I am dusting off this blog to take part in blogjune . Australian and New Zealand library bloggers are committing to write a post each day in June. It has been an annual event since 2010.

If you blog, or if you have been considering blogging, try popping over to Con’s blog and registering using this form. Giving it a go is fun and the consequences for not completing a post each day are … umm …. nothing. It’s worth a try.

I am not sure I will be able to manage to write a fully-fleshed blog post each day, so I am going to attempt a question each day. I am good at questions. Answers, not so much …

Why questions?

I’m full of questions.

I think my job as an educator is not to give answers, but to help my students learn how to ask useful questions – about the discipline, to solve daily problems in the workplace, to make the world a little bit better, for enjoyment, to stimulate their minds and hearts and those of people around them …

Asking the right question at the right time of the right person is one of the hardest skills to learn. The best questions have years of experience and thought and research around them, and can be deceptively simple. Often the most powerful question to ask is “why not ?”.

So, I’m having a go at blogjune.

Why not?

Here is a record of the tweets, and a couple of pics, from tonight’s “Digitisation is the death of history” debate from Curtin University tonight. If the embedded widget looks a bit funny, you can see the whole thing at Storify.

The “ayes” had it this evening, with the affirmative team being declared the winners. The event was well attended and there was – as described by one of my work colleagues – “a lot of inter-silo discussion happening”. The speakers were all excellent. They knew their material inside out, were well-prepared, entertaining and pitched at exactly the right tone and level of discussion.

There is already talk of a re-match next year. The topic? Unknown as yet … although it would be kind of interesting to debate about whether “Convergence in the GLAM sector is a myth” .. Hmmmmmm.

Tonight my department at Curtin University, Information Studies, is teaming up with the History Council of Western Australia to present a debate on the topic “Digitsation is the death of history”. Registrations are through Eventbrite: http://www.eventbrite.com.au/event/7267153251

Speakers for the affirmative are:

• Lise Summers who is a lecturer in our department, the president of the History Council and she works at the State Records Office.
• Meg Travers who is a research student of 20th century electronic music at the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts, and also works at the State Records Office of WA.

Speakers for the negative are:

• Andrew Bowman is an independent researcher who has been involved in a number of digitisation projects, including a very successful one for the Carnamah Historical Society.
• David Fricker who is Director-General of the National Archives of Australia

The event will be adjudicated by Bobbie Oliver who lectures in history at Curtin University.

The event is also an icebreaker for the start of semester for our students, with a wine and  cheese for all attendees at 6pm before the debate which runs from 6:30pm until 8pm. There has been so much interest that we have had to change the venue to accommodate the numbers. We have also had several requests to livestream or record the event. In the interests of encouraging the speakers to be candid and robust in what they say, we decided not to do this. The irony, given the title of the debate, is not lost on us. The speakers have given permission for people to blog and tweet about the event, so watch for the hashtag #digideath13 . I am general bossy boots and MCing, but if I have time to tweet, I will be doing so from @infoventurer tonight.

Today I took part in the Australian Library and Information Association’s National Advisory Congress . The theme was The Future of the Profession .

There is a very nice downloadable paper that sets out three future scenarios for public, academic, school and special libraries plus collecting institutions. An short annotated bibliography accompanies the paper. You can download both from the ALIA Futures Wiki .

UPDATE: 7:55pm 19 July: Renee Stokes has a nice summary of the discussion at the forum on her blog, The World is Quiet Here .

UPDATE: 9:09pm 19 July: Hoi Ng muses about Embracing Shambrarians at her blog Water Water Everywhere.

I spoke for 15 minutes at the start. My idea was to spark ideas rather than explain concepts . I wanted to highlight  some areas where I think librarians should be listening and learning. I think that we connect people and information and that there have been great changes in the way that connection occurs and the form that information takes. I wanted to just suggest that we maybe need to pay more attention to these changes and work out how they relate to what we do.

Here is my slideset from today:

Finally, after The-Crash-We-Shall-Speak-About-No-More, Molly and I have sewn together the questions from New Librarians’ Symposium with the answers from Information Online.

Thanks to everyone who joined in. We would have liked to include everyone’s efforts, but we wanted to get something around 10 minutes.

We have released this under a Creative Commons license and have already had someone ask whether it would be OK to share this on a listserv to spark conversation. Yes!. Please do share and discuss and feel free to continue the conversation in the comments, on Twitter or whereever else you would like to.

Here it is, Seen and Heard: librarian questions asked and answered .

My co-facilitator of the two “Being Seen and Heard” workshops in Brisbane next week, Molly Tebo, explains how you can join in from home.

When your PLN is buzzing about a conference not being there sucks. You know you’ll be able to follow much of it through Twitter, but it’s not the same as being there in person and getting to meet people and be inspired.

We know it’s not a good time for budgets. Your library might like to send you but won’t pony up and your personal funds won’t stretch that far.

Lucky for you, we want to give you a chance to be a part of our workshops spanning the two conferences. To be seen and heard by other participants. We are making a video and you can be a part without needing to be physically present in Brisbane.

If you are a new librarian, have a think about some questions you might want answered by people who have been in the profession longer than you. It could be anything from “If you were my manager, how could I impress you?” to “What extra skills do you look for when hiring?”. We’re sure you have some burning questions to ask.

You can tweet these questions to us using the hashtag #seenandheard or for bonus points, have a go at filming yourself asking the question (a smartphone will do fine) and tweet us a YouTube link. Keep an eye on the tweets from the account @seenandheardlib. At the end of this post is a widget with all the tweets from the account as they happen.

If you’ve been in the profession a while and would prefer to answer the questions, hang out until Feb 11 and keep an eye on @seenandheardlib for a link to the question video. When we release the video, pick a question and answer it. Once again, you can tweet us an answer using the hashtag #seenandheard or video yourself and send it through.

Don’t forget to keep an eye out for the #seenandheard hashtag during our sessions on the 10th and 12th of February to get some ideas of what others are asking and for the final video that we’ll be releasing on YouTube later in the week. We’ll also be capturing tweets via storify and posting them to this blog after the sessions.

You can watch the work in progress by checking out our page for the workshops. Movies will be added as they are created.

We hope you can join us virtually and if you ask or answer a question you may find yourself in the video! See you online.

Tweets by @seenandheardlib