Looking beyond the metrics and towards our future (Part 1 of 2)

TWITTER v. ZZZZZZ

I'd been trying to get some thoughts together for a few presentations that I have to give soon about the future of libraries (ours in particular) and a friend (@zaana) advised me late last night to take a look at the Twitter stream (#edge2011) from the Edge 2011 conference in Edinburgh, Scotland. At least the first of the two days looked to be very library-centric. A lot of the tweets seemed to be a bit too much like navel-gazing without any helpful suggestions, but there were a couple of positive and provocative ideas thrown in from some (service) design thinkers. A few ideas really helped me with my own thinking, even though it was all very late at night. More about that in a moment.

SOCIAL MEDIA METRICS

Already in my head was a little bit of a debate about some basic metrics that a colleague at work presented us with recently relating to our use of and progress with social media and social networks. They were OK, but nothing amazing, apart from a few interesting blips where certain content had really taken off. I think there are other more useful measures we could include as well such as referrals to our more traditional web content, but essentially, the point I want to make here is that for me at least I think our experience in this academic library with social media goes beyond what any metrics can actually measure. And it is in my opinion critically and positively related to the preparations we are making for our future library. That building isn't going to be designed on metrics alone and it will just be a building. It could be all about books and transactions relating to books.

UTS FUTURE LIBRARY: ASRS & RFID

So, to explain now: before we get to designing our future library, we've decided to jump in and implement two other major technology initiatives that take the focus away from books and transactions. Currently we are busy with a large team of designers working on an underground Library Retrieval System that will store and retrieve for our clients about 80% of our collections of books and journals. That will squarely refocus the library itself on PEOPLE. (Refocusing libraries on people was something I saw that was suggested at Edge 2011.) We are also busy implementing RFID technology that will assist us to take our focus away from transactions and onto the provision of more value-added services (e.g. improved and extended services for our researchers). These two initiatives will be implemented between 2011 and 2014, but there is also much to do to reshape the library and our services so that we can maximise the potential of those technologies and that is where social media comes in.

UTS LIBRARY & SOCIAL MEDIA/NETWORKS

At UTS Library we started playing around (literally playing around) with social media in 2009. Staff at all levels were encouraged to try some new platforms and to produce content for them. We also started setting up a presence and creating a sense of community in a few selected social networks. These things take a while. They don't happen overnight and I think you can make the mistake of killing it all off too soon by over analysing it before it has had the chance to grow and evolve. We've been patient.

THE REAL BENEFITS

In my view, however, the real benefit of encouraging these relatively new initiatives has been internal. Dipping our toes into social media has been a bit of a cultural fire-starter for us. We cannot hope to move into a brave new library world without some drastic changes in our own culture and our attitudes towards exploring new ideas and services. Social media has helped us with both. It has also helped reposition our "persona" from a corporate voice to a more personal voice (which is another thing I saw mentioned at Edge 2011 last night) and that is necessary because we cannot be all about people if that is just on the outside. The focus on people also has to happen on the inside.

Playing with social media has encouraged our people to learn about new platforms and about creating content for them. Those skills in both exploration of new or emerging technologies and content production are invaluable. They've also gained confidence in their writing and presentation skills and learned how to "network" more effectively (which is critical for liaison on campus). All of this has helped us promote our services and our people and now more than ever we are in demand on campus and elsewhere.

Our social media experiments have already led to the development of improved and new services for students and researchers at UTS all through establishing a culture of fun, playfulness and a willingness to try new things. They have really helped our people in the ways they use and help others to use our discovery layer and our website and that has also helped us to understand how we should improve that layer with the addition of new features and services. There is a real momentum of openness, sharing and experimentation that has developed accordingly.

THE IMPORTANCE OF TRUST

Underlying this has been a strong culture of trust at all levels of management and leadership in this library. We didn't issue a 27 page set of principles and rules for the use of social media. We simply referred to the existing UTS code of conduct for all staff and explained that for practical reasons we would concentrate our efforts on an agreed set of platforms: all the usual suspects. Everyone was treated like an adult and trusted to get on with it.

That's it for Part 1. In Part 2 I will explore a few more specific ideas about how we did this and what worked for us. (Oh, this is all straight off the top of my head after a late night following #edge2011, so I reserve the right to edit, add & change the content above over the next couple of days.)

Social media for academic researchers

Social media for academic researchersPresentation for UTS Library Research Week 2011.

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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).

Miscellaneous connections

Miscellaneous Connections

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I gave this presentation late last week to the ANZ Society of Indexers for their annual conference. It was meant to stimulate some thought about recent developments on the web and also within institutions. Maybe the following guide will help to interpret some of these slides.

SLIDES 2 & 3 (Connection)

I used these slides to draw a connection between myself and Hazel Bell, the other plenary speaker (by video from the UK). She indexed the first publication of T.E. Lawrence's Seven Pillars of Wisdom (1992 text) when it was first published by Jeremy Wilson in 1997. That text is over 80,000 words longer than the 1926 text that most people would be more familiar with and the index was invaluable to me when I curated a museum exhibition on Lawrence in 2006-08.

SLIDE 4 (Collaborators)

I am really grateful to those named on that slide as they raised my awareness and gave me new perspectives on a number of issues. We mostly used Google Docs to share comments and observations.

SLIDES 6-8 ("Indexing" the web)

Here you can see the influence of David Weinberger (Everything is Miscellaneous) and Cory Doctorow regarding the application of non-web protocols, classifications and restrictions to the web. We cannot attempt to index or classify the web in the same way we would for a book or a collection of physical objects. It isn't going to work and it isn't necessary.

SLIDES 9-11 (Connect, share & collaborate!)

Yes, connect and integrate our existing taxonomies and indexes with those available on the web. I'm not suggesting that we throw the baby out with the bath water. Folksonomies work best with taxonomies. We need to realise that what works best in web systems like iTunes, Flickr, LibraryThing and Delicious is their ease of use. You are not forced to spend days laboriously adding metadata to fields that you don't even understand. LibraryThing and iTunes draw or harvest open metadata for us from other sources. We can then add our own tags, and in some cases even comments, links and reviews.

SLIDES 12-15 (The power of sharing)

Social media allows us to share everything quickly and easily. Gary Hayes' Social Media Count brilliantly displays the amazing dynamics of social media as you watch. In 2008 I was able to share images from a world championships being run in Hawaii to the world while the race was still being conducted. Our collection management systems in cultural institutions are not that adept. So maybe we use them in conjunction with image sharing platforms like Flickr or Picasa, or maybe we just chuck out these cottage industry systems and start again, realising the importance and scope of digital media, and going with systems that are intuitive, easy to use and much less cumbersome? Even software is now being shared and users are collaborating with each other to improve it. People are also still busy having their say in blogs and using clever RSS readers to help them to read what they choose to read and not what newspaper editors think they should read or what TV news rooms want to sell them.

SLIDE 16 (Authenticity)

The web is often criticised for being unreliable. But just because something is published in a magazine, a newspaper or in a book does not make it always reliable or authentic. Even peer review is not completely reliable. So we've come up with new ways to measure how much to trust each other and judge authenticity online. eBay and craigslist are great examples of this and they've been so popular that they've effectively robbed newspapers of much of their classifieds revenue.

SLIDES 17-25 (Institutions & sharing)

Cultural institutions are realising that they need to get out there and connect with their users on the web. They cannot wait for people to come to them. The clever institutions are making their web data easily findable and easily used. Mashups are growing. These are just a few examples.

SLIDES 26-27 (UTS Library - now)

Open everything seems to be the way of the future, so with UTSeScholarship we are heading in that direction. We are also using social media to connect with our clients where they might begin their searches and to engage with them.

SLIDES 28-35 (UTS Library of the Future)

These slides present a quick tour of some of the plans we have for our future Library. We are going to put approximately 66% of our physical collection in an underground Automated Storage & Retrieval System adjacent to our new Library building and that will allow us to do much more with our physical spaces in the Library itself. (The rough dates are only indicative.) Some of the elements we are looking at will be stimulated by developments well outside traditional library and academic environments.

A quick presentation on using Twitter

I gave this quick presentation on using Twitter to my university's Teach & Learning Committee yesterday. Our Deputy Vice Chancellor (for Teaching, Learning and Equity), Shirley Alexander thought it was worth giving Twitter a try as a way of extending our reach and exposing the work of the committee. So here it is on SlideShare, below.
Oh, and one tool I used yesterday that isn't linked in the presentation is TwitBlock - a great help in ridding your followers of spammers.

Twitter: an introduction (for UTS Teach & Learning Committee)

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Of course hyperlinks still don't upload that well on SlideShare, so here they are, slide-by-slide:

SLIDE #1 https://twitter.com/signup http://delicious.com/malbooth/twitter www.slideshare.net/malbooth

SLIDE #3 http://twitter.com/ http://twitter.com/stephenfry http://search.twitter.com/

SLIDE #4 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar’s_number

SLIDE #5 http://tweetdeck.com/beta/download/ http://echofon.com/ http://www.atebits.com/tweetie-iphone/ http://bit.ly/ http://cotweet.com/

SLIDE #7 http://twitter.com/KevinRuddPM http://twitter.com/BarackObama http://twitter.com/SAlexander_UTS http://twitter.com/AnneBB http://twitter.com/search/users?q=UTS&category=people&source=find_on_twitter http://twitter.com/Twitter_Tips http://twitter.com/timoreilly

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

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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 . . .

Social media & world events

A number of people keep telling me that social media cannot save the world. Maybe not, but what a pessimistic thing to say anyway? There has actually been a lot of media recently that points strongly to the ways people are actually using social media such as Facebook, blogs and now Twitter to make or influence significant social change. Last night on the ABC's 7.30 Report I heard that the US Government has asked Twitter to not take itself off the air for regular system maintenance in case the link to what is happening in Tehran is lost. All other forms of media from Tehran are now being suppressed.
I think librarians need to better understand these social media tools in order to make the best use of them and to understand how our clients are using some of them, in our world. It is therefore wise to spend 17 minutes either watching or just listening to Professor Clay Shirky explaining social media to the US State Department (this month) on ted.com:
Clay Shirky's recent video on ted.com
And if you are further interested in the Q&A that happened afterwards, specifically about Iran, you can read that transcript here:
Q&A Transcript - Clay Shirky on Twitter & Iran

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.

Digital content & social media

A while back I was in Melbourne again to deliver a couple of talks. The prime reason was a keynote for the 2008 SPERA (rural education) conference and I also talked to members of VALA one night on much the same subject matter.
I've uploaded the presentation (using Apple's Keynote for the first time) to SlideShare, but as they are still sorting out a new way to bring hyperlinks with uploaded presentations, I thought I'd shove a quick post in my blog along with all of the URLs and some explanatory notes, so here it is (I've even corrected most of the typos!).

Digitisation, Digital Preservation & Web2.0 at the Australian War Memorial

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: social_media awm)

Notes and hyperlinks for some of the slides

Slide 4:
http://www.awm.gov.au/diaries/ww1/ This is our current major project and the diaries of all of the Australian units that served in the First World War are being uploaded progressively as we complete the scanning and checking.
http://www.awm.gov.au/database/collection.asp This is our online collection access system and users can search it for almost 300,000 digital images and catalogue records for art works, photographs, relics, and personal manuscripts in our museum collection.

Slide 13:
This slide highlights a few examples of the ways we’ve started using Web2.0 features to "tour the web" and put our content out well beyond our home website, reaching bigger social networks and engaging new audiences at the curatorial level.
http://www.awm.gov.au/podcast/index.asp RSS underpins much of Web2.0, by allowing the public to select their subscriptions and then have them delivered to them on a regular basis. The links takes you to our podcasts page. Podcasts were our first foray with Web2.0 and RSS.
http://apps.new.facebook.com/artshare/ We have just gone live with ArtShare - a program developed by Brooklyn Museum to allow for selected art works to be featured on Facebook profile pages.
http://blog.awm.gov.au/awm/2008/03/19/hmas-sydney/ The blogs have been the simplest, easiest to use model that has allowed our curators their own voice on the web about our collections and their work. Previously all content was much more formal, using institutional voice. WordPress is used by the Memorial and some of our staff use Blogger (externally, eg. this blog).
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Canberra-Australia/Australian-War-Memorial/7244252524
Facebook plunges us into growing social networks with more reach than we have and allows us to communicate with those who are more comfortable in that space. People seem more comfortable and relaxed in their feedback.
http://www.flickr.com/groups/awm/ & http://www.flickr.com/photos/australianwarmemorial/
Flickr is also a two-way process allowing us to share images with everyone and to learn from the public’s visual pointers to their interests in us.
http://www.youtube.com/user/AustWarMemorial YouTube is another vital way to engage a large audience interested in the moving image. We think it is important to re-use our content and provide interpretation of it on that large network.
http://www.pictureaustralia.org/ We’ve long been a major contributor to Picture Australia, a fantastic portal to cultural images from NLA. It is a great model for further collaborative projects along the same lines.
http://www.ning.com/ We use Ning internally as a social network platform to share ideas, learn about social media, discuss proposals and to help move projects forward.
http://www.awm.gov.au/research/browse.asp And we’ve started using del.icio.us social bookmarking to leave "muddy footprint trails" across our large website for content that isn’t well exposed or that easy to find. We are still learning what del.icio.us can do for us.

Slide 14:
http://www.flickr.com/commons We have been in touch with Flickr Commons and images from our collection are likely to be added on 11/11/08.
http://creativecommons.org/international/au/ We are seriously looking at CreativeCommons attributions to cover content that we’ve developed for our presence on the web, so as to enable its appropriate re-use.
http://buddypress.org/ As we use WordPress as our blogging platform, we will probably take a good look at BuddyPress when it goes live later in 2008. It may extend our blogs to become more of a hosted social network.
http://yourarchives.nationalarchives.gov.uk/index.php?title=Home_page Your Archives (from TNA in the UK) might offer us a good model to facilitate public contributions and a bit of personalisation relating to our archival collections.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QR_Code QR codes might be used by us in several ways to facilitate the provision of packets of information to mobile devices with cameras in and the required software. We are looking at this now.
http://www.awm.gov.au/encyclopedia/index.asp Currently we maintain our own military history encyclopedia and it is a pretty big drain on our own resources to keep adding new content, so maybe migrating the content to Wikipedia.org (and helping to manage it) or hosting a wiki where the community could contribute will work for us.
http://go.footnote.com/thewall/ We really like this mash-up that is related to the US Vietnam Veterans Memorial and we are trying to trial much the same thing with our Roll of Honour. Our trial will probably focus on the Korean War panels.

Socialising browsers & Chrome

Firefox is currently my browser of choice. I use it at home on my Macs and at work (as I managed to get in before the IT crowd started regulating use of it because like many social networks, Firefox might cause chaos, anarchy and the collapse of civilisation as we know it).
Anyway, I have started using the Yoono add-on to see whether it has any benefit in "socialising" my browser to manage feeds to my networks and perhaps to other stuff like news feeds. You too can try it here.
I'll let you know how it goes for me as I'm a really new user and still haven't explored it much. It sounds appealing and I agree with this post from ReadWriteWeb that it might enable me to keep track of a few things that have started to clutter up my Google Reader.

There have been a lot of posts about Google's Chrome browser, but I liked these early reflections best, from the wonderful JOHN TANgerine.

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.

Preservation, Web 2.0 and chamber orchestras (2) - following the lead of the Australian Chamber Orchestra with our cultural digitisation programs

This is most of the text for my recent "provocative paper" at the 2008 Museums Australia Futures Forum in Canberra. The rest of the text was made up as I talked to the slides I used, so if you wanted to hear them you should have come the the forum. My slides are now up on Slideshare (see the post above).

The Australian Chamber Orchestra (ACO) brings old music to life with their live performances. Sometimes they challenge the audience with new interpretations or even "mash-ups" of old and new music. Museums succeed in giving their own well-interpreted performance when they go beyond just shovelling huge amounts of scanned material on the web. I think it is a bit like the ACO breathing new life into old music.

Parallels (does anyone know a neater way to include a table in Blogger?):

Orchestras	Museums
Instruments, music	Collections
Performances	Exhibitions & curatorial interpretation
Tours & media broadcasts	Touring exhibitions and content on new online networks
Recorded music	Digitised collections

I think there is a further parallel in what the public expects from both orchestras and museums: a professional, engaging and enthusiastic performance. I think the ACO is a better example than a full scale symphony orchestra as it is easier for curators to identify with the artistic leadership given by Richard Tognetti, who usually leads the ACO from his violin, than the more formal orchestra conductor waving a baton from a podium.

Museum curators need to manage and care for the collections resulting from our digitisation programs just as we manage our physical collections and museum curators need to be interpreting our online content by playing "our own instruments". That interpretation needs to be delivered in many different ways. I don't think we can just assume the public will find and use it on our rather static websites. Blogs, Flickr groups, social networks and applications like Art Share on Facebook, You Tube videos, podcasts or downloadable audio guides are just a few examples of the relatively new means curators should be using to draw attention to our digitisation programs and collections. They're a little like touring exhibitions or broadcast performances, on the internet.

We need to recognise that digitisation of cultural material for preservation is also good for access. Digital assets created and acquired by digitisation initiatives must be managed and preserved. I believe that the provision of free and open access to the digitised collections of public cultural institutions is also an essential part of the process.

Using new online technologies, we can now facilitate the addition of public descriptions to these files. We can even collaborate with the public in the development of online exhibitions. But, I would not go as far as to say that simply allowing our users (or the audience to use the orchestra analogy again) to generate most of the supposed content of our websites is going to please anyone. If we use the new technologies and social networks primarily to allow users to make comments all over our online catalogues then that is the same as the ACO (or any orchestra) inviting those who have paid to attend a concert to get up on stage and have a go themselves. I believe the public want and deserve more from us than just engagement and conversation. We are being paid for our professional skills in museums, libraries and archives and have an obligation to digitise our collections and provide well-interpreted access to them online as well as other rich content for our websites, just as the ACO performs its music on stage.

I am certainly a keen advocate for social networking and going beyond “metadata” and traditional forms of museology, but there is something more fundamental to do before that kind of "window-dressing" becomes the top priority. We still need to be developing and interpreting fundamental digital collection content.

Some of my colleagues attended the first national Summit on Digital Collections in Adelaide in 2006, but despite a draft National Framework being circulated, not much has since changed. So what we have are some words on a page, but no music yet and certainly no instruments to play it with.

What do we need now? I believe we need some kind of national centre of excellence that is capable of encouraging us in the digitisation of cultural materials. But it should also provide research, advice, and facilitate collaboration, cooperation and training. Perhaps it could also coordinate a shared digital repository service (like CAN) for the poorer institutions who cannot afford their own digital storage.

Much of the advice and research is also available online from UK, US and European sites but the situation overseas is vastly different from our own environment and culture. We have different funding models, differing public expectations, different uptake and spread of broadband and mobile coverage and in many cases our national cultural institutions are well ahead of our overseas counterparts. There is nothing in Australia that meets our specific needs or is close enough geographically for us to have shared conferences, seminars and workshops without paying far too much money on overseas travel.

There are many examples of individual Australian digital initiatives that would be the envy of many overseas institutions. A quick list includes the National Library’s Pandora web archive, the Stable Tasmanian Open Repository Service, the Victorian Electronic Records Strategy, Picture Australia, and massive digitisation programs from the Australian War Memorial and the National Archives of Australia. Currently, something like a large shared digital repository and research service is really only being progressed in the Australian university sector for academic material in projects such as ARROW (led by Monash University) and Demetrius (at ANU). There is nothing like this in the Australian cultural sector.

Maybe we just need to set up an Australian partner centre under one of the international organisations, but we also need some local presence or we will all just keep moving forward in an uncoordinated manner and using vastly different file formats, standards, and even different preservation metadata. Sadly, I think too few institutions are planning for their digital future by setting up trusted digital repositories for their growing collection of digital assets. In the end, if the world decides that the only real digital repository is a certified “Trusted Digital Repository”, that is audited to standards being developed in the US (by OCLC/RLG and NARA) and Germany, will anyone in an Australian cultural institution have had a say in developing that audit checklist? That will make everything more difficult than it needs to be in the future. The “music” might be lost and even if it isn’t, we might not be able to play it.

Draft abstract for SPERA Conference Keynote paper

Here's a thing - a draft abstract that was due yesterday. I wonder whether putting it up as a blog post works? Comments are most welcome. (If it doesn't work, I may end up taking this post down in sheer embarrassment!)

SPERA Conference 2008 Keynote Paper (draft abstract)
Creative use of new and emerging technologies at the Australian War Memorial

The Australian War Memorial is busy preparing itself, both via its website and within the museum itself for the Mobile Generation. Digital content consumed on our website and available on new wireless networks within the museum (coming soon, not there yet!) will increasingly become platform independent and much richer, moving beyond simple text and images to include sound and video files. We are also changing our own approach and attitude to be less institutional or didactic and more engaging and collaborative with our community.

Our role as one of Australia's oldest national cultural institutions and the experience we have gained in our recent history with new and emerging online technologies is certainly relevant to the education sector, families and the personal development of both teachers and students. Compared to some other institutions, we have a small amount of didactic content specifically related to certain curricula, and have plans to increase this. Generally, our content and information is designed to be accessible to all and we are now making it easier to find, use and re-use, which will also be of benefit to teachers, students and parents. So, it becomes valuable content from the social history, literacy and cultural perspectives and, we may also be seen as a useful model to teachers and students with some imagination and initiative.

I will discuss and demonstrate some of our most recent and somewhat brave initiatives to expose our content and to engage with new and much larger social networks such as blog readers, Flickr, You Tube and Facebook. I will also cover our initiative to migrate our in-house Australian military history encyclopedia's content to Wikipedia.org, in an attempt to engage with an audience of “produsers”. We believe that many of our younger audience are now more reliant on some or all of these more social platforms and networks for much of their information and knowledge that older generations used to gain from traditional media such as TV, radio, newspapers and printed magazines.

Some of these initiatives may be seen as simple on the surface, but for a large and somewhat conservative national institution with a trusted reputation to protect, they can be seen as risky. Many of our colleagues in like institutions are watching us with some fascination as some have not yet been able to take the same steps. We believe that it is becoming increasingly important for us to learn more about these new “many-to-many” conversations and developing “viral” networks. Our experience has been that we can only learn through involvement, experimentation and innovation. All of that obviously involves some real risk management, as distinct from risk aversion. So far, the returns have been overwhelmingly beneficial and sometimes surprising.

The challenge for us in all of this is to maintain our advantage. We are seen as and need to maintain our position as a trusted provider or credible and authentic, high quality content.

Being miscellaneous or externalising meaning at our museum

I am reading about a May 2007 interview with David Weinberger's (author of Everything Is Miscellaneous, May 2007, Times Books) in which he referred to the fundamental change that is taking place (online) as being the "externalisation of meaning". I read about this on Seb Schmoller's blog Fortnightly Mailing. When he referred to there being no one right way to order the world, particularly digital stuff, I immediately thought the same thing about our vast digitised collections (both images and documents) that are now online and not always that comprehensively described.

So here is my take on Seb's summary of David's talk and what it means in the museum world:

• it is now simpler for people to organise or search digital things (content or collections) as they decide, rather than for them to be classified for them (eg. museum taxonomies which are not always that easy to understand);


• the links between digital things, and the tags (or folksonomies) and other attributes that people give them create a rich layer of meaning that can be drawn upon by others - and they may be better understood by others than the taxonomies we use in museums to describe our digitised stuff;


• the difference between data and meta-data is disappearing (I've not thought this one through fully, but will add some more when I do); and


• through Wikipedia and blogs and similar there is an increasingly public negotiation of knowledge, via a conversation, in which experts (curators, historians and the creators of digital collections) are decreasingly the arbiters of authority, solely through the addition of our own context.

So, if what this infers is a step along the path towards facilitating and building a better, open online community that is relevant to museums like the one I work in, perhaps this quote from Craigslist founder Craig Newmark (in an interview with David Weinberger) is also something we could well heed:

Somehow we've worked with people in the community to build an online community. We're not certain how it happened, except that we really do listen to people. We try to treat people like we want to be treated, and somehow we built a culture of trust.

In the same interview Craig compares the similarity between Craigslist and Wikipedia and again, I think there is relevance for us:

The big similarity is that both sites are built by the people who use them. Both have a culture of trust, and both are part of an historic trend where power is flowing from small groups of powerful people to much larger, but still small, groups of people.

The two go on from there to stress the critical importance and benefits (from unintended consequences) of doing good by paying attention to real customer service, listening to people (those engaged in the conversation) and following through (not just lip service).

The Memorial now has a Facebook page, a YouTube page and a presence on Flickr. And we now have a page on our website with links to them all: find it at http://www.awm.gov.au/aboutus/community.htm In doing this we've followed the fantastic example set by Brooklyn Museum and their Community page. We may not be as funky as Brooklyn have managed to be, but we are a war museum and our community will be different from theirs. All of this is an attempt to expose our digital content (or collections) to much larger networks. We are now also looking at the facilitation of tags (or folksonomies) and even deeper descriptions of some of our digitised content by this new community. That will probably have to wait until we've implemented our massive new Enterprise Content Management system as it will lay the foundations for many programs including digitisation, web publishing and improved federated search on our site across all collection management systemn and other databases containing digitised documents.

We also continue to use the AWM Blog to draw attention to our collections and the work we do on them as well as to engage the community on topis of particular interest. Some recent examples include posts from conservators, curators and historians on: Aircraft Conservation, our catalogue programs in the Research Centre and also the recent discovery of HMAS Sydney, which has attracted a great deal of interest and many comments from the community.

New rules for media or online museum communications?

I read these new rules for media first on Tony Walker's fantastic blog ABC Digital Futures and then went straight to the original source - Mark Glaser at Mediashift.

Mark's rules might at first seem only relevant to journalists and such, but the mere fact that museums are now engaged in online communications using their websites means that the rules also apply to us in a general sense. So, what I'll do is take Mark's rules and offer a museum perspective on what they mean for us more specifically. (Apologies to both original sources for a tad of borrowing.)

1. The Audience Knows More Than the Journalist: Rather than being a one-to-many broadcast, museums now must understand that they are just part of a much larger conversation that is networked and constantly evolving. So, replace "Journalist" with "Curator" (or historian, etc.) and you get the message. Our audience probably also has something valuable to contribute. A great topical example is the post we put up regarding HMAS Sydney’s recent discovery and the community’s contribution to that story. It has proved very popular and offered a perspective that we simply could not provide alone.

2. People Are in Control of Their Media Experience: The people are taking control and watching, and listening to what they want when they want. Making sure that we, in museums, provide content that is suitable for multiple platforms and entry points is critical. Increasingly, we will need to provide an option for content suitable for consumption on mobile devices.

3. Anyone Can Be a Media Creator or Remixer: But it still takes skills to use those tools and stand out from the millions of others who are doing the same thing. In a way, museums already do stand out as trusted sources of high quality content, but we need to balance what we do with regard to Rule #1 to ensure our position is not compromised here. As I've said here before, the big advantage we have is the content we can generate and provide online, particularly through our digitisation programs. Just facilitating conversations using fancy new technologies probably isn't going to be enough for us to sustain an audience.

4. Traditional Media Must Evolve or Die: The evolution that traditional museums must make online is not just in adding new features; we must change our mindset, ideas and methods to new ways. Many of our old processes are now completely irrelevant or redundant in this environment and hanging onto them has seen others bypassing us and finding new ways to search our content and collections, describe it, promote it, provide access to it, etc. Many traditional research journals are now either dead or dying and in Australian we’ve seen the death of the formerly popular Bulletin magazine. Maybe we need to look at some of our more traditional publications and move them online too. We also need to think up and use different methods for commerce in the online environment if we need to charge for services provided.

5. Despite Censorship, The Story Will Get Out: This isn’t just about censoring news stories; it also applies to new technologies like peer-to-peer file-sharing. Maybe we need to see these new technologies more as potential friends, than enemies. A good example is LOCKSS which uses peer-to-peer technology (as I understand) to safely share and store digital assets.

6. Amateur and Professional Journalists Should Work Together: The reality now is that professional curators/historians and amateur collectors, enthusiasts and historians can learn from each other and the new social media platforms not only allow this to happen, they facilitate the conversations much more readily.

7. Journalists Need to Be Multi-Platform: Museum professionals need to learn how to make best use of a host of skills to reach different audiences. I think most of us need to be familiar with digital cameras, scanners, digital recording equipment, and online technologies such as wikis, blogs, social bookmarks, RSS, tagging, mashups, social networks & collaborative technologies. We can’t just expect to engage with physical visitors nor those who come directly to our web front page.

I reserve the right to add more examples and thoughts to this post as they arise.