Open Password – Monday January 17, 2022
#1017
Library Management Day 2021:
Keynote Sascha Lobo
Libraries today: democratizers of knowledge,
discourse space for controversial opinions and digital third place
Coming essence: library as digital participation
By Willi Bredemeier
Library Management Day 2021 – Sascha Lobo – Libraries today – Democratizers of knowledge – Discourse space for controversial opinions – Digital third place – Library as digital participation – Willi Bredemeier – OCLC – Pandemic – SPIEGEL – Exponential progress – Smartphone – Knowledge work – Confrontation with culture and archives – Federal Government – Coalition agreement – Corona as the great accelerator – Home office – Power of networking – Transformation through data streams – Digital decentralized work – Social media – Facebook – Virtualization – Disappearance of the thing – Canon – iPhone – Instagram – Google – Openness – Accessibility – Non-commerciality – Ralf Stockmann – StaBi – Place of digital participation – Shared Knowledge Space – Hybrid learning – Hybrid working – Non-commercial artificial intelligence – Hub for culture and everyday AI – Provision spaces – Radicality of expectations – Libraries of the 21st century – Non-commercial digital community – Open Science – Open Access Platforms – Publishers – OABB – VuK – TH Wildau University Library – BAK – AspB – KOBV – GESiG – Libraries in Berlin and Brandenburg – Corona – Politics and Libraries – Media Technology – Library Congress – #CreatingFree Spaces
Title:
Library Management Day 2021: Keynote Sascha Lobo
Libraries today: democratizer of knowledge, discourse space for controversial opinions
and digital third place – Future essence: library as digital participation – By Willi Bredemeier
- Publishers versus open access platforms
Are scientific institutions the better publishers?
III.
“Libraries in Berlin and Brandenburg”: competence and passion
8th Leipzig Library Congress 2022. #CreatingFree Spaces
Library Management Day 2021:
Keynote Sascha Lobo
Libraries today: democratizers of knowledge,
discourse space for controversial opinions and digital third place
Coming essence: library as digital participation
By Willi Bredemeier
Sasha Lobo
Online Library Management Day 2021 sponsored by the OCLC. The OCLC characterized its event this way: “Attention, get set, restart! – New opportunities as a boost for your future! The pandemic has also reshuffled the cards for libraries – digitization boost, new exploration of space concepts, changed role in education, requirements for staff and much more .” The sponsor formulated the claim and hope: “The Library Management Day 2021 will help Recognize the signs of the times, take advantage of them and prepare your library for a successful, secure future.”
The keynote speech was given by Sacha Lobo, whom several media outlets described as the “class rep for Web 2.0” because of his apparent ubiquity on the Internet. He allegedly wrote advertising texts for every third DAX company and is making a name for himself as a SPIEGEL columnist and best-selling author. His closeness to libraries began as a child, when he fled from sports class to a “fantastic school library,” where he was welcomed with the “greatest openness.” At the library management day, Lobo remembered this library as a “place of knowledge and joy”. What I particularly liked about Lobo was his instructive images, most of which were unknown to me. He showed our partial inability to keep up with the latest developments, even though they are basically obvious, using the example of a heavily pregnant woman who, like the father-to-be, is completely surprised by the result of a pregnancy test.
Lobo gave his presentation the title: “How the Internet is changing the world and why libraries should not be left behind digitally”. Digitally primed, the pandemic has brought about huge social changes or greatly accelerated what might have come anyway. Apart from the technological changes, they have above all created new worlds in our heads.
Lobo illustrated how much has changed in two Corona years using two examples: a headline from ZEIT (“How dangerous are doorknobs?”) and a headline from Südkurier (“40 rolls of toilet paper stolen from Kapfenberg Castle”). The meaning and relevance of these statements are obvious and require no explanation. But before Corona, the connections mentioned were beyond our imagination. Or a third example that no one would have understood before the internet age: “Only one person in this meeting room in one time.”
Last but not least, a revolutionary rethink has taken place among those who previously had nothing to do with digitalization and at the time said: “Home office? No, that is out of the question for my work.” However, this sudden rethinking also led to the use of digital services becoming a matter of course and excessive demands being placed on the functionality of video conferences, for example. This could lead to unjustified expectations and unfair evaluations.
Lobo called his next issue a sorry if not a moderate disaster. By that he meant “the scary digital infrastructure.” He chose the indicator “Accessibility of households via fiber optic technology” as an indicator that German politicians have failed to lay the foundations for successful digitalization. While the Emirates, Qatar and Singapore have almost 100% and China and South Korea well over 90% of households with fiber optic connections, Germany exceeded the measurability limit for this indicator in 2018 to catch up with Angola in 2019. This is a country that looks back on 30 years of civil war and where only every second household has running water.
Now one might think, said Lobo, that Germany has never excelled in terms of speed, but has excelled in care and precision, and both require time. Lobo raised two objections to such a possible interpretation: Japanese sources were already reproduced in the January 1983 issue of SPIEGEL, which considered the German reliance on copper cables instead of fiber optics to be a “wrong long-term decision.” Almost forty years later, the world is still amazed at the Germans.
In addition, unlike what was possible in previous technological waves, waiting no longer makes sense, as we have entered a time of exponential progress with digitalization. Lobo made this clear using the example of the smartphone: Invented in 2007, it became widespread in 2010/2011 and has now turned society on its head. You put yourself on the sidelines of society if you don’t use a smartphone. Here, too, the speaker had instructive pictures on hand: On one hand it was written in black ink: “If you can read this someone stole my iPhone.” If you lend out your cell phone, it feels like an amputation.
Sascha Lobo (on screen) and presenter Andreas Mitrowann
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Libraries as democratizers of knowledge and knowledge work, as a discourse space for controversial opinions and as a digital third place.
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Sascha Lobo identified three “essences of libraries” that are currently valid or need to be demanded:
- Libraries as great democratizers of knowledge and knowledge work (regardless of media attributions such as books, eBooks and other media formats);
- Libraries as a place of confrontation with culture and archives (so that the “discourse space” library must reflect cultural change and must under no circumstances be an organ that confirms one’s own opinion) and
- Libraries as a “third place” in Ray Oldenburg’s expanded sense (where the expansion means that the third place is or should be a digital place).
Lobo welcomed the coalition that has come together to form a new federal government, and in particular the following sentence in the coalition agreement: “We want to strengthen public libraries as a third place and enable Sunday openings.”
He was more skeptical about other sentences in the coalition agreement, for example when an “innovation and renovation program for sport and culture, e.g. sports facilities, swimming pools, libraries” was recommended “to strengthen cohesion”. Apart from the fact that libraries and sport are combined here In a surprising context, the speaker warned against overloading the libraries with requirements or assigning them tasks that they could not fulfill. Otherwise, Lobo recommended reducing confrontations between libraries and publishers and recommended collective action. Some assumed confrontations may not even have existed . So library services would not reduce the number of books sold.
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How do libraries transform from a third place into a third digital place? Leverage the power of networking!
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How do libraries transform from a third place into a third digital place? Lobo recommended: “Leveraging the power of networking” and achieving “digital transformation through data streams”. To make his point plausible, he used the University of Oregon as an example: When students began protesting, they were allowed to design the campus themselves. After which, under architectural guidance, they leveled the entire ground between the buildings, sowed grass, waited six months and then laid paths where the grass was most trodden down. This created the most efficient network of paths that no landscape designer could have achieved.
Lobo cited the city of Berlin’s tram display as a negative example of how data streams should not be used, as it only too often displays: “Please pay attention to the timetable notice.” In general, the transfer of work from analogue to digital is a highly complex task, and Under no circumstances should the analogue world be represented 1:1 in the digital world.
Corona acted as the great accelerator in the transformation through data streams. With the mass introduction of the “home office” overnight, a development was “overturned” that would otherwise have taken ten years. However, the term “home office” was too narrow for him, said Lobo. For him it is about “digital decentralized work”, which must become available as a matter of course, for example in third places. Here the speaker pointed out that libraries may face overwhelming competition from social media and cited Facebook’s “Meeting Room” as an advanced example of “digital decentralized work”.
A central feature of digitalization is virtualization, which means the disappearance of things or, more specifically, the change from hardware to software to networked software. Here, too, Lobo had an instructive example of development at hand – from a Canon as the best-selling camera in the world (i.e. hardware) to the iPhone (software) to Instagram (networked software). On the disappearance of the thing: Google has set itself the goal of curing diseases without medication. And here is also an instructive example, although it comes from a different provider: Women can do without the contraceptive pill because they transmit their data using a temperature sensor, whereupon the artificial intelligence precisely predicts the woman’s fertile days.
What are the key features of a digital third place? Lobo mentioned openness (e.g. open source), accessibility (examples: fiber optics, open access) and, above all, lack of pressure, i.e. non-commerciality: “No economic pressure may be exerted.”
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The coming essence of libraries: libraries as digital assets
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And what are the future essences of libraries (which should also be the current strategic goals for library management)? Here Lobo took over the definition from Ralf Stockmann from Innovation Management, StaBi (Berlin), who sees “the library as a place of digital participation” and added as a further core: “the library as a shared knowledge space” that enables hybrid learning and hybrid work and make non-commercial artificial intelligence tangible. While everything that could become a platform becomes a platform and the platform economy conquers everyday life, libraries must serve as a hub for culture and everyday AI and create corresponding provision spaces – this under the pressure of an unrelenting radicality of expectations from the audience, that library services require a level of perfection similar to that of leading commercial offerings.
At this point, Lobo made a “transfer of responsibility” to the library management. They must take responsibility for the knowledge society and fight for libraries of the 21st century. Then “fantastic libraries” could be created. Lobo expressed his willingness to participate in the relevant debates in the political sphere and suggested finding allies for the goal of “fantastic libraries” in the non-commercial digital community.
Publishers versus open access platforms
Are academic institutions
the better publishers?
Panel discussion. JANUARY 19, 2022, 2:00 p.m. – 3:30 p.m. An event in the series “Quo vadis open science? A virtual Open Access Week Berlin-Brandenburg”
In the library world, we like to argue about the pricing of open access journals such as articles: How much should that cost? Until recently, the funding agency DFG set a limit of a maximum of two thousand euros per article for publication funds the APC fees. With the knowledge that public institutions create open access publications more cost-effectively, can we shape pricing? Should the publication market be divided into commercial offers and offers from public sponsors? Are open access publishers also good publishers? develop publishing programs, draw digital added value from their pool?
The discussion panel will examine the price-performance ratio and the cost-benefit components for open access in more detail. Where publishers and open access platforms compete will not be left out.
We discuss these and other questions together with: Detlef Büttner (Managing Director Lehmanns Media) – Dr. Kathrin Ganz (research associate in the project “Gender, artificial intelligence and the work of the future”, University of Hamburg, editorial member of the Open Gender Journal) – Miriam v. Maydell (head of editing and production at the Barbara Budrich publishing house, Budrich Academic Press) – Dagmar Schobert (head of publication services at the university library of the Technical University of Berlin). This discussion will be moderated by Dr. Thomas Mutschler (Head of Media Acquisition and Indexing Department at the Thuringian University and State Library in Jena).
The series of events is organized by the Berlin Open Access Office (OABB), the Open Access Brandenburg Networking and Competence Center (VuK) and the TH Wildau University Library in cooperation with the Berlin Information Working Group (BAK), the University Libraries Working Group in Section 4 the dbv, the Association of Special Libraries (ASpB), the Berlin-Brandenburg Cooperative Library Association (KOBV) and the German Serials Interest Group (GESiG).
The institutions involved
“Libraries in Berlin and Brandenburg”
Competence and passion
Library Day in Berlin and Brandenburg on September 24, 2022 in the Neuruppin City Library – Call for Papers.
Dear ladies and gentlemen,
dear colleagues,
on Saturday, September 24th, 2022, the 8th Library Day in Berlin and Brandenburg will take place in Neuruppin. Under the motto “Competence and Passion”, we would like to invite you to share experiences, learn from colleagues, network and together take a look at libraries and information facilities after the pandemic. The venue is the Neuruppin City Library: Neuruppin City Library, Am alten Gymnasium 1-3, 16816 Neuruppin
We look forward to your contributions, for example from the topic areas
- Lessons learned – consequences of the pandemic for libraries
- Politics and libraries – library self-image and social controversies
- Something about media technology – how much IT expertise do we need?
- What careers enrich library teams?
- …and on any topic that is important to you currently or in the future.
We are looking for speakers for every type of event: lecture, discussion, workshop, etc. as well as moderators who would like to contribute to the 8th Day of Libraries in Berlin and Brandenburg.
We ask that you send your suggestions with a short description of the contribution (max. 500 words) and a reference to the desired event format to the program committee by February 11, 2022 at the following address: info@bibliotheksverband-brandenburg.de About reports from volunteers for support at the T3B We welcome your suggestions at any time.
The organization team would like to thank you in advance for your support. Kind regards
BAK – Berlin Information Working Group, BIB Berlin, BIB Brandenburg, dbv Berlin, dbv Brandenburg, OPL Working Group Berlin-Brandenburg, VDB
Library Congress Leipzig 2022
#CreateFreeSpaces
Congress:
May 31st – June 2nd, 2022
Trade exhibition:
May 31st – June 2nd, 2022
8th Library Congress: #CreatingFree Spaces.
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Welcome to the 8th Library Congress on Tuesday, May 31st. until Thursday, June 2nd, 2022 in the Congress Center Leipzig, organized by Bibliothek und Information Deutschland (BID) (Federal Association of German Library and Information Associations).
The 8th Library Congress is also the 110th German Librarians’ Day.
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