Internet Librarian 2010 day 2 keynote speaker Hazel Hall

Hazel Hall - getting real about social media

What we are not going to do is as important as what we are going to do.

Clay Shirky – Cognitive surplus

Social media are not an alternative life, they are part of it

How social media can influence life. Finding people to talk to on the train with twitter. Facebook updates in a family that lives far away from each other.

Information + People

Library and Information Science Research Coalition

To what extent are we genuinly engaging with library stakeholders?

a) Social media currently provide additional platforms for traditional information delivery

b) Sophisticated personal professional application of social media demonstrates potential for further innovation in services.

c) How we concieve relationships will dertermine the boundaries of service innovation

New Knowledge happens at the boundaries – meeting people with different background

Long term effects of social media difficult to predict

Social media is “just another” techonology application

We still dont know the effects of the printing press

Our tools cannot keep up with the quantity of information

Example: Wikipedia as a site of breaking news

Twitter accpetance – five stages: denial, presence, dumping, conversing

Snapshot of 2010 research – pockets of sophisticated personal professional use

Library services delivery: Function, not tool

The search principle blog

Virtual refence

current awareness on twitter – twinforming – not tweeting, just putting out information

Where is user participation as opposed to consumption? The Question of the Day!

New forms of interatcion – example – Facebook Geek the Library

We are all part of the reality: develop our users – develop ourselves

Umar Ruhi, PhD: http://www.umar.biz

We steward – we accept flux&beta – we collaborate

Tactics vary: Networked cells vs. conventional action amonst large groups

Develop stakeholder participation: lead communities

They (users)  are here (in the library) with mobiles and wireless

They do it because it is useful – because humans like making and sharing things

Changed her mind about following on twitter – from strategic following to a more open approach – use lists to organize, increase peripheral vision and understanding context

For interacting with students – Facebook rules

Biggest risk? Missing the boat!

 

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Internet Librarian International 2010

Keynote session: There is nothing outside the cow – Robert Rowland Smith

Author of: Breakfast with Socrates

Knowledge – what it means to know things – Socrates and Platos view of that.

Reading from: Dropping ashes on Buddha

Meditation is on beeing extremely present in the moment.

Beeing human is to have an imagination – did not want to give up the ability to think about the past and the future.

Lapsed Buddhist:-)

Socrates and Plato – the imperfect world and the “more real” platonic ideals

What you know is true? Before Copernicus everybody knew the earth was the centre of the universe. You can know something and be wrong.

Blows to mankind

• Copernicus – not the centre of universe,
• Darwin - not gods special creature
• Freud – We do nok know ourselves.

Plato – Everything we know is corrupt – the real exists on a higher plane

Cloud technology – separation of the lasting world (the cloud) and the corruped working world (on your machine)

Real world vs. ideal world

We are enslaved to higher ideals – religion, philosophy etc. – Nietsche

The notion of the lie – Why lying is useful and a source of knowledge

When you try to describe the world – categorize – taxonomy – you must make distorted desiscions

Categorize – you gain something and you loose something

Gain in understanding – loose in accuracy

The Noble Lie – Plato – Framing is a lie – taxonomy is a lie – but it is noble because it is helpful. Gives a way of relating to the world, society, people etc.

The Noblest Lie of all – The war on terrorr – A distortion of the complexity of the state of the world after 911. Huge simplification and generalization –  useful to make sense of the world for international society (Not an moral approval!)

Helped de-fragment society – Unified illution

Knowledge happens as a distortion of the truth that is useful

Distorted knowledge may be very useful.

911 story – builds on the Biggest Noble Lie of the all – the Cold War.

Noble Lie – helps people understand

Poles – left and right – makes it easier to position yourself

Makes it easier to selforganize

Everything we know is based on where we are – Geography of knowledge

Knowledge effect – distorting – but useful

Horizontal relationship with knowledge – influenced by other people

We think in terms of the group we belong to – even ad-hoc groups (on bus etc.)

Very hard to be in a system without taking on the beliefs of the group – helps us make sense of the world -

Stop making sense

First we make it simple – then we make it complex again.

Sensemaking – about exluding as much as including.

Realtivism – one of the signs of modernity

Collections of subjectivity – working self-knowledge in a group – ethics, beauty, – Communities of knowledge, ethics, etc.

We will never get to a universal understanding of something

Wittgenstein! Overlapping frames of reference = working language (example in-jokes) (Best explanation of Wittgenstein I have heard!)

Madness – where  frames does not overlap with anybody elses

Communities of knowledge – indistinguable with cults

We have a responsibility to find ways to behave

Question from the room: How can we as info professionals change distorted views of what we do in society.

Answer – directing people towards knowledge/information – broaden horizon – Not  - this is the information, but – this is another field of thinking – unexpected info – broadning knowledge field – more random

Facillitate Chaos

Can we be innocent anymore? NO! We are inside – not neutral bystanders

Declare agenda.

Brands – simplification – breeds lazyness – few people surf outside well knows websites

randomwebsites.com

Lazy internet users

 

 

 

Arkivert i:Conferences, ILI2010, Internet Librarian International

Top technology trends – again!

I´m at the national norwegian library conference and tomorrow I´m supposed to sit on a panel to discuss top technology trends for libraries. I thought I would air my thoughts here, and maybe get some feedback from readers.

At first my main trend would be ebooks, this is one of the most controversial and hot topics for libraries this year, but then I realized something. This is no longer a technology trend, the issues are economic and legal, copyright and compensation for authors and publishers are the hot issues, not the technology. Actually I think that ebooks is a fairly mature technology. Yes we still have not resolved the reading platform issue to our satisfaction, but with Amazon Kindle and Sony Reader, ebook software like Calibre and standards like epub in place there is no longer burning technology issues revolving around ebooks. There will be many battles, like with google books, and development of yet better ways of delivery and services, but this is now a question of evolution, not revolution. Libraries need to get into the ebook game here in Norway and especially come up with our own solutions and priorities to questions like delivery and DRM. If not, we are at the mercy of publishers and author organizations who have a different set of solutions and priorites.

So what is the revolution issues in library technology in 2010?

Anywhere – this sums up most techonlogy trends I can think of. With the development of small tablet computers, internet everywhere and cloud computing you have access to information anywhere you go.

Platform independent – this is probably one of the most important developments to look for. As new platforms develop it is important for libraries to develop services and formats that can be accessed on any platform, PS3, iPad, Nintendo DSi XL, mobile phones of all sizes and types, even the good old PC. These are all valid platforms for information and services the library can offer.

In the cloud – goes back to anywhere, but  the cloud also poses some challenges for libraries when it comes to access and preservation. The cloud, i.e. computing and storage away from your local computer, is probably here to stay, but since it is totally in the hands of commercial firms, like Google, Amazon and a plethora of small firms offering cheap or free storage and computing power it is a volatile market that could see collapses and loss of mountains of data. If Google should belly up in the near future I will loose most of my email from the last ten years, most of my documents stored on google docs and so on. This is unlikely in the short term, but there are few companies that have lasted as long as libraries. This is something we need to keep in mind when we use cloud services and storage.

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One small step for a librarian, one giant leap for the library

Today I sent the resignation letter to our current ILS-vendor. The point of NO return has passed:-)

It promted another round of “OMG why am I doing this?”  It is in many ways a leap of faith. We are the first library in Norway to switch to Koha, the translation is still not completely done  and who knows what bugs and surprises we will get when we go live sometime in October.  This would of course be true independent of the system we switch to, commercial or open source. The important thing for me, who initiated the whole thing, is that with Koha we are looking forward, we will get more features than our current ILS can deliver or develop in the forseeable future, and we introduce the concept of open source into the norwegian library systems marketplace.

Norwegian libraries need to embrace open source for many reasons. The formal reason; that the government now requires public institutions to consider open source when choosing software, the financial reason; that open source means you can test and try out systems without initial costs and that the implementation cost is way smaller than any other system on the norwegian library system marketplace, and finally the ideological reason: open source embodies many of the same values that libraries are funded on, sharing, equality, access and community.

To further the understanding of open source in the norwegian library community we have initiated the unconference Free and Open Libraries in Bergen 12.-13. november 2009. (Conference wiki – Norwegian only). The key-note speaker will be Nicole C. Engard from LibLime in the USA, and we will have Nicolas Morin from BibLibre in France and of course our own Magnus Enger from Libriotech who both will contribute. Even though Koha is a major theme for this conference we will try to cover as many aspects of free and open software as possible.  The key-note speaker for day two will be Bjørn Venn from FriProg, the norwegian centre for free software.We will have a Open Software 101 session for those who want to learn the basics, we will let people discuss everything from programming to ideology and try to make the point of how important and useful open source is to libraries.

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OCLC-symposium destilled

Who’s Watching YOUR Space?

Great video for soundbites and an introduction to urgent issues for libraries and librarians

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Secret conference?

I have been busy these last three months trying to get the conference “Digital og Sosial 2.0″ – Digital and social 2.0 – in Bergen, Norway. It will be a two day conference where librarians will meet and discuss Library 2.0 in a norwegian setting and from the norwegian perspective. The conference blog for those of you who read norwegian.

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