IzRock’s Joseph (I think that’s his identity) and his mate Rene travel from Sydney to Canberra to visit the National Library of Australia to deposit zines and art books.

Their minds are boggled by the size and scope of the NLA’s archiving activities.

Check out the photo essay.

ALIA has aligned itself with Google, Inspire Foundation and Yahoo to present a statement on Internet filtering.
You can read Core Principles for Effective Action for a Safer Internet on the ALIA site.

As one tweeter put it…
@katiedatwork
smart partnering and a strong stance: http://www.alia.org.au/internetfiltering/ seriously impressed, @ALIANational.

VALA 2010 coverage continues on Day 3.

Live coverage of VALA2010 continues here…

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.

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 three key themes.

1. Keeping culture strong
2. Engaging the community
3. Powering the young

The discussion framework develops expands on these themes.

There are currently three questions on the forum and comments are already accumulating. They are about priorities for a policy, positive steps to advance Australian culture and an open-ended question about other important issues.

There are some great comments already on the site. Including one from Flying Pigeon who takes issue with the theme 3, says “I am young” and argues that it is “dangerous to the collective cultural development to single out a group for attention or benefit based on age”.

Other comments are quite detailed enumerating specific items to be included, and Hayley and Pinknantucket draw attention to libraries, archives and museums in theirs.

How about spreading the news with your library users, and encouraging and assisting those who are less web savvy to contribute to this discussion.

The consultation is not just limited to the web forum. Formal submissions can also be made. Check the site for details.

National Cultural Policy

And for our visual pleasure, this shot of the Mitchell Library, just one of many great cultural institutions in Australia.

Mitchell Library, Sydney (#24). Image by Christopher Chan. Used under CC license. Some rights reserved

And here are some “powered young” enjoying their culture, National Simultaneous Story Time at another great cultural institution, Mosman Library.

Storytime. Image by Mosman Library. Used here under a CC license. Some rights reserved.

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 that emerged ….

from Canberra & Brisbane meetings – an advocacy kit for all members, including statistics, quotes, fact sheets to promote the profession
from Gawler – a column or issue in Incite showcasing members who are doing a great job in advocacy or lobbying
from Hobart – the creation of an ALIA lobbying group
from Perth – change all membership fees to a low flat rate
from Darwin – more focus on the “I” in ALIA

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 writes  “Users have demonstrated a willingness to work towards the ‘common good’, to volunteer their time, energy, skill, knowledge and ideas and to be involved long term in a program of national historic significance. The collaborative activity from this new community is enhancing the quality of the data and therefore the accuracy of full‐text searching in a way that the National Library of Australia could never have achieved using its own resources alone.”

Many Hands Make Light Work: Public Collaborative OCR Text Correction in Australian Historic Newspapers by Rose Holley. (March 2009) ISBN 978‐0‐642‐27694‐0

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, is facilitating a session on what are the next 23 things. Have a great day libcampers.

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 sure if this is in action yet)

In September last year the Sydney Morning Herald reported that Angus & Robertson had installed an Espresso Book Machine (EBM) and that A& R would have up to 50 machines installed throughout Australian and New Zealand within a year.

Dymocks also had plans to launch on-demand printing within a year, according to the article.

This imminent rush of titles newly available for on-demand printing might see some more action in this area.

A&R, Dymocks and any other booksellers, if you are reading we’d love to hear how things are going in this area in Australia.

Any librarian from University of Melbourne reading – what’s the status of on-demand printing in the Baillieu Library?

Google Lets You Custom-Print Millions of Public Domain Books | Epicenter | Wired.com.