Transformations in cultural and scientific communication

Mylee and I participated in Transformations in cultural and scientific communication last week. We gave a master class, attended by about 40 people called Serendipity and Strategy:
using Web 2.0 tools to influence organisational change based on our work with public libraries. Mylee also spoke on Organisational Change through Social Networks in the conference

We were fortunate enough to be able to attend Seb Chan's masterclass on Measuring Online Success. This session was a cautionary one about the different kinds of statistics which can be used to measure online tools. Amongst the tools discussed were Compete allows you to compare web statistics from different US organisations, Domain tools which allows you to check activity on your domain (for us it would be for the entire nsw.gov.au domain) and How socialable? which allows you to see how our organisation features on social networking sites. If you try the How socialable site don't forget to try the different variations on the organisation name.

A hightlight of the conference was the presentation on Brooklyn Museum's crowd curated exhibition called Click!

This image was taken in part of the Melbourne Museum and is an acknowledgment of the recent deaths in the Victorian bushfires.

RAILS5

RAILS or Research applications in information and library studies brought together mainly student and academic research. The paper I presented on behalf of Leanne, Mylee and myself was one of the two practitioner pieces. Our paper is called Learning about learning 2.0 : evaluating the The New South Wales public library learning 2.0 program.

Janine Schmidt, currently the Trenholme Director of Libraries at McGill University, spoke about the need toResearch in practice: replacing faith with a few facts.

The paper of the day was Zine collections: An Australian perspective by Jessie Lymn & John Stevens. Watch out for this when it is published in Australian Academic & Research Libraries later this year. All the papers from the seminar will be published in Australian Academic & Research Libraries.

Nambour Chronicle

Colin Potter gave a presentation about the process of digitising the Nambour Chronicle. This newspaper has had OCR work done so that it is full searchable. The online version of the Nambour Chronicle covers 1903 to 1955 and it was the first historical Australian newspaper available on the internet. This is a very impressive project.

Harnessing and selling knowledge

An interesting keynote address by Justin Harness of the Macquarie Group had some ideas which we could consider here at the library. The theme of his address was Knowledge management: new frontiers, new opportunites. He mentioned a model of innovation devised by Susskind in his work The end of lawyers? - this title made me prick up my ears because I know from working in LIAC lawyers can make such a difference in the world - for good and bad I suppose. He compared lawyers to waiters. What does he mean? that when you eat in a restaurant you don't care what the chef looks like, how clean shaved the assistants are. you want good and reliable service and food. You don't care if it's been shipped in from the cafe next door.

The principle is that clients (including ours) just want a product which solves a problem or delivers. There is an evolution of service:
Follow this: bespoke - standard - systems - packages - commodities.

Justin pointed out that in this progression, the bespoke and the packaging stages are where true innovation can occur.
I thought that here we are moving in this direction - we've started packaging. Now we can make into commodities. Can we do this? as Obama would say - Yes we can!

Library of Congress

Laura Campbell (keynote) from the Library of Congress spoke about their strategy for change which started with the appointment of James Billington as the Librarian of Congress. The new focus was and is on increased accessibility. Out of this came American memory, Thomas, Learning page. These target the general public, Congress, and students. Each year they have 110 million online and 2 million onsite visits.

Their recent initiatives have focussed on partnerships and collaborations. The National digital newspaper program – in collaboration with National Endowment for Humanities has15 partners and almost 1 million pages online. The Flickr project (you can read a recent report on this). As a result of involvement in Flickr the viewing of photographic material in the Library of Congress website has increased by 20%. It will be interesting to see if the State Library has similar changes as a result of our involvement in the Flickr commons.

The National Digital Information Infrastructure and preservation program aims to capture “at risk “ born digital material”. This is done through a distributed network of over 130 partners who collect this content. It is in all formats of digital material including geospatial, news, e-journals…) This collaboration has collected 248 terabytes of at risk content (with partners) and by 2013 should have 650 terabytes

The strategy for effectiveness in a project like this is to
o take early action
o learn by doing
o be catalytic
o act collaboratively
o engage multiple platforms
o leverage natural, distributed networks
o share resources

See www.digitalpreservation.gov for more information.

Another venture to watch for is the World digital library network. This has over 25 partners and includes enhanced description and consistent high quality metadata. You will be able to search by place, time, topic, type of item, institution in 6 Unesco languages plus Portuguese. Viewers can add content. Core metadata has to be provided by the contributor in their first language. There are three pillars to the strategy for this project – content acquistion, construction of sustainable network, and development of state of the art web site. The public launch date is 21 April. Watch this site www.worlddigitalibrary.org. Laura finished her presentation by saying “creative collaboration is the key to future invention and innovation”.

Libraries as happiness engines

Elizabeth Lawley gave a key note with this great name. She highlighted the work of Jane McGonigal a game designer who highlighted the following four key elements of happiness:
*satisfying work to do
*the experience of being good at something
*time spent with people we like
*the chance to be a part of something bigger than yourself
Libraries as well as games can provide this. Mary Poppins also provided some of the learning points in this session.

In her discussion of libraries, games and happiness Elizabeth Lawley bright together a wide range of game concepts including learning 2.0, suduko, and reading programs. The library is an emersive social space and games are a way of engaging with people.

...and from the State Library of Victoria

Ian Patterson spoke about SLV21 (the paper was co-written by Prue Mercer). SLV21 is the name for their transitional change program. The State Library of Victoria received $21.5 million for this program from their State government.

As part of SLV21 they have increased to 150 public access computers in their reading rooms, and have the capacity for 400 concurrent users on their wireless network. They have done much digitisation of unique Victorian material for SLV21.

They have plans to change their website, and will be using drupal, an open source content management platform. drupal is used by several libraries including Ann Arbor Public Library, Darien Public Library, and Cleveland Public Library.

News from the State Library of Queensland

This covers two sessions from the conference.

Margie Barram from the State Library of Queensland spoke about the Queenland memory project. The paper was co-written by Gavin Bannerman
Queensland Memory is a collaboration between the State Library of Queensland and Queensland public libraries. It highlighted the relationship with Queensland State Government policy. This project has increased the amount of Queensland digital content. You can see some of the images which have been digitised as part of this ongoing project.

Karen Stone (title of paper One search many options), also from the State Library of Queensland, spoke about the one search feature on their catalogue. Currently it operates for databases and books. People can tag and add reviews of books. To help build content on the reviews State Library of Queensland staff are adding reviews and tags which are clearly marked as being done by staff. One search has been available for three months. They moderate after publishing, but so far have found people have been very constructive in adding tags and reviews. You can see examples of the tags.

Note the papers for this conference will be online later in the week from here.

Who was at the conference

Edith, Jerelynn and Jim had just listened to the keynote from Sherman Young, author of The book is dead long live the book. We were reminded of the value of books, but also of the need to rethink books (including as content rather than as objects), to keep considering books to try and find a place for books in a web 2.0 world.

Paul Hagon

Paul Hagon from the National Library presented a session called Beyond the search box - different ways of exploring collections.

This will be an interesting paper to check out once they go online later this week. Paul spoke about the usefulness of APIs, and showed examples of his work. He has been combining Flick, Google maps (and others) into very usable and interesting mashup. His blog shows examples of this.

I am writing this from the internet cafe at Information Online as there is interesting wireless access.

ALIA Information Online

The ALIA Information Online conference start today at Darling Harbour.    Have a look at the program for highlights.  There is an Information Online blog which you can follow, and you can read this blog for information from your library colleagues.