Digital Works Podcast
Talking about all the different things that 'digital' means in the arts, culture and heritage sectors. Tales of success and failure, interrogating the shiny new things and looking at what works (or not) and why, Interviews with digital folks working across the sector and beyond, in-house, consultants, funders, and more.
Digital Works Podcast
Paula Bray (State Library Victoria) on the power of experimentation, the importance of advocacy and generosity, recognising that some things take time, and the value of clear and joined-up strategy
A great conversation with Paula Bray. Paula is Chief Digital Officer at State Library Victoria in Melbourne.
Over the last twenty years Paula has held digital leadership roles at organisations including the State Library of NSW, Powerhouse Museum, Art Gallery of NSW and the Australian National Maritime Museum.
Innovation and experimentation runs through much of Paula's work, which is one of the reasons I wanted to have a converation with her. At the State Library of NSW she founded Australia’s first dedicated cultural heritage innovation lab, the DX Lab, building an award-winning team that explored new ways to open up collections and data. In 2019, she co-authored the book Open a GLAM Lab with peers from around the world, sharing the value of experimental practice across galleries, libraries, archives and museums.
Hello and welcome to the Digital Works podcast, the podcast about digital stuff in the cultural sector. I'm Ash, your host, and each episode we explore how people and organisations in the cultural world and beyond are using digital to create, connect and adapt. And if you need a hand with your own digital work, I'm also a consultant who helps cultural organisations make the most of all this stuff. Today's conversation is a chat with Paula Bray.
Speaker 1:Paula is the Chief Digital Officer at the State Library of Victoria in Melbourne, australia. Prior to being the first person to hold her role at SLV, paula led digital engagement work at the National Maritime Museum and before that, she started the DX Innovation Lab at the State Library of New South Wales. We had a really good conversation about the benefits and challenges of being the first person to hold a senior digital role, the importance of advocacy and collaboration, how you create and sustain a culture of experimentation, and the need for leaders to model empathy, clarity, generosity and intellectual humility. Enjoy Good morning afternoon, paula. I'm really looking forward to our conversation today. I'd like to start, as I do with everyone on these conversations, with your background, with your career. What is the Paula Bray story?
Speaker 2:Thank you for having me. I'm thrilled to be in this conversation with you, ash. So my story really started at around the age of 16, when I fell in love with photography and the medium of photography. I was very keen on the design aspect of how to use light and construct a scene, but I think also I was really curious about how you know the chemicals would work and how you could work with those chemicals as well as get an outcome. I look back on this and I think that had a real start for me in exploring this experimental practice.
Speaker 2:I went to art school to study. I did five years of studying photography because I was just so passionate about it, did a Bachelor of Visual Arts and a Master of Arts. But after I finished my Bachelor, I didn't set out to be, you know, like working in a digital environment because it didn't even exist right my job now. I would never have known that that's the career path I would have taken, but I did know that I loved history and I loved collections and I thought, well, what do I do now? I finished my degree, where would I like to work? And I thought, you know, I really love the Art Gallery of New South Wales. I'm going to just write them a letter. I thought, you know I really love the Art Gallery of New South Wales. I'm going to just write them a letter and see what happens. And you know, being quite naive at that time, thinking that that's how people get jobs. I did that and, lo and behold, I got a phone call back saying actually we'd love to talk to you about a photographic assistant job that we are thinking about placing within our organisation. So come in and, you know, have a chat. So I did that, took my little portfolio under my arm and went into the beautiful art gallery of New South Wales and met with the team. And then you know it's so unusual, but at that time the director of the gallery was very well known and said that they wanted to meet everyone who was applying for a job. So I was taken up to the CEO's office and I didn't even know what a CEO was back then and we had a fantastic chat about photographers, art history, why I wanted to work at the art gallery, and he turned around and said you can have the job. So you know it's a pretty unusual story and you know I tell my children that you know, if you don't ask, sometimes you will never know.
Speaker 2:So you know, I think that started my journey in the collecting institutions in Sydney. So I started at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. I also worked a little stint at the State Library of New South Wales doing digitisation, and I also did Film Australia working with their archives. But then I managed to be offered a role at the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney, which has the most magnificent collection 500,000 objects of, you know, applied arts and science, design, technology, just the most beautiful collection and I became the manager of the imaging services team. So the photographers, the photo library, the rights and permissions, digitization and then I spent eight years working at that museum and that was, you know, an absolute privilege.
Speaker 2:It was when, you know, the web was starting to come into play with collections and we had a fantastic team of really passionate, you know, workers in digital. I worked alongside, you know, seb Chan, who's now the CEO of Acme here in Melbourne, and we just had a very strong remit to start to make our collections accessible online and push some boundaries there as well. So that was a little bit risky at the time because, you know, people were sort of they were scared of what would happen to collections if the broader public got access to them, which is so ironic. Now, right, but yeah, we did. We pushed some boundaries and put our collections out there.
Speaker 2:We started this practice of really being open and sharing about what we were doing.
Speaker 2:Being open and sharing about what we were doing and you know I remember starting a blog back then called Photo of the Day, and every single day we'd publish a photo from the collection, do a little caption and you know, did that for several years, but it really started to broaden the audience's knowledge of what was actually in the collection.
Speaker 2:You know we'd put a lot of our collection items that were out of copyright in Flickr, commons and just really trying to ensure that the people could get access to the collection and know that it existed through the web, through the browser. And then from that role, I was very fortunate to be offered the innovation role at the State Library of New South Wales. So that was Australia's first dedicated innovation lab that existed within a cultural institution, a separate team, dx Lab. So I did that for six years and that again was an incredible opportunity to look at the role of experimentation and advanced technologies with the pure purpose of working with the digitized digitised collection and making it more accessible. Then, from there, I worked in the National Maritime Museum for a couple of years, again scaling up a sort of digital team there, and within a couple of years of that job I was approached to do the job I'm in now, which is the Chief Digital Officer role at the State Library of Victoria.
Speaker 1:Wonderful. Thank you for that Potter's history. It's really interesting to sort of hear how you've gone from that creative practitioner role, you know, through digitisation into innovation and now into leadership and I think every single one of these conversations I have. No one's career path is particularly linear and I think that makes for better perspectives really. But as you say, you're the chief digital officer at the State Library of Victoria, you're the first holder of this particular role. Yes, I'm interested to hear what is the remit of the chief digital officer at SLV, of the chief digital officer at SLV and you know, having been the first role holder, the first digital person in a few organisations, how have you found that experience coming into somewhere where maybe a digital focus or digital practice wasn't maybe prioritised at a leadership level or maybe wasn't sort of formalised within the institution? I would imagine there were probably lots of different understandings of what digital in inverted commas meant and should mean. So yeah, really interested to hear a bit more about that.
Speaker 2:Sure. So the role was created a couple of years ago and it was a very strong remit from our board and executive to have this role, which is fantastic because there's not that many chief digital officers on executives in cultural institutions, as you know. So having that remit from the very top is quite rare, as you would know. So it's an incredible opportunity and I feel very privileged that I have this incredible role within this organisation. You know, that's a bit of a flip for me in my career where you go from sort of convincing up to no longer having to do that because you have a very progressive thinking board around being a digital first organisation. The commitment to the role, you know, the commitment to the strategy that we have now and being able to get on and deliver on that is incredible, so very rare, and I'm thankful for that all the time.
Speaker 2:At the library, the remit is to build a library that is ready for rapid digital growth within a world economy. Right, we're living in it now and you know the pace at which advanced technologies are coming at us is thick and fast. We need to ensure that we are ready for that now, but also in the future. You know we need to provide better access to our collections. We need people to gain knowledge, drive digital literacy, promote skills across business innovation, enable productivity for the people of Victoria and beyond. And that's where digital scales. You know it's not a binary situation where we're trying to compete with the services. The in-person, you know, viewing a collection item, you know in the physical form. But being a library that is not a digital first library is potentially setting us back many, many years and not reaching our remit. So the remit is a digital innovation library that can drive knowledge and access to our collections in ways that we may not even know what that is in a couple of years time. So it's a fantastic remit.
Speaker 2:And the actual directorate it's got three branches. So it's made up of a technology unit, which is infrastructure systems, networking, cyber systems, networking, cyber. And then we've got the creative studio, which is our sort of digital media production house, design, ux and web, with our development team, front end, back end. And then the third branch is the digital strategy, research and insights branch, which is where we have slv lab. So that's very much about research.
Speaker 2:It's about experimentation, like the research side is about understanding our users as best we possibly can, being informed by the data to make really good, informed decisions, but also the sharing side of that. So we're really trying to use SLV Lab as a publishing platform to share as much knowledge you know, because that's what a library is about. Right, it's about turning to something like SLV Lab If you want to find out about a technology that we've applied in a way. How did it work, what were the objectives, what did you find? What didn't work? Is the code available? Can I build upon that, you know, and scale that to my either organization or even a personal, you know, individual who's doing some research?
Speaker 1:We'll absolutely talk more about the specifics of SLV Lab in a moment, but I'm interested to maybe dig a little more into, I guess maybe the advocacy role that you've had to fulfill within the organization. As you say, you're the first role holder. It feels like quite an ambitious, forward-thinking remit that you've been charged with. That is possibly quite a new focus for the library and certainly when we were speaking prior to today, we touched on the unhelpfully elastic nature of the word digital, you know you ask 10 colleagues in any cultural organisation what it means and you'll get 10 probably very divergent answers.
Speaker 1:Any cultural organization what it means and you'll get 10 probably very divergent answers. And how did you go about helping colleagues to understand what the focus of your directorate needed to be and then how that sort of mapped onto and supported the work that they were doing in the wider library?
Speaker 2:I think this is an ongoing conversation as well as not just doing it at the start. So it is a challenge, especially when the institution hasn't even had like a dedicated digital team before it's had, you know, a technology team and you know staff have done the best they can with the resources that they have to be a digital organisation, the best they can with the resources that they have to be a digital organisation. But when something is so new and is embedded into, you know, a cultural institution, that is, you know, established in and opened in 1856 with some very well-known skills and capabilities that you need to run an organisation, you know collection, acquisition, collection, care, exhibitions, they're all sort of very well-known and established skill sets and they, you know, are still very important today. That's the heart of what we do. But when you're bringing in a new directorate with a remit, it's a challenge and I think you know the conversations around.
Speaker 2:What is digital is still really problematic for the sector because, as you say, it is confusing. Some people think it's, you know one thing, it might be just, you know, social media. Some people might think it's putting on events only or back of house systems only, when actually what we're trying to do is go from the back end to the front end and look at the whole user experience. So I was very aware of the importance of bringing stuff along on this journey from the beginning, because we had established that at State Library of New South Wales with DX Lab, we were very conscious that it will be confusing and until people get to work with the team and get to work on specific projects, it's going to be a bit of digital word soup for a while, you know, and it's going to be very hard to understand. I get that. You know it can be incredibly hard to explain how a data visualisation of the whole collection in the browser is actually going to look like and what it's going to benefit. But until you actually see that work, you don't quite get it. So I know that it takes time for teams to come on that journey and it takes time for teams to be part of working on projects as well. That's a good 18 months, I think.
Speaker 2:When you're setting something up from scratch, you cannot expect staff to understand immediately what a contemporary digital strategy is, especially when you're throwing experimentation into the mix, you know. So there's a lot of conversations, there's a lot of sessions, we do a lot of drop-in sessions. We have a strategy that uses very simple sort of sub-strategies to the library strategies, which I think really helps understand what the initiative or the product is actually trying to achieve. So you know, trying to keep that sort of well, we know what we're talking about but it's better if we explain it in ways that is understandable to everyone else. So we've developed these sort of five sub strategies to the core library strategy of create a compelling digital experience and they're quite simple. And I think they're quite simple and I think they're really obvious. But I think it really helps. So the first one is showing what's possible. So that's the lab, the experimentation, the prototyping. Let's just try something, scale it up and you know we'll see what's possible before we delve deeper and, you know, do a year-long project that costs X.
Speaker 2:The second one is opening up the collection. So you know, using technologies to work with the data sets, the digitised assets, to make them more accessible. So I think that's fairly obvious. The third one is building the digital precinct. I think that's fairly obvious. The third one is building the digital precinct, which is about our physical site within the walls of the institution. So how do we elevate digital within those spaces so that it's not like an add-on, it's part of the experience. You almost don't notice it. You know like if you start to notice digital and screens here and there it's sort of you know not working. And we have the most magnificent library. It is absolutely stunning and the building and the experience is incredible. We have people come from all over the world just to look at some of our spaces. We want to make sure that the digital is part of that overall wonderful experience you have when you come physically to our library.
Speaker 2:And then the fourth one is embracing the future web. So I think you can kind of see where we're going because they kind of they can interweave as well. But the browser is just the most powerful thing and the technology that goes into the browser. How do we work with that? You know if we can sort of break these products down into. You know it's not a website, let's think of it as a browser experience. The fifth one is embracing the digital centrepiece. So we have a wonderful opportunity to look at an empty gallery space around our La Trobe reading room, which is one of the most magnificent reading rooms in the world, to elevate that into a sort of digital immersive research, prototyping event space, and I think that really helps you know ground each of the products or the experiences or the experiments within this sort of simple language. So we're working with that strategy.
Speaker 2:At the moment, we've done a number of showing what's possible, because I think in the first 18 months, I believe that you need to show stuff whilst you're doing the back of house right, because the back of house is under the hood. It's incredibly important and incredibly responsible of you to get that right, but it's also to attract partnerships, to attract collaborations, to attract researchers, to work with different cultural institutions. You need to be showing quite quickly what your strategy is, and that's by putting some stuff out. So it may not be perfect, but it's important that you actually start doing those two modes I believe in you know doing whilst building. So I think that really helps. It helps your audience, but it also helps your staff, because you can see the things that you're building. So an example of that would be we've just launched, a couple of months ago, a product called Mouthful of Dust, which is what we're calling a cinematic web experience. So it's more about embracing the future web.
Speaker 2:So we have collection items for a notorious icon in Melbourne and Australia, ned Kelly, who I'm sure you've heard of, and the institution owns the helmet, the shoulder piece, the armour, the rifle, his boot, and this is permanently on display in our library. And as soon as I started working at the institution, I heard that we were moving the showcase from one gallery to another gallery, and this is not something that you do very often. It's a pretty much once in 20, 30-year opportunity. And I just said we have to scan these objects whilst it's out of the showcase. This is just too good an opportunity.
Speaker 2:So, you know, our collection care team were amazing in that they allowed us to insert a couple of days into their busy schedule of, you know, doing really high-resolution photogrammetry scanning of all those objects. So then we were able to work with, you know, the curators, the collection team, to build out this beautiful web experience. Now that is online, and we've commissioned five writers to write new works of fiction based on each individual scan. So they were writing this work whilst looking at the 3D scans in the browser. But that's sort of. You know, let's do that while we have this opportunity and let's also work on the strategy at the same time. It gives people the opportunity to see what we're trying to do as well.
Speaker 1:And it feels like you know that work that you've been doing since the very start to open up the work of your teams to the wider library and also to try and ensure that the work of your teams is really obviously aligned to the priorities of the wider library, a really important sort of foundational cultural structures in your institution to allow something like SLV Lab to exist and to work as I imagine it's intended to work. So I'd love to sort of zoom in on SLV Lab now because, as you've said, there are not a lot of innovation labs in cultural institutions. You know there was a small trend of it happening about 10, 15 years ago, but that seemed to be a flickering in the dark that has since gone out. So I'm really interested to hear you know the background to SLV Lab. What are its aims, what does it look like in terms of structure and skills and then, day to day, what is its focus, what is it trying to do?
Speaker 2:Yeah, sure.
Speaker 2:So at the heart of it, SLV Lab is a new, you know, digital experimentation collective that is there to push some of the boundaries with advanced technologies and it's looking at what a library can be as well. So we bring together specialists, technologists, library staff, designers, researchers to come together to try and look at a problem and solve that through the experimentation practice. It's slightly different to the previous lab that I had set up at State Library of New South Wales in that I really want this to be the library's lab. Even though there are a few people who are dedicated to, you know, running the website and running the sessions, it is really a place where the whole of library can come and suggest something to work on a problem that they've been trying to solve for a long time. They may have had the idea, you know, many years ago, but they just haven't had the resources or the time dedicated to explore what some of the solutions can be. So I think it's important.
Speaker 2:I think if you are working in technology, if you're creating products, if you're looking at ways to improve your services and your access to your audiences, you really need to have a culture of experimentation. I mean it's very normal for corporates and commercial sector to. I mean, look at finance and the banking industry and you know they've got that culture of they wouldn't not do this process right, because they need to understand exactly what their audience needs are and get scale to market really quickly. There's no reason why we shouldn't be operating in that same way of working and we have a duty to our audiences also to be informed about these technologies and share that knowledge with them. You know, as a library, it's probably never been such an important time for a library. I mean, libraries have always been important. But if you think about what's happening in the world at the moment, particularly with advanced technologies such as AI, you know we're living in this sort of trust economy. And who do you trust, who do you go for for your information around things such as?
Speaker 2:you know, AI cybersecurity around things such as you know AI cybersecurity, like. Turn to your libraries, because we are a trusted organisation that provides you know knowledge to people whenever they want it. So I feel like we have a duty to not only be exploring these technologies, but be at the cusp of what they're doing for society and how people are impacted by them. So I think that there's never been a more important time to be working in experimentation, and I think libraries are actually some of those places that have been doing that quite well, because I think there's this intrinsic value of being, you know, free to access, open to all. I'm here to help you. How can I help you? And technology is a really important topic and you know we have to be doing this. I don't think there's an option anymore.
Speaker 1:It's fascinating to hear you talk about the focus of the lab being sort of 360, as in. It's absolutely there to help colleagues at the library, to help, I would imagine, the library's sort of infrastructure and ways of working. But also there's this external focus as well. You know, as you've said, experimenting with technologies, experimenting with different ways to service users and audiences, experimenting with different ways of, it seems, collaborating with creatives as well, you know, with the mouthful of dust project yeah that you mentioned.
Speaker 1:It sounded like that gave you new and different ways to form relationships with people outside the library who were sort of responding to objects in the library's collection in a way that maybe hadn't happened before.
Speaker 2:Absolutely. Yeah, I think it's really important that it's the people's lab as well. You know, and we're really conscious of working with researchers and experts and bringing them in to work with the collection in a really condensed timeframe. But working with the experts within the library, you know, particularly within our collection teams, who have so much knowledge. So bringing minds together in a critical thinking capacity to work on a problem together in a short time frame is really important.
Speaker 2:And we've just launched our creative technologist in residence program where we have experts come in and do an eight-week sprint with us and the outcome of that might be a product, it might be research, it might be interviews, it might be skill sharing. It's not a defined thing that people have to come in and do. It's more about how can we all put our minds together in a collaborative process and see what happens with this. You know part of the collection and what does that mean for our end users who might then get access to a whole suite of data and you know code, and so we've just finished our first creative technologist in residence. We had a pretty interesting artist scientist called yo-yo monk come in and work with the collection with mixed reality headsets and they did a site-specific work in our empty gallery around the dome that I mentioned before, and it was wonderful to see this collaboration between the staff, yo-yo, the lab, all kind of come together in this.
Speaker 2:You know, petri dish of excitement to work with this advanced technology and come up with something in eight weeks. And you know we held events on site that sold out. They weren't polished and perfect. You know, I think it really suggests that our audiences are accepting of things that are, you know, a little bit edgy, not finished, experimental, but once they're comfortable with that, then they really embrace it. I think, you know, we're sort of I don't think we're giving them credit there for things always being, you know, having to be completely, 100% perfect to what we think it should be.
Speaker 1:I think so much of what you've been talking about there and previously is about culture and practice. Because it's all well and good, you know, you could hire a bunch of creative technologists and data analysts and developers. You could put a ring around them on the org chart and say we've now got an innovation lab yeah, but actually without the sort of culture to support experimentation and uncertainty and risk taking and curiosity, that investment is going to be a total waste of time and money and will probably cause more resentment than it creates opportunity.
Speaker 2:Exactly yeah.
Speaker 1:And I'm really interested to hear how have you gone about sort of creating and holding the space where experimentation is maybe not even just sort of normalized but a welcome and interesting and exciting thing, because certainly my observation of much of the cultural sector is, for a number of very understandable reasons. You say the word experimentation.
Speaker 1:That has an almost one-to-one relationship with the idea of risk which has an almost one-to-one relationship with the idea of we can't afford to do that. And I think it was interesting that you cited the finance sector because in a previous conversation on the podcast, someone called Nick Sherrard he said in every other sector it is seen as a risk not to experiment, whereas in the cultural sector it's the other way around it's seen too risky to experiment, and so I'm really interested to hear about how you've gone about making it okay for experimentation to happen on a day-to-day basis.
Speaker 2:I think you know it is hard. It is an ongoing practice and I think we're sort of just starting to get some headway in what this means, and I think it takes up to two years, 18 months. You know you can't just start experimentation and see the value in it, right, that just doesn't happen. But it's about allowing your staff to have some space and time. You know, I spent six years experimenting, six whole years, and you know that's such a privilege. But I understand the importance of allowing staff to come together and just have a little bit of space to have conversations together. Explore a couple of things, because, although that seems like you're taking time away from you know the everyday work. You have to start flipping the narrative a bit and saying well, actually there is productivity gains by us coming together and using our expertise across the whole organization, because digital is really effective when there are multiple people inputting into the product. Right, you know that you're a practitioner. If you only do it within your digital team, you're going to fail because you don't have the SMEs across everything. So you know, and you learn that as you become a digital practitioner too, you learn that over many years and you build up skills, that ideas for digital excellence can come from anywhere and it's about how do you maximize that ideation and the practice.
Speaker 2:One of my staff members came to me and said look, this is great, I love what you're doing. I think we should start a code club. And I said great idea. I said, bring me back a one pager on how you're going to do it, how are you going to report on it and what are the benefits that you got to like spin it back. It can't just be something that you guys go off and do and no one hears about. Like we've got to close the loop and look at the impact. So they went off and started Code Club on their own and you know, incredible amount of people showed interest and it happens once a month. There's two other people from across the organisation, from different directorates, now running Code Club.
Speaker 2:So collections digital. They meet monthly. They bring their own topics to Code Club that they're trying to solve and it's just fantastic. We've seen some very engaged staff members really blossom through learning how to code. So it's about giving your staff some space to come together and do that, and I think we've still got a bit of work we need to do with SLB Lab in that as well and look at the impacts of the work. I think that's. Our next piece of work is reporting back on an impact strategy on innovation and experimentation. So what value do we get out of it? What does the staff get out of it?
Speaker 2:You know, but it's about bringing people together. It's about allowing them some space, allowing some skills development across teams. You know like we're actually in a really rare situation at State Library Victoria with the remit we have with digital and being allowed to do this, and it's about embracing other team members and bringing them in so that they can gain skills as well. So we're looking at things like drop-in programs, bringing in teams from other directorates to come and work on our initiatives, looking at as many opportunities for growth and skills development across the organization so that we can all benefit from the practice of experimentation.
Speaker 1:And it sounds like you know there are people listening to this, thinking oh, I would like to try and catalyze a more open culture and experimentation in my organization.
Speaker 1:It sounds like there are a few things that you're saying are important. I'll try and summarize them. And it sounds like there are a few things that you're saying are important. I'll try and summarize them. And it sounds like this idea of this is something, again, I talked about in a previous podcast with Tash Wilcox. This idea of sort of intellectual humility and not pretending that the digital people have all of the answers, and being open and welcoming of ideas and input from all of the institution feels like an important first step so that people aren't going oh well, we'll space for people to actually have the time to think and the time to be creative and that it isn't just, you know, a half an hour meeting that's feel sandwiched in amongst a day of back to back meetings and that you're, I guess, as leaders, saying this is a priority and we are going to create space for this and we are going to give our people permission to spend time on this.
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely. And you know when your values are. You know collaboration and innovation. You know you've got to actually put the practice in place for your values to blossom and for people to be able to see how they fit within innovation, because innovation comes from every part of the organization. It shouldn't be just one team, it should be everyone. Everyone should be. You know applying a new way of working. You know it really is just a new way of working. Experimentation. You know it's the norm, as you say, in other sectors. But you know, if you gain those skills and you apply your service design process with your experimentation, it's a wonderful way to work in a non-digital capacity as well. So we've got to build our organizations to be future ready, and that can be challenging, that can be hard for people. It can be. You know, will my role be my role in 10 years time? You know my role didn't exist when I went to study. What roles are we going to see, you know, in another five, 10 years time in our sector?
Speaker 1:And it feels like maybe the third area is you know the story you told about the colleague that came to you with the idea about Code Club that absolutely all ideas are welcome but we need to be able to explain and understand how that links back to the organization's priorities so that people don't feel this is a sort of lovely but non-essential set of activities. That people can see how this is anchored in the sort of focuses of the institution.
Speaker 2:I think you know that's going to take a little bit more time for the experimentations to become the sort of scaled up versions, because the scaled up versions, you know, might be a one to two year project, but certainly things like exploring new catalogue experiences, you know those sorts of projects do take time and I think we will see that as we move and progress through our experiments in SLV lab and then scale them. I mean, we're already thinking about the ways in which what we've learnt in a very short period of time can be applied to our new website, the web experience that we'll be building. You know, what does a future library web experience look like and feel like and how can we really create something that is as powerful as when you come into our building and experience the library in that way, but in the browser, you know, and so the work we're doing in SLV Lab is already going to be scaled up in that process. It just takes time to see that reflected across a whole organization and a big scale project.
Speaker 1:And I think, on that note of sort of optimism and pragmatism, that's a nice place to end. Thank you so much for your time today, paula.
Speaker 2:Oh, thank you for having me. Thanks, Ash.
Speaker 1:Thanks for listening. If you enjoyed this conversation and want to hear more, you can find all episodes of the podcast on the digital dot works, and if your organization needs help making sense of digital, you can get in touch with me via my website at ashmanco. That's man with two ends. See you next time.
