News arising - forwarded from the RMIT students mailing list (and also from the ALIA Vic list) I have received the following information about a Victorian public libraries initiative which I thought should be posted here, where all the 2.0 crowd tend to gather.
Dear colleagues
What’s the best part of a conference? Most people agree it’s [...]

public library closures in the UK that is. As I understand, despite parliamentary select committees and numerous initiatives, costs of the library service keep rising, while book stocks are decreasing and the public are becoming disenchanted with their public libraries, and the result has been lots of library closures. This article in the Times last [...]

I’m not blogging the conference, nor am I going, unfortunately, but this item caught my attention recently … I thought I’d love to attend, to hear new ideas and celebrate our profession and the people in it..  So perhaps you will be interested, too - either to register (if registrations haven’t closed), or to conduct a similar [...]

Childrens’ Book Week is almost upon us. I asked my teenagers what books they loved when they were really little. Out of the hundreds of books they read, looked at and listened to in their early years, these three struck a chord. (The links are to Librarything - if you haven’t tried that out, you [...]

If you are not subscribed to ALA TechSource, you may have missed Michael Stephens post on recent developments in the US where libraries are being threatened with report to the US Justice Dept. if they provide access to Flickr on their public use computers. In addition, public libraries that are open to children (which [...]

I love the sense of community that blogs can create.  It’s brainstorming - internet style, really, with all the value that we get from the brainstorming process, as well as that personal (yuk hate the word) bonding. 
I’ve found a corollary of this process… where the brainstorming happens in person and then the results are shared on [...]

The filtering debate is hotting up with the announcement that the Federal Government will provide every Australian family with a free Internet filter. (more…) As part of this same package, the National Library of Australia is required to install filtering on all their public PCs, with the option of disabling the filter for adult [...]

After years of creating my own homepage with pure HTML coding and FTP software, blogging and other social software does change the way in which information is being transmitted and shared. As a MIS student, a casual librarian and a casual library clerk in the public library sector, my research studies how blogs can enhance [...]

Public libraries throughout Australia face an imminent ‘age wave’ as the baby boomer generation reaches retirement age. Retirees and older people have traditionally been an important target market for public libraries [people over the age of 65 use libraries 5 times as often as the rest of us]. The impact of a greatly [...]