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.