Around Australia, there will be rallies on Saturday 13 December 2008 against the government’s proposal to censor filter the internet. In Perth, this is 12 noon to 3pm at Stirling Gardens – corner of Barrack Street and St George’s Terrace . Nice to see that in Victoria that the rally is planned for outside the State Library.

This video clip gives details of when and where. Rather than only go “rah rah” though, it offers alternative ways to “think of the children” and provide parental guidance and protection for children.

Details of other rallies:

Brisbane:
Saturday 13th of December 2008
11am-3pm
Brisbane Square (between the casino and city library, Victoria bridge end of Queen St Mall)

http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid…

Sydney: 
11:00 AM 13th of December, 2008
Where: Town Hall Square, George Street, Sydney (beside Town Hall)

http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid…

Melbourne:
Date: Saturday 13th of December 2008
Time: 12:00pm – 4:00pm
Location: Outside the State Library, corner of Swanston St and La Trobe St.

http://www.facebook.com/home.php?ref=…

Hobart: 

Saturday, December 13, 2008
11:00am – 1:30pm
Parliament Lawns
Hobart, Australia

http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid…

Adelaide:
Saturday, December 13, 2008
12:00pm – 4:00pm
Parliament House Stairs
North Terrace

http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid…

Perth: 
13th of December 2008
12pm-3:00pm
Stirling Gardens, City

http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid…

*squee* Happy Dance…

Kieran Hixon and Judy van Acker are my new heroes. They are in  John C Fremont Library, a small rural library in Colorado. They downloaded the Koha Open Source Library Management System and then sang about it last November,  Open Source ILS Song.

*squee* Happy Dance…

I’m biased about Open Source Library management systems. I think we should look at  them first if we are thinking of replacing our ILMS. I think that if we are not looking at replacing our ILMS soon, we should be restructuring our library staffing so that we have people who can download, tweak and customise OSS products to best suit our users’ needs.

I do not think this is the same as twenty years ago when we created our own in-house library management systems. Now it is about community created product, customised by us for our specific user groups. If we don’t like what it does, we can change it. But then – and this is the big difference – we can feed that change back into the community and harvest the effort of others who are doing the same. Yes, it depends on having the expertise . Get over it – it is a new skillset we need to add to our staff, just like a Systems Librarian or a Web Librarian.

*squee* Happy Dance…

That is why I am totally over the moon and doing happy dances all over my house at the moment. I have been awarded a travel scholarship to go to the United States and Canada next year to look at alternative discovery layers and open source library management systems.   I am extremely grateful to VALA: Libraries Technologies and the Future for providing the scholarship.

*squee* Happy Dance…

Briefly, the aims of the travel are:

1. To visit relatively mature “model” installation of alternative discovery layers and Open Source Library Management Systems in the United States.
2. To discuss the implementation and maintenance of the system with people who either maintain, install, wrote or manage the Alternative Discovery Layer or Open Source Library Management System.
3. To find out more about how these systems work technically.
4. To find out whether there are common factors among these organisations that make them early adopters of new technologies

*squee* Happy Dance…

I plan on travelling between March and April next year starting in Kansas City and finishing in Atlanta – in between looking at the OLE project, Koha, Evergreen, SOPAC2, Scriblio, VuFind and Project Blacklight. I also get to go to Library Camp East and the Computers in Libraries conference

*squee* Happy Dance…

Pinching self. Wow!!!! I only get to do this because I have a very supportive family and workplace – so a big thank you to them, particularly my husband Stewart and my boss, Margaret Jones.

This shouldn’t work. This should be disgusting.

Fruitcakes are labours of love that involve vast quantities of ingredients and lard and liqueur and esoteric stirring rituals. You bake them in July and wrap them carefully in layers of waxed paper and newspaper and aluminium foil.

Except….this just works.

Following on from Karen’s fruitcake recipe for Fiona who cannot eat nuts, here’s a recipe that a friend gave me last year. It produces something scrumptious, and much more fruitcake-like than ought to be allowed.

CHOCMILK FRUITCAKE

• 1kg dried mixed fruit
• 600ml dark chocmilk (prepackaged chocolate flavoured milk from the refrigerator section)
• 2 cups self-raising flour

1. Soak the fruit in the chocmilk overnight
2. Add the flour
3. Bake for one and a half hours in a moderate oven

It doesn’t really taste chocolatey at all. If you make it, please let me know how it goes – maybe we were delusional the couple of times we baked it.

My friend Peta has created a little video called library 2.0 unconference at SLQ. It is her impressions of last Thursday’s slq Unconference 2008: Web 2.0: Now what? .

It’s pretty obvious by now that I like unconferences. A lot. Even if you never attend them or have done so and found that they don’t work for you, it is really worth checking out the topics being discussed at recent unconferences. This list at the LISwiki lets you keep an eye on when the next library camps or unconferences are happening.

Reading this list from last Wednesday’s Library Camp Nebraska is like taking the pulse of libraryland right now. (at least my little online corner of libraryland).

* The Social Web in the library
* Is OCLC still relevant today and/or worth its price
* Open Source options for desktops and ILS
* Social Bookmarking
* Cheap and free tech tools
* Copyright & Creative Commons
* Public programs
* High Tech / High Touch: are they mutually exlusive?
* Get your free Web presence (for libraries that don’t have one already)
* Privacy in a Social Web world
* Wildly impractical, expensive ideas for your library
* Alternative searching techniques (or, what’s new & cool in the world of searching??)
* Ideas for library marketing on the cheap
* Ideas for new granting agencies/funding sources and/or grant success stories
* Demythologizing the “information wants to be free” (while information may want to be free, it aint cheap to provide it…)
* Community Outreach
* Mentoring
* Instruction
* Expanding the role of the library on campus (PR/marketing/collaboration)
* Exploring the future of library workers: What’s the greatest need in Nebraska?…support for Master’s level v. pre-professional training?
* Implementing ebooks in the academic library: who are relevant vendors? any good free resources? costs involved? benefits/drawbacks of differnt purchase/lease options?
* Social OPACs
* Professional Development and its connection to social networking
* Collecting and working with user satisfaction and assesstment data
* Strategies for working with ESL students/populations
* “Going green” – Environmental responsibility in librarianship
* Integrating mobile/smart phones into library customer service
*Web conferencing for distance students
* Pay for print management systems for academic libraries
*Standards for the 21st Century Learner
*Advocacy
*Creative Programming
*Collaboration that works
* Library policy regarding internet & DVDs
* What is the best software available for federated searching? Why?

Here is the Shanachie’s day with me and Con on Sunday, Perth Down Under –

Perth Down Under from Jaap van de Geer on Vimeo.

We were going to film Murdoch University’s new Learning Common the next day, but Erik was very sick that day. Next time 🙂

I’ve set up a liveblog of the Shanachies presentation this morning. While wireless lasts, I’ll be zipping my notes below:

I spent the day with the Shanachies – a pair of librarians from DOK (the library concept centre) in Delft in the Netherlands. Their mission is to “make stories, tell stories, keep stories”.

Here’s the groovy trailer made by Robin Slierendreg for their Downunder Tour:

ShanachieTour Down Under: Trailer from Jaap van de Geer on Vimeo.

I learned a lot from them.  Mainly about library staff thinking creatively, forming partnerships and just getting on and doing what needs to be done. I hope to mention more about some of their initiatives after I see their 4 hour workshop at the State Library of Western Australia tomorrow.

Right now, I’m utterly exhausted and slightly sunburnt, so goodness knows what they are feeling after travelling over 24 hours by plane yesterday to get here.

We tried to find five things that a librarian could do on their day off in Perth.

They were:

1. Visit Kings Park

2. Go shopping

3. Visit Curtin University Library’s iZone

4. March in a parade dressed as a story book character

5. Sit on the beach and think up new names for a library

Yup. Video and voice are now integrated into chat in gmail – but not yet via the gtalk stand alone client. A Skype-killer I would think?

Cindi-cam via gtalk in gmail  Uploaded to Flickr on November 13, 2008 by sirexkat

I remember going to the Science and Technology discovery centre (Scitech) 15 years ago and seeing an “amaaazing” and expensive device to allow video telephone calls – with a screen refresh rate of about 10 frames per minute.

google video chat w/kathryn  Uploaded to Flickr on November 14, 2008 by cindiann

As Cindi pointed out, all it needs now is screen and ap sharing functionality….and it’s still useful how you can do this in a window while working on a google doc together …. or anything else.  Me? I want to see split screen conference calling so you can have three or four people video conferencing at once.

Do like.

Con Wiebrands and I gave a paper about library unconferences last week at the LIANZA conference. You can find the whole 5000 or so words here: The unconference: a new model for better professional communication . Ignore the title – we both have *no* idea why we claimed it was *better*, rather than *different*.

We plan to dust it off a bit and submit it for publishing. We are not sure which journal – it’s not the library tech that we usually write. Any suggestions from you about a suitable journal would be most appreciated.  We will add in the results of our survey of participants of  four library unconferences in Australia and the United States.

The paper covers:

1. Definition
2. Open Spaces Technology
3. History
4. Elements of unconferences (decisions you need to make if you are holding one)
   1. organisers
   2. publicity
   3. costs
   4. food
   5. venue
   6. numbers
   7. invitees
   8. weekday or weekend?
   9. volunteer participation
   10. facilitator and deciding topics for the day
   11. opening session
5. Comparison between unconferences and conferences
6. Results of survey of participants of the 2008 Western Australian Library Unconference.

I met Liz Wilkinson from the University of Auckland at the LIANZA 2008 conference: Poropitia: Outside the Box. I was very impressed with an information literacy package she had helped to design. Te Punga uses online graphic novels and simulations to introduce students to the library catalogue.

I was even more impressed with her philosophy behind the design – and I have tried to capture this in this movie, Information Literacy: Seven ways to think outside the box. She was very gracious about being filmed with no rehearsal time, and I’m very grateful to her and the University Of Auckland for allowing me to use her words and screenshots from Te Punga in the movie.

Here are her main points:

1. Literacy beyond text
2. Student centred, not library centred
3. Outside experts
4. Involve students
5. Use students’ environments
6. Learning by doing
7. Make students feel at home