During my research into how Bookleteer might be used in the D.I.Y publishing community, particularly zines, (independent publications with a small circulation) I stumbled across several zine libraries, collections that have been created by, donated to, or purchased by the curators. These prove to be a fascinating archive of creativity and talent, often perfectly capturing the zeitgeist at the time of publication. A zine library is an important concept, as zines are generally not designed to be preserved. Most have very small (many in the hundreds at most) one-off print runs, due to costs of production, small specific audiences, and their transitory nature.

Zineopolis, housed within the University of Portsmouth, was started after a group zine project by Illustration Degree students. Although currently only accessible by students of the university, there is a comprehensive online index, with previews of the publications.

The Women’s Library at the London Metropolitan University has a collection of zines created by women, spanning a wide range of topics, particularly feminism, and has some examples of the Riot Grrl movement.

56a Infoshop Social Centre has an archive of zines related to revolutionary politics, women, and gay issues.

These are all physical collections, and can only be read on-site, unfortunately. If these zines were scanned and uploaded to the Diffusion library as eBooks, they could be read and recreated by anyone, then recirculated, either via sending the file, or by print. Future zine creators, using Bookleteer, can offer their zine as an online eBook, sharing it with interested parties or sending to distant locales where it can be distributed, in places where large scale printing and binding is not possible or viable, or the content is hampered by censorship.

I’ll be exploring how the digital format will impact the current zine aesthetic, as well as looking at zines that are already being produced as e-books, and their reception by the community, in the near future.

Zines at Zineopolis

]]> http://bookleteer.com/blog/2010/08/physical-vs-virtual-library/feed/ 0 http://bookleteer.com/blog/2010/08/kevin-harris-ebook-treasure-hunt/ http://bookleteer.com/blog/2010/08/kevin-harris-ebook-treasure-hunt/#comments Wed, 18 Aug 2010 08:02:30 +0000 karenmartin http://bookleteer.com/blog/?p=1820
eBook Treasure Hunt at Manningham library; via neighbourhoods.typepad.com

Even though the eBook Treasure Hunt took place in 2009 I hadn’t come across it until I was looking for projects for my talk at Be2camp Brum 2010 last week. I used this project to help me explain the idea that eBooks facilitate shared making. I thought it was really great and I wanted to share it with you here too.

The  eBook Treasure Hunt was designed and implemented by Kevin Harris of Local Level with Manningham Library in Bradford. The library was undergoing refurbishment and the Treasure Hunt was part of a public event to engage people with the refurbishment project and open up a period of consultation.

Completed eBook from the Treasure Hunt; via neighbourhoods.typepad.com

Treasure Hunt participants followed clues that sent them to specific spots around the library that would be affected by the refurbishment. The first clue was printed in the eBook and asked “Where are the books about Bradford?” Answers to the questions were written into the eBook and supplementary questions were designed to solicit ideas for the new building. The supplementary question for the first clue read “How else might the new library be used to celebrate Bradford and Manningham?” When they found the place in the library that held the answer participants were handed a sticky label with the next clue on. This was stuck onto a new page in the eBook.

In this post on diffusion.org.uk Kevin writes that the eBook Treasure Hunt worked well and no-one had difficulty following the clues or the instructions about where to place the sticky labels. He goes onto say that, in part, the success was because the activity took place in an ongoing mix of engagement activities and processes. Library staff were on hand at the event to hand out clues, give hints and generally smooth the process. He also wrote this post on his own blog about how the eBooks and questions were designed. I think this is such a thoughtful well-considered approach to engagement and consultation I encourage you to read the rest of the post.

As far as shared making goes I think this is a great example of how different types of making can come together in an eBook. Kevin designed the eBook and entered the content into bookleteer, librarians at Manningham then printed out the A4 eBook sheets and made them up into the A6 eBooks. Finally, the treasure hunt participants took these eNotebooks and made them unique and personal with their answers and ideas. Three types of making, one eBook!

The Manningham Library Treasure Hunt eBook is available for download here.

Continuing yesterday’s library theme, I thought I’d tell you about Nick Booth’s (from Podnosh) talk at Be2camp Brum 2010 last week. Nick asked, what could a librarian do if their libraries close as a result of digital technologies?

Nick roved the audience collecting answers while Alex Hughes represented them as cartoon images drawing live onstage.

Answers from the audience suggested that librarians carry out searches, that they act as signposts pointing people towards the information they are looking for, they host public meetings, they have indexing and cataloguing skills, they provide social contact.

Two answers didn’t make it onto the picture. One was that librarians watch over a quiet and neutral space and the other was that they watch over a potential dating space. Perhaps these didn’t make it into the cartoon because these are roles played by the library building as much as the librarian. To me this suggests that spaces have important social roles to play as well as people. If mobilising services means losing these spaces then I wonder what the social consequences of this might be? I feel that this is in some way related to the discussion we’ve been having about the role of books and eReaders. From finding that books have a number of roles that eReaders haven’t taken on I wonder if this is also the case for libraries and librarians where the relationship between the two has a very particular role beyond the obvious one of being a place where you go to borrow books.

Be2camp Brum 2010 was loosely themed around libraries. A new building for Birmingham Central Library (where Be2camp Brum 2010 was held) is currently under construction and due to open in 2013 and the first three presentations at Be2camp Brum were concerned with how digital technologies are being integrated into the planning and construction process as well as into the library services and building itself.

Brian Gambles speaking at Be2camp Brum 2010 via Meshed Media

Brian Gambles, head of BCC Library Services, outlined the broad overview that is being taken to the use of digital technologies, emphasising that they are designing for maximum flexibility and adaptability and aiming not to be platform-specific as they assume that digital infrastructures and technologies will change over the lifetime of the building. Brian emphasised that the aim is to redefine and reimagine the relationship between library services, the library building and library users through digital technologies.

Tom Epps speaking at Be2camp Brum 2010 via Meshed Media

Tom Epps then spoke about one of the ways this is taking place. Alongside the construction of the new building,  a virtual model of the new Library of Birmingham building is being built in Second Life. This model is to scale and Tom spoke about how this is providing a better sense of the relationships between different elements of the building than it’s possible to get from architects plans or non-interactive 3-D model. Once the Second Life Library goes live it will also be used for public consultations to gather people’s opinions on the new design via polls and feedback points, and possibly to host events paralleling the physical Library building and services. (And it was so impressive that the whole presentation was done while we were being expertly navigated live around the Second Life model live!)

We then heard a little about the role of mobile technologies in re-imagining library services (I’m afraid I didn’t get the speaker’s name) and a description of how library services and activities will be augmented by mobile personal devices and applications.

All in all it was great to hear that the Library are taking such an imaginative approach to the integration of digital technologies and working on platform neutrality and personalised services that open up great library resources – such as their archive of photographs – to city residents and library visitors. I really hope that this emphasis on the experience people have in the library will continue to inform all of their decisions. And I was only slightly disturbed that their Second Life model which professes to show how the library will be doesn’t actually have any people in it yet…

As if to emphasise James Bridle‘s point that books-as-objects act as souvenirs of the reading time, a few days ago I came across the blog bookshelf porn. The premise of the blog is simple – it shows photographs of bookshelves, contributed by readers, and adds a new picture of two every day. But I never would have imagined the variety of book shelves that exist, or how beautiful they look when they are collected together in this way.

This isn’t all about aesthetics – this is a blog with a message. While there’s very little text on the site occasionally, in between the photographs, there is a quote such as this one from The New Yorker’s The Book Bench writing about Bookshelf porn:

“Featuring a book on your bookshelf is akin to displaying a trophy. You’ve accomplished something in reading a book; it feels like a victory. The opportunity to display your literary conquests in unique or unexpected ways is something I will greatly miss with e-readers.”

This message – that bookshelves have a beauty and purpose that is not found in e-readers – is carried across the site. And looking at the photos I couldn’t really argue with that, however, I am excited to see how e-readers might begin to address that challenge…

My name is J.-Thomas Maillioux, and I’ve been working as the librarian for the collège Evariste Galois middle school since 2005. I’ve recently started to use the bookleteers to create “adventure books” for our first-year pupils’ library orientation program in a format both convenient and original. The flexibility of the Bookleteer publishing platform has also allowed me to quickly and easily implement the modifications suggested by my own observations, or advice from the students and teachers involved in the orientation program.

Download A4 | US Letter PDF 486Kb

I’ve also been able to sit down with small group of students to discuss what they would do with the Bookleteers : they suggested uses both for school (custom booklets for note taking on school trips, tutorials or HOWTOs for specific activities in sciences and technology classes, reminders while giving presentations in front of a class) and home (grocery shopping, tasks listing, books and stories writing or games) that make me think that, with the correct amount of support from their teachers in acquiring and supporting the necessary skills, they should be able to make the Bookleteers and the publishing platform their own relatively quickly : a good way to reconcile them not only with the printed word, but also with their printed word – that what they write, too, can be and deserves being made into a book with very little hassle.

We’d love to hear more testimonials of how bookleteer, the eBooks and StoryCubes are being used – please send your feedback to us at bookleteer at proboscis.org.uk