The new vision for public libraries in Queensland, Australia has been published by the State Library of Queensland.
The vision, which takes the form of a poster co-designed with Meld Studios, is based on research I conducted with the University of Southern Queensland’s Dr. Kate Davis last year.
You can download the poster for the new vision as a PDF here and read the research on which it was based as a PDF download here.
Today we’re joined by Australia’s Rob Thomson, a library worker and educator who trains library staff, runs conferences and events, and explores the future of the profession in a most adventurous way. We got to chatting after I read Charlie Spedding’s book From Last to First; in a previous entry on this blog, I explored a chapter of this book entitled “The Beer Drinker’s Guide to Sports Psychology.”
Matt
Thanks for joining me, Rob. I got in touch for this chat after reading the section of Spedding’s book where he describes changing his approach while nursing a pint of beer:
“If thinking differently was going to make me a better runner, I could do it sitting in the pub. I smiled to myself and took another drink as I figured I was making myself a better runner right now.”
And I thought of you!
Rob
That is awesome! I am no runner, but I do get to thinking differently. Sometimes that happens whilst nursing a beer… sometimes it is over a coffee; or even descending the stairs… But a beer helps!
Often because it’s not at work, you’re in a different place, more relaxed and can take a longer, more considered, view of things and put 2 and 3 together better than when distracted by what goes on at work.
In a sense, it’s giving yourself permission to have some thinking time.
Matt
You’re kind of in the business of making better librarians, aren’t you? Read more
Last year, I was invited to give a keynote speech at Aotearoa/New Zealand’s national library conference, LIANZA 2017.
I wanted to realise a long-held dream and present a collective keynote with a number of Australian & New Zealand colleagues sharing the stage, but it wasn’t practical for LIANZA to fly a whole group of us across the Tasman Sea.
(They did, however, kindly accede to one request and arrange a special funded session on Indigenous Knowledge Centres, led by my brilliant Queensland colleague Lesley Acres).
In the end, we contrived a way to deliver a unique collective keynote – by taping my mouth shut and inviting members of the audience on stage in an hour-long series of creative, constructive, collaborative activities.
For me, the highlight came at the end of the keynote session, when two special guests materialised.
We had arranged for Auckland Libraries’ Rachael Rivera & Hamish Noonan to attend the conference in secret, taking the stage to conclude our keynote.
Rachael’s concluding comments triggered a debate about libraries and homelessness on national media in New Zealand, and gave both Rachael and her Kiwi colleagues the opportunity to stand up for library values, articulating their commitment to equity, justice, and access to the world of knowledge and culture for all.
In October, US librarian Justin Hoenke approached me to co-nominate Rachael for the American Library Journal‘s annual Movers & Shakers Award, highlighting professionals who have done exceptional work in libraries around the world.
Today, Rachael was announced as a winner of the 2018 Movers & Shakers Award and her friends & supporters worldwide are justifiably celebrating. From her days back in suburban Auckland to current international glory, including her own individual library keynote in Edinburgh, Rachael is one of the greatest heroes of public librarianship in 2018.
Voices like hers deserve to be elevated. Look her up. Learn from her. Change the world for the better.
Read more about Rachael’s Movers & Shakers nomination at Justin Hoenke’s website.
The final pilot podcast from my 2017 project at the University of Southern Queensland (USQ) just went live.
The project explored ways for the university to engage a wider audience and connect with the community beyond recruitment, research, teaching and learning.
USQ’s resident Eurovision expert, humanities lecturer Jess Carniel, was joined by Neil Martin of the USQ Digital Life Lab and Lee McGowan, who researches the history of women’s football at a neighbouring institution, Queensland University of Technology.
Their conversation ranged from the history of women’s football to Aristotle’s views on “eudaimonia” and a life well-lived, politics, performance, and the fate of Katy Perry’s Left Shark.
Check out the latest USQ podcast episode online now.
You can also listen to previous instalments from USQ Astronomy Festival and Bluestocking Week for women in higher education.
The University of Southern Queensland (USQ) has piloted a new podcast at the end of a six-month community engagement project with their School of Information and Learning Services.
The chatshow-style podcast offers a new medium to bring university experts together with a wider audience, to explore new ways of sharing knowledge, and to stimulate conversations between USQ staff and peers in other institutions.
Staff and students from USQ’s radio school joined forces with REDTrain, the university’s Researcher Development and Training Team, to identify USQ researchers who could speak to contemporary issues for a wide audience. We then partnered USQ speakers with peers in museums, the arts, sciences, and other universities to broaden the conversation and stimulate debate.
Three pilot podcasts were recorded in late 2017, with the first episode launching to mark USQ’s Astronomy Festival.
A second edition celebrating women in academia has just gone live.
It’s the final edition of Curious, Mysterious, Marvellous, Electrical today – the newsletter I’ve used to capture stories and secret histories from Australasia and beyond over the last two years.
We started out by walking the coasts near Lisbon back in January 2016 and we finish the journey more or less where we began, exploring the history of one of Portugal’s most illustrious artistic families.
In the intervening years, highlights included:
And that’s not even including the drug counsellors, the Nazi hunting comedians, the dancer turned paramedic, the time travelling arts worker, or the Argentinian sisters running a horror-themed cake shop out on the tropic of Capricorn…
…or the pastry.
Check out the complete Marvellous, Electrical on Google Maps.
Pop stars at the fall of Communism. A man who builds imaginary tools to solve problems that never were. A mining engineer who made a ten-tonne truck disappear through a metre-wide tunnel.
Approaching the end of the year and the final instalments of Marvellous, Electrical, we’re joined by two humble figures with secret artistic careers.
Andy MacDonald, factory supervisor at Queensland’s Cobb + Co Museum, recounts a life spanning mining, sculpture, stage design, and jet fighter maintenance in Part 1 of The Fitter And The Handyman.
Then Alf Klimek, doing odd jobs and broadband installation in Melbourne, reveals an unexpected career as a Berlin-based Cold War pop star.
You can also see two years’ back catalogue of Marvellous, Electrical over at the newsletter’s Google Maps page. Distant lands are not so far away…
Well, that’s it for the current stint in Australia. We’ve achieved so much at the State Library of Queensland (SLQ) and University of Southern Queensland (USQ) since I came over for the initial 12-month residency in January 2016.
I’ve a few more gigs in London before Christmas, and then some exciting announcements to make going into 2018. Watch this space.
Hard to pick out highlights from the past two years, but among them I’d say:
But really there’s been too much to mention. (Like the roadtrip. The roadtrip!).
You can see some highlights here:
Thanks to everyone who made these projects possible and worked hard to let our teams explore all things wondrous and strange.
Anderson’s grand literary tour of urban environments that never were, from citadels of myth to more manageable fantasies of the kind you’d find in Walt Disney’s EPCOT centre, challenges our vision of what cities could be in 2017 and beyond.
In my review for The Lifted Brow, I link Anderson’s work to projects taking place around Australia, giving local context to his epic global account of the urban past, present, and future.
Read ‘Where Do We Dream Ourselves Next?” at The Lifted Brow.
I tell stories and I always want to push myself to develop my storytelling skills. New challenges, new audiences, new ways of getting a tale onto the page or stage or screen.
I’m interested in memory, too: how we make it, preserve it, remake and share it.
Tonight I’m embracing both of those things with a session as guest storyteller for Brisbane improv troupe Big Fork Theatre.
Big Fork run a series called “Cool Story Bro”, where a storyteller recounts tales from their life in response to shouted audience prompts. Those stories then become the basis for skits improvised by the performers.
matt finch / mechanical dolphin 
