Ann, Anna, Katie: Librarians swap smocks for hard hats
Carolyn Robertson, Libraries and Information Unit manager, has recently been out and about in Sydney and Wanaka. She’s been giving interesting presentations on how Christchurch libraries have handled this brave new world for libraries.
We’ve made PDF copies so you can read her presentations:
There is no-one like Sallyheroes for grabbing your attention. Sally is Sally Pewhirangi, a saviour for time poor librarians who want to try and keep up with what’s happening in the library world. Sally casts a lively eye over a vast range of library professional resources and alerts us via Twitter and her blog Finding Heroes to interesting articles and news.
Subscribe to her blog or follow her on Twitter and you will be informed and entertained.
And the reference to “no Dewey, all face out displays, 6ft alligator” – it’s about Lakeshore Library in New Orleans that has rebuilt from ruin to portacom to shiny new library following Hurricane Katrina. I’m sure the story will resonate with many Christchurch librarians.
Scrolling down the first page a number of Christchurch names and experiences jumped out – Penny Carnaby talking about the Capturing History project to record the impact of the quakes and the recovery process and Joan Simpson talking about how the University of Canterbury Library coped with the impact of the earthquakes.
Debbie Fox has blogged on her conference experience, now you can read in more depth the ideas that excited her.
Well my first LIANZA Conference is now over and I am jotting some thoughts down as i await my flight back to Christchurch. I have enjoyed the experience immensely and the last three days have done much to recharge my all-but exhausted batteries!
Highlights?
Many things stand out as making this a memorable experience for me not least of which is the sense of collegiality with colleagues from across the country but especially with fellow CCL librarians. Other memories which I will carry with me – the eerie similarity of the Michael Fowler auditorium to our own beloved Town Hall; the haunting music and poetry of MC Apirana Taylor and of course some truly inspirational keynote speakers – in particular Andrew Green (Wales), Michael Houlihan (Te Papa) and Jenica Rogers (New York). These speakers whilst acknowledging some very real challenges ahead for our profession in the next few years were also able to engender some hope for the future.
Sometimes however it is the simple things that resonate with us and give the best opportunity of trying some small thing that may make a difference to our customers. Andrew Booth, an evidence based library and information practice exponent from the UK discussed the idea of helping people get the best outcome with the way they currently search for information instead of always trying to force our own concepts of information literacy upon the hapless searcher! A simple notion with much to recommend it?
LIANZA 2011 conference kicked off for me with a very early arrival at the airport for the flight to Wellington (after a very late arrival the previous evening from Melbourne). Feeling a little weary the morning was spent checking into the hotel, hot chocolate with CCL colleagues and registration.
The afternoon was taken up with two overseas keynote speakers (Martin Molloy and Molly Raphael) dealing with the problems public libraries face in this the era of the credit crunch. Most of us have heard of the difficulties facing UK libraries in particular – 400 branch and mobile libraries have closed there. A very sobering statistic for our profession.
Exhibitors are in evidence everywhere and it is interesting to see what is new in the marketplace especially as most of them have the added incentive of chocolates, free bags and the opportunity to win an iPad 2!
Day two in Wellington has provided the opportunity to meet up with some fellow MIS students at the ‘Newcomers’ morning tea and listen to a very thought provoking speaker – Dr Aroha Mead speaking about WAI 262. She gave us the essence of this very lengthy 1000 page document in a concise and sometimes humorous presentation. A visit to the Te Papa library will be the highlight of my afternoon today. Days are full on and surprisingly exhausting with the sheer amount of information on offer and networking with colleagues from a diverse range of libraries.
The blog Books and Adventures features the latest news, interviews and features from writer-educator Dr. Matt Finch. Two recent posts have related directly to us at Christchurch City Libraries and are well worth a read (as is the rest of the blog):
The Diversity Forum is a unique national convention, now in its seventh year, at which people involved in race relations, human rights and cultural diversity come together to share ideas and good practice.
The theme this year was ‘People in harmony’ which was also the theme for Race Relations Day. We attended a variety of different sessions but failing to split ourselves into two or more we couldn’t go to all of them. Some of the key ones were:
Two new books were launched this year. Tangata Tiriti from the Treaty Education Group is a new resource specially written for migrants as an introduction to our very first immigration document. It’s a fun workbook designed for educators or personal use.
The second was introduced to us at the Diversity Librarian Network session. Jenny Magee, the editor, presented New to New Zealand: ethnic communities in Aotearoa: a handbook, an updated introduction to the myriad of minority communities in New Zealand. Look for it in your library or you can ask us – we won the pop quiz and the prize was our very own copy.
We both agreed that a highlight for the event was seeing Deaf Aotearoa receive an award for their work in producing a National Anthem DVD featuring all three of our official languages. Very heartwarming and beautifully presented.
Here are some suggestions on how to keep up-to-date with what’s happening in the diversity arena in Aotearoa:
Join the mailing list of the Human Rights Commission to receive their newsletters. You can choose from 9 different titles – some relate specifically to the Diversity Action Programme and race relations, while the others deal with disability, transgender and Treaty issues
Instead of another quantitative study of how students use their library, the Ethnographic Research in Illinois Academic Libraries group employed anthropological principles to see how students really interacted with them. The results surprised them:
The majority of students — of all levels — exhibited significant difficulties that ranged across nearly every aspect of the search process.
And even though students had problems finding the right information, they didn’t ask for help as:
Librarians are believed to do work unrelated to helping students, or work that, while possibly related to research, does not entitle students to relationships with them.
This article is about academic libraries, but I found in it some unexpected insights on how the public might view us, and how that affects the value we can give them.
The team that covered the Auckland Writers and Readers Festival this year never quite got to do its Library Liaison session, where we report back and encourage and inspire others with what we learned and encourage colleagues to have a go next year. Events have overtaken us. But here’s a few facts, some highlights, and some noise.
This is New Zealand’s biggest literary festival : This year’s festival set a record attendance of over 32,000 – up 21 per cent on figures in 2010.
There is an incredibly popular schools programme – held over two days, it offers subsidised transport to schools, and kids can bring books to be signed. Many of the top authors take the time to work with young people.
Web traffic always gets a bump when we cover a festival like this – it makes sense to put the library where the reading crowds are
Here are some of the sounds of this year’s festival, recorded in the field in Auckland: Atka Reid and Hana Schofield share some thoughts on libraries, and there’s also some crowd noise and a manic street preacher:
Highlights
Let’s start with the New Zealand Listener Gala Night which featured eight guests telling true stories – all based on a single letter of the alphabet. It was a great format – personal, quirky, funny and hopefully, a sign of things to come. It was so much better than straight readings – not that readings aren’t great, but this was something of the author’s own life or experience that wouldn’t necessarily have made it into a book.
The largest audience ever at a festival event was An Evening with A.A. Gill which took festival entertainment to a whole new level. Gill and ‘moderator’ Al Brown had been fishing earlier in the day. Brown’s moderation mainly consisted of him dodging a succession of sharp-witted barbs from Gill, before the nerves subsided and everyone decided to play nice. Wildly entertaining.
Naomi Oreskes’ ‘Michael King Memorial Lecture’ laid out the history of the damage wrought by contrarian scientists was immense, frightening and meticulously researched. On science and doubt can be heard on Radio New Zealand’s website.
Other popular sessions included New Zealand film-maker Vincent Ward with Charlotte Ryan; James Fergusson’s hour-long exploration of the Taliban with Sean Plunket; an innovative performance of music and spoken word by the Auckland Philharmonia Orchestra, and of course, This one’s for Christchurch, which you’ll get a chance to see in September as Putting words to the feelings. Is it any wonder the audiences turn out when the organisers manage to harness such an array of talent?
There’s always a good visual session or three at the festival, and this year Peter Simpson’s Leo Bensemann presentation was a bit of a feast. Fantastica is an awesome work – and it would be great to see a Christchurch exhibition of Bensemann’s artworks at some stage. However the real highlight for me was the elderly woman who brought in some original pieces for the author to look at. It was Antiques Roadshow in real life.
Then there was the twitter wall – technology for fun. You could tweet anything with #happy in it and there was a chance it would show up on the twitter wall above the bookstore. The camera was pointing at the crowd and if people moved, big blue dots formed around them, like hot spots. Unlike the ones that you see in airports which are actually Flash movies, this seemed to be pulling tweets from a live feed. Very cool.
It’s my sincere hope that we can continue to cover events like these – it’s really important for libraries to support writers, and we have a tradition of developing great writers at our library – Margaret Mahy, Bill Nagelkerke. Events like these really sharpen writing skills, and are great to give insight into the literary world.
The Auckland festival crew always look after us and are an amazing team. My thanks to them and to my colleagues who take on the challenge – their dedication, professionalism and desire to deliver made it all look easy.
2011 was my last festival for the library, as I am moving on to other things. If you get the chance to go to a festival, I encourage you to take it. You won’t be able to go and sit there and soak it all in – you’ll need to do some interviews, record some audio and edit it, take photos and learn some technical skills. Report back as fast and as fearlessly as you can – it’s a great experience and a wonderful opportunity.
Sally Pewhairangi at Finding Heroes has done an interesting series of blog posts about how New Zealand public libraries use of social media - in particular, Facebook and Twitter – and measuring the results by number of followers, Klout (a ranking system) etc.
I recommend signing up to Sally’s most excellent Daily News – she curates library news from New Zealand and around the world, and kindly delivers it to your inbox. You should also follow @Sallyheroes if you are on Twitter.
The 
