Public Libraries NSW Imagine Conference Part 2

Richard Glover shared his love of reading along with some funny stories.  Noteworthy quotes include: every book has a friend it wants to introduce you to; reading is a trapdoor to escape through; literacy is the engine to social change.
Rev Tim Costello spoke about reading for justice.  He spoke about how literacy is important for both the rich and the poor and how literacy benefits not just the individual but the whole community.  He highlighted the importance of the Millenium Development Goals - which to tell you the truth, I had never heard of - and that libraries have a role to play by having them on display in their walls and highlighting how these goals are being achieved.  And what stood out: it's the little things that are the measure of you.

Judith Parke then shared the achievements of the UK's National Year of Reading in 2008.  We need to engage in reading across a range of formats.  I was saddened to learn that some children were reprimanded for inappropriate reading, i.e. for fun.  The UK was clever enough to do a literacy review prior to NYR2008 so that they could measure the impact.  It is a shame that Australia didn't have the funding to do the same.  She spoke about an excellent program called the Haven Holiday Park partnership.   Where families go to a holiday park for holidays and each family was provided with a get a pre-holiday reading pack with a free audio book, a reading welcome pack in their chalet, plus reading activities on site run by Haven staff.  Overall, the UK offered lots of great programs it is a shame that Australia did not get the same funding support for it's NYR program.

I'll take a break and talk about the excellent catering provided at the conference and the novelty of a "take-away" lunch.  Due to the conference venue being located across the road from the beautiful Shoal Bay, it was an excellent idea to offer delegates the opportunity to take their lunch (from a buffet choice) in take away containers so they could sit across the road.

The photo above shoes some delegates eating lunch on the stairs down to the bay.  Lovely!!

Also, Port Stephens and Gosford Councils had their mobile libraries parked outside so that delegates could view them during the lunch break.  Another excellent idea!!

After lunch, Sophie Cunningham spoke about the future of reading, writing and publishing in the digital world.  She told us that the publishers knew that ebooks were coming and did nothing to prepare themselves.  Like libraries, publishers should of been proactive.  She warned us that publishers and libraries rely on readers but sometimes keep them at arms length and that all of us can learn from Amazon and how they successfully interact with their customers.  We should not engage with social media for the pure purpose of advertising - it needs to be an interaction with our customers.  She then shared the article that I wrote about in a previous blog post - Your ebook is reading you.  ebook or print - libraries should just concentrate on making good books available as that is what we are about.

Time has run out for me yet again so I will continue this post tomorrow.

More PLNSW Conference Soon

I was planning on writing another reflective piece - must practice written reflection as I don't think I've mastered yet - this morning but I have to leave early to go to HQ in Grafton to do some book selection today so I have limited time.

I will say one comment by futurist Marcus Barber before I forget it.  You see my battery on my tablet ran out before his presentation so I didn't get to take notes (tweet).  He said something along the lines of "Beware the cloud as the cloud will blow away."

Something to ponder.

Public Libraries NSW Imagine Conference Part 1

I promised I would do a post about the conference and I really need to force myself to reflect somewhere other than just in my head. The problem is that my tweeting was my note taking. Now it is hard to access my tweets as they are in the past and Twitter has issues when you keep trying to go back in time because it's about the "now." And since my laptop is so old I was unable to try to capture tweets using Storify - I say "try" because I've never done it before. Anyway, I will do my best.

In a nutshell, the conference was pretty much all about reading. Which since it is the National Year of Reading, it was timely to be discussing reading.

Dr Alex Byrne (State Librarian and Chief Executive of State Library of NSW) kicked off the conference with a keynote titled Imagine a 21st Century Public Library Network for NSW.  Alex started his talk commenting about the State Library's role of providing memory of past, and collecting new memories for the future.  He spoke of how they have been successful in gaining some grants/funding to focus on digitisation and how SLNSW has a role in capturing informal content such as blogs, emails, tweets etc and the challenges faced in doing this.

The talk then moved on to SLNSW relationship with public libraries in NSW.  He asked us to think about how we can reach more people.  Public libraries in NSW currently have 46% of the population as members of a public library.  He said our network is bigger than McDonalds and that for every $1 spent on public libraries it equals $4.24 in economic benefit - see more about that here at Enriching communities.  He felt that for us to push the importance of public libraries, Public Libraries NSW Association, Public Libraries NSW Metropolitian and the State Library have to work together as one voice.

He pushed Local Governments to invest more than the current $1.85 per person in public libraries and public library staff have to better communicate the role of the public library to the community.  He recognised that LGA's cannot provide public library services alone and that statewide access to resources is important.  This is where the talk got interesting as Alex discussed that a public library network should not only be local it should be state, national and international.  And perhaps the one card one library is not that far away.  See my previous blog post on this dream of mine.

We must speak with one voice and work in unison.

Well here I was thinking that I would get through more than one speaker in this post but due to time restraints I've barely touched on the conference.

I'll be back with more thoughts from the Public Libraries NSW conference.