Tag: Library Island

Unscripted Futures: 2020 OsloMet Urban Research Conference

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I’ll be co-presenting two projects at next week’s “Storbykonferansen” Urban Research Conference, hosted by Oslo Metropolitan University.

The conference’s “Unscripted Futures” session seeks to:

“explore how radically open futures can be constructed and how we can secure that future scenarios are not locked into the premises of today. The aim is not to simply celebrate the openness of the future, but to create a space for developing experiments, for proposing alternative possibilities and constructing new futures, and then studying and discussing their implications and consequences ‘on the ground’.”

Marie Mahon of NUI Galway and I will discuss “Unscripting Europe”: Using Future Scenarios to Rethink EU Territorial Inequalities, exploring the scenarios being developed by the Horizon 2020 IMAJINE project.

Inequality isn’t just a question of measuring the current distance between the haves and have-nots, then checking whether that distance increases or decreases. It’s also about changing forms of privilege and injustice, changing values, and a changing social context. How can plausible imagined futures help us to better understand the nature of inequality?

Then, David Robertson of Monash University and I will talk about Playing With The Futures You Didn’t See Coming: High-Agency Participatory Scenario Activities, On and Offline.

David & I will be looking at what it means to create truly playful activities and encounters where participants can surprise the facilitators, formats can be broken or rebuilt during use, and new ideas can arise. We’ll talk about the infamous Library Island game, as well as some of its successor experiments from the era of Zoom and COVID lockdown.

You can read all the abstracts from the session at the Storbykonferansen website (PDF download), and I hope you’ll join us online for what promises to be a lively set of discussions. Find out more, and register for the conference, here.

Campbelltown Library Island: Preparing for challenge and crisis

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The Library Island immersive training tool was released last year as a free PDF download and has since been taken up by organisations around the world.

Earlier this year, Paula Pfoeffer of the Community Connections team at Campbelltown City Council in Australia ran a modified version of Library Island with her colleagues.

Council workers visited a make-believe island nation to explore responses to uncertain and challenging situations – from climate change events to social unrest, government budget cuts, and the need to meet demands for recognition and justice for the whole community.

Below, Paula explains how the event was run, what the outcomes were, and how it has fed Campbelltown’s response to the Australian bushfire crisis and the emerging COVID-19 pandemic.

It was just another day on Uluibau Island……

In the towns of Juschester, Becstone and Pfefferville, the collections were being maintained and programs and services were being offered to the community. Life was pretty good for the staff that worked at the combined library and child care centre facility.

Then a climate change event happened and there were increasing demands for recognition and justice from the island’s indigenous population. Then the desperate people speaking a language that no-one seemed to recognise migrated to the City. And then the Ministry began to make ominous noises about cutting library budgets……

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My Visit to Library Island: Eli Neiburger, Ann Arbor District Library

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Library Island, the participatory activity which reaches the parts other professional development cannot reach, is here! You can read more and download your copy of the free, CC-licensed PDF file here.

I’m featuring some accounts of the Island from people who have attended Island sessions, or run Islands of their own, to give you a better sense of what it means to take part in, or even organise, your own Library Island.

Last time, Sherlonya Turner of Ann Arbor District Library (AADL) in Michigan, USA joined us for her account of running Library Island. Sherlonya and her colleagues ran a tailor-made session at LibCamp 2019, a professional development event for regional librarians hosted by AADL.

Now AADL Deputy Director Eli Neiburger takes up the story.

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My Visit to Library Island: Sherlonya Turner, Ann Arbor District Library

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Library Island, the participatory activity which reaches the parts other professional development cannot reach, is here! You can read more and download your copy of the free, CC-licensed PDF file here.

I’m featuring some accounts of the Island from people who have attended Island sessions, or run Islands of their own, to give you a better sense of what it means to take part in, or even organise, your own Library Island. 

Today, Sherlonya Turner of Ann Arbor District Library (AADL) in Michigan, USA joins us for her account of running Library Island. Sherlonya and her colleagues ran a tailor-made session at LibCamp 2019, a professional development event for regional librarians hosted by AADL.

Sherlonya is a great public library leader, and, in her regular contributions to AADL’s culture blog Pulp, one of Libraryland’s most talented writers. Here’s what happened when she took charge of Library Island earlier this year.

When Managers Cut Loose: Being Playful with Colleagues

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Clemson University Visits Library Island

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This week, South Carolina’s Clemson University Libraries became the latest organisation to visit Library Island, with their own lively adaptation of the free, CC-licensed core toolkit.

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This #TuesdayTrip we walked over to the Hendrix Student Center for our Professional Development Day, a chance for our employees to learn the ins and outs of other library job positions through a professional development game called Library Island. Each employee was assigned to a library with a new job position or role such as librarian, tech, dean, student, etc. Everyone was then given a task and had to find the corresponding person to help them with it, making the room operate like a library. Through this game, employees gained insight into their coworkers’ jobs and experienced both the good aspects and the challenges. After the game, we discussed what we learned. One employee said she now understands the demand placed on our financial officer, while someone who’s island was located far from the others realized how distance can impact an employee’s job, like those at our off-site Library Depot. Many employees said they realized they had a lot of assumptions about their coworkers’ jobs and the activity helped interpret them more clearly. But of course we couldn’t play a game and not have some fun! Stay tuned for this week’s #LibraryShenanigans to find out how we overthrew the dean, caught crooks stealing from Special Collections, declared a new library, ran out of books, and met a flamingo named Clarence. #NextTimeOnDragonBallZ . . . #clemson #clemsonlibraries #librariesofclemson #librariesofinstagram #library #cooperlibrary #academiclibrary #clemsonuniversity #southcarolina #clemsontigers #books #reading #learning #tuesday #trip #vacation #holiday #adventure #woohoo #employee #work #beach #island #hawaii #libraryisland

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“Each employee was assigned to a library with a new job position or role such as librarian, tech, dean, student, etc. Everyone was then given a task and had to find the corresponding person to help them with it, making the room operate like a library. Through this game, employees gained insight into their coworkers’ jobs and experienced both the good aspects and the challenges.

After the game, we discussed what we learned. One employee said she now understands the demand placed on our financial officer, while someone who’s island was located far from the others realized how distance can impact an employee’s job, like those at our off-site Library Depot.

Many employees said they realized they had a lot of assumptions about their coworkers’ jobs and the activity helped interpret them more clearly. But of course we couldn’t play a game and not have some fun!”

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Find out more and follow their Island adventures by visiting Clemson Libraries on Instagram, or read more about running a Library Island of your very own.

Public Libraries News: Mission to Library Island

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Investigating potential futures as they emerge elsewhere in the world, avoiding “copy and paste” innovation, playing games to figure out the choices our organisations should make next: I talk Library Island & scenario planning with Ian Anstice over at the UK’s Public Libraries News website.

My Visit to Library Island: Justin Hoenke

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Library Island, the participatory activity which reaches the parts other professional development cannot reach, is here! You can read more and download your copy of the free, CC-licensed PDF file here.

I’m featuring some accounts of the island from people who have attended Island sessions, or run Islands of their own, to give you a better sense of what it means to take part in, or even organise, your own Library Island.

This week, we’re joined by Pennsylvania public librarian Justin Hoenke, who attended an Island session with colleagues from across the western part of his state in June 2019. The activity was embedded in a day-long event focussed on strategic & scenario planning for public libraries and their communities.

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Pennsylvania librarians in action!

Justin writes: Read more →

Library Island Is Here!

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Welcome to Library Island!

This interactive training activity helps participants to explore strategy, innovation, and the messy business of working with communities. We’ve spent the last two years perfecting Library Island with university staff, health workers, museum professionals, students, and, yes, librarians.

The free CC-licensed print-and-play kit is now available for download in PDF format. Feel free to adopt it, adapt it, and make your own visit to Library Island.

Read more about Library Island, and what it has done for professionals all over the world, here.

Toronto iSchool, 6-7 June: Learning to Plan on Library Island

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We can’t predict the future, yet we do it all the time. We have to: there are objectives to be set and met, projects to be devised and delivered, holidays to be booked, birthdays to celebrate, mouths to be fed, children to raise, dreams to be fulfilled.

Sometimes people and organisations anticipate the future based on what has gone before – but then we risk being blindsided by social and sectoral changes, financial crises, political upsets, natural disasters, and complex systemic challenges.

So, how do we prepare for futures characterised by turbulence and uncertainty?

What methods help information professionals to develop foresight, insight, and awareness that will support decisions made for their communities, teams, and institutions?

Welcome to Library Island.

This June, visit the University of Toronto’s iSchool – “Learning to Plan on Library Island” – to develop skills and awareness which will help you to deal effectively with potential threats, opportunities, and challenges.

This two-day event will feature speakers including Peter Morville, author of Planning for Everything; Stephen Abram of Lighthouse Consulting; and Rebecca Jones & Jane Dysart of Dysart & Jones. I’ll also be there to offer insights gathered from information professionals working with institutions, communities, and businesses around the world.

Experienced consultants and leaders in the information profession will share planning tips, tricks, and methodologies. Participants will explore and experiment with new ways to develop their strategy, vision, and mission, including sessions of the Library Island play-based activity.

It’ll be provocative, inspiring, practical, challenging, and fun. Visit http://www.thefutureoflibraries.org to see more about this June’s University of Toronto iSchool – we’d love to see you there.

“Auf Trauminseln das strategische Bewusstsein schärfen” – Library Island auf Deutsch

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The first 2019 issue of German library and information magazine b.i.t. online has a special feature on Library Island, the playful professional development activity which helps institutions to think strategically about serving their community in turbulent times.

German speakers, and people with a mastery of machine translation, can read “Auf Trauminseln das strategische Bewusstsein schärfen” (PDF download) at the b.i.t. website.

You can also find out more about Library Island in this blog post.