Connecting Librarian

Today is Anzac Day, a public holiday in Australia to commemorate the men and women who fought and those who died for our country in armed conflicts around the world. Its a time of reflection, of thankfulness and of gratefulness and I truly am grateful for what those men and women gave – not only those that died, but all those whose lives were changed dramatically by being involved in these events. They have made our country a better place to live and I am one of the beneficiaries, with opportunities I could never have imagined otherwise.

Jerry Segraves, of http://jerrysfoto.com

So I felt it appropriate, to stop in the middle of all the busyness which is my life at present and reflect. Its funny, my husband and I were commenting the other day, that things have been a bit off lately – things weren’t disastrously bad, but they weren’t going right either, in pretty much everything except our family (thank goodness). We have recently celebrated our 15th anniversary and I am grateful for this strong, supportive and funny man who is my rock, my anchor, often my small still voice reminding me of what’s important and who is so supportive of all the things I have been doing and wanting to do, moreso in the last year with all the opportunities that have arisen. The rest of the “off” stuff we will work through as best we can.

Work is also getting exciting. We had 2 meetings this week, with the first we have now expanded our main library blog team to 5 people, with contributions to come from 2 of our senior managers. I’m really excited about this for a few reasons, one is that I don’t have to try and come up with something myself all the time, two is that we will have a range of voices and viewpoints, with more content coming on a regular basis and finally it is good to get some concrete support for what I think is becoming more important to my library.

The other meeting was about a prototype teen blog, which has been taken up enthusiastically by 3 of our youth services team, with news, reviews, plugins and lots of widgets etc. A couple of our young library officers have provided some great feedback and we will work with them to finalise the blog before we go live, using the blog to replace our static and little used or updated teen webpage.

I was also inspired by an interview of Helene Blowers (as I usually am by Helene) about some of what she is doing at Columbus Metropolitan Libraries. The thing that really stood out for me was having a focus for their virtual services in the coming year – they were going to be particularly aiming at power users, young people and the general public. It made me realise that it may no longer be enough for virtual services to be a focus of our Information Services, but that it is now big enough in itself to have its own strategy.

So that’s my ramble and my recent reflections. Things can change quickly in a few days. For the last few weeks I’ve felt tired, discouraged and sooo busy to the point that I wasn’t even interested in blogging or much else in professional development. I’m not so tired anymore (sleep-in today helped), I am more encouraged than I have been for a while and although I’m still sooo busy, a time of reflection and those elements of encouragement have brought me back here, just a little more fired up. We’ll see how long it lasts and where it will lead!

I am so excited.  Just as well, because I was very sad about not being in the thick of things at Computers in Libraries this year, after the awesome experience I had there last year.  Its great to be already reading all of the blogging reports coming out of this year’s conference. Thanks all!  Keep ‘em coming!

The reason I am so excited is that the mailman has just delivered my book!  Well its not just my book, I am just one of 19 contributors, but still excited anyway.  I’m a published author!  In a book, not only a journal!  Information Literacy meets Library 2.0 ‘addresses the impact of the adoption of these (Web 2.0) technologies on information literacy teaching’.

I wrote Chapter 5 – “Information Literacy, Web 2.0 and public libraries: an exploration”.  Most of the content came out of my study tour last year and coincidentally from what I learnt at last year’s Computers in Libraries conference.  For Australian readers, Judy O’Connell from Hey Jude authored Chapter 4 – “School Library 2.0: new skill, new knowledge, new futures”.  I am honoured to be in such great company in this book, with not only Judy, but 17 other great library experts.

I was surprised and delighted to also discover that it is a hardback edition.   I really like the cool cover (although this image does not do it justice) and the detailed information (including the list of contributors) on the back.  Thanks to the editors Peter Godwin and Jo Parker for inviting me to be involved.

Peter and Jo are following up the book with a blog – Information Literacy meets Library 2.0 where both the editors and the contributors will be able to continue to update the contents.  Also hope to do some related podcasts.  Come check it out!  I’ll just go back to exploring the crisp white pages of my book!

Early last week I was flown to Sydney to conduct the first day of a 2 day Masterclass – Revolutionising Library Management for the Ark Group. My topic was Web 2.0 in Libraries and my thanks go to our hosts and our committed, enthusiastic and knowledgeable group of participants for an informative day for me and hopefully for them too.  My slides, if you are interested, are on the presentations page of this blog and also on Slideshare.

The 2nd day, for which I opted to stay, was on Digitisation and was presented by Mal Booth from the Australian War Memorial. I was interested in this day for several reasons, one being digitisation work at my library (local history) and another being knowing the great work that the Australian War Memorial (AWM) has done – especially their virtual resources and services.  (check out his slides from the session at Slideshare)

As digitisation is not my area of expertise, I found most of what I learned was well explained by Mal’s slides – I encourage you to check them out if this topic is of interest to you.  However, I did take in the following points:

- The Australian War Memorial is constantly hearing from users that they want the content, not just the catalogue record and opening hours.   They are useless when the user is not in Canberra.

- It is extremely important to create a collection development policy for your digital collections.  For the same reasons that we have one for print, AV etc.

-  Mal’s recommended software for digitisation is Photoshop.  But if that’s cost prohibitive, then Photoshop Elements or the free open source software Gimp.

- Digitisation projects can use sponsors as a funding source – AWM does.

- When choosing a file format and standard for digitisation, three important things to consider are is it migratable? does it use an open source standard? and will it last?  May seem obvious, but not always the case.  File format and standards are continuing to develop.

Just some small points that grabbed my attention and that is saying something as Mal is an engaging speaker. He was able to make, what could be considered dry content, an interesting experience.