The mad square: modernity in German art 1910-1937

I saw this exhibition yesterday at the Art Gallery of NSW and was blown away. It is a wonderful example curatorial excellence (by Dr Jacqueline Strecker) at the highest level. The works illustrate a very creative and influential period of both art and design in Germany between two world wars. They are drawn from cultural institutions and collections across Europe, the US and Australia.

I don’t think such an exhibition could easily be mounted in Germany. It is so beautifully selected and the text is superb. I cannot write highly enough about this exhibition.

Media scandals & responsibility

Hmmm, so if you’re CEO & Chairman of huge media corporation, nothing is your fault. Of course it isn’t. You’re not to blame. One wonders, however, how your many media outlets would report this situation if it wasn’t about their boss.

What matters in the end is how your share value recovers. As long as your testimony saves the value of your stock all is good. You are an example to us all.

Farewell to Dr Alex Byrne (Part 1)

Photo credit: Dianne Garvan, UTS Library.
Last night UTS formally farewelled Alex Byrne as outgoing University Librarian. It was a wonderful function held in the University Chancellery with attendees including former Chancellor Sir Gerard Brennan, Emeritus Professor Brian Low, former Deputy Vice Chancellor (Administration) Robyn Kemmis, Alex’s partner Sue Hearn and daughter Kate Byrne.
The function was hosted by Professor Shirley Alexander, Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Teaching, Learning & Equity) and Vice President and speeches thanking Alex for his contribution to UTS were delivered by Professor Ross Milbourne, Vice-Chancellor and President of UTS and Professor Jill McKeogh, Dean of the Law Faculty. Professor Theo Van Leeuwen, Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences sang an Adieu for Alex to the tune of My Favorite Things.
Given Alex’s long and strong commitment to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander culture it was fitting that the evening was kicked off with an acknowledgement of the traditional owners of the land on which the UTS campus sits by Joan Tranter (Equity and Diversity Coordinator & Manager: Indigenous/Cultural Diversity at UTS).
I spoke on behalf of all staff of the Library and here it is, I think a fitting final post for #blogjune:

All of us in the UTS Library will miss Alex’s integrity, consultative leadership, forward thinking, his commitment to scholarship at UTS and his focus on excellence in library service.

His vision and leadership leaves behind a lasting legacy that has taken UTS Library from mediocrity to extraordinary. We are now recognised as a clear leader in service design, digital library services and e-Scholarship. His inspirational future vision will be realised by the new Library that is now being planned for the centre of the UTS campus, driven by new technologies that open up the library spaces for people and deliver fast and relevant services in both the physical and virtual worlds.

Beyond UTS, Alex is widely respected as one of the most accomplished senior librarians internationally and he has contributed much as both a Board Member and President of the International Federation of Library Associations. Alex has also had strategic leadership with a number of significant national projects such as his role in shaping the direction of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Data Archive and earlier work on developing protocols for the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Library and Information Resource Network. He has also contributed substantially to the growth of cooperative/collaborative arrangements to share collections between different universities like Bonus+.
Alex is also recognised by those who have been fortunate enough to work closely with him as a man of multiple talents and wisdom in so many fields, from literature and the arts to politics, history and languages. He is into everything. He makes his own bookends and he is sketching and print-making at the moment. He meets up with someone he studied French with once a month to practice his French conversation skills. He made ‘from Russia with Love’ for our edible books day. He regularly attends plays, operas, and musical performances. He has friends from all walks of life from countries all around the world, including a best friend who is Polish. He is an intellectual who understands deep conversations about philosophy, politics, literature, religion, history, as well as someone you can sit down and have a beer with.
He is a particularly generous leader who genuinely trusts his staff and is not afraid of having some fun at work. He often told us to push our initiatives even further than we had suggested to him: he encouraged us to “push it over the edge”, unlocking our imagination and giving us the freedom to experiment and truly innovate.
His has been a very humane and consultative style of leadership and he is respected as a sound decision maker, but a fair, honest and open judge. Alex is passionately committed to equity, accessibility, fairness for all and an open form of management.
We will miss his intellect, wit and wisdom in so many fields but all of his colleagues in the Library wish him the very best as State Librarian for NSW.

On Trust

Mal Booth
Image credit: Paul Hagon on Flickr
I meet with design thinkers, services designers and social innovators every week and we are starting to get them to help us prepare our library for its exciting future model. The model is fueled by the implementation of new technologies like ASRS and RFID, but we also realise that we need to change as an organisation and develop a new service model that fully realises the potential offered by these technologies. We are starting small and our first project to be facilitated by one of these designers (Grant Young from Zumio) will be an in house sustainability initiative. More on that when it gets going.
So Grant tweets the other day about a book he was given. Being the nosey parker that I am, I quickly looked it up on our catalogue and found that we had it here, so now I’m reading it too: Tim Brown’s Change by Design. It is an easy read, using story-telling to get across the experience of some case studies, and a couple of things have struck me as particularly relevant so far. One was all about trust in a section of the first chapter called cultures of innovation. Here is the quote and now you’ll see why I used the above image from a talk I did way back in 2009:

A culture that believes it is better to ask forgiveness afterward rather than permission before, that rewards people for success but gives them permission to fail, has removed one of the main obstacles to the formation of new ideas.

At UTS I’ve been lucky enough to work for Dr Alex Byrne for over two years now. That is exactly how he operates and I’ve enjoyed that culture and tried hard to encourage my unit to work together in the same manner. If you work somewhere that doesn’t even allow you to speak up before checking with your boss first or if that is how you manage your own organisation, then something is seriously wrong with that picture.