A new reading group on Twitter

Thursday 27 August 4pm-5pm AEST
#EBLIPRG #LARK

By Liz Walkley Hall

Since the recent EBLIP8 conference, some of us have been considering how we might build on the fantastic connections we made there -- both face to face and on the Twitter back channel using the #eblip and #LARK hashtags. We have a common cause in growing a community of practice in evidence-based librarianship, but weren't sure how best to do this as busy practitioner researchers.

Further conversation on Twitter saw our initial thoughts and connections evolve. Fiona started us off by suggesting a journal club.

Suzana offered the LARK space to bring it together.

And Liz sought the wisdom of the crowd for ideas and inspiration.

 We got lots of great responses from the EBLIP community...

And so our Twitter reading group is born! Our inaugural "meeting" will be this Thursday 27 August 4pm-5pm AEST and will focus on the how-to of a twitter reading group, including the format and frequency as well as potential topics/ articles. We plan to use the hashtags #ebliprg and #LARK. Fiona (@macdonaldf) will moderate our initial conversation, and Liz (@LizWalkleyHall) and Suzana (@suzanasukovic) will be joining in, but this is very much about bringing us all together as a community so please do add your thoughts and comments -- we look forward to hearing from you!

Liz Walkley Hall is Manager, eResearch at Flinders University

Social media in public libraries

By Edward Kostraby

https://pixabay.com/p-488886/?no_redirect

Leading the pack and constant innovation, seem to be part of the routine of managing any business venture and equally applies to libraries. The myriad of influences is simply overwhelming: the need to transition between platforms to access information, from open source products, cultural heritage and archival digitisation, to digital text mining, publishers with ever growing commercial interests, mobile apps, responding to various trends, whether surveyed or perceived and the need to enhance and develop new generation library management systems. 

Digital transition is now a constant, complex, ever changing and competes for the consumer’s diverse interests and engagement. Social media currently drives much of the need to be connected on an individual and business level. It is little wonder that the idea of a digital future seems meaningless as the digital is well entrenched as a constant. Creating new library service contexts and connections, virtual and physical spaces as a direct connect requires exploring diverse mental frameworks.

The article on hand, "Social technologies in public libraries: exploring best practice", is a research project which explores social media best practice in the public library sector, over 2 partnership library services, the Yarra Plenty Regional Library (YPRL) and City Libraries Townsville (CLT) which provide us with a pathway and an innovative practice on using what is a deep social trend and provides evidence to its effect.

It is an attempt to be part of the digital scene away from the commercial drivers (as these are in the background supporting the infrastructure) and to develop a participatory library service, to engage users (communities attached to the service and beyond) building relationships is time consuming and an important psychological component to a service, “including acceptance of the idea that they (users) added value to the library (rather than simply being a trend the library was following”.

The view that “users creating content and participating with the service, ever new time horizons will keep all on the edge of the next best thing and embedding what they already have”. There was a sense of the inevitable about social technologies melding into the networked society, so much so that YPRL established WikiNorthia, a user input into the “creating stories about the region”
Their report provided five emerging themes which were essential for strong community participation from connecting communities through social technologies “to allow users to have greater say in library direction and generate content” to “fostering an organisational culture that allows social technologies to be used to create a participatory service, where the users are equally engaged as are the staff in providing dialogue, information and a sense of being part of lively and evolving services”.

Libraries are often framed in terms of a library's physical branches, but the emphasis here is to go beyond this, as this is now the reality, something YPRL state explicitly in their strategic plan Yarra Plenty Regional Library from 2008. So this has been an emerging environment for them. During their engagement with participants, defining what they felt made a good social media message, participants identified similar features of a successful social messages, as messages should be interactive or engaging, fun, articulated in a personal tone, and most importantly, framed in terms of the users, so the message was about them, rather than just about the library. This was evident in their social media interactions where their organisations were given a personality that was welcoming and personable. Their online personality had been planned by the services and while it was not described in their governance documentation, there was an awareness that they needed to find this voice to promote community engagement. 

Both services decided to push their boundaries of their futures by connecting with their communities using social media and the essential role they can play within it. They do not have a clear vision of what they need to do beyond the current practice, but acknowledge that the future is digital and that they will be part of it. Predicting any digital future is up for grabs. It is always a brave and measured move and can be argued that it may be well beyond Delphi forecasting or other methods and perhaps is in the realm of stock market prediction - take your pick, but whatever one picks make sure that you lead the push.

Reference
Smeaton, Kathleen; Davis, Kate. 2014. Social technologies in public libraries: exploring best practice, Library Management vol.35, no. 3, pp. 224-238.

A version of this article first appeared in Incite, June/July  2015

Edward Kostraby is Head of Library at 
St Michael’s Grammar School, St Kilda, Victoria

Towards a teaching library: connecting academia and the profession

By Suzana Sukovic

The disconnect between academics and professionals in the library and information sector has puzzled me for many years. Like many others, I am interested in both and, surely, they have a lot in common. In Australia, LIS is a relatively small field, struggling for many years for its rightful place in the increasingly complex knowledge landscape. It would be reasonable to think that academia and practice could gain more ground if we worked together. But, somehow, the connection has remained elusive. On the other hand, listening to what has been happening in other applied fields, I’ve heard a lot about medical students in hospitals and academics’ ‘clinical days’; architects-academics whose main claim to fame are their building projects; engineers-academics who are valued industry consultants and I’ve seen many teachers-to-be in real classrooms. It seemed logical that we should have something like ‘teaching hospitals’ and ‘training schools’, and that our academics could be industry consultants on a regular basis as well. The concept of a ‘teaching library’ has been on my mind for a while, but EBLIP8 has finally promised a right environment to put my thoughts together and present a paper. Lively discussions with the audience after my presentation, conversations during the conference and comments on Twitter have clearly indicated that it was a good time to start this conversation. It may be that LIS needed a high-pressure situation, which came with digital technologies and many new players, to learn more from our disciplinary neighbours. In any case, many people at EBLIP8 seem to think the same as me about the ‘teaching library’: ‘Really, why not?!’Annotated slides are available here and here.

EBLIP8: Grass, trees and a landscape

By Suzana Sukovic

Poster session in The Cube #eblip8 amazing! pic.twitter.com/6KeEFPOUsc

— EBLIP8 (@EBLIP8) July 7, 2015

The excellent EBLIP8 closed on Wednesday, but it opened many possibilities. One is strengthening an often tenuous link between academic and professional silos. And, once we started talking about connections, links were popping up everywhere. If Twitter #EBLIP8 is anything to go by, I wasn’t the only one who responded to this.

The conference was in the middle of Brisbane with its mild winter sun, but you could be forgiven for thinking at times you were in Canada with its mild summer. According to conference statistics, Canadian were not a particularly large group, but they were well-represented as presenters and participants in various discussions because they have a lot to contribute to conversations about the evidence-based practice. In comparison with Australia, Canadians have a well-established EBP and support structures of which most countries can only dream. What we do have in Australia is curiosity, the ability to experiment and innovate, and individuals with significant experience in applied research –- a good start for learning and community-building. 

Grass, bush and a maple tree

The most powerful aspect of the conference for me was thinking of how we can connect individuals and various groups with their different strengths and needs. Grass--tree, rhizome--root metaphors for organisation of information and knowledge, especially in digital environments, have been pretty well-known and very meaningful to me (see Wikipedia page and this explanation). I’ll use the metaphor to sketch a rough landscape of EBLIP groups as glimpsed at the conference (albeit, without drawing skills of some talented library folks).

http://www.inflexions.org/1000platos-1914-14.gif

Grass: An obvious example of a grass-root group is LARK. As LARKs know, face-to-face meetings and events have been organised only in Sydney so far (except the LARK meeting at EBLIP8), but our online group is comprised of people across Australia and the world. A short meeting at the conference with people interested in being involved with LARK showed there is a good will to collaborate and connect. Because LARK is flexible, agile and has an online presence, it can easily link with other groups and take the role of a connector. Its strength is in its lightness. It is a peer-to-peer group and it doesn’t belong to any particular organisation. It also benefits from an association with ALIA.
 
Bush: Like-minded people within the same organisation come together to foster evidence-based practice at their workplace. They have a root structure to be planted within their organisations, but they are small and flexible enough to easily fit into a grassy landscape. Library Research Group at Flinders University, for example, is one of few academic libraries with a thriving peer-support group. Their strength is in their ability to provide face-to-face support and organise team work. Similar groups are not wide-spread, but exist in schools and other organisations. 

ALIA Research Advisory Committee (RAC) has also worked on building research culture by writing the research column in Incite and presenting research workshops at conferences for the last five years. RAC members are scattered across Australia, but exist within the ALIA structure (see ALIA Research).

Maple tree: North American countries have a well-established structure for practice-based research, including defined research roles for academic librarians. A keynote speaker, Virginia Wilson, made us gasp as she was describing support for evidence-based practice at the University of Saskatchewan. Research is part of the academic library role with 20% of work time devoted to research for pre-tenure and 15% for tenured librarians. They have the Centre for of Evidence Based Library & Information Practice which, among many initiatives, provides the Researcher-in-Residence Program. It is open to international applicants if any LARK wants to apply to see what is happening on this maple tree.

There are many excellent examples at North American academic institutions, which provide supportive structures for the EBLIP. It seems, however, that strong institutional structures are largely absent outside universities.

Whole landscape

In the current and future EBP landscape there is space and place for all these groups. What is needed in Australia is a sense of purposeful connection – or landscape architecture -- to extend the metaphor. EBLIP8 has played an important role in providing aspirational models, raising awareness and igniting discussions and connections. There were many excellent papers for modelling and learning, but equally important were conversations, both face-to-face and on Twitter. The conference also provided an excellent forum for quick feedback on some of the ideas.

A fantastic boost for the Australian EBLIP and a hope for a well-designed landscape was announced during the conference. The project to build the basis the evidence based library and information practice, led by professors Helen Partridge and Lisa Given in partnership with ALIA and NSLA, received a Linkage grant from the Australian Research Council. With solid funding and experienced people involved in the project, the dispersed, budding evidence-based community in Australia is looking forward to some tangible outcomes.

@suzanasukovic let's use #LARK and #eblip hashtags as another way to keep in touch :) @eblip8 #eblip8

— Liz Walkley Hall (@LizWalkleyHall) July 8, 2015

 

#DH2015 with a woman’s touch

Digital Humanities 2015, University of Western Sydney, 29 June-3 July 2015

Watching 2 corellas destroying the building during #dh2015 lunchtime session on research infrastructure #irony pic.twitter.com/umSHlA0jxm

— Fiona Tweedie (@FCTweedie) July 2, 2015

By Suzana Sukovic


It was a great day, Digital Humanities. After 15+ years of following, I thought I moved on to other things. But, you moved on too, and here we are again... More importantly, you haven’t quite become a well-established field yet. Actually, there is so much going on to keep many different people interested. And that makes you, DH, still interesting.

I have to say I’ve been having my doubts about all the DH inclusiveness talk for quite a while. Last week Scott Weingard posted a very interesting analysis on why women are so well represented in the audience and so poorly on the speaker’s podium. To simplify his more complex argument, male DH movers and shakers (and they are the majority) aren’t keen on all the talk about culture and other soft topics. They don’t like strange names that aren’t clearly male or female either. That’s what Weingard’s quantitative and digital analysis indicates – and, in machines we trust. 

The real shakeup, however, came with the announcement of the keynote address this morning. Deb Verhoaven from the Deaken University started lightly and inconspicuously before she launched into a DH version of the “misogyny speech”. Funnier and friendlier than Julia Gillard’s speech (for a reason), Verhoaven delivered the same poignant message about a “parade of patriarchs” seen at DH during the previous sessions. I hope that someone made a recording and will share the speech and the reaction in the audience. It nearly ended with a standing ovation. 

It was an unexpected moment of inspiration followed by Genevieve Bell’s fantastic keynote address. Who knew that a talk about the history of robots could be so interesting? History, culture, perceptions and human hope to breathe life into things, combined with funny situations when an anthropologist met a full room of engineers in the Silicon Valley 20 years ago, came together in a fascinating talk about people and machines. Most likely accidentally, Bell illustrated Weingard’s point that women like to talk about culture. And the audience was delighted – just look at the Twitter stream #dh2015.

The second plenary session was shared by a panel on the Indigenous Digital Knowledge. Hart Cohen, Peter Radoll, Susan Beetson, Julia Torpey and Peter Read (convener) discussed the use of technology in ways meaningful for Indigenous people. Peter Read referred to the project A History of Aboriginal Sydney* to discuss possibilities of a 3D presentation of spaces significant in Aboriginal history. He asked the audience to think how imagination and technology can open uncovered perspectives and lead to deeper historical understanding. Peter Read said that all his life he studied place and people and now wonders about uncovering emotions of the past.

It seems, after all, that the Program Committee had a good sense of the Other when they planned plenary sessions today. Listening is also a good sign of a healthy, vibrant field.

There were many excellent papers delivered in English with many accents by both (all?) genders. I can’t do them justice, but glimpses of a great range of papers and a sense of engagement can be seen on Twitter and notes by Geoffrey Rockwell.

*The website www.historyofaboriginalsydney.edu.au has been recently transferred to another server which caused some glitches. They will be corrected soon.  

EBLIP8

8th International Evidence Based Library and Information Practice Conference 

Suzana Sukovic
A whole conference devoted to applied research  – it’s a nerd dream come true to a LARK. I am looking forward to EBLIP8 so much that I allowed it to rule my weekends – a bit of work for the Program Committee, background reading, preparing a presentation and a workshop - and the first LARK meeting outside Sydney. Next weekend is a shopping-packing-flying routine and then three days of talking practice-based research. Imagine! If you have read so far, I think you can agree it isn’t just my weird taste to find it all so exciting.

EBLIP8 registrations are closing on Monday 29th. Only two days left to join all the fun! When you are filling in the registration form, please pay attention to many excellent workshops. Bhuva Narayan and I presenting the Workshop 3 From blog to academic article. 

LARK meeting is on Tuesday 8-9 am. As the meeting descriptions says, we will network and discuss how we can work together across geographical distances.

LARK event tonight

Suzana Sukovic

The LARK event - tour of the UTS library retrieval system and workshop How to get published?, followed by dinner at a Japanese restaurant - are tonight. Everyone involved in organising this event is looking forward to an evening of stimulating conversations and good fun. 

Anyone who has made the last moment decision to come is welcome to join us. The workshop will start at 6.15 pm. See LARK post on 20 May for details.

People who are going to the LRS tour will be escorted to the workshop. Others who are coming straight to the workshop will be directed from the entrance at the UTS Library. Someone from the LARK group or library staff at the front desk will be there to let you pass the security gates. We'll be in the Lecture Room 4K.

We'll use #LARK @UTSLibrary on Twitter. Join the conversation!