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 [...]

The ARROW (Australian Research Repositories Online to the World) Discovery Service has had a branding makeover. The ARROW project concluded in December 2008, and the new name is ARO (Australian Research Online) – a fortuitously homophonic new name. Update your bookmarks as the URL has changed although at present a redirect is handling traffic. Similarly the [...]

It is now possible to create your own ‘book’ of Wikipedia articles and either download it as a PDF, or order a bound copy. That adds a whole new dimension to collection development, and opens up possibilities for creating open educational resources. Help:Books – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Currently only Wikipedia editors can save books [...]

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 [...]

The Library 2.0 Gang is running a competition for the best library mashup idea.  It doesn’t have to be a working prototype, just an idea of how libraries could use mashups to provide awesome service to their users.  “The only restriction being that it must include library data or functionality somewhere within it.” The competition [...]

Some of the work that the THALI has put into the Libraries Interact blog is featured in a chapter in the just released Library Mashups: Exploring New Ways to Deliver Library Data published by Information Today, Inc. The chapter focuses on the three plugins that we have developed to extend the Libraries Interact blog and [...]

Do you have a story to tell about how you are using creative commons licenses? Or maybe you’d like to find some examples of how others are using CC licenses. Case Studies – CC Wiki Some examples: Ancient Free Gardeners – “Open content licensing was chosen as the band saw the great potential in using [...]

On 21st April, the World Digital Library was launched. The World Digital Library brings together digitised primary documents including rare books, maps, manuscripts, films and photographs, from countries around the world, with content available in Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish. Inspired by James Billington from the Library of Congress in 2004, it [...]