Vale Michele Huston

Today I heard that Michele Huston passed away. I am very sad. I will miss her very much: the sound of her voice, her laugh, her wit and her wise advice when I needed it.

We worked together for some years at the Australian War Memorial and continued to collaborate after she left the Memorial to work at the National Library of Australia. I enjoyed working with her and talking with her immensely.

She encouraged and championed new thinking from perspectives well away from the traditional areas in cultural institutions.

The Australian library sector has lost much with her passing, but she leaves a legacy in the people she encouraged and in many of the web initiatives she set in place.

There is a wonderful photo of Michele by Russ Weakley on Flickr with one of the talents she nurtured at both the Memorial and at NLA, Paul Hagon.

Farewell my friend. My sympathies to her loving family.

Some observations about VALA 2010

I made a few flippant and some serious observations about VALA 2010 on Twitter over the last week or so. Well, OK then, quite a lot really. I'll try and be less flippant and a little bit deeper in this post. Promise.
Firstly, I'd like to acknowledge the huge effort put in by all of those involved in putting this conference together. It really is an immense task and far too much to arrange for anyone wanting to keep their original hair colour. We should all be grateful to those who volunteered their time and energy to make the conference run so well.
From a content perspective, I think it had something for everyone and I know that the Program Committee made every formal and informal effort to consult with people about who to ask to give keynotes. I was also aware that people like David Feighan (the Program Chair) made an effort to encourage people to take some risks with what they said and to present it in an entertaining way. His opening address and welcome featuring the short video by Abbey the Digiberal Native was a brilliant example for us to follow. (If only David was wearing a tie.)
So, I came away satisfied that the conference pushed the buttons I wanted to have pushed:

• stimulating content and ideas that challenged some of my views or reminded me of reality (from RFID to networked books);
• the opportunity to swap ideas with colleagues from all over Australasia (& beyond!);
• the chance to let others know what we are up to;
• the opportunity to have some fun (away) with some of my colleagues and some new friends;
• stimulus to write a paper and prepare a presentation on a topic of some importance to us;
• connecting with old colleagues;
• watching and listening to some up-and-coming rock stars of the library world who are so passionate and enthusiastic about what they do; and
• sometimes I just needed a laugh (thanks to many of my Twitter friends and especially John Garraway from the University of Auckland who has a real gift for timing and delivery).

I don't think the real value, in terms of connections, content, conversations and encouragement, that such conferences give to their attendees can be discounted.

So, to some brief observations from my perspective:

SUSTAINABILITY: I was pretty surprised that this issue did not come up much apart from our (UTS) presentation. It is a major priority for us and was one of the main conference themes at Educause09.

TWITTER: It provided a very valuable back-channel for this conference and I think that, like Educause09 in Denver, if you didn't at least lurk, you missed a vital and really useful dimension of VALA2010. As @flexnib tweeted: "all of us are smarter than any of us". In a way, it provided a cloud for the crowd.

CLOUD COMPUTING: This issue emerged and was debated in several sessions, but again, I was surprised that it didn't feature on as many agendas as it might have.

ROCK STARS: I am glad that some new young Australian library "rock stars" are starting to emerge. I'm thinking of people like Paul Hagon, Kat Clancy and our own Sophie McDonald to name just a few of them. They need to be encouraged as examples for others to follow. Their essential role in connecting us to our clients or just the broader public cannot be underestimated.

INSPIRATION & LEARNING FROM OUTSIDE THE SECTOR: I really enjoyed two of the keynotes as they made me think . . . about everything. Firstly there was the wonderful Stephanie Orlic from Museum Lab, Musée du Louvre and finally we had McKenzie Wark from the New School for Social Research in New York. Both were brilliant. You could also argue that Paul Hagon's "cataloguing by faces and colours" session on 10 February was along the same lines - thinking outside the box.

FROM LITTLE THINGS . . . : One thing that disappointed me was hearing, I think from a panellist, that what some public and state libraries are doing in digitising their own historical collections and other popular and/or rare collection material is insignificant or really doesn't matter much. Well, I'm sorry, but it does. It matters big time. As Paul Kelly said "From little things, big things grow". It is an important start and if our public institutions don't make a start then someone else will start pulling the rug from under us. We should be encouraging any digitisation of cultural materials, not just endlessly debating which metadata schema to use or how to moderate user-created data, should we ever decide to allow it. What NLA is doing with Trove , what the Australian War Memorial has done with war diaries and more recently C.E.W. Bean's First World war records and what the State libraries and some public libraries are doing to provide online access to and digital preservation of our cultural and historical heritage is very important and a great example for others to follow. If we were really a clever nation, by now we'd have a national cultural digitisation strategy.

That's all!

Information Online 2009: some observations

This isn't going to be comprehensive. It is just a few observations that I came away with from Information Online 2009. As I gave a pre-conference workshop and a keynote address, I think it is probably up to others to make more detailed observations. I believe that my keynote address has been recorded and will eventually be podcast somewhere, so I'll link to that when I read about it. The photos used above (by Neerav Bhatt) are some of the more interesting slides that I used in my presentation.

I was a tad annoyed that many in the audience got hooked up about a minor point that I made. I said that we should not obsess so much about metadata. I think we've talked and debated so much about it for so long now (with very little real progress) that we just need to start making other things happen without waiting for it to be "perfected". It is I believe, with Copyright and "stakeholder consultation", used as an excuse not to progress things. If Flickr, Google, Amazon or iTunes had waited for us to agree on a schema they'd still not exist. I said a lot of other things, but all the metadata crusaders got hooked up on that wee point and missed all of the others. Typical.

A number of points I made and that were also made by Paul Hagon of NLA and happiness guru Liz Lawley were later re-inforced in other keynotes by Laura Campbell of the Library of Congress and the futurist, Andy Hines. (I'm very glad that we didn't have to listen to anyone banging on about a new management theory from their recent MBA.)

I took some rough notes at Laura's keynote address:

Keynote 21 January 2008 – Strategic Directions and Initiatives (on the Library of Congress’ last 20 years)

Strategies
1. Increasing access – American Memory, Thomas (workings of Congress) & their Learning Page – to general public and education audience (this to me was quite similar to our history in opening and broadening public access at the AWM, albeit on a smaller scale). They, like us needed to broaden access to be relevant. They have 110 million online users and 2 million onsite users (we have about 850,000 visitors).
2. Expanded offerings to new channels: embracing new partners & new sectors. Global Gateway – vast foreign collections. eg. the national newspaper program. Can search 1,000s of newspapers. 1 mill online now(?). Flickr Commons pilot – 3,000 images offered (Depression photos) – 10.4 million views in a few months – inviting user annotations and descriptions – all captured. Viewership up. They also arrangement with You Tube.
3. Networks – NDIIPP & WDL – changing work in the future:

• National Preservation Program (NDIIPP) - $100m in 2000. Guided by NDSA Board (all 27 of them). The Preserving Digital Heritage report in 2002 mapped out strategy for distributed network of trusted partners (never to be centralised). Goals – included at-risk content, identification of tools & partners, developing a strategy. 130 partners because even LoC can’t collect everything. Infrastructure addressed to share content. Had eight consortia groups for geospatial, political business/economics, cultural, public & social services data. They have 70 Tb of data. Partners include: universities, broadcasters, commercial enterprises, states, federal agencies, new businesses, tech companies, and other national libraries. Also IIPC – the international internet preservation consortium. 37 member libraries working on this now. they resisted temptation to start with by-laws and got on with accomplishing it. A sensible way to move forward. Now have 248 Tb and they are expecting 650 Tb by 2013. Laura: “Taking early action allows you to learn by doing!”. She also put up a slide about them being catalytic, collaborative, engaging multiple platforms, leveraged networks, shared resources.
  

• WDL – prototype launched with UNESCO a couple of years ago. No "show-runners" – all their own content. 25 partners now. You can browse by locations, type, time, institution, etc. – for books, manuscripts, maps photos, film and sound (more audiovisual than anything else); heaps of intelligent search (via annotations, curator videos, etc.); multi-lingual (translator services). Memory packages are available. They've set up a mirror site at Alexandria. See their online concept video (it is pretty good). (Prototype and Concept videos available here.)
  

Final comments from Laura: it is not the technology that is the hard part, it is the human element. That will never change. She also mentioned making choices about what work you are in. She said her early work at the LoC was "triage", then pushing out content, and now building on all of that and embracing networks, and solutions. They did consult some wise gurus about the future to learn about the driving forces of the future. “Creative collaboration is the key to future invention and innovation.” Not a perfect story, but a lot to be said for real collaboration – not easy, but a lot to be said for it when it works.

I didn't take many other notes that I can pass on right now. I took some notes from Andy Hines' presentation, but left them at home today on another laptop.

I did like what the State Library of Victoria is doing to connect with students, principally using their Inside a Dog website. Great stuff.

Oh, I almost forgot: Libraries Australia (courtesy of Paul Hagon) have now started their own Ning site, so check it out.

A pause in blogging

Yes, sorry. I spent much of November away in Iraq and the Northern Arabian Gulf on a curatorial/collecting visit with some elements of our defence forces. It is the first time the Australian War Memorial has ever sent an archivist/librarian to a war zone and only our second curatorial visit since the Second World War. I took about 2,000 photographs for our collection, gathered a lot of donations, recorded (digitally, using Audacity) about 30 oral history interviews, and identified some records and items we were interested in for our collection (post-deployment).
Since that time I've not been entirely sure about what details or images I can actually use in my blog. I certainly didn't want to compromise the security of any of our forces still deployed overseas. It is a bit frustrating because I think their role and the good work they are doing is not well understood, particularly by the Australian public, but there it is.
Then, in December I heard that I'd won a new job at the University of Technology in Sydney. That too wasn't public knowledge until more recently, so I couldn't really say much about it until UTS had made a staff announcement.
It has been a really busy time for me as over the Xmas period I really needed to catalogue all of the photos that I am leaving in our collection and I had to prepare a workshop on the management of digitisation projects and a keynote address for Information Online in Sydney.
I hope to get back to posting more on this blog as things settle down, including me, in Sydney, soon.