Boring is the new black.

The reading I have done recently on future forecasting and trends is boiling down to a few simple truths which can be summarised as: "Boring is the new black" (not mine I'm afraid - flicked past me on twitter this morning.)

1. As life becomes even more fast paced and frantic we are valuing the slow paced and calming.
2. We like to 'savour': lifestyle choices, quality social and recreational experiences.
3. Baby boomers will be slamming into retirement - and they won't be ready to put down their rucksacks and travel guides and recline into their lazyboys and largeprints. They are active and discerning and are looking for quality (and that doesn't mean excess) in the next ten years of their lives.

This post is a summary of the about the main themes from the Horowhenua Development Plan published in June 2008. It is actually really good reading!

Population
The population of Horowhenua has remained static for virtually 20 years, and is likely to remain so. It may even decline. The numbers of young people leaving the District is almost equally offset by the numbers of older people retiring to the area. We have about double the NZ average of retirees at 30%. This is set to rise to 34% by 2026 and around 50% by 2051. Council are committed to attracting a younger demographic to the District, people looking for an improved quality of life.

So what?
All retirees are not equal! Horowhenua is a destination for retiring baby boomers: 'young' retirees, active, highly mobile, relatively well off, discerning in their lifestyle choices and recreation choices. Over time they become 'old' retirees with a different set of characteristics: more dependent, less mobile, less 'able'. There will be an increasing workforce of caregivers who tend to be of a lower socio-economic demographic, and are often immigrants.

Development
Subdivision and building consents reveal that new development is up and trending towards rural-residential, lifestyle and coastal villages. There is noticeable trend for holiday or second homes in the District. We have a high proportion of single occupier dwellings. The lack of public transport is an issue for the District, especially but not exclusively for older people who are more restricted in their movements for reasons which include: financial, age related and philosophical reasons ie 'green' movement.

So what?
We will have the same number or less people spread over a larger areas in pockets of community. The goal is to develop 'liveable communities', neighbourhoods with 'hearts', focal point with all basic services to support lifestyle choices and an enhanced quality of life. New focal point for Levin is around the Mall carpark area, and "lack of social services restrict growth in coastal villages: schools, shops, libraries."

Concluding thoughts
So thinking now about this relation to the design of library services in Horowhenua over the next 20 years:

• we will have lots of young and old retirees,
• lots of service support workers and their families,
• we need to support Council in attracting a younger demographic to the District through providing a quality service; libraries are a key part of decision matrix in relocating and say a lot about the town,
• we be serving a disparate, dispersed community, clustered into 'village' service centres,
• our clients will be looking to savour 'quality' and libraries as 'experience' and being central to the heart of their communities. This is not the 'drive through' service model but a 'living room'.
  

Public Library Service in Horowhenua : now and in 2030

I have a small task to do .. nothing too challenging for a wet Thursday... I need to prepare 'something' to communicate to Council Officers what the library service delivered by Horowhenua Library Trust in 2030 might look like. Yes - I can hear you laughing - and now that I have stopped weeping, I am actually starting to feel excited by this.

The Background.
Very briefly: we have a new library building planned for Levin, we have been messed around for about 5 years, change of staff at Council, new chap thinks we have no vision, no plan, no idea what we want to achieve (obviously case studies, building briefs etc etc have been "lost" in the bowels of Council) . Moving along ...

The Good News
And this really is good news:

• Council are not disputing that we need a new building - they just want to know what we want to 'put' in it,
• Fundraising is going splendidly well - we have almost $2m already.

Refresh our Vision
We now have this golden opportunity:

• take back control of the project and drive it ourselves,
• think about changing societal trends in general and Levin in particular in 2030,
• refresh and define the role of HLT library service in the community both now and in 2030,
• consult with our community about what they want,
• recommunicate our vision.

I put out a wee cry for help on Twitter yesterday and the lovely Brenda Chawner and Alison Wallbutton sent me through some really useful links that I am including here for future reference.

Current Library Thinking

• Public Libraries of NZ : Strategic Framework (NZ, 2006).
• The Unison Report : taking stock of public libraries (UK, 2008)
• The Darien Summit : The Future of Libraries (2008) and The Darien Statements.
• The Future of Public Libraries.

The last link above is a visioning project currently being undertaken in Australia. While the report isn't out yet, but due any day, what I have found on the net so far is quite inspiring. The exercise is based around a scenario matrix, from which 4 possible scenarios are derived.



The good folk doing the work have shared their slides as well (I love librarians:)

Scenarios To Strategy

View more presentations from PublicLibraryServices.

Societal Trends

• 2009+ 10 trends,
• The Futurist

Local Context

• Horowhenua Development Plan: Executive summary and Levin
• Statistics NZ : Levin

What next
So the plan from here is to read through the future trends stuff about society in general, take a look at the Statistics NZ stuff for Levin demographics, then the Horowhenua Development Plan to see how Council see our local community developing over the next 20 years. We need then to think about that all in relation to the Future of Libraries scenarios, and from there come up with a vision of the role of the public library in Levin,now and moving forward, and the services we will be offering and the functions we will fulfil.

Easy!

Liblime forks Koha

Horowhenua Library Trust developed Koha, the world’s first open source library management system back in 2000. We gave it to the world in the spirit of community. We are very happy, delighted in fact, for any organisation or individual to take it, improve it and then give their improvements back.

Recipricocity is the keystone which gives strength to the Koha Community.

We do not begrudge vendors taking our gift and building a commercial enterprise out of it, as Liblime, Biblibre and any number of others have done, but the deal is that you give back. This has worked well for a decade and Liblime has been a strong, valued and much appreciated member of the Koha international community over that time.

So it is incredibly sad and disappointing that Liblime has decided to breach the spirit of the Koha project and offer a ‘Liblime clients only’ version of Koha. Let's call it what it is: vendor lockin and a fork.

Technically, because Liblime offers hosted Koha what it is doing does not breach the GNU GPL licence conditions of Koha. Liblime has said it will continue to push new developments – but its actions show it is not contributing code or participating in the community anymore. Other developers are sharing their public Git repositories but there is no sign of Liblime's yet. An important principle of FOSS is that you release early and often allowing the community to share in the development and benefit.

Long serving, reputable staff with a proven track record of commitment to open source have, I assume, chosen to not work in the new Liblime culture. They have moved to other vendors committed to the FOSS ethos - people like Nicole Engard who late last week accepted an employment offer from Bywater Solutions and Biblibre.

The other thing that us Kiwis don’t understand is how Liblime could have trademarked the word ‘Koha’. It’s a simple and common word in New Zealand; it would be like trademarking the word ‘thanks’ or ‘gift’ or ‘hello’ in America. Liblime has also registered a Koha Foundation which strikes at the very soul of the Koha community. Liblime has taken the name, the domain and the foundation away from us all. The company has said publicly that it is just holding them in safe keeping for the community and will hand them back to the Koha community.

The real loser in all this is the WALDO consortium who seem to be bearing much of the fallout for Liblime's divisive decision to fork the code. Much of the new development work that Liblime is going to be withholding from the community is being funded by WALDO - $USD600k worth:

* Acquisitions: Purchase Orders, Budget Hierarchies
* Serials: Serials Binding, Improved Prediction Patterns
* Cataloging: Holdings Structure (3-tiered), Authorities Control
* Circulation: Offline Circulation, Proxy Patrons
* System Administration: Granular Permissions, Enhanced Reporting

This could be a great contribution by WALDO to the Koha open source project, and a splendid reciprocal payment for being given Koha in the first place… except that Liblime is taking it, keeping it and robbing WALDO of the kudos and goodwill that they should be earning by sponsoring this development. Why WALDO are letting this happen is anyone’s guess but I sincerely hope that other Liblime clients don’t let this happen to them too.

Jo's Chicken Soup

I was going through my old emails this morning looking for something (must learn how to manage my inbox sometime...) and came across this addition to my inner list of motivational writings:

"How do I stay optimistic? I realize first the issues I face are miniscule to the good I can do. How do I get inspired to face intransigence, or laziness, or ineptitude? I look right past them at the real goal, and those who really need me:

Block me, and I will go around you. Build a wall, and I will build a door. Lock the door and I will break a window. And if I don’t have have a leader to inspire me, I will lead. If I don’t have a team that will support me, I will recruit a team from beyond the organizational boundaries - every policy has a loophole, every system has a hidden reward.”

The last bit is from Shakespeare - Henry V’s St. Crispen’s Day Speech - and it must have really struck a cord with me at some point in recent months when we were defending the Library funding in the LTCCP process. I don't know who I'm quoting in the top bit - it wafted through my blog aggregator, but it links back to a terrific site I'd forgotten about: The Participatory Librarianship Starter Kit (which on reflection, may have been the real reason I saved the quote ..) anyway, great site worth looking at.

Back to me ... The Desiderata is an oldie but a goodie:

"Go placidly amid the noise and haste, and remember what peace there may be in silence. As far as possible without surrender be on good terms with all persons. Speak your truth quietly and clearly; and listen to others, even the dull and the ignorant, they too have their story. Avoid loud and aggressive persons, they are vexatious to the spirit".

And yes I know its corny but its not bad. I picked up a new one on Twitter a few weeks ago:

"If you are right you don't need a defence, if you are wrong their is no defence".

And they all kind of hearken back to George Eliot's concept of a "Creed of Humanity" explored so beautifully in Silas Marner (must reread that too).

And to finish, a motivational warning from Olive Shrieiner's The Story of an African farm:

"He mounted the grey mare and rode off. The dog watched his retreat with cynical satisfaction; but his master lay on the ground with his head on his arms in the sand, and the little wheels and chips of wood lay on the ground around him. The dog jumped on to his back and snapped at the black curls, till, finding that no notice was taken, he walked off to play with a black beetle. The beetle was hard at work trying to roll home a great ball of dung it had been collecting all the morning: but Doss broke the ball, and ate the beetle's hind legs, and then bit off its head. And it was all play, and no one could tell what it had lived and worked for. A striving, and a striving, and an ending in nothing."

I have never forgotten the 'striving, striving and an ending in nothing bit' and think its about recognizing when you are pushing shit uphill, or as our guest speaker in the INFO560 class on Saturday more eloquently phrased it: Is it worth doing?

Marketing Libraries

Alison Wallbutton writes a great blog called Market Intelligence : news and views about marketing, consumers and trends relevant to libraries and librarians.

Her most recent post features the research project by Melissa Clarkson about special libraries and marketing, but is of relevance to public libraries to.

I'm not going to write anything here - coz I have nothing perceptive to add - but do check out Alison's blog. She writes about an aspect of librarianship that we are increasingly involved in and there aint much around!

Making a difference: try smiling :)

This is a lovely video clip - with a great message.

The September Project

I came across this project some months ago and while I quite like the idea of 'connecting the world 1 library at a time' I have never felt inspired enough to see if we wanted to do anything. Until now that is, when I found this video on the project site.



Since 2004, libraries across the world have organized events about freedom and issues that matter to their communities during the month of September. This grassroots project favors free over fee, public over private, and voices over silence.

Looking at the map of past and planned events, the project is definitely Americentric, and the September 11 date is not subtle. I thought at first it really wasn't for us... until I saw the video and I've been thinking that maybe it is.

September Project events explore and exercise freedom, justice, democracy, and community and include book displays, community book readings, childrens’ art projects, film screenings, theatrical performances, civic deliberations, voter registrations, gardens, murals, panel discussions, and puppet shows. September Project events are free and open to the public.

A couple of possibilities of themes which we could promote here in Horowhenua are:

• celebrate individuals and groups who foster and support community spirit and wellbeing,
• celebrate Kete, our community built library of local digital content,
• Celebrate Kete and Koha, as tangible results of our believe and commitment to open source and open standards.
• promote the role of libraries in an open society in terms of equity of access to information.

Planned September projects can be found on the project website and are incredibly diverse, including:

• Customer appreciation day where library staff bake cookies and brownies for library users,
• a live review and discussion of the book Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, one of the first novels relating to the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks,
• a storyteller will present tales of peace, justice, and humor from the Islamic World,
• celebrating local or ordinary heroes,
• "What I'd like the world to read" where patrons submit a short video, audio or Power Point presentation on any book they choose,
• defend anti-censorship in libraries principles by promoting previously banned books.
  

This post considers what makes an interesting September Project event. While there are no set templates, some of the most interesting past projects capture the surrounding culture and history of the region.