There are lots of interesting things floating around in my RSS feeds, Yammer and Twitter about the role of librarians and MOOCs. Howard, Jennifer; For Libraries, MOOCs Bring Uncertainty and Opportunity, The Chronicle of Higher Education. The Chronicle of Higher Education (March 25, 2013). Here’s a quote…. “Ms. O’Brien had one piece of basic advice [...]

The first ‘unglued’ (crowd-funded rights to make a book free to the world in e-format) is available for download under a Creative Commons licence. Oral Literature in Africa by Ruth H. Finnegan. Read Jan Holmquist’s article at Tame the Web to learn more about Unglue It.  

  Definitely worth a look… And have a play with the ngram viewer. I used the terms ‘libraries’ and ‘librarians’. There was a peak in 1970s and a decline since then. Uh oh! Or does this just mean that those topics are now being written about in non-book formats?

Fresh from the press, a leaked presentation to Yahoo’s internal staff, has shown that amongst other things, they will be shutting down delicious, the pioneering social bookmarking website. Yahoo has laid off quite a few staff of late and as a result is consolidating its products: shutting down some, merging others and putting their emphasis [...]

Trove, the discovery layer for Australian library and digital collections, is now showing access conditions for individual libraries. The benefit of this enhancement is to inform users whether or not they can get access to the collections. Libraries that need to modify the access levels displayed against their holdings can do so through the Australian [...]

My daughter is in Grade 5 and has just completed a project on Leaders and Legends as part of a major unit at school. She did a short assignment on two legends from the sixties, a PowerPoint presentation on a political figure and a major assignment on Princess Grace. Which got me thinking about who [...]

With our usual love of trying new things we have started playing with paper.li which creates a daily ‘newspaper’ view of tweets. Not only does it gather the tweets but also features the media and content to which they link. Paper.li is in alpha release at present. Check out the widget in our sidebar and [...]

Have your say to help shape Australia’s cultural future. The Commonwealth Government has established a web forum to gather our ideas for the development of a national cultural policy. A discussion framework is available on the site as well as a transcript of Peter Garrett MP’s address to the National Press Club, in which he [...]

The organisation representing Victorian Public Libraries in matters of advocacy and collaboration rebranded themselves earlier this year.  The group formerly known as Viclink is now the Public Libraries Victoria Network (PLVN). Part of this rebranding has included the creation of the PLVN website, where you can find information about PLVN, Victorian public libraries and more. [...]

Last year we reported that the National Library of Australia’s newspaper digitisation project had kicked off and that one of its features was that users could correct mistakes in the optical character recognition process. A review of this crowdsourcing has been available for some time, but only just came to my attention via eGov.au Rose [...]