Money or Love?

Looking at the library Flicker groups and found myself fractured. Am I a cataloguer? Am I photographer? Am I anything? If anyone can get anything (photos and cataloguing) on the internet, why pay money for it?

Also, If you want people to tag pictures on your pictures database, how will you induce them to take the time? It is time consuming to open a flicker account and post pictures, to take pictures in the first place. Why do people love us so much that they would want to do all that?

It reminds me of the other day. I had to book tickets at the opera House and I turned on my P.C., filled in the registration form, chose my tickets (filled in my credit card number), paid my I.P. bill and pressed enter. Low and behold they charged me a $7.50 "service" fee. What was the service? I did all the work.

Flickered

I checked out the video on Flicker; which pretty much said it all.

The sound flickered all the way through; but I get the picture.

It's about sharing photos, preservation (though when some unknown person somewhere can pull the plug at any time, I don't really buy into that one).

It's all good if you think about the thing in the moment and don't worry too much about tomorrow. But that's not what we do in Libraries and especially not in the Mitchell Library. We think about people in the future and people in the past. It's what they call HERITAGE.

Checked out Flicker for the State Library photos. Don't they like that Mitchell Library Facade!!! Well we all do but it took me heaps of photos to get inside and look at the really cool stuff. How like life!!!

Opportunities for the State Library

1. Sharing information with library colleagues, in the library and in other institutions
2. Working teams can cooperate on projects in their own time
3. Keeping clients up to date with things happening in the library
4. Collecting unsolicited feedback
5. Use of a new easy to use tool
6. Encourages new writers to contribute by putting their work out there quickly
7. Information on a wide range of informal subjects (ephemera on the net).
8. Sharing information with “families” of individuals (e.g. community organisations).
9. Current information is off paper (killing fewer trees?)
10. Linked to the State Library website blogs could be an accessible way to get information
across, attractive to younger clients

Working it Out in Your Head

One of the things from week one of the course that really got my head buzzing was how blogs can be used to work out things in your head. Sure, I like to work things out. But do you really need a computer to do it? (What about energy shortages and “global warming”?)

Surely that’s what you have a brain for?

A piece of paper and a pen can be helpful tools as well or you can use whatever comes to hand. Take Lieutenant Ray Stewart (1914-2001) of the 2/29th Australian Infantry Battalion who wrote his diaries on a roll of toilet paper and several note books during World War II (27 July to 12 September 1942).

Writing it down helped Lieutenant Stewart survive the Second World War and his insights help us to survive too. It could all have been erased if it had been put up on the internet.

Better than that. Making such diaries was illegal in time of war and he could have been penalized if caught. Writing it on toilet paper meant the diaries weren’t only a great legacy to succeeding generations, they could also be fully recyclable!

What About the Quality of the Text?

On the video I watched poor old Stephen Fry wondering “what do I do now?”

All those years learning to act at R.A.D.A. must seem pretty meaningless to him when he sees the legion of amateur video clips and “reality TV” that you can watch on the internet.

I know how he feels.

For nine years I have studied to write properly and express myself well, with some success. Now I face the prospect of wading through vast amounts of poorly expressed data that we have to sift through to make any sense of. Why do I want to do this?

Surely I’m too “time poor” to face this task.

The opportunity for libraries and information professionals is (as it always has been) to act as guides to the sea of “information”. Sifting and evaluating it to bring the best of it to our clients. As experts in information we can add value to the internet so that clients can actually find WHAT THEY WANT.

It’s Not About Living in the Past (It’s About Living in the Present)

Many people can’t imagine a time when there were no mobile phones because they have never lived with any other situation. What did we do before email? We sent each other a note or went round to their house and paid them a visit.

Another thing we did was write in diaries. The other day I went to the Mitchell galleries where I saw a diary in a note book where the author wrote about going to an Abba concert in the 1970s. Where would this be now if it were written on a blog? Out in the invisible ether, deleted from the hard disk of history to be no more.

History is important because it lets us track the changes of civilization. Without this we are at the mercy of institutions that say there has never been CHANGE, there has only been the situation we are in now; which is a lie.

Lifelong Learning Isn’t New

From the time of the Industrial Revolution people have been complaining about how the times have been changing at an ever accelerating rate.

In Victorian times workers’ institutes helped working people update their skills. So, they couldn’t do it on their laptop. You can always read a book on a horse drawn bus.

In the past thirty years (of my working life) the mantra has always been “update your training; you won’t be in the same job for life” (how wrong could they be about that one; I've been doing this job since 1987).

The Internet means you don’t have to go out of the house to update your skills. So you save your bus fare; you spend the money on your subscription to the gym.

Library Luddite?

Synchronistically I found these quotes in a book called The Enclopedia of Crime Scene Investigation by Michael Newton:

"Inventor, n. A person who makes an ingenious arrangement of wheels, levers and springs, and believes it civilization". ----Ambrose Bierce

"If the human race wants to go to hell in a basket, technology can help it get there by jet. It won't change the desire or the direction, but it can greatly speed the passage". ---Charles M. Allen.

The thing is the techology and these little boxes called blogs are only one of a range of options that we might choose to get our (the Library's) message across. They just happen to be the newest "sexiest" version.

Before we start "saying" things willy nilly shouldn't we work out what we think, what we want to say and how we want to say it?

Possibilities for the Client

Loved the Stephen Fry video. Love the possibilities of Blogs. A bit nervous of putting myself up on the web (again!!!!!). It feels like you're being another person, how weird is that?

Putting myself in the shoes of a user of the library this might be good. If you were a shy person wanting to give feed back and not wanting to talk face to face (which makes me feel most comfortable) you might think this kind of thing very cool.

It means we will get a lot more of what our readers really think. Not just trying to be nice. When we get the good oil from them we can act on it and move forward as a library.