Are Britain’s libraries sleepwalking into the future?
Britain’s culture minister Margaret Hodge published a paper today, Empower, Inform, Enrich - The modernisation review of public libraries: A consultation, looking at the direction libraries should take in the future.
The consultation paper includes 30 essays offering different views of what the important issues are, from people including authors Tracy Chevalier and Michael Rosen; Random House Chair and Chief Executive Gail Rebuck, Starbucks MD Darcy Willson-Rymer; and many others. It also poses a series of questions upon which the DCMS seeks views from as wide a range of people as possible including the library and publishing community.
According to The Guardian, elements of the paper could become policy early next year, and it is obvious that Hodge believes libraries in Britain require a radical shift in their priorities if they are to survive.
The incredible rise of easy internet access and use means that libraries simply have to compete and perform more effectively if they are to justify the public investment they need. Sleepwalking into the era of the iPhone, the eBook and the Xbox without a strategy, runs the risk of turning the library service into a curiosity of history like telex machines or typewriters.
Can libraries learn from The Rocky Mountain News?
Here is a thought provoking presentation by John Temple, former editor, president and publisher of The Rocky Mountain News. Founded in 1859, The Rocky Mountain News was Colorado’s oldest newspaper. However, it published its final edition on February 27, 2009. It was the first major paper to close after the economic crash and Temple outlines the events that led to the paper’s closure, many of them related to the paper’s inability to deal with new technologies. He believes that the lessons he learned can be broadly applied, and I am sure librarians can draw insights from his presentation to help us understand our engagement with both emerging technologies and our users.
Temple’s ten lessons are as follows;
- Know what business you’re in.
- Know your customers.
- Know your competition.
- Know your goal.
- Have a strategy and be committed to pursuing it.
- Measure, measure, measure.
- Keep new ventures free from the rules of the old.
- Let the people running a new venture do what’s best for their business, regardless of the potential impact on the old.
- To compete in a new medium, you have to understand it.
- Invest in R&D.
Tuesday tech links: Conferences
I love attending conferences and try to squeeze in as many as possible. However, time, distance and expense have to be taken into consideration, so my options are often limited. The following are upcoming conferences I wish I could attend. If anyone out there is attending any of these, please contact me, as attending conferences vicariously is often just as entertaining.
1. ReadWrite Real-Time Web Summit. I’ve mentioned the real-time web many times on this blog, and this event should produce some exciting insights.
The ReadWrite Real-Time Web Summit will be made up of a smart and diverse group of people. Together we will discuss the key questions, in the process creating a final agenda on-site - and in real-time! The Real-Time Web is changing so fast that no predetermined agenda of talking heads on stage can do it justice.
2. The Internet as Playground and Factory. A fascinating subject that is rarely discussed in the rush to find the next up-and-coming social media app.
Today we are arguably in the midst of massive transformations in economy, labor, and life related to digital media. The purpose of this conference is to interrogate these dramatic shifts restructuring leisure, consumption, and production since the mid-century. In the 1950s television began to establish commonalities between suburbanites across the United States. Currently, communities that were previously sustained through national newspapers now started to bond over sitcoms. Increasingly people are leaving behind televisions sets in favor of communing with — and through– their computers. They blog, comment, procrastinate, refer, network, tease, tag, detag, remix, and upload and from all of this attention and all of their labor, corporations expropriate value. Guests in the virtual world Second Life even co-create the products and experiences, which they then consume. What is the nature of this interactive ‘labor’ and the new forms of digital sociality that it brings into being? What are we doing to ourselves?
3. Engaging Data Forum. As we enter the next phase of the web, it seems privacy will become an even more contentious issue.
The Engaging Data: First International Forum on the Application and Management of Personal Electronic Information is the launching event of the Engaging Data Initiative, which will include a series of discussion panels and conferences at MIT. This initiative seeks to address the issues surrounding the application and management of personal electronic information by bringing together the main stakeholders from multiple disciplines, including social scientists, engineers, manufacturers, telecommunications service providers, Internet companies, credit companies and banks, privacy officers, lawyers, and watchdogs, and government officials.
Wildcard. Shift Electronic Arts Festival. I firmly believe that librarians, when looking at technology and trying to divine its future direction and what it will mean for our profession, should pay greater attention to the art world, where early adopters and innovators can be found.
From the dazzling shaman of dance music Ebony Bones to electro pioneers Dieter Moebius and Hans-Joachim Roedelius aka Cluster, from Susan Collins’ live-video broadcast from a haunted house in Britain and real-time tech-necromancy courtesy of Hamburg robotics artists F18, to seriously fathoming the borders of reality with the video medium: with “Magic. Tech-Evocations and Assumptions of Paranormal Realities” as its theme, Shift guarantees an enchantingly varied programme.
MiniSoOnCon 2009 and why libraries should embrace maker culture
On Saturday I had the pleasure of attending MiniSoOnCon, a southern Ontario Hackerspaces/Makers mini-conference, at ThinkHaus, Hamilton, which included presenters from the spaces hacklab.to, KwartzLab, and Diyode . I have been interested in Maker culture and hackerspaces for a while, and I saw this as the perfect opportunity to jump in at the deep end.
What is Maker culture? What are hackerspaces? Well…
A hackerspace is a physical location where like-minded people get together in a cooperative environment to pool their knowledge, experience, and physical resources with a goal to bringing into reality the projects about which they’ve been dreaming. The sky is the limit, almost literally: projects range from building hardware to building art, from restoring antique equipment to putting electronic blinking eyes in a crocheted doll. Put simply, members get together at the space to make stuff, to work on personal projects or bigger collaborative ones. (quote from KwartzLab)
I attended the following sessions
- Richard Degelder: Introduction to OpenStreetMap. A succinct introduction to OpenStreetMap, why we should use it, how to do it and the necessity of adding all the Tim Horton’s locations!
- Steve Singer: Importing GeoBase data into OpenStreetMap. A very detailed explanation of how to import Canadian government data into OpenStreetMap.
- Trevyn Watson and James Arlen: Badge Hacking. A little history of hacker con badges and an explanation of how we could hack our own, very cool, MiniSoOnCon badge.
- Natalie Silvanovich: ZigBee: Fact and Fiction. ZigBee is a low-cost, wireless, networking standard and this was a brief and entertaining overview of the technology.
- Zach Lanier: Disclosure Samsara. Very interesting discussion of vulnerability disclosure and the need for a facility for encouraging responsibility.
- Jedediah Smith: Laser Quest. The story of hacklab.to’s acquisition of a Universal Laser Systems ULS-25P laser engraver and how they brought it back to life, including a demonstration of its hidden musical abilities.
- Adina Bogert-O’Brien and Trevyn Watson: Intro to Kite Aerial Photography. Explained what kinds of kites can be used, how to build a kite, and how to get your camera to take pictures automatically. I also learned what a picavet suspension is. Shots from their first flight are available online.
- Darin White: Overcoming Internet-Induced Inertia to Making. Darin from KwartzLab gave a presentation that encouraged us not to be intimidated, to learn from our failures, and go and make something. Included hilarious examples of his own failed and almost failed projects. My favorite presentation from the conference.
- Leigh Honeywell: Holy Crap We Built (Most of) A Makerbot Today. Hacklab.to received their Makerbot, 3D printer the weekend of the conference and put it together (almost!) over the day . It was great to watch the process unfold and the printer slowly take shape, and Leigh gave an enlightening, impromptu presentation on the technology.
Journalism students from Ryerson and UWO where covering the event as part of a project on Maker culture, and you can see video from the day on their site.
So what does this have to do with libraries? I believe public libraries and maker culture are a perfect match, and I take the opportunity to spread the word when I can. The ideas that fuel hackerspaces, such as cooperation, resource and information sharing, self-directed education, and a diversity of views are concepts that are central to our profession’s ethos. And in these economically difficult times, a movement that offers an alternative to consumer culture and a return to DIY independence is timely indeed.
I would strongly suggest that librarians contact their local hackerspace or makerspace. You’ll find we have a lot in common. In the near future I hope to see public libraries with 3D printers, laser engravers, tool lending libraries, and classes like the ones at MiniSoOnCon.
So, why are you still reading this? Get out there and make something.
Tuesday tech links: The real time web
The idea of the real time web has taking on serious momentum, and is seen as a fundamental characteristic of the web’s next evolution. Here are a few real time applications that are worth keeping an eye on.
1. YourVersion. Winner of the People’s Choice Award at this years TechCrunch50, this application should certainly be of interest to librarians.
YourVersion is a personalized, real-time discovery engine that finds new, relevant content tailored to one’s interests and makes it easy to bookmark and share that content.
2. Aardvark. Aardvark is a way to get quick answers to questions using your extended social network. You can ask questions via IM or email, and the question is then passed to your friends, and friends of friends, based on what their profiles say their interests are.
3. PostRank. Based on social engagement, PostRank allows you to find the most relevant content on the web in real time that matches your specific interests.
PostRank measures engagement by analyzing the types and frequency of an audience’s interaction with online content. An item’s PostRank score represents how interesting and relevant people have found it to be. The more interesting or relevant an item is, the more work they will do to share or respond to that item so interactions that require more effort are weighted higher. PostRank scoring is based on analysis of the “5 Cs” of engagement: creating, critiquing, chatting, collecting, and clicking. By collecting interaction engagement metrics in these categories the overall engagement score is calculated and the PostRank value is determined.
Wildcard. Google Wave. Tomorrow, Google will issue 100,000 invitations to preview the new application, or “personal communication and collaboration tool.”. People already believe that it will overtake Twitter in the real time game, but Google has failed in the past so we have to wait and see.
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