On top of the VALATech Boot Camp, VALA will also be holding the L-Plate Series, the details of which have just been announced. This year it will only be 1/2 day long, to be held on Monday afternoon, 8th February, before VALA commences. The program will comprise a series of 1/2 hour overviews, intended to [...]

Twitter has been all atwitter today about the ISP filtering campaign in Australia. The Federal Government announced today that the pilot ISP filtering trials have concluded. The Government has considered them a great success and have announced more details of their plans to “improve safety online”. Rather than rehash all the details and responses to [...]

Colleagues, I have been here at the Realising our Broadband Future forum for the past two days and many of you have seen the twittering at #bbfuture. Places at this conference have been by invitation only and I have been pleased and proud to represent our profession and ALIA here – amongst the government, technical [...]

As an adjunct to the VALA 2010 Conference, a series of special ‘techie’ sessions is being run under the title of VALAtech Boot Camp. The five sessions will be run over 4 days and include: OCLC API Mashathon Video: Negotiating the Online and Mobile Space Semantic Web APIs Open Source Content Management Systems – Joomla! [...]

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. [...]

This just in from VALA: “****Information technology award**** VALA is inviting nominations for its most prestigious award, the Robert D. Williamson Award 2010, and we’d like them by Monday 15 November 2009 (but keep them secret!). This biennial award, always a surprise to its recipient, is presented to an individual or organisation who or which [...]

In the latest round of who is buying who, Facebook has purchased FriendFeed, for an (officially) undisclosed amount. Check out the reports on the acquisition and what will happen to FriendFeed at Tech Crunch, FriendFeed blog, Read/Write Web and Mashable.

VALA 2010 will be held in Melbourne from February 9 to 11, 2010 and the program is now available on the website.  The keynote speakers are Marshall Breeding from Vanderbilt University, Karen Calhoun from OCLC, Stephanie Orlic from the Musee de Louvre, Lee Rainie of the Pew Internet Project, McKenzie (Ken) Wark from the Eugene [...]

Have librarians got Google Goggles on? Are we not using other search engines/strategies as much as we used to for general internet searching? I’m not really thinking about specific database here – more just what do we turn to for searching the free internet. iLibrarian had a post recently 100+ Alternative Search Engines You Should [...]

ALA Annual Conference 2009 is finishing up in the US on the 15th, after 8 days of action packed library fun in Chicago.  If you have missed seeing some of the reports coming out, I can highly recommend you check out the following, for conference blogging and reports. ALA Annual Conference 2009 Website Library Journal [...]