SXSW Day One

March 10, 2014

Librarians from all over the country have landed in Austin, Texas, for SXSW Interactive, a five-day conference of tech professionals and venture capitalists, startups and entrepreneurs, gamers and makers, and everything in between. For the past few years, a group of library, archives, and museum professionals have coordinated to present sessions, advocate for libraries, and learn about trends that are happening in technology-related fields. The group goes by #sxswLAM (libraries, archives, museums) and you can learn more about all of their own and related activities on their website. I’ll be posting a few accounts from my own perspective as a librarian about what this bohemoth of a conference is like.

My day started on Friday at the Library #IDEAdrop house, a project of Bonnie and Sandy Tijerina of ER&L (Electronic Resources and Libraries). They have rented a house with the goal of bringing some of the conversations happening at SXSW to a library-themed living-room space, where they livestream the interactions to be shared with the greater library community and anyone else who is interested. The house has also become the gathering space for the #sxswLAM crew and EveryLibrary is sponsoring morning meetings for folks to gather, charge up for the day, share things they’ve learned, and coordinate where we should be throughout the day. It’s been a wonderful convening space and a place for me to connect with the passionate professionals that are involved in the greater library world.

The Electric Campfire, parked outside the O Henry House, is plugged in and ready to charge. On Friday afternoon, I headed over to the O Henry House to check out the Labrary, a pop-up library space. There, I met Jeff Goldenson and Jessica Yurkofsky who work with the Library Test Kitchen, a design class at Harvard. The class creates library machines and we got to sample a few of them, including Book Face and the Electric Campfire. The first is an interactive exhibit that allows you to take a picture in a murder mystery photo booth. The Electric Campfire is a mobile charging station that runs on car batteries so it can roll into any location. Electric Campfire encourage connectivity, not only with your electronics, but also with those around you who are also charging. It’s always great to see technologies and libraries converge to create something new and unexpected.

The last thing I’d like to share is about a session I attended called “The Ten Best Startups in Austin.” This session featured startups doing pitches for their projects. My librarian brain started to think about how libraries could use certain technology and ideas I heard about to deliver services to our community. There were a few in particular that I think had definite library connections: Famigo and Weeva. The first is an app that creates a safe, fun, and educational learning environment for kids on mobile devices and the second is an online platform for a group of people to share stories, pictures, and soon, oral histories, and to aggregate this information in one place. One of the major advocacy messages that we are trying to talk to tech professionals about is the ways in which businesses can leverage library resources at every stage to build better products and save money. What if Famigo and Weeva worked with libraries to make their products better? Wouldn’t the work that we do in determining the legitimacy of kids’ online learning products and helping folks to record their oral histories make wonderful expertise for these startups? (To learn more about libraries and startups, read the press release from EveryLibrary, which is doing great work to plug libraries into the SXSW Interactive world.)

MARY ABLER is a public librarian currently employed as an Innovation Leadership Program Resident, a joint project of the Los Angeles Public Library and the Library Foundation of Los Angeles.

Tagged Under

42m

Latia Ward writes: “One way to keep current with what students think of the library and its services is through Student Library Advisory Committee meetings. These meetings are a way to gather feedback and reinforce the library as a welcoming place. How do librarians create a welcoming environment within Student Library Advisory Committee meetings? Librarians create a welcoming environment through community, purpose, and dedicated space.” Also see part 1 of this blog post.

RIPS Law Librarian Blog, Nov. 13, Dec. 5
5h

Eleanor Hecks writes: “Few things are as frustrating to a user as when a site won’t respond. Unfortunately, it’s also an all-too-common scenario. Graceful degradation is a design approach that ensures the basics of a website will still function even if specific individual parts of it stop working. The approach removes single points of failure: just because one thing stops working doesn’t mean the system as a whole fails. A site following this principle fails in pieces instead of all at once, so the most important features remain available when some components encounter an error.”

Smashing Magazine, Dec. 6
1d

Camruinn Morgan-Rumsey and Lexi Lepof write: “On December 3, Knox County (Tenn.) schools received a list from the district of books to be removed from school libraries under Tennessee’s Age-Appropriate Materials Act. Knox County’s board of education voted in July, passing a policy to remove ‘explicit’ books from everyday student access in response to the new law. Some of the books on the list of nearly 50 titles might surprise parents. Among those to be removed are Shel Silverstein’s A Light in the Attic and Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five.”

WVLT-TV (Knoxville, Tenn.), Dec. 4
1d

Joe Foley writes: “Copyright rules vary from country to country and have changed over time. In the US, works created between 1929 and 1963 that gave notice and renewed copyright have 95 years from their first publication date. That means that on January 1, 2025, a host of works from 1929 will enter the public domain. This means that copyright will expire on Buck Rogers, Captain Easy, Horace Horsecollar, Tintin, Hal Foster’s first Tarzan comic strips and, yes, Popeye.” Other notable works entering public domain in the United States include the Marx Brothers’ first film, The Cocoanuts, contralto Marian Anderson’s first record, and Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms.

Creative Bloq, Dec. 7; Everybody’s Libraries, Dec. 3, Dec. 7; Public Domain Review, Dec. 10
2d

Brittany Adams writes: “The digital landscape of libraries is expanding rapidly, with an increasing shift towards electronic resources and online services. As members of the library community, we’re witnessing a transformative era where physical collections are complemented—and sometimes replaced—by digital ones. This transition offers new opportunities for enhancing accessibility and engagement, but it also presents challenges, especially for young patrons and their families. It is essential to equip children and their caregivers with the tools and knowledge they need to navigate this evolving space confidently.”

ALSC Blog, Dec. 9
2d

Karen O’Grady writes: “I am the embedded librarian for the Hahn School of Nursing at the University of San Diego. I am surrounded by nursing faculty, staff, and students rather than by librarians. This has proven to be an incredible gamechanger for the way I see things. Every student in my school knows me by name. I am often stopped in the hallway to answer questions. Every correct answer I give increases my authority and builds trust. Through these casual mini-lessons, this foreign animal called ‘librarian’ slowly becomes an approachable, knowledgeable person.”

College & Research Libraries News, Dec.
2d

ALA has selected 46 participants for its 2025 class of Emerging Leaders (EL). The EL program allows library staff and information workers to participate in project planning work groups, network with peers, gain an inside look into ALA structure, and have an opportunity to serve the profession in a leadership capacity early in their careers. The group will take part in a day-long session during the 2025 LibLearnX conference in Phoenix this January and work for six months, culminating in a poster session at ALA’s 2025 Annual Conference and Exhibition in Philadelphia in June, where they will highlight results of their project planning work.

ALA Office for Human Resource Development and Recruitment, Dec. 4