The Role of Libraries in the iPad Age

The National Library of Australia ran an excellent Innovative Ideas Forum 2010. For next year I suggest allowing for more audience input. The NLA provides time for questions and has excellent wireless microphones so you can hear the person asking the question. Also the NLA encourages blogging (tag: iif2010) and twittering (#iif2010) , providing power points and WiFi for laptops. However, what is blogged or twittered does not appear to the speaker or the non-twittering audience. The room is full of talent which could be tapped. Perhaps there could be some breakout session, where we fan out across different pars of the NLA building and discuss the issues, then come back and report.

In any case there is still clearly a role for the library in the iPad age. Being in this building at this event I felt I the "flow" which Ben Swift described in his seminar on mobile music making yesterday. This is helped by the NLA building being in the shape of a Greek temple and having stained glass windows like a medieval scriptorium. Things got a little historically weird when one of the library staff appeared, dressed like a character from a Jane Austin novel.

Food-Scanner needed for Austrlaia

At the Innovative Ideas Forum 2010,one of the speakers asked for a gadget which would tell you the nutritional content of food in the supermarket. So I did a web search and found a iPhone App for US$0.99 called "Foodscanner". This scans the Universal Product Code (UPC) barcodes on packaged food and displays ingredients, nutrition and calorie information. So I mentioned this but the audience said "yes we know Tom, but it doesn't work in Australia and its database is limited".

Cell phone download from iTunes: FoodScanner

The Future is Catered For

Greeting from the reading room of the National Library of Australia, in Canberra. I have taken half an hour off from the Innovative Ideas Forum 2010, which is happening down stairs. The morning session was interesting, exciting, but also hard work. There was an excellent lunch provided in the foyer by the NLA and the chance to chat with participants. I took up what proved to be a strategic position on the couch outside the cafe (corner seat is the best). I then helped a colleague from the University of Canberra design a social networking course for next semester, from the people who wandered over and what they chatted about. That might sound a random process but these were people like Intel Fellow, Genevieve Bell, who I had the pleasure of sitting behind at the "Realising Our Broadband Future" forum in Sydney (where she was carrying out an impromptu anthropological study of the politicians use of mobile devices around her her). Also there are people from the communications department, who work on the digital economy while suffering from the acronym of "dbcde". ;-)

Over the last few weeks I have attended events on e-teaching, innovation, e-publishing and reading a history of Cam,bridge University. It may just be the excellent coffee and the fresh air at the outdoor cafe at the NLA making me light headed, but I think I can see a way to combine these together.

The Library of Alexandria was Destroyed

Brianna Laugher, President Wikimedia Australia is talking on "Is Wikipedia a one-off? Is mass collaboration all it's cracked up to be?"
at the Innovative Ideas Forum 2010 success was a one off, short term at the National Library of Australia in Canberra. The issue addressed was if the Wikipedia'sphenomena. The Wikipedia might come and go quickly, even the Library of Alexandria, which must have seemed for ever, was destroyed.

An ebook is a standalone website

Mark Pesce at Innovative Ideas Forum 2010 seems to be using a very complex and wordy analysis for some very simple ideas of what an ebook is. He seems to think that paper books are a linear form starting from page one and going to the last page. This is not the case, most obviously for non-fiction books and less so for fiction.

Books have non-liner features such as tables of contents indexes and footnotes. In teaching web design I explain to the students how to design a web site by analogy to a book. I suggest that designed have one default linear path through the web site, like the format of a book. In the extreme case a book can be converted to a book, by converting the components to their book equivalent.

Recently I took a set of web pages and turned them into a book, including ebook versions (the paper version is in the NLA and the web version in Trove). Obviously the paper and ebook versions have different features. The ebook versions differ depending on the ebook device used and if it is online or not. As an example, the citations cannot be clicked on in the paper version of the book. In the PDF and Kindle versions they can be clicked on, but if the book is not online external links will still not work.

Whatever happened to plain English?

Greeting from the Innovative Ideas Forum 2010 at the National Library of Australia in Canberra. The second speaker is Mark Pesce, of Future St Consulting. His topic is "Whatever Happened to the Book?". So far he seems to have said that commercial content providers do not like to hyperlink outside their own web site, that the web encourages brief easily understood items and e-books are different to paper books. Perhaps he has some other non-obvious point he is trying to make, but I am having difficulty understanding what he is saying due to all the big words being used and convoluted sentences. He seems to be reading out a paper for a university paper (or something for Fibreculture). Perhaps it is just that I am so used to brief simple online expression and can't cope with old fashioned substantive expression and am too used to short, clear, easy to understand online expression.

The Future is Messy

Greeting from the Innovative Ideas Forum 2010 at the National Library of Australia in Canberra. The first speaker is Dr Genevieve Bell , Intel Fellow, Digital Home Group Director, User Experience Group, Intel Corporation, talking about technology and the ways people use it in their everyday lives.

Genevieve is originally from Canberra and gave an entertaining insight as to how culture and technology interact. One insight was that the people in the growth areas for Internet use in Asia live much more densely and that English was not longer the dominant language of the Internet. Western, and particularly American, ideas of how information is organised, meaning is expressed will not necessarily continue to dominate the Internet.

Genevieve argued that old forms of media, such as television, will live on. Rather than television being subsumed as a VOD service, TV is influencing the design of computers and the Internet. It would be interesting to see how this apply to the book.

The room is packed with about 400 people, about one quarter of who I know by sight from other e-events. The organisers encourage live blogging (tag: iif2010) and twittering (#iif2010) from the event, making for a lively discussion. You can read my notes from last year .

Innovative Ideas Forum 2010 in Canberra

The National Library of Australia will host the Innovative Ideas Forum 2010, in Canberra, 16 April 2010. This excellent annual event is free, but you need to register.

The organisers encourage live blogging (tag: iif2010) and twittering (#iif2010) from the event, making for a lively discussion. Last year I took Mark Scott, Managing Director, ABC, to task for problems with the accessibility of the ABC mobile web site, grumbled about Marcus Gillezeau's "Scorched", and contemplated what Dr Anne Summers had to say about serious writing and the Internet.

Innovative Ideas Forum 2010: Program

Chair: Warwick Cathro, Assistant Director-General, Resource Sharing & Innovation, NLA
9.30am	Welcome: Jan Fullerton, Director-General, NLA
9.40am	Dr Genevieve Bell , Intel Fellow, Digital Home Group Director, User Experience Group, Intel Corporation, talking about technology and the ways people use it in their everyday lives
10.30am	Mark Pesce, FutureSt Consulting "Whatever Happened to the Book?"
11.15am	Morning Tea
11.45am	Brianna Laugher, President Wikimedia Australia, "Is Wikipedia a one-off? Is mass collaboration all it's cracked up to be?"
12.30pm	Kent Fitch, Programmer, IT Division, NLA " Resistance is futile: how libraries must serve society by embracing cloud culture, the end of the information age, and inevitable technological and social trends"
1.15	Lunch
Chair: Mark Corbould, Assistant Director-General, Information Technology, NLA
2.30pm	Dr Nicholas Gruen, CEO. Lateral Economics "Information and content: the new public good of the 21st Century"
3.15pm	Rob Manson, Managing Director, MOB, "Collections are Leaking into the Real World". A look at how mobile phones, iPhones, iPads and augmented reality are changing our use of collections and their place in the world.
4.00pm	Closing remarks: Jan Fullerton