Last year Indigenous Literacy Day raised over $250,000 to address literacy problems in remote indigenous communities. Wednesday the 3rd of September is ILD 2008. Funds raised on the day through participating
booksellers’ and publishers’ sales, school events and other donations will be put to work at the Fred Hollows Foundation in the provision of literacy [...]

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.

The Sydney Morning Herald is today reporting that Leichhardt Public Library, located in Sydney’s Inner West, has cancelled a planned exhibition about Israel and Palestine -
“Al-Nakba”, a pictorial exhibition about Palestine and Israel,  should have  opened at Leichhardt municipal library last Friday.
But after the police visit on Thursday night, it was suddenly cancelled the next morning.
The exhibition [...]

September is a lovely time of year to visit Brisbane.. And this September, you can attend the Open Access and Research Conference and hear speakers on topics such as evolving publishing models, repository management, e-Research, policy development, and legal and technical issues.
Early bird registration is available until the 25th of July. The conference will be [...]

The Western Australian Library Unconference is on again this year. This year the theme 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.
DATE: Friday 22 August 2008
TIME: 9:30am - 5pm
VENUE: State [...]

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 [...]

Another professional development opportunity at the State Library of Queensland. And it’s free too.
Power to the people through public access computing: a presentation and workshop by Dr Karen Fisher
Dr Karen Fisher – Associate Professor, The Information School, University of Washington, Seattle, USA
Karen’s research and teaching focus is information behavior (social and cognitive aspects of how [...]

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 [...]