This week the new-look ARROW Discovery Service was launched featuring faceted browsing, tag clouds and access to more statistics such as the most popular authors and institutions.  The ARROW Discovery Service includes metadata records harvested from institutional research repositories across Australia and from the Australasian Digital Thesis Program.
Faceted searching enables results to be refined by [...]

The Australian Society of Authors has published a report on Educational Publishing in Australia. The report is based on a survey of educational writers carried out in 2007 and early 2008 and states that since 2000, writers’ conditions have deteriorated due to onerous contractual conditions from a smaller pool of publishers. The impact of digital [...]

Librarians in research and academia are keeping a close eye on changes to Research Assessment under the new Government. Michael Jubb from the UK based Research Information Blog has a post about how the new Excellence in Research for Australia (ERA), replacing the Research Quality Framework (RQF) compares to what’s happening in the UK -
What’s [...]

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 [...]

On Library Lovers’ Day I attended Open Access Collections at Customs House in Brisbane. This was an APSR event held in association with QULOC and the University of Queensland.
I found the presentations very stimulating, especially Peter Murray-Rust’s in which he talked about open data and highlighted some useful sites to investigate further. It [...]

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 [...]

Scott Carlson of The Chronicle of Higher Education - Information Technology asks some young(ish) librarians about what will change and what needs to change.
These are the questions he asked them:

What is the future of the book?
Will there be a reference desk?
What information services will be performed by libraries in the future, and what information services [...]

Thursday, October 11, 2007

9:30 AM to 5:00 PM

Library2.0 UnconferenceLibrary2.0 - using Web 2.0 social networking tools (blogs, wikis, feeds, podcasts, virtual reality, instant messaging, LibraryThing, MySpace, Facebook, Second Life etc) in Libraries….

State Library of Queensland

Stanley Place
South Bank, Brisbane, Queensland

 
On the day before the unconference, the Queensland University Libraries Office of Cooperation ICT Working Party is [...]

If you want to see a real life example of a library using a social bookmarking service as a content management system…
Massachusetts Institute of Technology Libraries is using del.icio.us to manage the virtual reference page on their website. Librarians add a bookmark in del.icio.us and give each one tags to assign the link to particular categories [...]

The Australian Partnership for Sustainable Repositories (APSR) has two events on the horizon for those interested in research data. Later this month at the University of Queensland, “eResearch Australasia 2007″ focuses on raising awareness for eResearch activities, information sharing and networking, Australian and regional eResearch initiatives.
The program, dates and registration information is available from the event [...]