Last week I gave a keynote at VALA in Melbourne. It’s a biennial conference for people who work in galleries, museums, and libraries. The text below builds on key ideas from my speech – you can see a full video at the VALA website.
Last week, I was one of six keynote speakers at the biennial Australasian culture-and-technology conference, VALA.
My speech will be online later this week, and I’ll post a written version on this blog shortly, but in the meantime you can hear me being interviewed by Corin Haines in a special VALA Red Carpet edition of Library Chat.
Aaaand we’re……back from the long summer holidays in the sweltering Aussie heat! And straight into the whirlwind of adventure.
Saturday, February 15th 2014 is a historic date for comics fans of all ages from across the Central West region of New South Wales – marking the first comics festival for this part of rural Australia.
Australian comics creator Pat Grant, author of the acclaimed meditation on youth, migration, and coastal identity Blue, will be offering workshops to adults and older teens alongside Marcelo Baez, who has drawn for everyone from Marvel to Microsoft, National Geographic to GQ Magazine, and will be schooling us in the ways of comic-book storytelling. In addition, the lovely folk at Sydney’s Kings Comics are venturing out of the CBD to offer their wares to people from across the region – a chance to peruse and purchase the latest comics, merch, and memorabilia without making the epic voyage all the way to Sydney.
More information can be found on the Central West Comics Fest poster:
In related news, I was recently interviewed for Melbournian radio station Joy FM’s Sci-Fi and Squeam podcast, talking about pop culture, libraries, and, inevitably, zombies, with the smart and suave Emmet O’Cuana – you can find my segment on their podcast, from 26:50 on the Joy FM website.
There were also some kind words for Parkes Writers’ Group from 2013 Banjo Patterson Poetry Award winner Jim Cassidy (although I’m not sure how I feel about being compared to Andrew Flintoff!) – you can read them at the Parkes Champion Post website here and see the kind of strange, all-ages, continent-hopping, Barbra Streisand-themed activities we get up to at the group here.
Finally, next week sees my keynote speech to the biennial Australasian culture-and-technology conference VALA – expect Doctor Who references, current affairs, the history of librarianship, and musings on hipsterity alongside the usual celebration and championing of public libraries.
<vworp vworp!>
It has just been announced that I’ll be one of six keynote speakers at VALA 2014, the biennial technology conference for culture professionals in Australasia – you can see more about the event, which runs 3-7 February, on the VALA website.
My paper’s called ‘The Book of the World: Pushing Boundaries in Culture and Outreach”, and the organisers have assigned me to the conference’s publishing strand – so I expect they chose me on the basis of the recent debate about e-books, centralisation, and public libraries in Australia.
You can get a flavour of my views on technology and libraries in the latest edition of the American journal Reference and User Services Quarterly (RUSQ). My guest column, “Less Like A Lesson, and More Like An Adventure”, was written earlier this year and describes the vision behind our original 2012 zombie roleplay in the Australian town of Tullamore. Thanks to the wonders of open access, you can read a proof copy of the article for free here. You can also find the finished piece online at the RUSQ site. (To see how the zombie game developed in 2013, check out this coverage from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation).
2013 has been an incredible – and incredibly busy – year for me, ranging from Foyles’ Future of the Book consultation in London to work at the Museum of Contemporary Art and Design in Manila, via library burlesque in Auckland, live-action gaming in rural Australia, and interactive storytelling at the New South Wales Writers’ Centre. I’m looking forward to the coming year, but now’s a time for rest, remembrance, and celebration.
Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year; see you in 2014,
Matt
Regular readers of this blog will be aware that it’s been an intense season over here in Australia, creating new programmes, training librarians and writers in the arcane arts of roleplay and immersive storytelling, and even taking up cudgels on behalf of libraries everywhere.
I just finished giving a talk to librarians of the Australian Library and Information Association in Queensland – you can hear a short pre-recorded version of my presentation at Soundcloud.
This talk is the culmination of a season advocating for libraries to challenge their own boundaries and reach out in new ways, to new communities and new partners.
Of course, in 2013, every speaker at every library conference is preaching a gospel of change, innovation, and transformation – those are the buzzwords of the hour – but I’ve made the effort to link these concepts to practical, affordable, and unexpected examples – from comic book dice games in the Philippines to day-long zombie sieges and Godzilla-versus-robot battles for schoolkids in Australia, citywide time travel storylines in New Zealand, interactive storytelling for writers in Sydney, and – perhaps scariest of all – bringing Barbra Streisand songs into a rural writers’ group.
It has also involved pushing back against voices in the arts who sideline local libraries as venues for all forms of culture and knowledge – see the recent debate about e-books and community outreach for more on that. Serving marginal communities is one of the things librarians do best, and it is vital that the profession advocates for itself in this time of dramatic change.
Librarians and supporters of the local library must remember that libraries are under threat, especially from people who equate them with shelfy places good for little more than storing books. In the UK, public library visits have continued to decline, in a context of branch closures and volunteer-run libraries replacing trained information professionals. In New Zealand, proposed changes to the Local Government Act jeopardise funding for community library developments. In the USA, the EveryLibrary campaign has highlighted the challenges faced by Californian libraries seeking funding, and the mind-boggling story of the Louisiana election in which a parish councillor is seeking to trade a library for a jail, disparaging his librarians for serving “Mexicans, junkies, and hippies“!
It’s never been more important for libraries to demonstrate, on a practical, grassroots level, their relevance to every member of the community. I’m pleased that library organisations and senior managers are addressing questions of branding and strategy, but it’s also vital that we make a difference on the front line, in grassroots settings and customer-facing roles.
A great essay by Adrienne Hannan of Wellington City Libraries in New Zealand – probably the single best piece about libraries I’ve read this year – sets out how librarians of all ranks should act strategically, working with integrity and immediacy as a fighting force on behalf of the forces of culture, literacy and knowledge. Read ‘The Strategic Librarian‘ here…and prepare for battle.
Here’s an update on last week’s Great Popcorn Debate which covered e-books, community outreach, and the future of Australian libraries.
Start with this image:
This was the picture that EWF Digital Festival Director Connor Tomas O’Brien used to illustrate his position on libraries’ attempts to secure e-book lending rights with publishers.
It’s in ‘A very quiet battle’, Connor’s piece for Kill Your Darlings on publishers and libraries’ negotiations around digital lending of e-books. He claims to be neutral in this debate, but his piece includes comments like:
I’m tempted to believe that ebooks and public libraries fundamentally just don’t mix.
and:
It’s unclear how public libraries can lend out ebooks without either becoming conduits for piracy (even now, it’s not hard to loan out an ebook, strip the DRM, then send out copies of the file) or cannibalising ebook sales, nor is it clear why anybody would want to visit a physical space just to load digital files onto their ereader. After all, if you don’t need to visit a real-world space to loan the ebook, doesn’t that defeat the purpose of the public library existing physically as a cultural hub?
That last line comes dangerously close to an argument against public libraries having a physical presence of any kind in the community.
Concerned by this, I approached Connor for an interview. In his piece, Connor had tried to protect himself from seeming like an enemy of libraries by writing:
The public library, in other words, is nowhere near obsolete. In some cases, it’s more important than ever.
Therefore, I asked him: What do you think a public library should be doing in 2013?
Connor’s response offered Melbourne’s city-centre based Wheeler Centre as an example:
The issue public libraries face is largely that there often isn’t that critical mass of energy. Instead, that energy is usually spread across state writers’ centres, universities, cafes, and bookstores. Melbourne already has the Wheeler, but in other states I hope likeminded groups converge to set up similar spaces. If you have one or two central spaces for books and ideas in a city, all the energy flows through those spaces, and it has a catalysing effect.
For me, that sounded like a centralising impulse which would deprive neighbourhoods, especially in our most disadvantaged, remote, rural, and suburban areas, of their local librarian. Instead, marginalised communities would be expected to find their way under their own steam to “one or two central spaces for books and ideas in a city”.
Public librarians exist to give every community member access to all of human knowledge and culture, whether rich or poor, young or old, urban, suburban, or rural. (Caitlin Moran has written especially eloquently about this at The Huffington Post).
Therefore, I felt that Connor’s idea was A Bad Thing.
Connor’s probably a very nice man, but his words lend ammunition to the enemies of libraries and damage the future prospects for marginal communities to have the full local support of their own public librarians as information and culture professionals.
I wrote in response:
I sometimes feel uncomfortable with all those big-city cultural venues. It’s not the institutions’ fault, rather it’s that of the funding bodies, but when did the Sydney-based NSW Writers Centre, allegedly a state-wide body, last have the money to run a programme west of the Blue Mountains? And the “national” Centre for Youth Literature at State Library of Victoria is crewed by a team of awesome badasses, who do make the effort to tour Victorian schools – but it seems to be “national” only in the sense that any Australian can access their website.
In the ensuing Twitter discussion, which got somewhat tetchy as these things do in 140-character bites, I gently challenged Melbourne’s Centre for Youth Literature on their city-centre focus.
The author Cory Doctorow, whose work explores decentred and future-facing solutions to the problems of 21st century economics, knowledge, and culture, is visiting the Centre this month – but all they’re doing with him is hosting the same old city-centre panel discussions and speeches and workshop events.
I suggested they should take him to a marginalised venue instead, and use digital technology to connect Doctorow to the usual, privileged, CBD audience. To show that I’m not just taking a cheap shot, I wrote a short proposal on how they could use Doctorow’s visit to ‘hack Australian literary culture’:
My suggestion was this:
Imagine if SLV hacked old-school literary festival practice and used Doctorow’s visit to celebrate culture at the margins for once. Imagine if he was speaking, not in the Melbourne city centre, but at a marginal, underutilized venue; perhaps a school or library in one of Melbourne’s less privileged suburbs.
SLV and its Centre for Youth Literature, who organized Doctorow’s visit, could encourage attendees to come out to the suburbs using their networks – but they could also ensure a city-centre audience by streaming Doctorow’s presentation to the[ir high-tech] Experimedia suite.
It’s an opportunity to reverse the opposition between the city centre and the margins. Anna Burkey, SLV’s Reader Development Manager, is clearly under pressure to deliver footfall through the SLV’s city-centre doors – it must be necessary for SLV to justify all that expensive real estate! – so why not run a makerspace in SLV on the day of the talk?
Invite Melbournian makers in to Experimedia, celebrate their work, remind people that libraries are about more than books on shelves (or e-books, for that matter), and really bring to life the work of the man who wrote a novel called Makers.
(I’m not pretending it’s perfect, but if I can come up with that on my coffee break, I expect the talented people at the Centre could do much better as part of their actual day job – and although Doctorow was careful not to annoy his Melbournian hosts, he posted a timely blog on librarianship at Tumblr which was in favour of both local libraries in general, and libraries having e-books).
Connor responded, “Broadly I agree w/ some of your points, Matt, but I don’t think your proposals are very practical.“
As far as I can see, my suggestion was no more or less practical than the existing model, I just moved physical presence to the needy periphery and digital outreach to the already privileged centre. I did a double-check and ran the Doctorow ideas past a few tech and community outreach people, who seemed to think it wouldn’t be such a struggle. I’m Skyping a talk soon from rural Australia to a conference in the city of Brisbane, for example, and Auckland Libraries has only recently run a city-centre makerspace within their walls.
I’m not a raving fan of Steve Jobs, but when I hear people like Connor being naysayers and merchants of the “can’t-do” attitude, I do think of that Jobs quote: “The people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.”
That should definitely be true for arts people in bleeding-edge roles like director of a digital festival for emerging writers. Surely they should be the most audacious, innovative, and swashbuckling agents of change in a nation’s literary culture?
But the truth is, librarians may actually be more radical, more relevant, and more engaged with our most marginal and dispossessed communities than the city-centre arts crowd.
Connor has just posted a new piece on this topic at The Writers Bloc.
He frames the issue as being about individual writers’ choices to stay in the regions or migrate to cities like Melbourne. He writes,
Writing in regional areas – South Australia, Tasmania, the Northern Territory, and rural New South Wales, Queensland, Victoria, and Western Australia – is not impossible, because it is possible to write from anywhere, but subtle infrastructure gaps do make sustaining your writing practice more difficult. Internationally renowned authors routinely visit Melbourne to deliver lectures, creating an invigorating culture of ideas in that city that sends a strong signal that writing matters. When you’re writing in a regional area, that culture can be lacking, making it infinitely more likely that prospective writers will never open their word processor in the first place.
[…]
There are also questions to be raised about the goal of outreach programs: do Melbourne-based organisations travel to regional areas to preach the benefits of living and working in Melbourne (to some degree, I think so – that’s one reason I’m now living here), or do they travel to regional areas to encourage those in the region to stay put and establish their own infrastructure (I think this happens, too)?
What saddens me is that Connor, in his role as director of a digital writers’ festival, doesn’t seem to be clear whether he wants to support the regions or try to consolidate power in places like Melbourne. He acknowledges that effort has gone into giving Melbourne “an invigorating culture of ideas in that city that sends a strong signal that writing matters”, but won’t use his privilege to help other places share that culture and that signal.
It’s even more disheartening when you remember that this is a man who has questioned the value of local branch libraries and proposed a consolidated model based on places like the Wheeler Centre: his words sap power and potential from marginal, rural, suburban and disempowered communities, despite his acknowledgement that “stories from the margins […] can be the most vital”.
The truth is that digital technology, transport, and telecommunications are better and cheaper than ever. That we have ever more people writing, blogging, creating fan fiction; using literacy to express themselves in an unimaginable diversity of ways. (Maori librarian Kris Wehipeihana in New Zealand questioned Connor’s “narrow definition of who is a ‘writer'” in her impassioned response to his post.)
American author Matt de la Peña wrote this week about his work in schools outreach – about identifying tough kids, not the superstars, not the self-identified writers, who have great potential to become the storytellers of tomorrow. Their stories resonated with Matt’s own experience as an author who himself didn’t read a novel all the way through until after high school.
The sad truth is that Cory Doctorow visiting Melbourne CBD, and Connor effectively telling marginal writers, “It’s up to you if you stay or go”, will do nothing for the Australian equivalent of Caitlin Moran, or Matt de la Peña, or those tough kids of whom Matt wrote.
Even that I could forgive if Connor would just give real and wholehearted support to local libraries. If his festival won’t be there for the writers and readers of rural and marginalized Australia, local librarians will be – but they need his support, not popcorn complacency.
Every now and then, I get asked to run a writers’ group in whatever community I’m currently working in.
This is one of the most intimidating challenges for a stranger in town, because each group is its own unique beast. Some people go to these things because they’re working on their magnum opus and are seeking feedback; others want exercises to stimulate their creativity; still others want to write in silent company; and some will be simply be there for the social contact.
On a couple of occasions, I’ve found myself leading a three-hour group with participants ranging in age from 14 to 65, and trying to solve this riddle:
What do you do with the buggers for that long?
It’s like Newton standing on the shoulders of giants – I dig out something like Daniel Nester’s lovely writers’ course idea ‘The Worst Song I Ever Loved.’
Today on the blog I’m joined by writer, web developer, and Australian creative-man-about-town Connor Tomas O’Brien plus Kiwi open source advocate (and fellow developer) Chris Cormack of Koha.
Connor is the director of the EWF Digital Writers’ Festival. He came to my attention after a Twitter conversation which led to his article “A very quiet battle” for the journal Kill Your Darlings. In it, he addressed sci-fi author Ursula Le Guin’s argument that publishers are deliberately making it untenable for public libraries to loan e-books to their patrons.
“That’s probably true, and actually not very surprising,” Connor replied, suggesting that “ebooks and public libraries fundamentally just don’t mix”:
After all, if we accept that one of the core roles of the public library system is to make work freely available, and to make that work as convenient as possible to access… well, it’s already extremely easy to acquire ebooks freely and easily online without paying a cent. If we ignore the copyright implications, the torrenting website The Pirate Bay is, in a sense, like a modern day Library of Alexandria […D]igital lending systems are so complex, restrictive, and counterintuitive that it’s far more convenient for somebody with a limited income to pirate an ebook than rent it from their public library. The Pirate Bay, though illicit, offers a superior system of unrestricted free digital access to written work than any public library in existence. (For reference, here’s a breakdown of a typical library’s ebook checkout restrictions).
It’s hard to see things improving. Public libraries were established to facilitate the distribution of physical objects, not digital files. The conceptual framework for lending – involving one patron visiting a physical space, removing a book from the collection for a limited period, then returning it for others to enjoy – breaks down when it comes to ebooks, which can be accessed anywhere and endlessly duplicated.
Connor acknowledged that “The public library […] is nowhere near obsolete. In some cases, it’s more important than ever”, but without giving examples of what he expected the library to do in this brave new world. And when he signed off the article like this:
For now, there’s not much to do, really, but grab the popcorn and sit back and watch as publishers and librarians battle it out (very, very quietly, of course).
Well, of course this got my dander up. I was minded of Edward Burke’s “All that is necessary for the triumph of Evil is that good men do nothing.” If people complacently munch popcorn while public libraries ail and the smallest, most disadvantaged communities lose their free point of access to human knowledge and culture, they’re actually helping a deeper slide into inequality across the nation.
So I got in touch with Connor and asked him to talk through his ideas about the future of public libraries – and to bolster my limited technical knowledge, I talked also with Chris Cormack of Koha, an open-source software developer who spoke at this year’s Auckland Libraries Youth Hui. I won’t deny I’ve got a soft spot for Chris ever since I found out he arranged for the Māori hero Maui to attend his son’s birthday party – the kind of parenting that chimes so well with the spirit of playful learning.
The following interview comes from stitching together e-mail discussions with Connor and Chris. Connor ran out of time because of his work with the Digital Writers’ Festival, but I hope interested readers will be able to pursue the issue further online – you can find Connor online as @mrconnorobrien and Chris as @ranginui.
After reading Connor’s article, I asked him: “Aren’t the systems around e-book lending only so complex because publishers are trying to enforce unenforceable, outdated business systems? It’s so easy to publish an ebook now: aren’t publishers trying to create an artificial scarcity, because the traditional business model was based on scarcity of the physical text? I’ve heard it argued that libraries should directly value and reward authors for the work that they do, rather than the distributors who might be increasingly irrelevant. Rather than the problem being libraries, isn’t the problem a publishing business model which places intrinsic value not on the work, but on its transmission?”
I’m just back from Manila after flitting around Australia and the Philippines for a couple of weeks, running various events for libraries and art galleries. 7 flights in 8 days…that’s more than enough!
On the 10th and 11th of October, Parkes Shire Library ran our biggest and best zombie roleplay event to date, working in collaboration with three local schools, police, firefighters, and student volunteers from Charles Sturt University. We had two days of around 70 people taking part in a 4 1/2 hour unbroken zombie-fighting roleplay with real emergency services. You can see video from the news coverage at the ABC website.
That event was the culmination of about a month’s work creating immersive theatre and learning activities in country libraries; you can find out more under the Finding Library Futures tag at this site. As the zombie dust settled, I spent a week training librarians around the region before flying to Sydney during the bushfires, which give the city a rather unnervingly apocalyptic skyline:
The next day, I was off to Manila’s Museum of Contemporary Art and Design to give a talk and run another day of events. This included activities like making storytelling dice with comic-book panels on each face:
The kids were very cool but it was pretty intense work – in fact, just walking down the street was pretty intense! Tho’ I’ve been to bustling cities in Peru and Indonesia, this was another level of wild traffic, wealth disparity, and sheer volume of humanity. Five minute taxi rides generated impressions that will take a long time to process. I felt privileged to be invited to work with the talented staff at MCAD and the youth museum Museo Pambata.
On my last night in the city, I went to a gallery launch but ended up sneaking off with another artist, Leeroy New (designer of a Lady Gaga dress, not the infamous meat one), to see his exhibition Gates of Hell, which I found utterly wonderful:
Leeroy’s transgressive, playful, pop-cultural take on the sacred had an impact as soon as you entered the room, yet when you ventured beneath the carapace of oozy foam which encased many of his holy subjects, there was a serious engagement with the numinous and transcendent. Gates of Hell reminded me of one of my favourite novels, Toby Litt’s troubling, surrealist fairytale-for-adults Hospital. With its psychopomps and defiantly rebellious bodies, its unyielding but indefinable laws of magic, It’s one of those flawed yet lingering novels – see this Telegraph review for a decent skewering of the flaws – which, despite it all, I can’t recommend enough.
I loved Leeroy’s work for recalling the grotesquerie of Bosch as much as the claymation splurge of the British 1980s cartoon Trap Door. Gates of Hell marked a perfect balance between pop culture and traditional spirituality, those two rival paths towards a world beyond the everyday. No wonder Lady Gaga had Leeroy make wearable art for her.
After escaping the Gates of Hell, I chaired an evening panel on monsters in children’s literature for the New South Wales Writers’ Centre (you can see a great write-up here from panellist Nyssa Harkness) before finally flying home (my 7th flight in 8 days)…
To recover from all that adventure, I spent a long weekend in a darkened room with too many comics and now I’m back in the game. Stay tuned for tomorrow’s big interview/discussion piece on e-books, publishing, and the future of libraries…
Update: just to round off the festivities on this ghoulish night, you can find a six-minute recording of my piece There’s No Terror In The Carelessness of Flesh online at Soundcloud. Strictly NSFW – an adult exploration of blood, bodies, desire, and dismay. Happy Hallowe’en!
Part 5 in my series on Finding Library Futures.
In my travels, I’ve met some incredible and inspiring library leaders. Managers and specialists delivering incredible stuff: people like Hamish Curry, the Melbournian library superhero who gets kids making Ned Kelly armour in his library, or Adrienne Hannan in the New Zealand capital Wellington, a children’s and youth specialist whose role outside traditional management structures gives her freedom and flexibility to innovate. But sometimes libraries’ own bureaucracy impedes them: sometimes, even when the media, local communities, and local politicians, too, are supporting libraries’ attempts to be audacious, internal process can be an obstacle. So – here’s three thoughts on a style of leadership which will let libraries be the sword-hand of literacy and the major cultural player they so clearly ought to be in the new Information Age.
1. Library leaders need to be librarians.
Don’t get me wrong; I’m not talking my role out of existence – outsiders to library service have a value in stirring the pot, bringing in new ideas, cross-pollinating between librarianship, education, theatre, creative writing, marketing, etc – but I truly believe that the people at the head of a library organisation need to have walked the floor, stacked the shelves, held their own on a desk shift, and put contact plastic on a few books in their time. Read more
matt finch / mechanical dolphin 
