Angels have the phone box

Getting the most out of a library conference – ENGAGE

Again I tweeted at LIANZA09. For me it is a way to engage with other participants at the conference. I am still working on being critical when I tweet instead of just sending sound bites out into the twitterverse. However, I though the quality of tweets was particularly high at LIANZA (#lianza09).

The programme is available here: http://lianza.org.nz/events/conference2009/programme.html and you can search for papers here: http://opac.lianza.org.nz/cgi-bin/koha/opac-search.pl

My whole library career has been in Australia so I was interested in to what is going on in the land of the long white cloud. Originally from NZ I received a shock (most people thought I was Australian). Sobering. I have lived in Australia for over 20 years but  a piece of my heart is always connected to NZ. Christchurch is a very beautiful City and my early morning runs along the river to the gardens were awesome.

Here are some of my thoughts:

1. Open source is embraced by many in New Zealand libraries – the community are big supporters of open source solutions such as Kete (digital archiving software) which got a mention by the National Librarian, Penny Carnaby in her keynote.
2. Collaboration & consortia is the way it works. Many libraries have formed alliances and consortia to increase their buying power.
3. Free broadband in public libraries is available through Aotearoa People’s Network and the network also encourages digital story telling using Kete.
4. I must investigate the Cephalonia method used successfully at University Otago for library orientation/induction – I didn’t get to see this paper but heard great things about it. A technique to invigorate library classes (Simon Hart and Charlotte Brown).
5. I heard researcher (Chris Brickel, University of Otago) get really excited about the possibility of social cataloguing/tagging and reviews (in the library catalogue). It made me cheer to see his eyes light up.

I particularly liked Rachel Esson’s paper Hearing from the people: designing effective user surveys (PDF). It included some pragmatic tips on making surveys more effective and how to get better response rates for example:

• People respond better to paper surveys
• Include less than 30 questions
• Pretest
• Offer incentives at the time
• If sending out surveys include a cover note
• Use coloured paper
• Include a stamped self-addressed envelop for returning survey
• What to include in your report – methodology, data collection, how big your response rate was, design, what software you used to analyse data, survey instrument as well as results and analysis

Chris Brickel’s paper Research in Libraries: The example of gay history was terrific. Chris talked about his research for his book Mates & Lovers: A history of gay New Zealand. Being a visual person I particularly like this presentation because Chris included lots of photographs of images he had found in archives and libraries. It touched on the sensitivity around dealing with material of a sexualised nature and that catalogues were not very helpful in helping him sourcing material for his book.  However, the archivists, librarians and people who wanted to share their stories or stories of friends/family etc… were the most effective way of finding information. As I mentioned above Chris was genuinely excited about tagging library records.

The highlight of the conference for me was hearing Tim Spalding of LibraryThing talk about social cataloguing. It was invigorating and his cynicism about library management systems and WorldCat caused a bit of a stir at the conference. But the evidence is clear there is a lot of people out there that like social cataloguing and they aren’t constrained by archaic subject headings and years of convention. It is an arena I am interested in as we will enable some of this kind of functionality in our new library system in the near future.

I think LIANZA is a great conference and would love to return to New Zealand. I have made some great twitter friends some of whom have offered to give me tours of their libraries – yay! I will be back in New Zealand in November and plan to take them up on their offers.