VALA 2024

I missed the first day of VALA 2024, but I was there for days 2 and 3. The subsequent few weeks at work were ...eventful, including getting Covid (not from the conference). So this is my belated write-up of what I learned and observed at VALA 2024.

Sites of resistance in the digital age

The keynote on Wednesday morning was from dynamic Deakin University duo Hero Macdonald and Tui Raven. You can tell they are serious people because their bio photos are in black and white and they both have their arms crossed. "Hmm, I wasn't expecting a talk about French philosophy at VALA 2024", I thought. It wouldn't be the last time. Tui spoke about libraries and knowledge systems as being social, relational, and alive:

For me knowledge is alive–when passed to me it is like a baby I need to care for and pass on to the next generation like a grandchild.

Tui Raven

Tui talked about the datafication and ownership of knowledge, and and as she spoke I thought about how this is linked to conversations the previous week about generative AI being used to use synthesised voices of dead actors to narrate audiobooks. I'd expressed the view on Mastodon that this was "creepy", and there was a bit of a conversation exploring why it seems creepy specifically. As I listened to Tui her words helped me realise that it's because synthesised voices of people we know (or in the case of celebrities, people we've formed para-social relationships to) both breaks and fakes the social bonds and promises of our knowledge systems.

More things to explore from this talk

• AIATSIS Core cultural learning course
• National survey on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander employment in Australian libraries : Research report

Being Hacked

Vickery Bowles and Steve Till-Rogers presented via video link from Toronto about the experience they had with a major "cyber incident". This was similar to what happened to the British Library - TPL's entire system was compromised in an attempted ransomware attack, and they had to rebuild their network and databases from scratch. Their ILS was down for over three months, but none of their branches were closed the entire time: they moved to recording loans via ye olde paper and pen. TPL is huge: 2400 staff and 100 branches. The whole thing sounds like a massive logistical nightmare.

Key take-aways for me were:

• prior "tabletop cyber exercises" were very helpful to TPL as they knew basically what they needed to do to respond and recover
• there was a significant focus on internal communication - not just on "public relations" (or at least that's what these two senior managers assert!)
• they implemented a "phased recovery" where systems and processes were essentially triaged. Getting the website back up was a priority so they could communicate with library users, and this itself was phased: initially a simple static site. Someone decided they may as well do a website redesign since they were rebuilding the website anyway, which I guess makes sense
• logistics around storage of collection items that couldn't be checked back in was a major consideration
• disaster recovery plans need to have a reasonable level of detail to be useful in situations like this

Creating narrative-based rubrics for library services evaluation

Anna Rubinowski and Lauren Halcomb-Smith from Deakin ran an excellent workshop after the keynotes. They have been busy improving their system for analysing collection usage and making decisions about subscription renewals - a common and laborious activity in academic libraries. This workshop was to teach us how to think about and create rubrics for decision making. Lauren explained the concept of "consistent subjectivity" - we know our assessments are subjective, but with the help of a rubric we can at least be consistently subjective by being explicit about what it looks like to meet, exceed, or fail to meet a given criteria.

I could immediately see how this approach would be helpful when making and justifying decisions about subscription reviews. But it has also been incredibly useful already for our work at La Trobe on open education projects, where I started using it immediately. Our process for approving La Trobe eBureau proposals has certainly used criteria for some time - but just like Deakin with their subscription reviews, if anyone was to ask us to justify our decision making we haven't had much in the way of documenting how we come to our decisions. Just as importantly, by using a rubric we can use the rubric i