Information Online 2009 - Day 3 Wrap

Leaving aside Andy Hines' keynote (which I have written about previously) here's a snapshot of some of the presentations that I attended.

Lynette Lewis, formerly of Yarra Plenty Library in Melbourne described their bold, ambitious project to outreach their Learning 2.0 program to School libraries and Victorian teachers via the Department of Education. What a great idea! Taking the skills and knowledge learned to the public domain.

Librarians from Queensland Department of the Premier and Cabinet Library and Research Services talked about their successful use of blogs and the associated RSS feeds as a delivery mechanism for their current awareness service. Their success in getting public service staff to embrace these new technologies and their innovative use of RSS was fascinating.

Michael Ossipoff from Telstra was highly entertaining during his presentation on the impact that fast, readily available Internet access would have on our society. And according to Telstra, it's all coming sooner than you think!

I haven't forgotten Ellen, Ross and Cathy's presentation about Reference Excellence but I'm sure you've all read about that one already.

Anticipating the Future - Information Online Day 3 Keynote

The morning Keynote presentation on Day 3 of Information Online was certainly the highlight of the day for me. It was titled Anticipating the future of librarians: understanding trends and staying relevant in the digital age and was given by Andy Hines, a professional futurist. I don't think that means he reads the Tarot or has his own crystal ball, although I have no evidence to suggest he doesn't!

Rather, as he explained it, as a futurist he looks at trends along with generational changes through a number of lenses such as values, demography, lifestyle, work, education and technology to try to understand where organisations need to be to meet the demands of future clients. What I might call strategic planning. It was all interesting but I'm just going to pull out a few things that resonated with me. I encourage you to chase up the full paper through the Information Online web site when it's available though.

Firstly, he described the typical differences in values between poor, developing and high income societies, arguing that postmodern societies move beyond success as a primary goal toward self-actualisation. We're in a period where we ask ourselves, 'What does it all mean?' This is manifested in, amongst other things, a rejection of institutional authority for a greater emphasis on trust in personal relationships. Andy suggested that this could partly explain the rise of social networking and I would add that it is consistent with the rise in the use of Google for information searches at the expense of reference services.

Next Andy described the attributes of Gen-y, the future users of library services. The key point here for me was that this drive for self-actualisation is leading towards a desire for intense personalisation. Everyone has their own personal needs and your services better cater to those or your clients will satisfy them somewhere else. This makes it hard to differentiate your target audiences, let alone market to them. You can no longer expect to speak to a mass audience.

We must create personal relationships with our users and one way of helping this along is for libraries to focus on authenticity over perfection. This is something I've been thinking about quite a bit lately and has been explored by John Blyberg, Kate Sheehan, Seth Godin and others. We need to become transparent and let the community in.

What does this mean for libraries in terms of services?

Libraries need to focus on services that cater for personalisation and encourage co-creation. We need to move away from ownership toward sharing. We need to foster community connection and interaction through virtual and physical spaces...

Sounds like Library 2.0 to me.

Information online - day 2

Laura Campbell from the Library of Congress spoke about current collaborations.

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. So far 248 terabytes of at risk content has been collected, and by 2013 they should have 650 terabytes

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”.

Elizabeth Lawley

Elizabeth Lawley spoke about Libraries as happiness engines based on some work done by Jane McGonigal a game designer who has presented on Games are happiness engines.

Lawley highlighted the range of games including learning 2.0, reading programs, suduko, board games as well as online games with the highest percentage of gamers being adult women.

Also mentioned that four key elements of happiness are
o satisfying work to do
o the experience of being good at something
o time spent with people we like
o the chance to be a part of something bigger than yourself

and that libraries can help people with this and library staff can be happy as well. Mary Poppins was also an inspiration.

Paul Hagon

Have a look at some of the mashups Paul Hagon is doing using images on the Flickr commons, Google maps and other tools. Check out his paper from Information Online (available later this week).