Winning the Paul Reynolds Scholarship

An article by Paul    4 Comments

It’s been quite a week.

As some of you may know earlier this week I discovered that I had been selected as the inaugural recipient of the Paul Reynolds Scholarship ‘No Numpties Award’ for 2011.

I’m very humbled to have been chosen to receive such an honour.

After entering the GLAM sector in late 2007 the name Paul Reynolds soon came across my radar during discussions with fellow colleagues on such topics as ‘The Fitch’ and the National Digital Library.

Upon reflection I think my first face to face encounter with Paul was not until the 2009 ALIA Information Online Conference in Sydney where I serendipitously found myself sitting just a couple of rows behind him during a keynote.

At the end during a questions from the floor session I knew it was him because of his wonderful Scottish accent and thoughtful enquiring line of questioning directed at the (by then) rather nervous looking presenter.

When the intellectual jousting was done and the lunch break was upon us I introduced myself as another fellow New Zealander in the audience and thereafter we kept in touch.

I’d be lying if I said I knew Paul very well however during those last two years of his life I was lucky enough to have had first hand contact with him and observe his enthusiasm for all things digital.

He had such a strong drive and belief in the transformational power that the Internet afforded people.

In my application for the scholarship I wrote:

“The value of the Internet and the digital world for New Zealanders in 2011 is in its ability to act as a powerful social and economic enabler. A resident’s individual growth is empowered through ease of access to information from around the globe and the knowledge that it affords. Similarly, a country’s ability to compete on the world stage is facilitated by the borderless and immediate exchange of ideas and services online.”

I’m keenly aware of the important role our sector has to play in fostering equity of digital access for its citizens.

Equally important to me is that people are then able find and engage with a range of digital content offered by the New Zealand GLAM sector.

My sincere hope is that the research I’ll undertake will help to further our understanding of strategies that contribute towards successful online engagement between GLAM institutions and their customers.

So what am I going to do?

I’m going to spend a two week internship with the Digital Social and Emerging Technologies team at the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney – thanks guys

While I’m there I want to investigate how the team have successfully embraced the rapid growth of the mobile Smartphone market, the types of digital content they are creating, their rationale for doing so and how they measure success.

Their use of multimedia content and how it is served up via location-aware mechanisms is also of great interest to me, as is the impact such content has on customer engagement levels.

To finish off this post I would like to thank and acknowledge the judges and the sponsors of the scholarship.

The scholarship was established from donations made by the National Library of New Zealand, Internet NZ and friends of Paul Reynolds and held in trust by LIANZA, who administers the award on behalf of the GLAM sector.

It’s going to be an interesting journey and one that I hope that you will join me on.