New Librarian’s Symposium (’08)

This symposium was held in Melbourne on the 5^th and 6^th of December, 2008. I realize that this conference happened 4 months ago, but better late than never! (?). I wanted to make sure that I shared a few points about the conference because several presentations covered technology/ideas that are not yet being used by libraries in New Zealand.

“23 things” was talked about in several presentations. “23 things” is an online exercise, essentially, where librarians sign up for the project and each week they search and participate in a different Web 2.0 application or technology. I found this to be an interesting tool to get the technophobes among us to give Web 2.0 applications a go. This exercise allows them to explore areas that they had no reason to tinker with before. This link has a good example of one attempt by a library. “23 things” (inspired by 43 Things, a website that challenges people to “list your goals, share your progress, and cheer each other on”) is a way for the more technologically hesitant librarians to sign up and use Web 2.0 and think about how these applications could be useful to the libraries.  The University of Michigan has altered it to 13 things.

Many of the younger librarians who have tried to start Web 2.0 initiatives have found great difficulty getting fellow tech-hesitant librarians among them to participate. Unfortunately justifications or alternatives were not discussed.

Common Craft was brought up by many presenters as well. This website is useful for those people that are too embarrassed to ask their colleagues what RSS or Twitter is. You can just go to the website and find a video that explains ‘in plain English’ quite a lot of popular technology/ideas (You just have to put up with the American accents, which even I find annoying).

A talk about keeping up-to-date with the library profession and web technology inspired me to make a little more time to read through those e-mails sent from all of the lists that I subscribe to. Or, to take stock and unsubscribe and find something better. Some general advice from the speaker, Michelle McLean from the Australian Library Corporation, was to read journals, go to conferences and training sessions, network (librarians are supposed to be sharing people, aren’t we?), bookmark websites using Del.icio.us, etc. They are mostly suggestions that are not new to a lot of us. But, I think it is useful to keep in touch and keep reading. It inspires us about our profession, giving us new (and used) ideas to apply to our own work.

Gillian Hallam from Queensland University of Technology spoke about the potential of ePortfolios. These are widely used in the U.S. for doctors and engineers. It is a way that an applicant can show a little more about him/herself as well as all of the essential CV material, providing a deeper view of a person. Look at this ePortfolio to see an example.

 

150th Tukutuku Panels Project

First Design Workshop Warm-Up by CCL Staff, on Flickr

On Tuesday 17 March colleagues from all over the library network met for an initial workshop on the 150th Tukutuku panels project. Each team in the library will create a tukutuku panel which tells the story of their library or their team’s role within the library.

Facilitated by Aurelia Arona and Paula Rigby (Christchurch City Council Maori Art Advisor) the session was a great opportunity for team representatives to learn about tukutuku and to start thinking about ideas for the design of their panel.

The panels will be contemporary, combining traditional patterns with more contemporary designs and materials to symbolise aspects specific to our library’s history, our community, our natural surroundings, our role in the wider library team. By using non traditional materials we will be free from observing much of the tikanga surrounding traditional materials.

Each team will be provided with a 1200 x 600 pegboard panel on which rows of half round dowel are glued and painted black. We can use “scoubidous” – colourful plastic cords, to weave the base patterns and to lash objects to the panel (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scoubidou) Objects such as buttons, beads and other treasures to embellish the designs. Once the panel is at the halfway stage it’s time to get out customers involved – they can help with the weaving or contribute objects, ideas etc. The idea is to work together and have some creative fun while celebrating your team and library.

There are many ways teams can contribute – weaving, design ideas, donating materials, recording the process with words and /or photographs, writing the explanation of what the design symbolises and promoting the community weaving sessions to customers. At the first training day teams were working together sharing ideas and this can continue by using the message board that had been created.  http://staffforums.ccc.govt.nz/ccc/forums/728/ShowThread.aspx#728

Upon completion, the panels will be displayed on the website and our customers can vote on their favourite one. The ‘Peoples Choice’ prize is a team morning tea.

There will be two Library Liaison sessions in April which will cover similar information. Paula and Aurelia have prepared an excellent print overview: Te Puna Mahara

 

Tamatea, Otakou Marae

Tamatea, Otakou marae, Otago Peninsula

One of the great things about getting to stay on different marae around the country is that by doing so you get to hear the history of the place in which you are staying. Darryn Russell, Director of Maori Development at the University of Otago, and tangata whenua of the area in which we were staying told us quite a bit about the whare that we were occupying this weekend.

The wharenui is called Tamatea and unlike most meeting houses is not carved. Certainly it appears that way from a distance but Darryn informed us that their meeting house is actually a replica cast from plaster on the interiors and concrete on the outside. This was done due to issues of cost (a cast whare requires less ongoing maintenance) and also due to a lack of master carvers available. The project of a new whare was started in 1940 as part of the centennial celebrations of the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi and the building was completed in 1943. The casts were taken from a whare held at the Otago museum which had Ngati Porou origins. Ngai Tahu and Ngati Porou are both iwi who whakapapa back to two brothers, namely Tahu Potiki and Porourangi. It was decided that it would be alright to create a copy of a northern whare given these connections.

The marae complex also includes a church/museum in a similar style which is decorated with casts of painted rafter boards (kowhaiwhai) as well as woven tukutuku panels. I snapped a few pics of these for you to see since everyone will be in the throes of designing their 150th tukutuku panels now. Maybe you can get a little inspiration from the photos below -

 

Hocken is chocka of goodness

This afternoon we were lucky enough to get a talk and tour around the Hocken library.  Our tour guide was Anna Blackman who is responsible for Archives and Manuscripts.  The collection is sooo cool.  If you think ANZC’s got some treasures (and it does) Hocken blows it out of the water.  With 8500 linear metres of archives of mostly Otago-related material you’d better believe there are some gems in there.  I wanted to fossick but that sort of thing is frowned on, I’m sure.

As well as having a nosey in the stacks/archives we had a look at the pictorial collection, and were shown the gallery, currently hosting a Ralph Hotere exhibition.  Hotere was a Frances Hodgkins  fellow at the University of Otago forty years ago in 1969 and it was interesting to see see the original artworks that were previously only familiar as art from the books of various writers such as Hone Tuwhare.

Anna also gave us a presentation looking at what of the Hocken is available online, particularly looking at their He Taonga Mokemoke project which involves around fifty photographic images of Māori people who are unidentified.  The idea is that by pointing these images online members of the public may be able to help in, not only identifying the tupuna pictured but thereby also allowing whanau to have some input in how the images are used/displayed.

Anna also talked about Hakena, which is the online “catalogue” of what is held by Hocken and is something that I’ve found really useful in MLIS projects and in helping ANZC customers.

 

Palmerston is…kei te pie

Terrisa, Carol Brandenburg (of Lincoln) and Georgie outside McGregors, Palmerston

Yeah, I wasn’t kidding about the mutton pies.  Choice.

 

Blogging at 100 kph

Blogging from the front seat of a van speeding down the road in Otago?  Pretty damn flash isn’t it?  The reason I’m here and not at my rather more stationary desk is that I and colleagues Haneta Pierce, Terrisa Goldsmith and Georgie Waihape are on our way to Dunedin for the annual Te Rōpū Whakahau Te Waipounamu hui at which Maori library workers from around the mainland get together to learn, share and explore.

So far the trip is going swimmingly.  We’ve passed 4 Alpaca farms, we’ve practised our LIANZA waiata (you didn’t know there was one?  Well shame on you) and next stop is mutton pies in Palmerston.  We’re looking to arrive in Dunedin in the early afternoon and will be checking out the Hocken Collections when we get there.  There are sure to be lots of interesting things to see and hear about there.  No doubt. 

More later.

 

NZ On Screen

Another NZ film/moving image resource is NZ On Screen. Although when I try to load it, my work PC is begging me to “PLEASE update flash player…it will also be useful for other sites!” Hmm, I love it when my software takes a begging tone…last week in Auckland I saw it in all it’s glory at the National Digital Forum.

Funded by NZ On Air, the site contains profiles of NZ creatives, background information on the making of items, photos and full length streaming video of some NZ TV shows and movies. The “watch” list isn’t very full at the moment, but there are some real gems on there – McPhail and Gadsby, Shelly and Miles go flatting and It’s in the bag! With continued funding, the selection of items will hopefully grow rapidly and start to become a entertainment and educational resource for our customers.

If you are wondering about the overlap between the Film Archive and NZonscreen, you are not the only one. The Film Archive has the ability to stream more items more easily, due to it’s government sanction to surpass some copyright restrictions, the archive also has home movies and ads. Why aren’t these two organisations working together? Good question, meanwhile, check out both sites if there is a particular part of NZ media history you want to relive.

 

Seb Chan and web metrics

Seb Chan works for the Powerhouse museum, and on a lot of projects that need measurement in one way or another. This session was a rapid fire tour de force through measuring web visits and some of the fallabilities of old-style reporting of them. These are my notes from the session.

He explored the search problem – Powerhouse has up to 9 ways to enter its site and how more and more people don’t come through the home page – searches have visitors arriving on all sorts of pages from google.

85% of traffic comes through search – bringing a multiplicity of reasons for visiting with them. 16,000 variations of powerhouse, 18,000 of museum occur across the site.

Searchers spend different lengths of time – searchers 4 minutes, home page users about 7.5 minutes.

Log analysis is not always useful – can’t differentiate real from bot traffic for instance.

Powerhouse also uses video ads and Chan made an interesting comment about video ad monitoring – although the video viewed by 10,000, just 16% reached the end – but the museum paid for the 10,000 impressions.

Email newsletters, reporting tools, live tracking of websites. Comparative measurements and benchmarking were all covered in the first half of the lecture. The second half put the focus on web presences and combining them with other reporting.

One of the tools used was a photo of the day blog – about 500 days of photos. The museum encourage people to use subscriptions. Feedburner reports clients who don’t visit your site. For some blog comments are more important – for others citations are. Technorati measures blog posts about your blog – and in some cases the other comments occur on other websites – and perhaps that is better as it shows people may not be talking to you, but may be talking about you.

In that sense, content continues to move further and further away from us. We are crowding out traditional reporting with other stuff – you can learn more from Facebook than from web log analysis.

More intereactive experience with content than on our own website. Net promoter score is a one question survey. On a scale of 1 – 10 how likely are you to recommend this resource to another person.

0-6 detractors

7-8 – passives

9-10 promoters

% promoters – % detractors = NPS

Web is all about recomendations. To get content used more it has to be recommended to others. They have to be excited enough by the content to tell friends about it. Content has to be easily shareable

Set goals segment and observe trends – benchmarks, city first, trends in local community more important than international. Use appropriate tools, find benchmarks and aim to measure net usage growth.

More at www.archimuse.com/mw2008/papers/chan-metrics/chan-metrics.html

Get better as you go

Need to improve content as a result of tracking web use – that is the benefit of doing the tracking in the first place and helps provide evidence base for trying things out.

Combine qualitative and quantitative – don’t report volume alone. Visitation does not equal satisfaction.

 

1908 City of Auckland map

This map is made up of 74 sheets measuring 42 x 29 inches -the largest size that could be lithographed at the time. The map shows position of streets, buildings and boundaries and took up to 36 staff more than 18 months to create. The detail is impressive – stone or brick walls, whether verandah posts were iron or wood, picket fences gates and trees and so on.

The aim of digitisation was to use the maps for research, and to alow geodata to be included as well as simultaneous access by multiple users. Several versions of the images were made by an outsourced vendor. Perhaps the best feature is the overlay of old maps with new aerial photographs. A browse map function is also planned.

Another interesitng approach is to cross reference the map with transcribe content of the valuation roll – to enable family history researchers to find some details of houses or buildings that family members either owned or may have lived in.

The process is explained in some detail on this page, where you can also view the map.

 

Seb and the velveteen rabbit

Seb Chan started is social media session with a moral from the velveteen rabbit – when things are well loved they are worn out and used and not preserved in pristine condition. Social media is about that love and sharing and making things relevant and interesting for your life. LIbraries are good at facts and information, but less comfortable when dealing with the messy child’s bedroom that social networking is.

digitalyouth.berkley.edu – talks about interest driven practices are in the minority. The majority of social networks are friendship-driven practices. There are ‘genres of participation’.

This means Facebook and flickr have situational relevance – research shows most people who have myspace accounts have facebook accounts. Different bar serves different drinks.

Engagement is hard – no shouting and give up control and share!! Conversations, listening and engagement.

Audiences talk about you and share – sometimes good, sometimes bad – you have to deal with that. Showed a video a teenager made while waiting in the queue to get in cussing at an older guy who could get straight in while the schoolkids had to wait and go in the back door. “They just happened to have media creation tools in their pocket.”

Lego used community driven website to combine with their custom build lego site. pick a brick

It is a way of acknowledging engagement – using people who take photos on flickr in marketing. But this is hard work – requires ongoing internal resourcing as more social networks are built and they work. Need to use the reach of social media – powerhouse have community managers and persona managers – its customer service when you get a comment on a flickr – you have to respond – and customer service doesn’t scale. Managers are dispersed across the organsation.

So where is the audience and what are they using. Can you use digital volunteers? Can you make an ecosystem of shantytowns. It is messy and it is emerging, but it is essential. And everyone must be involved – otherwise “your web team will explode”.