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.
Venezuela’s revolutionary reading
The BBC News has just published an article on Venezuela’s Revolutionary Reading Plan, which offers some interesting insights into the politics of reading.
The government has given out tens of thousands of free copies of Don Quijote by Cervantes and Les Miserables by Victor Hugo, saying that such events “promote reading for the construction of socialism and humanist values”.
The part of the article that caught my eye was the role of “book squadrons”,
Beyond the book give-aways, another key part of the Reading Plan are thousands of “book squadrons”. These are basically roving book clubs that are intended to encourage reading on the metro, in public squares and in parks. Each squadron wears a different colour to identify their type of book. For example, the red team promotes autobiographies while the black team discusses books on “militant resistance”.
Is there an idea for a library program in there somewhere? Some day will we see roving librarian book squadrons on the TTC, really meeting the users where they are? And will they be talking about “militant resistance“?
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.
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)
Free books on the London tube
Londoners Alfie Boyd and Claire Wilson have set up a system to hand out free paperbacks every month at various London tube stations as an alternative to free newspapers.
So, when is this coming to the TTC?
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