Merry Christmas everyone!As the year draws to a close, there are just under 12 months left till the exciting and innovative ALIA New Librarians Symposium, to be held at CQ Functions, Melbourne. The dates for this event are Friday December 5 to Saturday December 6, so mark them in your diary. It will be summer in beautiful Melbourne, so it is the ideal time to catch up with old friends, as well as making new ones. The call for abstracts is now open, and we encourage you to read on and see how you can contribute to the success of the 4th ALIA New Librarians Symposium.
The Symposium will showcase new and innovative developments by addressing various issues which affect new graduates and students from all library and related sectors. The theme of Breaking Barriers has been developed to stimulate discussion and debate, as well as encourage innovation, best practice and information sharing. The Organising Committee is dedicated to providing an inspiring and challenging programme for all delegates. The Symposium provides a forum for delegates to network, exchange ideas and learn from each other, as well as opportunities to tour best-practice sites, visit trade exhibitions and enjoy social activities.
What are you doing with your extra day in 2008, February 29? Would you like to spend it participating in an introductory leadership workshop, whilst being exposed to the knowledge and wisdom of many leaders in the library and information industry? A group of fellow Victorian Aurorians have put together a cost recovery workshop for you to, “Leap into Leadership” that allows you to gain an experience to drive your leadership learning further. The workshop will be led by distinguished Victorian based facilitator Greg Cook, who has conducted leadership training for the State Library of Victoria and various Public Library Services across Victoria. There will be a panel session where some noteable (to be announced soon) leaders from a variety of library sectors will share their personal insights on leadership with you. The aims of the workshop are to:
provide a framework to assist participants to identify their own leadership styles;
provide role models by having a panel of highly experienced leaders talk about their leadership;
provide opportunity for participants to work in small groups to discuss and consolidate their learning with the support of experienced leaders.
The workshop is aimed at participants who are new to leadership and wish to develop their leadership style. This is a rare opportunity to learn about leadership with respected industry leaders and a highly qualified facilitator. Librarians, Library Technicians, recent graduates and students from ALL sectors are encouraged to participate. Other important details:
When: 29th Februrary 2008
Where: State Library of Victoria
Time: 8.30 for 9am sharp start - till about 5pm
Cost: $130 for ALIA Members and $172 for Non ALIA Members The registration form is available at. http://www.alia.org.au/groups/aliavic/Payment will confirm your registration. Participant numbers are limited, so you will need to apply quickly The venue has been kindly sponsored by the State Library of Victoria Workshop Organisers: Margie Anderson, Tania Barry, Chris Kelly, Paula Kelly, Beth McKenzie, Jill Stephens, Michelle Thomason - the workshop is run under the ALIA Victoria Banner
For more information: email: Jill Stephens - [email protected] (remove the no spam) - Subject: Leap into Leadership Workshop
A report [pdf, 325k] on Public Library usage for 2005/06 has recently become available (or at least I received a recent notification). The 35 page report is a straightforward read covering the work of public libraries across the country:
“Access to services is provided through a network of 1,522 public library service points (1,439 fixed point libraries and 83 mobile libraries) throughout Australia, one service point for every 13,537 persons.”
There was a total of 178,740,362 items loaned, or 8.7 per capita; reported information enquiries numbered 10,194,879; and 48% of the population is a registered member of a public library. There’s a total of 6,456 public access Internet terminals and public libraries employ 8,107 staff (FTE).
Western Australia’s ALIAWest has joined the blogosphere with Biblia. Billed as “A virtual conversation for librarians in Western Australia”, it hopes to make Biblia (a newsletter , once upon a time - see the newsletter’s archives) “more accessible to today’s generation of library workers”.
I look forward to hearing more about ALIAWest events and WA library events in general (hopefully I’ll be participating, too!).
Oh, and this has got me wondering - how does your local ALIA group communicate with you?
Not only will this give you a different perspective on the news we are all reading and commenting on, but it may also help you to stay in touch with developments that may not be covered in the English-language library world. It can work in reverse too, helping those in countries where English is not their first language and there are fewer local blogs to subscribe to the major English-language blogs.
Find new blogs
The first step is to find them. I discovered the following translations for our blog genre -
English - biblioblogger
French - biblioblogueur
German - biblioblogosphäre
Japanese - ﾌﾞﾛｸﾞ(図書館) blog library (library blogger)
Search for the translated word and you’ll find many blogs in each of these languages.
Yahoo! Pipes
Note: The next step is to either create or clone a pipe in Yahoo! Pipes. Working with Yahoo! Pipes can be a little bit technical, so you might feel more comfortable just subscribing to a translated feed that has already been created.
So, what exactly is Yahoo! Pipes? It’s basically a visual mashup generator, you put in RSS or other feeds, add images, translate, or other transformations, and it gives you a new feed at the end. It is extremely versatile and because it has a visual interface, and you can copy feeds (or Pipes) made by others, this makes it easy to start to use.
First steps
Take a look at a Pipe that I created to translate the Bibliobsession 2.0 blog from French to English. You’ll probably notice one thing right away, that the translation is not very good, but machine translation is generally problemmatic, especially when dealing with technical or specialised topics. However, if you click on each article, the translations are generally better.
You can either subscribe to the translated blog as is, or you can clone the Pipe to add subscriptions to other blogs, or choose other languages.
Modifying the Pipe
If you want to have a go at modifying the Pipe, choose clone. You can then edit the source to look at the parts that make up the translation. As you can see below, there’s not a lot to it. Feed goes in, gets mashed up a bit, translated, and comes out -
To make your own, either change the feed address to another blog, or try changing the selected languages.
And voilà, you have a translated feed. Have you used Yahoo! Pipes for an interesting project? Are there blogs you would like to see translated? Does anyone want to read this blog in another language? Tell us about it in the comments!
Thursday the 29th of November is a Day of Action to improve funding for New South Wales Public Libraries. According to an ALIA press release, “funding for these libraries has decreased from 23.6% of the total operating costs of public libraries in 1980 to 7.8% in 2004-05 with further reductions in years since then. The State budget for 2006-07 included a massive cut of $1,023,000 (4.16%).”
Public Libraries New South Wales (PLNSW) has some practical things you can do to support the campaign on their website.
Sign the petition
Put up their posters
Show the community what cuts to services may mean in real terms.
Their suggestions for this last one include removing high profile parts of the collection for the day, declining any requests for interlibrary loans, and leaving the news books display bare.
At Parliament House, Macquarie St., Sydney there will be a protest rally at 11.00am. According to the PLNSW website this starting time is yet to be confirmed.
There are now a number of sites which have developed their own ‘23 things’ type staff development activities. In many cases these programs are openly accessible and encourage anyone to join in.
This one really got the ball rolling, with a 9-week program for staff at PLCMC. It listed 23 Things (or small exercises) that you can do on the web to explore and expand your knowledge of the Internet and Web 2.0.
There is a long list of sites that are doing similar programs and many of these will be helpful for the motivated self-learner or for those tailoring a similar program for their library. On the list are a heap of Australian sites, including those participating in the state-wide program in Victoria.
This is a sample of sites from different sectors that have modified the 23 things program (not all Australian)..
“Learn More is a series of self-paced discovery entries for library staff interested in venturing out on the social web. Each post is meant as a short introduction to a different social website, tool, or concept. It might not be ground-breaking information to veteran readers of the blogosphere, but I hope each brief summary will act as a gentle nudge for newcomers to social networking.”
Libraries Australia 2007-2010 strategic plan is now available and according to a message to the LA discussion list - comments and feedback are welcome.
There is an environmental scan and some interesting activities spread out for the next few years including these 3 that caught my eye:
Expand exposure of ANBD content including investigation of potentially for mutually beneficial relationships with social networking sites such as the Open Library project and LibraryThing
investigate use of link resolvers or other mechanisms to facilitate discovery pathways from services like Google Scholar to electronic journal articles
Implement NLA-OCLC agreement including ANBD-WorldCat data synchronisation
This is well worth a scan, if not a detailed read. For non-subscribers to the discussion list, contact details are available on the website to submit your comments.
The AAF project is working to develop infrastructure to facilitate trusted electronic communications within and between research and higher education institutions to support world-class research. The idea is that each institution in the federation would trust the authentication credentials of other members’ users to provide improved, authorised acccess. The AAF model for federated access management uses Shibboleth and Public Key Infrastructure (PKI).
The Australian Access Federation has developed an animation to introduce the concept of federated access management.
On the 10th of October, the Queensland University Libraries Office of Cooperation (QULOC) hosted a seminar at the Garden’s Point campus of Queensland University of Technology. The seminar was organised by the ICT Working Party and featured presentations, demonstrations and hands-on sessions focused on social software.
Despite a stormy Brisbane morning there was a full-house of attendees, many with umbrellas. The Working Party is sharing most of the presentations with the wider community on a blog called Librarian Too. You can use the commenting feature on the blog to ask a question of the presenters.
Topics included wikis, social networking, social bookmarking and virtual worlds. One presenter, Andrew Bennett from UQ, was asked “What if our SOE went web 2.0?” and came up with a great presentation that considered how we might work if we used Google Docs or Zoho instead of our usual desktop-based office applications.
PS - just wanted to let you know, that I am currently the convenor of the QULOC ICT Working Party, and I was also a presenter on the day. But it is still worth checking out the presentations. Lint’s own Kathryn Greenhill also features…
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