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 [...]

The National Library of Australia has launched "Library Labs", a wiki to share news with colleagues about what the NLA is doing in the redevelopment of digital library services using service-oriented architecture and open source software solutions. Comments, suggestions and feedback is welcome via the wiki. Four different prototypes are described including the NBD prototype, [...]

The Australian Society of Authors has published a report on Educational Publishing in Australia. The report is based on a survey of educational writers carried out in 2007 and early 2008 and states that since 2000, writers’ conditions have deteriorated due to onerous contractual conditions from a smaller pool of publishers. The impact of digital [...]

Last Saturday Tim Spalding, from LibraryThing, posted about how you can use Google Book Search as a source of cover images. You can read all about it at the Thingology blog. Tim says that the code is a little rough, but it does provide a working example. With this technique for getting book covers from [...]

Sue Hutley reports on the ALIA Board Blog that a number of submissions for the ALIA Education and Workforce Summit are now available for reading. The summit is invitation only, and will be held on Friday the 28th March. Late submissions can still be made via email, and those in Victoria may be able to [...]

A new article, Online Predators and their victims in the journal of the American Psychological Association, examined fears of internet predators and concluded that they are myths. Based on three US surveys conducted by the authors, from the Crimes Against Children Research Center at the University of New Hampshire, they found that internet-related sex crimes [...]

Today I’ve released an updated version of our popular Aussie Library Blogs page. The page is now built dynamically created using a WordPress plugin that I’ve created with the assistance of the other THALI members. This new way of managing the list of Aussie Library Blogs is exciting in a number of ways including: It [...]

Late last month tango posted about a report on Australia’s Internet filter. It sparked some discussion and one of the main points was that we, those in the discussion, believe that user education is more important than filtering. With this in mind it was interesting to read on The Australian IT website an article entitled [...]

The Call for Abstracts has just gone out for the annual LIANZA conference in New Zealand, to be held in Auckland, 2-5 Nov, 2008. The conference theme this year is: Poropitia – Outside the Box. IMPORTANT DATES: Abstracts for papers due: 2 May 2008 Notification of acceptance: 30 June 2008 Confirmation of format of presentation: [...]

Librarians in research and academia are keeping a close eye on changes to Research Assessment under the new Government. Michael Jubb from the UK based Research Information Blog has a post about how the new Excellence in Research for Australia (ERA), replacing the Research Quality Framework (RQF) compares to what’s happening in the UK – [...]