Or at least a venue….

The unorganising committee for #LibCampOz12 would like to welcome and thank The University of Melbourne Library for agreeing to be our venue sponsor.

The University is located on the edge of the CBD. It is easily accessible by tram, train and bus and casual parking is available.  The library is centrally located within the picturesque grounds and we will be providing maps and tram routes you can take to get there.

Hopefully this will be the first of many more exciting announcements about Library Camp Australia 2012.

There is still time to get involved- please contact Kim or myself if you wish to be part of the unorganising team.

libcampoz the national library unconference which kicked off in Perth and has been held in Adelaide and other States is making its way to Melbourne. I would encourage you to put the date in your calendars.

I recently attended Libcampoz (Perth) and had a great time. Participating the unconference was invigorating.  Benefits include:

• flexibility (choose on the day the sessions you want to attend)
• networking (you can network your socks off)
• topics voted on by participants (on the day we decide what to talk about)
• create your own session (you can create a session for the day – if the people want it it will be in)

It will be free and will be held on the day after VALA2012.

News

• Date – Friday 10 Feb
• Location – Melbourne
• Venue is yet to be confirmed

The website for the last library camp has been archived and the new logo is ready. So watch this space as more information comes to hand. We are calling on local library folk in Melbourne to join the un-organising group. If you have some time we would love to hear from you. Contact me and we will get you signed up for the wiki. To all those lovely interstate people who have indicated your interest in un-organising we will be in touch soon.

A few weeks back I attended the Gold Coast regional meeting for ALIA’s National Advisory Congress. The actual congress is next week in Alice Springs, but the minutes from the regional meetings are now available on the ALIA website. The focus is professional development. Skimming through the minutes of these regional meetings it’s clear that members want to participate in professional development, but are somewhat disenchanted with the record keeping required for the ALIA PD scheme. Another key theme is that there is not enough incentive to belong to the scheme. A couple of letters after your name and a certificate is not enough for most. They would like to see it linked to some career or remuneration outcomes.

It’s important I think, to distinguish here that generally members are motivated to develop their skills and learn new things, they are just not motivated to do the record keeping to obtain a certificate and a couple of postnomials.

I have been audited once for the PD scheme and I have to report that it wasn’t a whole lot of fun pulling together the year’s evidence that was scattered in print and electronic sources at home and work. The PD scheme has an online service for recording points, but it does not provide a way to collate the certificates, reading lists and learning reflections that are required come audit time.

Accumulating points is actually easy – it’s the record keeping that is a pain.

Here are a few ideas that might make the process easier:

• Record your learning reflections in a blog – use a tag such as “professional development” to make it easy to identify them. Writing counts towards points too – so keep up the blogging
• You probably already have PD events in your electronic calendar (Outlook or similar) – use a tag or category to identify them as relevant events for your PD scheme
• Record the number of points/hours as you go in your blog post or comments fields of your social bookmarks
• List all your professional reading as you go in a social bookmarking site (Connotea, Citeulike) or use Zotero. Delicious is probably not going to be enough as you will want to record bibliographic citations. Once again use a tag to differentiate them from your other bookmarks
• Use a wiki instead to create your own professional development portfolio. In addition to recording your reflections and professional readings you could scan certificates and upload them to the wiki. WordPress also allows pdf files to be uploaded so could be used in a similar way.
• Don’t duplicate record-keeping. If your workplace requires you to complete feedback forms on PD events, keep a copy for the PD scheme too.

Do you have any tips for making record-keeping easier?

Minutes from the Regional meetings are available from the ALIA site : 2008 National Advisory Congress

We had a great night out at Bhoj for the first annual Australian Library Bloggers’ Dinner.

In the scenic and relaxing environment of Docklands, on a balmy Melbourne summer’s night, Libraries Interact bloggers (past and present) Kathryn, Peta, CW, snail, Morgan and Michelle were joined by friends Mike, Genevieve and Tania for beautiful food, great conversation and stirling company.

Check out the photos on Flickr.

Now onto the serious stuff – VALA starts tomorrow with several of the Libraries Interact team presenting papers, showcases and some doing both! Watch this space for reports and blog post links on VALA sessions over coming days.

Last Wednesday I was fortunate to be able to attend a seminar on E-Repositories presented by the ALIA Information Science SA and the Joint University Library Staff Development Group, which is a collaboration between the three Universities here in Adelaide.

The speakers were:

• Katie Blake, from the ARROW Project
• Jenny Quilliam, from the University of South Australia
• Amanda Nixon, from Flinders University
• Steve Thomas, from the University of Adelaide

It was an excellent afternoon and I came away with a full page of notes and things to think about. Some of the issues I’d like to highlight here.

Vendor Support vs. Community Support

There was some discussion about the benefits of vendor support vs. the benefits of community support. Of the four speakers two were talking about the ARROW project and the associated commercial VITAL software from VTLS. The others concentrated on DSpace, which is an open source application. This is an interesting area which I think could be explored further. For example, in what circumstances would an organisation choose a commercial product over an open source product, and what benefits do they perceive as gaining by making such a choice?

Creating a sense of ownership

There continues to be a debate, often heated, about how content in a repository should be organised. Should it be organised into strict collections that reflect the structure of the institution, or should it be more “organic” and driven by those submitting to the repository. By having those submitting to the repository design the structure a sense of ownership can be developed and this can in turn assist in gaining acceptance of the repository. Others feel that such a structure will make data migration more complex at a future date and makes it harder to find content. I look forward to watching both systems of organisation evolve.

Copyright management

Copyright is a very big issue with repositories. Strategies need to be put into place to assist those submitting items to the repository to ensure that the content they add is copyright cleared. One example provided during the seminar was a collection of over 30 documents that were submitted for inclusion. Unfortunately only a small fraction could be used because they were publisher copies which are not allowed for inclusion in a repository by some publishers.

Access Controls and Embargos

Considerations such as the following are increasingly being thought about:

• What do you do with items that should be made available to the university community only?
• What do you do with items that are commercially sensitive and should not be made public?
• What do you do with items that can not be put into a repository now, but can in the future once an embargo period has passed?

There are no “hard and fast” rules for addressing these issues and they are, I suspect, going to need to be addressed by all universities that have repositories. These types of issues are particularly relevant to universities in Australia who are trying to come to terms with the impending Research Quality Framework.

Handles and persistent identifiers

The issue of handles was raised. A handle, or other persistent identifier, essentially provides a layer of abstraction between the repository and the URL used to retrieve a specific item. It is useful in ensuring the item has a URL for the entire life of the item. If, for example, a university changed repository solutions the URL used to gain access to the repository may change. By updating the record in the handle system for the item the handle URL will continue to be valid. A similar persistent identifier scheme is the Digital Object Identifier.

I would like to take this opportunity to offer my thanks to the speakers, and to those that organised the day. I think all of the participants gained something from attending.

ALIA is just getting underway with regional meetings for their National Advisory Congress with meetings across the country. The first was in Alice Springs last week, with Brisbane tomorrow, and the rest are planning to meet during August. I recall going to the Sydney one last year at which a dozen or so folk attended and found it useful for catching up with colleagues and getting a feel for what was happening with ALIA. The National meeting will be held in conjunction with the ALIA conference, click06, on 19 September.