examples of people not getting it. Maybe we need to peer-review presenters as well as their written papers? Get them to send in an audition tape? I don’t necessarily want flashy attention grabbing, although I was happy with James Bond, time travelling students, animated researcher avatars, slinkies, and movies of augmented reality. Marshall Breeding showed how you can be engaging just by clarity of thought. Please do:
- Tell me at the start what your presentation is about and where you will go with it – that one minute makes a big difference to how well I understand
- Enjoy yourself
- Refrain from reading your paper if you are not going to make contact with the audience as well
- Accept my sympathy if you were one of the speakers who was a victim of techfail when you tried to use multi-media
- Fish out just the key points and repeat them, rather than try to cram your entire 6000 word paper into the 20 minutes or so…
- Practice, practice, practice…and then practice some more – think of it as equivalent to proofreading your written paper
- Make eye contact with the audience, ask us how we are going and whether we are understanding. If it’s a hands-on session, please have room for shared tinkering
10 Alyson Kosina and her team of volunteers should be bottled and declared Living Treasures. It’s clear from the papers this year that for library technology to work, we need to adapt nimbly and understand new trends. The VALA2010 committee illustrated this in the way they embraced social media and introduced new elements like the bootcamp sessions and the panel discussions – all this on top of locating the conference in a brand new untested venue and the usual hard slog of peer review and keeping delegates and speakers happy. I’m convinced that David Feighan did not wear a tie because there were five robotic copies of him zipping about doing all the VALA business that needed doing, and the tie would have obstructed the control panel…
I hope that as a profession we have the good sense to collectively put in the effort to keep VALA evolving and existing, even when Alyson retires – as she is threatening to do….hopefully with a VALA paper about her experiences before she bows out ?...
So, I know that you went to a totally different VALA2010 to me…maybe you were there in person and went to totally different sessions, maybe you followed on the Twitter stream from home, maybe you think Twitter created a dreadful digital divide in the conference – what was *your* experience?
