I wrote the abstract for my talk several months ago, and it looked like this:

What skills do library staff need to evaluate whether innovations spaces are suitable for their users? How can they plan and implement these nimbly? In this keynote, Kathryn Greenhill reviews the physical spaces created in some of the most innovative libraries in Australia, New Zealand, the United States and the Netherlands. She examines some of the tools and opportunities for creating new online spaces. She suggests two ingredients that are essential if we are going to create our libraries as effective learning spaces.

When I sat down to write the talk,  I found that I talked a lot more about serendipitous learning, or “guerrilla  learning”  – learning that is beyond a curriculum – and whether this should be a core purpose for libraries. I still managed to slip in heaps of photos of the best libraries I’ve visited in the last couple of years.

Here is the slideset that I used, synchronised with audio of a practice in my bedroom a couple of days before -  Disco balls, waterless urinals and augmented reality: equipping ourselves to create innovative library learning spaces. Slides 118 – 148 are out of sync with the audio. They changed too quickly for slideshare’s slidecast tool to cope with.

The document

The Australian Library and Information Association is leading the formulation of a unified vision on Australia’s public libraries. This vision statement will guide a future framework. It will be used in lobbying government to help them understand the importance and mission of libraries. The vision, rationale, priority areas and questions are outlined in Developing a vision and national framework for Australian Public Libraries .

Feedback on the statement is sought until 11 December 2009. Feedback to: Jane Hardy ALIA Assistant Director: Strategy & Advocacy 02 6215 8235 advocacy@alia.org.au.

Priority areas

The areas to bring to government attention are identified as:

• Social inclusion and community engagement
• Children, early learning and a literate Australia
• Encouraging the digital economy and digital citizenship
• Health and aging.

I would add to the list something about recreation, fun and joy. This permeates the four areas, but I would list it separately. Yes, being happy makes one healthier and encourages engagement. Programs like  wii gaming, or Santa in the library, or a sing-along for the elderly can be framed as having high “worthiness”, but they also have a very high fun index.  I think this sometimes needs to be foregrounded in our funding requests – some of our activities are just straight out fun, and this is worthy in itself.

Any lobbying effort about the value of libraries should be coupled with sensible indicators of Return On Investment. I don’t mean stats about numbers of issues or number of legs that come through our doors or number of programs. Too often we give these easy to count numbers to our funding bodies as though they relayed our entire value. I think it is essential that we articulate what our aims are in the four identified areas and how we will measure them. I don’t mean research into what we are doing now (as mentioned in the document), but where we aim to be and how we will know when we get there.

The vision statement

All elements of the vision statement are well justified in the document, and I can see why all elements are included. The point is made in the document that “It is a lengthy statement. Is there an opportunity to shorten it?”. Yes, I think it should be shorter. Too many words, too much like any other government document, too easily ignored and not understood at first reading. Here is the statement

Australia’s public libraries, united behind common goals and ambitions, sharing best practice, contributing to strong communities, valued by people and government, continuing to provide universal free access to information, knowledge and ideas, and confirming the importance of their role for future generations.

Cutting a few words for brevity, rather than precision, can bring it down to:

Australia’s public libraries united by common goals and valued by citizens and government as they continue to strengthen communities by providing free and professional access to information, knowledge and ideas.

Trying to get shorter and punchier, although not so comprehensive, comes down to the vision below. It  focuses on clarifying what we do. How we do it and who cares is not added in the vision, and I am not sure it needs to be:

Australia’s public libraries united as we strengthen our communities through free access to information, knowledge and ideas.

What do you think? Too bland?

I have added my own point by point comments on the google doc embedded at the end of this post.

Stephen Abram’s blog

There has been vigourous debate in the comments on Stephen Abram’s blog post – often disjointed due to the fact that comments appear only after Stephen has checked them and added his 2c worth. I understand that he has a spam problem, but it makes it very hard to keep a fluid, open and timely dialogue. Several  SIRSI/Dynix customers have weighed in. They present a rather different picture of the product to that depicted in the position paper.

Joint Google Doc annotation

Jason Griffey – while stuck in an airport on the way back from a conference – set up a google document for anyone who wanted to add annotations.  He has blogged about this: Sirsi-Dynix vs Open Source Software .

The google doc is here, SIRSI Dynix Position Paper on Open Source annoted by other libraryfolk and embedded at the end of this post.  I contributed to this. Editors included:  Jason Griffey Nicole Engard, Chris Cormack, Toby Greenwalt, Kathryn Greenhill, Karen Schneider, Melissa Houlroyd, Tara Robertson, Dweaver, Lori Ayre, Heather Braum, Laura Crossett, Josh Neff, and a few others who have usernames that Jason could not can’t decipher.

Scroll down half way to see the start of the commentary, colour coded and initialled so you can see who said what. The start of the document is a collation of the points made below.

Etherpad

Tim Spalding set up a  Etherpad document , limited to 16 editors, where a different set of people have been adding their notes.

Code4Lib wiki pages

There is a page on the Code4Lib wiki pointing to all the commentaries on the document . Another page on the same wiki has a dump of the Etherpad as on 1 Novemember .

(I started creating a dump of the doc on the Code4 Lib site, with a view to merging it with the etherpad, but time overtook me…If anyone has time to do this – and maybe add in the material from Stephen’s blog , I think a very interesting and comprehensive picture would emerge).

Outside Libraryland

The story has also been picked up outside of libraryland, notably by ItWire Open Source FUD is alive and kicking and Linux Weekly News Hudson: Corporate lobbying against free software .

Here is the SIRSI Dynix Position Paper on Open Source annoted by other libraryfolk Google Doc embedded:

Here is a link to a document by Stephen Abram about Integrated Library Systems Platforms on Open Source .  It was originally circulated by hand to a few his company’s own customers and leaked via the wikileaks site. Stephen has since released it on his blog, along with his explanation and a request for respectful discussion.

To me, it looks like the document essentially a marketing document about the virtues of the vendor for which Stephen works. I don’t think it aims to be a balanced discussion on the pros and cons of Open Source software in libraries. I’m disappointed that some claims made are unsubstantiated and that some of the unsubstantiated claims are about rival products. I do not think the tone of the article was the best choice.

I do not think that many of Stephen’s claims are backed by formal literature,  nor that the claims about why libraries develop Open Source are accurate. I spent the last few weeks extensively researching the literature and analysing my own survey and interview data with six libraries that originally developed major Open Source library software – Koha, Evergreen, VUFind, Blacklight, Scriblio and SOPAC2 . I submitted the resulting paper for peer review on Monday, but since I was sponsored by the good folk at VALA to write the paper for the VALA 2010 conference on February 9-11 2010, I can’t say anything about *what* I found out until then.

A reason to be cheerful

I’m feeling a bit down about the FUD around Stephen’s paper – but I cheer up when I think about what is happening in Canberra this weekend. Some of the cleverest and most civic-minded Australian programmers  have descended on the nation’s capital for a one and a half day “hackfest” using Australian government web based datasets and services.  Govhack participants will then have 90 seconds to pitch their product to the judges at the end of the day. Products are beginning to trickle out, like these preliminary visualisations of government agencies that perform arts, indigenous and health functions from Rob Manson. This event is being run in conjunction with the MashupAustralia competition that runs until 13 November.

What do I want to see in my world? More Open Data and community effort, less FUD.

The was aim is not just to wear disco pants and entertain – although I’m grateful that they did that – but to get people talking and thinking about what to keep and what to change. The Library 101 site , also launched this morning has a section of Resources and Things to Know plus a collection of 24 essays around the theme. David and Michael “asked some widely known and respected folks in Libraryland to talk about what they see changing in libraries and what we need to be doing to ensure we remain relevant as technology and society evolve”.

For my contribution I made a 2 minute mini-movie and a little essay about the basics of what it means to get “deeply local” – community, content, local linking, linking to the world and knowing possibilities. Here it is, Deeply local at your library 101 .

DEEPLY LOCAL AT YOUR LIBRARY 101

The key for libraries to thrive in the new digital landscape is to get deeply local.

Libraries have a competitive strength over Google or Amazon or off-the-shelf one-size-fits-all databases.

We can use human skills to know intimately our communities and their information needs. We can know what type of information they want, how they prefer to get it and ask them questions.

We can provide platforms for creating local content and match existing content to the needs of our communities.

Rather than declining in a world of born-digital user-created content , libraries have a chance to occupy a central place in our communities.

We do need to change the way we do things.

The deeply local has five key components:
1. Community – Knowing intimately our communities and their informational, recreational needs. This could involve chatting regularly to our users, conducting non-user surveys or analysing the hits on our website.

2) Content – Knowing the content available for our local community and by our community. This includes local history collections in local libraries and institutional repositories in academic libraries.

3) Local linking – Linking our community with each other via local content, or content that meets their informational needs. Encouraging study groups in our buildings or hosting a social network for a local bookclub is an example of this.

4) Linking to the world – Linking the world to local content. Linking our users to the local information hosted elsewhere. Essential in this is providing free and open access to material produced with public money and understanding about the best ways to get data in an out of our systems for remixing.

5) Knowing possibilities – Knowing what is available and possible with information and content – and bringing that back to our communities and matching it to their needs. Getting deeply local is not about doing exactly what our users want – we can do better than that. It is about library staff knowing about how to connect people and information so well that we exceed our users expectations.

Google Wave basically creates threaded conversations that can have documents and objects embedded within them. The Wave can be replayed, so you can rewind to any point in the conversation and see who said what. If that explanation doesn’t seem clear (and trying to describe it without showing is a bit like trying to dance about architecture) then check out Mashable’s Google Wave: a complete guide .

I had another look today and spoke with a couple of folk and explored together. I was very excited that – with my usual ” *this* button looks fun to press” style – I managed to insert a robot into a conversation. The robot looks for any 13 digit ISBN in the conversation and replaces it with a book cover. I tried inserting it in the Librarians Directory Wave and the Library Society of the World Wave too. It only works with OReilly Media items and it seemed to work in Firefox but not Chrome. Instructions on how to do it are here, Reacting to Wave Conversations and Inserting Wave Gadgets with a Wave Robot .

Yes, there is a Librarian’s Directory Wave and yes, the 117 people on it so far did list themselves in alphabetical order.

I was so excited that I made a one and a half minute screencast showing what I did, Google Wave: how to add a bot .

These two make me sit up and think.

Legacy Media

Mark Scott, Managing Director of the Australian Broadcasting Commission gave a talk yesterday about Media after Empire . He outlines the changes facing legacy media,  mentions that he has so far not read a workable model for profit making old media companies to continue to make a profit, and talks about what the ABC is doing. It doesn’t take a big leap to apply a lot of what he says to libraries – who traditionally have been the distributors of legacy media objects.

He outlines the changes that the ABC needs to make:

Declaring war on silos and insulated thinking. Being audience, not organisationally-centred. It affects the way we organise ourselves, the way we work together and cooperate, the way we partner with others, the way we need to cede some space, some control to our audiences to remain compelling and relevant. If we are to survive as anything more than a shell – a legacy broadcaster, an empire in decline – this is what we must do.

There is a lot in there about how to change thinking within an organisation that is based on a model that is no longer viable. He suggests that thinking in the same way will not bring any solutions and offers five ideas that approach a solution:

#1: The only media organisations that will survive will be those who know and accept that all the rules have changed….

#2: Successful organisations will be endlessly inquisitive about the new, understanding that no-one knows where the next breakthrough idea or technology will come from…

#3: Successful organisations will be willing to empower their audiences to contribute, to create and to share media. Will cede power to audiences to gain engagement and respect. They will be willing to let other voices to be heard. They will learn how to protect brand integrity whilst entrusting their brand to others…

#4: Part of the protection of media assets will come through diversification, as has been the case with News and The Washington Post. Commercial media have found themselves long in assets greatly threatened by this revolution, like newsprint and free-to-air television, with no other growth story, will remain greatly challenged…

#5: The great challenge on all this is to start within, on areas of culture and behaviours. Recognising your old internal fiefdoms came from another world…

I like his final point:

… the words of John Schaar who said the future is not the place we are going, it is a place we are making. The paths to the future are made not found, and the process of making them changes both us and our final destination.

Social Media

Gary Hayes , Director of LAMP at the Australian Film Television and Radio School has created a Social Media Counter, embedded below. It gives numbers of messages and members of various social networks, and how many have been added since you first started viewing the counter. This would be great to display on one screen during a presentation about social media.

I had fun watching them ooh and aaah over new apps, and seeing how generous people were via Twitter about helping them get set up with new apps.

The old “should I *pay* for apps when I can get so many for free?” discussion was raised. Me? I just compare everything to the cost of a chocolate bar. How many Mars Bars is this app worth? Would it bring me more pleasure than chocolate for longer? If so, I get it.

Below are images of the six pages of apps on my iPhone. Gah – I just counted them for the first time – 87 in all.

If you go to the set on Flickr, Apps on my iPhone October 2009,  you will find notes on most apps describing how I use them and how useful they are to me.

UPDATE 4 hours later:

The most useful apps for me are those that I can sync to the web and my laptop as well, like Remember the Milk, Tripit and Evernote. I also sync my google calendars, but it is not obvious how to do this.

1. STEP 1: Go to here to find out how to set up the google account (by choosing Microsoft Exchange settings ) : Mail, Calendar, & Contacts Setup: Set Up Your iPhone or iPod Touch
2. STEP 2: Go here to nominate which calendars you want to sync: Mail, Calendar, & Contacts Setup: Choose Which Calendars to Sync (We give our kids access to only *some* family calendars on their iPod Touches – they don’t care when the bills are due to be paid…)
3. STEP 3: (Well, if you are me and just want it to be complex…) Sync your work Outlook calendar on your work PC up to Google Calendars, so that it can then be viewed via your synced iPhone using Google Calendar Sync .

My iPhone Apps Pg 1 – use all day every day

My iPhone Apps – Pg – 2 – Used a couple of times a week

My iPhone Apps – Pg 3 – Games to amuse me and the kids

My iPhone Apps – Pg 4 – Yeah, sorta, if I'm in the mood

My iPhone Apps – Pg 5 – The graveyard of retired apps.

My iPhone Apps – Pg 6 – Apps that use the iPhone impressively

I should have just trusted.

LibCamp2009 – 21 Uploaded to Flickr on October 3, 2009 by rosehortonau

It all went very well

The venue made a big difference this year. A comfortable breakout room, sessions close to each other in rooms properly equipped and – thanks to the efforts of  Helen Burgess- wifi that just worked. We had about 60 – 70 very engaged and open participants. Special guest Michael Stephens had everyone talking from the first session. I saw a couple of people who I’d worked with give a ripsnorting presentation about a project that was so successful because of their efforts and energy in the last 6 months. I had someone feel comfortable enough to come up to me after a session on iPhone apps and say “hey, I didn’t understand a thing that you were saying in that session” – which was kind of confronting, but really great that it was an environment where someone could say that. I hope she understood a bit more after we chatted and pressed a few buttons on my phone over lunch.

Most agreed that Saturday was a good day for the event, with some corporate librarians pointing out that this was the only way they could attend. A very useful suggestion was that we hold the event earlier in the year. The vibe seemed to be more open, engaged  and with higher energy than last years. This is maybe because participants only had to please themselves, rather than justifying an employer’s expectations by sending people along.

If I had to describe the main themes of the Western Australian Library Unconferences, I would say 2007 was “wow – look at the shiny toys, what do they do?”, 2008 was “how can we use all these toys?”, 2009 was – “how do these toys fit into organisational/social systems that are already there?”. (Maybe that just reflects my own progression over the years, not the events’….).

LibCamp2009 – 07 Uploaded to Flickr on October 3, 2009 by rosehortonau

And many things were discussed

I was kind of uncomfortable that I gave so many sessions – I don’t mind doing it at all, I enjoy it – but I would have liked more voices to be heard. Unlike previous years, we had far fewer concurrent sessions and spent more time in group conversation. I like that. This seems to be a trend at recent unconferences I have attended. The Futures of Libraries Summit at Darien Library in March was more like a collegial Town Hall Meeting too.

Here are the sessions from the day:

• Admin, welcome, thank yous and topics decided
• Everyone – Q and A with Michael Stephens. First off I had everyone turn to the person next to them and ask them a question. Then for every question we asked Michael, he got to ask the crowd one. Topics included the 23 Things, barriers to getting things done, ways to get things done.
• Everyone – 14 Things program for staff and students at Murdoch University – Kate Freedman and Aaron Trenorden, 23 Things programs in Australia – Michael Stephens
• 2 sessions – 1. More on 23 Things with Michael Stephens . 2. iPhone Apps – me and Sue Cook and several others
• 2 sessions – 1. A Tale of Two Blogs – Sue Cook from CSIRO and Emma Taylor, Water Corp. 2. Slide Presentations: Bane of Conferences or Valuable Pointers – Rosemary Horton, South Metro Health Service
• LUNCH
• 3 sessions – 1. Internet Filtering – Amy Hightower, University of Western Australia 2. Creating Community Respositories – Kete and Omeka – Me 2. RFID – Adi Tedjasaputra
• Everyone – Three topics all combined – dreaming together…

LibCamp2009 – 25 Uploaded to Flickr on October 3, 2009 by rosehortonau

We dreamed together

By the last session, travelling for the last couple of days and attending exciting events had taken their toll on my brain, so it was a bit mushy. I led the session, and I think it went fine though. Kate Freedman was an excellent scribe. I think there were very few people who did not speak out during the conversation.  We combined three topics that everyone wanted to talk about:

1. Outrageous, impractical ideas for libraries
2. What will the library of 2019 look like?
3. What do we need to stop doing so we can do other things in the future?

As with most sessions, the discussion on the way was more important than the ideas that finally made it to the board.

So, what did we think?

Outrageous, impractical ideas for libraries

• Digital Rights Management – gone and no more
• Faster broadband
• Compulsory professional development
• Study leave to explore and play
• Personal filtering by librarians for all users – “here’s a book I know you will like”
• Netflix model  – give the library your list of “must reads” and we send you two from your list each time you return two
• Mailing out of materials
• Delivery of e-copies of materials to our users
• A decent Integrated Library Management System
  • Copes with different formats
  • Reports out without affecting rest of system
  • Flexible
  • Interfaces with other systems and data sets
  • Magical sorting of items by users’ preferred topics – eg. men’s books and women’s books, blue books
  • Know what people are studying and rank results in order of likely relevance
• $$$$$$
• More young people on staff / (or after some discussion – more innovative people of any age)
• Revamp library studies courses in universities
• More library techs
• Collaboration and cooperation between libraries – shared resources and projects
• All journals become Open Access
• Bars in libraries (as in serving drinks to staff)
• A toolbar that allowed users on Amazon or Google sites to select a book then make an instant order for their library to buy it
• All databases available to all libraries
• Libraries open 24/7
• More IT Librarians
• Managers who read and understand
• Smarter Members of Parliament

What will the library of 2019 look like?

We needed to cut this bit short, so didn’t get to collections like we wanted:

Buildings

• Collaborative spaces
• Embedded spaces (librarians as part of work teams outside of library buildings)
• Versatile, flexible spaces and furnishing because we don’t know what the future will be
• More electrical outlets
• Working secure free wifi
• Green/Sustainable buildings and behaviours
• Co-location with other facilities (eg. shopping centres)
• Websites with branding and library data
• Youth friendly

Staff and Skills

• People who know how to learn
• like working with people
• willing to learn
• willing to change
• basic coding (programming skills)
• learning how to teach
• know about administration and leadership
• communication skills
• marketing skills
• know how to deal with people
• develop and promote ethics

What do we need to stop doing so we can do other things in the future? What to drop.

• Recataloguing or tweaking generalist material that is already catalogued
• (do more cataloguing of local materials)
• Due Back dates
• External Key Performance Indicators from people who don’t know what we do – make our own KPIs
• Many different library cards – let’s have a universal library card
• Drop/improve MARC
• Librarians as the main people deciding what stock is added/acquisitions
• Fines
• Bean Counting
• More self-service checkouts
• Staff checking out books for people without adaptive needs – but still keep the human contact and chat for people who want it – not necessarily while wanding issues though…
• Irrelevant management courses in library school

The CoverItLive is pulling in all tweets with hashtag “libcampperth09″, plus *all* my tweets from @libsmatter from 9:30 to 4pm today. I am happy to add other authors – if you are interested, just ask via the CoverItLive box or shout out to me via Twitter.

I have put the TwitterFountain here because the Wetpaint Wiki would not take script tags .

And here is the CoverItLive window. I’m SO happy that there are so many other people tweeting the session…feel less pressure to be the reporter and can be more a part of it…