accessCeramics: digital image collection using Flickr

Mark Dahl's and Jeremy McWilliams' presentation on accessCeramics was probably the most inspirational session that I attended at Educause09. I am an unashamed fan of Flickr and its possibilities and Mark and Jeremy explained just how they used it to its full potential. Many of us should be following their brilliant example as it shows just how an institution can use a Web 2.0 service to facilitate a collaborative project. You can see all 53 slides for yourself in the presentation link above. These cover: the history of the project, how they did it, who was involved, cataloguing issues, enhancements, lessons learned, gains, costs and future plans. And they are now using Twitter (@accessCeramics) as their news feed: another great idea.

Having been involved in a more traditional (i.e. expensive, never ending, painful and frustratingly complex) DAM program in a large museum recently that used commercially sourced software, I found slide #48 particularly illuminating. Yes, they had hurdles too, but nowhere near the issues endemic in the traditional models.

Recently, we've started discussions about a community-based project to develop a special collection as part of the UTS Library. We will certainly be looking very closely at accessCeramics.

Breathing new life into collections

George Oates is at it again. This presentation covers her brilliant work at Flickr Commons and her recent work on openlibrary.org. The themes that run through this presentation are: increasing access to collections; exploiting the power of (larger) networks; and institutional knowledge as substrate (through deconstruction, opening up and sharing).
Flickr Commons now boasts the shared collections of about 30 participating institutions, greatly increasing access to the shared photos (through the power and reach of Flickr) and perhaps more importantly, allowing the active participation of the viewing audience in adding to the institutional descriptions of those images. Now George has a similar vision for openlibrary.org.
She recognises that the catalogue records of libraries often do not make much sense to many intelligent people and in many cases they can actually be improved if we release our authoritative control over them and share them amongst our readers. A retired friend of mine has a massive personal library of well over 20,000 books. A while back we encouraged him to start cataloguing his books on Library Thing and he has already made a major contribution to the improvement of the descriptive records of those books in his collection, many of which he says were poorly catalogued by many great libraries or Amazon. His cataloguing is also less about the strictures of institutional taxonomies and more about the emotional and intellectual discoveries he has made through reading those books. Surely that helps if we think that our catalogues are primarily to be read by people and not machines?

Oh, you can follow her latest project on Twitter too @openlibrary

Into The Wild: Breathing New Life Into Collections

View more documents from George Oates.

Can Sydney Surf the Digital Sunami?

These are my (rough) notes from a UTS Speaks presentation by Professor Tom Barker, 31 March 2009.

This is the second talk by Tom Barker that I've attended since joining UTS about 10 minutes ago. I am now beginning to understand more about his passion for "digital urbanism".

Interestingly, the first thing I noticed in the University's Great Hall was that the audience began and then continued to sit on the left hand side, in front of the screen that would carry his PowerPoint slides, not in front of Tom himself. What does that alone say about our preferred means of consuming information? Do we attach any importance to facial expression at all? Do we just ignore it and place it further down our list of priorities than whatever is served up on a screen? I just did what everyone else was doing: baaa, baaaaa.

Again, Tom started his talk with a movie clip, this time from Matrix, which featured the Sydney CBD. It was the segment that asked "what is real?"

Tom posed a few concepts that might be taken up once we are over the current credit crunch. He is all about creativity and innovation and he thinks that the new creative industries are now more resilient than many others and should survive the crunch pretty well. He also thinks Australia is well-positioned to be more "e-ready" than most of its neighbours, especially within our cultural environment. We do, however, lack decent Government policy and vision (compared with others like the UK and NZ), and business/consumer adoption. So let's look at his concepts, many of which have some relevance to our future library (hence its place in the Forums):

e-with everything

Here he referred us to a newly proposed environment in Singapore which has been designed for new creative businesses, working from home, new office spaces, new business districts, etc. It would become a hub of work, living and entertainment in one environment, mixing green spaces with business, office, residential, industrial and entertainment uses. The e-uses are no longer a separate community or space, they are integrated with everything else we do and everywhere we go.

He also described "intelligence" as our ability to adapt to different and changing circumstances.

giant clouds

Here he referred to computing clouds; creative collaboration that harnesses and exploits the power of enormous networks. They offer a tool for collaborative working. He said that the first big city to offer such a cloud will steal the march on all of the others.

global universities

Apparently we are not there yet and there is much further to go, but a start has been made (I thought about MIT and their use of DSpace here). He said that hierarchies simply do not work and that it all depends on connectivity, eg. EVO. Connections can be made and exploited in many ways, eg. the joint lectures currently being facilitated between UTS and RMIT. Student and post-graduate travel was also important in this light and he referred to a UK program where students are helping facilitate e-commerce ventures in under-developed Ghana.
He also introduced a "creativity rose" which I think he suggested using to measure the success of such ventures: the four points on the rose being economic, creative, social welfare and knowledge benefits.

banks 2.0 - try again

He showed a graphic in which Australian banks were compared to the size and value of major Western banks. The Australian banks had retained more of their pre-crash value than many well known US and UK banks which had suffered heavily from collapsed current values.
He introduced a rather radical concept of banks "trading" in currencies other than traditional stores of value (like money). Again, he mentioned a conceptual idea for the future use of London's derelict Battersea Power Station. Tom seems particularly keen on a proposal to set it up as the new home for the British Library (which is running out of space). But it would become much more than that, by becoming a "bank of culture", moving the British Library and the British cultural digital space into it. (This idea is in many ways similar to what we want to do with the new UTS library of the future next to the tower.) So, the new British Library plus new media and creative industries would become a bank of culture; a trading bank with its currency being "creativity". Perhaps we could apply a similar concept to the new UTS Library, our currency being knowledge?

gen-z kids

These guys are now under 16 years of age (so they are the clients of the library of the future). They are characterised by:

• continual partial attention (multi-tasking);
• always online or connected (but not always paying attention to any one feed);
  a social conscience;
• an environmental conscience and awareness;
• (something about the structure of their life, which I didn't get fully); and
• they are the first generation who have had parents completely familiar with web technologies.

"lymphatic systems"

These systems are important for waste disposal, energy and disease resistance. For the digital world I think he said something like "these systems are integrating when they are working and regenerating when they are not (starting from scratch)", but I'm not sure I completely caught his meaning here. He cited the London Eye and Melbourne's Federation Square as good public "urban" squares or spaces, but Sydney apparently has nothing like this in the open . . . yet. Another example is Berlin's amazing Potsdamer Platz. He said that in these spaces, technology (screens made of pixels) was being used to bring the spaces alive and to make them interactive, particularly after hours. He showed an example of SmartSlab technology that will be used to broadcast live media for 40-50 UK public spaces.

outdoor media

He referred to the progression of broadcast outdoor media from simple live broadcast, to living media, to "autonomous pixels", and finally to intelligent media (which is pro-active). UTS is involved in an autonomous pixels project for the Sydney Light Festival in May which will attempt to display uploaded facial expressions. I think their "face" will hang somewhere in the Rocks area. People will MMS photos of their face to the system and I think they will then be accumulated to show different expressions. The screen is made of pixels which are spherical, solar-powered eggs and the face itself will be shown in semi-3D. The same technology can provide a more interactive "2nd skin" for construction sites, so UTS could again lead in the use of such technology during its campus redevelopment.

Such technology is "esemplastic", a word coined by S.T. Coleridge to convey the ability to shape diverse elements or concepts into a unified whole. (I once witnessed some amazing British minds doing this in the UK Cabinet Office, preparing complex intelligence briefs for the UK PM, but that is a whole other story.) This would be a worthy aim for the library of the future.

"beaches"

No, not Barbara & Bette. This section was his environmental and sustainability component. Energy is obviously a valuable commodity. Construction costs are also rising with the cost of production materials, but the cost of of digital pixels has fallen (recently) by over 95% and when used to provide digital lighting he said it was 90% more efficient than other forms of lighting. So, for Tom, the Internet has better environmental credentials. The downside of the Internet is that most people involved in it still do a lot more flying around the globe to make projects happen.

summing up

Tom said he was most interested in facilitating the ability for individuals to be collaboratively creative. He referred to the Renaissance model of the patron, master and apprentice as a good model for us to follow too. He spoke of technology as part of the urban fabric as opposed to a device we must attach to it. It has the potential to be more inclusive and therefore, accessibility issues should be able to be addressed. Its downsides can be balanced.

Delighting or going beyond the ordinary: the ACO, Cedric Price, and SXSW

Anyone guessed what this is about yet? I often get a head full of new and somewhat confused ideas at ACO concerts and Saturday night at the Angel Place Recital Hall in Sydney was no exception. Well, actually it was in a way because I enjoyed the whole program and we were given two amazing encores. It was also the third in a series of experiences that I'd had in one week in which the underlying theme was delighting an audience.
Maybe I should start again at the beginning. That was going to a public lecture one evening this week by Tom Baker (who has never been a Dr Who to my knowledge) who is now Professor of Innovation, Design and Architecture in the Faculty of Design Architecture and Building at UTS. There, in a fast-paced review of digital urbanism (the melding of the physical and virtual [cyber] worlds), he spoke quite a bit about the role architecture and design has today in providing extraordinary experiences for people in our cities by designing buildings, urban environments and dwellings that while being functional and efficient (from a use and energy consumption perspective) also delight us. It seems that one of his inspirations in this field was Cedric Price. Tom introduced us to even more exciting ideas that we might be able to use on and within our new library building such as energy saving initiatives, creation of a community space, using large digital media screens on the outside of the building, etc. Maybe we should ask him to talk to us specifically about what might be feasible for our new library?
Next came reading a blog post by Jeremy Keith (the web developer and microformats advocate from the UK) about his recent attendance at the recent SXSW Interactive. His most recent post is a great review of what he saw and heard at SXSW for those of us who could not attend. What caught my eye was his reference to a talk by a colleague of his (Paul Annett: Clearleft's visual designer) about putting "the delighters" back into web design. What a fantastic concept! So I went over to Paul's blog hoping to find out more and he described his talk as being about "putting delightful and entertaining niceties into the websites you design". The talk was titled something like "Oooh, that's clever! (unnatural experiments in web design)". He continues:
Find inspiration for innovation. See technological quirks as opportunities. Try something previously unheard of with your site design. Laugh in the face of convention. Use and abuse CSS in ways never before imagined. Get away with it. And if it doesn't work, try something else instead.
I think that is brilliant, and not just for website design. So when I read that, having heard about him only a couple of days ago, I was immediately reminded of Cedric Price. But wait, there's more, my journey continues . . .
For some years (nearly 10?) I've subscribed to the ACO series of concerts in my former home town of Canberra. But late last year I was really lucky to be offered a new job at UTS in Sydney. For those who don't understand "lucky": no more war; no more Canberra. I'd had enough of both. There are small patches of delight in Canberra, but there are not enough (for me anyway), I'd seen them all and they don't change or grow much. I'll miss some people, but that is about it. So what was I to do with my 2009 subscription? I'm not sure yet, but as my music friends are away in South America, I managed to swap my ticket to go to the brilliant Inner Voices concert given by the ACO under guest conductor and Finnish violinist Pekka Kuusisto at Angel Place. The members of the orchestra play so well under Pekka that I believe he is probably penciled in as the next artistic director should Richard Tognetti, who this year celebrates 20 years as the ACO's artistic director, ever move on. The music of Sibelius, Bach, Andrew Ford and Timo Alkotila wasn't at all ordinary and the whole performance was a real delight. Pekka began the night with a warm and humorous welcome for one of the composers, Andrew Ford, who was in the audience. (Bach and Sibelius were not there: I checked.)
Under Richard Tognetti the ACO plays with an infectious enthusiasm, especially for new chamber music and with guest performers. They do the same under Pekka. And I've seen it before when he was out here last time. Pekka plays glorious music and he isn't afraid to flaunt his obvious love of Finnish folk music and a long Finnish fiddling tradition. That alone probably horrifies some of his chamber music audiences, but it delights me. Like a skilled ballet dancer, he makes his playing look both graceful and easy.
So what does all this mean for me? Well, I've moved out of the museum and the strictly-cultural sector into a university library and I'm not yet completely sure, but would it be a bad thing if we all tried to delight our users occasionally? (Maybe we already do and I've witnessed some people doing just that on the client service desks in the Blake and Kuringai libraries.) Soon we are to build a library of the future on Broadway and maybe that new building will do it. Perhaps, as the university's cultural hub, it could have one of those really cool small performance spaces that well known artists ask us to perform in? Maybe it will also be a bit of a showpiece for digital urbanism, alerting and showcasing what goes on inside the building on some of its external surfaces? Nevertheless, as we begin planning for it this year, I think that aiming to delight our clients, to laugh in the face of convention and to provide an extraordinary service in that library are decent and worthwhile objectives.
That's all!

My take on the Olympics in Beijing

Image above: Matthew Mitcham, from his Facebook page. His win was the moment of the Games for me, marginally ahead of Sally McLellan, Jared Tallent and Steve Hooker.

Image above: Italy's Giovanna Trillini (L) competes against Cuba's Misleydis Company during the Women's individual Foil elimination round of 32 match on August 11, 2008 at the Fencing Hall of National Convention center, as part of the 2008 Beijing Olympic games. Trillini won 15-7. (ADRIAN DENNIS/AFP/Getty Images).

This post will by dynamic. I will keep adding my observations as they come to mind. Oh, this definitely has an Australian bias. I wasn't going to get too interested in the Olympics this time, in fact I really didn't four years ago, but there were so many brilliant surprises and historic moments this time. These events can only be positive for China.

Opening Ceremonies. Zzzzzzz. Who cares? I do not think that we should need armies to run or entertain us at big sporting events, wearing uniforms or not. Hopefully they will not try to do it in the same way in London. I would rather see the money devoted to sport itself.

Inane morning TV programs. Yum Cha, the lowest of the low. Why? They occupy time that could have been used to show delayed telecasts or at least highlights of events that could not be broadcast live the day before. Mostly they are full of stooopid comments from assorted B-grade idiots who do not understand any sports and seem more interested in self-promotion than anything else. Their only saving grace is that (hopefully) they provide canon-fodder for the acerbic SMH journalist and TV-reviewer Ruth Ritchie. Please Ruth, pleeeeeaaaassseee!!!!

Inspiration. Michael Phelps, Stephanie Rice, Drew Ginn & Duncan Free, the Australian hockey teams, the Australian female swimmers, Emma Snowsill, Jared Tallent, both 470 crews, Sally McLellan, Steve Hooker and perhaps above all the others Matt Mitcham . . . (more to be added I hope). They stood out to me from the sports I managed to watch. Phelps is a complete legend, almost too good to be true. Jared Tallent pushed himself so hard that he threw up twice in the finishing straight, then he backed up with 2nd in the 50 km walk. Their results are not just from four years of work. To do what they do usually requires many more years of extreme devotion and more hard work than any of us have ever done. They showcase humanity almost at its peak. We can't all be Olympians, but their efforts can at least inspire us to overcome inertia, resistance and sheer incompetence in our daily work. How many of them have said that nothing is impossible so far? Did Matt Mitcham and Steve Hooker choke under enormous pressure when the gold was on the line before their final jump? I don't think so. What fantastic mental strength and belief in their own capability. I was so impressed. Matt's win was unexpected and certainly against all odds.

Hope. I hope that those we find inspiring are "clean" and that more honest-looking and talented hard workers like all those Jamaican sprinters continue to beat the heck out of all of those big-headed, loud-mouthed, steroid-fed show-offs from you-know-where. And I hope we continue to see more inspirational efforts in the last week. I also hope we never have to see Happy Daddo and his stooopid side kicks associated with serious sport ever again. I hope Jo Griggs continues to be associated with sports broadcasting. She knows what it means and doesn't try to steal the limelight from the real stars, nor does she feel the need to remind us of her own sporting glory.

Entertainment. The Australian womens' water polo team coach; all of the gymnasts and divers; Phil Liggett (the doyen of cycling commentators, who could make paint-drying sound exciting); the laconic Mike Turtur (84 Olympic cycling gold medallist and commentator); and Steve Moneghetti whom I will always remember for his impartial, objective and highly technical call of the final moments of the 5,000m event won by Andrew Lloyd at the 1990 Commonwealth Games in Auckland: "LLOYDIE, LLOYDIE!!!!!!". And the brilliant association of fantastic sporting images and drama with Massive Attack's Teardrop during the final night's coverage on Seven. It worked for me!

The Olympics and Social Media. For me this was one huge distinction between this and previous Olympics. You didn't need to donate to Telstra to send a personal message to athletes who had the brains to set up social media profiles. As soon as Sally McLellan won her silver and spread joy to athletics fans all over Australia, I was straight onto her Facebook profile and sent her congratulations. She even mentioned receiving the messages in her post-race media interviews. With Matthew Mitcham I could go even further as someone had set up a fan page for him on Facebook. Within about 36 hours of him making the 10 m platform diving final the total number of his global fans had increased (from memory) by about 4-5,000. This indicates a few very powerful aspects of Social Networks: their viral power, world-wide reach and spread; community (in this case probably strongly GLBT or GLBT-friendly); and the need people have now to express themselves or engage when they feel strongly about something. Whilst those of us in cultural institutions might not always be able to compete with such popular figures and events such as the Olympics, there is nevertheless a lot for us to learn from this.

In conclusion, I would like to add here that I think Matthew's final gold medal was very important for Australians. His attitude, emotion and his open, honest and very articulate responses to the media left all of us in a very positive frame of mind post-Olympics. I take nothing away from the efforts of previous medal winners, but I feel and I have heard it said elsewhere, that some of the swimmers' interviews were just too well-drilled and unconvincing. Perhaps Ian Hanson does too good a job with them and now their responses just don't have half the credibility and spontaneity that Matthew and Sally did. The media just lapped them both up.