• About me

The Library of Tomorrow

~ thoughts and reflections on the world of Library and Information Science

The Library of Tomorrow

Tag Archives: Matt Finch

Serendipity and zine-making: dispatches from the Fun Palaces front line

05 Monday Oct 2015

Posted by Dominic in Information Society

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Barbican Library, City University London, Clapham Library, Ernesto Priego, event reports, Fun Palaces, information retrieval, information society, Matt Finch, public libraries, serendipity, Stéphann Makri, user experience, zines

Over the weekend, I (and several other members of CityLIS) took part in two annual Fun Palaces events held in the Barbican Library and Clapham Library. The Fun Palaces initiative aims to, in the words of its organisers, facilitate “free, welcoming annual events combining arts and sciences, made for and with local people”. As such, it represents a wonderful opportunity for public libraries to promote themselves as community centres by hosting these events, within the ongoing repurposing of the institution itself as a dynamic social space for activities, collaboration and engagement, rather than merely a repository of physical items. This is particularly important in this country right now due to the current government’s continuing policy of austerity, which is threatening the effectiveness, and even the future, of many public libraries.

City University London was involved in organising two events this year, both of which were guided by professional public events creator Matt Finch. The first, which I helped out with during the morning at the Barbican, was a guide to serendipity in the library run by Stephann Makri, who specialises in Human-Computer Interaction; the second, held in Clapham and to which I defected after lunch, was a zine-making workshop led by the already oft-mentioned Ernesto Priego, whose research interests include the relevant areas comics and publishing.

Dr Makri’s research into serendipity is rooted in the age-old library (amongst others…) problem of how to effectively retrieve information. He and other academics have noted that library users often find information serendipitously—by chance, with a positive outcome—due to the simple fact that it exists in a physical form and must be laid out in a physical space. This means that a person looking for a specific book will see other books whilst navigating the library shelves, and will be able to form connections easily between them and their initial area of interest. By contrast, electronic information retrieval relies on ever more-precise algorithms to return only the most specific results; the overwhelmingly vast majority of electronic, online documents remaining invisible unless specifically searched for, hence reducing the possibility for serendipity.

The serendipity event involved Dr Makri giving a short presentation on the subject to the participants (as with all the Fun Palaces events, willing members of the public who were visiting the library), followed by a practical exercise in utilising various “serendipity strategies” to find new and interesting books on the library shelves. The subjects carried this out with aplomb, finding books that interested them in new areas of the library that they had not previously thought to explore, and also contributing their own techniques which they already used to encourage serendipity (even if they were previously unaware of it as a subject of serious academic research) to the project’s bank of data.

The second workshop, in Clapham, was completely different but no less related to issues affecting libraries. Under the leadership of Dr Priego, we encouraged children to make their own “zines” (short for fanzines)—a self-made publication collated from repurposed texts and images on a subject of the creator’s interest. To facilitate this, we provided a stack of recent newspapers to cut up and reassemble, in addition to access to the Internet, from which further items of interest could be printed. The finished zines were then photocopied using library facilities to encourage further dissemination.

@LudiPrice @citylis @domallsmi @LamLibsFP The end result was a doozy pic.twitter.com/yfIOOwyT2R

— Matt Finch (@DrMattFinch) October 4, 2015

The subjects of the zines made by the participating children included Chelsea F.C., information technology and luxury houses. The CityLIS people helping to run the event also made their own examples; mine was on the subject of cars and motorsport (above). The experience reminded me not only of my own childhood of undertaking similar projects, but more generally of a time before ubiquitous access to and use of the Web, when the creation and exchange of fan-made content had to be carried out without the benefit of computer programmes or social networks.

All in all, the Fun Palaces events made for an interesting and rewarding Saturday. After a year spent studying the theories, technologies and issues surrounding library science in a classroom environment, and working in an academic library, it was particularly beneficial for me to spend the day experiencing life in two public libraries, and how the subjects we have studied can have considerable practical significance in the real world.

If you go down to the library today, you’re in for a big surprise

12 Sunday Apr 2015

Posted by Dominic in Information Society

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Aby Warburg, British Library, British Library Labs, data manipulation, data mining, datasets, disruptive innovation, Flickr, Fun Palaces, information society, James Baker, LAPIS, libraries in society, library OPACs, Matt Finch, public libraries, social media, text analysis, Tumblr, Twitter, user experience, Warburg Institute

The ninth and penultimate LAPIS lecture of term featured guest lectures by Matt Finch, a writer and content producer who has developed immersive play experiences for libraries, and James Baker, a curator of digital research at the British Library. These lectures both centred on the challenges facing libraries—in particular public libraries—today that result from the myriad changes in publishing that we have discussed in previous lectures. In short, the transition to a digitised, automated model of publishing content that can be accessed from (almost) anywhere via the Internet threatens to make the traditional physical library irrelevant, as potential users can simply find the information they seek online from within the comfort of their own homes.

Dr Finch approached this problem from the perspective of re-inventing the public library as a community hub, which encourages users of all ages to explore and learn on their own terms. Examples of this type of activity in which he has been involved include using “comic-book dice” to facilitate storytelling games for children, and staging live-action events such as a staged zombie invasion of the Tullamore Public Library in Australia. At first glance, these projects may appear somewhat frivolous, especially when run in collaboration with initiatives with names such as Fun Palaces, but they achieve measurable positive results in terms of both publicity for the public library service as a whole, and a sustained increase in user-based metrics, without any increase in expenditure. These activities also rely upon the library as a physical entity, thus providing justification for its continuing existence.

Nevertheless, the general public can be hard to convince: for instance, the comments on an article on the opening of a new central public library in Christchurch, New Zealand reveal a sharp divide between those who agree with the ideal of the library as a multi-purpose and multimedia community facility, and those who believe that anything beyond a repository of books and some reading rooms for silent study is a waste of public money. Yet more traditional areas of LIS research also support the first view: for instance, much work has been carried out into the effects of serendipity on information retrieval (or, in everyday terms, how browsing for information can produce interesting and unexpected results deriving from the layout of physical books, whether in a library or bookshop—how often have you gone looking for a particular book, only to emerge with another that happened to catch your eye?), how some libraries such as that attached to the Warburg Institute has tried to maximise this effect with an extremely idiosyncratic in-house classification scheme, and how it is difficult to create the same atmosphere using an online search engine or library OPAC. Furthermore, the role of libraries as valued community centres has been well-documented during social crises, such as in Ferguson last year following the police shooting of Michael Brown, and in the already-mentioned Christchurch following the devastating earthquakes in 2011. The recognised importance of the public library in society is officially enshrined in the UNESCO Public Library Manifesto.

Dr Baker’s lecture focussed on the changing nature of library collections and services in the digital age, and covered some of the same areas that we explored last term in the DITA module, such as text analysis and data mining. He also emphasised the British Library’s role in(and legal responsibility for, under recently-revised British legal deposit law) collecting webpages for the UK Web Archive, and the importance of curating and sharing datasets, such as this one relating to the British Library’s Flickr stream. Yet these responsibilities can also manifest themselves in fun and creative ways as the British Library Labs work on projects to maximise the accessibility of the institution’s digital collections: examples include the Mechanical Curator, an automated Twitter and Tumblr account that sequentially posts images from a digitised corpus of texts, PicaGuess, a crowdsourcing app designed to create metadata for similar images by identifying their defining characteristics, and even an art installation by David Normal at the Burning Man Festival in 2014. These developments all help to foster community engagement with the British Library (which, let us not forget, is also a public library—just a particularly large one) and justify its place in society.

Thus, although the changing face of publishing and technology has challenged the traditional role of the public library, measures undertaken to facilitate community engagement, whether through innovative events, the promotion of resources through social media, and the training of librarians in such skills as how to handle large datasets, are keeping them relevant. The tools and technology used to seek information, and aspects of the information itself, may have changed, but the average user will still be appreciative of a professional to help guide them through the information-seeking process—and if this process can take place in a pleasant, creative environment in the heart of the local community, then that is even better!

#citylis blogs

  • CityLIS blog
  • David Bawden
  • Ernesto Priego
  • Ludi Price
  • Lyn Robinson

Posts by category

  • General (5)
  • Information Architecture (9)
  • Information History (3)
  • Information Management (1)
  • Information Organisation (1)
  • Information Society (12)
  • Information Technology (1)
  • Information Theory (2)

Follow me on Twitter

My Tweets

Common Tags

Altmetric altmetrics Analogue Internet application programming interfaces authority control BIBFRAME Big Data censorship Charles Ammi Cutter City University London Creative Commons databases data manipulation data mining datasets data visualisation digital divide Digital Humanities disruptive innovation DITA Ernesto Priego event reports Fun Palaces Google Google Scholar Henri La Fontaine housekeeping information architecture information behaviour information futurology information history information law information management information needs information organisation information overload information retrieval information society information technology information theory JSON LAPIS Lawrence Lessig Library education library OPACs Library qualifications Library school LibraryThing MARC markup languages Matt Finch Memex metadata Mundaneum museums Old Bailey Online Open Access Paul Otlet programming languages public libraries search engines Semantic Web social media TAGS text analysis Twitter Universal Decimal Classification user experience Vannevar Bush Voyant Tools Web 2.0 website design Wikipedia WordPress XML

#citylis student blogs

  • Ali
  • Alison
  • Amy
  • Caitlin
  • Cathy
  • Chris
  • Clyden
  • Daniel
  • David
  • Eleanor
  • Elena
  • Emma
  • Eve
  • Fengchun
  • Gordon
  • Hannah
  • Hannie
  • Harkiran
  • Ian
  • Iro
  • Isobel
  • James
  • Jamilah
  • Joanna
  • Judith
  • Julie
  • Kathryn
  • Kristina
  • Lamar
  • Lisa
  • Maryam
  • Matthew
  • Melissa
  • Naama
  • Neil
  • Nicole
  • Pablo
  • Rachel
  • Richard
  • Russell
  • Saidah
  • Sal
  • Sarah B.
  • Sarah R.
  • Scott
  • Shermaine
  • Steve
  • Tom
  • Wendy
  • Yee Xin

Blog archives

Blog Stats

  • 10,408 hits

Recent Comments

Anime roundup 6/29/2… on A Demon of the Second Kind: St…
A voyage of Discover… on Anticipating the dissertation:…
Serendipity and zine… on If you go down to the library…
Visiting the Mundane… on Reductio ad Wikipedia?
Visiting the Mundane… on Anticipating the dissertation:…

Copyright

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

The cover image (Orion Nebula) was taken by NASA/ESA, and is in the public domain. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

Create a free website or blog at WordPress.com.

Privacy & Cookies: This site uses cookies. By continuing to use this website, you agree to their use.
To find out more, including how to control cookies, see here: Cookie Policy