I made a few flippant and some serious observations about VALA 2010 on Twitter over the last week or so. Well, OK then, quite a lot really. I’ll try and be less flippant and a little bit deeper in this post. Promise.
Firstly, I’d like to acknowledge the huge effort put in by all of those involved in putting this conference together. It really is an immense task and far too much to arrange for anyone wanting to keep their original hair colour. We should all be grateful to those who volunteered their time and energy to make the conference run so well.
From a content perspective, I think it had something for everyone and I know that the Program Committee made every formal and informal effort to consult with people about who to ask to give keynotes. I was also aware that people like David Feighan (the Program Chair) made an effort to encourage people to take some risks with what they said and to present it in an entertaining way. His opening address and welcome featuring the short video by Abbey the Digiberal Native was a brilliant example for us to follow. (If only David was wearing a tie.)
So, I came away satisfied that the conference pushed the buttons I wanted to have pushed:

• stimulating content and ideas that challenged some of my views or reminded me of reality (from RFID to networked books);
• the opportunity to swap ideas with colleagues from all over Australasia (& beyond!);
• the chance to let others know what we are up to;
• the opportunity to have some fun (away) with some of my colleagues and some new friends;
• stimulus to write a paper and prepare a presentation on a topic of some importance to us;
• connecting with old colleagues;
• watching and listening to some up-and-coming rock stars of the library world who are so passionate and enthusiastic about what they do; and
• sometimes I just needed a laugh (thanks to many of my Twitter friends and especially John Garraway from the University of Auckland who has a real gift for timing and delivery).

I don’t think the real value, in terms of connections, content, conversations and encouragement, that such conferences give to their attendees can be discounted.

So, to some brief observations from my perspective:

SUSTAINABILITY: I was pretty surprised that this issue did not come up much apart from our (UTS) presentation. It is a major priority for us and was one of the main conference themes at Educause09.

TWITTER: It provided a very valuable back-channel for this conference and I think that, like Educause09 in Denver, if you didn’t at least lurk, you missed a vital and really useful dimension of VALA2010. As @flexnib tweeted: “all of us are smarter than any of us”. In a way, it provided a cloud for the crowd.

CLOUD COMPUTING: This issue emerged and was debated in several sessions, but again, I was surprised that it didn’t feature on as many agendas as it might have.

ROCK STARS: I am glad that some new young Australian library “rock stars” are starting to emerge. I’m thinking of people like Paul Hagon, Kat Clancy and our own Sophie McDonald to name just a few of them. They need to be encouraged as examples for others to follow. Their essential role in connecting us to our clients or just the broader public cannot be underestimated.

INSPIRATION & LEARNING FROM OUTSIDE THE SECTOR: I really enjoyed two of the keynotes as they made me think . . . about everything. Firstly there was the wonderful Stephanie Orlic from Museum Lab, Musée du Louvre and finally we had McKenzie Wark from the New School for Social Research in New York. Both were brilliant. You could also argue that Paul Hagon’s “cataloguing by faces and colours” session on 10 February was along the same lines – thinking outside the box.

FROM LITTLE THINGS . . . : One thing that disappointed me was hearing, I think from a panellist, that what some public and state libraries are doing in digitising their own historical collections and other popular and/or rare collection material is insignificant or really doesn’t matter much. Well, I’m sorry, but it does. It matters big time. As Paul Kelly said “From little things, big things grow”. It is an important start and if our public institutions don’t make a start then someone else will start pulling the rug from under us. We should be encouraging any digitisation of cultural materials, not just endlessly debating which metadata schema to use or how to moderate user-created data, should we ever decide to allow it. What NLA is doing with Trove , what the Australian War Memorial has done with war diaries and more recently C.E.W. Bean’s First World war records and what the State libraries and some public libraries are doing to provide online access to and digital preservation of our cultural and historical heritage is very important and a great example for others to follow. If we were really a clever nation, by now we’d have a national cultural digitisation strategy.

That’s all!

I’ve lost your address!
2009 was another hectic year for me as I took a job offered to me in December 2008 at the University of Technology Sydney. That meant quickly selling my house in Canberra and moving everything to Sydney while still looking for a new home.
I found a near new unit in Camperdown and it is really handy to work, Newtown, Glebe and Annandale. I usually walk or run everywhere now and love living in Sydney so close to the city.
Work started (for me) in early March at the University Library and I’m enjoying the job and my new colleagues there. Apart from looking after the services we provide to students, researchers and staff I’m leading a project to build an underground repository for our little-used books (about 60% of our collection) and then the design of a new library for the University on Broadway that is currently scheduled for 2015.
Most of the year was spent settling into the University and life in Sydney, but in November I had the chance to travel to the US for a higher education conference and to visit several academic libraries that have done what we are planning to do. This meant seeing new places like Denver, Salt Lake City, Las Vegas, Reno, Santa Clara and San José and returning to San Francisco for the first time in over 20 years. It was hectic but really interesting and enjoyable.
That’s all. I hope you are all well and happy!

This is just a photo essay on two lakes in Canberra. Words by Aimee Mann: Lost in Space and images taken by me while playing around with different cameras. I think you need to view it in Flickr as a slideshow to see the captions. (Select Show info once onto the slideshow.)

What is different, and how is it different, when you compare cloud computing to traditional out-sourcing or software as a service?

• Cloud computing needs integration so it looks like extension of the campus.
• It also needs strong identity management and a federation system.
• It differs from out sourcing as it is usually more flexible, elastic and it is more configurable to meet changed demands.
• Also, cloud computing makes universities it think differently about running everything themselves.
• The comfort factor is different too for off-campus services: If Google goes down people seem to understand; there is a different end-user experience in cloud.
• Users don’t care about content being hosted in a “ .edu” domain as long as it works.
• Easy-to-use interfaces from huge investments in the cloud if the services are mass consumerised but if not, it could cause trouble.
• One panelist saw IT as advocates for best service and therefore the cloud had to be on their radar.

What is the compelling case for cloud computing?

• There are very obvious economic benefits from shared data centres alone. Regional computing centres are growing rapidly in California – as the cheapest available solution.
• We need to decouple the concept of “computer labs” from the location of software and digital storage so they (i.e. users) don’t need to come to the service (it comes to them).
• We may be in a “perfect storm” for case-building right now: the GFC; carbon neutral pressure; limited expansion space; etc.
• The total cost of ownership is less.
• Services are provided to locations all over with limited space investment.
• The time to market and deliver is much quicker.

There may be opportunities for scaling infrastructure. Does the collaborative nature of higher ed support cloud activities across university systems or consortia?

• One panelist cited the example of the Fedora Commons and Dspace consortium DuraCloud as large buying agents.
• Collaboration provides many advantages for those who don’t have the necessary storage competencies.
• Collaborative consortia may be better equipped to leverage Amazon services.
• There is already pressure for access from researchers to use the commercial cloud and they seem less concerned with oft cited disadvantages such as re privacy, security of data, down times, etc.
• It works when the new service is better than old way

How does cloud computing impact governance, the organization of our departments and the skills of our staff?

• Simple innovation isn’t a component of greatness – we need to focus on core (and not just try to be “trendy”).
• Cloud computing could be disruptive and it must be a strategic decision that is supported by whole management team (it isn’t just a tactical initiative tactical like moving student email to Google is).
• The decision needs entire institution buy-in.
• It is broader than just a CIO issue.
• Privacy issues: when dealing with offshore servers, yes there are jurisdiction issues; but Google is willing to give assurances that they will comply with national requirement as they want our business; the problem is solvable.
• One issue is the possibility of going to the cloud and then the company who is providing the service goes bankrupt, but that can also happen with traditional IT services. A risk management plan is needed.
• Universities may need to reset different levels of service.

How does cloud computing impact governance, the organization of our departments and the skills of our staff?

• We cannot grow as quickly, even in regional collaboration projects as the large commercial companies can.
• What changes needed in IT staff? More expertise in contract management.
• Someone needs to make a sensible decision about which records to turn over.
• Most (IT) jobs and roles are changing anyway.

What should campuses be thinking about today and including in our planning for tomorrow?

• Changing capital $ into those devoted to the provision of services (power costs need to be considered too).
• In general, some services seem appropriate for the cloud, some should be provided on the campus & and some should be shared.

As you may have noticed, I recently returned from a hectic two-week trip to the US for an education and higher education conference (Educause09) in Denver Colorado and a race through various institutions (university libraries, state archives and factories) equipped with automated storage and repository systems (ASRS).
I have to add that I travelled with an iPhone (a work phone) and a new 13″ MacBook Pro (my own). Both of these Apple devices proved to be robust, efficient and very reliable for the entire trip. I had no hassles staying in touch and making new contacts by email, Twitter, web, Flickr, SMS, etc. And I found connecting to what seems to be a pretty standard offering of free (or included) wifi access in my hotel rooms no probs whatsoever. Apple devices just work without any hassles.
I also visited a few Apples stores and ended up purchasing a cool purple acrylic protective cover for my new MacBook in Denver and some noise reducing headphones in San Francisco. There is something about Apple Stores that I find irresistible (quite apart from the fact that I am kind of addicted to the design and functionality of most Apple devices). In two different stores I found excellent customer service and easily processed sales where I stood with friendly staff on their hand-held devices. I even had the option (which I took) of receiving a receipt electronically by email. When back in Sydney I was alerted to the following post about the new Apple Store that just opened in NYC by one of the people I follow on Twitter: Apple: the “New Nordstrum“.
The post explains it in talking about the opening of the new store in New York:

The beauty of the stores are effective but that’s not what’s ultimately driving sales. At the end of the day, the physical store is merely the visible manifestation of the Apple customer experience.

That is where I think we need to go with the services we offer in libraries.

This slide show comes from the Mathewson IGT Knowledge Center, University of Nevada, Reno. I visited on Veteran’s Day and even on the national holiday a staff member (Erin Silva) was available to give me a tour, answer my questions and Carolyn Adams (the Head of Library Services) had even prepared a useful briefing paper for me. I have referred to that paper in producing this post, particularly about “MARS” (see below).

UNR’s Mathewson Automated Storage and Retrieval System (“MARS”)
(My thanks again to Carolyn Adams for the information below.)

MARS has six cranes, over 25,000 bins and is three stories high. It was completed in 2008 and now has over 600,000 items locatd in about 10,000 bins (about 40% of maximum capacity). The maximum number of “picks” (retrievals) per day from MARS is 323 and the average picks per day is 77 (they are open from 8 am to midnight, so this is around five per hour), including staff and patron use.

Interestingly, they have three levels of picking stations:

1. Used by Teaching & Learning Technologies department for (dedicated rather than random) equipment storage. Two workstations on one aisle.
2. Used by Library Services department (the main level). Items stored include books published before 1995 that have been checked out seven of less times in the last 20 years and periodicals older than one year. High use materials are excluded. They took nine months to load 500,000 items initially. Books and periodicals are all stored randomly. A green mask is used over the external barcode label to denote MARS items. There are 11 workstations on nine aisles.
3. Used by Special Collections and University Archives. Items have dedicated bin storage and there is a secured access point or non-circulating collections. Storage includesd manuscript boxes and framed photographs. Four workstations on two aisles.

They loaded the (empty) bins in the system first and then loaded the collection items into the bins using the picking stations (which is when the six stations on the main level were busiest). Like UNLV, they have student circulation staff who assisted with this.

They initially marked all books destined for MARS with a blue dot, but these fell off and some were missed, so since then they have used the green mask over the barcode labels to alert retrieval/circulation staff about books to be returned to MARS. Student workers were used to size books for their bins: 8, 10, 12, 14 and 18 inches. They did not report the same physical access issues with the 18 inch bins as reported by UNLV. Maybe their stations were slightly lower? I noted the hazard warning strips and the use of cushioned matting at the stations to make them more comfortable for staff loading books for long time frames. (See the images on Flickr.)

Interestingly, they do not have a sound system to alert staff to requests from MARS (like they do at Lied Library UNLV), so it is dependent on staff looking in on the system (at the rear of their staff area) to see if any bins have been brought up by MARS to the picking stations. The advertised delivery time is 10-15 mins from request, but it is usually in the immediate to 5 mins range.

Monographs in MARS are rarely requested and it seems that journals are the most often requested items. These are not stored in runs. All monographs and periodicals are stored randomly (other than by size), by the system itself. They keep the most recent journal issues on the shelves until bound (in-house), after which they are placed in MARS. They do lend journals (but not from MARS) for up to three days.

They are a recently commissioned library (2008), so did not see the need for a glass window to the system. They have a screen near the circulation desk that runs a loop of a video on the system that is also available on their website. They have now discontinued tours of MARS (which they used to run for anyone) because of safety concerns about access to the machinery itself. Unlike the Australian set up we will have to have under our legislative requirements, there are no protective cages, nor screens preventing people from coming into contact with a crane if they lent over the edge of a station.

Erin said they needed an area to store divider materials (MDF). She did not know whether the MDF stored on carts behind the picking stations was spare or replacement dividers.

Erin said that at first, they did not offer retrievals from MARS over the weekend as circulation staff on weekends were usually just students, but eventually staff were put on to supervise students and now retrievals are available whenever it is open.

Library Building space

The large open atrium was sad to be an important feature that impacts on the student experience when entering the Knowledge Center and therefore impacts on student experience and their behaviour in the library. The openness achieved in the atrium is due to the fact that 50% of the collection is stored in the ASRS, thus leaving more open spaces for library users to use for other purposes. Students can use the spaces as they like, without regulation apart from the fifth floor which is reserved as a quiet space and is glassed in accordingly (unlike the other open floors, which all have a range of group study spaces). The students monitor each others’ behaviour and noise quite well.

The lowest floor (under the ground floor entrance) is perhaps the most unconventional and interesting. Outside the learning commons “@ One” is a 160-seat auditorium with full multi-media capabilities. @ One contains no book shelves at all. It is mostly a computer commons with both PCs and Macs and some large wide screen Macs in the commons area as well as a studio of about 18 Macs in one room for the purposes of using non-text based software to create films, podcasts, etc. They also have two studios, one for sound/film recording and one for editing. They lend out multi-media equipment like video cameras as well.

They have a suite just for data analysis use and a useful and well-used computer instruction lab with tiered and sloped desking.

Probably the most interesting and certainly the most popular feature is their print/production centre, the only such facility on campus. This can produce large posters, art/graphic prints and photographic prints and is very well used by students for all kinds of purposes. They are just charged a cost for the materials (inks, paper, board, etc.) and this works out to be 1/5 of the commercial cost for such services.

http://www.knowledgecenter.unr.edu/

Here is the slide show from my visit to the “U of U” in Salt Lake City. Yet another impressive academic library with an ASRS by HK Systems (called “ARC” Automated Retrievals Centre), who also showed me around their manufacturing plant and the Utah State Archives ASRS.

I must also thank the helpful staff of the U of U Library who were very generous with their time and in answering all of my questions.

http://www.lib.utah.edu/portal/site/marriottlibrary/

Some pretty rough notes from my visit:
Trays/bins from the ARC are delivered straight up by the cranes. They have four cranes delivering about 2 million items in bins 6”, 9”, 12” & 18”. These bins are typical HK mini-load bins (or totes) and can cope with up to 750 lb loads. This is more than tightly packed paper (of any density) would weigh and they are tested for maximum load carrying capacity in the HK plant, also in Salt Lake City.

They have CD/DVDs in the lower 6” bins and are beginning to also include microform.

The trays only tilt about 5 degrees for the pickers as they are near the top of the system. It is 45 foot high crane.

They do not keep all serials in their runs and have not found this to be an issue.

They do not have spines facing up (none of the systems I saw in the US did), but the computer screens tell the pickers which zone o sector the item is in and then they must identify it themselves. Their zones are pretty full and they have to readjust the load of the zone before fitting some books in, or check it out again and note that the tray is full and re-store it elsewhere.

The Marriot Library did a “huge” library re-organisation to cope with the new library wing and the ARC. It has freed up much space and allowed for collection expansion. The ARC is attended by their Security, Circulation and Access Team. The ARC staff member who took us around the system said he had three days initially training and he had since learned more through daily use. Reference and loans staff estimate that only 5% of books used come from the ASRS. (I will email for through-put figures.)

They do not have RFID and are moving to ExLibris Primo as heir discovery and delivery system.

They undertook a 12 month intensive weeding program (completed in six months) before loading the arc totes and the library was continually kept open over the four year building and ARC-implementation program.

Reference Services staff say that a glass window so that (particularly new) students could understand the system would be useful. There are glass doors and walls, but they think students should be able to see the size/extent and working of the system including robotic retrievals in progress. A video camera showing the path of a requested book is desirable.

When walking around the Library I saw some excellent (& very popular) “Knoll” lounge chairs. See image on the Flickr set (above).

This slide show is from the Lied Library, University of Nevada, Las Vegas. The post comes to you from the One World Lounge at LAX, so it may need some further adjustments after a couple of glasses of champagne. Really I should have put up the slide show of the U of Utah at Salt Lake City first, but I just got all confused in Flickr, so here it is, out of order.

http://www.library.unlv.edu/

Wow! Even those of you who are hard to impress will be amazed by this library.

Salt Lake City has a very impressive public library design by Moshe Safdie. It is a good looking and striking building, but the internal spaces are what makes it function so well. It was a real pleasure to visit and so easy to explore. I found myself constantly surprised by what else it had to offer.
Nothing is over the top or just for show and all features seem to have a genuine purpose.
It cleverly makes the best of the sweeping views of the ranges that the position has to offer. I enjoyed: the small “boutiques” on ground level, the lifts and the stairs that take you out into the atrium, the roof top garden, the furnishings, the study “galleries” looking over the atrium, the water feature outside, the amphitheatre and the sweeping semi-circular stairway leading down from the roof-top. Fantastic!