The Bookless Library?

(Reblogged from something I posted here: http://informationonline2013.wordpress.com/2012/08/06/the-bookless-library/)

This article in The New Republic by David A. Bell is a pretty interesting read about the NYPL and its struggle for a slice of the future, albeit on a much larger and more public scale than ours: http://www.tnr.com/article/books-and-arts/magazine/david-bell-future-bookless-library?page=0,0

Much of the ground covered in the article will be familiar to those of us interested in the subject matter, i.e. us and our institutions. It is a long read, but it covers issues including the place of books, ebooks, obsolescence of core library functions, "banishing" books from the library proper (to offsite storage), nostalgia for dead-tree books, Copyright & licensing, the consolidation of library spaces, access to knowledge, the evolution of digital formats and digitisation of text, acquisition, "curation" and building design. All in a climate of constant change. Ring any bells?

I do not think that we will become glorified internet cafes, but I do agree that change is afoot and we must change with it. I enjoyed seeing a couple of things in the article, such as: libraries as communities; a nod to the library's role in the collaborative consumption (of knowledge); and recognition that libraries are a source of crucial expertise, not least with regard to acquisition. David Bell recognises that libraries are "homes to lovingly compiled collections that amount to far more than the sum of their individual printed parts" and recognises that special collections are to be treasured. He almost starts to imagine new roles for us, but stops short of recognising those large public libraries that have already taken such steps such as the British Library (and its BIPC), The State Library of Queensland (and The Edge) and some new programs led by the NYPL itself.

Bell says, and I agree, that the digital revolution is creating the need for more spaces of physical interaction and the easy access to online academic courses will not kill off the desire to rub shoulders with fellow students and professors. He goes on to encourage more partnerships between public libraries and universities and also to advocate spaces in libraries in which readers can organise appropriate activities themselves.

What is missing? I guess some explanation and understanding of the role that librarians have in properly curating their collections as experts. By that I mean researching, acquiring, describing & arranging, promoting, exposing and encouraging the discovery of library collections, no matter what format they are. Being more active in such roles establishes a valued role for the future that cannot be eroded by the march of online services. Also I think he deals with libraries as mostly keepers of text-based, largely monograph collections and therefore he fails to recognise that knowledge and culture these days is not just contained in books and journals. Increasingly, other richer and more engaging media formats are being used for storytelling, as containers of knowledge and for the sharing of ideas. Libraries need to understand this and part of that understanding is a new more proactive research and acquisition process that comes to terms with these new creative practices. Finally, I think he might have touched on our role in encouraging public debate of pressing social issues, in part because we provide access to the knowledge that gives a deeper level of understanding, but also because we are or should be active participants in some of the themes: coping in a digital age; the democratisation of knowledge and opening access to it; and being more sustainable in our daily lives.

Thanks to Hamish Curry @hamishcurry for alerting me to this on Twitter. Let me know what you think if you get a chance.

UTS: Designing our Future Library

UTS Future Library - CCA Educause

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I gave this presentation yesterday at CCA Educause 2011 in Sydney. We are still designing and planning, so his isn't about the result, it is more about how we are getting there. From the abstract:

The game has changed. It is no longer just about text or about us (as librarians) and how we see the world being organised or classified. To some extent we need to catch up with students and assist them, the same applies to researchers and academics though in other ways. We can only do this if we understand them, know what they want and know how they’d like us to help. We also need to understand the new landscape and environment ourselves and my guess is that most in the library and educational world do not.

In this presentation I’d like to discuss some of the elements I see as necessary in a more inclusive, participatory approach to planning our future library. I hope to illustrate an approach that isn’t just about the technologies we will use, but also the way we select them and how we will deploy them. I will cover the following points as I illustrate that approach:

• We need to learn (again) how to be active, creative, innovative and inclusive contributors in order to fully understand and utilise fully some of the new technologies we are deploying. Most cannot fully be understood by observation alone nor by reading about them in books. We also need to re-learn how to see possibilities, not problems and to be brave enough to have a go. Any form of innovation has almost been sidelined by an obsession with risk management that has become risk avoidance at all costs.
• We need to learn how to take responsibility for our own future and do things for ourselves, not wait for a consultant to design a matrix to contract out the risk, experience, learning, responsibility and activity. Nor should we simply wait for our masters or government to invest in our future. Yes, there are hard decisions to make, but if we were really pressed by an emergency or disaster such decisions about what really matters and what doesn’t would be made efficiently and quickly, so why not try to do it without that imperative? Do we really need adversity to inspire action?
• We must also understand the power and benefits of randomness and chaos. Freedom from yesterday’s policy barriers, useless governance structures, risk aversion, committee bureaucracy; and freedom to explore new ways and new methods is vital. Creative innovation is almost completely ruled out and its sharp edges are dulled by a comprehensive and bureaucratic set of rules, procedures, guidelines and policies covering everything we might do. We should not rule out the unknown so completely because we fear it. Sometimes the unknown contains the answers.
• Liaison needs to be extended both within our own communities and networks and also outside our communities because there is a great deal we can build on. There are valuable partnerships to be made from that liaison and external collaboration. Not all the answers and inspiration will come from within or the familiar.
• Can we crowd-source and co-design better ideas, services and solutions to some of our challenges and even provide much-needed infrastructure more effectively using social media technology? Has anyone really tried? We must understand the power and influence of communities and living networks and how connections are best made and facilitated within these.
• Do we listen to what our users are saying and how can we do that better these days? Can we set up convenient, intuitive and more engaging ways for users to communicate with us (e.g. encouraging conversations instead of complaints through the use of Wallwisher feedback software). When our users or students express interest in academic services like libraries, do we listen and respond accordingly, i.e. seriously consider taking up their ideas and making them real (examples here include our work with Designining Out Crime students, taking up student ideas for the Augmented Campus, regular displays of student art and design work in the Library, and our Digi-stories competition).

We are not modelling our future library on someone else’s blue-print. Some major technologies that we will incorporate in it (i.e. ASRS & RFID) will allow us to deliver different services and to provide new spaces within the library itself. They will also require us to incorporate enhanced search and discovery tools online and students are already indicating what else they’d like to see in that respect on portable platforms. Our solution is evolving “organically” from within and from our research, the UTS community and our networks. It has grown and changed as a result of some “experimentation” and play, even over the last 12 months. It is also being combined with encouragement from senior managers to explore the use of new web and mobile technologies and shared attitudinal change from within including a more inclusive, trusting, motivated and less hierarchical approach to strategic planning. In that respect I will discuss how are we giving library staff at UTS more autonomy, mastery and purpose.

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.

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 . . .

Emerging technologies

What a misused term. I think that most people using the term now in many public institutions and libraries are actually describing well-developed and long-used technologies that they think are new or emerging. It says more about how far behind they really are. Sorry, but it does.

Can Sydney Surf the Digital Sunami?

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

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

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

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

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

e-with everything

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

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

giant clouds

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

global universities

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

banks 2.0 - try again

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

gen-z kids

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

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

"lymphatic systems"

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

outdoor media

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

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

"beaches"

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

summing up

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

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

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

Using iPods in the Museum

I heard an interview (online) today with Chris Alexander from the San Jose Museum of Art. They are doing some very cool stuff with iPod Touch devices and a wifi network in their museum. The interview is podcast on the here.
If you don't have the time to listen, these are the main points that I picked up:

• they are mainly using it for a current exhibition and also to feature the work of some of the artists in their collection who have been filmed at work in their own studios;
• they have a multi-use approach with delivery of the same material via many platforms using their YouTube channel, RSS, iPods that visitors can check out, a wifi network in the museum and as audio files on their website;
• they were originally using video iPods in "notes-only" mode, so they were locked down for use specifically in the museum;
• they are now using iPod Touch devices because they offer a better interface and more possibilities including the upload of user comments (not quite there yet);
• they deliver all content to visitors via a wifi network or website only available in the museum, so that saves synch-ing or updating 20-30 devices for new or changed content;
• if you don't have an iPod or iTouch you can check out one of 20 they have now and they will eventually have 30;
• other US museums experimenting in this space include MoMA (NYC), SFMoMA, Denver, but Chris says a lot of museums are looking at using the same technology;
• he said the URL for their online iPod content was sjma.mobi but on a computer terminal it comes up as http://www.sjmusart.org/m/#_home;
• Chris said they go into the artist's studio and film them working, but only one in 30 has declined their suggestion to do this and some of the artists have embedded their YouTube vids on their own sites too; and
• again he mentioned their intention to use the devices to allow users to upload their own comments about their experience.
  

I reckon this is a great model for us and many other museums. I'm not sure whether their wifi content will only work on Apple's devices and I think that might be a bit limiting in an Australian setting.
SJMA's home page is here: http://www.sjmusart.org/

Low-Cost Multi-point Interactive Whiteboards Using the Wiimote

Wow . . . just wow! Johnny Chung Lee is really clever. He has come up with a complete electronic whiteboard system that you can make yourself really cheaply. You can find the hardware and software instructions, including a very popular YouTube video and the software downloads on his Wii Project page here. You can also view a great demo of his new projects on TEDBlog here. (I tried embedding the video here using the code they give on TEDBlog, but for some reason Blogger didn't allow the video content to load.)

The only limits to what we might be able to use this for in museums are the bounds of our imagination.