Categories
news the periodical

Endings and Beginnings

thePeriodical-logo
Last Autumn, after 3 years and much fun selecting and sending out fine publications made and shared on bookleteer, I decided to end the Periodical’s monthly service. There were a number of reasons – some practical and financial – but I felt that as a project it had achieved as much as it could in its existing form. At its height there were over 80 subscribers across the world. Something like 60 different books were distributed during the 3 years, and there will be a few more that will be sent out to the last subscribers later this year as part of the LibraryPress Legacy project.

Since many subscribers were keen for the project to continue I will be considering options – the most likely being a once yearly round-up. If you’re interested in subscribing to this, please leave a comment on this post to let me know.

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My work with anthropologist James Leach and the villagers of Reite in Papua New Guinea has defined much of my recent work with bookleteer and is shaping the trajectory of development in which it is heading. You can read about our fieldwork in PNG, about the TKRN project and the TKRN Toolkit or explore the lovely handmade books created by the community on the dedicated website I created for them. We are returning to Reite in April and May this year to do further work, and to expand the project into some neighbouring villages. We have also been invited to develop a parallel project with indigenous fieldworkers in the neighbouring island nation of Vanuatu. Later in 2016 we hope to facilitate some of the villagers from Reite to transfer their skills and knowledge of using the TKRN Toolkit to local people in Vanuatu.


This past year I have also been helping (in a small way) Grace Tillyard to develop her amazing Breast Cancer awareness and engagement programme for women in Haiti. The project is hosted by Project Medishare‘s Womens Health Centre in Port-au-Prince and recently received $60,000 in funding. Grace is currently co-developing with local people a new kind of Patient Notebook using bookleteer to help communicate more about the condition and the medical treatments available, as well as to allow people to record their own medical information in a dedicated book of their own. We hope to have a prototype ready this Spring for testing by the community.

LibraryPress Legacy
I have also been collaborating with Peter Baxter of Camden’s Library Service to extend and continue the work of introducing self-publishing using bookleteer into London’s libraries that was initiated in 2014 and 2015 through the LibraryPress project. Last week we held a professional development workshop for Librarians from Camden, Hackney, Brent, Hounslow and Harrow. Over the next few months the aim is for these librarians to use bookleteer to create publications with library users as part of the many events to promote reading and literacy that take place. We shall be selecting some of these to be printed and distributed as part of a special issue of the Periodical.

Lastly, I wish to share a stunning new book, Northern Musings, created by the Canadian artist and printmaker, Joyce Majiski:

Categories
events news

Bookleteer Masterclass for Librarypress


Yesterday I ran a Bookleteer Masterclass for Library professionals from the boroughs of Lewisham, Brent, Hounslow, Camden, Islington, Merton and Harrow at the Deptford Lounge. The event was part of our collaboration with the Librarypress project and was designed to introduce library staff to bookleteer and how they might use it in their own projects and activities with library users and local groups. We had a fantastic turnout with very inquisitive and engaged participants – it was wonderful to see them all getting straight down to making books and StoryCubes with text and images they had brought along with them specifically for the day. We will be selecting a series of books made by the participants for the Periodical over the coming months, as inspiring examples of what can be done with bookleteer to engage readers and local groups with library projects and services.

I’d like to encourage other library authorities who are also interested in using bookleteer as part of their services to get in touch : we are more than happy to offer workshops and provide consultancy on how bookleteer can used by the public and integrated within existing projects and services.

Categories
events news pitch up & publish

Islington & Wembley Pop Up Publishing Workshops

More workshops are being held next week in Islington & Wembley Libraries as part of the Librarypress project. Below is the presentation I’ll be using to illustrate my talk on bookleteer to participants and explore the kinds of things they can do with it.

Pop Up Publishing with bookleteer from Giles Lane
Categories
events news pitch up & publish

Pop Up Publishing with Librarypress


This month I am running 6 pop up publishing sessions across three libraries in London : Hounslow Library; Islington Central Library (First Steps Learning Centre) and Wembley Library. All the sessions are free and last for about 3 hours in the evening. The sessions are part of the Librarypress project which aims to get more people publishing.

The aim is to introduce bookleteer.com as a simple way to create and share publications that can be both physical (paper) and digital (readable online). Everyone is welcome, no technical/computer experience required or previous publishing experience. Bring stories, pictures, ideas and we’ll help you turn them into simple publications you can make and share.

We are hoping that some gems will emerge over the sessions – we have arranged with Librarypress to select up to 12 books by participants for inclusion in the Periodical, to be printed professionally and posted out to subscribers.

The sessions are :

    Hounslow Library : Tuesday 6th & Thursday 8th May 5-8pm
    Islington Central Library : Monday 19th & Thursday 22nd May 4.30-7.45pm
    Wembley Library : Tuesday 20th & Friday 23rd May 5-7.45pm

To book a place at one of these sessions, email Librarypress : news@librarypress.org.uk

Categories
updates & improvements

New Feature : Collections

We are excited to announce another update to bookleteer including a new feature called Collections. This new feature allows for eBooks or StoryCubes to be grouped together to form a collection. This can be given its own title, author, publisher, colophon, summary, copyright info and a cover image. Collections can be shared or kept private – those shared are listed in the Collections Library.

Viewing Collections

Clicking on a collection box will open it’s unique page – each collection has a unique URL as well as buttons for sharing it on Facebook and Twitter:

Creating a Collection
To create a collection, log in to bookleteer and select the collections button (illustrated above) in the “create + order” bar.

This will open a new page where you can add details such as the title, author, publisher, copyright, colophon, summary and publication date. You can also upload an image to act as its ‘cover’ and select which book or StoryCubes are to be included in the collection.

You can see all the collections you have made by clicking on the “my collections” link, which opens a list. Clicking on the collections in the list allows you to edit each one.

Your Feedback
The Collections feature is a crucial step towards building an internal ‘crowdfunding’ mechanism (“Pledge For Print”) that we have written about before, and which we hope to bring to bookleteer later this year. We’d love to hear feedback about this new feature, please use the comments section here or email us direct.

Categories
case study ideas & suggestions inspiration

Being 18 in the past and today by Katrina Siliprandi

Being 18 in the past and today: using Bookleteer for a museum-based project with young people
by Katrina Siliprandi
Norfolk Museums and Archaeology Service

Young people working on ‘Project 18’ carried out and recorded 39 interviews in people’s homes, at Norwich Castle museum and in residential care homes. They amalgamated quotes from these interviews with photographs of selected museum objects to produce both a printed booklet and an e-reader version using Bookleteer.

The project is a partnership between Norwich Castle Museum and the Mancroft Advice Project (MAP), a charity that provides help, education and training for young people through advisors, counsellors, youth workers and a drop-in centre. Project 18 helps young people to learn more about themselves, others and their community through the creation of an accessible small archive of oral history testimony about being 18 in the past and today, inspired by the museum’s collections.

Some people might expect paper copies to be of low importance and relevance to young people who are already comfortably immersed and swimming in the cyber ocean. Conversely, paper copies could be seen as important tools to present to those people who have travelled to positions of influence and governance where a more traditional background might place greater value on well-trodden methods of communication.

We found the reality to be that the young participants placed great store in the tangible form of the printed items. They valued something they could actually hold, see, feel and smell. This multiply dimensioned tangibility was something they could experience wherever and whenever they chose, rather than only when in contact with a screen. Just having something physical to keep, share and treasure was hugely important. In addition young people expressed their gratification about something that was a token, a signifier of their achievement and enhanced status. Of course this enhanced status works both in the way in which others see the young person and in the way in which they see and value themselves.

This effect was re-enforced by the good physical standard of the booklets themselves. The cost of short-run printing was impressive. We were not forced to order a huge bulk run to achieve economy (with concomitant waste), nor did we have to be miserly in distributing the booklets to the young people and their friends, museum and MAP staff, stakeholders and supporters.

At the same time, having the e-booklet available has given an easy flavour of the project and its purpose to outsiders such as funders and government agencies, both national and local. We feel this kind of attention-catching and information giving is much more likely to lead to interaction and positive responses and outcomes than just a paper communication in the general wasteful paper blizzard. In this way, perhaps counter-intuitively, the e-booklet has provided us with a more permanent resource than traditional paper copies for those that we wish to inspire and involve in financially supporting future projects.

Maybe, too, by putting the booklet on the internet we will benefit from some degree of good fortune as people anywhere in the world stumble on the project. One person’s happy discovery could be promulgated world-wide with astonishing rapidity.

More about the project on the MAP site here.

Categories
education

Idea Store and bookleteer


I chose to visit the Idea Store in East London’s Chrisp Street Market and was quite surprised by how modern it looked inside – it was brightly lit with large open spaces, laptop benches, lots of seating areas, and visitors of all ages. Working areas, books, computers, ‘chill out areas’, and learning labs (rooms hired specifically for meetings and training sessions), are all clearly sign posted and well spaced out, offering an alternative ‘library feel’ all within a comfortable learning atmosphere.

Having walked around the library taking pictures, looking through leaflets and flyers, peeking into learning labs and flicking through some books in their library section, I realised that the Idea Store was definitely the ‘mega library’ of East London. Because the Idea Store has so much going on already, I left feeling slightly overwhelmed and wondered how, if at all, bookleteer would fit in to an already thriving library service. However, after some research, I realised that there were two areas that bookleteer could further help the Idea Store, and this was through advertising and user experience eBooks.

The Idea Store could advertise and promote courses, events, and services through bookleteer by creating mini information eBooks, providing a new and modern way to advertise what’s on offer. Allowing the thousands of people who use the store to create user experience eBooks to map out what they’ve learnt and what they’ll take away from using the Idea Store’s services would help both staff and visitors explore ways of improving services and document their experiences at the same time.

Download my ebook of ideas about using bookleteer in the Idea Store

Categories
publishing on demand

Physical Vs Virtual Library?

Hello! I’ve been at Proboscis for just over a month now, under the Future Jobs Fund placement scheme. I’ll be contributing regularly to the Bookleteer blog during my time here, mainly topics relating to my own interests; independent literary publications and the D.I.Y attitude that inspires them.

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

Categories
inspiration making

Kevin Harris: eBook Treasure Hunt


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.

Categories
events sharing

What is a librarian?


The final picture of what a librarian might do if their library was taken away, as drawn by Alex Hughes via Meshed Media

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.