I’m off road-tripping with the State Library’s Regional Partnerships team from Tuesday 7th February.
Queenslanders in Emerald and the Central Highlands can join us for a day of Library Island adventures as we kick off the tour, then we’ll be hitting the road to talk with GLAM professionals across the region.
See more in “When Librarians Ruled The Earth” over at the State Library website.
I’m pleased to say I’ll be joining the librarians of Aotearoa / New Zealand for this year’s LIANZA conference, 24-27 September at Addington Raceway.
More news to follow.
My newsletter Marvellous, Electrical kicks off its second season this weekend.
Last year, the newsletter took us from the fairytale coasts of Portugal to an ibis-themed burlesque show; we met bakers and boxers and bassists and acrobats, spent time with cleaners and inner-city drug counsellors, and even investigated a family history of murder.
In 2017, Marvellous, Electrical will appear once a month so I can fit in a few more projects on the side.
I’ll be running an interactive workshop, Library Island, at the 8th New Librarians’ Symposium in Canberra, Australia, this June.
There will be drama, there will be danger – and the freedom to reimagine librarianship in a whole new way.
Watch this space for more information nearer the time. Or sign up for the conference today.
Melbourne-based digital artist Peter Miller, who featured in last month’s Library as Incubator piece on the links between libraries and musicians, has released a new piece: Beyond the Wall of Sleep.
The piece blends H.P. Lovecraft, NASA recordings, and a reading of the rules and regulations of the Insane Asylum of California, drawing on material from Librivox and Prelinger Archives.
You can read more about the history of Beyond the Wall of Sleep at Peter’s website, and read about how libraries, archives, and multimedia artists might work together in Library as Incubator’s “Sing Me A Library”.
Or just enjoy the spooky video, above.
Here’s a blast from the past – the all-ages Tabletop Superheroes game devised during my Reader-in-Residence placement at Parkes Shire in New South Wales.
The game is Creative Commons licensed and adapted from the work of Cory Doctorow – so please feel free to remix it as per the terms of a CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.
Our version needs dice, Lego bricks, and a tape measure – plus our print-and-cut-out paper figures and somewhere to play the game (back in Parkes, we took it down the pub).
The paper figures and rules for the Tabletop Superheroes game can be downloaded as a PDF here.
My latest column for Library as Incubator explores the links between libraries and musicians, from Glenn Gould’s radio documentaries to English community choirs and digital experiments in today’s Australia.
America’s Library Journal has a piece on the Comic Maker built by the State Library of Queensland and piloted by Fun Palaces over in the UK.
The comic maker was built by Phil Gullberg and Talia Yat of the State Library. Read Ian Chant’s piece on the Comic Maker over at the Library Journal site.
Hard even to know what to say about a year like 2016. So much upset and upheaval in the world, but I’m still hopeful for the shape of things to come.
It’s been hectic, but productively so, for us here at the State Library of Queensland. I worked with teams on public projects like Human Library and the Scrub Turkey sessions, adding oral histories from TV chef Bernard King and Doctor Who‘s Janet Fielding to our digital collections, and encouraging digital experiments like the State Library’s remixable comic maker and Ozofarm game.
I also got to partner with a number of outside organisations, including healthcare agencies and allied health professionals across Queensland, from Metro South Health Board to the occupational therapy students of Griffith University. A long-held desire to explore the difficult field of ‘death literacy’ came to fruition with a panel discussion for Brisbane’s inaugural ‘Deathfest’ last month.
I also got to work with the Brisbane Writers Festival and various other events across Australia on devising alternatives to the usual conference formats of panels and presentations.
There was even time to interview some personal heroes like the Kransky Sisters, Matti Bunzl of the Vienna Museum, and the makers of Danger 5. This was part of exploring a different corner of Queensland life every week at Marvellous, Electrical, a project that will return in 2017.
Until then, have a good break.
In this week’s Marvellous, Electrical, Leanne de Souza of Brisbane’s Rock ‘n’ Roll Writers Festival runs backwards through the highs and lows of an eventful life…
matt finch / mechanical dolphin 