OCLC has recently introduced WorldShare Management Services into the Australia / New Zealand region. Come and hear how Australian libraries have been able to utilise a cooperative strategy, technology platform and management services that enable shared efficiencies and innovation.

OCLC WorldShare Applications and Services offer a new approach to managing library workflows cooperatively, including integrated acquisitions, cataloguing, circulation, patron administration, resource sharing and e-resource management. OCLC WorldShare services and applications eliminate traditional operational silos and deliver new efficiencies in library management, freeing libraries from the restrictions of local hardware and software to provide more time to focus on serving users and communities. Included with every WorldShare implementation is the discovery layer, WorldCat Local, a patron interface that empowers patrons from a single search to discover the broad range of resources including physical resources, eBooks, online services and digital objects that libraries now provide.
OCLC staff presenting during the session included Chris Thewlis (Regional Manager, OCLC ANZ), Susie Thorpe (Senior Product Manager ANZ, OCLC WorldShare and Amlib) and Angus Cook (Sales Consultant, OCLC ANZ).

Nat torkington

He’s one of my favourite speakers – always entertaining, very smart and sharp on learning and information ideas. (Plus he’s not afraid to be a bit sweary.)

• When you see people who are doing things with tech, or their services “you don’t become like them by buying the artifacts. [there is] an ocean of possible artifacts and toys.“ What we don’t see is the pedagogy behind it which is how to understand how and why it’s being used. Laptops aren’t the answer. “The transformative power if that stuff is sweet fuck all, unless you change the thinking and attitudes of the teachers and students. Otherwise you only have a classroom with Macs in it.“
• To see something that you don’t understand and see it as a threat, that’s deadly.
• Teaching as inquiry – Hypothesis > Evidence> Research > Action > Evidence > Reflection > Hypothesis (repeat). This is a good model for a way to embrace learning for (and about) the future. (One school used an open Google doc for staff which included – this is the thing I’m doing, this is what I’ve learned. Public sharing of the individual learning which validates learning and experimentation. Staff only had to pick one thing to work on at a time.)
• Don’t make the mistake of doing the futuring TO something, do it WITH someone.

I haven’t been to a full LIANZA conference for a few years (small library, small staff) and this conference has convinced me more than ever of the importance of attending the full event. There are themes outside of the official conference theme which rise during the four days. There are so many people to continue building relationships with that it can’t all be done in a day or two days.

I’m finishing this reflection with something that Nat said. On the day I was so entertained by his presentation that I missed the care for learning, libraries, and librarians that permeated his words. I think this is simultaneously a challenge, and a hope for the future.

You can make your own damn future.

Professor Linda Smith

The first keynote was Professor Linda Tuhiwai Smith from Waikato University. There was so much in her presentation that resonated with what I’m interested in.

• Maori staff (often) come into organisations with their iwi and hapu identities.  For those staff, it’s a responsibility to serve the bigger community – to serve the language, serve the culture. Therefore they are often looked to as exponents of the Maori language and tikanga. This can be part of a hidden workload – service to the organisation in powhiri, karakia, waiata, poroporoake, tangihanga etc.
• Many of our institutions try to absorb Maori into existing structures. The challenge for institutions is to engage with difference on the inside (of people), to recognise and reward (not punish) for the hidden workload.
• For institutions that want to build Maori capacity – build a long term agenda and commitment to build transformation within. Requires leadership. There is implicit knowledge that’s at work in those environments so share the values of the organisation and the people in it. Build structures for discussion – talk about the issue, then address it if reasonable. Institutional culture change can occur within a very small unit of staff. Institutions must see this as a learning journey. Figure it out together. Needs leadership which doesn’t go into panic mode when there’s a minor crisis.
• Don’t put the pressure on one Maori to carry the whole Maori world and the Pakeha world at the same time. Individuals are individuals.
• The more that Maori shape our future, the more we can determine it. Our aspirations are to engage in positive ways.

This is one of her aims for her life.

• Live a life that builds something so that other people don’t have to fight society – try and make society better.

I like it. I think Libraries can be great contributors to that idea.

Eli Nei Burger

Wow I dazzled by the bombardment of awesome from Eli Neiburger,  from Ann Arbor. His main points were about diversification of the library role – collections, production, and customer experience. He did this by using examples that illustrated what his library had been doing. The activities were exciting and inspiring, but it was the way they were thinking about the value of their services for their communities that I found the most exciting.  On a smaller more achievable scale, Matt is writing about the activities he’s been doing in Parkes in the Finding Library Futures series. Same philosophy – to steal a phrase from Matt – “that imaginative play is also the business of libraries.“)
There’s a real theme emerging about Playfulness.
It started in the presentation by Penny Hagen about using design frameworks to have a conversation with the community about their library – particularly useful for a new building or. – to start the conversation. From this another couple of themes are emerging – Just Start and Prototype/Test.
The themes of Context and Collaboration are also continuing through the presentations. I enjoyed the links that people made during their presentations with the effect that the research/initiatives/changes/ actions had on their communities.  It made their examples more concrete and made it easier for me to transfer some of that thinking to my situation. It feels like more sophisticated thinking than ‘how to do this thing’ or ‘how I did this thing’. That practical work is also important, but the examples about the difference it makes speaks to the Library’s purpose. I’m calling it next layer thinking – we’re getting beyond the objects/basic service and starting to dream and think about what could be done next. This was particularly evident for me in Tim Sherratt‘s presentation on the work Trove is doing to connect heritage collections with users. Their success is shown by the fact that users are spontaneously creating their own ways of sharing the things they find in the collection via #TroveTuesday and other ways. (Ravelry is apparently a great place for people to share the patterns they’ve found on Trove. We’re articulating value for the community rather than financial return or stuff based things. It’s really exciting.
Two practical things for me -
1. An idea that was inspired by Eli’s presentation is for APNK to expand into MakerSpaces in smaller towns. MakerSpaces (according to Eli) are extensions of what already happens at the library – photocopy, print, access to creation software. It feels like a great fit for APNK with their mission of “everyone can benefit from accessing, experiencing and creating digital content.”
2. Co-creation with our communities and APNK / Kete great places to host these co-creations.

Lorcan Depmsey OCLC Keynote Speaker

Lorcan Dempsey @lorcanD

The network repatterns the library: from infrastructure to engagement.

 

References Nanaia Mahuta’s opening keynote. Interest in the idea of culture. For him Ireland to US. As his kids gets older, raises interesting questions about the fabric of their identity. Their affiliation and freedom. Children will want to know where their parents are from. Relates to thinking about libraries and the

Main interest is in organisational terms. Contextualising and enriching network knowledge. Local stories through affiliation, pictures of local areas. Libraries will be creating spaces that allow local stories to be collected and shared.

 

Community and network interdependence. Libraries collaboration - must move from the margin to the fore. The collective resource is highly distributed.

 

WorldCat has good coverage for some places in the world, not so good in others, very light in others. Look at WorldCat as a proxy - NZ provides the best coverage of published records related to Maori (New Zealand people) culture. Not everything is in National  Library - the records are distributed. ‘Rareness is quite common.’ The types of things that relate to the texture of a place, Personal narratives --New Zealand. Spread is quite significant. To find things, “Prospect” it requires a way to think about and across many different libraries. Points to the need to think about libraries together.

 

Looks at the New Zealand presence in the published record. Venn diagram of In NZ; About NZ; By NZ authors. (Matched algorithmically from information in Wikipedia.) Most popular authors - Mahy, Cowley, Marsh, Partridge, Eden. Then looked at most popular title by holdings. (Lexicons.) Programmatically looking at holdings using subject headings to analyse. (This information will be published as a research report from OCLC.)

 

A reset moment for libraries. An opportunity what they do, where they’re directed, what’s important to them. Context of ‘Value’ discussion - ROI is the secondary question, should be asking - are you doing the right things?

 

Reconnect with host institution goals - a view that reconnect with host goals is important.

Libraries exist in the context of goals established by the organisation. Research libraries - a mission of deep exploration; Academic - student success, reputation; Publis - skills, learning, civic engagement; National - rich engagement with national identity and memory (in a new context of the networked environment,.) Changes in the parent institution is the most important driver of change, so libraries need to understand those changes so they can change to meet them.

 

Columbus Metropolitan Library - strategic plan. http://www.columbuslibrary.org/ Defining themselves in ways that support the values of their parent organisation. (rather than demonstrating their value.)

 

Shift to engagement - how to be an effective actor in research and learning environments of its users. Thinking about new services, how to engage and enable people to be successful in the way they want, in what they want to do, not how we want them to do it.

Rightscale infrastructure - rebalance in collections and systems between local, shared, and third party to improve impact and efficiency. Collaboration moves from margin to core. Thinking district/national for collections (especially print - which sometimes gets in the way of other areas we want to develop.)

Everybody can’t do everything. - consider is this going to add value for your local community - how do we share the cost of infrastructure? How are we active in our users lives in the changed way they want to do things? Focus on the success, make them work into the future, make them scalable and repeat where you can. Think about new ways of collaborating.

 

Visible expertise. Used to be invisible and neutral. If the library wishes to be seen as expert then its expertise must be seen. Library staff are absent from websites in comparison to e.g. dentists who are all over their websites and physical spaces. Databases come as lists, not as recommendations. People are entry points to the web. We’re used to valuing particular people as entry points, we rate, rank, and review things. Where is this on library sites? The expertise must be visible through its people, through its presence - you meet people in the network spaces - pull them towards yourself. ‘Need to have some gravitational attraction.’ U of Michigan indexes their librarians who appear in results as appropriate points of contact for more information. Search results include resources and services. “What people might be suitable content points?”

 

Collections: from curation to creation. Then - acquire external resources. Now - curation and creation : engage with creation, use and sharing of all information resources. People create in their work. Aim is to find the local stories and push them out so that other people can discover them. You want to disclose them into the world. You want to have discovered them. Advising, assisting, working with members of your community to create things, make them available, put them on the web. New goal to create a place where people and their research can be seen. Information activity is helping people share what they have done with the rest of the world in sensible and effective ways. Working with the information needs of their users. Exploring new scholarly forms. In the networked environment (some) people need help.

Chattanooga Public Library - 4th floor “unique because it supports the production, connection and sharing of knowledge.” http://chattlibrary.org/4th-floor

 

Space. Then: configured around collections. Now it’s configured around the user. Direct shift from infrastructure to engagement. Space is under pressure in busy libraries - collections vs. engagement with your community. NCSU Libraries - Hunt Library - space reconfigured around experience, expertise and communication rather than collections. http://www.lib.ncsu.edu/huntlibrary

 

Decentered web presence - then - discovery happened at the library. Now - discovery happens outside. Decoupling their services and creation from their corporate website and are available in other environments. Think about the multiple places where you want people to encounter you. ‘Sleevefacing’ http://www.sleeveface.com/ Not just publishing but making that information discoverable.

 

Roles: means and ends. Then goals were stable. Now- goals are changing. Structured around meeting new goals. Roles change to address shifting goals > how do I reassign things? Roles shifting. Emergence of more enterprise role. what’s important are the goals rather than focusing on what the role is. Focus on ends. Ready to read corps - getting out into the community.

 

Do locally what creates the most distinctive value.

Share what makes sense for efficiency and impact. Buy the rest.

 

Shared print. Then - how big was your mountain of stuff? Now - value relates to system wide curation of and access to print collections.

 

Digital and systems infrastructure. Now: look for scale for efficiency and impact.

 

enterprise + insitutional innovation. how to create structures, trust, agreements etc for collaboration?

 

Welcome Drinks with the vendors

Welcome drinks with the vendors
A great evening great Kai and lots of networking, meeting the vendors catching up with colleagues
Chance to start working out who I wanted to see.

Nanaia Mahuta

Our first keynote, Nanaia Mahuta spoke.

These are the things that she said that resonated with me. (Paraphrased because my notetaking abilities were hampered by a dying phone battery.)

• The seen and the unseen make up the world of knowledge.
• Context is important. Place is important. Somewhere like this marae is timeless.
• Notice the powerful transformative nature of knowledge.
• Navigate through information then pause and reflect to create knowledge.

She also talked about individuals going out into the world, learning new things, then incorporating that back into their lives.

That got me thinking about the opportunities for LIANZA in the future. I’d really like to see LIANZA respond to the future from a uniquely NZ point of view which includes a Maori perspective. I’d like to see us hold our own powhiri as an expression of that. (‘Hold’ in a more holistic sense, a sort of mashup of ‘run the event, hold the line, look after everything’ sense.) I’d like to see us pay more than lip-service to the idea of biculturalism and I’d like to see libraries follow that. I’m not sure how realistic this is because it would mean a fundamental change to organisational culture which would be difficult. However, linking it back to the globalisation/localisation discussion, it’s a smart choice which preserves the uniqueness of our NZ philosophy towards information and knowledge while at the same time giving us a position on the global stage.

On a closer-to-home note, her keynote has given me some ideas about how to frame the changing position of the library (I work in) to the kura. The people who are not in the library are very focused on a library that provides access to resources which I feel is a very limited view of what the library could be in the school. It could be a place of turning information into knowledge, a still place (as Brendan described it) while at the same time still being exciting (in terms of learning) which is what I want it to be.

Obviously this all needs much more work. I hope that the next few days continue to change my perspective on libraries in New Zealand.