A few months ago, I wrote about taking off for a fantastic adventure and moving overseas to take up a short-term role in the Netherlands. My time in Europe is nearly over and I will be returning to librarianship in Australia in a few weeks. Whether you are returning from time in another sector, country, [...]

Asking how big the internet is, is a bit like asking how long is a piece of string. The answer is we really don’t know because it is unorganised, uncatalogued and continues to grow at a phenomenal rate. However, two recent sources are having a guestimate on where the internet is in terms of a [...]

You better hurry, as nominations close 1st August. Why should you care?  I’ve been thinking about how, as a profession, we don’t do enough to applaud librarians’ achievements.  There are librarians doing great things in all departments, across all sectors of libraries and we should do more to applaud them and recognise these achievements. One [...]

Several of the Thali are Asus EeePC users. We thought we’d compare our impressions of the eee pc , especially from the perspective of using it in the library environment. But first, what are we talking about? Asus eee pcs are tiny, ultra-portable, cheap computers. There are now three sizes (7″, 9″ and  10″ or [...]

The School Library Journal in the US is running a “Learning 2.0 / 23 Things” program for …well…school librarians all over the world… All Together Now: A Learning 2.0 Experience . It is being led by Dr Michael Stephens , who has a knack for simplifying the complex in a way that inspires you to [...]

Not sure how I missed this one, but a week or so back Tim Spalding of LibraryThing fame put up a call for librarians to lead a project to create an open classification system. Tim’s vision is for a free, modern, humble, collaborativley written and assigned scheme as an alternative to Dewey (and others, but [...]

Last year Indigenous Literacy Day raised over $250,000 to address literacy problems in remote indigenous communities. Wednesday the 3rd of September is ILD 2008. Funds raised on the day through participating booksellers’ and publishers’ sales, school events and other donations will be put to work at the Fred Hollows Foundation in the provision of literacy [...]

With possibly a record contingent of Australians in Anaheim (about 20!), this year’s ALA Annual was a great one to attend. My last ALA was in New Orleans in 2006, so it was great to attend for a second time and not be so overwhelmed by the largeness of everything. ALA is notoriously difficult to [...]

Registrations for the second WA Library Unconference are now open. The theme this year is – Library 2.0 and Beyond: getting our hands dirty. We hope to include half a day of small hands-on workshops and a “technology petting zoo” with gizmoes and gadgets to fiddle with. Sessions focus on discussion rather than single person [...]