{"id":529,"date":"2008-10-20T22:27:35","date_gmt":"2008-10-20T13:27:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/librariansmatter.com\/blog\/2008\/10\/20\/what-i-took-home-from-bridging-worlds\/"},"modified":"2008-10-20T22:27:35","modified_gmt":"2008-10-20T13:27:35","slug":"what-i-took-home-from-bridging-worlds","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/librariansmatter.com\/blog\/2008\/10\/20\/what-i-took-home-from-bridging-worlds\/","title":{"rendered":"What I took home from Bridging Worlds"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I had the best time at the\u00a0 <a href=\"http:\/\/www.bridgingworlds.sg\/\">Bridging Worlds<\/a> conference. The speakers were excellent and gave a worldwide perspective. The food and venue was fantastic. The small number of participants &#8211; around 250 &#8211;\u00a0 made it easy to navigate and access. The backchannel and &#8220;unconference&#8221; elements of it &#8211; twitter, chatting in the breaks and general playfulness of a few delegates &#8211; made it the best conference I have ever attended.<\/p>\n<p>The sessions were all videod and most presenters wrote a full paper to accompany their session. These will be available soon &#8211; keep watching <a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.nlb.gov.sg\/bridgingworlds2008\/\">the Bridging Worlds blog<\/a>. You can also view the slide sets, collated at slideshare.net: <a href=\"http:\/\/www.slideshare.net\/bridgingworlds2008\/slideshows\">BridgingWorlds 2008 <\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>Here are some ideas I came home with:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>We need to share &#8211; our data and our co-operative efforts.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li>Standards &#8211; data storage, web application, metadata &#8211; are vitally important to our work. We need to know what applies in our area and work to ensure they are developed sensibly and used well.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li>3. The GLAM sector &#8211; Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums &#8211; is converging. Libraries play an essential role in preserving, collating and providing access to these collections.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li>4. We can stop debating and trying to find definitions of Library 2.0 now. A participative, user-focused, web-enabled, Open and Transparent library can exist; whatever we want to call it. It does exist in places and we need the technical and visionary skills to facilitate it if our profession can survive.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li>5. The physical library can be a Third Place- somewhere that is not home, not work, but a gathering place where citizens feel pride of ownership and &#8220;at home&#8221;.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li>6. The online library is often a Second Place. Users come to our resources after they have first tried google, and they need more depth or organisation..<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li>7. Not everyone is using Web 2.0 tools &#8211; it varies a lot within library staff and library user populations.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li>8. Unintended consequences often happen when we use Web 2.0 tools &#8211; many of them full of benefits for which we did not plan.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li>9. Digital preservation is an essential service to our community. Sometimes it is easier and cheaper in staff time to just save everything in a domain, rather than be selective.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li>10. True leaders of libraries are humble, down to earth and have grasped the implications of global and technological changes. (Naming names &#8211; Penny Carnaby (National Library of New Zealand) and Dr N Varaprasad (National Library Board Singapore) &#8211; both extremely impressive and very human and nice).<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li>11. Sometimes the best move is for the librarian to step back and allow users to interact with our data and each other via widgets and re-purposed library spaces.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li>12. What practical means are we taking to ensure that if google, flickr or youtube collapsed tomorrow our archives and services are isolated from this?<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li>13. A quote from Peter Godwin&#8217;s\u00a0 <a href=\"http:\/\/www.slideshare.net\/bridgingworlds2008\/information-literacy-and-web-20-is-it-just-hype-presentation\">Information Literacy and Web 2.0: is it just hype <\/a>presentation: &#8220;We want to change their habits rather than just     develop their skills&#8221;.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li>Play can be incorporated to enhance a serious enterprises, like the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.smartlab.uk.com\">SMARTlab<\/a>&#8216;s style of teaching PhD students (including a facility shaped like a pirate ship) or a conference presentation where you aim to mention as many animal legs as possible and SMASH the competition. (Oh Hai Cindi, Brian and Liddy).<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li>Lots of world-class speakers would be happy to come to Australia and just need an invitation to do so&#8230;<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>There was much more, I am sure&#8230;but after going non-stop for four days &#8211; including walking Little India, the Night Safari, shopping at Mustafa, buying rather too much Lego for the kids, drinking cocktails at The Raffles two nights in a row, and a three hour wallow in the kitch splendour that is Tiger Balm Gardens &#8211; I&#8217;m going to catch up on some sleep.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ll leave you with some <a href=\"http:\/\/flickr.com\/photos\/sirexkat\/sets\/72157608157422424\/\">images of Tiger Balm Gardens from my set of 60 photos<\/a>, including a set of the <a href=\"http:\/\/flickr.com\/photos\/sirexkat\/sets\/72157608157422982\/\">Ten Courts of Hell<\/a>. Check out <a href=\"http:\/\/flickr.com\/photos\/sirexkat\/2953042255\/in\/set-72157608157422982\/\">what happens in the afterlife if you deface books.<\/a><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/farm4.static.flickr.com\/3073\/2957582191_d1a78c8ccc.jpg?v=0\" height=\"500\" width=\"500\" \/><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I had the best time at the\u00a0 Bridging Worlds conference. The speakers were excellent and gave a worldwide perspective. The food and venue was fantastic. The small number of participants &#8211; around 250 &#8211;\u00a0 made it easy to navigate and access. The backchannel and &#8220;unconference&#8221; elements of it &#8211; twitter, chatting in the breaks and&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-529","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3BXdd-8x","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/librariansmatter.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/529","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/librariansmatter.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/librariansmatter.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/librariansmatter.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/librariansmatter.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=529"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/librariansmatter.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/529\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/librariansmatter.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=529"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/librariansmatter.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=529"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/librariansmatter.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=529"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}