Tag: outreach

Perspectiva colaborativa en las bibliotecas: Challenges & opportunities for Spain

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Poster for the "perspectiva colaborativa" event in Spain, showing scissors and a silhouette of a human head full of gears on a cutting board

Courtesy of the Spanish Ministry of Culture & Sport, plus the Ubik Tabakalera library in San Sebastian, I’ll be joining librarians, architects, culture professionals, and other stakeholders in the future of public libraries for a one-day workshop exploring challenges & opportunities in community collaboration.

What does it mean for these institutions to join forces with organisations, institutions, businesses, non-profit entities, users and potential users, when designing & delivering the services of the future?

How might libraries serve as spaces of collective creation & learning, and how would this service relate to their traditional mission and brand?

How could awareness of the wider transactional and contextual environment affect the way libraries define and negotiate their own future?

I’ll be joined by librarians from across southern Europe to explore these issues in an open, participatory, multidisciplinary format. In addition, our host venue is Ubik Tabakalera, one of the most fascinating public libraries in Europe, headed by the fiercely impressive Arantza Mariskal.

Spanish speakers who love their library and want to help shape its future should join us  in the Basque Country on 30th May for a day of discussion and debate.

Read more at the Spanish Ministry of Culture & Sport’s website.

The USQ Podcast

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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.

Visit the USQ podcast platform, Whooska, to hear more.

Outback adventures with Tammy & Matt

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I spent last week on the road with the State Library of Queensland’s Tammy Joynson, delivering professional development with a twist & consulting with librarians & local government on future policies, strategies, plans and schemes.

You can see a 2-minute recap of our adventures here.

“Bless my cotton socks, I’m in the news…”

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What links stone circles, public libraries, the seas of the Torres Strait, and 1980s pop band The Teardrop Explodes?

You can find out in my keynote from last week’s SWITCH 2016 conference in New South Wales – “Science Fiction Double Feature” is available to download from their website as a PDF.

Queensland Fun Palaces 1-2 October

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The long-awaited Fun Palaces weekend has arrived.

Fun Palaces illustration

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).

Local History, Local Music

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Got to love a conference which takes place in a pub: I’m speaking at next week’s Australian gathering of the International Association of Music Librarians, and the venue is Brisbane’s Ship Inn, a “rowdy sailors’ drinking den now transformed into a civilised gastropub”.

My paper’s called “Wondrous Strange, Marvellous Electrical” and it’s scheduled for the afternoon of Friday, 30 September. I’ll use a playlist to explore musicality, play, makers, archives, uncomfortable histories, and information science in the digital age.

It’s not too late to sign up for the conference via their Eventbrite page.

Attendees will get to hear a bit of Powerwolf during my presentation, but sadly Mina’s ‘Se Telefonando’ didn’t make the cut.

It’s lovely, though, so have a listen below:

 

Comic Makers at Brisbane Parking Day

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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.

Brisbane Parking Day - Comic Maker Stall

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 →

Townsville Adventures

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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…

Write Here: The Worst Song I Ever Loved

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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.

90085-barbraguiltysleeve-streisand-and-barry-gibb-guilty-cbs-2

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.

Interview with ABC Capricornia: Adventure, experience, participation

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Rockhampton riverside, Central Queensland
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’.

You can hear ‘Zombies, Burlesque, Cardboard, and Coffee’ on ABC Capricornia’s Soundcloud account here.