Western-Australia

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.

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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.

Practice to Presentation seminar at University of Western Australia

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I told twitter I was going to this seminar, and twitter asked me to blog it. Here’s my rough notes prettied up a bit.

Carol Newton-Smith ably chaired the session and between speakers had us do one activity:

  1. Write down a presentation idea
  2. Chat with the person next to you about the idea
  3. Go forth and do a literature search
  4. This created 30 potential conference papers in the audience

Carmel O’Sullivan: Law librarian, Edith Cowan University

Started with anecdote about her first presentation where she knew her topic very well, but discovered she didn’t really know where the knowledge gaps were in the profession. It was an opportunity for self-reflection as she did everything that you classically shouldn’t do – read the paper, spoke to fast…

Outlined 5 tips:

  1. Have something to say. Read widely and know where the gaps are in the professional literature.
  2. Be self reflexive. Analyse your mistakes, learn from them and try again
  3. Find reasons to write professionally – practice your writing with journal aricles, etc..it’s very easy to get published, just do it.
  4. Rig what you do in your practice so that it can be written up later
  5. Gain skills in speaking well. Apply adult learning principles. If you are desperately nervous, robotically following the principles of good presentation (speak slowly, engage your audience, don’t read the entire paper word for word…etc) works well.

She used to have her talk written out completely, then just pared it down to the main points. She memorises her closing sentence so she finishes strongly.

QUESTION FROM AUDIENCE : If you have submitted a written paper serveral months before, how much of it should you cover in your presentation?

ANSWERS Paper usually is 5000 words or so, only have chance to say about 3000. OK to just pare it down and say “paper covers 5 points, I’ll just talk about 3”. What can you offer to people by being in the room with them that your written paper didn’t offer?

Paul Genoni , Curtin University

Has given 45 papers and sat through about 1600 others. Sees a good presentation as an art, not a science.

Eight tips

  1. It’s OK to commence your paper with an anecdote. (He began with one about Bernard, a very experienced law librarian who sat in the front row of Paul’s first presentation and then fell asleep. A couple of weeks later, Paul discovered that Bernard had died at work of a heart attack).
  2. In every audience there is going to be somebody who is going to be the next to die. (Is your paper worth them exchanging some of their last hours for?)
  3. Content is everything. Your abstract is a contract with your audience. Give them what you told them they’d hear. If you do a “how we done it good” paper, ensure you broaden the application of what you did so that it is relevant to the audience. You want them to go home with 2-3 points. Less is more – don’t cram everything you know into the presentation
  4. Timing is everything. You lose your audience if you go overtime. Plan for 18 minutes if it is a 20 minute presentation
  5. Presentation is everything. Your presentation should fit your personality and not feel fake to the audience.
  6. Preparation is more than everything. You can control content, timing and presentation and good preparation ensures you do. Try sitting in the audience of the room where you will speak.
  7. No-one in the audience knows or cares how you feel. If you feel super-confident, don’t digress because you think you can take the audience with you. If you feel like you are dying on stage, don’t digress to try to win the audience back.
  8. One person in every audience will fall asleep. Your obligation is to those who are still listening.

Liz Burke, University of Western Australia

Do lots of professional writing. Think about writing for scholarly journals. Practice having something to say

Often we don’t write up what we are doing professionally, then go to a conference and are surprised that something being lauded as innovative is the same thing we’ve been doing for years.

Have a network of trusted professional colleagues to bounce ideas off.

Books and circuses

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Circuses? They’re all about performing animals and clowns that do slapstick and must have a ringmaster with a big black moustache, right?

Libraries? They’re all about books and being quiet and must have a circulation desk and a reference desk, right?

I’m just back from ooohing and aaahing at the latest offering from Circus Oz called Laughing at Gravity (gotta love those puns). Their high energy performance showed how circuses have morphed to fit their audience. The ring master was a high octane woman with glam silver boots, a style which crossed diva with Frank’N’Furter and who belted out songs like “La Vie En Rose” and a piece about trying to be an object of female beauty in the age of global warming.

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There were no animals involved, but people doing amazing things with their bodies and circus apparatus. The style was distinctly Australian, but edgy and owed a lot to musical comedy – although much more Caberet than Oklahoma. One of my favourite parts was the strong woman who did a bendback, had three concrete slabs placed on her abdomon and then…and then….kept still while a man with a sldegehammer smashed the slabs to smithereens. They even incorporated new technology – a bloke who swang out on a rope, missed his target and kept swinging until he hit a wall and…stuck!. The velcro fuzz on the front of his tracksuit met the velcro hooks of the wall.

Yesterday, I heard from a library manager who, like Circus Oz, has been transforming his craft to fit his audience. Chris Szekely ,who has just finished as City Librarian of Manukau in New Zealand, gave the closing keynote at the loclib biennial conference. The conference is aimed at Western Australian public librarians, but some of us from other sectors (Hi Sue!) came along for a couple of presentations from US library blogging legend, Jesssamyn West (Hi Jessamyn!).

Chris described how they redefined and repositioned their services when they were faced with a growing population, the need for more libraries but not many more staff allocated. Among other points he described the Botany Library, the Idealibrary (gotta love those puns), which was built in a new retail hub taking a lot of service ideas and design elements from the surrounding shops. There are no service desks, but staff who wander the floor restocking, serving the customers and acknowleding everyone who walks in within 90 seconds of entry. They implemented RFID as a security system – which lets someone checking out their entire limit of 35 items to do so by placing them in a single pile on the self-check machines.

An area aimed at youth (covertly – not with signage!!) takes design from night clubs, with a mezzanine and subdued neon lighting and a disco ball. Magazine displays compete with those in nearby newsagents. Display walls of books, which look like bays in a video shop, can be turned to create a separate space for study or events. A quiet area is enforced not by signage or staff, but by having a totally different ambience to the rest of the building. The Staff were chosen not for librarianship skills, per se, but for their ability to fit the customer service model. Consequently, 90 percent of the staff are men under 25. A very unusual proportion in a traditional library.

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Like Circus Oz, we need to embrace new technologies, define the core of what we do and then highly hone those skills – maybe throw in a bit of glitter and disco – and continue to do our best to delight our audiences.