For several years now I have observed the increasing success of the Virtual International Day of the Midwife (an online conference for midwives) — Sarah Stewart’s “baby” so to speak.

Now there is one for anyone interested in the library world. Library 2.012 Worldwide Virtual Conference October 3 – 5, 2012. It is a free conference held online, in multiple time zones, over 2 calendar days (three if you take all the time zones into account.

It looks to be a much larger affair than VIDM with several strands of presentations being planned. The School of Library and Information Science (SLIS) at San José State University (http://slisweb.sjsu.edu/) is the founding conference sponsor. Opportunities for commercial sponsorship, and conference partner organisations are available.

The call for presentation proposals is open.

Sarah Stewart taking part in last year’s VIDM.

Image : Virtual International Day of the Midwife 2011 by Sarah M Stewart. Reproduced under a Creative Commons Licence.

Interested in Free Open Source Software in Libraries, but not sure what library-specific products are out there or where to begin? Have a bit of time to attend a free webinar? Then FOSS4Lib may be just what you are looking for …

In January, one of my favourite library technology bloggers, Peter Murray (who blogs as the Disruptive Library Technology Jester ) launched this brand new community site.

Peter describes the site like this:

The FOSS4Lib resource site for open source software in libraries was launched in January to help libraries decide IF and WHICH open source software is right for them in service to their patrons. Consultants specializing in library open source software created the FOSS4LIB self-guided readiness assessments to help libraries determine if open source software is right for them. The site also features a registry of software packages to help libraries find information about open source software service providers, events, and usage by peers.  Funded by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and supported LYRASIS Technology Services, FOSS4Lib is a community-run site where anyone with a valid e-mail address can register and update information about packages, service providers, events and software releases.

You can learn about FOSS4Lib at one of two introductory webinars timed to be convenient to Australian colleagues:

• April 18th from 10pm to 11pm Eastern U.S. Time (April 19 0200 to 0300 UTC)
• May 16th from 9pm to 10pm Eastern U.S. Time (May 17th 0100 to 0200 UTC)

Sign-up by e-mailing Peter.Murray@lyrasis.org and learn more at http://foss4lib.org/content/free-webinars-introducing-foss4lib

Thanks!

Heads up for an innovative professional development opportunity – the inaugural Intelligent Information Symposium, to be held in Sydney on 3rd and 4th May 2012.

The 1.5 day program is designed “so delegates can interact with speakers and vendors who have backgrounds in social media, taxonomy, information and records management, research, knowledge management, mobility, information design and architecture. ”

With an organising committee comprising experienced professionals and events organisers – Kay Harris, Melissa Simmons, Michelle Nutting, Linden Fairbairn and Rawdyn Nutting, it promises to be an informative and inspiring event.

Check out the Intelligent Information website for more details and future plans for this exciting new venture in information management.

Recently, the Institute for the Future (IFTF) at the University of Phoenix Research Institute released their report – Future Work Skills 2020. IFTF is renowned for its work using advancing foresight methodologies and use a range of techniques, including using gaming to crowd-source foresights.

This report examines key drivers of change that will change the work landscape and offers up the 10 work skills that will be required to be able to successfully work in such a landscape.

The Six drivers of change are:

1. Extreme longevity – people will work until later in their lives, multiple careers will be common and lifelong learning will be a necessity
2. Rise of smart machines and systems – new tools will be available to use in every part of our lives, eliminating much rote type work
3. Computational world – huge increase in sensors and processing power giving us our world in data which can then be extrapolated in an amazing range of ways
4. New media ecology – a new way of communicating will become available, taking us way beyond text
5. Super-structured organisations – new technologies will change the way organisations produce and how things are created
6. Globally connected world – the world will be connected as never before and diversity and adaptability will play greater roles in design and production

Future Work Skills 2020 Summary Map

The skills that IFTF sees as being required in such a work landscape are each related to at least one of the key drivers of change (as represented using colour in the summary map above). The skills are:

1. Sense-making – being able to discover deeper meaning in what is being expressed
2. Social intelligence – being able to connect to other people more deeply and directly
3. Novel & adaptive thinking – being able to come up with solutions that are outside the box
4. Cross-cultural competency – being able to work in different cultural settings
5. Computational thinking – being able to make meaning out of vast amounts of data
6. New-media literacy – being fluent in new media forms
7. Transdisciplinary – being able to work in multiple disciplines
8. Design mindset – being able to plan our workplaces and workflows to achieve desired outcomes
9. Cognitive load management – being able to filter information and focus only on what is required
10. Virtual collaboration – being able to work effectively as part of a virtual team

These skills, at some level at least, are being taught in our schools now, but I can think of one profession at least (and we all know which), has developed these skills in its most of its current workforce, just through environment and necessity. Librarians, according to this report, even if you only have a fraction of these skills (which you will), your future is assured!

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!

Trying to fill a position in your library or have an internship on offer? Need volunteers to help with a stocktake?

Image: photologue_np on Flickr http://www.flickr.com/photos/44313045@N08/6290270129/

From the go-get we have welcomed job advertisements that would interest people who like to read about Australasian Libraryland.  To post one, just join up as a contributor by filling in our online contributor’s form . We will then approve you so that you can write drafts that we will then make live when you let us know they are ready.

Another great place to advertise job vacancies is the WAIN e-list. It stands for Western Australian Information Network, however material on it is of interest to people throughout Australia and one of its purposes is to “advertise positions that have become available”. To sign up, go to the WAIN Info Page .

A reminder: do not try to post to job advertisements to just any ALIA elist, even though you think the readership would match the vacancy or would like to share directly with a group of colleagues that you choose. This is against online communication guidelines , as it conflicts with a money-raising operation run by the association.  There is a separate  elist for job vacancies and – as cautioned through an email sent to members tonight – it is considered unfair to advertisers who pay for ALIA’s services. The relevant policy point is:

ALIA e-lists and social media are not to be used to advertise vacant positions. ALIA offers an online employment advertising service via ouremployment pages and the dedicated employment e-list (maintained by the National Office Publishing Team). Messages sent to e-lists which advertise vacant positions will be rejected, and the author contacted with details on how one can best utilise ALIA’s employment services to reach a wider range of candidates.

Here’s hoping that ALIA does not decide to take advertising from any library blogs, or Libraries Interact may cease being a topic that may be mentioned by members on their own elists ….

UPDATE: Thanks Kelly for this information:

Another place for posting vacancies is the South Australian Library and Information Network (SALIN) – http://www.salin.org.au/. Click on Join to subscribe to the elist

If you’ve tried to check something in Wikipedia in the last hour or two, you’ll probably have seen a blacked out page linking to an explanation of its protest against SOPA – hundreds of other sites are doing similar. It might seem unfair to blackout all these sites worldwide (24 hours without lolcats!) for the sake of a US protest, but if this legislation is passed the whole world could suffer a lot worse.

SOPA and a similar proposal PIPA aim to address piracy in part by allowing for sanctions against a foreign site that breaks US copyright law.  This might include getting US servers to block access to the domain name; or getting US search engines to remove it from their results; or stopping it from receiving money from US advertisers.

Don’t Break the Internet (Lemley, Levine and Post) outlines from a legal point of view why this would be a Bad Thing for the internet as a whole; Foreign Libraries Will Be Infringing Sites Under SOPA (Eric Hellman) gives a specific example of just how bad it would be.  Because Project Gutenberg Australia, and many many other sites, could be classified as a “US-directed” site (defined by SOPA hilariously loosely as a site that doesn’t actively prevent someone in the US from accessing it) and includes content that, while in the public domain in Australia, is still under copyright in the USA.

What can we do about it, outside the US? We don’t have a representative to contact, at least not about these laws – there have been, and will be more, bad IP laws in our own countries to protest against.  But we can talk to the publishers supporting SOPA (pdf, 92kB), or even the publishers supporting the proposed Research Works Act (unrelated to SOPA or PIPA, but it would outlaw open access mandates and thus bolster publishers’ monopoly over scholarly publications) and the publisher making campaign contributions to the politicians who introduced the RWA.

Theoretically we could stop buying from these publishers.  In practice – yeah, well, we’ve got customers so we probably can’t, but we can withdraw any free labour we give them by way of writing or peer reviewing papers or editing journals for them. In other words, strike.  (That link’s blacked out against SOPA, but come back to it in 24 hours, it’s well worth it.) There are plenty of Open Access library science journals we can be supporting instead.

ALIA has announced the Board for 2012.

“In accordance with its Constitutional requirements the ALIA Board called for nominations for three upcoming Director vacancies and one Vice-President (President elect vacancy). Sufficient nominations were received to fill the vacancies but insufficient for an election to be held.”

The new ALIA Board members for 2012 are:

Vice President (President-elect) – Julie Rae – Director, Information and Research for the Australian Drug Foundation and formerly with VISION Australia, Central Highlands Regional Library Corporation, Bayside Libraries and GEAC.

Directors:

Edmund Balnaves – Founder and Principal of Prosentient Systems

Elke Dawson – Deputy Director (Resource and Access Services) at Central Queensland University Library

Aileen Weir – Acting Director Reader Services at National Library of Australia

We at Libraries Interact congratulate the new Board members on their appointment and look forward to the work they will do for our national organisation.

As many of us are back at work, its time to consider what the New Year is going to bring to our libraries. And as VALA 2012 is fast approaching, its only appropriate that we look at tech trends.

Mashable recently listed its 5 Tech Trends to Watch in 2012.  They are:

• Augmented reality
• Micro-payment economy
• Rise of the ultra-book
• Social/digital inclusion
• Mobile chip wars

Although not all of these will directly relate to libraries and their service, it is still useful to know what is happening on the technological landscape.

The trends that I see for already see for our library this year are:

• Mobile technologies – both expanding our options for users of them and using them more in our libraries for services – this includes doing more with QR Codes
• Discovery layers – we are launching ours in February
• Social technologies – embedding the library even more out in the online social sphere
• Technology diversity – possibly getting more diverse hardware for borrowers to use, already loaded with more specialist software than the usual standard offerings of Office and Internet

What do you see as the tech trends for your library in 2012? Will any of Mashable’s suggested tech trends be something that your library will be pursuing?

Interestingly, one of the commenter’s on the Mashable post listed the one thing that will affect everyone in some way or another this year. The biggest trend will likely be something that no-one has even heard of yet.  How true!

Happy New Year to all!

The winners of the 2011 Edublog Awards have been announced.

Some of Libraries Interact’s friends were nominated and we congratulate them on this amazing honour.

Check out the winners and runner ups – I am sure you’ll find something to add to your feed reader.