ALIA will be making a joint submission with CAUL and other library organisations to the  Digital Economy Future Directions Consultation Paper. All members - including those who attended ALIA Information Online and heard Senator Conroy invite us to make a submission - are asked to submit any comments, case studies and suggestions relating to the Digital Economy Future [...]

In early 2008, Flickr launched the Commons to showcase the public photo collections of libraries, museums and archives from around the world. The Library of Congress was the first to start adding their collections and New York Public Library (probably) the most recent. The two main objectives of the Commons are to increase access to [...]

The Dept. of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy has launched a blog to gather Australians’ thoughts and ideas about the digital economy.  The blog will apparently only be ‘open’ for two weeks, so get over there now if you want to share your ideas in this type of forum, and subscribe. There should be [...]

We have a very happy and excited author here at Libraries Interact. Kathryn Greenhill has shared her very exciting news on her personal blog, but we want to make a fuss about her too. Kathryn has been awarded the VALA Travel Scholarship and will be heading off to the United States and Canada next year [...]

If you have been living under a rock, maybe you haven’t heard that the Shanachie Tour Down Under is on right now. Erik Boekesteijn and Jaap van de Geer from the DOK, Delft Public Library are touring Australia, interviewing librarians and videoing some of the wonderful libraries in our country.  The videos are posted at their blog [...]

A project, Reference Extract, is currently in the planning stage to build a web search engine with the search capabilities of Google and the results credibility of a librarian.  In a very small nutshell, the idea is to use the data from QuestionPoint Service to provide the web resources cited by librarians and to rank [...]

A two-day workshop on the Public Knowledge Project (PKP) is being held on the 4th and 5th of December at the University of Sydney. Themes for this workshop are: scholarly publishing in the electronic environment business models and service frameworks establishing and maintaining publications and services experience sharing and establishing an Australian PKP community, and technical [...]

Unnameable Books, a Brooklyn bookstore, recently featured in Gothamist after they created an in-store display of all the oddities they have found in used books. Also mentioned in the post was the discoveries that AbeBooks have made over time. So let’s share – what have you found in returned library books/secondhand books or… your own books? I [...]

Australian Newspapers beta, was recently released and after a short visit to the Courier Mail classifieds of Tuesday 12th April 1864, I can say that the user interface looks great. Users can correct errors in the OCR (optical character recognition) process of scanning the newspapers, add tags, navigate easily between daily editions and pages, and [...]

Not sure how I missed this one, but a week or so back Tim Spalding of LibraryThing fame put up a call for librarians to lead a project to create an open classification system. Tim’s vision is for a free, modern, humble, collaborativley written and assigned scheme as an alternative to Dewey (and others, but [...]