Future of Libraries

Editor's Notes

1. Hello my name is Kim Tairi and I am here today talk to you about the future of libraries including some of the amazing things on the horizon and hopefully along the way bust some myths about libraries and librarians and leave you thinking a little differently about what we do. Thanks very much for having me here to day you all look fabulous. I hope you noticed my shoes I bought them especially for the presentation so for me the day is already a winner! I thought I would start with a bit of context about how I came to be standing in front of you today. Social media…. I am professionally and personally active on Twitter and I share and connect with people about libraries/education/craft/mobile photography oh and what I ate for breakfast. I met Geoff Young on Twitter we talked about education but also a mutual love of Doctor Who… his daughter's and mine. I can’t speak highly enough about the benefits of belong to a community of practice or Personal learning Network on Twitter. It has been fabulous for me and I have learnt so much from other people and I am here today.I’ve worked in the VET sector since 1993 while I was a student I got a job library technician in training at what was then Western Melbourne Institute of TAFE.How many of you have also studied at TAFE? I stayed at Victoria University in its’ various incarnations for a total of 16 years. Working part-time, full-time and studying. I had several different roles during that time. For me TAFE was the pathway to a new life… a career and it was and has always been a great place to work. I come from a far off land across the sea called New Zealand. NO it is not another state of Australia – did you know that many Nzers refer to Australia as West Island – it’s a fact. But I do have a bit of paper that says I am an Australia and I am actually proud to be both. But I still barrack for the All-blacks but I now follow the Doggies in the footy. I actually became a member for the first time this year. Perhaps not the best choice of a team to barrack for but I live in Melbourne’s west and I always like an underdog (pun intended!) Both my daughters decided not to go to University and did TAFE courses both are gainfully employed one in logistics and the other is a travel agent. In the last couple of years I have taught a unit in Cert IV/Diploma course in Library Studies as a sessional and my eyes were truly opened to the joys of teaching.Learning management systems, marking and administrivia oh my.. So this was my first experience of blended learning as a teacher and I was thrown in the deep end with teaching face to face and online. I inherited a subject that need a little bit of updating. I augmented my teaching delivery with external blogs and other social media like twitter. Social media was a great tool for engaging students. I flipped the classroom. With the weekly lessons online I was able to make classes more interactive, with guest speakers, visits and discussions. I have come full circle starting as a student in TAFE and then teaching in TAFE. It was great to be able to share my skills, knowledge and industry experience with the students.Many librarians actually have qualifications in training and teaching it is one of the reasons we are so versatile is a great resource for you to call on. They understand how you will use the material in both the online and face-to-face environment. Now I work at Swinburne as the Associate Director, Information Management. I look after some interesting areas. Research, Library Website, library campuses, content management systems and more….It’s a challenging environment – restructures, campus closures and an enterprise bargaining year. But I love my job and the people I work with and feel very fortunate to be doing the work that I am doing.
2. Read more: Young, Damon 2013. The Age. http://www.smh.com.au/lifestyle/life/mindfull-adventures-of-a-different-kind-20130521-2jy8h.html#ixzz2WpIzvWW5. Now on to the good stuff talking libraries in education and society with a particular focus on the tertiary environment. In the last decade in library design we have tried very hard to make libraries a hub, a central location for student and staff to come that is welcoming, friendly and conducive to study… but there as still are in many libraries a gatekeeper mentally or culture we are there to guard the knowledge and stop things being stolen… we are not there to control stock we are there to provide ACCESS. As Zaana Howard we focus too much about the commodities (books/things) and not enough on the experience for the people using the library. Every interaction that people have when they use our services.
3. For some it is a huge cultural shift… we want our libraries to be open & welcoming. Not places with long lists of rules that put up barriers for people who use them. Libraries have been offering blended library services for some time… with the so called “e” services. Ebooks, journal articles, online training and skills. There are many complexities around electronic books and articles. Digital rights management; copyright; availability and cost. There are different rules for libraries and limits that don’t apply to individuals. Hopefully these complexities will lessen as online learning becomes more common…. It will get easier and the divide between e and print will disappear. It just what we do.At the moment publishers have libraries over a barrel. All over the globe libraries are lobbying with publisher/suppliers to get a better deal for library users to make e-lending easier. Some are asking for the question why should we pay for publically funded research when we are giving you the content? Fair enough I say. The Australian Research Council has a new policy that says that all ARC funded research must be deposited in within an open institutional repository within 12 months, effectively mandating openness (http://www.arc.gov.au/applicants/open_access.htm).
4. Another major change on the horizon in Australia is that there is an inquiry into copyright law and the digital economy in Australia. The changes could have quite a significant impact on education… you would be familiar with the 1 chapter or 10% rule for education well that looks likely to change to a fair use. I am not a copyright expert so I am not going to go into detail but if you are interested there Australian Digital Alliance website http://www.faircopyright.com.au./libraries-digital-preservation but you can guarantee there will be someone in your library that can help you with those trick rules and exceptions.
5. Many educational institutes are moving into delivering MOOCs. Swinburne is developing some MOOCs in partnership with OUA. Unfortunately many of our agreements and licenses say that only our institute students and staff can use the electronic content we provide. So many teachers are turning to OER (open education resources) which are open learning materials made available under creative commons licenses.We have a couple of projects underway to make sharing of resources easier and PVC of learning transformations, Gilly Salmon has a project to help develop new open resources too. Libraries can help you identify good places to find OERs.
6. At Swinburne we have a project for a content management system for learning objects… to enable people within Swinburne to create/share/reuse/mashup learning objects. We are using Equella which integrates with Blackboard. We also have the Swinburne Commons one of our repositories which enables us to share content with the rest of the world through itunes U; youtube; commons itself. For example we developed some library tutorials for Endnote which is software to help people write their reference lists and the tutorials have been downloaded 23,000 times. UTS and a number of other academic libraries are doing similar things creating content and sharing through youtube| flickr | websites.
7. Libraries are giving away API (application program interfaces) to allow people to use their data to mash-up to make new works or visualisaitons of data.We have used crowd sourcing at Swinburne to get people to transcribe George Swinburne the founder of Swinburne diary.At Swinburne some of our challenges are around making our websites and services friendly for people bring there own devices – wireless printing / mobile friendly / device agnostic websites. We’ve implemented wireless printing for people bringing in laptops now we want to do the same for BYOD devices. Accessibility | Usability is vitally important in our library and at Swinburne we have a usability expert on staff looking for creative solutions to problems and doing research into how people experience our service to help us design better experiences.
8. We are looking a better ways of enabling users to discover information…. Have you ever thought about search flickr images by colour? http://labs.tineye.com/multicolr#colors=de323c;weights=100; We are always looking for better ways of enabling people to find stuff in our collections….
9. http://www.decinternational.nsw.edu.au/documents/19483218/21790938/tafensw-fast-facts-infographic-130523.pdfThis year we are going to develop some data visualisations of statistics and other library information to make in more interesting and easier to interpret for users…
10. It is not good enough to do things the old way… we need todesign great customer experiences. Not a big list of rules about things they can’t do. The philosophy is about openness and access tearing down the barriers….
11. Early I talked about the last decade of library design but what is changing in library design now.There is a lot of talk about designing experiences for the user. Mal Booth the University Librarian UTS in planning their new library space at UTS worked with his staff and used designing thinking to create a vision of their new library: creativity | visualise | play | engaging spaces | green | imaginative | prototyping | maker/hacker spaces- 3D printing places where people can create content and make things too…@zaanahoward is an academic at QUT and she works with library on service design http://storify.com/zaana/designing-the-future-of-librariesThis is a visualisation that I did at one of her workshops were we where thinking about different shoe brands as library services and that each brand represents different kinds of service.My favourite shoe brand happens to be Fluevog which is practical or pragmatic but beautiful at the same time… just the kind of service that I want to offer.
12. Recently I went to MONA < who here has been?> it is an remarkable place. The whole experience of visiting Mona is carefully designed from the travelling on the sleek black ferry out to Mona with the staff dressed in pseudo military uniforms to the carefully curated space itself much of which is underground. This is a work by Patrick Hall it is called when my heart stops beating. None of the pieces have labels but you are given a tablet to take around with you and you can mark which pieces you like and you are sent a link to all the information about the pieces. I can revisit my Mona tour anytime I want. The also use social media and email subscription mailing list to great affect. One day we may just have a pair of “goggle classes” and the whole tour would have an augmented reality layer over the top of it. There is a lot that library an learn from spaces like Mona – how to use technology to enrich the experience/ how to use social media effectively to engage audiences/ mobile apps.
13. One of the other things we are doing at Swinburne is we are using the Carpe diem process to design much of our online learning content. It is a team approach to online learning design – librarians a key member of the team developing units – staged process – key is a two day workshop http://www.gillysalmon.com/uploads/1/6/0/5/16055858/carpe_diem_planning_processmay2013_3.pdfLibrarians can be involved in developing online learningWE are also valuable partners in team teaching Emoderating – librarians doing e-moderation course at Swinburne so they can help in online delivery, can design library related e-tivities, and facilitate discussion related to assessment task – library related skills and help to get students to engagehttp://www.swinburne.edu.au/spl/pd/files/Gilly_Salmon_E_Moderating.pdfEmbedded in LMS – giving your liaison librarian access to your online units to offer support to students
14. If we are designing experiences for people who use library what better way than to include ZOMBIES. Zombies are huge in pop culture and popping up in libraries all over the world why…. Because students relate to the zombie trope it is fun to dress up as zombie and a good way to get students to engage with content. This photo is taken at UTS they have a zombie apocalypse and RMIT have a zombie amazing race – the aim to neutralise a zombie hoard using the services/resources in the Library. It is a way of making library orientations fun and more engaging for students. Gamify the activity and way of making the Library more engaging for students. Using story-telling and having a good time. Fun and play. Much better than giving a boring talk that students don’t engage with or listen too…http://youtu.be/h0110tJnR90Some of the things we have been doing at Swinburne include using twitter to engage with students have fun with some memes.
15. Instead of dull responses to feedback forms using memes instead. Grumpy cat meme… had a bit of meme war… students not thinking memes are funny… that in it’s self is a good way to engage students! There are many many library memes if you are interested in that sort of thing… and some great online meme generators so you can pop memes into your learning materials…
16. Libraries have been blended for some time and are constantly evolving. Our mission - the one we have choose to accept, is to provide meaningful experiences for the people that use our spaces and services. We want people to engage with our services and take down the barriers to accessing information where openness is supported. Open wide, come inside it’s your tertiary library - where creativity, play and learning are all supported.
17. I will leave you with some cuteness for the rest of the day…. Some #openbadgersAnd this quote from the Victorian Public Libraries 2030 Strategic framework Open wide, come inside it’s your tertiary library - where creativity, play and learning are all supported.http://plvn.net.au/sites/default/files/20130528%20FINAL%20VPL2030%20Summary%20Report_web.pdfThe creative library There is a fundamental shift in societies aspirations where people are seeking to explore, develop and express creativityCollaboration becomes more importantThe creative library is a kaleidoscope of sound, colour, ideas and creativity. It is an inspiring place located centrally, reflecting its position as the central hub for learning and creativity. A range of professionals work in the space: educators, artists, community workers, mentors, producers, literacy teachers, content managers and navigators. This is one delightful vision of libraries in the future and one that I aspire to…