This week’s list of things to watch out for…

1) IFLA world library report – An interactive map showing all sorts of facts and figures about libraries in different countries.

2) ALIA Access blogging – coming soon to an Australian Library Blog near  you…. the ALIA Access 2010 library conference that is happening in Brisbane right now. You can check out the official conference blog, follow the conference on its own Twitter account @ALIAAccess , or search for the hashtag #aliaaccess .

3) ALIA Access #leftbehind Western Australian tweetup – a bunch of us who are enjoying the Perth rain instead of the Brisbane sunshine are getting together tomorrow night to discuss how we aren’t at ALIA Access and don’t need to be when we have each other’s wonderful company.  All librarianly types are welcome. It’s at 7pm tomorrow (Wednesday)  night at Chocolateria San Churro, Leederville. (This is red so people notice it before the tweetup. I may change it to something more seemly after the event).

4) HTML5 This new standard for HTML will allow web browsers to be told how to do backflips and jump thorough hoops that previously third party browser plug-ins handled. Check out what can be done with HTML5 in “The Wilderness Downtown “, an interactive film starring the streetscape where you grew up (if you put in that address at the start). It does lots of neat video tricks and you can check out the HTML5 canvas element when you get an opportunity to write a postcard to … well, you’ll have to watch the film to find that out…

5)  Positive Tweeting in September .  Kat Clancy, Library Web Developer at Deakin University, who gave a great presentation at last week’s VALA meeting about m-libraries had a bright idea last night. Following on from the  30 Posts in 30 Day blogfest in June and 1Pic1ThoughtinAug Flickrfest comes the #postiveSep positivityfest. The idea is simple – post one positive tweet each day in September and use the hashtag #positiveSep to identify it. Even if you are not doing the tweeting, just searching on the hashtag should make your day a bit brighter.

6)  Gmail priority inbox . Oh, look, I’m raving about some new gmail feature again. They just keep pumping them out and I just keep liking them. Coming in the next day or so is the Gmail Priority Inbox . It works like a reverse spam filter – learning which emails you open, answer, deal with as a priority and floating them to a special section at the top of your inbox. Nice. Hopefully it will work better than the newly-in-your-email google phone calls. Michael Arrington from Techcrunch is reporting that 75% of his outbound calls are failing since the service was opened up to all …

This morning, along with a lot of people in Australia, my gmail account came with a new feature, offering to let me make free phone calls to the US and Canada.

“Huh”, I thought, “dumb google marketers presume we are all in the US and Canada and have just added the notice to *everyone’s* account – bet it doesn’t work”…

BUT….

I opened the window, started entering a friend’s phone number – only to have it finished from my contacts lists – and bingo! – connected for free to a phone number in the US. The line (channel ?) quality was fine and the connection was fast with no dropouts. And it didn’t cost me a cent.

How quickly my thinking has changed. I didn’t think “gee, this is just like calling from my phone”, but “hey, just like Skype”…

Wonder how long before – if ever – I will be able to call within Australia for free. Right now it costs 2c per minute if I use this service … actually not too bad … And definitely what I would use when travelling overseas,  if for some reason Skype does not let me call home.

… you can skip this post if you are here for the library tech. This one fits in the “balancing and being mum” bit of the blog tagline.

I’m insanely proud of my family this week.

BROADBAND INNOVATION AWARD

My husband, Stewart, was instrumental in developing  the software for discerning unusual patterns in video surveillance footage for the Icetana company, which grew out of his research group at Curtin University. Last week the company pitched to over 400+ potential investors, mentors, entrepreneurs and customers at the Tech 23 event in Sydney – and won $25 000 from the New South Wales Government for the “Broadband Innovation Award”.

(Of course, I can bring librarianship into this one – check out another one of the finalists – readcloud , which claims to be “the world’s first social ereading software”. It uses the ebook itself as the platform for social discussion about the book’s content. This Australian firm is not to be confused with Copia, which claims to be “the first social eReading experience designed so you can discover, connect and share what’s meaningful” – but they do this by integrating a website and a their own ereading device )

LEGO

Then today my Mr12 came second in his school’s Lego club “Science Fiction City” building competition. He instigated the group last year and it has been a source of many, many hours of joy for him and his mates at lunch times. The support teachers are in on the act and buy ridiculously attractive large Lego sets as prizes that whip the kids up into a frenzy of creativity. Mr12 let on that they have a “Greenhill Award” in the club for each term’s competition – for whoever “shows spirit and never gives up”.

WRITING

Libraries again… Last night Mr7 had his turn to shine. The family attended the Tim Winton Award for Young Writers’ Ceremony at Subiaco Library – complete with canapes and a string quartet. Mr7 was a finalist in the Junior Primary Category. In another show of great support from the kids’ school, the Head of Junior School attended to be there for Mr7.  The competition received 1634 entries in five categories. I was very, very proud when Mr7 was awarded Second Prize in his category for his story “North Goes on Holiday”. Mr7 was very, very thrilled to read the congratulations that were tweeted from my friends on Twitter and I’m not sure he’s stopped grinning yet…

…well, that was the advertising for the event on Wednesday….

I have updated and very much expanded my presentation about ebooks. This was for a Professional Development session for the Association of Independent Schools in Western Australia at  Hale School.

The slideset, handout and a movie of me delivering it are embedded below.

If you want to find some great practical tips about useful sites and applications from a voracious Australian ebook reader please check out the comment from Clytie on my previous post. She has been incredibly generous with her time by writing a very comprehensive comment that would be and excellent blog post in itself. In answer to your question about ebooks in Australian libraries, Clytie, I recently tried to make a comprehensive list over at librariesinteract.info:
Ebooks for loan in Australian public libraries – who’s doing it?

Topics covered in the presentation are:

• History
• Print vs audio vs ebook
• Reading devices
• Platforms and software
• Formats
• Content
• Ebooks in libraries
• Pushing it – ebooks beyond 2D text

Here is the slideset:

Here is the handout (saved as a document at slideshare, which gives it clickable links in the embed below – novel!)

Are you Australian and want to read Tim Winton or John Marsden or Peter Carey using Kindle reader? Dream on.

Last night I had a friend in the US take a screenshot of the Amazon.com Kindle Books Store at the same time as I took a screenshot in Australia. I wanted to compare the number of items available to people in the US with the number of items available to people in Australia. I created a set of screenshots at Flickr , Kindle Store: Australia vs USA if you want to see the screenshots below more clearly.

In Australia – you have access to 129, 393 works. But look at the New Releases – 3901 in the last 60 days.

In the USA, you have access to 197, 947 works … but  6361 New Releases in the last 60 days.

This means that while Australians have access to only aboout 65% of the Kindle ebook stock available to people in the US, when you look at recently published items, that drops to about 61%.

When I logged out of Amazon.com, I noticed that the sidebar now let me change my country or region (at the top right hand side). I did a few comparative searches. Tim Winton – no ebooks available in Australia, 4 ebooks available from the US. Peter Carey? One ebook for Australians (The Tax Inspector) with about 10 US ebooks.

Can someone please explain to me how these restrictions on getting Australian content in Australia helps Australian writers, readers or publishers? I’m a little slow at understanding how.

My favourite, though was with Australian Young Adult writer, John Marsden. 8 results for readers in the US. If you are a teen in Australia searching for your favourite author? You get this:

I love local book stores and libraries. Browsing, pulling books from shelves, taking my choice home with me then and there…

But sometimes at 11pm I just want to order an obscure print title or technical book and have it delivered. The convenience of not having to find time for a physical visit  is worth paying for some days.  Sometimes I want to consume a book as an *experience* rather than as an object. If  it is not available as an ebook, then I want it delivered as soon as possible.  As an aside, I think that both libraries and bookshops will need to very quickly come to terms with this “experience vs artifact” desire – a point made very well by Emily Lloyd in ShelfCheck 423B

By poesygalore | View this Toon at ToonDoo | Create your own Toon

Last year I mentioned to my friends  Penny and Con that I might try not to rely on local bookstores when buying books for the library, but instead order solely online and have them delivered. Suddenly they were excited and yelling – “Booko, Booko, try Booko”.

Just last week one of the students in my classes was recommending Booko to his classmates as a way to get cheaper text books, so I suspect that there are still some library folk who do not know about this tool.

Dan Milne was sick of trying to work out the best prices for online books – especially when one took into consideration the exchange rate and the cost of shipping. That’s how Booko came about. Plug in details of the book you want and it dashes off to search several local and overseas shops to calculate the cheapest one.  Dan now gets a small “referrer fee” when one purchases an item as a result  of a link from Booko – but he doesn’t let it affect the search. I have found that sometimes the search (understandably) does not indicate whether the item is in stock at the store, so sometimes one has to click through to a few to get something cheap and available now, now, now…

Here’s a pic of what happened when I searched for Tim Winton’s Bugalugs Bum Thief:

Shiny!

If you are like me, you may have too many online identities for your own good. I often want to swap between a vanilla-ish gmail account that I use for creating screencasts and a bells-and-whistles-all-my-email-redirected-here account that I use as my main workspace.

I used to have to have one account open in Chrome and one in Firefox to achieve this, but starting today, Google is rolling out the option to use multiple identities in the same browser. You just change a setting in your account settings and then you can select which account you are working with from a dropdown box in the top right of the screen in the place where your account name is usually displayed.

To check whether it is enabled for you, go to your google account settings. You will now have a “Multiple Sign In” option, like this:

Then when you select the “Change” option, you will be asked to acknowledge four points about using the sign-in, and then you are away…

Many librarians have cats. Many librarians knit and crochet. Life facts that we should all accept – and celebrate.

Just check out the Flickr search for “Librarians Knitting” and scroll through the pages to see what I mean.

Look around at your library next conference, even in classes at university, and the needles are flicking. I’ve been in several unconference sessions where social networking is being discussed and someone eventually shuffles to their feet to say “Well, I’m a member of this amazing network for knitters and crocheters called Ravelry“, to be met with a few heads snap-turning in their direction and a chorus of “oh – me tooo”….and then all talk of librarianship melts into the ether….

If you want a geeky treat, check out current VALA president, Kim Tairi’s Flickr stream of amazing amigurumi, especially the Spuffy and Doctor and Amy Pond sets. I think my favourite is Bunny winks then shoots you – DEAD :

Ryan Deschamps even shows how knitting is a skill that can be used for librarianship. To attract the attention of passers-by in Halifax, Nova Scotia, in June he and a group of other knitters created a Yarnbomb and  wrapped it around a tree. They attached publicity material asking for the community’s vision for their new library – Public Tree Yarn Wrap.

Knitting and crocheting librarians are also generous souls. How else can I explain the appearance in my life of an alpaca (?) wool Toque that Ryan knitted for me  on the way to Computers in Libraries last year. Or the purple handwarmers that Kate made for me before she left for Melbourne. Or the wonderful package of goodies sent by Cindi last week as a congratulations for finishing my degree and starting a new job.

Thank you Yarnbrarians. I was going to wish that you ravel long and prosper – but looks like ravel means “pull apart” (so is almost the same as unravel?)…. Anyhow, please know that your continued creativity creates bright spots in my days.

I’ve been working at Curtin University for a week now.

On my way from the carpark on my first day, I tweeted that I had just heard a segment about the whether the  “paperless office” fulfilled its promise on ABC Radio National’s Future Tense .  In response, Michael Rees from Bond University shared that night his experience with cleaning out 19 years worth of contents in his university office, A Major Step Closer to a Paperless Office. He discarded…

…About 8 bookshelf metres of conference proceedings, box files and the usual stuff in ring binders including lots of overhead slides from the 1970s and 1980s all bit the dust. 9 full filing cabinet drawers were reduced to 0.25 of a drawer – that was all I had actually looked at in the last 12 months. 23 old conference bags were reduced to 2. Out of over 100 optical disks about 3 survived. I kept 1 USB headset/mic and discarded a dozen or more old analogue headsets, mics and speakers. It feels wonderful. [For those wondering I discarded all my printed journals 2 or 3 years ago.]

Consequently I don’t feel too bad about the inheritance that will share my space until we move buildings at the end of the year. It’s a decade worth of the Tuesday IT Section of the Australian newspaper. Only half of the collection fit into the photo.

I was asked whether I wanted to continue adding to the collection. “Why not”, I thought, “obviously it was valued and it would be a pity to stop it now”. For about 5 seconds… before I asked myself whether I would have chosen it as essential for my office if it wasn’t there already…