Sutherland Shire Libraries Staff News

Digital Frontiers - NSW.net seminar - 28 October 2016

Helen and I attended this seminar and I thought I'd try and pass on some of the key points I took away from it. The full transcripts will be available some time in the future and I'll let you know when.

Our Voices Our World
Jamie LaRue spoke via video link. He is a very animated and passionate speaker. His current area of interest is to try to involve libraries in the new world of self publishing, which he believe all libraries should be supporting on a local level, because they are telling the stories of the diverse individuals in local communities.
He acknowledged self published material is often avoided due to it's poor quality. He proposes that this is a new role for libraries - helping people write a good book. (I thought this fit in well with NaNoWriMo) He suggested providing lists of publishers, editors, cover designers, support writing groups and offer reviewing by readers.
His reasoning was to bring in to our libraries the stories of the diverse range of individuals in the community, because in order to get published through normal channels, the stories must be seen to have a wide market and so must reflect the majority.
Supporting emerging authors brings diverse locally produced quality content into the library - so people can see their own stories. We are censoring by not making sure we get the diverse titles out there that are not offered by established publishers. This includes all the online self-publishing.
Pew report put librarians s the 3rd most trusted profession after fire fighters and nurses - because we do not judge the question asked but are fascinated by them and work towards answering them.
Further information about this idea can be found here.

Building a digital ecosystem
Euwe Ermita  Systems and Applications Leader at State Library of NSW.
She spoke about the need to remodel LMS and other databases. Gartner's Pace Layered methodology says online projects fail because of the size layering and the complexity. Simplicity equals success.
It should be easy to integrate new aspects, that are fit for purpose and be able to use digital infrastructure to do it . Open standards for integration  helps make systems resilient to change, allows agility and self organisation. There should be a seamless co-existence which understands its touch points with the clients. She spoke of swarming - big companies working together to create a good user experience.
The State Library Business Plan included becoming a  Smart Library and Digital Preservation (DPS)
Smart Library involves capturing data on clients  - via the wifi connection, what they are using, where and when, analysing the data and then acting upon it.
DPS involves creating/ meeting metadata standards and cultural protocols. Using crowd sourcing tools - Rosetta to bring in all formats - then publishing, like Dictionary of Sydney. Create partnerships - Public Libraries - GLAM - Academic, State, National libraries. Enriching the data at the symantic level. Publish to other aggregators. Automation of the curation, correction and descriptions.
Public libraries need a digital presence for their Local Studies material. They need to start partnering with their vendors. Have a piggyback clause. eg design to have the ability to add things on.

A (fan) Tale of Linked Data
Paul Hagon  Senior Web Designer National Library spoke very animatedly about The (Fan) Tale of linked data. http://wiki.dbpedia.org/ He gave us all a fantale and told us to keep the wrapper. What he spoke about was the need for markup for web pages. The heading being the most important. We are loosing the detail that is/was in MARC records when published on the web. Markup addresses this problem. Each concept/aspect of an entry gets it's on URI. Often a triplet - a person could be a creator, the subject and/or in a place - each one of these would have it's own URI so that linkages can be created from all aspects.
Schema.org is becoming the  standard for indexing and displaying structured data on the internet.
Eg the Google Knowledge graphs which are now appearing of the right of search screens are using URI's to bring together information from many sources. See this Google search for Hunt for the wilderpeople  to illustrate. All the info in the right hand  box does not just come from the IMBD info entry.
Further info to be found at rdfa.info/play, Open Graph, Google recipe view, TED: Tim Berners Lee
The point of the Fantale wrapper was to give us homework to do. Adding URI's for the info contained therein.

Legal & social dynamics of ebook lending in Aust. Public Libraries
Kimberlee Weatherall is an Associate Professor with Sydney Law School
 She saw the challenges in the ebook market for public libraries as; pricing, bundling, disappearance of titles once purchased, being locked into a specific platform, titles not being available at all, and usability of the item/platform.
Copyright gives the owner exclusive rights, but lending is not mentioned. It was always left to 'copy' for preservation purposes etc. But that is not happening with ebooks.
We are bound to our contracts . We must do what was promised in the contract, however this does not bind the third party eg customers. (I think this means that if customers copy the title to a secondary device they could not be in an legal trouble for doing so).
Physical books                                                       Digital Books
Don't need  permission                                          Require publishers permission
Have statutory rights/exemptions                          Contractually required to give up these
Retain copies until worn out                                  Titles may be withdrawn
Competitive pricing                                               Can impose higher prices
Ongoing payments to publishers and                     May be required to pay recurring costs
authors come from general revenue

She stated that the remarkable thing is that there has been no deliberate decision made on these things AND they have been made with no real understanding of how it affects public libraries ability to fulfil their mission.
The example given was music bought and downloaded from itunes in Australia is not available when one moves to the UK. One would need to rebuy due to licencing  requirements.
She is taking part in a 3 year investigation into elending. It's in it's very early stages, looking at 3 aspects;
Availablity - what titles are available as ebooks as compared to print - patterns in what becomes an etitle - time taken before titles are available as ebooks.
Access - terms of contractual arrangements eg. pricing & bundling
Readership - how and why Australians use ebooks - characteristics of users.
It will use the data to better understand how ebook regulation impacts on Pub Lib. ability to achieve their objectives.
Aim - to produce - better understanding of the reader - inform decision making about resource allocation - evidence for regulatory reform.
For more see 'At the intersection of public service and the market: Libraries & the future of lending' 26 AIPJ Giblin & Weatherall

Ampilfy: a new audio transcription tool
Jenna Bain, Digital Project leader at State Library.
She talked about a new State Library service which had only been launched the day before and was already a great success.
It was launched in Nimbin and the 75 digitally transcribed interviews of original Aquarians from the 1970's and some were all corrected by the time Jenna was speaking!
It is essentially a crowdsourcing tool to encourage the public to help correct audio that has been digitally transcribed (and so is not perfect the same as OCR)
It's a providing a digital village for volunteering, access to the material for the first time, collaboations, engagement with communities, shared  cultural heritage, exchange, value-adding, it's open source, allows tagging (people, emotions, places, objects, science), translation, geo-coding and adding maps, captioning and descriptions.
No account is required, anyone can edit. After a line is edited 3 times it is locked and any further adjustments are then sent to a librarian, for the first time, for adjudication.
Fulltext search is available and it works with MP3 or MP4.

Indyreads - public library as content aggregator
Ross Balharrie - Digital Services Coordinator, NSW.net Services State Library.
Indy Books have been a neglected part of library collections. Sees the Public Library as aggregator.
Indy publishing is growing over the last 5years whilst the mainstream publishers have been fairly stagnant.
23% of 1000 authors questioned have self published.
Leichhardt and Parramatta libraries have Indyreads Pilots.
NSW.net is exploring opportunities to make the platform available to NSW public libraries.
A great platform for including Local History  material, encouraging local authors to publish on it, oppotunity for Makerspace for authors...expand NaNoWriMo!!!

Digital Reads: history moves forward
Amie Zar - Local history Librarian, Leichhardt Library.
Very briefly showcased her new online digital Local History collection made available via Indyreads.
They have a few collections Parramatta Local History books, Leichhardt Local History books, Leichhardt Historical Journal, and Leichhardt Oral History Collection.
If you are interested in having  look at the format and functionality, look up our library card number and password in the Online Catalogues - Van run list on Compass.
You can then get in to see what's available.

I found it all quite interesting and enjoyed getting a feel for where the wider library world is headed, as well as getting ideas for advancing our own service.

Cheers
Jacinta