TEDxLibrarians is coming!
I am now an official TEDx licensee and will be organizing a TEDx event in Ontario for librarians in the fall of 2009 called, strangely enough, TEDxLibrarians.
If you would like to help or have any suggestions, please contact me. If you are on Twitter and would like to spread the word, the hashtag is #tedxlib.
Want to learn more about TEDx? Then go here.
Stay tuned!
Giving it away at the Harbourfront
Friday I attended Giving It Away: Books, Business and the Culture of Free held at the Harbourfront Centre in Toronto. The goal of the conference was to examine the impact of free culture on writing and publishing.
Now deeply into the digital age, we find ourselves thrust into a new universe of textual media, provoking some unexpected questions. Giving It Away will confront these issues of access, diversity and democracy. Increasingly, the pressure is on the publishing industry to “give it away.” It has happened in the music business and it is starting to happen in the newspaper industry. Is book publishing next? Will it go beyond sampling and current marketing methods to the very core of what we do?
The first session was How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Give It Away for Free with keynote speaker Rives, “the first 2.0 poet”. Along with performing his poems, Rives discussed his pop-up books, his grandmother’s fascination with his first patent, how he ended up writing commercials and almost marrying a supermodel and the wonderful story of his hero and earphones girl. I feel that the audience were expecting some structured advice but the presentation did an excellent job demonstrating the complexities of producing online content, what happens when you give it away and how it can impact your offline existence, without attempting to lay out an approach that would be redundant three months from now. I only wish we had more sessions like this at library conferences.
Visiting the library
I recently returned from a trip that included Dublin, Edinburgh and London and I managed to squeeze in visits to a few libraries in between catching flights/trains/taxis.
Two of my favorites were Marsh’s Library and the Chester Beatty Library, both in Dublin. Founded in 1701, Marsh’s Library was Ireland’s first public library. I attended The Sceptred Isle, their current exhibition of early printed books on England and had a wonderful discussion with one of the librarians. The Chester Beatty Library, which was named European Museum of the Year in 2002, has always been a personal favorite and the permanent exhibits, The Arts of the Book and Sacred Traditions, are stunning. I also visited the National Library of Ireland (for the Yeat’s exhibit which you can experience online) and the National Museum of Ireland, The National Library of Scotland and The Library and Museum of Freemasonry, London.
So if your travels take you near any of these, make time to drop in for an hour or two and have a chat with a librarian.
BookCamp Toronto 2009
I attended the first BookCamp Toronto unconference over the weekend and left the iSchool with plenty to think about. I enjoyed it immensely and hope it will become an annual event. It was attended by small to large publishers, marketing people, authors, journalists and other interested parties and I found that the mix was a good one, with enough diversity of opinion to make the discussions interesting. I’ve included a list of the presentations I attended below, and I encourage you to go to the conference website and spend some time reading and following the links. You won’t be disappointed.
- Artefatica: an open publishing experiment. Christine Prefontaine (Artefatica)
- Relating better. Ghazaleh Etezal (InternetOfLife.com)
- At the intersection of video game & narrative. Erin Robinson (Wadjet Eye Games)
- Toward the sBook: simple, searchable, smart, social, sustainable, scalable. Greg Van Alstyne, Bob Logan (Strategic Innovation Lab) Peter Jones (Redesign Research)
- Putting print in its place: the importance of the local in a world of globalized words. Amy Lavender Harris (Imagining Toronto)
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