September is a lovely time of year to visit Brisbane..
And this September, you can attend the Open Access and Research Conference and hear speakers on topics such as evolving publishing models, repository management, e-Research, policy development, and legal and technical issues.

Early bird registration is available until the 25th of July. The conference will be held at the Stamford Plaza.

Beach in the city @ Brisbane, Australia by timparkinson

http://www.flickr.com/photos/timparkinson/104219504/

This week the new-look ARROW Discovery Service was launched featuring faceted browsing, tag clouds and access to more statistics such as the most popular authors and institutions.  The ARROW Discovery Service includes metadata records harvested from institutional research repositories across Australia and from the Australasian Digital Thesis Program.

Faceted searching enables results to be refined by institution, subject, resource type, date or creator.

If you are looking for Australian research, the ARROW Discovery Service is a great option to get started. The majority of records do link through to online versions of papers, and email alerts can be set up if you need to monitor research in a topic area. But at this stage I can’t see any sign of RSS feeds.

The service has also made available a search plugin if you want to add this as a search option to your browser search box.

ARROW is seeking feedback including suggestions for improvements. Send an email with “Feedback” in the subject line to arrow(at)nla(dot)gov(dot)au.

Today is the first day of Information Awareness Month. The ‘month’ is a collaborative event supported by Australian Library & Information Association, Records Management Association Australia, the Institute of Information Management, the Australian Society of Archivists, the Health Information Management Association of Australia, the Public Record Office Victoria, and the National Archives of Australia. Its purpose is to increase public awareness of the breadth of the information industry.

The theme this year is Safety, Security, Privacy.

The IAM website lists a series of events across Australia and New Zealand.

Considering that the purpose of IAM is to increase public awareness of the information industry it seems that there are quite a few events which are aimed at professionals already in the industry, rather than the public.

However,  there is at least one with a public audience including one in New Zealand on preservation of personal and family records -Preserving your records in a changing world.

There might be others, but some don’t have a lot of information available. If you are attending any of these events, how about writing a post for Libraries Interact about it? Or at least leave a comment here.

Apologies to the NSLA , I got my facts wrong in the last post (The Big Bang: Creating the new library universe ). Caused by reading an email too quickly.

The Big Bang document that I mentioned was actually a preliminary paper from July 2007, designed to stimulate discussion as NLSA worked toward a new strategic direction.

A much longer and more comprehensive document is the Exposure Draft out for comment - Re-Imaging Library Services: strategic plan . They accept feedback until 16 May 2008 - nsla@slv.vic.gov.au .

Here’s the Executive Summary:

This Plan outlines the way in which we will embrace new opportunities in service delivery. We will be active, leading, visionary and collaborative in meeting the challenges ahead.

What does change look like?

Our new vision is:

In collaboration, the National, State and Territory Libraries of Australia and New Zealand will become leaders in empowering people to create, discover, use and transform our collections, content and global information resources.

We will deliver this vision through three strategies:

· One Library will put the user at the centre. We will redefine services providing users with a consistent and easy experience across our libraries.

· Transforming Our Culture will transform our culture and workplace. We will promote a new culture which supports new services and emerging technologies.

· Accessible Content sees collaboration as the key to liberating our content. We will empower our users to find, share and create content.

How do we get there?

There are ten projects within the NSLA Re-imagining Library Services Strategic Plan:

1. Just do it! – initiatives to improve services immediately
2. Open borders – opening up access to e-resources across our libraries
3. Virtual reference – integrating virtual reference as a core function, with a new business and resourcing model
4. Delivery – developing a standard service model for user-requested document supply
5. User-created content – identifying and implementing a framework and tool set for our users to create and transform online content
6. Changing capability and culture – developing a framework for new work environments
7. Collaborative collecting – delivering efficiencies through collaborative collecting
8. Scaling up digitisation – developing collaborative business models for shared digitisation
9. New metadata services – stimulating metadata contribution and developing effective strategies to place resources in non-library discovery tools
10. Discovering content – making collection holdings visible through Libraries Australia / LibrariesNZ and linking our content to internet resources

I didn’t make up the title - it’s an Exposure Draft produced by National and State Libraries Australasia (NSLA). (PLEASE SEE UPDATE AT FOOT OF THIS POST )

It is a look into how these libraries will cope with future service demands and encourage “flexibility, rapid response and innovation within the library sector”. It is just 4 pages long and worth reading - especially if you would like to give feedback on the document. They welcome this until 12 May 2008. The email address is: nsla@slv.vic.gov.au

Here are a couple of excerpts from the document: The Big Bang: Creating the new library universe .

New technologies are impacting on every aspect of libraries. We have responded by implementing an extraordinary range of continuous improvement and innovative projects, building on the foundation of decades of collaborative technology and standards. We have created new services and made key parts of our collections available globally.

.
We are now in a position to explode and reshape our core services, resourcing and infrastructure; to explore radical new approaches across all parts of our work; and to fundamentally shift our libraries to the digital world. Our response to the environment is maturing and we must re-examine our collections; the services we provide to library users; our preservation and digitisation responsibilities; operational priorities; and workforce planning.

I liked these key points:

• Access is our primary driver.
• Digital is mainstream.
• No job will be unchanged.
• New web technologies and community digital content are shaping user expectations and behaviour.
• Some things we have always done, we will no longer do.
• Experimentation and risk are necessary.
• People want services and spaces to be welcoming and easy to use. They want to be independent.

UPDATE: 1 MAY 2008. The Big Bang document is actually the preliminary document to a much more comprehensive Exposure document Re-Imaging Library Services: strategic plan . See the next post, Update on the Big Bang: Re-imagining the Library for more information

The Western Australian Library Unconference is on again this year. This year the theme is : Library 2.0 and beyond: getting our hands dirty. We hope to include half a day of small hands-on workshops and a “technology petting zoo” with gizmoes and gadgets to fiddle with.

DATE: Friday 22 August 2008
TIME: 9:30am - 5pm
VENUE: State Library of Western Australia

If you would like to help out with organising, please subscribe to the unconfwalib google group and join in. If you attended last year, now is the time to give us feedback about what you’d like to see so we can make it even better this year.

Check out the unconference wiki for up-to-date details. You can
find out more and see what happened at the Library 2.0 on the loose unconference in 2007 here.

An unconference works on the principle that whoever turns up is the right person and whatever you discuss is the right thing. People prepare topics, but sessions are decided on the day. Everyone is expected to participate by either presenting, joining in the discussion or doing another job.

We aim to run this as a free event again this year, and are grateful to the State Library for providing the venue. If anyone would like to sponsor lunch on the day, please let us know.

The venue only holds 75 people. Registrations for attendance will open on 1 July 2008. Watch the wiki for details.

Contact people:
Kathryn Greenhill: k.greenhill@murdoch.edu.au
Hoi Ng: HNg@vicpark.wa.gov.au
Sue Cook: sue.cook@csiro.au
Constance Wiebrands c.wiebrands@curtin.edu.au

Recently I stumbled across this post on the ABC Unleashed website by Lucy Saunders. It presents an interesting way at looking at issues that we’ve posted about before [1] [2] [3] [4]. From the post:

Enjoy your unfiltered internet access while it lasts. As we speak, the government is hard at work building a device to censor the internet. Presumably this will be followed by a machine to beam KEVIN11 propaganda straight into people’s brains, then a giant ray gun to obliterate dissidents from space.

Okay, that’s probably a little bit of an overreaction, but it is true that Stephen Conroy, the Communications Minister expects the mandatory internet filters blocking “inappropriate material” to be ready for field testing by the end of June.

Hopefully these field tests will check whether the filters slow download speeds to the point where it takes an hour to load this page, or can be circumvented in minutes by an average ten-year-old, thus becoming a total waste of time and money. What remains to be seen is if some kind of coherent definition of what constitutes “inappropriate material” will be ready by then.

The post is well worth a read, as are the large number of comments.

Another professional development opportunity at the State Library of Queensland. And it’s free too.

Power to the people through public access computing: a presentation and workshop by Dr Karen Fisher

Dr Karen Fisher – Associate Professor, The Information School, University of Washington, Seattle, USA

Karen’s research and teaching focus is information behavior (social and cognitive aspects of how individuals need, seek, give and use information in different contexts. She is interested in how we go about seeking (and not seeking) information for such situations as finding a job or volunteer opportunity, deciding about a medical treatment or childcare option, getting our cars or houses repaired, choosing educational or personal fulfilment paths, learning to become a citizen or avoid paying taxes, becoming a snowboard addict or Great Big Sea fan club leader, etc.

“I want to know where we turn for information, why we go there, how we’re helped, how we express our needs for help, how we get stopped, and how we make it against the odds. My studies have ranged for how everyday information is shared at foot clinics in Canada, to how people use the Internet for everyday problem solving, to people’s needs for consumer health information literacy programs. I’m very keen on discerning the affective and social dimensions of information behavior.”

Date/Time & Place
Wed 21 May 2008, 10am
Morning tea will be available from 9:30am

State Library of Queensland, Level 2, Auditorium 1

Tickets
FREE EVENT. Book through QTIX (Bookings are essential)

Duration
2 hours

Presented by
State Library of Queensland

Do you have 40 minutes for some free professional development? You can attend Peter Morville’s presentation on search patterns for the IA (Information Architecture) Summit. The slides and audio are available from SlideShare and showcases innovative search interfaces and features.

| View | Upload your own

Go to the slideshare page if you want to get the links that Morville provides in the comments area so you can visit the sites and resources he shared with the live audience.

Adobe has joined the ranks of online image editors by launching their new free service, Adobe Photoshop Express beta.  It offers crop and rotate, correct, exposure, red-eye removal, touchup and much more, making it a direct competitor to services such as  Picnik and Phixr.

It also offers photo sharing and online galleries, which brings it into competition with Flickr and enables social networking, with users able to share their photos through Facebook, Picasa and Photobucket.

Aimed at the photo hobbyist, it allows the user to upload, edit and store up to 2GB of photos for free and then exhibit the images there or on a Facebook page for example.  There are also limits of 10MB on uploads and 4000 pixels in height and width for images.

However, considering the photo of Adobe Photoshop as a image editing tool, it is well worth checking out.  Information Week anticipates that it may also be available as a desktop application in the future.