The Australian Bureau of Statistics released a snapshot yesterday, as part of Library & Information Week, detailing several facts about library usage in this country including:

46% of Australians aged over 18 years visited a library in 2006
72,600 Australians reported unpaid involvement in libraries and archives in April 2007
Libraries were the second most attended cultural venue [...]

Oops, almost missed it Today marks the start of Library and Information Week 2008, running through to Sunday, 25th May. There’s a bunch of events planned including, but not restricted to:

National Simultaneous Storytime
National Library Technicians Day
Biggest Morning Tea @ your library

Please comment on what your library is doing this week.

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 [...]

Back in September 2006, Gillian Hallam asked us all to contribute data for the Nexus survey, to discover more about the Australian LIS workforce. Nexus 2 has arrived and the aim of this survey is to gather data from institutions on workforce planning, staff development policies and practices.
If you are not a library manager, check if [...]

Last Saturday Tim Spalding, from LibraryThing, posted about how you can use Google Book Search as a source of cover images. You can read all about it at the Thingology blog. Tim says that the code is a little rough, but it does provide a working example.
With this technique for getting book covers from Google [...]

Today I’ve released an updated version of our popular Aussie Library Blogs page. The page is now built dynamically created using a WordPress plugin that I’ve created with the assistance of the other THALI members. This new way of managing the list of Aussie Library Blogs is exciting in a number of ways including:

It is [...]

Late last month tango posted about a report on Australia’s Internet filter. It sparked some discussion and one of the main points was that we, those in the discussion, believe that user education is more important than filtering.
With this in mind it was interesting to read on The Australian IT website an article entitled “E-security [...]

The Australian Library Journal is editing a special issue on web 2.0 and the library and information science profession. The issue is being put together by a couple of folk responsible for the recent Beyond the Hype Symposium in Qld.
Guest Editors: Helen Partridge and Clare Thorpe
Contact: Helen Partridge Email: h.partridge at qut dot edu dot [...]

The ALIA National Simultaneous Storytime is on a bit earlier this year, Wednesday 21 May 2008. From their recent update:

National Simultaneous Storytime 2007
Wednesday, 21 May 2008 at 11:00am
We are thrilled to announce that the National Simultaneous Storytime book for 2008 is Arthur by Amanda Graham and illustrated by Donna Gynell!
The book is [...]

In today’s Higher Education supplement there are two articles, here and here, dealing with the replacement to the now defunct RQF process. The replacement is called Excellence in Research for Australia, and will be jointly crafted by the Australian Research Council and the Department of Innovation, Industry, Science and Research.  These also relate to the [...]