In time for Library Week, the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) has launched a new information pack for public library staff, aimed at assisting them to promote safe internet use in-house, with a particular focus on children. Created with consultation from ALIA and staff from public libraries, the pack includes: Cybersmart Guide for Library [...]

The Live Search team at Microsoft recently announced that they are winding up their Live Search Books and Live Search Academic projects. “Given the evolution of the Web and our strategy, we believe the next generation of search is about the development of an underlying, sustainable business model for the search engine, consumer, and content [...]

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 [...]

Today is the first day of Information Awareness Month. The ‘month’ is a collaborative event supported by Australian Library & Information Association, Records Management Association Australia, the Institute of Information Management, the Australian Society of Archivists, the Health Information Management Association of Australia, the Public Record Office Victoria, and the National Archives of Australia. Its [...]

The National Library of Australia has launched "Library Labs", a wiki to share news with colleagues about what the NLA is doing in the redevelopment of digital library services using service-oriented architecture and open source software solutions. Comments, suggestions and feedback is welcome via the wiki. Four different prototypes are described including the NBD prototype, [...]

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 [...]

Alexis Madrigal at Wired Science reports that Google will start hosting terabytes of open source research data at http://research.google.com. The storage will be free to scientists and freely accessible to all.  The project is called Palimpsest and one of the planned datasets is the Hubble Space telescope data – all 120 terabytes. Google to Host [...]

About a month ago I wrote about a new initiative that we introduced, the THALI-Tags tag cloud. This morning an updated version of the site went live. The changes are: Using a new Yahoo! Pipe for the analysis of posts to extract terms; The PHP code used to generate the tag cloud was cleaned up [...]

In July last year I wrote about blogging platforms being used for a variety of information management purposes. I gave a few examples and CW reminded us of Casey Bisson’s use of WordPress to “unsuck” the OPAC and build a library catalogue. Since then, the WPopac has become Scriblio, and it is now being used for an [...]

It’s time to start planning events for National Simultaneous Storytime. Here is the update from ALIA…. Libraries, school classrooms, bookstores, childcare centres, coffee shops, mums and dads clubs and children’s hospitals are all invited to register for NSS ! The Australian Library and Information Assocation is delighted to announce that the 2007 NSS book is: [...]