As a cataloguer, I use the ANBD component of Libraries Australia every day. Since my team and I contribute a large number of CD, DVD and console game records to the database, I thought the Forum would be an valuable learning experience, and I wasn't disappointed. It was a great opportunity to meet NSW and ACT librarians, chat with some of the Libraries Australia team and get a bit of a glimpse behind the curtain. There were also some excellent speakers, including:
- Keynote speaker Carl Grant on using library technologies to benefit our users and communities
- Geoff Strempel on the challenges and rewards of implementing a statewide library consortium and one-card borrowing across South Australia
- An expert panel on ebooks and how they fit in (or not) with collaborative initiatives such as interlibrary loans and purchasing consortia
- Robyn Van Dyk on how the Australian War Memorial (AWM) is using digitisation, linked data and crowdsourcing to make information on Australian soldiers available to the public
- Mylee Joseph on collaborations with non-library organisations, through some very exciting projects at the State Library of New South Wales (SLNSW)
You can find audio recordings and PowerPoint presentations from the day on the Forum website, but here's some of what I took away from it:
Working with the "Outside World"
As far as I can see, the library industry and its public profile are shrinking (or at least changing in challenging and unexpected ways), but the world needs our skill set more than ever. Terms like "metadata" and "search optimisation" may be buzzwords, but they're also concepts that library professionals have been dealing with since the days of card catalogues.
The speakers put forward some great points and ideas about how libraries and other GLAM organisations are seen, what we we can do to raise our profile and help our image:
- Grant talked about how frustrating and damaging it is to be branded as "that place where you get books." He said we need to ask people (not just library users!) what they want and embed our services in their lives.
- We need to "speak the same language" as our users and partners. Grant made it clear that the average library website is a lumbering, complex dinosaur in the age of Google-style searching, and called for a common, cross-institutional search interface. Mylee talked about SLNSW's partnership with Wikipedia and its community of editors, and how important their Project Page is for communicating within that space.
- Mylee also talked about how getting digitally available library resources out onto the open web can promote the institution and increase traffic to library websites. She gave the example of uploading picture collections to Wikimedia Commons.
- Robyn and the Libraries Australia team talked about crowdsourcing of the AWM Nominal Rolls and Trove, and how, though it might be scary at first to let the public go behind the scenes, it can yield some truly wonderful results.
- And then there's my pet subject and HUGE buzzword - makerspaces. There are a lot of people who question their place in the library space. Carl pointed out that they provide an opportunity to facilitate connections between people in our communities within similar disciplines and interest groups, and to provide startups with information on aspects like grant applications and patents.
The Vendor/Library Relationship
Oh dear. As both a cataloguer and a vendor, I've become used to getting the occasional strange look at events, but I was slightly confronted by the perspective I got at the Forum. Here's a Twitter conversation I had during the ebooks panel:
With all due respect to Hugh, this shows the prevailing "us vs. them" attitude, which I find completely counter-productive. The theme of this year's ALIA National Conference was "together we are stronger", and the Forum was all about collaboration both within and outside the GLAM sector. In the end, vendors, suppliers and libraries are all in the same industry, and we depend upon each other for survival. Yes, we're trying to sell you stuff, and yes, you're trying to get the best deal out of us. But that doesn't change the fact that many on the vendor side consider ourselves LIS professionals, and our ultimate goal is to enable libraries to provide better products and services to their communities. I like to think we can work with this.
TL;DR: WHY CAN'T WE ALL JUST GET ALONG?!?!?!
I also found out how costly the problem of poor MARC records from vendors can be for libraries, and how far-reaching their impact is on Libraries Australia. I may have taken some satisfaction from the fact that I work for a vendor with a knowledgeable cataloguing team who take pride in their work - if I do say so myself.
With all due respect to Hugh, this shows the prevailing "us vs. them" attitude, which I find completely counter-productive. The theme of this year's ALIA National Conference was "together we are stronger", and the Forum was all about collaboration both within and outside the GLAM sector. In the end, vendors, suppliers and libraries are all in the same industry, and we depend upon each other for survival. Yes, we're trying to sell you stuff, and yes, you're trying to get the best deal out of us. But that doesn't change the fact that many on the vendor side consider ourselves LIS professionals, and our ultimate goal is to enable libraries to provide better products and services to their communities. I like to think we can work with this.
TL;DR: WHY CAN'T WE ALL JUST GET ALONG?!?!?!
I also found out how costly the problem of poor MARC records from vendors can be for libraries, and how far-reaching their impact is on Libraries Australia. I may have taken some satisfaction from the fact that I work for a vendor with a knowledgeable cataloguing team who take pride in their work - if I do say so myself.
The Cult of Perfection
Cataloguers are infamous for pursuing the mythical Cult of Perfection, lovingly crafting records and obsessing over minutiae. But this hinders productivity, and means losing sight of the ultimate goal of all library services: To better serve our customers.
- One of the best catch phrases to come out of the Forum was Robyn's comment that "it's doesn't have to be perfect to be useful". The AWM Nominal Rolls provide ease of access to a set of linked records which were previously very difficult to gather together, even if they don't perfectly meet all the metadata standards.
- Geoff spoke about how perfection was not an option is establishing the South Australian consortium, because it had to cater to the requirements of 80 different library services, covering a hugely diverse range communities. It was more important to create systems that were flexible. He used the term "perpetually beta" because library users ended up being "co-developers," contributing their feedback so that library products, services and systems could evolve to meet their needs.
- In Mylee's summary of SLNSW's Wikipedia collaboration, she commented that no project on Wikipedia is ever finished, as such. It can take some getting used to, but on the other hand, continuing contributions can lead to completely unexpected improvements, such as additions to the article on the journals of the First Fleet.
This definitely doesn't cover the whole experience, but I hope it gives you as much food for thought as it did for me. You can see the rest of the conversation on Twitter.
