ALIA Sydney Presents: From Little Things Big Things Grow: preparing to present and write a paper

It's conference season with the ALIA New Librarians Symposium and Library Technicians Conference both happening this month and the ALIA Biennial have already released their call for abstracts for next year's conference in Sydney. 


Have you thought you would like to present a paper at a conference? 


But don't know where to start? 


Or maybe you've done it before but would like to brush up your skills and get some insiders tips? 


Well, the latest ALIA Sydney event is here to help you get your hands dirty and start to grow your little ideas into big ones. 


This half day workshop is to help you develop confidence and learn some tips and tricks about how to put together a conference paper covering everything from pitching the idea to your manager, submitting an abstract, working with colleagues and brushing up your presentations skills. The workshop will also explore writing a small piece for a professional publication such as inCite as this can be great way to hone sharing your ideas. 


Featuring guest presenters: 


Janet Fletcher (Director, Information Services Department, UNSW and Co-Convenor for the ALIA 2012 Biennial) 


Alyson Dalby (InSync Surveys and former Co-Convenor ALIA New Librarians Symposium) 

Room 209, UNSW Library, University of New South Wales

1 - 5pm Saturday 15th October 2011  

ALIA Members $15 and Non-Members $20

RSVPs are essential so please email your details to aliasydneygroup@gmail.com 

Measuring for Success?

Recently I was reading a post over at Fresh + New(er) the digital media blog for the Powerhouse Museum, which was talking about the launch of the first of their new iPhone Walking Tours which is now available in the AppStore. Whilst the app looks interesting, what really caught my attention was this statement:

"We aren’t measuring success by the number of downloads but in the number of completed tours. And I strongly believe that a low price (vs free) will lead to more tour completions relative to total downloads."

Clearly I wasn't the only one intrigued by this concept as Seb Chan further posted in response to a comment asking how they would know if people completed the tour:

"We've got analytics built in so like a website we can see what stops get viewed, time spent, paths etc. Plus more rubbery qualitative feedback like you tell us that you've walked it (after you do)."

This set me thinking about the ways in which libraries are measuring success. We all do it and whether your library relies on balanced scorecards or benchmarks, statistics or surveys, someone, somewhere in your organization is probably spending an awful lot of time trying to figure out how to show what we do and why it matters. 

But I'm curious to know how widespread electronic analytics, such as the ones the Powerhouse have employed for their walking tour, have become in libraries and how are we translating that data into knowledge about our organisations and our user communities. Have we reached a point yet with our electronic resources that we no longer need to ask our users what they are using because we can already see it?

 I remember being inspired a while back when Seb Chan from the Powerhouse mentioned that one of the ways they were improving the catalogue of their collection was tracking the parts of the pages that people were cutting and pasting from. This idea, whilst conceptually so simple, was such a clever way to know not just which pages were opened but what people did when they got there.

Currently in my organization we explore a lot of statistics about  our e-resources (when the publishers offer them) just as we create and use a lot of statistics about our services and physical collections. But is the the tricky leap from quantitative to qualitative measures that still causes so many complications. How do you know that 9000 searches in a year is a sign of a popular database and not a sign of a database that is viewed by our clients as necessary but chronically difficult to use? 

I'm afraid I don't have answers here but rather questions as I think our explorations of the ways in which our users are engaging with out electronic collections can only become more exciting. 

So I want to know, how does your library measure success?

Kate

Kate Byrne is the Convenor for ALIA Sydney.

Designing our library future: be involved or be forgotten

What is the future of the Library? What is the future of the Librarian? These are questions we hear and see discussed ad nauseum at conferences, in blogs, in our tea rooms. In reality the ‘future library’ has already snuck in the back door. We were just too focused on the discussion to notice.

There is no doubt that technology has changed libraries, and the role of the librarian, exponentially over the past thirty years. Over this time as librarians have adapted and taken on new roles and more responsibilities they have in fact become less adept at being able to succinctly describe their role, and more importantly less able to articulate their value.

Perhaps the library world thought it could just get by on its warm fuzzy factor… after all everyone seems to love libraries! I’ve never seen a library receive poor ratings on satisfaction surveys. Libraries have the power to have people protest at their closing down who have never walked into the building. In actuality, people love the idea of libraries more than the reality of the juxtaposition of books, shelves, space and people they are forced to interact with. What is it about the idea of libraries (more than the reality) that people are so committed to?

In light of this, the library world has a lot of questions it needs to answer.

What is the role of the library today?
What is the value of the librarian?
What is it about a library that makes people care about it?
What do people need from a library?
How do people use a library?
And most fundamentally of all – What do we want the library to be?

These are all questions we need to be able to answer – articulately, succinctly and passionately - if we are to regain control over our own future. Notice this does not include technology or tools but is about people, culture, and needs. In true librarian style we are instead having a pleasant leisurely conversation about it over tea and biscuits rather than understanding the urgency of the situation.

How might we, the library industry, design our own future?

There is no question that we are facing a paradigm shift of epic proportions that requires a complete reconsideration of the very foundations and ideas of the role and value of libraries and librarians. It’s messy, it will feel uncomfortable and take some getting used to, but we need to put down the tea and bickies and embrace design thinking. In its essence design thinking is a collaborative and human centred problem solving approach for solving complex business, organizational and social problems.

Design thinking offers an approach for the library world to strategically move forward, as co-authors of the future of libraries. It provides an opportunity to explore in a structured and meaningful way these philosophical questions and ‘problem find’, to then problem solve, appropriately.

Co-authoring and collaboration here does not mean a team of librarians, or even a team of librarians and designers, but a multidisciplinary team that represents all the people who have a stake in the library. This includes: librarians, designers, customers, vendors, service providers and other major stakeholders depending on the library’s context. Further to this, a human centred approach not only considers just the librarian or user or vendor. Instead design thinking ensures a holistic solution is designed that is sustainable and caters to all the humans involved, not just one segment.

The process is grounded in engaging and co-creating the future with and for all stakeholders with the human always at the centre. It is a proactive and future focused approach that is grounded in understanding the stories of the past and the current operating context.

Design thinking is already being used in libraries to rethink and redesign the future of libraries, as in this presentation by Scottish service design agency Snook:

Library Innovation Game

View more presentations from Snook

We have to understand this is not about adding on, or adapting, or evolving, or rebuilding, but redesigning the very core of what a library is and means in today’s postmodern world.

Or we will be sipping our tea, eating our biscuits and talking about how important we are while the world moves on without us.

- Zaana Howard

Zaana blogs at Design Tapas and tweets @zaana