Having never attended a RAILS (Research Applications in Information and Library Studies) conference before I wasn’t really sure what to expect but with 15 presentations, 20 mins in length I knew I wasn’t going to have time to be bored. Despite having been in libraries nearly 20 years I had forgotten about the research side of our profession and the importance that it has in keeping LIS in the academic sphere and our practioners seen as professionals.

The research presented ranged from the importance of information as a social inclusion tool to information seeking behaviours, from the hermeneutic circle of literature reviews to classifying Australian PhD Theses and many other areas in between. The scope was wide and from a practitioner’s point of view of varying degrees of practical relevance.

The audience was a mix of practitioners and academics and a reminder to those of us working in libraries that there is research being undertaken that can inform practice and also a view into the future direction of some of this research. It would have been interesting to be able to debate more about future directions of research from both an academic and practical viewpoint. Maybe a few less papers and a bit more time for discussion and debate.

This was a good networking opportunity for me as I consider embarking on a PhD and a reminder that research is an important part of our profession. All papers will be published in the Australian Library Journal.

This week the new-look ARROW Discovery Service was launched featuring faceted browsing, tag clouds and access to more statistics such as the most popular authors and institutions.  The ARROW Discovery Service includes metadata records harvested from institutional research repositories across Australia and from the Australasian Digital Thesis Program.

Faceted searching enables results to be refined by institution, subject, resource type, date or creator.

If you are looking for Australian research, the ARROW Discovery Service is a great option to get started. The majority of records do link through to online versions of papers, and email alerts can be set up if you need to monitor research in a topic area. But at this stage I can’t see any sign of RSS feeds.

The service has also made available a search plugin if you want to add this as a search option to your browser search box.

ARROW is seeking feedback including suggestions for improvements. Send an email with “Feedback” in the subject line to arrow(at)nla(dot)gov(dot)au.

Back in September 2006, Gillian Hallam asked us all to contribute data for the Nexus survey, to discover more about the Australian LIS workforce. Nexus 2 has arrived and the aim of this survey is to gather data from institutions on workforce planning, staff development policies and practices.

If you are not a library manager, check if your manager or director knows about this survey. More information is available from the ALIA Board Blog.

On Library Lovers’ Day I attended Open Access Collections at Customs House in Brisbane. This was an APSR event held in association with QULOC and the University of Queensland.

I found the presentations very stimulating, especially Peter Murray-Rust’s in which he talked about open data and highlighted some useful sites to investigate further. It was particularly interesting to hear about scholarly publishing and accessibility from the point of view of a chemist. Later in the day we also heard from other academics in civil engineering and inorganic materials research about their experience with repositories at the University of Queensland and Queensland University of Technology. These
tied in nicely with Danny Kingsley’s discussion of her research into the institutional/disciplinary barriers affecting take up rates of repositories by researchers.

We also heard from Leanne Harvey (formerly DEST, not sure whereabouts in the Ministries she will be in future) about the Australian Government’s accessibility framework and that there is no news yet about what will replace the RQF, and from Anne Fitzgerald and Scott Kiel-Chisholm about the OAK Law project and the legal relationships between authors, repositories, publishers and users.

The panel session with repository managers was informative, but I missed the very last presentation by Kevin Stranack on the Public Knowledge Project. Colleagues tell me I would have enjoyed it. I’m hoping that one will be available as a video from the APSR site in the near future. The presentations are available already.
Danny Kingsley’s paper is also available in full from the VALA 08 program.

200210 customs house image by superciliousness. Used under a Creative Commons licence. Some rights reserved.