One step forward, two steps back in library-land

There was a couple of really nice things I read yesterday. Firstly, Katie Birkwood got out of the Echo Chamber and presented at Ignite London 4, a non-library event, and talked about libraries. This is absolutely brilliant - a central tenant of the echolib philosophy is to go where librarians aren't, and preach to the unconverted. By the sounds of things she succeeded in converting some of them, too - you can read about it on her blog, here.

I wanted to embed her slides here because I think they are absolutely fantastic:

Just a Room Full of Stuff? Why Libraries are Great / Katie Birkwood

View more presentations from Katie Birkwood.

Another positive thing (for me) was seeing Emma Davidson's blog post about the LISNPN competition - she contrasted the energies being directed at down-playing the positivity around the SaveLibraries campagin, on the LIS-Profession mailing list, with the energies being directed at trying to improve things a tiny bit, via our competition. That was a nice way of looking at it. Emma said:

"I think it’s extremely interesting that one cohort is choosing to spend their energies deploring the current situation, whilst the other is doing their best to get people to do something about it.

Of course, some of the points made on the discussion list are extremely valid, and equally one might argue that a bunch of random acts of advocacy won’t necessarily make much difference to the overall picture, but I know which general approach makes me proud to be part of this profession, and which route fills me with gloom."

Generally speaking I think those JISC-mail lists seem to bring out the worst in people a lot of the time, I don't know why. Lots of gloom mixed in with the odd flash of anger. They can be very productive at times, though, so I stay subscribed and look for diamonds in the rough.

My own views on SaveLibrariesDay, both the positive and the cautioning, are encapsulated better than I could say it myself by this excellent piece on Use Libraries and Learn Stuff.

Anyhow, these nice things were offset by a pronouncement from David Cameron in the Commons. He's on a bit of a roll for making idiotic public statements of late, and this one was really depressing from an information professional's point of view.

"We all know a truth about libraries, which is that those which will succeed are those that wake up to the world of new technology, the internet and everything else, and investment goes in."

How utterly depressing. Needless to say in the echo chamber of this blog, we all know that we have of course woken up to the world of new technology (and THE INTERNET - thanks Dave, public libraries have offered internet access since the nineties for God's sake) a long time ago, and it is ignorant for him to pronounce otherwise. Has he been to a library recently, or is he just making it up? Has he been to his own library in the House of Commons which, despite being closer to the Victorian ideal of a library (the one that everyone thinks all libraries are like) than the vast majority of libraries in the world, still contains computers? I like the idea that if we DO 'wake up' to this stuff that we've been awake to for two decades, 'investment goes in' - well that's settled then, invest in us you fool.

Everyone tells you that living under a Tory Government will be rubbish, of course, but you really have to experience it for yourself to get the full forlorn, listless, faith-in-humanity eroding, fear-mongering, banker-pandering, xenophobic, misogynist, racist, homophobic, equality-ignoring hatefulness of it all. Good times.

Anyway, hearing David Cameron talk about libraries reminded me of an email exchange I'd had with Chris Rhodes, and he gave me permission to quote something he said which is very important, and very true, about the whole Save Libraries thing:

“The problem with the save libraries campaign [is] even highly educated people have no idea what libraries do.

‘Save the local bus route’ is an easier campaign, prima facie, because public perception of what the local bus route does and what it actually does are not that different. With ‘save the local library’ there is a massive disparity between what the library does and what people think it does.

The campaign has to both explain the role of libraries and explain why they should not be cut.”

I think he's absolutely right, and it does make the whole thing massively, massively harder.

*bangs head against desk*

Sorry, normal cheerier service will be resumed with the next blog post. :)

- thewikiman

Learning from the Orteig Prize - the sky is the limit for libraries!

It was from this Freakonomics Radio podcast, which I've refered to on this blog before and which provoked a huge number of comments, that I learned about the Orteig Prize. It's a really fascinating story, it inspired the LISNPN competition mentioned in part one of this post, and who knows what else we can learn from it - so bear with me while I go through the events of the early 1920s.

A little history

In 1919, a New York hotelier called Raymond Orteig put up a prize of $25,000 (equivalent to over $300,000 today in pure inflation terms, but actually a lot more in terms of what that money could buy) for the first aviator to fly non-stop from New York to Paris, or the other way around. For the first five years, no one could claim his prize as the technology wasn't advanced enough. But in those five years people worked enormously hard, because that was an enormous amount of money.

Eventually, in 1927, Charles Lindbergh makes the flight successfully, and wins the prize. It took 33.5 hours in a single-engine plane (the Spirit of  St Louis) and was a minor miracle of good fortune allied with supreme skill, but he made it safely to France. Lindbergh was only 25 years old at the time, and he used the massive fame he now enjoyed to promote commercial aviation. He was obviously one of those polymathic people who just operate on a higher plain (no pun intended) than the rest of us - he later became a prize-winning author, an environmentalist (can't of been too many of them at that time), an international explorer and an inventor!

This was of course a fantastic achievement, but the existence of the competition catalysed massive progress in the aviation industry by loads of people, not just Lindbergh himself. In fact, $400,000 worth (in old money) of innovation happened from the combined entries to the competition - and Orteig only had to pay out once! The results of this expenditure were immediately quantifiable - the year before Lindbergh's flight, just 6,000 people travelled by air as passengers; 18 months afterwards there was 180,000 commercial passengers. Even in the months remaining in 1927, the year of his flight, applications for pilot's licences tripled and the number of registered aircraft quadrupled.

(Another ramification of the competition was, as you might expect with experimental air travel, a huge loss of human life. Many pilots died failing to win the prize. Hopefully a library equivalent won't place its entrants in such jeopardy...)

The Legacy

Apart from the 30-fold increase in commercial air-travel, which effectively gave birth the multi-billion dollar industry we know today, the prize had another legacy. Inspired by Orteig's competition, Peter Diamandis set up the X Prize Foundation. This offers a more modern prize of $10,000,000 to achieve huge goals such as commercial flight into space - again, far more than $10,000,000 is invested, in total, by all the entrants combined, so the field moves on apace. Not only that, but the Foundation themselves don't put up the prizes! They are funded by organisations and philanthropists, eager to making progress happen.

The LISNPN competition

As I'm sure you've realised, the LISNPN competition is a very (VERY) small-scale attempt to do something similar. We're offering prizes we think people will really value, and will be willing to work hard and innovate in order to have a shot at winning. Although entrants will retain full copyright of their ideas, LISNPN will be able to show-case ALL of them, and hopefully ALL of them should reach a new audience not normally involved with libraries at all. We're only giving out two prizes (again, put up by generous people who want to encourage the enterprise, rather than paid for from the - non-existent - LISNPN coffers) but hopefully the profession will benefit from lots and lots of advocacy efforts.

Are there other things we can do with competitons and libraires?

So is there scope for more library innovation on a much grander scale, adopting the Orteig prize principles? I think there must be. Other bodies must be able to run other competitions, the entries for which could be public-facing and progressive. I'd love to see one around technology in libraries.

And this links to another thing I've often thought, which is that libraries (certainly in the UK) don't appear to be as good at attracting philanthropy as other comparable areas. We need to be something that rich people and foundations think of when they're wondering where to put their money in a charitable way. Perhaps an innovation inspiring competition is a way to achieve this? What do you think?

In the meantime, good luck with the competition if you're entering.

- thewikiman

A competition to benefit everyone in libraries, not just the winners

LISNPN, the New Professionals Network, has just announced it's first ever competition and I am really excited about it.

You can read all about it on the network itself, but the short version is this: we want people who have entered the profession in the last decade or so to create a piece of library advocacy. It could be an article, a video, a slide-deck, an essay, a piece of art, a project, a campaign - literally anything that doesn't pre-date the competition. The only criteria is that it gets some pro-library ideas to people who wouldn't normally engage with libraries at all. The idea is to indulge in a bit of stealth advocising - to package up some library advocacy in something so intrinsically awesome that it reaches new audiences. Doesn't even have to be particularly stealthy - just reach new people.

The first prize is a full pass to Umbrella, CILIP's biennial conference which takes place in July this year. We're working with CILIP on this competition so thank you very much to CEO Annie Mauger for agreeing to be part of this - the prize is worth up to £500 (based on what the pass would cost to buy; it'd be slightly cheaper if you are a CILIP member already) and includes refreshments, social activities and the Gala Dinner. Attendance at such a conference is usually out of the reach of New Professionals due to the cost, so we're really hoping the competition sparks loads of interest and is entered by people who would love to attend but couldn't normally. Not only that but there is a second prize of attendance at the New Professionals Conference this year! This has kindly been donated by the Career Development Group. Full details of this year's NPC are still to be decided, but it'll take place in June, somewhere other than London. You can read about last year's conference here to get an idea of what it's all about.

We'd really encourage as many people as possible to enter, whether it will be your first attempts at library advocacy, or if you're a veteran. You can read the full Terms and Conditions on LISNPN. (And thank you muchly to the LISNPN admin team for spending ages with me working those out!)

Apart from the great prize, and it being another step forward for the network, there's another reason I'm thrilled about this. Every single entry should benefit the library community, whether it wins or not. Many competition entries are inward-facing rather than out-ward facing - an essay about why you want to win, only ever seen by the judges, for example. That's fine, but this is different. Because every single entry to this competition will be a little piece of library advocacy, a small effort to raise awareness about the profession and the industry. The beauty of a competition format like this is that one prize inspires multiple efforts - to actually commission 10 or 20 or 50 people to create advocacy would cost a fortune, whereas here we only 'pay out' once, or rather twice as we have a second prize. So lots of innovation is (hopefully) catalysed. When this happened in the air-travel industry, with the Orteig prize in 1927, it moved things on by years in a single leap! Not saying that will happen here, but I'm still excited at the prospects of what we can do.

You can read more about the Orteig Prize and how we can use the method to advance the library profession, in the unofficial part 2 of this blog post, here. It's a really interesting story!

- thewikiman

Everyone should read this article! Then maybe write their own...

Librarianship was yesterday featured in the Guardian's Beyond the Job Series. The article was entitled Beyond books: what it takes to be a 21st century librarian and was written by Emma Cragg and Katie Birkwood.

I am so happy about this article! For loads of reasons.

First of all, this is a brilliant piece. Here is a quote - I originally highlighted three paragraphs I really liked in order to copy and paste them, but realised that would basically be quoting half the article... Here is one bit I liked, but I liked all of it, and you should go read the whole thing.

"Books are only one aspect of what libraries and librarians are about. Librarianship is a people profession; a librarian's job is to connect people with the information they are seeking, whatever format that may take. At their heart, all library jobs have a central purpose: to help people access and use information, for education, for work, or for pleasure. In all library roles customer service and communication skills are important. If anyone ever thought they'd become a librarian because they liked books or reading, they would be sorely disappointed if they did not also like people too."

The article says all the things you'd want it to say, as a library professional, and all the things you'd need it to say, as someone curious about entering the field and needing to know the reality of it.

Second of all, it is in the Guardian. It will be read by thousands and thousands of people, all of whom will be educated about what librarianship consists of even if they don't go on to try and become one. It is a proper bonafide Echo Chamber escape. I believe the genesis of the idea came from this post on Emma's blog, and the comments that followed.

Thirdly, it mentions the Library Routes Project. Laura and I wanted to break this resource (which, if you're unfamiliar with it, documents librarians' roots into the profession and their routes through it) out of the echo chamber but have been unable to do so, really. I actually contacted the Guardian to propose an article about it, but didn't get a response. Emma and Katie have found just the right medium in which to mention it, and they got in lots of references to Bobbi Newman's Library Day in the Life Project too (you can see my video contribution to that project, here). Perfection! Since the article was published around 24hrs ago, the Library Routes wiki has been viewed hundreds of extra times - finally by some non-librarians, I hope.

Fourthly it mentions me! And this slide-deck:

If you want to work in libraries

I sought to get this slide-deck seen outside the echo chamber as much as possible, and although that certainly happened this will really add to it - in fact Emma commented that they were going to try and link to it from a Guardian article way back then, now it has finally come to fruition. It's really kind of Katie and Emma to include a link to this, so thank you to them. As a Guardian reader since literally aged 12 (yes, I know...) and someone who literally loves the paper and the institution, being mentioned by a Guardian article is definitely (literally) pretty fabulous!

So the question is, can any of us repeat this success elsewhere? Emma and Katie are presumably forbidden from reproducing their work in other publications, but there is nothing to stop the rest of us finding avenues for writing a guide to librarianship and getting it published in neutral, non-library places. Are you up for the challenge?

- thewikiman

How would you behave if Privacy didn't exist?

A lot of the prominent stories recently emanating from our world, and the wider world, are linked by the subject of Privacy. It runs like a vein through so many contemporary stories, that I wonder if people will look back on the years around the turn of this decade as a tipping point for privacy. Perhaps we're about to go one of two ways - a future in which nothing is really private, or something a little more Orwellian where privacy is shut down, globally, off the back of Bush-administration style rhetoric about 'national security'.

Sometimes, the privacy stories directly intersect with library stories (such as the controversy around the Library of Congress's handling of the wikileaks saga), but even when they don't, it's all relevant. Privacy is about access to information, and we are the Information Professionals.

The big stories

Many of the biggest stories at the moment are privacy related. The phone-hacking scandal currently rocking the Murdoch empire, for example. Of course Wikileaks is the most obvious one - there are many levels of privacy involved here. People were doing or saying things they thought were private, which were recorded by third parties who in turn thought this would be kept private. Then along comes a whistle-blower who makes the information available to a website, who in turn make it available to the world. For the most part the information only has value because of some distinctly librarian-like intervention between the data being leaked, and we the public ingesting it. 300,000 files on a memory stick is pretty useless on its own - hours and hours of collating, sorting, curating and research, in this case by journalists, give the information the accessibility it needs to be communicable to a large audience. Information overload is also a factor here - absolutely incredible stories, scoops of the year in their own right at any other time, get down-graded because of their proximity to so many other high-interest pieces of information. We become immunised to scandal when we get too much of it at one time.

It is interesting to think how much revelatory material is currently waiting to be unearthed, once someone has done the research to make it viable for public release. It is interesting to wonder how diplomacy will work in the future, if everyone knows that everything they say may one day be read in the paper by you or I.

Recent events in Egypt have taken in Privacy related elements too. The Government wanted privacy; they didn't want easy communication between the people and the outside world, regarding the week-long protests that have been happening in Cairo and elsewhere.  So they turned off the internet.

Surely these two examples show the two ways this could go? Everyone knowing everything, or no one being allowed to communicate anything.

The logistics of leaking

As the excellent Guardian Week in Review podcast pointed out, it is very easy to breach privacy these days. Wikileaks gets hold of 300,000 files at a time - can you imagine trying to carry that many pieces of paper out of a building, at all, let alone covertly? You'd need a lorry parked outside, for a start. Electronic data transfer facilitates leaks - you send things across the ether, or you can save them onto a memory stick the size of your thumb.

Not only that but technology tends to become smaller as it gets more advanced, and so a: more discrete and b: more ubiquitous because you can fit it into more stuff. An absolutely extraordinary number of people own mobile phones – some estimates put the figure as high as 5 billion mobiles in circulation – and pretty much all of those being sold today have cameras and video cameras as standard now. This is technology which would have been super-spy territory a couple of decades ago - devices capable of recording anything, that can fit in your pocket, and that look like something else and give no indication they're recording? Everyone can create the news now.

Not only that, but we have plenty of technology at our finger tips which allows pretty much instantaneous dissemination of whatever we have to share.

The smaller stories

Many privacy stories come about simply because people act differently if they don't think they're accountable for their actions. If they don't think their private actions will become public, they don't attempt to filter their behaviour. When they do become public, the people have to apologise and show contrition - as if it was only the fact that their actions came to light publicly that somehow enlightened them as to the fact those actions were wrong.

The MPs expenses scandal is an example of this - they were comfortable with what they were doing, until the private actions came under public scrutiny, and then they were all suddenly aware of their moral failings and very sorry. The recent departures of Keys and Gray from Sky's football coverage is similar - they acted in a way they knew was inappropriate in the eyes of the public, only because they didn't think those eyes would ever see those actions.

We all do this. I'm glad Keys and Grey are gone, they were buffoons. Their comments were indicative of their misogyny, and unpleasantly bullying. But who hasn't said something privately that would get them into enormous trouble if it was made public? As a case in point, I played poker with some male friends on Friday night, and we spent much of the night satirising Gray and Keys, impersonating them and so on. But context is everything - if you were to see footage of our conversation with the context stripped away, it would be just six men sitting round a table drinking and making sexist remarks.

Our stories

This is relevant to us and to libraries and to information, for many reasons. Particularly the way we use Search Engines. Because we use them, for the first part, thinking we are doing so in private. Would we use them differently if we knew our actions would become public? As the experience of the recent Yahoo! leak shows, I think we would. It's not just that people use the internet to access the seedier side of human existence, it's that our whole lives can be pieced together from the questions we ask of Yahoo!, Google and the rest. Our hopes, our fears, our indiscretions, our health, our finances, our plans - our identity. Google is keen not to be evil now, but the information it has on us already will be around forever. Forever! Who knows what the next generation of owners / CEOs will do with it all.

Facebook is much more openly evil, and plays around with your privacy all the time. We all know this, but as Bobbi Newman pointed out to me, a large percentage of its half-billion-plus users (that's one in four internet users in the world) will not be fully aware of this or of its implications.

The future

How would you behave if privacy didn't exist? Most of us would behave differently, I think. Our private morality would be more closely aligned with our public morality. The tabloids who, happy in their own rank hypocrisy, crow about Gray's 'disgraceful' sexist comments about a female referee whilst simultaneously trying to objectify her in the accompanying out-of-context pictures of her at a nightclub, would not find it so easy to preach about what they so clearly don't practice themselves. But it occurs to me that if this IS a tipping point in privacy, then perhaps we're already happily revealing everything about ourselves, it's just that the information will be made public retrospectively.

So perhaps we should all start behaving as if privacy didn't exist now, to save embarrassment later..? In any case, the role of the Information Professional will surely be of increasing importance, in providing guidance and education, as the stakes associated with digital literacy, information literacy, transliteracy, grow ever higher.

- thewikiman

NB: Hilariously, since writing this piece this morning, and coming back to proof-read it and add the links this afternoon, I've since read a piece by Charlie Brooker in the Guardian this very day saying, in some cases, pretty much exactly the same thing - except more entertainingly... You can read his article here.