With possibly a record contingent of Australians in Anaheim (about 20!), this year’s ALA Annual was a great one to attend. My last ALA was in New Orleans in 2006, so it was great to attend for a second time and not be so overwhelmed by the largeness of everything.

ALA is notoriously difficult to get around, and it did seem that everything was on at the same time in hotels several miles apart this year. Apart from my own session that I spoke at with fellow Australians, Alyson Dalby and Andrew Spencer, it seemed like we didn’t actually attend many talks. Despite this, highlights for me were Top Tech Trends and a session on the AMPAS library.

BIGWIG

After my talk I ran over to BIGWIG which was still in full swing. I missed the presentation part of the session but joining in the informal discussions and the video streaming was fun.

Top Tech Trends

So does TTT live up to the hype? It sure does! In addition to the panel of trend watchers, we were joined virtually by Karen Coombs and Sarah Houghton-Jan, and we could watch and participate in the toptech Meebo chat room. It was great fun to be able to interact with some of the audience and the panel through Meebo in real time. But backchanneling for me did have the downside of being terribly distracting from, you know, the actual discussion.

Academy of Motion Pictures, Arts and Sciences library

On Monday I decided to go to a session just for fun, one that has nothing to do with my work - a talk on the AMPAS library. The challenges of maintaining a major film archive were discussed - everything from preserving billboard posters to photographs and handwritten screenplays. The session was accompanied by a fantastic video showing how they restored a billboard poster for the film King of Kings. Definitely a highlight.

Bookcart Drill

I was really looking forward to the Bookcart Drill Championships after missing the inaugural championship in New Orleans in 2006 and it did not disappoint. Such coordination and creativity! A lot of fun to watch. There will surely be plenty of videos on YouTube soon.

Blog Salon

Like most conferences, the socials are the most interesting and useful for networking and meeting people you’ve only ever met online. Blog Salon is always a fantastic place to do that.

The International Librarians Reception is another excellent place to meet people attending ALA from all over the world. It was great to put a name to many faces and catch up with others. This year the reception was held at Muzeo. It was formerly the Anaheim Public Library, built in 1905 and is the only remaining Carnegie library in Orange County.

Anaheim

Unlike most of ALA’s conferences, Anaheim is not a major city, and entertainment and food options other than Disney were limited. It’s similar to conferencing on the Gold Coast.

Overall ALA Annual 2008 was again a good, if tiring and overwhelming experience. If you’ve never been, it’s worth going just once to experience the largest library conference in the world.

Registrations for the second WA Library Unconference are now open. The theme this year 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. Sessions focus on discussion rather than single person presentations.

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

The venue only holds 75 people, so it is first in, first served. Registration has two steps. 1. Put your details on the  Registration 2008 page. 2. Go to the  What is happening on the day 2008 page to put your name down to do something. We need people to present sessions, suggest session ideas, co-ordinate funding, keep accounts,  to order lunch, to collect lunch on the day, to record audio and vision of the sessions, clean up, look after rooms on the day, set up for the “Inspect-a-gadget” session, update the wiki for sessions, be gophers on the day and anything else they think to offer.

A new feature this year is “Libjam”. While we are tallying up who wants to go to which session, we’d like at least 6 people to take just 3 minutes to share something their library is doing to “get hands dirty”. You can sing, dance, present a clay model, a mini movie , just talk - whatever fits in 3 minutes.

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. To see what happened last year, see What happened at the Library 2.0 on the loose unconference in 2007 here.

This is a free event again this year. We are grateful to the State Library for providing the venue. Thanks to Murdoch University Library for providing sponsorship for lunch.

From Wired Campus, comes a report of an e-book design where users can ‘turn the screen’.

Comments on the article suggest that readers are underwhelmed at the possibilities presented by researchers from the University of Maryland and the University of California at Berkeley in a prototype dual-display e-book reader. But the researchers state that “Our users’ feedback about the greater comfort and flexibility of our device argues in favor of a specialized device. Specialized reading devices may not provide all the capabilities found on a computer, but in return, minimize size and weight, which positively affects the reading experience.”

Abstract from Nick Chen, François Guimbretière, Morgan Dixon, Cassandra Lewis and Maneesh
Agrawala.Navigation Techniques for Dual-Display E-Book Readers. Proceedings of CHI’08, pp. 1779 -
1788:

“Existing e-book readers do not do a good job supporting many reading tasks that people perform, as ethnographers report that when reading, people frequently read from multiple display surfaces. In this paper we present our design of a dual-display e-book reader and explore how it can be used to interact with electronic documents. Our design supports embodied interactions like folding, flipping, and fanning for local/lightweight navigation. We also show how mechanisms like Space Filling Thumbnails can use the increased display space to aid global navigation. Lastly, the detachable faces in our design can facilitate inter-document operations and flexible layout of documents in the workspace. Semi-directed interviews with seven users found that dual-displays have the potential to improve the reading experience by supporting several local navigation tasks better than a single display device. Users also identified many reading tasks for which the device would be valuable. Users did not find the embodied interface particularly useful when reading in our controlled lab setting, however.”

Wired Campus: Researchers Design E-Book to Mimic Turning Book Pages - Chronicle.com

BRW Magazine launched the top 100 Australian Web applications in a feature section on Web 2.0 in 19th June issue. The article in BRW is only accessible online by subscription (check to see if your library’s databases have it covered), but the full list is available from Ross Dawson’s blog.

Applications are included on the basis of being predominantly Australian applications, not just content, web-based that create value from participation and which represent genuine innovation. There is further background including criteria and insights also available from Dawson’s blog in Early insights from the Top 100 Australian Web 2.0 applications.

Of the 100 listed, I know of about 10 and have only ever used a few and those not even regularly. Would love to hear of your experiences with any of the applications on this list and whether you think there are any others out there that didn’t make the list, but should have. I know I will be checking them all out in coming weeks.

The program is complete and registrations are now open for the New Librarians’s Symposium 4: Breaking Barriers, to be held in Melbourne in December.

Keynote speakers include Dr Sherman Young and Erik Boekesteijn with Jaap van de Geer. The symposium will be held at CitiClub on Queens, the dinner will be held at the MCG and a Professional Development Day will be held as a pre-conference special.

It looks like a great program, with the theme of challenging attendees to look beyond the barriers in their careers and workplaces. I’m looking forward to attending, as a not so new librarian!

More from the NLS4 website.

According to “Digital copyright: it’s all wrong” a report in Fairfax newspapers from Graeme Philipson, the US has “circulated a draft Discussion Paper on a possible anti-counterfeiting trade agreement (ACTA) for the next G8 meeting in Tokyo in July.” This document is concerning those who have read it, as it “would enable any border guard, in any treaty country, to check any electronic device for any content that they suspect infringes copyright laws”. Only suspicion is required to be able to legally enable this to happen.”

In Australia, they would almost have to pull up everyone carrying a phone, a laptop or other mobile device on suspicion of having something illegal contained therein. Then there is the time it would take to check such devices to find any infringing content. We already have long lead times at our ports of departure, this would only make it so much longer again. However, that doesn’t put it out of the realm of possibility.

The agreement also proposes an international copyright governing organisation, separate to the World Trade Organisation and the United Nations, ” a global police force, answerable to no-one, with intrusive powers that vastly exceed those currently available to adherents of the concepts of intellectual property.”

What happens with mashups then too, where content has been remixed. Will this governing organisation be manning all partner country ports to do the examining and assessing of the legality of a device’s content?

There is a big can of worms in this discussion paper and I have only touched on a few of them. What other issues can you see being raised by this and do you think it will ever make it into law?

I was catching up on The Chronicle : Wired Campus in my feed reader and found a reference to an article on the AbeBooks.Com site called “Found in Books“.

“Be careful what you use as a bookmark. Thousands of dollars, a Christmas card signed by Frank Baum, a Mickey Mantle rookie baseball card, a marriage certificate from 1879, a baby’s tooth, a diamond ring and a handwritten poem by Irish writer Katharine Tynan Hickson are just some of the stranger objects discovered inside books by AbeBooks.com booksellers.”

There’s an interesting story in a comment on the Chronicle’s article, “Found in old books, June 11 2008″.

“When I attended the same Univ that my Dad had 30 years earlier, he told me to go check out his dissertation. I did and found a $10 bill inside! I called him and told him. He had forgotten that — when he had recently earned his doctorate — he had placed that bill in the library’s copy of his dissertation, just to see if anyone ever read those things. 30 years later, it was still in there. I initialed it, replaced it, and returned the book.”

The only remarkable thing I can actually remember finding in a book was a  AU $50 note many years back when I worked in the Albert Shire Library Service (now part of the Gold Coast). There was also an occasional squashed fly or mosquito, and plenty of sand - a hazard for all libraries located near the beach.

Read the article on the AbeBooks site for much more interesting finds than mine, and take a look at the photo pool on Flickr for “Things found in Books“.  Some second-hand bookstores and libraries have set up displays of things they find in books, so why not do the same thing online in Flickr.  I’d love to see some of the quirkier finds on Flickr, and what books they were found in.  How about a campaign to grow the pool on Flickr?

I couldn’t find any in the pool with a creative commons license to show here, so please consider using a CC licence if you contribute.

Image used here is by DG Jones, reproduced under a Creative Commons Licence.

Education.au has released their market research report on Educators and ICT Usage. This survey of the use of technology by Australian teachers was commissioned to inform future roles and responsibilities for Education Network Australia (edna). edna is a repository of thousands of online resources for education, training and research.

If you don’t want the whole 108p. straight up, an executive summary is also available.

Things about librarians in the report:

• Awareness of edna (Education Network Australia) was higher among librarians (78%) than almost half of the educators (47%) surveyed.
• The computer and the Internet were vital tools for many participants, especially for librarians and IT specialists.

… and some responses about libraries ….

“The library is not so much a physical facility, more of a database” p. 103

“I think contact with the library is of critical importance to anything we do as lecturers, and the same is true for students.” p. 103

“And don’t forget keeping the libraries informed. They are vital to the way others in TAFE are informed about these sorts of things.” p.102 in reference to edna.

“Our librarians are absolutely wonderful. You go to them for help, and they immediately ask have you tried this? If they know about edna, everyone will eventually know about it.” p.98

“All the course work is on-line. I don’t even go to libraries any more. I rely totally on the Internet.” p.55

For those of us involved in providing professional support to educators the report includes responses to a question asking about types of support in the use of online services and tools would be most valuable. The key it seems is flexibility, and not too hard a sell. Short, hands-on demonstrations are valued. (p. 40.)

If you want to be part of a Guiness World Record Attempt - for the most software downloaded in 24 hours, then pledge here to download Firefox 3 when it launches on 17 June.

Given that they are aiming for a 24 hour period, I guess the New Zealanders and Aussies will be waiting for a while tomorrow morning for the official release.

Mozilla are even encouraging punters to throw a Mozilla party . Looks like there are 3450 partygoers who have taken them up over 566 parties . I’m not sure what is sadder - the obvious marketing/brand awareness attempt, the fact that punters have taken them up, or that if you divide 3450 by 566 you get just 6.9 people at each party.

OpenAustralia.org was launched last night. It is a collaborative, grassroots effort styled on TheyWorkForYou. in the UK.

Want to know when your local Federal member speaks in the House of Representatives? Enter your postcode and then you can be notified via RSS every time they speak in Parliament. You can even check out the Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level for the readability of their speeches. Records go back to 2006.

Interestingly, the FAQs mention that they are keeping some “silly statistics” like “how often your member has uses alliterative phrases like “she sells seashells”. Why? Mainly in the hope that people will read deeper than just the headlines and numbers and actually have a look at the speeches. The other reason is because when TheyWorkForYouused to publish rankings of the most verbose politicians, staffers used to try to rig it by getting their bosses to ask incredibly rambling questions.