Live coverage of VALA2010 continues here…
VALA2010 – Wednesday

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 [...]

Have your say to help shape Australia’s cultural future. The Commonwealth Government has established a web forum to gather our ideas for the development of a national cultural policy.
A discussion framework is available on the site as well as a transcript of Peter Garrett MP’s address to the National Press Club, in which he identified [...]

In September a program of regional meetings for ALIA members was conducted to gather members’ input to guide the professional organisation.
The consultation focussed on lobbying and advocacy, local issues and reviewing outcomes of the 2008 topic – professional development.
The reports from the regional meetings are now available on the ALIA website.
Just a few interesting ideas [...]

Last year we reported that the National Library of Australia’s newspaper digitisation project had kicked off and that one of its features was that users could correct mistakes in the optical character recognition process. A review of this crowdsourcing has been available for some time, but only just came to my attention via eGov.au
Rose Holley [...]

Library unconference fever has hit Perth again with libcampperth09 kicking off this morning.
Live coverage should be available from the unconference wiki using Coveritlive – although at time of writing it still says “Upcoming Event”.
In addition a Twitter fountain can be seen on Kathryn Greenhill’s blog “Librarians Matter”.
This year, Michael Stephens is attending and I believe, [...]

Wired reports that more than 2 million public domain books will soon be available for on-demand printing from Google Book Search in partnership with On Demand Books.
According to the On Demand Books site, the only locations in Australia are:

Angus and Robertson in Bourke St, Melbourne.
Baillieu Library University of Melbourne (Fall 2009 – so not [...]

The ARROW (Australian Research Repositories Online to the World) Discovery Service has had a branding makeover. The ARROW project concluded in December 2008, and the new name is ARO (Australian Research Online) – a fortuitously homophonic new name.
Update your bookmarks as the URL has changed although at present a redirect is handling traffic. Similarly the email [...]

Applications are open until 20th October 2009 for next year’s Aurora Leadership Institute. This is a fantastic opportunity to explore your leadership potential and learn about yourself and how you operate. It is not a management course, it is about leadership.
The institute is held in Thredbo in February – a charming time of the year [...]

It is now possible to create your own ‘book’ of Wikipedia articles and either download it as a PDF, or order a bound copy.
That adds a whole new dimension to collection development, and opens up possibilities for creating open educational resources.
Help:Books – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
Currently only Wikipedia editors can save books permanently, but maybe [...]