Live coverage of VALA2010 continues here…

Libraries Interact and friends will be covering VALA 2010 live.

Twenty-two of libraries finest gathered together at Berth at Docklands for dinner on the eve of the VALA2010 conference proper.

Many of us had attended either the Boot Tech Camp or L-Plate Series during the day ( both of which were found to be valuable by those who attended), but we were joined by others both from Melbourne and interstate, for good food, good company and a good time.

It was nice to finally put faces to Twitter names and it was to our great delight that we discovered that all twenty-two people in attendance had Twitter accounts!  (a list will follow).

In the meantime, please check out the photos from the dinner on Flickr, follow the Cover It Live feeds on Libraries Interact and take a moment to check out the new VALA website.  Conference starts today and papers will follow after it finishes.

A very good speech from Senator Trood on 2 February 2010

The NLA is a place where resources of national significance are collected, preserved and made accessible to the public. It is a place with a wealth of knowledge that ensures that the nation’s experiences are shared. As the country’s largest and most important reference library, the NLA has the objective of ensuring that Australians have access to a national collection of library material to enhance learning, nowledge, creation, enjoyment and understanding of Australian life and society. It ensures that a representative record of Australian life is collected and preserved for the future. The NLA is not just our national library. It is internationally recognised and we can be absolutely confident that it has the esteem and respect of many of the great libraries of the world. Like all libraries, the NLA is a place of peaceful repose for those who want to read, study and think in surroundings so conducive to these activities.

But the NLA is not just a place to read books. One of its important and longstanding functions is to stage exhibitions that offer an insight into our national life and culture. Many and varied temporary exhibitions are on show at the National Library. For example, in 2008-09 the Nick Cave exhibition looked behind the music to the man himself through a collection of original lyrics, notebooks, artwork, photography and books as well as personal items from his home and office. These kinds of exhibitions will continue to be an important part of the NLA’s activities.

.…

But it would be misleading to suggest that, for all the distinguished work that the library is undertaking, it is not facing some enormous challenges. The NLA, like the National Film and Sound Archive and the National Archives of Australia, requires additional funding to ensure that the work that it does is preserved to share with future generations. The digital age has certainly arrived. As a result, digitisation has become an increasingly important medium for Australian government agencies, authors, researchers, film makers, musicians and creators. Australia’s ability to maintain a permanent and accessible record in this area is therefore linked to a national capacity to cope with this digital tidal wave of images and sounds.

The reality is that the national collecting institutions are not resourced to cope with this digital tidal wave. The NLA certainly has the commitment, skills and vision to embrace the digital world. But currently it lacks the resources to undertake the task effectively. There is little doubt that saving Australia’s digital cultural heritage will require significant funding. In this context, I was delighted to see that the 2009-10 Rudd government budget provided some funding for a business case to be set forth for comprehensive funding for digitisation into the future. I very sincerely hope that the government will see fit in the forthcoming budget to further fund this important national activity. Investing in Australia’s digital heritage is an investment for the future. I therefore trust that, despite the difficult budgetary situation, this will be a serious priority in relation to the NLA’s activities.

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Whilst many of us will be at VALA, for those who aren’t, Tuesday 9th February is a day to note, its Safer Internet Day 2010!

Even with the issue of ISP filtering is still ongoing, we can’t forget that one of the best protections for children on the internet continues to be education.

So on Safer Internet Day 2010, why don’t you:

• Check out the resources on cybersafety that ALIA and public library staff have worked with ACMA to develop
• Revisit the Cybersmart guide for library staff, to refresh yourself and to get some inspiration on how to promote this important topic
• Download and display the cybersmart poster
• Promote the cybersmart website to your library users and staff
• Note the date, so you can plan bigger and better promotions in 2011

Libraries Interact writers and friends will be covering VALA 2010 using CoveritLive. Prior to the main event, is the OCLC mashathon. A few of us are attending and our tweets and comments can be viewed here, so you can follow along as we discover a variety of OCLC-provided APIs, including the WorldCat Search API, led by Roy Tennant. Each day of VALA2010 will have a new post here at Libraries Interact. If you are attending VALA2010 and would like to contribute your tweets to the coverage – leave a comment here or send dm to @petahopkins.

Due to popular demand, we are doing it all over again!  Some of the Libraries Interact team will be in Melbourne for the VALA 2010 conference and are getting together for dinner. We are keen to catch up with each other and with you, our fellow blog readers, bloggers and tweeters..

So it is with great pleasure that the team from Libraries Interact invite you all to share dinner with us on Monday 8th February from 6.30pm. (night before first day of conference). (Thanks to Sue for her twitter poll which settled the weighty issue of when)

We will be enjoying fine food, great scenery and awesome company at Berth at Melbourne’s Docklands. (45 New Quay Promenade Tel: +9670 0199) Resting right over the water at Docklands, Berth comes recommended to me by my sister. The menu looks good, with hopefully enough to suit all tastes and dietary requirements.

For those visiting our fine city or locals wanting to get in early, feel free to meet us at 5.45pm (after both Boot Camp and LPlate have finished) at the VALA registration desk at the Melbourne Convention Centre. We will work our way down to Docklands, using the free City Circle Tram and our feet! (City Circle tram finishes running at 6pm – hence the rush) For those wanting to make their own way there, here’s the map.

And most importantly, please let me know if you are coming, so that I can ensure that everyone gets a seat. Email me at tango65 at gmail dot com by Friday 5th February.

We would love to have you join us!

Having never attended a RAILS (Research Applications in Information and Library Studies) conference before I wasn’t really sure what to expect but with 15 presentations, 20 mins in length I knew I wasn’t going to have time to be bored. Despite having been in libraries nearly 20 years I had forgotten about the research side of our profession and the importance that it has in keeping LIS in the academic sphere and our practioners seen as professionals.

The research presented ranged from the importance of information as a social inclusion tool to information seeking behaviours, from the hermeneutic circle of literature reviews to classifying Australian PhD Theses and many other areas in between. The scope was wide and from a practitioner’s point of view of varying degrees of practical relevance.

The audience was a mix of practitioners and academics and a reminder to those of us working in libraries that there is research being undertaken that can inform practice and also a view into the future direction of some of this research. It would have been interesting to be able to debate more about future directions of research from both an academic and practical viewpoint. Maybe a few less papers and a bit more time for discussion and debate.

This was a good networking opportunity for me as I consider embarking on a PhD and a reminder that research is an important part of our profession. All papers will be published in the Australian Library Journal.

On top of the VALATech Boot Camp, VALA will also be holding the L-Plate Series, the details of which have just been announced.

This year it will only be 1/2 day long, to be held on Monday afternoon, 8th February, before VALA commences.

The program will comprise a series of 1/2 hour overviews, intended to give some background to the type of content that will be discussed in paper’s presented at the Conference proper.

Topics to be covered include Open Source Library Systems, presented by our own lovely Kathryn Greenhill, as well as sessions on Library Mashups and APIs, Semantic Web, Cloud Computing, Discovery Layer Interfaces, Social Web apps for libraries and eBooks.

Registration is free for VALA attendees, but places are limited, so please check out L-Plate Series for more details and to book your place.

A new study by CareerCast.Com has rated the Best jobs for 2010.

Based on research into 200 positions, investigating environment, income, employment outlook, physical demands and stress, the top ten best jobs were:

1. Actuary
2. Software engineer
3. Computer systems analyst
4. Biologist
5. Historian
6. Mathematician
7. Paralegal assistant
8. Statistician
9. Accountant
10. Dental Hygienist

Although librarians didn’t make the top ten list, they came in at a reasonable 46 in the Top 200 of jobs, ranked best to worst. That at least put us on the positive side of the list, at least in this study.  Librarians earned the following rankings:

To give you some perspective, Actuary had the following rankings:

This study is based on the American situation and the financial situation in Australia is more secure than in the USA, so I would expect that such a study done in Australia would have some differences. Exactly how many differences and what they would be I can only leave to conjecture. However, the US situation is often a guide to what may happen here.

So, anyone want to get a job in libraries in 2010?