Dangerous ideas for libraries

Dangerous ideas for libraries: ASLA 2011

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This is the keynote presentation I gave to the ASLA 2011 Conference: http://www.asla.org.au/pd/conference/ 

I had a couple of good questions that went much further than the content of this presentation, perhaps into areas that I've covered in other recent presentations (also on SlideShare). One question, however, was on how we are going to manage all of the changes indicated in this presentation. I don't think I answered that one comprehensively.  I said that for some of the new initiatives such as developing a new range of services that will be more appropriate to the role of a new Library within a world-leading university of technology (UTS's aspiration), we are already engaged in active learning programs to improve our understanding of Design Thinking processes as they apply to service design.

What I should have added, however, is that I don't think there is anything in this presentation that presents a major change for us beyond the development of a new range of services. At UTS Library we are already actively exploring or already doing most of the "dangerous ideas" covered here. So none of this really presents a major change in direction for us.

Librarians, active content creation & going beyond what is expected

Active Content Creation & Collecting

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In early May 2010 I gave a talk at the State Library of NSW to a meeting of reference librarians. Ostensibly it was to talk to a series of images that I took while making a curatorial visit to Iraq for the Australian War Memorial in late 2008, but I thought that I'd put that trip in context by discussing why I think getting curators, archivists and librarians out "into the field" is important. So here is the gist of my talk. The embedded slideshow above should be viewed with this outline of my thoughts.

I wonder whether we are too passive?

I also wonder whether we are we too obsessed with how technology works (and not really using it to its potential)? Everywhere we talk about data mash-ups, catalogue improvements, better discovery & search tools, mobile platforms, cloud computing and digitising content. All of these things are worthy of our attention but surely there is more we can do aside from using technology better and there are other more fundamental tasks to focus on as well. Also, as far as technology goes, is the tail wagging the dog? Have we already lost control?

I'm sure most of our users and patrons all not be satisfied by cultural institutions that simply present and ever increasing echo chamber or a means of reflecting user-generated data. I think they want and expect more from us than that.

We can create and we must also be more proactive in collecting and developing our collections to reflect contemporary content, not just what has been collected by those who came before us. It isn't sufficient to rely only on subscription services and commercial publishers.

My inspiration for these thoughts comes from other things that I see and hear about. Generally it comes from those who do create and perform, for example, the Australian Chamber Orchestra. Recently they again dazzled audiences around Australia by mixing pieces from more recent composers (Shostakovich, Shoenberg and Pärt) within Bach's Missa Brevis in G Minor. It worked for me and I think it provided another way to interpret and enjoy Bach's older work. The performance seemed to breathe new life into this work. The ACO constantly push boundaries and collaborate with cartoonists, writers, actors, and modern singers in order to keep their audiences both surprised and delighted.

Surely we can take a leaf out of their book and do what is not expected of us nor taught to us. Something more. Something beyond the rules. Not more of the same. We need to get beyond our traditional boundaries.

We need to create and to facilitate or encourage the creative talents of our patrons by modelling that behaviour ourselves, not just by providing the technological tools and spaces, nor by just digitising what was collected by those who came before us. We also need to get out there and collect contemporary content now from each of our "communities" whether they be an institution, region, small town, state or nation.

It will be good for us: being fun & playful; being a rich new experience; uncovering hidden talents; and by making our profession more interesting, stimulating and attractive. It should also delight our patrons. We must play out instruments and ride our bikes, not just leave them aside, locked up in a safe place.

So what are some of the options are available to us now?

• curating exhibitions;
• writing & story-telling - online and traditionally;
• actively collecting (not just contracting it out);
• facilitating online open access publication (particularly for academic libraries);
• hosting digital repositories;
• running film and short-story festivals, poetry slams, readings & other competitions;
• facilitating community cultural projects like co-curation projects;
• producing, directing and finding sponsors for artist/geek/writer/gamer/musician/visionary-in-residence programs;
• producing and editing online magazines;
• creating local content for our library collections (film, audio, music, games, animations, photo collections, even artists' books) - and this can be done with what makes your community different or unique, just as the AWM's focus is on Australian experience of war, yours might be an industry, local pioneers or veterans, immigrant families, famous families, a factory, an institution, craft, a crop, farms, etc.;
• producing photo essays;
• hosting travelling exhibitions; and
• exhibiting (not just displaying) our special collections.

So, now to talk about my collecting visit in Iraq and the in 2008.

It may not sound relevant to reference and information service librarians in all kinds of libraries, but it is all about asking for what you want (to do), grasping your chances when they come and creating content yourself.

We (i.e. my senior curatorial colleagues in our museum) had been asking to send curators and archivists to the field for years, so when the opportunity presented itself, I had very little time to prepare for it and there was no time to stop and think about whether it was wise, safe, advisable, practical, the right thing to do, in my duty statement, feasible, etc. I just went.

There were no rules or guide books. Other than some general telling me to "do as you're told!".

The Australian War Memorial obviously has a strong focus on its own community and works very hard to maintain trusted and respected relationships with its key stakeholders and their representatives. It knows its core business and as a library/archive we needed to get more strongly aligned and involved with that.

We had set up and run collection groups focusing on the Australian Defence Force's recent and ongoing operational commitments overseas. A subset of this was an official records working group looking at the challenges of ensuring a lasting record of war was being made and kept in the digital age. First, we had to identify what that records was and update our knowledge and processes from the Vietnam era! Since then all trains had changed on all platforms. This was impossible to scope from Canberra by meeting with a group of archival bureaucrats.

We had a couple of things on our side (eg. AWM’s reputation, my security clearance), but essentially I had to quickly learn how to select a “target” (no pun intended), get in someone’s face, establish trust, ask relevant questions, cover rights and permissions, grab and/or create something and then keep going.

Generally speaking, not many of us are trained to do all of that and we hardly ever practice it, but I can think of many reasons we should.

Somewhere, someone realised that the end of 2008 was probably going to be our last opportunity in Iraq and Northern Gulf waters to identify what we wanted as a record of years of Australian involvement. We didn't know what there was nor what it looked like.

Over the course of the trip, there were many amazing opportunities that presented themselves and I just needed to take them when they were offered.

Some libraries are focusing on the creation of content (e.g. the Edge at the State Library of Queensland) and I think this is a good example of something feasible for all librarians if they can think beyond the norm and of the possibilities that are easily done now for digital story telling, taking and sharing images and small oral histories (from just local events and local people). All we need to do is get started.

Disrespectful and Time-Wasting, or Engaged and Transformative? The Mile-High Twitter Debate

This post is "loosely based" (as they say in films) on a series of my tweets (@malbooth) from the Twitter Debate session at Educause09. I've cleaned up and explained a few tweets in the interests of your sanity.

(#edTwitter is the hash tag for the Twitter debate at #educause09)

• RT @jeremyindenver Standing room only at the Mile High Twitter debate (yes, the room was packed and people were standing up lining all walls)
  
• Mostly academic theatre so far.
• Noise, safety, security, content, distractions, spam, reality?
• Or passion, diversity, helpful, connections, real time?
• Check this video out -- The Twitter Experiment - UT Dallas http://bit.ly/YlBZt
• CIOs as orange cones over potholes?
• A reference to Harvard now. The school that gave us those that gave us the GFC [sorry, that was unfair: I put it onto the jet lag]
  
• Is it about experimentation, innovation, making mistakes, exploring?
• "Messy creativity that leads to engagement" (I liked that)
• Do ground rules inhibit exploration & experimentation?
• Google on innovation. Comes when reflecting, not on schedule in a divisional structure. Self-organise in shared-value culture.
• Clay Shirky now: changing the world via social networks (from his recent talk at US State Dept)
• How to make best use of the media even though it means changing our ways (Shirky)
• Who cares what a CIO thinks about Twitter anyway?
• [I then noticed that:] #educause09 [was] now a trending topic - imagine what we could achieve if we really collaborated
• Twitter offers transparency, but [there are] some costs - uni reputation needs to be considered. Voices or consistency?
• Dialogue is important. can practices be integrated? Is it a distraction?
• Has tweeting become competitive in this debate? [This tweet attracted a response: "@kaiyen @malbooth no, unless you tweet faster than I do"]
• [I think it is] too early for best practice & benchmarking: read some blogs, but not [the] usual suspects: see practitioners
• Immersion is important! Follow @RWW, @mashable
• [The someone mentioned:] FRBR (groans) [actually I heard FRBR being a librarian, but maybe they said FERPA?]
  
• "Twitter is a basic information literacy skill" & [it is not] not in a walled garden
• "What better evidence of your engagement in learning than results when your name is Googled": be a citizen of open web
• "Please don't tell us what we can't do: help us, guide us"
• Someone raised the importance of the back-channel as a toll for LISTENING!
• Back-channel can be transformative, scary, invaluable and great guidance
• Does or should twitter emulate real life communications? Trust users to do what is right with it as a tool
• Can lead to moments of authentic connection!
• We will all make mistakes and need to be tolerant of each other
• Many different ways to use it appropriately - make a judgment
• Important to be able to use all forms of media for communications!
• Thanks for this session - it made me think
  

This was a very lively, active and well-presented session. My thanks to the two presenters: W. Gardner Campbell, Director of the Academy of Teaching and Learning and an Associate Professor of Literature and Media from Baylor University (who played the radical academic) & Bruce Maas who played (and is) the CIO of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (all universities should be so lucky).

Visit to Thinkspace (Powerhouse Museum)

These are some images of a recent visit that I made with some colleagues from the UTS Library to the Powerhouse Museum's Thinkspace. The super staff there, Joy Suliman and Peter Mahony, gave us a great workshop to introduce us to some of the possibilities for collaborative digital learning and creativity in such a space. We played around with Garage Band, Google Earth, Inspiration (a mind-mapping tool, see below) and some other programs.

Peter and a blurry Joy answering some of our questions.

The two shots above show the results of some quick mind-mapping about technology and social spaces in libraries.

I'd been to this space for a quick tour once before but I wanted to go back and take our entire management team along with a few younger colleagues to help us out. We're probably going to experiment with a similar space in our library very soon.

Peter and Joy said their space had three key features: it could be personalized (made relevant to me); it was connected (to the web and therefore elsewhere); and it could be situated (made even more relevant with maps, GPS, etc.). It also had durable and flexible furnishings as you can see above. Their room contained four workstations and it works well that way. I think at one stage Peter said something like collaboration in such a space is "augmented by technology that is configurable to different levels". The whole environment seems very conducive to creativity.

For us I think it could assist in facilitating collaboration and even cross faculty interaction. The technology does has a shelf life, but as it is already in many NSW schools our future students will be expecting access to it when they get to university too.

Thanks again to Joy and Peter for a great workshop!

Watch this space . . .

An old but still relevant rant from Bruce Sterling

Recently, I found the text for an internally circulated article that I sent to some colleagues in the museum I was working in. It dates from March 2007, but some of the statements are still relevant today, so with a small amount of updating, I'm re-posting it here as maybe some of those new to this environment missed what Bruce had to say.

I remember being impressed by the amount of live web coverage coming from SXSW 2007 including a website full of content, papers online, podcasts, blogs, flickr sites and online videos.

Furthermore, I thought about what this means for us down here in Oz where we are soooo far away from all these hip conferences about new stuff. The web is finally making these far-away conferences and even some courses more accessible to us and it seems to still be mostly free. Those who truly understand what it is about also understand that to get the message out there, you don’t lock it away on pay-per-view sites or member only networks. You share it for free and maybe include some ads that hardly anyone ever clicks or views. At least that’s the way I see it and the whole new web culture of sharing, i.e. sharing valuable, new knowledge and even some wisdom, still amazes me.

So, later that day, in need of some inspiration, I listened to a keynote rant from a guy called Bruce Sterling who was then a Visionary in Residence at wired.com. The podcast was already available on the SXSW website and while not all of it is directly relevant to the work of a cultural institution, some of it was and still is in a conceptual sense if we are to understand the world we are now part of (particularly given the large investment already in most museum websites). I knew that not many of my then colleagues would ever listen to the whole podcast (an hour long), so I jotted down these notes from it as I listened:

Bruce mentions RFID in the SXSW participant wrist bands, but doesn’t ever allude to what they really used RFID for apart from the obvious. (RFID tagging of items like conference delegates, triathletes and baggage at airports has moved on a lot since then, but that is a whole other story, so lets not go there now.) He then refers to “2007 – the year of video”. Sterling calls it a stoopid medium, especially in TV which really is a wasteland. And the vested interests from TV-land are trying to step on the net, but he says it isn’t going to happen.

New trend drivers are emerging.

Three in particular are worth discussing (Prof) Henry Jenkins and convergence culture; Yochai Benkler who wrote The Wealth of Networks; and Lev Manovich and his Soft Cinema – hybrid media. These blokes have cultural, legal and media studies backgrounds, but they talk the same language. They talk in an analytical policy vocabulary – about a new method or approach to increase peoples’ wealth.

On the web information is free and it wants to be free. You are charged nothing and don’t have to click the ads. It is available to anybody and it is incredibly powerful and growing right there in front of you. The first world is the global market – capitalism and the market world as we know it. The second world is all forms of government. The new third world is common-space peer production – not communism, not the state and not the market. It is really growing fast and having profound effects. We use ‘Google’ as a verb now. It is also about ‘Not-For-Profit’ stuff. The fourth world is disorder and where they don’t have any of this.

The new third world is more powerful than we give it credit for, but not necessarily a good thing yet. It is a new thing. Benkler’s and Jenkin’s arguments are fearsome, but the new networks may not be as fragile as they think – they are pretty resilient. Take for example Craigslist – he isn’t a business mogul, he is mild and low key guy from San Francisco and not really interested in business. He just wanted 200 million friends. But he has gutted the revenue streams of major newspapers (i.e. classifieds)! He has no business. (My comment: Some of these networks and start-ups are now being acquired by bigger predators though and will someone like Murdoch or Yahoo eventually acquire craigslist?)

‘Peer2Peer networks are turned on and they out-shift anything else ever built without a dime changing hands.’ This world is still vulnerable to charlatans and rip-off merchants. And there are down-sides to too much ‘fan involvement’ in art.

Mashups – of video & sound.

Are they really a tremendous source of creativity? They won’t last 10 years. They are novel (now) and have no staying power as music. They are not tremendously creative works. It is new and has an audience, but it isn’t a cultural advance.

Lev Manovich talks about soft cinema – digital tools are melting all media down into a kind of slum. It is all merging and distinctions go with powerful compositing tools. Effects are becoming the means of production. All pieces are sent to a compositor, like in Hollywood films. Different flavours come out of the same mixing machine. There are different windows to the same media. Does everything need to go through this ‘media blender’? It is a new capacity, but isn’t necessarily any better. Electronic art stinks. It is interesting, not great. Ease of production? E.g. deviantART. Sure it is folk culture, but it is for hicks! We need a new form of media criticism. Film media, literature, music are all just going away and there are new realities, but they are not that good.

Now there are some 55 million blogs and some are good? Well, no actually. He would be quite surprised if any exist in 10 years. (And if it is true that blogs are that ephemeral, some cultural institutions like libraries and archives better start archiving those relevant to their collecting guidelines sometime soon!) They may be best as platforms for the development of something. ‘They are like watching yourself get beaten to death with croutons’ – and they’re not that potent a media. They’re also not fine art. The usual discourse is like three paras, an embedded video, some hyperlinks, flickr sets, Digg and social book-marking links, etc. Is it done well or badly? Is there any web design critique that could be applied to it to say whether it is done well or not? Sterling (a blogger himself) says it is an unstable media not aspiring to greatness. A word-of-mouth kind of culture.

Is it good to turn on the ‘information factory’ and leave the room? It is machine expression and needs to be understood as that. ‘Semiotic pollution’. The worst is spam. Gibberish. Imagine if that happened on TV or in a movie theatre!

Reed Hundt – a US intellectual and lawyer, who is very weary looking. Disenchanted by Federal Government, he is now in private practice. He was involved in auctioning spectrum (just like we are doing here in Oz). And he has a mad scheme to steal broadband and sell it (as gifts) to police, public safety authorities, etc. He wants to take it from broadband TV. Broadband TV is for shut-ins. Broadcast TV is a lower end evil medium. It was bad before American Idol, but now there is no budget to put on decent stuff. It is junk. He wants to put the net over TV as b-band Internet. It would reduce distinctions between the different media forms. There is no technical reason to not do it. It would change major stuff. It needed a ground swell of support and Hundt was trying to do it with public-safety and security services – cops, firemen, etc. The US would then leapfrog to the top of the national broadband rankings. He has a rather dull website and he used to run a blog.

Yochai Benkler – social networking and what it takes to build a third kind of production system that harnesses productivity, creativity. They need thoughtful engineering and some care. He puts forward a method for socially motivated common-space peer production:

• divide up the work – there is a lot to do, suck helpers in


• the work must be granular, modular (projects) and ‘integrate-able’ (all adds up to turn into one thing that really achieves something) – not seen much in other lines of work, not business, even government


• be self-selective – people chose to join in (people come out of the wood-work)


• have an in or out mechanism (like a two-way membrane)


• have a communication platform to talk to each other, fast & efficient


• humanisation??? (not further discussed)


• include trust construction – has to be built, confidence building (very important)


• someone has to think about what is normal, acceptable behaviour and create that


• transparency – so motives are not questioned


• monitoring (a police force of sorts to prevent someone attacking the system – hackers, thieves, etc. because the Internet is a savage world)


• peer review (who is good at stuff?) – a motivator


• discipline (an Achilles heel of all Internet efforts)


• fairness (will ‘the intelligentsia exploit the helpless proletariat?’!) – Wikipedia and Digg don’t pay people! Things that were formerly professions are now falling apart on the net and are no longer business, they are melting like the Arctic


• institutional sustainability – who knows how long it will last (e.g. Slashdot) – what is the legacy plan, what is needed? The hardware is radically unstable!

Benkler doesn’t talk about some unpleasant extremist forms which might appear to have all of this licked! We can all think of extremist organisations who might be doing much of the above, but perhaps without the transparency and with a different take on humanisation and fairness? Maybe they are proof of the potency of this form of organisation?

In order to make this work, Benkler says that we need to understand that computers are platforms for self-expression rather than well-behaved appliances. Computers really stink as appliances. They are painful to use, always in beta, etc. Well-behaved appliances kill self-expression and common space peer production. Something that barely works can become a common space peer production factory!

Benkler distributed his book (all 500+ pp!) in pdf format and then he opened a wiki for everyone to help him explore this issue, but there was nobody there. It isn’t easy to be as smart as he is! It was just a vast echo chamber. You can open stuff like that, but it doesn’t mean they come in and if they do it doesn’t mean they’ll be useful. Sterling says he could not help him. It is an interesting issue.

Sterling closed his rant with a poem about serenity and a sense of fulfilment. Perhaps it was about life not on the web? It was a bit of a stretch for me . . .

Web 3.0 & blogging less, Twittering more

Yeah, been blogging less and Twittering more recently. Sorry. Actually, that is not really true as I've been pretty active in putting up content that I want our staff to be aware of on our internal staff online forum at work. So, why Web 3.0? Well it has been a bit of a concern to me of late as we begin contemplating our future as a university library over the next decade. Do we really understand where the Web is heading and what our role might be?
So, just today via the Twitter stream (because I didn't even have the time to plough through Google Reader) I found what I think is a great presentation from Richard MacManus of ReadWriteWeb:
Web 3.0 or Not, There's Something Different About 2009

Here is what I got out of it regarding some aspects of Web 3.0 that are appearing already:

• from read/write web to provision of more web services
• smarter web - personalised, filters (Facebook & FriendFeed) & recommendations
• more mobile applications and services (like IPTV)
• more openness
• Twitter as an indicator - real time web?
• Google evolving by offering improved core search

I reckon Richard's slides are a quick and easy-to-understand introduction to the "concept" of Web 3.0. I even felt moved to comment on Richard's post, saying that at UTS we have: started moving on a mobile presence for the Library's website; we're looking at how we can personalise our web interface and provide improved filters/recommendations; we're doing more real-time online service by using Meebo (now) and Twitter (soon); and we're enhancing & extending the search interface for our "catalogue". Richard's post and presentation ties in well to the other recent useful writings of people like Greg Boutin. More people need to read this now!

Actually, while we are on this future library topic, I also think it is a good idea to read The gathering storm on the future of academic libraries from Mark Dahl of Lewis & Clark College in the US. It focuses on the impact cloud computing will have on higher education libraries.

Most of us will find slides 7-9 challenging, and I hasten to add that there is certainly no agenda to down-size the UTS Library. We do, however, need to focus more on creative value-adding if we are to stay relevant. Slides 17-24 are really the message I liked and I think they are good advice for our future.

I also came across this article via his blog (synthesize-specialize-mobilize). It sums up his thoughts about the future of our uni-library search & discovery systems (i.e. Endeca for us). A good quote from the article is:

The challenge of technology and metadata professionals will move from managing a library's own set of isolated databases to managing their library's imprint on shared global discovery platforms.

His blog is probably a good one to follow.

Libraries and building communities

These notes come from a talk I attended earlier today at the National Library of Australia on building online communities. The speaker was Chrystie Hill, Director of Community Services at WebJunction.org, from Seattle, WA.

It was interesting to hear about her journey as she spoke using stories, and didn’t just regurgitate facts.

She spoke of the shift in services for things like reference – both physical and in the virtual world. She experienced this when being educated. She has worked in the Seattle Central Library and says that the space is now much better to work in. Then she introduced her four seminal realisations (my term, not hers):

See The Great Good Place by Ray Oldenburg is about connections between people: pubs build communities.

She also spoke of John Seely Brown and The Social Life of Documents (on FirstMonday): documents build communities.

And Bowling Alone by Robert D. Putnam and the decline of civic engagement & social capital in US: capital and networks build communities.

Is your library relevant to you (& your needs)? She said hers wasn’t (at the time) and her most important need was to know what her friends were doing: individuals build communities.

Libraries were not accepting their role as community builders (maybe they still don't understand that role at all?). But US public libraries became carriers for public Internet access in the 1990s. Eventually home and work use of the Internet also grew. People soon began to find themselves on the web – publishing, subscribing & sharing. It became a story of communities and collaboration on a scale never seen before. Now libraries (& librarians) have to be involved to stay relevant. It is about conversations. It is about people who are saying “here is what I am doing”. People sit behind all the tools and experience. It is also about what your friends are doing. So many tools are now available that it can seem overwhelming, so step back and look at what is behind it all.

So, where is the library?

People are finding their own answers easily on the web themselves. Library use is going down while use of email, online bookstores and search engines is going up!

Can libraries cope where the stuff isn’t completely organised or controlled? Probably not. Many public libraries are closing in the US because they lost their relevance and then they lost their funding. See Content, not Containers (an Information Format Trends report from OCLC, 2003).

Do libraries just = books? Do our users think of us for other information needs? Do we just stop making it feel like church?

She then went back to the new Seattle City Library (image appears above in this post) and said it is what a library should look like (if only!). Real visitation went up 300% in its first year. Public access computer use quadrupled. Its spaces are very inviting and its services are very innovative: multi-lingual programs; online assistance; teen services (via MySpace) – with 50% boys participating!. They are building communities daily and get 1,000s of teens involved.

She said we must do better jobs in all libraries. Online tools help us to see our roles as connectors, facilitators, and community builders.

Currently, Chrystie is writing a book and blogging (one of several). She spoke for a while about the work of Webjunction.org – helping to build relevant vibrant, sustainable libraries in every community. Most content comes from members and partners. All of it is wrapped around social engagement. Public access computing and personalisation services were key to this and to building real communities.

What do they do?

They connect, create and learn:

Connect: using wikis, del.icio.us (others follow this without it being promoted, they just find it – they just use one tag to share stuff for all, eg. we could use AWMWSG or AWMRC), micro-blogging (they use Twitter), phone, Flickr groups, Facebook groups and events, and alternate spaces (eg. LinkedIN, engaging widely!)

Create: blogs and wikis, blip.tv (I suspect schools might find this easier to find than our content on www.awm.gov.au or our blocked content on YouTube), and staff are encouraged to contribute elsewhere (blogs, publications, etc.)

Learn: active learning is encouraged, staff/members are surveyed - What was your greatest achievement last year? (part of bi-annual member survey on webjunction.org – results were visually presented in a tag-cloud), speaking engagements, blogging internally and externally encouraged for all staff.

So what does this mean for us at the Memorial? I think we are heading in the right direction. We are not there yet, but we've made a good start and even though we might complain about some restrictions placed on us by out IT staff, they have already facilitated much more freedom and innovation in our organisation than many, may others (judging by the tone of questions asked of Chrystie). Our management too have been both supportive and visionary. How many national cultural institutions can boast that they now have these words as their first listed corporate priority for the 2008-2011 period: "Enhance online access through use of emerging web technologies and improved web content"?

Encouraging exploration in social media @ work

A friend asked me via Facebook what social media tools we've been encouraging staff to play with at work. (I used to say Web2.0 tools, but have now ceased using that term after reading something on Peta Hopkins Innovate blog .)
We could have gone with anyone of a dozen existing programs ranging from 16-43 "things" but decided to quickly tailor a program to our needs and our endorsed strategic directions for our website. Liz (our Web Manager) and I put it all together in super quick time by collaborating on the one Google Doc. It seems to have attracted enough keen participants and we are happy with the result so far.
So, here are our "ten things" (actually there are nine because thing #1 is an internal thing - applying for extended network access to Firefox browser, Facebook, YouTube, etc.):

1. iGoogle and a Gmail account (I know Yahoo is another alternative, but to keep it simple we selected Google);
2. Blogs & blogging (duh);
3. RSS and feed readers;
4. social bookmarks (we picked del.icio.us);
5. sharing presentations (eg. SlideShare);
6. social networks (Facebook & ArtShare, LinkedIn);
7. social media "things" (including: Flickr, YouTube & Podcasts);
8. wikis and Wikipedia.org; &
9. "other" tools and applications we invited participants to find and explore themselves (Zoho, Google Docs, Open/NeoOffice, CutePDF, Rollyo, LibraryThing, Last.fm).

We've used several CommonCraft videos (which I think are GREAT!) and Wikipedia definitions where available and useful to introduce each "thing" so as not to overload them with too many motherhood statements from us.
To facilitate all of this we are using Ning. It is another social network and we think it has been very helpful in facilitating: forum discussions, user profiles, blog posts, the formation of groups for projects and the hosting of videos. It isn't perfect (yet), but it is almost free (we pay a monthly subscription to get the adverts removed). Hopefully they'll eventually introduce a spell checker and some easy way to export useful discussions. It hasn't been made compulsory, but so far we've managed to get 52 staff involved - almost a fifth of our total staff. The groups we've set up focus on progressing small sub-projects such as Flickr Commons, ArtShare on Facebook, Copyright, our Digitisation Steering Group and Marketing. Just participating in our internal Ning network is itself a learning experience for some people.