Program

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Sunday 10 May 2009

Venue: City Hall, Brisbane City Council

17.00 – 19.00 - Official welcome reception by Cr Geraldine Knapp, Chairman Families & Community Service, Brisbane City Council

Monday 11 May 2009

Venue: State Library of Queensland

9.30 - 9.45 Conference opening and Welcome to Country

9.45 - 10.45 Creativity and new media
Keynote speaker – Dan Hill
Making the invisible visible

Dan is a Senior Consultant with Arup, and is currently working with State Library of Queensland on the development of The Edge. Previous positions include Head of Interactive Technology and Design at the BBC and Director of Web and Broadcast at Monocle [London and Sydney].

10.45 - 11.15 Morning tea

11.15 - 12.15 Theme: Creativity and new media
Keynote address: Liz Slagus
Drawing new audiences through supporting creative practice

Liz was recently appointed Creative Innovator in Residence, through a fellowship arrangement with Arts Queensland and Queensland University of Technology. Liz will be contributing to the planning process to infuse creative use of arts and technology in programming for The Edge. Scheduled to open in late 2009, The Edge will be a new space for digital culture, ideas and innovation at the State Library of Queensland.

12.15 - 13.15 Lunch

13.20 - 13.50 Paper 1- Creative community spaces
Liv Saeteren. Oslo City Library – Norway
Design of the future library – the library of the future.

Twenty architects are competing to create a conceptual solution for the new main library in Oslo. The winners will be announced on 27 March 2009.

My thoughts for the contestants (in short):

In developing the library of the future, the crucial parameter is not the building as such, but rather the interior design. The monumentalism of the existing library – and many other large libraries - works against and limits both contemporary and future library services.

Libraries today and tomorrow are institutions for education, knowledge, and culture. This demands architecture for exciting and vibrant institutions, visually and physically, that can support the institutions’ ambitions of being “the third place”, an agora for reflection, a workshop for learning, and a place for inspiration and joy.

Special challenges in library architecture:
• to create an institution that addresses “everyone” with services that are “everything”, but with a visual language that is not reduced to “nothing in particular”
• to design a low-threshold institution while maintaining high quality
• to eradicate the library archetype and create a new typology for libraries that harmonises with developments in ICT, and with new methods of learning and new patterns in social life and working processes.
• to solve the dilemma concerning collections: both the effectiveness in maximum access to material, and keeping the responsibility of being a literary institution – and at the same time not allowing the collection to dominate the space.

The nominated and winning entries in the competition will be shown and commented upon.

Details to be confirmed.

13.50 - 14.20 Paper 2 – Creative community spaces
Johanna Hansson. Stockholm City Library – Sweden
All tradition is change! reorganization and development while planning for a new city library in Stockholm

This presentation is about what might happen on the journey from vision to reality, from words to action, and the importance of strong ideas as guidelines in everyday work

14.20 - 14.50 Paper 3 – Creative community spaces
Christine Mackenzie. Yarra Plenty Regional Library – Australia
Lessons from the Great Public Library Tour

In October last year 15 librarians embarked on a wonderful adventure to visit some of the major public libraries in the world and to attend a conference in Copenhagen organised by the Copenhagen City Library, PLIN and the Urban Libraries Council. The tour started in Singapore, then went to Finland, Sweden, Denmark, the Netherlands, Hong Kong and home. Over 21 days we visited 23 libraries altogether. We learned that the reason for communities having libraries is the same all over the world. Libraries select, acquire, describe and make accessible to the communities who fund them, the information, culture and heritage of the community regardless of class, income or educational status.

What we saw in our travels was that the key opportunity identified for the library of the future is connecting the community – providing connections to people, information, resources, events and programs. We heard very strongly that libraries are about people not about books, and librarians should look after people, not books. We found spaces that are identifiable community “hearts”; providing flexible spaces that enable the delivery of programs that are evolving and adapting as community needs and aspirations change. We saw libraries that are flexible community spaces that can be different things to different people. We were energised, enthused and inspired.

This presentation will reflect on our learnings and show how libraries are evolving in an increasingly online world.

14.50 - 15.00 Discussion on today’s papers

15.00 - 15.30 Afternoon tea

15.30 - 16.00 State Library of Queensland – overview

16.00 - 17.00 Tour of State Library