I'm exhausted of ideas and I'm coming down with a head cold despite taking every natural immune system booster known in Western civilisation. Part of the reason I'm exhausted is because today I had to present most of our future library concepts to students in our UTS Designing Out Crime (DOC) Research Centre. I used a presentation of our key ideas around some illustrative images, but as it is a bit of a rehearsal for a short presentation that I'm to give later this year at the ILI conference in London, I don't think I should share it just yet.
By 2016 the UTS Library will be relocated to the building next the the big UTS tower on Broadway, one of the main avenues taking people into the city of Sydney. Having a more prominent location both within the University and within that area of Sydney will present its own challenges and we hope to get some decent ideas from the DOC students.
It isn't as if we are expecting a future series of Underbelly to be written about the crime in the UTS Library. We are just hoping for some proposals primarily to do with regulating or discouraging behaviours like theft, vandalism, consumption of inappropriate food and beverages, noise, etc. We are also looking for their ideas to assist us in presenting the key library resources and services as exclusive for UTS members (i.e not accessible by the general community). I spent a couple of hours with them making my presentation and then answering some really stimulating questions that gave me much food for thought.
I think we are really fortunate to have such a program at UTS and I love that we are giving UTS students the chance to contribute to the planning of the new Library in such a practical way (even though it is still very early in the planning stage).
The image is UTS tower from my place.
5 comments:
I think that's a real post!
Would love to hear more about your students' ideas on preventing crime. It's a problem down here too.
Am also taken with the idea of using Underbelly theme to draw attention to thefs in the library down here.
Pretend drive by shootings could help with your shush patrol image being taken more seriously too.
That was a real post! Would love to hear more about this when I recover from the sickness that has taken over the library. Hope you feel better soon.
Fascinating stuff, will look forward to the paper!
ooo lovely collaborative collaboration! Will look forward to hearing more.
Thanks for the insight. Following on from the Twitter chat earlier though. Innovative ideas definitely thrive when there are no rules. Sadly RFID companies are a good example of this behaviour inventing new products and protocols without any thought to how they play with the existing infrastructure, often with expensive outcomes (for the library). Informed mediation between the thinkers and the doers is vital. Keep up the good work!
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