[templelib] Rachel Frick. Digital Library Federation
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NOTE: Live-blogging. Getting things wrong. Missing points. Omitting key information. Introducing artificial choppiness. Over-emphasizing small matters. Paraphrasing badly. Not running a spellpchecker. Mangling other people’s ideas and words. You are warned, people. |
At Temple University’s symposium in honor of the inauguration of the University’s new president, on Oct. 18, 2013.
[I came in late. Sorry!!]
Rachel Frick is talking about the importance of the Commons. Too often, she says, librarians come into the conversation as if they’re from a bounded place. We keep producing the same solutions to different problems. (She recommends Steven John’s Where Good Ideas Come From. She earlier recommend Networked by Lee Rainie and Barry Wellman. [I concur with these recommendations!])
Rachel says she likes SxSW for idea sharing. She was talking with Bonnie Tijerina and they came up with the idea of the Idea Drop house for librarians at SxSW for livestreaming conversations. [I did one last year! It was a very cool venue: an AirBnB residence with librarians and refreshments. What more could you want?] They had 800+ visitors. [*This is even more impressive since the house was not on the main campus of SxSW.]
She worked with DPLA, Europeana and OpenGLAM on “Culture Hack”: use our data! Also meetups at SxSW. Also, LibraryBox: an instant wifi distribution point run on a battery for distribution of library content. They used it to distribute tons of open content at the conference. It was a great way to engage people in conversation about libraries.
Jason Griffey wanted to upgrade the LibraryBoxes. He needed about $3K. He needed to make a case for its need. So what are some non-ilbrary-centric use cases? Health care info in remote areas. Unmonitored conversations. He raised $13K in 4 days on Kickstarter. At the end of 30 days, he’d raised $33K. Because he could reach beyond the library space, and because it spoke to open access to info, it succeeded.
Now is the time for creators and makers, she says. Bess Sadler talks about the hacker epistemology: adopt a problem solving mindset, the truth is what works, solve for interesting. Bethany Nowviskie at Code4Lib a few years ago talked about the creative mindset: meticulous, practical, an impulse to build and maintain, and to suffer fools gladly. Kathy Sierra talks about how you get over The Big Frickin’ Wall between incremental changes and transformation. John Voss, who works for HistoryPin [and organizer of LODLAM], says you get over the wall by connecting what we do to a greater purpose.
“The mission of librarians is to improve society through facilitating knowledge creation in their communities” David Lankes, Atlas of New Librarianship. This is how Linked Data will be made real, Rachel says. She cites the LODLAM conference, and DPLA: intracommunity conversation.
