Weeknote #34: Retention

Busy, busy. Feeling the pinch of back-to-school organisation with new timetables, devices, and parent briefings. The kids are coping better than we are. The weather is also dipping into Autumn with most of the city being hugged closely by low hanging cloud. In brighter news, we're about to enter that glorious Edinburgh period where tourists head home from the Fringe and the students are yet to return.

What happened this week?

The week kicked off with a GovCamp Scotland call finalising ticket allocations and email confirmation. Some slight nervousness that messages have landed in junk, but being oversubscribed is a good problem to have.

On Tuesday I hosted the first Board meeting of a UKRI-funded project exploring ATR outputs from digitised collections. We're lucky to have some brilliant people providing expertise and challenge - as Ash Mann phrases it a doubt and wisdom council: "somewhere that 'the plan' and core assumptions gets usefully challenged, by people who have no stake in defending them".

This was followed by a detailed discussion on how best to encourage teams across the Library to apply better file management practices across the nexus of Teams, OneDrive and SharePoint. I'm fascinated by the different ways people understand and navigate their own digital workspaces, with many still relying on the way they first did something (compounded by a baked-in Library instinct to save everything for all time).

Retention labels and file management inevitably fall to the bottom of the to-do list (if considered at all) and it's frustrating for those accountable for data protection and our digital overall footprint. It needs a little bit of carrot (time and attention from expert colleagues) and a little bit of stick (you will lose stuff unless you take action). A useful tool is asking people to picture what their digital world looks like in analogue form: would you be happy surrounded by multiple overflowing filing cabinets and thousands of single printed pages?

Another internal challenge has been developing a useful Systems Catalogue listing the status, ownership and documentation of the Library's key systems. This is undoubtedly a useful thing, but it's a little snarled up by our definitions of systems, applications, software and services.

On Wednesday I had a call with a friend-of-a-friend applying for a CEO position at a national cultural organisation who was seeking guidance on digital "transformation". It was an interesting call to prepare for, if a little painful to hear myself repeating the "pragmatic optimism" mantra. I shared a timely post from SCVO's John Fitzgerald on how charities can navigate through AI's "glitter-bomb" moment across cyber security, change management and digital confidence.

Thursday was back-to-back meetings, including an in-person catch up with team managers. There was a healthy questioning of approaches alongside frustrations around gaps in capacity and resource. We have limited room for manoeuvre but my attention is probably best spent identifying where gaps could open up significant areas of risk.

As a conterpoint, the Library's Russell Dornan has carved out some space for playful and low-risk experimentation. In the creation of an Augmented Reality Game he's exploring ways to "turn some of our long-standing problems into strengths" through joined‑up digital storytelling 🎲

AI thinking

I've now shared the results and insights from our AI Survey with teams across the Library. The feedback has surfaced interesting gaps, including the need for better staff guidelines and rules for commissioning creative content. It was super helpful to chat to a good friend about how his agency is adopting AI workflows and what stipulations clients are sending around AI-generated outputs.

Related AI reading:

• Bill Gates has written on the urgent need for—and lack of—a systematic plan for how society will address AI. Where were you earlier, Bill?
• Slow AI by Sam Illingworth is a brilliant, pared-back exploration of how and where to use AI, baking in tools for critical AI literacy (kudos to John Fitzgerald for the tip):

Knowing when to refuse AI is a judgement, and judgement is the thing the machine cannot supply.

Anyone who tells you AI is usless is selling something, usually nostalgia.

• Museums as Sites of Critical Technology Discourse - Oonagh Murphy sets out the responsibilities of Museums [or Libraries] to play an active part in public conversatons about AI:

If museums reduce their technological responsibilities to compliance, procurement, and risk management, they will have misunderstood their public role. Museums should not simply echo the assumptions of the technology sector. They should create the conditions in which those assumptions can be questioned.

Interesting things

• An overview of the newly-launched data.gov.scot beta service.
• Daniel van Strien from Hugging Face continues to do interesting things with digital collections and AI, this time building a semantic search interface over 1 million+ British Library images.
• The Smithsonian has launched a digital platform (MySmithsonian) which aims to bring together curated tailored content matched to people's interests and location.
• The Library of Congress has launched a new open-source OCR solution to reprocess OCR from the National Newspaper Collection.
• Nick Sharp continues to do good stuff at the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC. He's looking for a Senior Product Manager, with a salary that puts UK culture sector roles to shame.

Nice internet stuff

• The urge to keep tabs open is not new - Libraries have always been information interfaces.
• Where I've lived - a nice map thing.
• This amazing LinkedIn post - a classic of the genre.

Watching, listening, reading, doing

📖 The Inside Scoop on Investigations ⭐⭐⭐⭐- a fascinating talk at the Edinburgh International Book Festival featuring my former boss Isabel Hilton, who was as engaging and formidable as ever.

📺 Dog Park (Channel 4) - not as fun as Colin from Accounts but the set up is intriguing enough to stick with it ⭐⭐⭐

🎞️ H is for Hawk ⭐⭐⭐⭐ - a faithful retelling which leant into the book's meditations on connection and grief.

🏃 The Portobello Beach Run on Sunday promises to be both fun and not fun.

🎧 I had my first Fringe encounter with the cursed Silent Disco. It is not silent. No stars.

🪧 My favourite pitch from the gazillions of Fringe flyers: "Do you like snakes? No? There are no snakes in this show!"