library euthanasia, twapperkeeper, echolib, and New Professionals Conference

 NB: It's been pointed out to me that the links in this post are not working from Google Reader, for some reason. Apologies for that - while I sort it out, the links definitely do work online... If you are viewing this in Reader, then copy and paste this URL - http://thewikiman.org/blog/?p=473 - into your browser to get a working version!

 COLLEAGUES /

:)

A whole bundle of little things in this post, starting with a link to a provocative blog post from the Library Thing Thingology Blog - have a look at this.

The central premise is a quote from a further blog post from idealog.com, about e-books killing book stores. The key part of that quote is this: "If you are for bookstores lasting as long as possible, you want to slow down the uptake of ebooks." The implication (in fact it's not an implication; the idealog blog post explicitly states this) is that we have to make an uncomfortable choice between attempting to slow down the uptake of new technology, or hastening the death of the book-store. Thingology extrapolates this to libraries, reasonably enough, and although it stops short of actually advocating strategically slowing the influx and influence of e-books, the blog post is entitled 'Why are you for killing libraries?' and the suggestion clearly is that we are being complicit in our own demise. It's thought-provoking stuff - I may save my own opinions for an entry to the LISNews Contest... But in a nut-shell,  I don't think we should slow down the technology, as we exist to facilitate access to information and if we can't do that we shouldn't be here. We need to adapt, or die, but quite honestly either of those is probably preferable to deliberately obstructing progress.

Anyhow. In other news, I've been guilty of not using twapperkeeperwhen linking to the #echolib debate on Twitter. When pointing people towards the discussion regarding how to move library advocacy beyond the echo-chamber, I've just linked to a search of Twitter- but this only keeps post from the last few days. Twapperkeeper allows you to archive all the tweets relating to any hash-tag - I'm sure most of you reading this use it already, but I thought I'd mention it just in case... Turns out Emma Cragg has already set up an archive for #echolib, so thank you to her - it has all the tweets on the subject, from the very beginning.

Myself and Woodsiegirlhave not just been collecting comments / articles / ideas on this echolib subject for reasons of idle curiosity, by the way - we're going to run a seminar on the subject at the CILIP Yorkshire & Humberside branch Member's Day / AGM in York on April 7th, so if you're around then do come along; we'll be pumping you for information and ideas as well as presenting our own! I'm hoping this'll be the first of a few sessions / presentations etc on the subject - and CILIP members, look out for an article in Update soon.

Finally just to say there is still time for a New Professionals Conference proposal submission! Submission details are here, and you can read the papers from last year for some inspiration, here. New Professionals, too, has its own twapper archive, for tweets using the #npc2010 hashtag - it is still in its infancy for now but we'll use in the run-up t0, during, and after the conference.

- thewikiman

about dismantling the echo-chamber...

As the #echolib debate goes on, I have a confession to make. When I first appropriated the phrase echo-chamber to try and kick off this whole discussion, I was quite selective in how I interpreted it... So the part of the Wikipedia definition which describes the echo-chamber as '...any situation in which information, ideas or beliefs are amplified or reinforced by transmission inside an enclosed" space' - that suits my purposes perfectly. But the bit about '...like-minded people then repeat, overhear, and repeat again (often in an exaggerated or otherwise distorted form) until most people assume that some extreme variation of the story is true' - that bit I didn't really apply to our situation in the library community. I don't mean to suggest that we're kidding ourselves about stuff, and that by only listening to similarly minded peers we're blind (or rather deaf) to dissonant voices. I should have made that clear earlier, and Andy's post - Dismantling the echo-chamber - on his Agnostic, Maybe blog has brought home the need for clarification. I wrote a veeeery long comment in response to the Andy's post - it was so long, I decided to release it as a blog post all of its own, so here it is.

Perhaps a better analogy for my particular take on the echo-chamber would be the library blogging community on one side of a mirror, firing all sorts of brilliant and important ideas towards the mirror. For the most part, the ideas bounce back into the same group of already-forward-thinking people - whereas those on the other side of the mirror (ie the wider library community, and the people who are entirely indifferent to us and what we do) are only receiving the very small percentage of ideas that get 'through' the mirror.

So an ASCII representation might look like this, where > is an idea, and | is the mirror:

[like-minded library bloggers] >>>>>>>><<<< | > > > [everyone else]

Hmmm... :) Anyway, point is: many more ideas are fired at the mirror and bounce back, than get through. Like the dam picture at the top - there's a hell of a lot more water contained the other side of the dam than is escaping through the pipe.

I love that Andy follows blogs he doesn't agree with (see his original post), that's a truly reflective practitioner! He's absolutely right, it is good to know what detractors are thinking, and it does help focus your potential responses and defences. I find that just by virtue of choosing a 2.0ish medium of communication, many library bloggers seem to be people who think along similar lines to me, and vice versa, anyway. Not on a detail level, but a meta-level. I'd be interested in who anyone else's 'team of rivals' is. But it's a great principle, and I will try and adopt it.

Incidentally, about this whole thing, I think there's a curve of interest in libraries which corresponds to how and where we should devote our energies. So on the far left there's the actively hostile - it isn't worth trying to 'convert' them or otherwise try and force people into libraries who have no need for the services we provide. (But we should defend ourselves with well-honed arguments if they publicly attack...) Then at the other end on the right there's the library super-fans - we should be harnessing their advocacy, but not putting too much effort into telling them how wonderful we are, because they already know. Then there's the people in the middle - currently indifferent, but if they knew what we could really do for them in 2010, their informed opinion might be that we are a resource they should utilise. Those are the people who are beyond the echo-chamber, and who we should be trying to reach.

- thewikiman