Music for our brother

One thing that my sister and I did together was to select the music to be played at out brother’s funeral. This was a really hard thing to do, but I think very beneficial. As I said in the eulogy, a really good friend of ours sang at the service during a period of reflection after the eulogies and that was very hard for her too. It was one of the most wonderful gestures made for our family.

Anyway, here are our selections. We thought it would take a while to get everyone into the chapel, so there were the following two pieces:

We wanted reasonably contemporary music, but did not want to use music that was inappropriate or shocking to the older people who would be attending. I think both of these pieces worked really well and they created the right atmosphere for mourning. (I hope that doesn’t ruin them for anyone else!)

On exit from the chapel we used one of Muz’s favourite bands, The Cure.

This such a beautiful song. Some Cure purists (like @paulhagon) will say that this is not the best version, but we used the Extended Dub Mix from Mixed Up deliberately. I think it is softer and even more beautiful than the original. The lyrics are not completely appropriate, but this is the song that will always put images of my brother in my mind.

My experience is that music is very important at funerals, especially for those people who respond emotionally to musical stimulation.

An update & some analysis

I think that some people may have wondered why I put my brother’s eulogy up on this blog about a month ago. There seems to be a lot of online tributes these days elsewhere, although they sometimes get ruined by idiots on Facebook, and I think that posting it has helped my grieving.


I talked it over with my sister very seriously before we decided to go ahead and in retrospect I believe it was a good idea. There were a lot of folk who simply could not make it to the funeral service and we decided that we wanted more people to know about him because he was such a decent and modest man.
I looked at Google analytics this morning and it has had 304 views since it went up. It has had 244 unique views (& therefore about 60 repeat views) and the average time spent on it was just under six minutes. These figures are both on the high side compared to the usual for my run of-the-mill posts.
Maybe I should apologise for continually mentioning his loss, but grief is such an all consuming thing that it still dominates most of my thoughts and activities. What has helped me is coming to work as much as I could and spending time with family and friends. The people at work have really been wonderfully supportive and my friends have offered very helpful advice.
The image is from a Deus bike swap meet I attended with my brother last year. Muz loved Colnagos.

@flexnib’s Day 6 Meme


Do you snack while reading?
Sometimes, but not as a habit.
What is your favourite drink while reading?
I don’t normally drink while reading, but either espresso coffee or juice I suppose.
Do you tend to mark your books while you read, or does the idea of writing in books horrify you?
The idea of writing in books horrifies me.
How do you keep your place? Bookmark? Dog-ears? Laying the book open flat?
A bookmark if I can find one or any old bit of paper that I can get my hands on.
Fiction, non-fiction or both?
Both.
Do you tend to read to the end of a chapter or can you stop anywhere?
Depends on the book. I found Shackelton’s Endurance very had to put down mid-chapter because I didn’t want to leave the men on some awful island under a boat.
Are you the type of person to throw a book across the room or on the floor if the author irritates you?
No.
If you come across an unfamiliar word, do you stop and look it up right away?
If I’m near my laptop I’d look it up.
What are you currently reading?
Beneath Hill 60 by Will Davies, Men I might have known by Brad Saunders and City Boy by Edmund White. I am making very slow progress on all three, but at least I’m carrying the first one around now. Usually they sit beside my bed protecting me from invaders and vampires at night.
What is the last book you bought?
Probably that series of three books by Stieg Larsson with the first being The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.
Do you have a favourite time/place to read?
Bed or my arm chair.
Do you prefer series books or stand-alones?
Neither, see above as both are mentioned.
Is there a specific book or author you find yourself recommending over and over?
Yes, these authors: John Le Carre, Robert Ludlum, Len Deighton, Alan Hollinghurst, Evelyn Waugh, Edmund White and John Mortimer.
How do you organize your books (by genre, title, author’s last name, etc.)?
Subject areas and a bit by value I suppose. The better books are all downstairs in the better bookcase. The crappy books are also downstairs, but they’re in boxes under the stairs. The rest are wherever they can fit in the bedrooms upstairs.
Barbara’s additional question: background noise or silence?
Doesn’t matter.
Moonflowerdragon’s additional questions:
How often do you even open a meme post by someone else?
Not very.
About how much of that post would you really READ rather than scan?
About 70-80% I suppose. It depends on how interesting it is.

Sunday


I had no energy left today. Needed to recharge, so I stayed at home.


My unit flooded with all the rain, so the carpet in the spare room is ruined and I need to get someone to fix everything on Monday. My best friend was coming to stay for a few months and now he has had to find a bed elsewhere until I can get it all fixed. I had to keep mopping the floor under the carpet on Friday and Saturday and today it started raining again, so I had to keep shutting the doors and windows I had opened to let some of the moisture out of the house.

I’ve been putting up with the leak issue for a long while now because the builder had to diagnose the source of the leak, but the torrential downpour last Friday made everything much worse than ever.

Friends had asked me out and I also should have visited various family members who are still mourning my brother’s death, but I would not have been good company today. I just had to stop and do bugger-all.

Hopefully the new week will bring a better attitude and more energy.

Oh and the image is unrelated. Just a heap of bikes I perved at in Elwood earlier this year.

Vivid & Sydney Film Festival 2010

I hope you all stayed up late waiting for this. It was a late night. And I must say that tonight Rage is playing the worst music I’ve heard in ages (apart from the stuff after 5.30 am). Terrible guest programming.
So tonight I went out to two flicks at the 2010 Sydney Film Festival. Firstly there was the Australian premier of The Tree at the State Theatre. It is a decent film about loss, grief, imagination, families and country Queensland. As I’ve recently lost my brother in an accident it was all a bit close to the bone for me. Everyone is going to say it is beautiful, poetic and lyrical, but I’m not so sure. There was a lot I liked, but overall, I don’t think it grabbed me or convinced me. Sorry.
After that we walked down Macquarie Street to look at all the Vivid lights and then entered the Sydney Opera House for Nosferatu with Darth Vargus. The band and score were excellent as were the sound effects by Miss Death. Jamie Leonarder’s introduction just went on for too long. And for me the film is just pretty corny. It may well be historically significant, but I’m glad we didn’t have to sit through it without the amusing live soundtrack. Even so I fell asleep a number of times.
I have to add that the seats in both venues were excellent and I had heaps of leg room. You cannot say that about all film venues in Sydney, especially some old cinemas in Oxford St.

Librarians, active content creation & going beyond what is expected

Active Content Creation & Collecting

View more presentations from Mal Booth.

In early May 2010 I gave a talk at the State Library of NSW to a meeting of reference librarians. Ostensibly it was to talk to a series of images that I took while making a curatorial visit to Iraq for the Australian War Memorial in late 2008, but I thought that I’d put that trip in context by discussing why I think getting curators, archivists and librarians out “into the field” is important. So here is the gist of my talk. The embedded slideshow above should be viewed with this outline of my thoughts.


I wonder whether we are too passive?

I also wonder whether we are we too obsessed with how technology works (and not really using it to its potential)? Everywhere we talk about data mash-ups, catalogue improvements, better discovery & search tools, mobile platforms, cloud computing and digitising content. All of these things are worthy of our attention but surely there is more we can do aside from using technology better and there are other more fundamental tasks to focus on as well. Also, as far as technology goes, is the tail wagging the dog? Have we already lost control?

I’m sure most of our users and patrons all not be satisfied by cultural institutions that simply present and ever increasing echo chamber or a means of reflecting user-generated data. I think they want and expect more from us than that.

We can create and we must also be more proactive in collecting and developing our collections to reflect contemporary content, not just what has been collected by those who came before us. It isn’t sufficient to rely only on subscription services and commercial publishers.

My inspiration for these thoughts comes from other things that I see and hear about. Generally it comes from those who do create and perform, for example, the Australian Chamber Orchestra. Recently they again dazzled audiences around Australia by mixing pieces from more recent composers (Shostakovich, Shoenberg and Pärt) within Bach’s Missa Brevis in G Minor. It worked for me and I think it provided another way to interpret and enjoy Bach’s older work. The performance seemed to breathe new life into this work. The ACO constantly push boundaries and collaborate with cartoonists, writers, actors, and modern singers in order to keep their audiences both surprised and delighted.


Surely we can take a leaf out of their book and do what is not expected of us nor taught to us. Something more. Something beyond the rules. Not more of the same. We need to get beyond our traditional boundaries.

We need to create and to facilitate or encourage the creative talents of our patrons by modelling that behaviour ourselves, not just by providing the technological tools and spaces, nor by just digitising what was collected by those who came before us. We also need to get out there and collect contemporary content now from each of our “communities” whether they be an institution, region, small town, state or nation.

It will be good for us: being fun & playful; being a rich new experience; uncovering hidden talents; and by making our profession more interesting, stimulating and attractive. It should also delight our patrons. We must play out instruments and ride our bikes, not just leave them aside, locked up in a safe place.


So what are some of the options are available to us now?

  • curating exhibitions;
  • writing & story-telling – online and traditionally;
  • actively collecting (not just contracting it out);
  • facilitating online open access publication (particularly for academic libraries);
  • hosting digital repositories;
  • running film and short-story festivals, poetry slams, readings & other competitions;
  • facilitating community cultural projects like co-curation projects;
  • producing, directing and finding sponsors for artist/geek/writer/gamer/musician/visionary-in-residence programs;
  • producing and editing online magazines;
  • creating local content for our library collections (film, audio, music, games, animations, photo collections, even artists’ books) – and this can be done with what makes your community different or unique, just as the AWM’s focus is on Australian experience of war, yours might be an industry, local pioneers or veterans, immigrant families, famous families, a factory, an institution, craft, a crop, farms, etc.;
  • producing photo essays;
  • hosting travelling exhibitions; and
  • exhibiting (not just displaying) our special collections.

So, now to talk about my collecting visit in Iraq and the in 2008.


It may not sound relevant to reference and information service librarians in all kinds of libraries, but it is all about asking for what you want (to do), grasping your chances when they come and creating content yourself.

We (i.e. my senior curatorial colleagues in our museum) had been asking to send curators and archivists to the field for years, so when the opportunity presented itself, I had very little time to prepare for it and there was no time to stop and think about whether it was wise, safe, advisable, practical, the right thing to do, in my duty statement, feasible, etc. I just went.

There were no rules or guide books. Other than some general telling me to “do as you’re told!”.

The Australian War Memorial obviously has a strong focus on its own community and works very hard to maintain trusted and respected relationships with its key stakeholders and their representatives. It knows its core business and as a library/archive we needed to get more strongly aligned and involved with that.

We had set up and run collection groups focusing on the Australian Defence Force’s recent and ongoing operational commitments overseas. A subset of this was an official records working group looking at the challenges of ensuring a lasting record of war was being made and kept in the digital age. First, we had to identify what that records was and update our knowledge and processes from the Vietnam era! Since then all trains had changed on all platforms. This was impossible to scope from Canberra by meeting with a group of archival bureaucrats.

We had a couple of things on our side (eg. AWM’s reputation, my security clearance), but essentially I had to quickly learn how to select a “target” (no pun intended), get in someone’s face, establish trust, ask relevant questions, cover rights and permissions, grab and/or create something and then keep going.

Generally speaking, not many of us are trained to do all of that and we hardly ever practice it, but I can think of many reasons we should.

Somewhere, someone realised that the end of 2008 was probably going to be our last opportunity in Iraq and Northern Gulf waters to identify what we wanted as a record of years of Australian involvement. We didn’t know what there was nor what it looked like.

Over the course of the trip, there were many amazing opportunities that presented themselves and I just needed to take them when they were offered.

Some libraries are focusing on the creation of content (e.g. the Edge at the State Library of Queensland) and I think this is a good example of something feasible for all librarians if they can think beyond the norm and of the possibilities that are easily done now for digital story telling, taking and sharing images and small oral histories (from just local events and local people). All we need to do is get started.

A collection of thoughts


It has been raining on and off for ages in Sidknee.

I don’t like riding or running when it is wet and cold.
I bought a new red and white umbrella.
I should not complain as Sidknee weather is actually pretty mild.
There is a mystery leak in my house that is ruining the carpet in the spare bedroom.
I’ve been riding indoors watching recorded shows and DVDs.
I watch a lot of Vampire and crime flicks.
Then I walk to the light rail and catch a tram to work.
I like the light rail.
I miss having my bike in my office, but don’t know why.
I listen to music while walking and check email and Twitter on the tram.
Currently I’m enjoying the new Cloud Control and Midnight Juggernauts albums.
My walking track is so dark at night that I’m now taking a torch with me.
I think the walk in the weather is a good reminder of the benefits provided by shelter at home and at work.
I’m lucky.
My friends at work have been fantastically supportive since my brother’s death.
Friends surrounded me at a talk yesterday.
I’m very lucky.
Inclement weather seems more appropriate for grieving.
Soon I think I’ll be able to concentrate enough to read books again.
That doesn’t mean I’ll ever finish them.
I think they are getting closer to finding the source of the leak at home.
When you have a leak in your house you don’t enjoy the sound of rain as much.

30 posts in 30 days challenge


Just a quickie! Kathryn Greenhill has created a list of all the bloggers we know that are taking part in the 30 posts in 30 days challenge. She is way clever.

(The image to the right is Jessica Watson’s tiny boat at the Australian National Maritime Museum on a rainy day last week.)

Oh, and just in case you’ve not yet seen it, here is Kate Bunker’s Netvibes page of widgets for all the blogs participating in this challenge. Even Kathryn thinks Kate is clever.

Knit In @ UTS Library


Yesterday we had our first Knit In at our Library. It was very well attended and enjoyed by all participants.

Why did we do it?
Well it resulted from our Earth Hour competition. The winner, Ben Schuman, suggested that we could turn down our heating by asking people to wear their outside gear inside the library. (And you can see Ben knitting towards the rear of the image, just to the right of centre.)
So what?
It is a small step, but it signals more “greening” of our Library and our intent for the future. It also brought new people to the Library and we welcomed them well enough that some asked for us to make this a more regular venue for knitters at UTS.
Part II
So when we did this, some of the knitting participants suggested that the Library was a better place to do this than their usual venue (a traffic island in Harris St). I indicated to them my tentative support, given my well known belief that knitters in conferences are just terrorists in disguise. And then I went even further than this suggesting that we could certainly allocate them a space of approximately 1.37 sq m on a regular basis as long as we account for the following simple risk factors and corporate governance requirements:
  • development of a full risk register (accounting for all OHS hazards – needle injuries, woolen trip wires, people knitting disguises for terrorists, sheep dogs, excess knitting noise, etc.);
  • development & printing of new permissions forms (Entry to Library with Needles; Permission to Knit; Intellectual Property; Public Liability; No Fault Disclosure; Damage to Third Party; Personal Insurance Declaration; etc.);
  • appointment of a fully certified Quantity Surveyor and independent auditor for the club’s budget;
  • cleaning of knitting areas (for lost needles, dye stains, stray shearers, wool, fur balls, patterns, wounded knitters, etc.);
  • a security plan for the knitting area (I believe these cost at least US$90 million); and
  • quality control & assurance (we do not want to ruin our reputation by having people wandering around in garments that do not fit well or are not stylish).

That should be easy enough.

Recovery via Belvoir, the ACO & At The Movies


I think I’m slowly starting to improve in spirit and mind after the unexpected death of my brother Murray in early May. For a while it was all surreal, unsettling and confusing. I could not really concentrate on much at all. I could not read or even watch movies. One night I left a live concert at the Enmore Theatre (see image left) in a complete state of confused anxiety.


The support from my friends and family has been amazing and really helpful in aiding my own recovery. I’m now beginning to see some things more clearly again, but I find my emotions are still in over-drive.

So, I think I’ll try and post something each day on this blog as part of my recovery and in line with the #blogeverydayofjune hashtag on Twitter. Maybe someone will notice whether the posts become more or less coherent over the month. This first post is probably going to be a bit of a mess but I did warn you that my emotions are still in over-drive. Mind the step . . .


I saw The Power of Yes by Company B at Belvoir St Theatre on Friday night and really enjoyed it. I tweeted after it that it was “Brilliant, funny, but sadly all too true” and I stand by that comment. Maybe it is the lapsed economist in me? I also saw the ACO’s Romantic Symphony concert that mixed music by Schubert, Brahms and Johnny Greenwood (the lead guitarist from Radiohead) on Saturday night. There was a lot of energy apparent on both stages. What both Company B and the ACO do is really challenging because they must keep their products or output fresh and entertaining and up to the demands of very critical audiences with high expectations of satisfaction. Maybe they are measured by paying bums on seats, but I think the performers also know themselves when they are doing self-satisfying and fulfilling work.

I don’t think the kind of management theory that emanates from Harvard Business School that, along with a culture of sheer greed, gambling and competition, has almost destroyed the finance industry can be applied neatly to rescue or to keep afloat libraries and other cultural institutions. This is especially the case given the kind of second rate management “experts” (who didn’t make it to the finance industry) who tend to regard it so highly in such institutions. We don’t simply have clients and stakeholders and we don’t need to worry about bottom lines and shareholder returns in exactly the the same way as a merchant bank does. Our outputs are different and we should be able to focus on more specific qualitative indicators that are much harder to measure.


Obviously, just focusing on ticks in corporate governance boxes (designed by finance managers) does not work either. We are services providers, but not in the same way as a retail store or a call centre. What we do is less tangible, but not less important. I think we have more to learn from successful artists and maybe from the Artistic Directors and General Managers of successful arts organisations like the ACO than we do from sundry second rate management consultants, accountants or auditors. That lot should not be steering our course.

On a happier note, On Sunday afternoon I caught up with At The Movies on ABC TV. I’ve been a fan for years, even though I don’t always agree with David’s or Margaret’s ratings. David was reporting from the 2010 Cannes Film Festival and I really liked what the actor Melanie Thierry had to say about her Director Bertrand Tavernier (not to the bishop!) in the film The Princess of Montpensier. I think it is what we have been trying to do at UTS and what distinguishes us from many other workplaces. (Maybe I’m just a bit silly about this kind of thing in my present state, but it is how I like to work when I’m happier.)

Bertrand’s directing consists mostly in the confidence and freedom he gave us. He never imposes anything. He hates marks on the ground. He just can’t stand them. He’s so cheerful when he’s shooting, so happy. His obsession is that energy flows, that every moment, every second is fresh. He communicates so well. He is so positive, so cheerful. He jumps around all day long, getting excited about every scene, rubbing his hands and muttering, “This is fantastic! I love my actors! I’m crazy about them.” And just that gives you so much confidence that you’ll do anything. And that’s an important aspect of directing.

What a fantastic way to direct.