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 product consolidation

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 on yet others. You can read all the details and see the evidence for yourself at Tech Crunch.

A petition is underway via Twitter, to try and save delicious and in a very short time has picked up a lot of momentum. However, its hard to say whether it will have any impact.

So if it doesn’t and there is no way to save delicious, what do we do with all our bookmarks that we have fastidiously saved and organised there?  You have to love Wikipedia. They have a great list of social bookmarking sites for you to explore.

At least you now know what you are going to do on your holidays.     

Any recommendations?

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 Libraries Gateway.

More information on this functionality is available from the National Library’s website.

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.

Desert Leader uploaded to Flickr by Hamed Saber 15th December 2006, Attribution 2.0 Generic

Which got me thinking about who are the leaders and legends in the library world. Ranganathan and his laws come immediately to mind, as does Dewey.

Thinking about more modern times and I think it becomes more of a personal preference. I think about who I would have considered library leaders or legends a few years ago and things have changed. Although the leaders I looked to then may have moved on, they will continue to have a legend type status to me.

My leaders and legends these days include Warwick Cathro, Paul Hagon, Mal Booth and our own Kathryn Greenhill, all great Aussies in libraries. Further afield, its easy to create a list, beginning with Walt Crawford, David Lee King and Stephen Abrams. And that’s just from a couple of minutes of thinking.

But as librarians, we should be and are looking for new ideas and new inspiration, so I put it to you: Who are your library leaders and legends? Who are you looking to for your inspiration? I look forward to finding some of my own from the people you suggest.

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 click through to see the paper.

This one is based on the libsinteract twitter account and the accounts that it follows, but other ‘papers’ can be set up to prepare a roundup based on a hashtag.

Please take a look and tell us what you think.

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 identified three key themes.

1. Keeping culture strong
2. Engaging the community
3. Powering the young

The discussion framework develops expands on these themes.

There are currently three questions on the forum and comments are already accumulating. They are about priorities for a policy, positive steps to advance Australian culture and an open-ended question about other important issues.

There are some great comments already on the site. Including one from Flying Pigeon who takes issue with the theme 3, says “I am young” and argues that it is “dangerous to the collective cultural development to single out a group for attention or benefit based on age”.

Other comments are quite detailed enumerating specific items to be included, and Hayley and Pinknantucket draw attention to libraries, archives and museums in theirs.

How about spreading the news with your library users, and encouraging and assisting those who are less web savvy to contribute to this discussion.

The consultation is not just limited to the web forum. Formal submissions can also be made. Check the site for details.

National Cultural Policy

And for our visual pleasure, this shot of the Mitchell Library, just one of many great cultural institutions in Australia.

Mitchell Library, Sydney (#24). Image by Christopher Chan. Used under CC license. Some rights reserved

And here are some “powered young” enjoying their culture, National Simultaneous Story Time at another great cultural institution, Mosman Library.

Storytime. Image by Mosman Library. Used here under a CC license. Some rights reserved.

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).

PLVN Logo

Part of this rebranding has included the creation of the PLVN website, where you can find information about PLVN, Victorian public libraries and more.

It is early days and not much is happening yet, but it will grow with time and as more people come on board to contribute content.  This will be made easier by the website being built on Drupal.

What is worth noting at this stage, is PLVN’s publications page.  Apart from reports and statistics about PLVN and its member libraries, it also includes training, project and conference  reports, and other items of interest.

As I am on one of PLVN’s working groups, I will keep you posted on new developments as they occur.

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 Holley writes  “Users have demonstrated a willingness to work towards the ‘common good’, to volunteer their time, energy, skill, knowledge and ideas and to be involved long term in a program of national historic significance. The collaborative activity from this new community is enhancing the quality of the data and therefore the accuracy of full‐text searching in a way that the National Library of Australia could never have achieved using its own resources alone.”

Many Hands Make Light Work: Public Collaborative OCR Text Correction in Australian Historic Newspapers by Rose Holley. (March 2009) ISBN 978‐0‐642‐27694‐0

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 email address has changed for contacts too.

The discovery service now has three government contributors:

• Defence Science and Technology Organisation Scientific Publications Online
• Queensland Primary Industries and Fisheries eResearch Archive
• South Australia Health

…  and in the future we can look forward to Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) and Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation (ANSTO) content.

Australian Research Online – http://research.nla.gov.au

An openSearch plugin is available so you can add this to the drop down list of search targets in your browser toolbar (Firefox and IE), and an embed code snippet is provided for those wishing to add a search box to their website. — Search and Access page

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 permanently, but maybe in the future libraries will be able to select articles to suit particular needs for their communites and add the book to their virtual bookshelf.