#LAPIS Week 3: “@ Is For Activism”

We had a guest lecture this week from the awesome Eliza Angyanwe, freelance writer and commissioning editor. Among many other things we discussed the dawn of ‘open’ or ‘citizen’ journalism; a paradigm shift which is explained by this rather nice animation…

…and this Storify. Some of the key words and phrases from the Storify that really pop for me are participation, formation of communities of interest, attempts to reflect diversity, striving for transparency. Eliza stressed the importance of editors commissioning stories that reflect the realities of their readership; not what they think their readers should be reading.

The citizen journalism model has embraced (some might say co-opted) the blogging world; with ‘ordinary’ people writing about what they know and being globally platformed…for not much remuneration. The implication of course is to wonder how ‘professional’ journalists can compete, particularly as some of the best writing I have read in the last year or so has been on blogs.

The blogs I read the most are written by people who are outside mainstream journalism; whose realities are definitely not reflected by the negative, shaming narratives forced on them by the media. They are written by people with disabilities, transgender people, people involved in sex work. People who are marginalised, criminalised and denied a platform by society, and their writing is articulate, passionate and humorous in equal measures. The bloggers I follow tend to be active across multiple social medias, and following them has opened my eyes to the value of the (sometimes) neutral and egalitarian platform that social medias provide for us to shout from. From change.org to the No More Page 3 campaign (whatever you might think of that; and what I think about it might just surprise you), @ is for activism.

Anger Is An Energy

First Musings

I believe that, as well as providing us with opportunities for quiet contemplation and scholarly behaviours; libraries and information services should be active, alive and organic. They should be participatory spaces, inspiring users to try out new ways of engaging with the world and encouraging commitment to life-long learning. This awesomely ambitious mission statement requires a strong base triangulation model, in which effective information delivery systems and trained, adaptable staff are as important as engaging content.

Until very recently I worked in the library of the Imperial War Museum London. IWM oversees a national reference collection of printed material on all matters relating to conflict since 1914. The library comprises a myriad of different types of information items from books, journals and official government publications to maps, technical drawings and ephemera. I gained an excellent view of how information management is central to the ongoing development of IWM: as a centre for public engagement and life-long learning, as a commercial enterprise and as a renowned academic research institution.

The collections are accessible in a number of different ways. A fairly recent development has been the Explore History Centre (EHC), a user-centred walk-in space where visitors can access collections digitally and link to online databases as well as browsing a selection of books. Staff members from the Collections Access team are also present to answer questions and ‘sign-post’ visitors to the information they require. There is also a more formal research space where users can order further material from the library collections as well as the document and sound archives. This two-tier model is sensitive to the ‘personal user journey’: it is often the case that a visitor will wander in with a family history query- perhaps having rarely engaged with information services prior to this- and be guided towards engaging with the collections digitally or progressing to the research room. I observed that this informal approach has resulted in a highly diverse audience demographic, as the Collections Access team have developed the skills necessary to ‘coax’ users into articulating the nature of the information they seek, thus enabling them to discover the satisfaction of the finding process for themselves.

I am passionate about diversity within audience development, and believe that we should strive to create a network of information rather than a hierarchy. My favourite library collections at IWM are the ephemera collections. The term ‘ephemeral’ means to be transitory and exist only briefly; so ‘ephemeral items’ are by definition not intended to be retained or preserved. But many libraries and museums preserve them precisely because they tell us so much: because they are largely produced to meet the immediate and particular needs of society at a particular time they are a brilliant reflection of the ‘moods and mores’ of that society in a way that more formal documentation can never be. As the printer and ephemerist John Johnson said, ‘…the ephemera of today becomes the evidential data of tomorrow…’ (www.reading.ac.uk/typography/research)