Here is a photo of me attending the conference sessions. It was taken by a Swedish librarian with a Scottish name. Any suggestions that I look like I'm asleep will not be received favourably -- I am concentrating -- we were asked to close our eyes and think of what our next generation library would look like, feel like, sound like, smell like. How about that?
The second day's keynote address was The Shanachie report -- presented by 3 people from the Delft Public Library who and toured several countries, visiting libraries, interviewing librarians and filming the process.
Here is a photo of them -- they are coming to Melbourne on Dec. 6th. We should go. Recommendation for library -- 3 staff members to produce a road trip documentary on library best practice (perhaps Austin Texas as the starting point).
I also attended sessions on Web 2.0 applications in Denmark, Finland, Cairo and Singapore. I probably need to follow these up with visits as the accents of the presenters made it a bit difficult to grasp all points.
A couple things I did pick were that the person who created the Facebook page for the American University in Cairo was jailed for 2 weeks, and that that library developed a concept of a deskless library. How good would that be for the person doing the desk roster?
Here is a photo of last night's dinner with some young people we hooked up with (some are my friends on Facebook)
Nice work Michael. I like the road trip documentary idea. Looks like you need to be careful following the jailing of the Facebook maintainer in Egypt.
ReplyDeleteThere was also an article in Saturday's Age (18.10.2008, A2 p.13) on the dangers of the "blogosphere" by Monica Dux, who described herself as the victim of a "virtual lynching"-
"... I'd written an opinion article that riled one of the moderators of a political blog. Who, I do not know because she, like many bloggers, chooses to hide behind a pseudonym..."
The moderator wrote an "...irate denunciation of my article..."
"...What followed was a 'monster thread'- a collection of pseudonymous 'posters' mostly intent on joining the howl of condemnation. It was clear that many of them had not actually read my article, as they damned me for failing to say something that No Name had conveniently edited out of her account of my argument..."
Things apparently went from bad to worse until the thread was picked up by other blogs that fed off it, including one in the US "...where not even the person initiating the thread had read my article, though she was furious about it anyway. I briefly attained a kind of online infamy for something I had not said and for views I did not hold..."
She said she was accused of everything from racism, disablism to ageism; was fatphobic and transphobic, and was expecting any moment to be accused of "...being a torturer of small fluffy animals..."
Take care Michael, its a jungle out there.
I will be interestng to compare our thoughts (vision) on the future library with that of the Conference.
ReplyDelete