Communicating through Collections
In August 2011, for 3 days, London was overtaken by a series of spontaneous riots. As disaffected children and young people took to the streets, looting shops and damaging property, the television news...
View ArticleDoing useful things well
Many times over the years, I have found myself locked into discussions about how to make things ‘sustainable’. Often as part of a discussion about what on earth we’re going to do about a project once...
View ArticleAssessing an organisation
I’ve made a few moves during the course of my career which have involved assessing the strength of organisations and the opportunities that lie ahead of them, so I though it would be useful to capture...
View ArticleI can’t ‘get with the programme’ if you don’t have one
A peculiar new feature of public discourse about the EU Referendum and Brexit is the emerging theme that people who voted to Remain in the EU should ‘stop whinging’ and ‘get with the programme’. To...
View ArticleUsing impact to engage stakeholders – Carnegie UK Trust discussion
I was recently invited by the Carnegie UK Trust to address a meeting of the Library Lab partners on the subject of “using impact to engage stakeholders in competitive environments”. These are the notes...
View ArticleAssessing Local Authority budgets
For good or ill, our public libraries are intrinsically connected to the Local Authorities that fund and coordinate them. The challenges faced by libraries are less about a direct assault on libraries...
View ArticleCulture must always be a Commons
This is one of a series of re-posts from blogs I wrote between 2006-2012 since the site they’re on is about to be archived. This was originally published for the Collections Trust...
View ArticleSpeech to the Living Knowledge Network Launch (03.04.2019)
Good afternoon. I really appreciated this in Roly Keating’s introduction today – “if you put a library somewhere, wonderful things will happen to it”. Or to put it as one librarian put it to me, “if...
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