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ALIA National 2014 Conference, 15-19 September 2014 Melbourne : together we are stronger
This conference paper discusses how technology offers a TAFE library a great opportunity to improve the way students access information and customer service. Over the years, TAFE libraries have embraced technology, however, it’s been incremental and a case of making small noticeable differences to the service. The primary driver is still brick-and-mortar service delivery. It’s the way we have done things for so long.  We deliver service in a way that we believe, best offers students immediate gratification and quality delivery. Either the information is on the shelves or our staff will find it and get it to you without delay. So brick-and-mortar is still the primary channel for TAFE libraries.
Nevertheless, we have now reached the precipice of change. We are now in a technology charged world that is accelerating at a rapid pace, opening the doors for TAFE libraries to dramatically change the way we deliver library products and services. The coming years will see TAFE libraries push quicker towards an omni-channel strategy - a mash up of physical and digital service experience for students.

ALIA National 2014 Conference, 15-19 September 2014 Melbourne : together we are stronger

This conference presentation explores the role of grey literature in public policy and practice in Australia based on the results of the Grey Literature Strategies research project, an ARC Linkage project being undertaken by Swinburne University and Victoria University in partnership with the National Library of Australia, the National and State Libraries Australasia (NSLA), the Australian Council for Educational Research and the Eidos Institute.

The presentation presents the findings from three online surveys conducted in 2013 of users, producers and collectors of research and information as well as interviews conducted with librarians, researchers and producing organisations. The paper will focus on the data from collecting organisations and other relevant results for the library community and will discuss the way in which libraries are both succeeding and still struggling in their approach to digital content. Topics that will be discussed include: the content users and collecting organisations consider most important; how users find and access content; views on copyright reform; strategies for dealing with deadlinks; selection and evaluation of digital content; contingent valuation and cost benefit analysis of grey literature.

ACOC 2018 Seminar, 13 August 2018 Canberra: resource description for the 21st century 
 
This presentation (PowerPoint slides) provides an overview of the RDA toolkit and RDA registry.
 
The ACOC seminar, organised by the Australian Committee on Cataloguing (ACOC), provides an opportunity to learn about the IFLA-LRM and how it will affect you, as well as the future of the RDA standard. It is of interest to all librarians, especially cataloguers, metadata creators and library system administrators. This seminar provides a rare opportunity to hear from the Chair of the RDA Steering Committee (RSC), Gordon Dunsire, who is visiting Australia and New Zealand on his way to IFLA in Malaysia. Gordon, along with Deborah Fritz, the legendary cataloguing trainer and consultant, will introduce the new look RDA and demystify the IFLA-LRM.
 
The seminar will also include news about the newly formed Oceania RDA Committee (ORDAC), a BIBFRAME update, and a demonstration of the new RDA Toolkit.

Share it: Resource Sharing Futures Conference, 10-11 May 2018 Canberra
 
In collaboration with ALIA, Libraries Australia held Share it, a two-day resource sharing futures event. The aim of Share it was to discuss the current Australian resource sharing landscape and issues around the complex world of modern resource sharing. A further aim was to determine whether there is still a need for a national resource sharing service and, if so, to develop a resource sharing road map and action plan for Australia.
 
This conference presentation (PowerPoint slides) provides an overview the current resource sharing landscape in Australian libraries.

Asia-Pacific Library and Information Conference 2018, 30 July - 2 August 2018 Gold Coast: Roar Leap Dare
 
This conference presentation (PowerPoint slides) discusses the idea of the 3rd space, first raised by ay Oldenberg in his book ‘The Great Good Place’ (1989). In the 21st Century the places where a person may have no expectations placed upon them, where they may enter into a world of social acceptance and feel instantly ‘at home’ are rare. For some the library is the one place where they can guarantee they will have a conversation or at least some kind of interaction with another human being.  Many are lonely, elderly, restricted in some manner and have very small or non-existent social circles. The library is therefore becoming the ‘coal face’ for the disenfranchised, the lonely and the unaware.  ‘You should expect your library to be a community space – a place for the interchange of ideas and the creation of whole new concepts.’ (R.D.Lankes, 2012)

In this Pecha Kucha session I will demonstrate how the Eltham Library is demonstrating the use of the community as the 3rd space. I will show photographic evidence and provide testimony from our members – relating their stories and their reasons for regular participation in our weekly sessions. The common link is the need for social interaction and companionship. ‘The individual with a 3rd place has a host of friends that are not limited by the narrowness of personal choice.’ (Oldenberg, 1989).

This submission from the Australian Library and Information Association (ALIA) discusses the value of school libraries in supporting teaching staff, building reading and information literacies, promoting cybersafety and digital skills, and providing access to recreational books as well as essential study materials.
 
ALIA supports the notion of introducing mandatory, reportable minimum standards for literacy, numeracy and digital literacy and urges the review to make a clear link between these skills and the role of school libraries. Well-resourced school libraries, staffed by qualified professionals should be available to all young people in order to prepare them for future study and work.

ALIA National 2014 Conference, 15-19 September 2014 Melbourne : together we are stronger

This conference paper discusses the future of  library studies courses in the Northern Territory (NT). In 2008 the lifespan of the Library Studies course in the NT was said to be very short. Sources reported it would be discontinued due to the low enrolment numbers. This posed a huge disadvantage for the local industry if students were no longer trained at a paraprofessional level.

The strategy was to visit libraries, introduce the course (over many cups of coffee) to gain industry trust and support! Employers were strongly encouraged to provide input into assessment and training strategies. This proved to be a huge success for work placement and delivery in the workplace. A strong Course Advisory Committee (CAC) was formed and as staff numbers for delivery were limited flexible learning was introduced. Each semester students were encouraged to visit and tour a variety of libraries and the Museum and were always greeted enthusiastically.

ALIA Information Online 2015 Conference, 2-5 February 2015, Sydney: at the edge.
 
Abstract
 
Visions of technological utopia often portray an increasingly ‘seamless’ world, where technology integrates experience across space and time. Edges are blurred as we move easily between devices and contexts, between the digital and the physical.
 
But Mark Weiser, one of the pioneers of ubiquitous computing, questioned the idea of seamlessness, arguing instead for ‘beautiful seams’ — exposed edges that encouraged questions and the exploration of connections and meanings.
 
With discovery services and software vendors still promoting ‘seamless discovery’ as one of their major selling points, it seems the value of seams and edges requires further discussion. As we imagine the future of a service such as Trove, how do we balance the benefits of consistency, coordination and centralisation against the reality of a fragmented, unequal, and fundamentally broken world.
 
This paper will examine the rhetoric of ‘seamlessness’ in the world of discovery services, focusing in particular on the possibilities and problems facing Trove. By analysing both the literature around discovery, and the data about user behaviours currently available through Trove, I intend to expose the edges of meaning-making and explore the role of technology in both inhibiting and enriching experience.
 
How does our dream of comprehensiveness mask the biases in our collections? How do new tools for visualisation reinforce the invisibility of the missing and excluded? How do the assumptions of ‘access’ direct attention away from practical barriers to participation?
 
How does the very idea of systems and services, of complex and powerful ‘machines’ ready to do our bidding, discourage us from seeing the many, fragile acts of collaboration, connection, interpretation, and repair that hold these systems together?
 
Trove is an aggregator and a community; a collection of metadata and a platform for engagement. But as we imagine its future, how do avoid the rhetoric of technological power, and expose its seams and edges to scrutiny.

Our Global Future summit, facilitated by Dr Gill Hallam on 29 July 2018, Gold Coast, Queensland, Australia.
More than 50 library leaders from Australia and the Asia-Pacific met for the Asia-Pacific Sustainable Development Goals summit (SDG).
The presentations and workships resulted in the development of a shared understanding of what lies ahead for libraries and a list of actions to raise awareness and understanding of the sustainable development goals and the role libraries can play

Submission by ALIA to the first round consulation of the Australian Public Service Review, 31 July 2018.
This review is looking at the capability, culture and operating model of the APS.
The submission presents a case against library staffing and service reductions in government libraries and requests that the APS Review consider the following five recommendations:
1. That the review recognise the importance of knowledge and information to the efficient and effective operation of the APS.
2. That the review endorse the ongoing need for qualified library and information professionals serving the Commonwealth Government.
3. That the review propose exploration of new service models for library and information services, with advice from ALIA and other relevant organisations.
4. That the review note the opportunity for the recruitment and employment of Indigenous professionals in the library stream.
5. That the APS recognise the need for specialist skills in the management of library and information services.
 

The Australian Library and Information Association (ALIA) brief submission in response to the issues paper supports the appointment of a National Data Commissioner to oversee data sharing and release.
 

This joint submission from the Australian Library and Information Association (ALIA), the Interactive Games & Entertainment Association (iGEA), the Australian Direct Marketing Association (ADMA), the Australian Interactive Media Industry Association (AIMIA), eBay, Google, nineMSN, and Yahoo!7 in response to the Government's Convergence Review Framing Paper.

The Australian Library and Information Association (ALIA) emphasises the role of public libraries in support of open government and digital tranformation through helping users to discover, access and use data. Libraries are trusted places, promoting equity and freedom of access to information and resources. They provide a valuable platform for government communication and public education initiatives. For Open Government to be successful and universal, the National Action Plan must actively engage the public library network, otherwise it will fail to reach people who are on the fringes through lack of internet connectivity, issues of affordability or limited digital skills.
 

ALIA Information Online 2015 Conference, 2-5 February 2015, Sydney: at the edge.
 
Abstract:
 
Social media statistics are a fluid area. We explore the strategy of measuring social media, with specific case studies. What are the statistics which count? Are all ‘likes’ equal? Data will be from the State Library of NSW Public Library Services use of social media and the NSW Readers’ Advisory Working Group’s Twitter-based reading group.
 
The State Library has a few public library related social media channels, with a well-defined audience of NSW public libraries. We encourage the use of #nswpubliclibraries. The Twitter reading group focuses on a different theme each month and people tweet about what they are reading, watching or playing using the relevant hashtags (#rwpchat and the hashtag for that month’s theme). Data from both of these streams are captured and evaluated and used in planning.
 
Efforts to evaluate the effectiveness and the reach of these online conversations are not straightforward. One of the main barriers to measuring a Twitter-based initiative is that the tools, which are readily available to assist with the analysis of a particular set of activities change. The tools adopted for this initiative quantify hashtag use differently. There are variations in the number of Tweets recorded as contributing to a particular discussion. This workshop explores the reliability of such tools (including Archivist, TAGS explorer and Eventifier). The analysis of hashtags is vital to record both current performance, and continued growth, of the reading group. There will also be exploration of the effectiveness of the Twitter reading group’s blog and the posts that support each month’s theme (views, comments and sharing of posts) and the associated Pinterest account which has been established to support the various reading themes (analytics and benefits of collaborative pinning). Some of these tools are being used by Public Library Services, and the different results will be explored.
 
Although social media has been around for several years, there are still questions about how the data is analysed, as demonstrated in the recent academic work Twitter and society edited by Karen Weller. The different analytics tools present different results and allow the data to be seen and accessed in diverse ways.
 
The paper will have practitioner focused discussion of social media analytics. The authors will explore some of the possible meanings and look at what indicative conclusions can be drawn. We will be showing how the data from two different kinds of accounts may be interpreted, any influences on planning, and how not all likes and follows are equal. We will discuss the importance of evaluation of social media use, and how we need to be at the edge of thinking and planning to be effective in how we use and evaluation social media within libraries.