Connecting Librarian

Linda Burridge and I were the first presenters in this session. Our presentation – From Mess to CMS: the transformation of a library website, which is available on SlideShare.

Rachel Chidlow -Aging gracefully?: Reviewing and enhancing Information Commons services at the University of Auckland

Started with an introductory video about their Information Commons.

Technological changes and staffing model changes made, based on student feedback. They user focus groups, suggestions, etc. Get a lot of feedback from their Information Commons blog – seeks input on software updates, arrangements and more.

What has been changed? Software – more and more varied. Students are very forward in their requests, but library also seeks feedback from faculty. Try to offer the same software as the general software offered in departmental computer labs.

Access to recreational resources online is available but had been charged or offered at a lower speed. New model introduced a flat rate model and data limits with high rates for exceeding limits, which student’s readily accepted. Educational access is still free.

Upgraded university email service and introduced access to Google Docs and Gmail.  Implemented UserLock & PC Booking System, to help with the issue of multiple bookings, while still allowing access to Web 2.0 including social networks. Yet to implement a booking system – looking at MyPC and Pharos Sign-up. Trial of software changed studen’ts minds about it – they complained when it was removed. Software was helpful in giving trend and use information, which help them to determine future booking and use limitations.

13 FTE and 17 casual staff in the 3 Information Commons locations. Permanent staff have portfolio responsibilities, casual student assistants work on housekeeping roles and elsewhere as required.

Finished with a short video showing how busy it gets.

Mal Booth, Sophie McDonald and Belinda Tiffen – UTS – A new vision for universitylibraries towards 2015.

Technical issues – video, then animation, then Common Craft idea based video, showing what their 3 visions for the future of UTS which is getting a new library by 2015.

Firstv Video available on YouTube – UTS Library.  Lots of open spaces, natural light, funky furniture, impressive buildings, technology, collaboration space.
2nd video produced by students,outlining their vision of the future of the library.

Key points: social hub, everywhere all the time, mulitmedia, personalised services, collaboration, both happening in physical and virtual realms.  Mobile catalogue, exploring QR codes. ¾ of collection moving to storage – will change what they are and what they do.

Students content creators – need to provide multimedia content and facilities – encouraging it with competitions and YouTube channel. Encouraging playfulness and more open dialogue with library users – personal relationships.

3rd video – video blog entry from researcher in 2015. Talked about personal information consultants, worldwide collaboration, open access publishing, cloud computing, digital media. (quote at end , if you can type, you can make movies)

Researching in 2015 key points – collaboration, personal service, open acsess, support across research life cycle.

4th video with apologies to Common Craft – working in 2015.
Working culture key points: trusting open culture, flexibile visible and mobile, personal and connected, green aware and sustainable, creative and constantly evolving.

All their videos are available on YouTube – they have a UTS Channel.

Here are my notes from the L-Plate series at VALA 2010 conference.  I am just cutting and pasting from what I took at the time, so I apologise for spelling and grammar, no time to do anything else at this stage.

Hope you get something out of it. I got plenty.

Open Source Software – Kathryn Greenhill
Imperfect analogy – spaghetti sauce – buy it in jar or make it yourself.
Flexibility and control.  Open Source requires particular skills, still has a price, but involves community effort and altruism.

Proprietary software: license, user restricted, no source code
Open Source: free redistribution, source code accessible, derived works, integrity of code, no discrimination, not specific to purpse, device, works with other software

There are checks and balances before any new code goes into the code base.

Key ideas of Open Source – release early – release often, many eyes make bugs shallow, peer review, developer-user relationship.

Koha – open source library management system.
Check http://www.ohloh.net for cot comparisons between proprietary and open source over time.

We already use open source software – linux, apache, mysql, php, firefox.
Who else uses os? Denmark using Open Office by 2011, Trove at NLA, White House uses Drupal, for their website, North  East Kansas Libraries for their LMS.

Examples of open source software: Open Office, Word Press, Drupal, Mediawiki, Gimp, Dimdim, Zimbra, Pidgin, Audacity, VLC media player.

Open source LMS – Evergreen, Koha, OLE project

Discovery layers – Scriblio, Sopac2 and more

Digital resources management – Kete, Omeka

Whats stopping us from using Open Source?  Skills. We need to know about relational databases, SML,  indexing and programming
Cost – of change
Perceived accountability
Centralised IT
Maturity of the products
Consortial impacts
Monopolies – marketing
What users have at home
Cloud computing and Software as a Service (Saas)
Closed hardware

What we can gain by using open source software?
Skills, flexibility, control, nimbleness, accountability, budgetary control.

However, software needs to fit the purpose and the organisation.

Library Mashups and APIs – Paul Hagon
RSS is a common API (application programming interface)
Can be used to interact with other services – application on iphone for eg.
API is used to put javascript showing marker on a Google map.
Don’t have to do the hard work, that is all done for you.

Can use APIs to adapt URLs to change what you are getting out of a site ie. Google calendar display on our website.
Can be used with our website – but they can be fragile, as they can break if you change your website.
Can use microformats – ie. Vcards for phones and internet.

Mashups using more than one data source to make something new – may be totally disparate. One of earliest was chicagocrime. org – Google maps and crime reports.
Libraries are using mashups involving Google maps and Flickr, Picture Australia has an open search interface – can add search to your browser options, Picture Australia with Google maps and geotagging, along with your location giving you photos of local area.

Code alert – a lot of  mashups involve XML. Jquery and YUI can help ease you into the process.

Where to start: Your library catalogue can help – check your RSS feeds – play with the XML and see what you can do.
data.australia.gov.au – data licensed for re-use under Creative Commons.

delicious.com/paulhagon/vala2010-lplate – links to all the resources and demos used.

Tools available to help – Yahoo Developer Network – YQL, use common language to extract XML. Yahoo Pipes, Firebug – plugin for Firefox.

Why? – Our community not just consumers, also producers once data is made available. Some of ours could be creating these sorts of things, if only the data is available – let our geeks loose on our data.

Semantic Web – Tom Tague

Check out stuff on semantic web on Wikipedia – good foundation.

Variety of interpretations: web 3.0, near religious standard, set of technical standards and capabilities we can use – very hard to define

Standards and Capabilities: RDF (resource description framework – form of XML – ugly but it is the standard), RDFS/OWL/Other ontology standards – great debate about these, Linked data, Automated semantic information generation.

OpenCalais – Thomas Reuters initiative to connect world’s business content, free service that brings new efficiencies and productivity to publishers and content creators, fastest easiest way to categorize your contentand tag the entities, facts and events therein; 30,000s of users, 4-8 million transactions daily.

Issues: attaching metadata to content is expensive – both in time and money.

Metadata generation – feed content into their extraction engine, categorizes the stories and returns the metadata to you, also returns links.

Linked data – standard for publishing data on the web – uses RDF -  add data as well as links to other relevant linked data (not webpages, actual data). Standard is exploding, but there is no governance – ‘geeks playing in highway’ – librarians can add a lot of value to this as well as using the data generated.

There are alternatives to Open Calais – Yahoo and more.

Use it to:  add metadata to cotent, content enhancement via linked data, build your own linked data could, but don’t just think source content (commentary, user submitted content)

Think about collections: repositories, trend analysis, harmonization across data sets, federated search.

Cloud Computing – Bart Rutherford
Geek and poke cartoons.

No standard definition of cloud computing – consistently about the internet however.

Charting –  input/processor/output, corporate computing – people with money had these systems (banking, transport).

Progress of clients – fat clients, thin clients, desktop computer as client, browser as client.

How things have changed: mobile as client, internet, cheap storage, broadband, wifi, 3G and LTE, Open source and Linux, Ipv6

Lots of different types of clouds – public eg Facebook, private – Intranet, hybrid. Joined by VPNs and virtualization (servers with sub-servers within it)

Saas, Iaas, Paas
Software as a service – vendor provides hardware and infrastructure, user interacts through PC – eg. Webmail, facebook, twitter, Apples App, Google Docs, BitTorrent, DropBox and so  much more.
Infrastructure as a service – Amazon, Microsoft Azure.
Platform as a service – software and development tools hosted on the providers infrastructure, access and delivery (API) – Google Apps, Yahoo Pipes, Google Maps, Sugar CRM, Finance eg. Paypal.

Complexity runs from low to high – moves from consumer to developer.

Services are based on buy as you use – like utility bills. Scalable – to meet your needs, cost effective – PAYG and low tech input, secure and automated, mobility.

Warnings – no network connection – no cloud, no local storage – no local data,  slow connections no good, what to do if provider is destroyed?

Global outlook – EASE – Everything as a service, everywhere!  Won’t matter where your data is, just need the power and network connection to get to it.

Discovery Layer Interfaces – Marshall Breeding
Crowded landscape of information providers on the web – lots of non-library destinations, ie. Google Search and Scholar, Amazon, Wikipedia, Ask.com.

Digital natives are more experienced than us in web stuff, so when they come to our websites and catalogues, they are way underwhelmed. Don’t want to lose relevancy to this audience who have been raised on those listed above.

Evolution of library collection discovery tools: bound handwritten catalogues, card catalogues, OPACs – many libraries have stagnated here, discovery interfaces, web-scale discovery services.

Not just about books on shelves, but about all our subscription content, digital items and more.

Don’t want a computerised card catalogue, although that is generally what we still have.  Amazon is our competition in terms of user interfaces and information presented.  They make it as transparent to the user as they can.  It has a complex layered structure, but with a simple user interface.

Have a lot of great content and services, but have too many barriers to our users accessing them.

Disjointed approach to delivery: silos prevail – catalogue, databases, website and more and each one has to be accessed individually.

Simple vision – single point of entry to all the content and services offered by the library, but wth precision, nuanced sophistication and multiple dimensions. Doesn’t preclude advanced searching options and ability to hone in on particular services or collections as alternative options.

Modernized interface – single search box, query tools (did you mean, type ahead), relevance ranked results, faceted navigation, enhanced visual displays – covers and summaries/reviews, recommendation services. Must be visually pleasing, give more than a single record and helps users find more.

Can have any front end almost regardless of what back end you use.

Deep indexing – metadata is no longer enough, increasing opportunities to search full content, commercial providers already doing so.

Current phase of discovery tools now focused on pre-populated indexes that aim to deliver Web-scale delivery eg. Summon, WorldCat  Local, EBSCO Discovery, Primo Central, Encore with Article Intergration.

Products available will index the vast majority of content that libraries have in their collections.

Beyond local discovery – eg. NCSU – Summon, Phoenix Public – Endeca (very Amazon like interface), Queens Public Library – Aquabrowser.

Need to make our search compelling, but not overwhelm our users with the guff about what and where they are searching.

Being social: apps for libraries – Kim Tairi
@haikugirloz

Social media conversion scale – image from – darmano.typepad.com

Social apps about conversations, marketing and communications with our users.

She follows High Country Public Library on Twitter – they talk about the library and things that are happening in their broader community as well.

Amongst top 10 tools for libraries – niche networks – eg, NING, built by users, focus on particular interest, UX – User experience, want to create good ones – starts at design and works through testing, evaluating and decision making.

More visual infographics – designing messages so they are clear, short, sharp. eg. The story (so far) of Twitter (image). Move to make visual communication more widespread.

Twitter can enhance your experience – back channel is interesting and adds to the experience. Librarians are sharing. Kim’s presentation was based a lot on the feedback she got from people on Twitter. It gives you a sense of community and helps to build a community. It is self-selecting, creates conversation, can be used for public note-taking and it’s interactive. Great as a personal learning network, both with workmates and colleagues at other libraries. Can get followed by bots or social media gurus, but can control it by blocking them or making your tweets private.

Mobile interfaces for catalogues and websites. Deakin Uni has done this. NYPL has an iPhone app. Can get into mobile interfaces, apps, info literacy, tours and QR codes (see Powerhouse Museu who are doing great things with these).

Technology petting zoos – letting users play with the new technology, as well as staff.

Social apps and networks have taken off since VALA2008 – need to get into it. Australia has now 7.9 million active Facebook users, there over 400 million worldwide.

eBooks – Bart Rutherford

File formats for ebooks include text, html, pdf, mobipocket, DjVu – magazine specific, EPUB – Kindle uses azw which is a modified mobipocket. Some locked in DRM, some not.

Can read ebook content on desktops, mobile phones etc – software includes Microsoft Reader, Mobipocket, Adobe Reader (pdf) and Calibre (open source read and convert).

EPUB – open publication structure – open XHTML, open packaging format – SML, OEBPS Container format – bundled ZIP file. Many readers that originally came out with proprietary formats are now opening up to EPUB. Keep watch out for EPUB and the devices that will read it.

DRM – Digital Rights Management (Bart’s boss calls it Don’t Read Me). PID Personal identification number – can restrict to one user, unlike print copy,  Access levels include print, copy, paste and now lending, depending on device and content.

Content – Amazon: Fiction to Kindle, Dymocks – using eBook library growing fiction, Gutenberg Project, Read Cloud, EBL – nonfiction, academic learning model using Adobe reader.

Should not have to worry about how the content gets on the device, it should just happen.

Publisher rights are still a problem, so a lot of content that could be available, is not because of these issues.

E-Paper technologies: Elerophoretic technology used by eInk, iRex, Sony Reader, Kindle, Plastic Logic Que. Use glass back pane, but they don’t flex so can break.

Cholesteric technology – Modified LCD, being used by Fujitsu FLEPia. Need to have a colour display which doesn’t require a backlight and doesn’t use as much power.

Combination of eInk and LCD – eg. Nook. LCD gets turned off when reading the ebook.

Electrowetting – controlled water/oil interface, then Electrofluidic technology which uses the former.  Deals with the issue of slow display and these devices will be able to show video.

Interferometric – wavelengths of light etc, uses reflective natural light, low power usage, which can also show video eg. mirasol

Growing market – lots of options and many more on the way. Be sure the one you choose does EPUB.

News Limited is launching the Skiff interface – from publishing to reading, including payment process and their own software.

Publishers will hopefully start putting material out in a wider range of formats so that multiple readers can access them.

The Dream for DRM – Desktop reading, when called away, you pick up where you left off on your e-reader, then the same again with your phone.  As you can with a book.

Author of the book – The book is dead: long live the book.

History of the world in 3.5 slides. In the beginning was the book and it was good. It was the basis for the modern world. Then came the falll (this is the half slide). The conflict came in the form of electronic media. Bringing the villain, television and other media which seemed to kill the book all for the worship of money. We became people of the screen. However, the screen has now be rehabilitated and is now a place where connections can be formed, and much more.

A history of the web in 3.5 slides. First was Web 1.0, and the ability to communicate with the world. Then Web 2.0 in which we are currently immersed – summarised as We are the Web. People not only consuming but producing content and as a result, building the web.
Next is Web 3.0 – about making the web more like librarians, finding meaning not just data in response to a simple question.

In the beginning was the web – and it was good. Then came the fall (the 1/2 slide), the evil villain – the moving image destroyed the web, in the form of sites such as You Tube. Question being asked if YouTube is the new Google. Screen literacy is the next skill. What the future will be is unknown, it is still being written.

The book is not dead – just resting. We need to preserve both text literacies and book literacies. Future of books – wikibooks, networked books. We need book literacies, books do things that no other form can, including enable us to slow down in this fast paced world.

Alan Kay – quote – The best way to predict the future is to invent it.
We need to do exactly that.

Showed their US tour video, introducing everyone to the concept of the Shanachie tour.

Jaap then started filming Erik talking, whilst also showing it live on the big screen. Deer caught in the headlights is what comes to mind when looking at the big screen. Erik spoke about the need for librarians in the Netherlands, and encouraged attendees to consider heading over!

Gave background to the project. Decided they wanted to show how Web 2.0 can be used to create content, easily and quickly. Was glad to be able to watch the video interview of Paul Holdengraber again – very inspiring that guy.

Back to live filming and interviewing people in the audience. Asking about the role of libraries in education and the importance f imagination and information. They then showed the video of Imaginon, of the mobile games box and of the Domincan Uni students perspective on the future of libraries.

Then interviewed a few more librarians about the library of the future and the ideal library in less than 10 words. They finished with part of the video on DOK.

The challenge of social and market norms in the workplace: book – predictably irrational. How are we dealing with change? Getting ahead, riding the curve or trailing behind it? Change is creating competing and conflicting needs. Which should we value: the craft, the experience or code, future potential and flexibility. We need both.

In organisations, culture is king. We need to be human centred, but technically informed. They need a framework which will help your organisation to head in the right direction. Balancing competing needs – with a ship analogy, the ship is present needs, speedboat is future potential, which comes back to the ship with its discoveries

Mix up teams and make the most of any mentoring opportunities you can create. New librarians may have up-to-date knowledge and technical skills, may have new ways to do old tricks, have a well developed external social networks. Experienced librarians have tacit knowledge perform contextualising and interpretative roles, may have tested tricks to save timme, have a strong internal social network within the organisation.

Break social barriers – its not them and us, its we as a team.

Create information profiles of your team – identify each persons craft and code, allow effective networking. Combining craft and code can lead to innovation. Book – Think, play, do.

Recognise people as information resources. Need talking, listening, presenting and interviewing skills. Develope a wisdom network internally. eg. SLVs fridge. Expand beyond your internal network – he highlighed Libraries Interact -woo hoo!, Web Junction and the LISWiki.

Maintaining motivation and incentive is vital. Leverage social capital – use mass collaboration to achieve shared incomes. The move from rules to principles – which gives a bit of flexibility. Staff should learn the principles, not the rules, which helps them to be more adaptive. Think like a 10 year old – they learn by exploring. Book: Everything bad is good for you. Need to develop this in staff.

Why become familiar with new tech? So that we can actively and productively contribute to creation and adoption. Staff need to be active and educated participants in digital environments. Book: The future of the internet and how to stop it.

Encourage think, play,, do. Experiment with ready, fire, aim model. Used in business. Try to create safe fail environment – provide opportunities for this, which is free.

Summing up- break social barriers that prevent knowledge sharing use social capital to engage with new technologies, recongise that experimenting is risky but should be part of the strategic plan of the library.

Question: papers available – yes, lots of books and they are referred to in the paper.

Started with Sesame Street video on library and Cookie Monster. In the video, Cookie Monster represented the current young generation, he knows what he wants and he wants it now, regardless of the paradigm of the existing library. Hence Cookie Monsters needs go unfulfilled.

Library services are being increasingly shaped by a new generation of users and their needs. Gen Y has a need for fast-food delivery. Like fast food, they dont always know whats good for them and to have the patience to wait for the better stuff which will take a bit longer to deliver. Recruiting gen Y is recruiting fresh perspectives and libraries are beginning to take up the challenge that they bring.

Librarianship is an ageing profession and there are not enough new graduates to fill the gaps that the projected retirements will produce.

Graduate program which provides 9 placements over 12 months. It provides a solid foundation, provides a range of diverse experiences, enables knowledge sharing, a supportive environment with the involvement of mentors, allows for Gen Y work patterns.

The graduate program is breaking barriers for graduates, which will include participants from Marketing, History, ICT in 2010. For knowledge retention, including the 23 things and knowledge communities.

Question: UWA also has a program, were they developed in collaboration? No, totally independent.

Question: program is for new graduates, would they consider mature age applicants. Yes, absolutely.

Question: what happened to Gen X – were floating in the middle – been overlooked.

Question: millenials what about them – will adapt to them when they arrive on the scene.

Question: at the end of the program, what happen? Try to fit them into appropriate roles that match their preferences.

Tendency to focus on the largest, most visible users group – being the students. However they also serve the academics and corporate arms of the uni. Their multiple users groups mean they also have multiple support roles including teaching, learning and research. The strategic goals need to align with those of their uni and at Swinburne means a focus on research. However, it is difficult to quantify the value of the library. Libraries need to change and be more entrepreneurial and innovative. Libraries collaborate but universities dont.

Libraries are not dead, although many people see them as such. We need to be flexible adaptable, responsive and extensible to help change their minds. What do we need from libraries of the future? A new kind of grail?

Possible futures: diffuse libraries – dispersed,decentralised and distributed librarians into the workings of the university, diverse libraries – culturally, gender.

Cutting edge libraries are one step ahead – mission creep. Looking to engage with other activities in unis, particularly research.

Institutional repositories are not a new role, but an extension an existing one. Librarian skills are vital for this type of role. They catalogue, faciltate access to information and more.

So why arent people interested in working in repositories – Rebecca believes taht there is a problematic relationship with LIS education, that reference is held up as the ideal which leads to expectations and a cycle of conservatism.

We need to break own internal barriers within libraries if we are going to embrace the climate of change that we live in.

Question: which is the authorative version – would encourage users to use the published versions, as that has been peer reviewed.

Question: what experiences led you to the IR role, who works on it, what do you use etc. – ARROW project involvement was an advantage in setting up their infrastructure, they use Fedora and has took 18 months to publicly launch the repository. Now have 4 librarians working on it, but managed with just over 1 for a time.

Vanessa is a liason librarian at the Launceston campus and works in collection development, research support, teaching and learning, reference services and strategic planning and an awful lot of improvisation.

In a reorganisation in 2007, all liason librarians were reclassified to take account of skills and levels of expertise, which could in turn prevent new graduates from applying for such positions. They introduced a framework that would enable new graduates to obtain such a position at a lower level and then graduate to the reclassified level.

Framework was separated into 3 distinct sections – direction which incorporated capability and performance criteria, how to get there which covered learning activities and types of evidence to be used to demonstrate that the learning had been achieved, what happened on the way reflected through discussion which was kept online and accessible to all stakeholders involved and open to their comments.

Changes in management left Vanessa in the lurch and the need for a mentor was overlooked, even though it had been needed. Her angst over the whole process was only overridden when she obtained an informal mentor and discovered how much she had achieved.

Framework was supposed to replace the normal HR reclassification process. However, when it came to reclassification, HR still required the old documentation. However, the framework gave all required content and this process was completed in a timely manner.

The framework has been useful to new librarians in getting established in their roles, but also as a refresher to experienced librarians in all the particulars of their roles. It is still developing as a framework and will continue to do so as new graduates move through the process.

Fairfax Media has no physical space. The library is embedded into various areas in the company, and has been since 2006. Fairfax Media provides research to all areas of the company, with the exception of the Age, which has its own research library.

Librarians have desks in amongst the departments and the collection dispersed to various spaces, basement storage, corridors and more.

The benefits of embedded librarians to clients: library team is not tied to the image of a room of books, but acknowledged for their information skills. They are flexible and accessible and on hand for the urgent information queries. They are part of the news meeting where stories are discussed and available for immediate consultation. A survey of Fairfax Media staff of this arrangement returned an overwhelmingly positive result.

Drawbacks of the model: communications barriers arose, librarians were stripped of their immediate resources apart from their desktops – leading to frustration and vulnerability and the feeling that they were not able to provide the high quality of service they had before, the dispersal of the physical collection led to the devaluing of it in the eyes of both library and company staff.

Breaking down communication barriers within the library team – go drinking, use RefTracker to monitor requests to stop duplication of work, library team meets after the news conference. Breaking down barriers with clients – having the library staff location clearly branded, online branding through notes on emails etc, proactive information generation including background to developing stories, moved serials collections close to where the librarians were located.

Moderated by Craig Anderson.

Positive: Julie Rae – would love to say that they dont need to requalify, but experience shows that they are not keeping up-to-date. Need to be more competitive, need to be recognised as industry leaders and cant do this unless we are keeping current. We need to better understand our communities, build our profession, be proactive – when is it going to happen. Will have to agree with the affirmative, because they will employ you.

Negative – Roxanne Missingham – NLS4 storytime. Long time ago, people started on a learning journey, right from the time of using fire. Their learning journey didnt involve university, short courses or watching TV, but they learnt how to provide for themselves – there was a little bit of the librarian in all of them. In some, that librarian within was strong and they brought all the stories together, shared them and built communities. The true profession developed and librarians were placed into their temples, which is where they should be. As the world developed the world became confused and so librarians again took the lead to make sense of the world, and so lead the people forward with meta-data. Take the little bit of librarian in you and grow it by engaging in your professional development.

Positive – Karyn Siegmann – she scoffed in Roxannes general direction. If Roxannes argument held up, then we would never have gone to uni in the first place. The online world alone is ever changing and we need to keep current. Although there are librarians who are taking up the challenge, not everyone does. Need training to be able to plan strategically. We need to be able to deal with the questions that people are asking us, from finding information to using the technology available in our libraries. Staff need to understand what our users are talking about and if they need to requalify to do that, then so be it.

Negative – Gill Hallam – requalifying – we dont have the educators to do it. Universities have far more aging problems that librarians. They have more problems with keeping up to date than librarians do. Technology is allowing us to have new learning opportunities, enabling us to learn from each other. Libraries are lifelong learning centres, if we cant teach ourselves, then how can we lead the way. What are we doing for the next generation?

Positive – Andrew Finnegan – Tragedy of Batgirl – noone remembers her glory days as information champion, only as they girl who ran alongside Batman and Robin. Librarians have a trusted brand when it comes to books, known as passionate founts of knowledge with no bias. However, when it comes to technology, we have enormous problems with branding. Friends just believe that librarians are bigger nerds than they previously thought. There is no clarity in professional branding with some corporates divorcing themsleves from the librarian label. Books are our brand, not technology. The public doesnt recognise our formal qualifications. CPAs need to requalify – economy might collapse if they were responsible for their own professional development! We need a PR revolution – with every librarian guaranteed by ALIA on requalification. Roxannes assertion that is a little bit of librarian in all of us sounds a bit rude. If thats the case though, why do we need training and where are the standards? If we cant do it for ourselves, do it for Barbara Gordon – Batgirl!

Negative – Kate Davis – single best reference librarian Kate ever worked with was not qualified. She didnt learn her search skills in her library degree. Will requalifying bring us to the place that Julie wants us to be. The answer is in marketing,not requalifying. Its about a commitment to lifelong learning and a passion to learn – if we dont have that, requalifying is not going to change that. If we dont have this commitment, we need to requalify as something else, not a librarian. Google is not going to be the end of us, its ourselves, our lack of marketing of our services, our collections, our lack of customer service techniques, our lack of business acumen, some of which is inate. Failure to find external fundings sources and the demonisation of big business and the lack of partnership opportunities. We dont need to requalify, we need to upskill. Book: get into bed with Google – we are already there, but need to ask ourselves will Google still love us in the morning.

Craig Anderson did a beautiful job of doing an amusing summary of the arguments, coming from a pre-Google librarian.

By the vote of claps, the winner was determined to be the positive.

This was a great session.