I’ll be speaking at ALIA Queensland‘s mini-conference “Library Hacks” in a couple of weeks.
American-style model railway. Photo by Graham Causer, used under a CC BY-SA 3.0 Licence
My keynote’s called Revenge of the Model Railway Club and it takes the form of a hands-on workshop. It should be fun – if you’re in the area, you should come!
Library Hacks runs 9am to 5pm at Brisbane Square Library on Wednesday 26th October.
The British Library has bumped me up from a “project worker” to Creative/Researcher at British Library Labs.
Just words but it’s always nice to have a punctuation mark in your job title. You can take it out and use it to defend yourself in single combat if need be. Especially as it turns out the “/” mark is called a Solidus.
Read about my dual role over at the British Library Labs blog.
The long-awaited Fun Palaces weekend has arrived.
After months of planning and preparation, communities across Queensland are gearing up to celebrate the arts and sciences in all their forms, partnered with a range of libraries and other institutions.
From the islands of the Torres Strait to the cotton fields of the Darling Downs, plus every library in the city of Brisbane, and of course our own State Library on the city’s South Bank, the first weekend in October will see a swathe of venues open their doors for community-led events celebrating the Fun Palace motto “everyone an artist, everyone a scientist.”
We’ve come along way since Parkes Library hosted Australia’s first ever Fun Palace back in 2014.
I’ll be with the State Library team on Saturday, supporting events including our Scrub Turkey Sessions devised with urban ecologist Professor Darryl Jones of Griffith University.
Wherever you are in the world, check the Fun Palaces website for your nearest event, or join in online with the Comic Maker built for Fun Palaces by the State Library. (We’ve also put the code behind the site online, if you feel like a bit of digital tinkering).
What does it mean to have a creative relationship with the past?
How do 21st century institutions manage our cultural heritage?
I asked Jacinta Sutton, Gavin Bannerman, and Laura Daenke of the State Library of Queensland.
Call them the Memory Squad.
I’m working in a library at the moment, so here’s three quick stories for Banned Books Week, the US-led celebration of our freedom to read what we want.
These all come from the research of the State Library of Queensland’s resident banned book specialist, Joan Bruce. Read more
Yesterday I took a team of staff from the State Library of Queensland to run a pop-up comic making stand in Brisbane’s West End.
Drawing on previous experiences with comic book dice at Bermondsey Street Festival, we took over a car parking space to let Brisbane locals tell their own sidewalk stories using simple three-dimensional cartoons. Read more
On Sunday, I hosted the Science and Belonging panel at Brisbane Writers Festival.
Scientists Tamara Davis and Maggie Hardy joined writers Ellen van Neerven and Maree Kimberley for a conversation about their work and the crossovers between art, science, storytelling, and identity.
We wanted the people attending our event to be participants, not just an audience – so I helped the library devise an “anti-panel” session inspired by our Broadband and Heritage workshops earlier this year.
In the “anti-panel”, the audience split up into four groups. Each group got to spend ten minutes in conversation with each of our four guests. At the end of that forty-minute session, we held a plenary panel where our guests reflected on the discussions they’d had, and more questions could be fielded from the floor.
The aim was to change audiences’ experience at a festival panel from “sitting watching VIPs have a conversation, with maybe a few questions at the end” to full interaction and engagement.
Our tools weren’t digital devices or social media apps, but wheelie chairs and a stopwatch.
The experiment in event design was part of a broader conversation I’ve been having with David Robertson around audience participation and public engagement. You can read more of his work at the Beyond Panels website, a great one-stop shop for alternative event formats.
The 2016 Brisbane Writers Festival will be notorious for Lionel Shriver’s controversial keynote, which challenged notions of cultural appropriation, and the powerful response to it from Yassmin Abdel-Magied.
Festival organisers quickly organised a right-to-reply for Yassmin and other writers, which you can watch on Yassmin’s Facebook page. (The live stream was filmed by Yen-Rong Wong, whose account of the dispute is also worth reading).
Our Science and Belonging event, presented by the State Library of Queensland for the Festival, was part of the library’s year-long theme of Belonging – an exploration of many different Queensland identities and experiences.
During the event, we were asked if we had deliberately chosen an all-women panel of experts. We hadn’t – we simply wanted outstanding practitioners of science and science-fiction – but we also acknowledged the importance of bringing together women, migrants, and Indigenous people as experts on a panel which was not “the token diversity panel”.
I’m proud that the Library and the Festival were able to deliver this special celebration of science and speculative fiction with a distinctive Queensland flavour. See more from Brisbane Writers Festival via the #bwf16 hashtag on Twitter.
Last month, I went up to Townsville in North Queensland with a team of staff from the State Library.
I worked with Townsville staff on strategy and innovation for a couple of days, then we invited around sixty people from across the region – and across the culture sector – for a day of workshops focussed on service innovation and professional development.
We discussed everything from robotics to scrub turkeys, David Bowie’s creative process to President Obama’s response to Muhammad Ali’s death, all the while thinking about how our organisations could better serve the communities we’re part of.
You’ll hear more about all of these projects in coming weeks, but for now here’s a report from attendee Sabine Carter.
Townsville was famously the setting for turn-of-the-millennium cartoon series The Powerpuff Girls – our team’s iPads are named after the lead characters Blossom, Bubbles, and Buttercup.
I’ll leave you today with Frank Black of the Pixies signing a Powerpuff-inspired song…
In Library Journal this month, Henrietta Verma discusses writers’ groups and gives a shout-out to The Worst Song I Ever Loved, a writing project I ran for the Parkes Shire Library in New South Wales.
Library Journal calls me an “Australian librarian”; I’m neither of those things, but will let them off as the project was devised for a creative residency in public libraries Down Under.
The Worst Song I Ever Loved was based on a university task created by Daniel Nester.
You can find out more about the project here at The Signal In Transition.
On my last trip to Rockhampton in Central Queensland, I was interviewed by Chrissy Arthur of ABC Capricornia. We talked about some of my projects in Australia and New Zealand, the role of public libraries in 2016, and this year’s upcoming Fun Palaces across Queensland and worldwide.
The best part was talking about how creativity isn’t determined by your pay grade – anyone can have a bright idea, and a role like mine is as much about listening to organisations and their communities as it is ‘thinking up cool stuff to do’.
matt finch / mechanical dolphin 
