Yes its back yet again!  Library Day in the Life Round 8, will run from Monday 30th January to Sunday 5th February.

You can share a day, days or your whole librarian week, through blogging, tweeting, pictures, video or however else you are inspired.

To participate, register at the Library Day in the Life wiki and then record your (choose time period) in the life of you as a librarian, for others to discover the joys of how varied work as a librarian is, both here and around the world.

Then watch the same wiki, to learn about what other librarians around the world do in their respective jobs. It is very inspirational!

These reports were produced a little while ago, but they are worth the look.

The International Federation of Library Associations (IFLA) produces the IFLA World Report a biennial series that reports on the state of countries of the world relating to freedom of information, freedom of expression and other related issues.

So I checked out the 2010 report on Australia, fully expecting that I would know everything that was there.  Not so. The report was quite interesting and reported on numbers of libraries – broken down by type, libraries and the Internet – including filtering used and national policy towards it, legal issues, open access, social issues, ethics and more.

You can view individual or multiple country reports, using the Google Map to access them, either in full or customised form. You can also access the Analysis and Conclusions of the World Report 2010 and comment on the whole report.

Well worth a view and an interesting insight into libraries and information worldwide.

Yet another post about VALA

Kate Davis and her partner in crime, Carolyn McDonald, are working to complete their VALA paper (they have an extension…honest guv! but they need lots of folk to complete their survey.

Full details can be found on Kate’s blog but briefly they are exploring the relationship between IT and libraries. Libraries are moving more and more online in ways that tend to go round their local IT outfits. Is this sort of behaviour a result of problems with IT depts understanding libraries or vice versa? Is there a disconnect between libraries and IT? It’s an interesting question and I know from my own background that the relationship between IT depts and libraries can be a tricky one, with each group having differing expectations of the other. Definitely an area rich for study.