Weeknote #22: Liminal spaces

The house felt very empty this week as my daughter headed off a school trip to the Netherlands. Friday then saw my son head off on another trip. We managed about 30 minutes of child-free waiting at the airport between one departure and another arrival.

What happened this week?

A bit of budget wrangling. I've been trying to simplify annual budget processes to separate out project spend and make it clear the bottom line clearer. Any change from embedded practice takes extra effort, but I find it useful to think: 'will this [process, decision, set-up] make sense for the next person?'

I held a Digital Managers meeting, which I've neglected of late. It was good to be reminded of the value of coming together in person.

I'm really pleased with the progress we're making with our AI "test and learn" projects, automating cataloguing workflows. We're sharing progress among teams but also need to advocate for the work externally. As Giles Turnbull has noted, working in the open and comms are not the same thing: Working in the open is about making work visible. It’s an act of sharing; Comms is about broadcasting achievements and results. It’s an act of promotion.

On this topic, Daniel van Strein has written further about extending the Library's original model trained on single index cards to other archival collections with more complex data structures. This type of 'build-and-extend' work will be super valuable across the sector.

I worked from home on Wednesday, partly to catch the street's elusive decorator. We're hoping to repaint the boy's room while he's away, although it will be sad to say goodbye to his dinosaur wallpaper.

A Thursday morning catch-up with Stuart Lewis, now at Scottish Enterprise, via the Library and Visit Scotland. It was good to sense check our direction of travel, ponder the role of a CTO and share pain points, as well as an amazing rainbow CRM diagram 🌈. More coffee chats needed.

On Friday I presented to the Library's Research and Innovation Group, Chaired by Christopher Smith. The remit here is wide and I'm pondering the value of convening an external "Digital Advisory Board" to help with some of the big infrastructure choices and possible funding sources.

Interesting things

• The Organisational and Cultural Review of Historic Environment Scotland was difficult reading in places.
• I liked Russell Davies' take on fast/good/cheap: jobs can only ever be any two of the following: easy, well paid, interesting. I've often compromised on the first couple to work somewhere I care about. As Neil Williams summarised:

If it’s interesting and well paid, that’s because it will also be borderline impossible. If it’s well paid and easy, that salary is compensating for a dull domain. If it’s easy and interesting, you’ll do it for less and they know it.

• Josh Hadro at Library of Congress built a nice data explorer for the 1921 edition of the Tulsa city directory, published just before the Tulsa Race Massacre.
• Tom Watson on the death of grant application: "The form exists to make applicants prove they're worthy. LLMs broke that filter by making proof cheap."
• Google's changes to search are not an update, but a replacement - here's why that matters for arts organisations trying to cultivate relationships with their audiences:

The agent decides what’s worth paying attention to, what to buy, and what’s true about the world. Discovery on your own terms doesn’t just get harder, it moves inside a black box optimized for values you can’t see and didn’t set.

• Phrases like "cognitive outsourcing" or "invest in your cognitive surplus" remind me of terrible Instagram ads hawking a 12-step programme. That said, this was interesting on AI Gravity pulling users towards dependency.
• If a profession runs on the basis of the "billable hour", what happens when everything can be sped up? Turns out the barriers to AI lawyers are most often organisational, not technical: "even firms that want AI can’t deploy it because their data is a mess and their governance structures punish change."
• Some great responses to this LinkedIn post by Esme Ward (Director of Manchester Museums) on cultural organisations providing shared communal collaboration/workspaces.
• Why Inclusive Policy Matters - A brilliant post by Nicola Osbourne on "the right to live out some of the most mundane realities in an authentic way" 💌

Other stuff

📖 I've started Close to Home by Michael Magee.

🎨 The Edinburgh College of Art Degree Show provided a good lunchtime distraction.

📺 Legends (Netflix) was a nice concept and just about sustained itself over six episodes. It's rare for me to pause shows but the "confessional " scene at the end of Half Man (Netflix) was super tense due to powerful performances from Richard Gadd and Jamie Bell.

🏃 There's already too much content about the World Cup, but I enjoyed this simple predictive tool and this anthem for Scotland.