Weeknote #20: Recovery
A slow start to the week as I recovered from the Hackney Half. Not my finest race. After my brother sailed into the distance I settled into a steady pace and tried to enjoy the good vibes.
What happened this week?
Monday kicked off with the Audit Committee providing positive feedback on our progress with cyber security and recognition of the difficult operating environment.
We finally made it over the line this week in the battle to extract ourselves from expensive VMware licenses. Sometimes the big wins involve avoiding additional costs and delays.
On Tuesday I was interviewed by a PhD student at Edinburgh College of Art (ECA) about capturing the National Museum of Scotland in Google Streetview way back in 2018. We were the first cultural venue in Scotland to do this and the team spent two spooky nights following a camera around the whole museum.
I missed out on a trip to Trinity College Dublin on Wednesday to join digital colleagues at the latest Legal Deposit meet up. Group messages about finding the perfect pint of Guinness didn't help my FOMO.
On Wednesday I chaired AI Steering Group and it was great to see progress on mutiple fronts pared with a healthy commitment to protecting core Library values. This was followed by a useful chat with Scottish Enterprise on their roll-out of Co-Pilot across all staff. I picked up on an interesting point about equality of access: if usage and efficiency gains are being measured, everyone should be given the same tools from the start.
Linked to the Creative Content Exchange project, we're in the process of applying for UKRI funding to help us create more research-ready data sets from the national collections. It can be hard to pitch for mid-range levels of funding when we would ideally want to build new processes and infrastructure.
We're also chatting to the team at EPCC on possible projects that can take advantage of their access to large scale compute and research infrastructure. Again, the challenge is forming research projects that can help us build practical, scalable solutions over the long term.
On Thursday, I chaired the Digital Preservation Steering Group. Not too much to report here, mainly due to the sustained commitment of a small but dedicated team. Some interesting early thoughts about providing digital preservation as a commercial service.
We're looking for a CRM Product Manager. These roles are hard to come by and a fab person is crucial. Please share.
My incredibly dull task of the week involved the mass deletion of emails from Outlook, which has been running slow. I'm very folder-heavy in my email admin - three years had accrued closed to 10,000 emails!
Ai at the National Library of Scotland
Daniel van Strein has produced a comprehensive overview of the "test and learn" pilots he helped us run over the last six months. I need to talk more about this work as it's a good example of stepping through the stages of AI adoption outlined in the UK Government's Adoption Pathway. We're close to moving on from small-scale experiments to integrating useful live workflows.
I've also been fielding queries across the organisation on using AI tools to "quickly" produce video content. Playing around with generative tools yielded mixed results, although voiceover generation is one area with potential time/cost savings. However, you still need to answers the key questions - what? why? who for? - before skipping to the creative (or, automated?) bit.
Interesting things
- Neil Williams has provided a quick-fire summary of Designed for Digital. This distinction between different digital transformations seems very helpful for communicating work across the organisation: i) A transformation that digitizes the company – i.e. uses digital technologies to enhance operational efficiency. ii) A transformation that pursues new digital customer value propositions – i.e. uses digital technology to rapidly innovate new digital offerings.
neillyneil
- Another book summary, this time by Sarah Fisher focussed on Matainance: of Everything by Stewart Brand (h/t Neil). Systems of government digital delivery are often unified against a commitment to careful, sustained maintenance.
"Government should view ‘digital transformation’ as entering into a lifelong contract of care and maintenance for its services."
- One of my overriding concerns in my role is knowledge and expertise residing in a single person. A low "bus factor" indicates higher risks and critical dependencies. It's not exciting, but we need more documentation and knowledge-sharing across teams.
- Richard Ovenden at the Bodleian encourages the government to embrace libraries in the age of AI: "As stewards of vast quantities of data, the sector could play a critical role in fuelling the digital economy."
- Lessons from Bank of England's transformation, including a ‘competitive dialogue’ procurement allowing suppliers to build simple solutions before contract award.
- Insight into IKEA's approach to AI, separating "transactional" customer queries which can be automated from the questions requiring human-led guidance and advice.
- I enjoyed the reaction on Bluesky to an infuriating opinion piece failing to grasp the basics of how museums work and what they are for.
Watching, listening, reading, doing
📺 I loved Stefan Golaszewski's previous comedy series, Mum and Him & Her. Babies (iPlayer) was a harder watch, but the extended scenes of all-the-things-left-unsaid generated some moving moments.
📺 I'm not a Liverpool fan, but watching the Kenny Daglish documentary (Prime) left me with new respect for his talent and heroic response to the Hillsborough disaster.
🎧 The Paul McCartney documentary, Man on the Run (Prime) sparked a great conversation with my Dad about the albums he was listening to at university in 197o.
🏃 I'm relieved I abandoned the plan to also run the Edinburgh Half this coming weekend. Know your limits and all that. It will be fun seeing my daughter aim for a PB in the 2k race and a few colleagues take on the full distance.
