I missed the first day of VALA 2024, but I was there for days 2 and 3. The subsequent few weeks at work were ...eventful, including getting Covid (not from the conference). So this is my belated write-up of what I learned and observed at VALA 2024.
Sites of resistance in the digital age
The keynote on Wednesday morning was from dynamic Deakin University duo Hero Macdonald and Tui Raven. You can tell they are serious people because their bio photos are in black and white and they both have their arms crossed. "Hmm, I wasn't expecting a talk about French philosophy at VALA 2024", I thought. It wouldn't be the last time. Tui spoke about libraries and knowledge systems as being social, relational, and alive:
For me knowledge is alive–when passed to me it is like a baby I need to care for and pass on to the next generation like a grandchild.
Tui talked about the datafication and ownership of knowledge, and and as she spoke I thought about how this is linked to conversations the previous week about generative AI being used to use synthesised voices of dead actors to narrate audiobooks. I'd expressed the view on Mastodon that this was "creepy", and there was a bit of a conversation exploring why it seems creepy specifically. As I listened to Tui her words helped me realise that it's because synthesised voices of people we know (or in the case of celebrities, people we've formed para-social relationships to) both breaks and fakes the social bonds and promises of our knowledge systems.
More things to explore from this talk
- AIATSIS Core cultural learning course
- National survey on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander employment in Australian libraries : Research report
Being Hacked
Vickery Bowles and Steve Till-Rogers presented via video link from Toronto about the experience they had with a major "cyber incident". This was similar to what happened to the British Library - TPL's entire system was compromised in an attempted ransomware attack, and they had to rebuild their network and databases from scratch. Their ILS was down for over three months, but none of their branches were closed the entire time: they moved to recording loans via ye olde paper and pen. TPL is huge: 2400 staff and 100 branches. The whole thing sounds like a massive logistical nightmare.
Key take-aways for me were:
- prior "tabletop cyber exercises" were very helpful to TPL as they knew basically what they needed to do to respond and recover
- there was a significant focus on internal communication - not just on "public relations" (or at least that's what these two senior managers assert!)
- they implemented a "phased recovery" where systems and processes were essentially triaged. Getting the website back up was a priority so they could communicate with library users, and this itself was phased: initially a simple static site. Someone decided they may as well do a website redesign since they were rebuilding the website anyway, which I guess makes sense
- logistics around storage of collection items that couldn't be checked back in was a major consideration
- disaster recovery plans need to have a reasonable level of detail to be useful in situations like this
Creating narrative-based rubrics for library services evaluation
Anna Rubinowski and Lauren Halcomb-Smith from Deakin ran an excellent workshop after the keynotes. They have been busy improving their system for analysing collection usage and making decisions about subscription renewals - a common and laborious activity in academic libraries. This workshop was to teach us how to think about and create rubrics for decision making. Lauren explained the concept of "consistent subjectivity" - we know our assessments are subjective, but with the help of a rubric we can at least be consistently subjective by being explicit about what it looks like to meet, exceed, or fail to meet a given criteria.
I could immediately see how this approach would be helpful when making and justifying decisions about subscription reviews. But it has also been incredibly useful already for our work at La Trobe on open education projects, where I started using it immediately. Our process for approving La Trobe eBureau proposals has certainly used criteria for some time - but just like Deakin with their subscription reviews, if anyone was to ask us to justify our decision making we haven't had much in the way of documenting how we come to our decisions. Just as importantly, by using a rubric we can use the rubric itself as a way to indicate to the academics writing a proposal what it is we're looking for and what we want them to think about. In this context, the rubric isn't just to help make or justify a decision to approve or reject a proposal - it also helps us understand what aspects of open educational practice our applicants will need support to develop further. This workshop has had a big impact on how we are thinking about open education projects, using the rubric as a launching point for a lot of other things.
The Interdependent Library System: Revisiting Human Aspects of Library Automation
I have to be honest - I mostly went to VALA to attend Ruth Tillman's keynote. Ruth's topic was the Integrated Library System, but she's primarily interested not so much in the tech itself as the experiences of the people using it. Specifically, Ruth has been doing an oral history project talking to librarians (retired and practicing) about their experiences of ILS migrations.
Library systems are made of people.
I found the whole talk very interesting, but one of the things that really struck me about how Ruth talks about her topic is that for something so ubiquitous in libraries, we rarely discuss the ILS as a general technology. Usually, we're talking/complaining about a specific implementation.
Ruth spoke of each library service as an "implementation of the technology of 'library'". This in turn is why a single ILS software can work in multiple library contexts. It's rare for libraries to migrate their ILS very often, and when they do it's often traumatic and frustrating for library staff. Ruth outlined a reason for this: An ILS is a prescriptive technology, and ILS migrations are shifts between prescriptive systems. Ruth's formulation reverses the common complaint from managers that staff are "resisting change" and insist on processes occuring in a particular way. On the contrary, it is very often the ILS as a piece of software that forces staff to do a task in a specific way: when you change the ILS, you change the procedure.
Ergonomics in ILS design
Ruth mentioned in her talk that she kept hearing a new word in her interviews, particularly regarding Alma and FOLIO: "clicky". Tasks that had previously required one or two mouse clicks or perhaps just some keyboard shortcuts now took several clicks to achieve. This is an important aspect of systems changes that is often brushed aside. "It's just one or two more clicks" sounds reasonable in the abstract. But Ruth pointed out that small changes in process can have big ergonomic and psychological impacts to people doing the same thing over and over.
A final aspect from my notes is on staff as workers, and the "hacky workarounds" that those of us doing library systems work are familiar with. For Ruth, these workarounds are all about worker self-empowerment. I made a note as she spoke about this: "Is this also why sometimes people resist a more robust solution?" Something to ponder.
More things to explore from this talk
- The text and images from Ruth's talk: The Interdependent Library System: Revisiting Human Aspects of Library Automation
- The real world of technology / Ursula M. Franklin
Communities in code
Aleisha Amohia is the Rōpū kohinga Technical Lead at Catalyst IT. This includes working on KohaILS, one of my favourite open source software projects. Aleisha's talk was about the alignment between open source values and the Māori worldview. She also introduced me to the term "LinkedIn broetry", for which I thank her.
Regulating the digital frontier
Trish Hepworth was such an energetic speaker after presumably drinking 7 coffees that I was too captivated to take any notes. She took us through what she and ALIA have been doing to stay on top of the Australian regulatory environment when it comes to AI, what the current state of play is in legal terms, and what we should be thinking about. The morning keynote felt like being blasted by an Academic Twitter Ray Gun and after months on end of people declaring that Everything Has Changed it was refreshing for Trish to confidently declare that we all need to chill out, and in fact everything librarians have been doing for the last decade (focussing on information literacy, critical thinking, and ontological mapping) is exactly the sort of thing needed to manage in a generative-AI-impacted world. Trish also snuck in a slide with Monkey Selfie, which is always fun.
Like and subscribe: How to keep up after #LibraryTwitter (RIP)
I attended this session because ...I was the speaker. I presented a poster session which is basically a lightning talk to a small crowd while you stand in front of your poster. The tl;dr is that you should go check out Aus GLAMR, my new application for sharing and finding out about GLAMR blogs, events, groups, and newsletters.
Privacy, security and browser changes: how to future-proof your library’s authentication
Anna Russo came all the way from the UK to give this short presentation on the latest and upcoming changes to security in web browser engines. I almost didn't attend because I figured it would probably be an OpenAthens sales pitch, but the VALA conference organisers did a good job of preventing those sorts of sessions and this turned out to be incredibly useful.
Jisc and NISO have both analysed how upcoming changes to browser privacy and security are likely to affect library authentication, and there's both good and bad news. Third party cookie blocking seems to be largely unproblematic for common library authentication systems. This makes sense, as we're generally sending authentication information forward rather than backwards. IP address masking, on the other hand, is going to break everything that relies on non-proxied IP recognition. This is likely to primarily affect "walk up" access, because this is usually unauthenticated access provided by vendors simply recognising the requesting IP address. Lots for library discovery teams to check - IP obfuscation is available optionally in Safari already, but there is talk of Google Chrome turning it on by default some time next year. We're likely to have at least until the end of 2024 to come up with workarounds.
More things to explore from this talk
The once and future librarian
Donna Benjamin was the conference "lock note". Her talk rapidly took us through a series of "four things" in open practice.
Donna also asked a rhetorical question that got me thinking: "Why is library search still so bad [compared to Google]?". I've heard this question asked at library conferences for years on end. Donna is a fan of libraries rather than a librarian, so I'm not having a go at her here. But I wrote a note to remind me later that I was wondering is this even a useful question? Librarians have been beating ourselves up about Google Seach being Good and library search being Bad for the entire life of Google. This is an entire other blog post, but briefly there are two things I want to note here:
- Google Search is a full-text index of the world wide web. Library Search is at best a full-text index of abstracts of various texts, and never only that. So asking why one is better than the other is a category error, like asking why hot air balloons are better than goats.
- Google Search has obviously and measurably become much worse over the last 5 years, and Google Inc seems to be doing their best to accelarate the decline. I'm convinced that thoughtful, human-scale information management and classification will win out over the long term.
More things to explore from this talk
Anyway, VALA conference was great as usual. You should go to the next one.