If you combine UNs sustainable development goals with libraries you get a powerful force working for a better world for all of us.
If you are curious about how Danish libraries approach this work read my article published in English and German from the journal “Bibliothek Forschung und Praxis”.
Sustainability in Danish Public Libraries: How do the Sustainable Development Goals Inspire their Work?
Things move fast in this field. Feel free to connect with any questions you might have.
The UNs Sustainable Development Goals played the leading role in my keynote about trends, goals and innovations that influence our world and, therefore, our communities and libraries.
The global goals are a universal call to action to end poverty, protect the planet, and ensure that by 2030 all people enjoy peace and prosperity. While the 17 global goals are made simple, they are not always easy to understand. Libraries are essential in making the goals understandable for the public and facilitating partnerships in and with the community to actively support projects that have a tangible impact on the SDGs.
To give the global goals the focus they deserve, they should be part of your existing library strategy.
As an example of a national public library strategy that includes the SDGs, go to the all-new Scottish library strategy: Forward.
Part of my keynote was an example of a strategy process I did about the library as a strategically important learning institution in the community and how that informed decisions like building a FabLab with a sharp library focus on the services it delivered to the public.
By doing all of the above, libraries enable communities to make smarter decisions.
To be relevant for our communities, we need to listen to all parts of the community – also the people who are not like us. We must listen actively to the people who do not visit us often or never visit us at all. That means we must get out and have honest conversations with people in the community.
When we still struggle with COVID (though times are getting better in many countries now), we must not forget that it has been a rough time for all of us – the people who visit our libraries. Compassion and sincere interest in how people are doing is a highly valued skill these days.
In the group, we discussed what we wanted to bring into the new post-COVID normal and what we wanted to leave behind in the old world.
You can see all of the trends mentioned in my slides, and here is the “worknotes” from our workshop.
I promised the group to share a few links about the theme “Biased tech”. So here are the once I mentioned from New York Times:
The Week in Tech: Algorithmic Bias Is Bad. Uncovering It Is Good. [New York Times 15. November 2019]
Exposing the Bias Embedded in Tech. [New York Times 17. June 2019]
I want to thank the National Library of Estonia for inviting me and all the participants for their contributions and kindness: Thank you for learning with me. – Please stay in touch.
Thank you participants in Aveiro and online for your feedback and positivity. I was honored to be part of your wonderful conference.
Public libraries are about providing access to information for all citizens. They are also about giving the community members the best possibilities to transform that information into knowledge.
When we look at libraries not only as a place for cultural inspiration or a house full of information -but also as the learning hub in the community, we focus on different ways of connecting with the community and new ways of delivering library services. We also have a new approach to what skillset librarians need to make this happen.
In this talk, I focus on practical examples from my work as a library director in Denmark and New Zealand. Examples of working with learning as a strategy and how that impacted the library services delivered and how libraries reached out to the community.
Here are the slides:
I have two pieces of exciting news to share:
1) I am starting my own business in early 2020. Lately, I have been doing consultancy in Denmark, and Europe centred around Strategic leadership, innovation, collaboration and project management.
I will have a desk in the heart of Copenhagen for the next 12 weeks in a shared space with 49 other startups. The scope is to win and fail and learn from both.
I will share the journey with you on Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr and here on the blog using the hashtag #HolmquistStartup
2) For the next 9 months, I will work part-time as a Project Lead for a national library learning project centred around digital learning for library staff and digital leadership for library managers.
I am very excited about both new opportunities and as always. I will keep you posted.
Thank you Internet Librarian International for your kind feedback and for questions and comments after my talk and during the day. It has been a pleasure learning with you.
Like I promised – My slides:
This is a slightly reworked Q and A I did for CILIP Update before the keynote, and it provides some context to the talk.
Q. Firstly a little bit about you – Tell us about your current role and the projects are you currently working on.
I am also studying Master of Public Governance at Copenhagen Business School and doing some Consultant work on crowdfunding and making presentations and keynotes about i.e. global librarianship, gamification and libraries and the Library professional development program 23 mobile things that we made in Guldborgsund and expanded world-wide in cooperation with State Library of New South Wales in Australia.
The theme of this years CILIPS conference is “Making connections”. I am proud to do todays morning keynote.
Libraries are strategically important for modern knowledge societies. In the library people of all ages have a safe space for learning and exchanging ideas. In the knowledge economy where communities, regions and countries compete for knowledge jobs libraries are essential in actively supporting life long learning for all. Libraries facilitae connections between people and their knowledge. Thereby libraries are making their communities smarter.
Here are my slides:
It is always a very special thing for me to learn about a new version of 23 Mobile Things. This week 7 Mobile Things (7 Mobiele Dingen) from the Netherlands joined the 23 family.
The new version adds academic libraries to the project and is primarily aimed at familiarizing the library staff at Universitaire Bibliotheken Leiden with using mobile devices to gather and process scholarly information. Selected themes are “Collecting and sharing”, “Privacy” and “Reference managers”. This makes 7 Mobile Things true to the 23 vision: to explore the potential of mobile tools to deliver library services.
We have proudly added the project to our list of 23 Mobile Things versions and I want to thank Universitaire Bibliotheken Leiden and Mieneke van der Salm for doing this wonderful job with the academic version in Dutch.
23 Mobile Things is now available in 14 different versions in 7 different languages with an estimated number of around 20.000 participants world wide.
At #nextlibrary2015 I did an Ignite talk about global librarianship. I shared the vision that in a world where countries compete on knowledge to get knowledge jobs – life long learning is valuable. Therefore libraries are more important than ever.
We need to know how people learn, unlearn and relearn – and we need to have our own agenda about how we learn on a global level so we can be one step ahead as information professionals – and be even better to support the learning of our communities.
By being inspired globally we learn different answers to the challenges we all face as libraries – and we can translate our inspiration into acting locally in our communities – to make our communities smarter.
The examples I shared was Buy India a Library where four information professionals (Including yours truly) set up a crowdfunding project to build a library attached to a school in Mysore, India. More than 100 wonderfully generous people from all over the globe supported our effort – so though we (at that time) we enabled people to fund a brand new library.
23 Mobile Things took the inspiration from the original 23 Things project and transformed it into a learning program for information professionals with the scope to explore the potential of mobile tools for delivering library services. It was a local project for the staff at Guldborgsund Public Library and we then turned it into a global learning project in cooperation with State Library of New South Wales (with my wonderful colleagues Mylee Joseph and Kathryn Barwick). Today there are several English language versions in USA, Australia / New Zealand, Singapore and the Philippines and versions in German, French, Russian, Norwegian and Danish.
At Guldborgsund Public Library we have just launched a version of the program with 16 Mobile Things for the public (in cooperation with Kalundborg Public Library) (New blog post coming up soon!)
Thank you for feedback to everyone at Next Library – and thank you to all the people I connected and learned with and who shared your time and knowledge with me.
The Ignite presentation format is very challenging. 5 minutes – 20 slides advancing automatically after 15 seconds.
Global librarian is not a title – it is a choice. Global librarianship is a mindset where you seek inspiration from global projects and translate them into making value in your community.
In my recent presentation at EduTech in Brisbane, Australia I spoke about learning as a core task and strategy for libraries, skills we need to upgrade as librarians and I shared examples of global projects – remixed into local ones. Thank you for a great conference and for the feedback.
Thank you to everyone who explored the potential of mobile tools for delivering library services with me.Thank you for your participation and very relevant questions, I enjoyed it very much.
The slides are up:
Jan Holmquist 