Libraries – Page 27 – matt finch / mechanical dolphin

Finding Library Futures, 1a: A Love Letter to Auckland

October 15, 2013May 5, 2014Mechanical Dolphin

Auckland Libraries - Timequest — Auckland Libraries – Timequest logo

I wrote the recent Auckland Libraries school holiday programme TimeQuest as a love letter to the city – a science fiction romance with time-travelling heroes using libraries to save the heritage of New Zealand’s largest conurbation. Creating the activity, I thought about what I might go back in time to save from Auckland Libraries. My experience with both the library system and the city itself was intense, challenging, and ultimately rewarding – but along the journey, there were days where I might not have been sad to see Auckland blown into the time vortex!

Even in those toughest times, I found things to make me cherish the city. Places and people and even items on the library shelves. In one such case, it wasn’t a book, but a song. A song which belongs to pop culture in general, and Auckland in particular: that Australasian underdog which is still only slowly recognising how awesome it is and how much greater it could yet be.

This song, set on Takapuna Beach, alludes to the death of songwriter Don McGlashan’s brother at the age of 15. In it you find pop, melancholy, honesty. It belongs to specifc people, and specific places; it speaks of birthday parties and city politics, but also reaches out to touch something beyond everyday life. In four minutes, it gives me everything I love in a piece of art.

So…if you were on Auckland’s TimeQuest, saving your cultural heritage in the face of apocalypse, what one item would you rescue from your library?

Finding Library Futures, 1: TimeQuest – A Scientific Romance for Libraries

October 13, 2013March 13, 2015Mechanical Dolphin

This school holiday season has seen Auckland’s library branches join forces to deliver a programme of activities built around a single citywide storyline, “TimeQuest.” Working with the city’s Service Development advisers Anne Dickson and Danielle Carter, I wrote the short text which frames the whole season:

Auckland, 2379. It’s the end for planet Earth – a red sun burns in the sky and the ground is parched of life.

The last survivors are preparing to leave for a new home on the other side of the galaxy, when the scientist Maia completes her greatest invention – a time portal that can take you to any moment in Auckland’s history.

Her plan: to send you back in time to recover the best books, art, and objects from New Zealand’s past.

Where will you go – and when?

What will you choose to save?

TimeQuest – Raid the past to save the future.

From monsters to Manila: a few upcoming events

October 2, 2013Mechanical Dolphin

Awestruck Time Travel Detectives! — Awestruck Time Travel Detectives at Parkes Shire Library, New South Wales

Once again, it’s busy times over at Finch Towers. I owe this blog a report on Time Travel Detectives and Big Box Battle, two immersive roleplay activities that I’ve just run at Parkes Library. That’s coming, but in the meantime you can see a few photographs from the two events below. There’s no qualitative assessment quite as cool as the awestruck expression on a child’s face…or the air-punching victory of a seven-year-old girl who just took down a chainsaw wielding Elvis robot.

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Next week sees schools from around Central West New South Wales converge on Tullamore for the sequel to 2012’s zombie showdown, and after that I’ll be speaking in Manila and Sydney.

Zombie at the window — ALWAYS with the zombies…

In Manila, I’ll be running a youth activity for the Museum of Contemporary Art and Design, (MCAD) as well as speaking to Filipino librarians on strategy and innovation. MCAD made a rather beautiful poster for the event:

After that, I’ll be speaking at a New South Wales Writers’ Centre event on Thursday 24th October, Monsters Under The Bed, alongside novelist Kate Forsyth and researcher Nyssa Harkness. We’ll be looking at the place of monsters in children’s and Young Adult fiction – and with Nyssa’s gaming background, I’m hoping we get to explore whether our relationship to monsters changes in an age when interactive storytelling and gaming often allow us to struggle with them directly… You can order tickets for the event at the Writers’ Centre Eventbrite page.

And when all that is done, I have a few words for you on immersive roleplay, performance and literacy, and embedding stories in a community. Stay tuned…

Busy week, lucky country

September 22, 2013September 22, 2013Mechanical Dolphin

It’s been another busy week out here in Central West New South Wales.

On Monday, I interviewed the Australian comics creator Pat Grant for the New South Wales Writers’ Centre. You can read Pat’s comics Blue and Toormina Video online. Pat and I will both be teaching courses at the Centre later this year – Pat’s on Graphic Storytelling and mine on Storytelling for a 21st Century Audience.

Time Travel Detectives poster

Talking to Pat was timely, because I’d just arranged for Sydney’s superlative comic store Kings Comics to send our local library a vast selection of comics on sale-or-return, which we then allowed the public to choose from in a series of all-ages workshops which I ran to determine our new collection. (Kings mistook me for Doctor Who, too, which only endeared them to me more).

Tuesday saw the kick-off of Time Travel Detectives, an immersive role-play programme for 5-12 year olds which invited local children to enter the Parkes Library Time Travel Lab and venture back to 1873 to prevent a time-lost Justin Bieber and his strange minion creatures from changing history and taking over the town.

The event included two new artworks by the Melbournian artist Peter Miller, Spirit Box and the Life Projector, which became Victorian scientists’ devices for detecting the time-travelling intruders – with Peter and his wife Wendy taking on the roles of rival 19th-century inventors battling to outdo one another. Read more →

Can Aussie libraries learn from their Kiwi cousins?

September 3, 2013June 17, 2015Mechanical Dolphin

It’s a cheeky question, really. A few days back I was trying to tease the Centre for Youth Literature team at the State Library of Victoria on Twitter, as they ran an event which saw authors debating the relative merits of zombies and unicorns:

http://storify.com/booksadventures/zombies-vs-unicorns-nz-versus-australia

All I was really doing was stoking the old trans-Tasman banter between Australia and Aotearoa/New Zealand, suggesting that Melbourne were all about the author talks, while the Kiwis rolled up their sleeves and waded into the front lines of storytelling and outreach.

The State Library of Victoria is one of my favourite libraries in the world: a beautiful building to rival the New York Public Library, home to non-shelfy treasures like Ned Kelly’s armour, staffed by people like the superheroic Hamish Curry running gaming and cinema events, the Centre for Youth Literature’s Adele Walsh creating activities like “comic book speed dating”, and the zombies versus unicorns ringmaster herself, Jordi Kerr, who wrote for this very site on roller derby and librarianship last year.

So why tease such lovely people?

Well, it was this talk of zombies vs unicorns – a debate for the schools element of the Melbourne Writers Festival featuring authors Justine Larbalestier and Margo Lanagan – a spin-off from Justine’s anthology of the same name.

When I saw that the Melbourne Writers Festival was charging schools $7 per student to visit the city centre and hear writers debate “zombies versus unicorns” on stage, I got to thinking about the work we’d been doing in New Zealand over the last six months, which focussed on taking storytelling off its pedestal and out of the city centre; getting out in the community and inviting kids into the world of stories through roleplay and immersive storytelling.

Complete control: New Zealand censorship, security, space, word, and image

August 19, 2013August 19, 2013Mechanical Dolphin

For a while now I’ve been fascinated about the links between space, word, and image – starting with a talk I gave to the State Library of New South Wales about the comics medium last year.

Our recent panel on censorship at Auckland Libraries opened up some more explicit links between space and media – in the way New Zealand polices its physical borders and its cultural ones.

Did you know that New Zealand’s chief censor, Andrew Jack, comes from a background as a legal adviser to New Zealand police and customs?

That the man he replaced, Bill Hastings, left censorship to run the Immigration and Protection Tribunal, which decides on issues of residency, deportation, and refugees?

Or that New Zealand’s censorship began in the 1850s, more than thirty years before the first Offensive Publications legislation, when customs officers began to regulate importation of material they saw as indecent?

It’s as if the business of policing material and cultural boundaries were interchangeable in the eyes of the Kiwi state. Coming to New Zealand as a foreigner and a native of that other Island Nation, so implicated in NZ’s colonial and postcolonial history, it’s interesting to see the tensions between the country’s physical and cultural border controls, even when the tradition of censorship is relatively liberal.

NZ Censor's Stamp In the interwar years of the 20th century, American comics and movies were the boogeyman feared by the New Zealand state. Comic imports were banned from 1938 under regulations which considered US comics to place an “undue emphasis” on “sex, obscenity, horror, crime, and cruelty”, while in the 1920s the Manawatu Daily Times had expressed concern that US films were showing Kiwi youth “life through the artificial, spurious, and meretricious glare of Broadway, New York.” But material which the state finds objectionable comes from within NZ’s borders, as well as without – from undesirable persons to controversial teen literature.

Our panel last week was part of a broader event which looked at the history of the sex industry in Auckland’s Karangahape Road, urban development in New Zealand’s largest city, and the ways in which women’s bodies are policed and controlled in Kiwi culture. It felt timely, as it seems the tensions around policing cultural and physical boundaries in New Zealand are rising once again.

The Kiwis might just have celebrated their first gay marriages, but at the same time women are being told that tampons are a luxury item – the female body as the object of state control.

New Zealand censored reportage from the First and Second World Wars in the interests of national morale. Now a government communications security bill and questions around reporting on the NZ SAS link restrictions on Kiwi media to the surveillance state.

Culturally, too, the issue of censorship is beginning to bubble over in this small Pacific nation. The winner of New Zealand’s most prestigious children’s book award has been submitted for age classification.There’s also a growing debate over the legal status of Alan Moore’s controversial but widely acclaimed comic Lost Girls.

As part of my legacy work at Auckland Libraries, I’ve set up a teen feminism working group in collaboration with Auckland University of Technology. This project, run by female librarians for teenage girls, will help to develop a media literacy curriculum with a focus on gender, sexuality, and their representation in the media: exploring everything from an infamous (and awesome) Bodyform advert to Adventure Time‘s gender-flipped episodes with Fionna and Cake, and beyond.

In doing so, it chimes with the best of the liberal tradition in the Kiwi state, recalling a 1989 ministerial inquiry which found: “A media-literate public, well-educated about human sexuality, sex stereotyping, the demeaning treatment of women and minorities, and the misuse of violence in entertainment is the best defence against the harmful effects of the media. This is especially important in the face of fast developing communications technologies.”

Public libraries, with their principle of free public access to all human knowledge and culture, have a key role to play in arming and empowering the public to make their own decisions about the material they read or watch. It will be interesting to see how the debate moves forward in 21st century New Zealand…

For more on the history of Kiwi censorship, visit A Brief History of Censorship in New Zealand.

See coverage of Auckland’s protest against the GCSB online.

Tuesday at Method and Manners: Auckland Libraries Panel Discussion

August 12, 2013August 12, 2013Mechanical Dolphin

As part of a fringe art festival exploring sex and sexuality in the media, and a sequel to June’s successful Dark Night festival, Auckland Libraries presents a panel discussion with creators and commentators looking at controversial literature in New Zealand.

We’ll be supporting Auckland’s artists by contributing a panel discussion on the boundaries of acceptability in literature – from the history of censorship in Aotearoa to the scandal around Ted Dawe’s Into The River – the prize-winning NZ teen book which has now been been submitted for age-restricted classification!

The panel will feature cartoonist Dylan Horrocks and literary columnist Craig Ranapia alongside librarian Karen Craig. Aucklanders can catch that dream team of literati walking the boundaries of scandal and culture on Tuesday, 6pm-8pm at Method and Manners on Level 2, 6 Upper Queen Street, Auckland.
See more about the upcoming festival events here.

Dark Night at Auckland Libraries — Image by Dylan Horrocks

Still pushing boundaries: creative discomfort, adventure, and change in Auckland and beyond

August 10, 2013August 11, 2013Mechanical Dolphin

Well, it’s been another busy old week in Auckland, bookended by presentations to Auckland Council’s Democracy Services team and the Rotarians of Auckland’s North Shore, on making the civic life of New Zealand’s largest city more creative and daring.

There’ll be more on that in the next few days, but in the meantime here’s a quick plug for a fringe festival at which I’ll be speaking on Wednesday night – I’ll be at St. Kevin’s Arcade on Karangahape Road from 7pm, performing a short piece on illness, age, and sexuality called “There’s no terror in the carelessness of flesh”.

The festival ties in with Auckland Libraries’ own successful Dark Night season in June, which pushed the boundaries of library services to over-18s with events that explored, challenged, and celebrated sex and sexuality on page, stage, and screen.

This time round we’ll be supporting Auckland’s artists by contributing a panel discussion about the boundaries of acceptability in literature – from the scandal around Ted Dawe’s Into The River – the prize-winning NZ teen book which has now been been submitted for age-restricted classification! – to the legal status in New Zealand of Alan Moore’s Lost Girls. The panel will be moderated by Stuff.co.nz’s literary maven Karen Tay, and feature cartoonist Dylan Horrocks and literary columnist Craig Ranapia alongisde badass librarian Karen Craig.

Aucklanders can catch that dream team of literati walking the boundaries of scandal and culture on Tuesday, 6pm-8pm at Method and Manners on Queen Street. Then there’s more at St. Kevin’s Arcade on the Wednesday night. Hope to see you then!

Guest Post: Walking Through Walls – Library Spaces Everywhere

August 7, 2013December 17, 2018Mechanical Dolphin

Following guest posts from Adrienne Hannan on what librarians can learn from military strategy and Hamish Lindop on the best way to reach out to our customers, we’re joined this week by Auckland Libraries’ Baruk – aka @feddabonn on Twitter – an outspoken, audacious, and innovative librarian who co-designed and delivered our interactive teen space (featuring real live teens!) at the recent Auckland Libraries hui New Rules of Engagement. Here’s Baruk on ‘Walking Through Walls’:

We usually think of libraries as being confined to specific spaces that people come to. Even the more liberal expressions I have heard, “parks with walls” still focuses on a particular geographic space…with walls. And one wonders – does this attitude wall us in psychologically as well?

I’m an Aucklander and a librarian: although I grew up in a remote corner of north eastern India, I work in New Zealand’s largest city, in the biggest public library system in the southern hemisphere. A decade into the 21st century, the majority of the human race lives in an urban environment – but at the same time, the concept of the city is being re-imagined. This breakdown is a rich source of inspiration for librarians; here are three examples.

Frieze magazine recently published a piece on the methods of urban warfare used by the Israeli Defence Force (IDF). It’s a philosophical change as much as a tactical one, based on a drastic re-conceptualisation of space. If a soldier sees an urban space as consisting of streets and houses, each doorway and window becomes a threat that could hold a sniper or be booby trapped. The IDF therefore ‘walks through walls’, using explosives to blow apart roofs and walls that stand in the way of the direction they wish to go.

“We interpreted the alley as a place forbidden to walk through and the door as a place forbidden to pass through, and the window as a place forbidden to look through, because a weapon awaits us in the alley, and a booby trap awaits us behind the doors. This is because the enemy interprets space in a traditional, classical manner, and I do not want to obey this interpretation and fall into his traps.” – Brigadier-General Aviv Kokhavi

What’s good for war is also good for play: the increasingly popular sport of parkour does something similar, in its refusal to stick to prescribed paths laid down by urban planners. Parkour players – “traceurs” – make a game of moving vertically, climbing walls and jumping roofs to move between spaces. While at first glance it looks like it requires more athleticism and gymnastic ability than most of us have, it is more about one’s attitude to space, and really another way of tracing desire lines in the urban landscape. (See more on desire lines and libraries from Books and Adventures guest Jess Begley).

If we lack the acrobatic skill to move through the urban space as a traceur would, there are other options. Read more →

Guest Post: Hamish Lindop – Buying Library Users A Birthday Present

August 2, 2013Mechanical Dolphin

Today’s guest post comes from Hamish Lindop, who is Reference Librarian-Learning Services at Auckland Libraries, but has also turned his hand to numerous special projects in the city this year – from street promotion for our Dark Night festival to behind the scenes work on our 2013 Children’s and Youth Service conference, “the hui of awesome awesomeness”.

The hui was a huge success, bringing together librarians from across New Zealand and Australia for panel discussions, hands-on Nerf-gunning workshops, and a teen space which attendees could visit to experience youth librarianship in action. You can follow the discussions via the Storify page created by Auckland’s own social media maven Tosca Waerea.

One of the biggest tensions I sensed at the hui was between the need for librarians to be courageous and creative, and the tendency of managers to struggle as they balanced this creativity with the demands of administration and the bigger picture of the libraries’ business plan. It’s very hard to not take bureaucracy personally when one is also being directed to be passionate and innovative…

Hamish has done some work reconciling these challenges with a wonderful common-sense analogy: buying our communities a birthday present.

I’ve been thinking a lot about how a public library can deliver the best value to the community that it sits in. The answer that I have come up with is this: we can get the community a birthday present. This is my favourite analogy for how to synthesize listening to your community, and innovating to surprise and delight them.