JayGee library log

Coming to grips with data as an asset

2011-08-30T16:33:00.003+08:00

The week before last we had Research Week at ECU.

For me the highlight was the Three Minute thesis competition and the winner this year was Matthew Bambach. He goes onto the finals later this year at UWA.

I gave a presentation: Research data as an asset: taking the long term view.

Here are the PowerPoints which have been loaded to our institutional repository, Research Online

Library life day two

2011-07-26T14:24:00.007+08:00

Yesterday I neglected to include a link to what the Library Day in the Life Project is all about:

The Library Day in the Life Project is coordinated by Bobbi Newman of Librarian by Day. Twice a year librarians, library staff and library students from all over the globe share a day (or week) in their life through blog posts, photos, video and Twitter updates.

This site includes links to all the other people involved in the project:

http://twapperkeeper.com/hashtag/libday7
http://www.netvibes.com/librarianbyday#Round_6_Library_Day_in_the_Life_Project

I started the day conducting a data interview with one of our researchers in computer security.
This involved discussing several datasets the research centre holds that could possibly be shared with other researchers outside the centre. One dataset I heard about is what they call “honeypot” data that reveal patterns in security attacks. It was fascinating and I came away just a little bit worried about how secure any of us are online. Going by the laws of probability, despite our best efforts some malware will get through and do damage.

The data interview is one of the key roles of a research data librarian. The idea of the data interview is to gather as much information as possible about a research project and associated research dataset or data collection. This information (in our case) then gets written up and described and added to Research Data Australia (RDA) Australia's research data portal. The metadata schema used to described data in RDA is RIF-CS.

There are several elements to this work: one is using the skills a research or faculty librarian would have whereby you learn to understand the client’s research area. Another is having a sound understanding of research data and how that may differ across disciplines. Another is more a cataloguing/metadata librarian role whereby you use a defined metadata schema to describe the data.

I have been working on some research data training and seminars which I will talk about tomorrow…

Day in the life of a research data librarian

2011-07-25T09:52:00.005+08:00

I had a late night last night, sitting up watching the conclusion of the Tour de France, witnessing history being made when Cadel Evans became the first ever Australian to win..…yeah go Cadel. It was so inspiring to see him cycling into Paris in the yellow jersey, with the BCM team all in red. With the 8 hour time difference between Europe and Western Australia the event finished after midnight our time. Then at 5am someone rang on my mobile…wrong number from someone in another time zone across the other side of the country. Still, I managed to start the day with a visit to the Joondalup Arena 50 metre indoor pool for a great swim. It’s winter here, so the pool is pretty quiet. At one stage there were just three of us with a lane to ourselves…bliss. The pool is about one kilometre from work, so I bring my breakfast and change of clothes and then head straight on to work.

At work the main activity today revolves around finish off the Seeding the Commons project. This is a national research data project funded by the ANDS (Australian National Data Service). The details about the project at Edith Cowan University (ECU) are here. There are similar projects running at most Australian universities and major research institutions.

This time last year I was getting ready to attend research data management training at the ANDS BootCamp which was held in Canberra in August 2010. Later on I was seconded to work on the project as a research data librarian. It has been a steep learning curve, but lot of fun. I have left my substantive job as the Faculty librarian for Education and Arts at ECU to become a research data librarian. Now, a year later, the project is winding up. We are at Week 25 of a 32 week project and the 3rd progress report is due on 12 August. More on this project and the work involved tomorrow.

The Woman in White

2011-07-01T07:40:00.001+08:00

First of all a confession… I am not, strictly speaking, “reading” this book, but listening to an audio version. Audio books provide a really convenient way to increase your amount of reading, if you commute or spend time at the gym you can listen to the audio. Fortunately there are more and more excellent audio titles available through the public libraries in Perth and they are narrated by some fine actors.

At the moment I am “reading” The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins. Incredibly, The Woman in White has never been out of print since it first appeared in serial form in Victorian England (1860) and it still has readers in its thrall.

The narrative hook draws you into the story right in the beginning when the hero, Walter Hartright, comes across the mysterious woman in white late at night on a lonely road north of London. She stops him, appears agitated and asks strange questions. Later on our hero comes across some men who are searching for the woman, claiming has escaped from an asylum. Then the story moves to another location where Walter meets another woman in white. Is this a doppelganger? As the story develops, Hartright becomes a type of Victorian detective as he follows clues along the way to discover the truth about this mysterious woman: who is she and why was she so agitated, why is she on the run?

In many ways Wilkie Collins' novels were forerunners of contemporary crime fiction and they certainly influenced many current writers of crime and mystery. Collins most famous novel is The Moonstone (published 1868) which Dorothy L Sayers considered "probably the very finest detective story ever written". I plan to read The Moonstone next and I already have downloaded a free ebook copy onto my Kindle.

As an aside, Wilkie Collins was a great friend of Charles Dickens and he lead quite a sensational life for Victorian times.

My post for the July readit2001 Twitter #whodoneit

Searching the online library for known items

2011-06-29T13:28:00.006+08:00

One of the findings of our user studies of Summon was that students struggled with finding "known items". Where they had been given an exact citation of, for example, a journal article they did not know where to start. This is probably not surprising ... "twas ever thus". Providing some basic sessions on recognising citation elements and referencing would help students in this area.

Another symptom of the searching known item problem at our library is that increasingly higher percentages of requests that come through our document delivery system are for items the library already holds.

A recent study from University of Nevada looked into this phenomenon in more detail. This appeared in a journal article in New Library World and is worth reading.

It's at DOI 10.1108/03074801111117050

Kress, N., Del Bosque, D & Ipri, T (2011). User failure to find known library items, New Library World, Vol. 112, 3/4, 150 - 170.

"Findings – Participants in the study failed to locate known items for multiple reasons, but from the usability testing and analysis three major areas emerged: finding the correct starting-point for the search, information not indexed for a selected search, and clicking on the call number link. The complexity of library resources was the main contributor to these failures. Participants expected library searching to behave like their other search experiences."

Social Media Competencies for Librarians

2011-06-28T07:43:00.007+08:00

On Stephen Abrams' blog last year he wrote about the Top Ten Social Media Competencies for Librarians (& Teachers).

What are these competencies? Where have they come from? Have they been widely adopted?

Dean Giustini writing on The Search principle blog gives some more information: Top ten (10) social media competencies for librarians.

Murphy & Moulaison are advocating that “social media competencies” be recognised as a new set of literacies required for librarians who work in the Web 2.0 environment. They presented a paper at the ACRL 14th National Conference, Pushing the Edge: Explore, Engage, Extend, Seattle, 2009. The PDF to the full paper is here.

The draft list of these social media competencies is:

• understand, explain and teach others about the main principles and trends of Web 2.0 (and Library 2.0)

• list major tools, categories and affordances of social networking

• apply social media to solve information problems, and communicate digitally with users

• use social networking sites for promotional, reference and instructional services in libraries

• navigate, evaluate and create content on social networking sites

• follow netiquette, conform to ethical standards, and interact appropriately with others online

• explain copyright, security and privacy issues on social media sites to colleagues and user communities

• understand the importance of identity and reputation management using social media

• explain related terminology such as collaboration 2.0, remix and open source

• renew social media competencies, advocate for institutional strategies and policies, and build an evidence base in social media

Murphy and Moulaison are advocating that we go beyond just gaining knowledge of how to use particular Web 2.0 technologies to gain an understanding of the changing information landscape in which librarians operate.

I think these are really useful competencies and have been thinking about how they can be applied. I'll like to see them more widely discussed.

My olive curing recipe

2011-06-26T10:00:00.001+08:00

Olive Pickling Instructions

There are two stages in preparing olives. The first stage is all about getting rid of the bitterness and this takes about two months, less for the darker, black olives, while the second stage is where you start adding flavour.

First stage, involves soaking olives in water for a week and then brine for 6-8 weeks. Some people use caustic soda on the green olives, but I do the old fashioned recipe which uses salt only.

Here's what you do from woe to go:

Pick olives when the fruit begins to turn from plain green to pink and purplish black. After picking treat them straight away while they are still fresh and hard. Remove any soft or damaged olives and rinse in clean water in a bucket. Make a fine slit in the side of each olive, using a very sharp knife. This cutting will draw out the bitterness and will allow the water and salt soaking brine to penetrate the olive.

Place all olives in bowl with fresh water and make sure they are under the liquid. You can place a plate on top to keep the olives submerged. Pour the liquid away each day and replace with fresh water. After a week alter this routine so that the soaking liquid consists of 10% salt. To make this solution and ensure the salt is dissolved, bring the salt and water mixture to the boil and allow to cool before adding to the olives. I cook up a few litres of this solution and store it. The amount you need will depend on how many olives you have. Use this salt solution for soaking the olives and every three days or so change the salt water. Do this until the olives are no longer too bitter, which may take 6 to 8 weeks. Then the olives are ready for the second stage.

Second stage
Pour off and measure the last lot of water so that you will know the volume of salt brine that will be required. Measure that quantity of fresh, warm water into a pan and dissolve the salt, this time at the rate of 1/2 cup of salt to 10 cups of water. Place olives in clean sterilised bottles with some dried garlic, some chillies and a teaspoon of lemon juice per litre. Then pour the salt water brine over the olives they are completely submerged. Top up bottles with up to one centimetre of olive oil to stop air getting to the fruit and seal the lids on. No further preparation is required and the bottled olives will store for at least 12 months in a cool cupboard.

When you are ready to eat your olives, pour out the strong preserving solution and fill the jar with clean, cool water. Leave in the refrigerator for a further 24 hours. (The plain water leaches some of the salt back out of the olives.) At this stage you can also add any or all of the following flavourings: grated garlic, basil, oregano, chopped onion, red capsicum, lemon juice and lemon pieces. You can also use the olives just as they are, along with other things as a pizza topping.

Curing your own olives

2011-06-25T10:30:00.001+08:00

Perth's Mediterranean climate makes olive growing ideal and many varieties of olive trees are grown in gardens here. But I am always amazed that many olives go unpicked. Do people just grow them for the lovely foliage? Probably. Well maybe it's not that surprising garden olives get left on the tree as the first time I tried to cure my garden olives, it was a total disaster. They were so bitter and ended up being thrown out. Back then I made two mistakes: (1) I was impatient and didn't wait long enough for the bitterness to go out of the olives and (2) I tried to do the green olives, which are more difficult to cure.

By the way green olives are NOT a different variety, but just unripe olives and they need special treatment. They are harder and more bitter. If you are a newbie/wannabee olive curer and want to give this a go, try first with the black ones, or with olives that are just turning pinkish dark, like the ones in the top photo. I actually picked these from someone's verge tree. I will post my olive curing recipe tomorrow.

Coasting is not an option

2011-06-24T08:48:00.001+08:00

I'm reading Jonathan Raban's wonderful travel book "Coasting", which is about Raban's voyage sailing solo around the British Isles in the 1980s. Early on in the book Raban goes off on a diversion about the various meanings of the word "coasting" and says he was hauled over the coals at school for "coasting". His school report said he was not using his talents, not exerting himself, and was just sailing along.

Then I came across Michael Stephens' heretical thoughts on transforming library science education, set out recently in some of his slides posted on Stephens' Tame the Web blog. The slides are from a presentation at the Future of Academic Libraries Symposium.

One of the slides struck a chord with me. It was entitled : "coasting is not an option".

I think Raban's school teacher and Michael Stephens are making the same point and it's a familiar point, made by many: use your talents, make the most of your opportunities, step out of you comfort zone and take a few risks. Libraries are changing so fast that we can't afford to coast.

If you want to be inspired by a group of librarians who are NOT coasting read some of the posts on the SLA Future Ready 365 blog 2011 http://futureready365.sla.org/

Our webinar experience

2011-06-23T15:28:00.006+08:00

Today Lutie Sheridan and I presented our webinar on Summon: “Web-scale discovery: the user experience brought” which was organised by Richard Levy from Serials Solutions. The subject of the webinar was the findings of our user studies on Serials Solutions' Summon conducted at Edith Cowan University Library during 2010 and 2011.

We had about 33 people online from all around the place, mainly in Australia. I think it went quite well, but it is a somewhat unreal experience talking into the phone to 30+ people.

You need to be skilled at multitasking to do one of these things. The speaker-phone did not work, so we had to pass the phone back and forth to present the slides, and then later to answer questions. The questions appeared as text in the chat box and Richard repeated them to us as well.

Lutie commented that it was like talking on the phone when you get no "ah-ha" comments coming back at you...no verbal or visual cues. Another colleague mentioned having once done a phone job interview with a panel of interviewers firing questions and you have no visual cues.

Later I found out that some people were unable to log in. It’s always tricky with the technology in these events.

Richard Levy of Serials Solutions recorded the whole presentation including questions and responses. I believe he will be making it available at some stage.

My advice if you decide to do a webinar as presenter: prepare, check out the technology before hand and try to RELAX and have fun with it!!

Webinar on Summon this week

2011-06-21T09:00:00.004+08:00

This blog post is just a little plug for our upcoming webinar on Thursday 23rd June 2011 at 11am Sydney time.

The topic of the webinar is the findings of our user studies on Serials Solutions' Summon conducted during 2010 and 2011

Web-scale discovery: user experience brought to you by Serials Solutions and Julia Gross and Lutie Sheridan from Edith Cowan University.

This is a free event and you can register at http://tinyurl.com/3tuwq6x

Fingers crossed the technology will work. We have had a few runs though and all is go position.

Singapore cathedral, the story behind the photo

2011-06-19T07:43:00.008+08:00

Last time I was in Singapore I did my own self-guided heritage walking tour around the vicinity of the Raffles Hotel and Chijmes Centre. Not far from there, right near Singapore MRT City Hall station is the beautiful St Andrew's Cathedral.

I took some photos at the time and now I am prompted to find out more about this Anglican cathedral.

There was an old church on this site built by Indian convicts as far back as 1837. However the building was struck by lightning and was pulled down, so the cathedral you see now is the building that replaced it in 1852. The building now on the site now was designed by Colonel Ronald MacPherson in the architectural style of English Gothic revival. It is based on the 13th-century Netley Abbey in England. The four paths that lead to the cathedral form the Cross of St. Andrew.

It’s difficult to get a full distance photo of the cathedral now, as the area is in the midst of city buildings. However you can see old picture of St Andrew's Cathedral, here Courtesy of National Archives of Singapore.

The interior walls are plastered with an unusual building material known as Madras Chunam which is a mixture of shell lime, egg white and sugar, and was used to achieve the glossy white walls.

During the Japanese occupation in 1942, the church served as a casualty clearing station where the war wounded were treated.

I did not take any interior photos, but here on Flickr there is a picture of the Stained glass East window.

Read more about the history of St Andrew’s Cathedral here and next time you are in Singapore take some time to visit.

In praise of Downton Abbey

2011-06-18T09:09:00.001+08:00

I'm a sucker for costume dramas, I'll admit. When Downton Abbey started on free to air television in Perth three weeks ago I was glued to the screen and haven't been disappointed thus far. Episode 4 Series 1 shows this weekend and I am resisting the temptation to "read-ahead". I am rather miffed than this wasn't picked up by the ABC. Maybe they could not afford it.

It's an Upstairs Downstairs themed story set in a fictitious grand house during the Edwardian era and in the first episode we hear about the sinking of the Titanic (1912) and the heir to Downtown Abbey is one of the casualties.

For me Maggie Smith steals the show right from the first episode. She definitely has the best lines: "I dont like many of my friends" and "what is a weekend" and "I couldn't have electricity in the house, I wouldn't sleep a wink"

What are your favourite Downtown moments?

Birds have their fill of plastic

2011-06-17T07:40:00.001+08:00

Anyone who's walked along a beach in a remote area will be appalled by the amount of washed up plastic and other debris you find.

At our local beach people often leave behind plastic buckets, balls, plastic shoes and other rubbish and if the council beach cleaners don't collect it, where does it end up?

Birds Australia have been highlighted the problem of plastic waste on Lord Howe Island where researchers have found that 95% of Flesh-footed Shearwaters have large amounts of plastics in their digestive systems. Plastic breaks down, but then it can be mistaken for food by the birds. To make matters worse the adult birds feed their chicks with the plastic bits.

A recent report in The Age makes you realise that the plastic you throw out today, or the stuff left behind on the beach may end up in the ocean and eventually find its way into the stomachs of vulnerable seabirds as well as fish and animals such as turtles.

Just take a look at this graphic photo, taken by photographer Chris Jordan on Midway Atoll, of a dead seabird with its stomach full of plastic.

The Australian government has information on its Department of Sustainability, Environment, Water, Population and Communities website about the whole marine debris problem and what is being done.

Why buy an Android tablet?

2011-06-16T11:50:00.001+08:00

I've been thinking about the proliferation of tablets and the competition (or lack of competition) for Apple's iPad.

The question is why would you buy an Android tablet?

This question was posted on the Businessinsider website. Here's a summary of the responses. Android tablet offers:

Price
More competition
More variety
Openness
Flash support
Support for PDF
No DRM
Drag and drop via USB like it's another drive
Avoid Itunes

CNET has looked at the range of current and upcoming tablets and presented them all in a comparative table.

And Garner predicts that the gap between Apple & Android tablet market shares will continue to decrease. Apple’s iOS currently has 83.9% market share which is expected to drop to 68.7% later in 2011. But it will stay at a healthy 63.5% in 2012, retaining almost half of the market (47.1%) by 2015.

If you want to follow this topic check out Crave: the gadget blog from CNET.

Frog education on campus

2011-06-15T16:07:00.002+08:00

Edith Cowan University (ECU) is providing some exciting "green" initiatives and offering a range of interesting sessions for staff and students. The ECU Green Officer Program recently organised for Johnny Prefumo, the Frog Doctor, to run a lunchtime session about setting up a frog friendly garden.

We used to live near a lake in Perth and would hear the wonderful nightly chorus of frogs during the winter months once the rainy season started. So I was keen to find out more about WA frogs and how difficult it would be to set up a frog friendly habitat in a suburban garden.

What did I learn?

Most of the local WA frogs are brown, not green.
Most of them have claws as they burrow down to shelter during summer and to breed.
There are tree frogs and burrowing frogs, most local ones are the latter.
Frogs can't swim, only the tadpoles swim.
You need to set up areas for the frogs to hide as well as water zones.
They call loudly in winter, once the rain starts and breeding begins.
Frog numbers are declining.
Local frogs are named after the sounds of their call, for example: "motorbike frog", "quacking frog", "moaning frog".

The WA Museum is running a tadpole exchange program for those who have the right habitat and are wanting to get started with preparing a frog friendly garden. But read up first as it is not just a matter of putting in a pond. The Museum have a frog garden publication which will tell you what you need to do.

And oh, by the way, I won't be setting up a frog spot at home, as the little blighters are really noisy in winter and the neighbours might object. But if you live in a rural or semi-rural area it would be ideal and would help the survival of native frogs.

Pictured is the local Perth frog species, the moaning frog. Note that it has claws, not sucker pads, so it's a burrowing frog not a tree frog.

Steinbeck revisited

2011-06-14T10:23:00.001+08:00

I love reading and re-reading the classics and some years ago had a Steinbeck "fling" and read a whole lot of his novels....East Of Eden, The Pearl, Cannery Row and the Grapes of Wrath. But for some reason I had never read Of Mice and Men until recently.

John Steinbeck’s novella, Of Mice and Men, was written in 1937 and tells the story of two down-on-their-luck drifters traveling around, looking for work in California's Salinas Valley during the Depression. This work was written before the Grapes of Wrath and has some similar themes.

The story starts with the two mates, George and Lennie, back on the road after hurridly leaving their previous job. It seems Lennie did some “bad things” and as we hear parts of their story we realise that the child-like Lennie has a mental disability and is a large, lumbering man who does not know his own strength. George is Lennie’s best mate and his protector who is trying the keep him out of trouble. They arrive at a ranch looking for work and hoping for a better life with dreams of making enough money to buy their own place and raise chickens and rabbits. Lennie loves rabbits. When the mean and aggressive Curly, the boss’s son, appears on the scene you know things are not going to end well and that George will have his work cut out trying to keep Lennie safe from harm. Of Mice and Men has a Greek tragedy air of inevitability about it and it moves relentlessly to its tragic conclusion.

One major criticism I have of the book is the character of Curly's wife, who is the archetypical fallen woman and temptress, Eve. You know when you meet her that she will play an important role in Lennie and George's downfall.

Steinbeck’s novels are published here by Penguin Australia

Learning about photonics

2011-06-13T09:42:00.007+08:00

I am working on an ANDS Seeding the Commons project along with a team of staff at ECU. One of the exciting aspects of this project is actually going out and interviewing our university researchers, asking them about their research and their research data. Recently we spoke with Professor Kamal Alameh, the director of the Electron Science Research Institute (ESRI), about ECU's research in photonics and microelectronics. Professor Alameh was incredibly hospitable and took us on a tour around the ESRI research facility and explained in layman's terms their diverse and exciting projects. We will be contributing metadata about an ESRI dataset into Research Data Australia.

This Youtube video shows Professor Alameh talking about ESRI and was released in the ECU YouTube Channel this week.

(My blog post 13 for blog every day of June 2011)

An architectural treasure south of Perth

2011-06-12T09:51:00.019+08:00

I came across this book recently - "The Fairbridge Chapel : Sir Herbert Baker's labour of love" by David Dolan and Christine Lewis and it reminded me that I was intrigued by this chapel when I saw it for the first time last year on a visit to Fairbridge Farm. The architecture looks so unusual compared to the style of most Australian colonial church architecture (not that I am an expert at all). It certainly has a Cape, as in Cape Town, look about it.

The Fairbridge Chapel is known as the Chapel of the Holy Innocents and was designed by the famous architect Sir Herbert Baker who also designed buildings all over South Africa.

"Baker was a great believer in Kingsley Fairbridge and his work at Fairbridge Farm that when the Child Emigration Society approached him in 1928 about designing a chapel for the Farm School, he was more than happy to oblige. In his autobiography Architecture and Personalities (1994) Baker explained, " I have such admiration for the work of Kingsley Fairbridge, inspired by Rhodes and a Rhodes Scholar, in his farm schools that I gave designs of a chapel for the first Farm School at Pinjarra in Western Australia."

More about Herbert Baker architecture in South Africa here

Baker designed the Union Buildings, the official seat of the South African government in Pretoria, South Africa.

It is well worth a visit to Fairbridge Farm just to see the chapel. It is less than a 60 minute drive south of Perth, near Pinjarra.

Fly in fly out

2011-06-09T07:12:00.002+08:00

I won't be posting for a few days as I am off on a whistle stop trip to Sydney to attend a research data management forum.

It is the 2011 Research Data Management Policy Summit, hosted by the University of Sydney.

We are participating in an ANDS Seeding the Commons project that requires our university to draft a range of policies and procedures around research data management, so this summit will be really useful.

My aim is to resume the Blog Every Day of June when I get back on the weekend. Happy blogging to y'all and keep up the posts.

Following people in Google Reader

2011-06-08T08:56:00.002+08:00

This is my second post about using Google Reader.

One useful aspect of Google Reader is that you can "follow" people in Google Reader, as well as subscribing to RSS feeds on a particular topic. For example a leader of the profession might be a useful person to follow. This following of people links through to a person's Google Profile. If they choose to share their profile publicly via a Google Reader profile, you can find them by name. You just need to search for their name using Reader's People Search. What comes up in the "follow" feed will be different from just subscribing to someone's blog via RSS. For example if they "like" a particularity post written by a third party you will see that too.

To search for someone to follow:

click the Browse for stuff in your left hand sidebar in Google Reader.
click the Search tab.
then click Find people sharing in Reader
finally, type in the name of the person you're searching for under the heading Find people to follow.

Help on following people in Google Reader is here.

Using Google Reader to the max

2011-06-07T09:35:00.004+08:00

As part of Blog Everyday of June I thought I would do a few posts on how I try to keep up with current information without getting totally overloaded and I find Google Reader is one good way to do that.

It’s been almost a year since Bloglines disappeared and Google Reader was the main player left to provide a comprehensive RSS reader. I confess to being a Google Reader fan and gave up on Bloglines ages ago, but I know some people were sad to see Bloglines go.

Above is a screen from my Google Reader page. I try to dip in every day or so to see what's new and have organised things into topic folders. They display on the left. I try not to subscribe to too many feeds and regularly delete feeds as my interests change.

For those still looking to get used to Google Reader there are lots of great help sites out there.

Ellyssa Kroski, the iLibrarian, had a useful post recently: How To Get the Most Out of Google Reader which gave some pointers on best ways to use Google Reader, covering use of

Folders
Trends
Shortcuts
Other Tweaks

This linked to a more comprehensive Mashable article on the subject of Getting the Most Out of Google Reader .

There are a number of helpful videos out there to get you started too. One from the Common Craft people (of course): Google Reader in Plain English

And there's even more help available at the Google Reader Help channel on YouTube.

I'll post again tomorrow on some cool GR stuff.

International Year of Forests my forest photos

2011-06-06T12:25:00.001+08:00

Western Australia has precious few forests and all are in the South West of the state. Here’s my photo album tribute for 2011 the International Year of Forests. These photos were taken around Perth, Pemberton, on the Cape to Cape trail, Yallingup and Dwellingup.

Walkers in the forest

Flowers after forest fire

Walking the dog through the Karri forest

Burnt out Marri tree covered with moss

Coastal Melaleuca trees

Catspaw Flower

Karri forest

Marri and grass trees

Kangaroos on the edge of the forest

At the movies

2011-06-05T14:26:00.001+08:00

I have seen quite a few movies over the last month of so and here are some of my recommendations and links to other sources of information.

OF GODS AND MEN Wonderful, highly recommended. It is based on a true story, set in the early 1990s about a group of French Trappist monks living under the threat of hostile elements in the Algerian community where the monastery is located. 5 stars

GET LOW I found this very slow moving, but it has some wonderful acting from Robert Duvall, Bill Murray and Sissy Spacek. 3 stars

SNOWTOWN Oh dear I can't rate this, other than saying it is horrid and I felt quite traumatised after some scenes. In fact we walked out after 45 minutes. I agreed to see it without really finding out what it was about…silly me.

WATER FOR ELEPHANTS oh yeah, it is a bit Hollywood but a good 1930s Depression time period piece and I did not mind that it was quite changed from the book. Austrian actor Christoph Waltz steals the show. 4 stars.

INCENDIES a very grim story of war and its impact in Lebanon, but well done. There are some excellent French Canadian films around. 4 1/2 stars

HERE I AM I can really recommend this - a great new Aussie film, well told story of indigenous woman's struggle coming out of gaol and moving into a women’s refuge in North Adelaide to get her life together. It’s sad but also inspirational, battling against the odds, with some wonderful funny moments and great music. The Aboriginal cast are wonderful and include some experienced actors and some new faces. Warwick Thornton (of Samson and Delilah) is the cinematographer. The film premiered to a standing ovation at the Adelaide Film Festival earlier this year and I can see why. 5 stars.

Students use of Summon, article in New Library World

2011-06-04T15:56:00.006+08:00

My colleague and I have had an article published in the Emerald journal New Library World. This is based on a study we did where we observed students using the Serials Solutions webscale discovery tool, Summon.

Gross, J. & Sheridan, L. (2011). Web scale discovery: the user experience. New Library World, 112 (5/6) 236-247.

The DOI is: 10.1108/03074801111136275

Purpose – This study aims to look at how a small group of university students used the new library web scale search discovery tool, “Summon”, and whether they encountered any difficulties pertaining to navigation, ease of use and the quality of the search results.

Design/methodology/approach – Researchers conducted a series of usability studies in which students were observed as they conducted some typical library resource searches using the new discovery search platform.

Findings – The paper analyses the data, describes and reports the findings of the usability tests. The study found that the new homepage design of providing a single search box was an effective interface for users. The students found a single search box discovery solution was simple to use, and seemed to deliver satisfactory results on a selection of typical library search tasks. The study confirms some of the promise for web scale discovery, but points to new lines of enquiry in relation to the nature of assistance that students will need in the future, particularly in relation to their need to evaluate information.

Originality/value – Web scale discovery searching is an innovation in the online searching of library collections. The study revealed how a small sample of end-users experienced the new type of searching and serendipitously identified a new issue that warrants further investigation

Report: The value of libraries for research and researchers

2011-06-03T16:36:00.003+08:00

One of the most interesting reports to come out in recent months is the UK report on libraries and research which is a must read for all academic library managers.

The value of libraries for research and researchers

The report was jointly commissioned by RIN and RLUK in the U.K. and it presents the ﬁndings of a systematic study of the value of the services that libraries provide to researchers, and of the contributions that libraries from a wide range of institutions make to institutional research performance.

The key points are compelling and clearly state the benefits of libraries for research:

1. Good libraries help institutions to recruit and retain top researchers

2. Libraries help researchers win research grants and contracts

3. Libraries promote and exploit new technologies and new models of scholarly communications

4. Repositories increase the visibility of the institution and raise its research profile

5. Outward-facing libraries contribute to institution-wide initiatives

6. Specialist staff work in partnership with academic departments

7. Connecting with researchers enhances the value of the library's services

8. Dedicated spaces provide a better work environment for researchers

9. Easy access to high-quality content is a key foundation for good research

10. Libraries are a physical manifestation of the values of the academy and of scholarship

Books read so far, in 2011

2011-06-02T12:57:00.004+08:00

I'm trying to read more this year. Here's a list with comments on the books I have read so far in 2011.

The Good Earth by Pearl Buck
a classic that has stood the test of time

Burying the Bones by Hilary Spurling
a biography of Pearl Buck's life in early 20th Century China

Passage to Juneau by Jonathan Raban
I had not read JR before and was blown away by his erudition and wonderful descriptions of sailing the inside passage, from Seattle to Juneau

Coasting by Jonathan Raban
an earlier book by JR, about sailing around the British Isles

Larry’s Party by Carol Shields
my expectations on hearing positive reports about this book from friends when it first came out, were not quite met

Enchantment and Sorrow by Gabrielle Roy
Gabrielle Roy is not well known in Australia at all, but is one of the most famous French Canadian writers. She wrote in French and this is a translation of the first part of her autobiography, set in Manitoba in the 1920-1940s. If the French Canadians had it rough in Quebec, those in the isolated French communities were even worse off.

Flashman Papers by Macdonald Fraser
well what can I say. Politically incorrect, but very flashy in a boy's own adventure way!

The Resurrectionist by James Bradley
a strange dark tale about "body snatchers" in 19th Century London. It is based on the story of the Burke and Hare murders. I will seek out some more of James Bradley.

Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
you must read this post-colonial classic from Nigerian writer

The Road by Cormac McCarthy
Must read some more of CMcC have seen the film of The Road and the book is equally stark and grim

No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy
terrific

Mothers and Sons by Colm Toibin
short stories, set in Ireland, all around this theme, each quite different.

Dancing Backwards by Salley Vickers
one of her latest, but not as good and her previous books such as Miss Garnet's Angel and The Other Side of You

Ruby in her navel by Barry Unsworth
Forget the silly title, this is a terrific well researched historical novel set in Sicily in the 12th Century, when Sicily had a Norman king (Roger) and Saracens and Christians worked along side and shared power for one brief period in history. Very informative and enjoyable. I am an Unsworth fan.

Barry Unsworth by Pascali’s Island
this is one of Unsworth's earlier books set in pre- WW1 in the dying days of the Ottoman Empire. Good read

Five Bells by Gail Jones
this is the first book of Gail Jones that I have read. It's set in Sydney on one bright summer day and tracks the intertwining lives of four adults and a child. The title comes from classic Australian poem Five Bells by Kenneth Slessor which I have also been delving into. A wonderful book. The various story lines propel you forward and the language is beautiful and poetic. The subject of the poem, Five Bells, is echoed in the novel as well.

The Angel and the Octopus by Simon Leys
some great essays here and I especially enjoyed the ones about China under Mao.

Blog every day of June 2011

2011-06-01T09:46:00.005+08:00

Last year a group of librarians on Twitter brought together by @flexnib embarked upon a blogging challenge and set themselves the goal of posting one blog post a day throughout June.

It's on again and starting today and I've decided to give it a go and see if I can maintain the pace and write something interesting.

I hope to also revive my blogging enthusiasm which I have to admit has flagged since I started devoting more time to Twitter.

Here's the getting started post from Libraries Interact, the Australian Library group blog, where all the participants names are listed.

Best of luck to all those who have decided to join in, it will be fun to see how we go. I imagine half way thorough the 2nd week will be the time we strike writer's block!

The Twitter tag for this is #blogeverydayofjune

CCA-EDUCAUSE Australasia presentation on Summon

2011-05-19T16:45:00.009+08:00

Many of the presentations from the recent CCA-EDUCAUSE Australasia Sydney conference are now on the Conference program website.

The full list of presentations, posters and so forth is here

We gave a presentation on the usability studies conducted during 2010 and 2011 of the Serials Solutions Web scale discovery product, Summon. One key finding was that although students found the product easy to use, their skills at sifting through the results screens were not so good.

There is no full paper of the Summon presentation, however an article will be published this month's New Library World. More of that soon.

Discovering Scholarly Resources

View more presentations from Julia Gross

Anzac Day post

2011-04-11T12:22:00.008+08:00

It's Anzac Day here so I was reminded of the photos I have and that I must get around to contacting the Australian War Memorial to see if they are interested in seeing them.

Here's a photo from the family archives of two unknown Aussie soldiers taken around the time of the Battle of El Alamein in 1942. All I know about them is they were part of the Australian Ninth Division which I wrote about previously. Here they were obviously enjoying a day off.

Early birds for CCA-EDUCAUSE Australasia conference 2011

2011-02-21T16:27:00.006+08:00

CCA-EDUCAUSE Australasia conference is on again in Sydney this year: 3-6 April 2011 at the Sydney Convention & Exhibition Centre, Darling Harbour. CCA-EDUCAUSE conference is organised by CAUDIT, CAUL and ACODE and the focus is on information technology in higher education.

This conference is attended by a range of professionals working in the higher education sector:

IT practitioners and managers
Teaching and learning technology practitioners and managers
Librarians and knowledge managers
Developers of information technologies and services for higher education

Theme for 2011 is: The game has changed

"The game has changed for information technology in higher education. Fundamental shifts in learning and teaching, research, resources, and technology mean we’re not using the same rules or playing fields anymore. According to some leading thinkers, the very survival of the university is on the line if we're not able to adapt.

What game changers do you see in your organisation? What are the new rules and who are the players? What do we need to do to adapt? And what things remain constant, no matter what the external appearances of transformation?"

Early Bird registrations close on 3 March.

Keynote speakers include:

Bryan Alexander – Director of Research at NITLE. Emerging technologies, mobile and wireless computing, digital gaming, social media.

Shirley Alexander – Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Teaching, Learning and Equity) at the University of Technology, Sydney. Professor of Learning Technologies.

Richard Katz – Consults on strategy, technology, and assessment issues with universities, governments, and corporations worldwide.

Diana Oblinger – President and CEO of EDUCAUSE. Co-author of What Business Wants from Higher Education. Co-editor of The Learning Revolution.

McKenzie Wark – Author of Gamer Theory and A Hacker Manifesto. Chair of Culture and Media, Eugene Lang College, The New School, New York.

Brad Wheeler – CIO, Indiana University. Co-founder of the Sakai Project and Kuali. Transformative software and service collaborations.

Follow @ccaeducause on Twitter for news and updates

Perth Library Unconference goes national

2011-02-14T12:10:00.019+08:00

The Perth Library Unconference is going national for 2011.

The annual Perth Library Camp or Library UnConference has been going for a number of years, due to the enthusiasm of the "unorganisers" and the support of some local institutions.

This year it will be held to coincide with a number of national conferences happening in Perth:

The ALIA 5th New Librarians Symposium (2011) Friday 16 – Sunday 18 September 2011 and the ALIA National Library & Information Technicians Conference (Libtech) 12 - Friday 16 September 2011.

Library Camp Australia will be held in Perth on 19 September 2011, 9am to 4pm at the State Library of Western Australia:

"This will be an unconference for anyone who works in, researches, uses or is interested in libraries, following the principles that session topics are set on the day and that everyone contributes in some way. It is being organised by volunteers and so far is being supported by our generous sponsors the State Library of Western Australia and Public Libraries Western Australia.

There's also a competition to design a logo for Library Camp Australia. Check out this librariesinteract blog post.

The Twitter hashtag for Library Camp Australia is #libcampoz

coming up 2011 Teaching and Learning Forum in Perth

2011-01-17T09:21:00.001+08:00

The 2011 Teaching and Learning Forum is coming up in Perth on 1-2 February, 2011.

This year it is being hosted at Edith Cowan University, at the Joondalup Campus.

This year's conference title and theme is: Developing student skills for the next decade

all about...

"English language proficiency, written English language proficiency, numeracy, oral communication, employability, diversity, internationalisation, information literacy, IT, interpersonal skills, critical thinking and students with disabilities."

You can register on the website: http://www.ecu.edu.au/CLT/tlf/

The details of the campus location are:

Edith Cowan University
270 Joondalup Drive
JOONDALUP WA 6027

Sharing biodiversity data on Atlas of Living Australia

2011-01-10T17:30:00.012+08:00

Australia's biodiversity data is being shared on the wonderful new site, The Atlas of Living Australia (http://www.ala.org.au/) which was launched in November 2010 . This is an example of shared data on a huge scale and presented in a visual way that people can relate to.

The Atlas of Living Australia is a "collaborative, national project focused on making biodiversity information more accessible and useable online". The site includes sections where you:

Get started including how-to tutorials
Explore information on species, maps, collections and regions
Share sightings, photos and information

The atlas is a result collaboration between the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), the Australian museums, the Australian Government and other partners.

Media release states that the site "already holds over 23 million records on the distribution of Australia’s fauna and flora, in addition to maps, images and literature. Members of the public can help to build the database by contributing local photographs and information."

Go and check it out.

Books I read in 2010

2011-01-06T08:12:00.008+08:00

I’ve been inspired by Ruminations list of books read in 2010 to come up with my own list of what I read in 2010. I hadn’t actually kept track, apart from the bookgroup readings, but here’s an approximate list of those read in the year. New Year's Resolution read more in 2011...

B indicates the bookgroup ones and A the Australian ones.

1. A year of wonders : a novel of the plague by Geraldine Brooks
2. Frenchman's Creek by Daphne du Maurier
3. War and peace by Leo Tolstoy
4. The spare room by Helen Garner (A)
5. Parrot and Olivier in America by Peter Carey (A)
6. Lovesong by Alex Miller (A)
7. Purple hibiscus by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.
8. Half of a yellow sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.
9. Ordinary Thunderstorms by William Boyd (B)
10. The Other Side of You by Sally Vickers (B)
11. Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout (B)
12. Jasper Jones by Craig Silvey (A) (B)
13. Wanting by Richard Flanagan (A) (B)
14. The Black Englishman by Carolyn Slaughter (B)
15. The Red Highway by Nicholas Rothwell (A) (B)
16. The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson
17. The Girl Who Played with Fire by Stieg Larsson
18. The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets' Nest by Stieg Larsson
19. A Journey Tony Blair

Highlights

The Spare Room by Helen Garner would be my highlight. It's about a friend dying of cancer who comes to stay in the spare room. Don’t be put off by the subject matter as the clear writing and honesty make it shine. What a wonderful writer Helen Garner is, and she is not afraid of tackling difficult subjects. Joe Cinque's Consolation is another amazing book by HG.

Ordinary Thunderstorms is a rollicking good whodunit story about a guy who loses all his ID and survives on the streets of London while trying to get back his life and find the criminals. It would make a great movie. I’ve read another by William Boyd (Armadillo), also excellent and they did make a movie of that.

And I finally read War and Peace which, according to Elaine in Seinfeld was really meant to be called “War what is it good for” ;). Once you get your head around all the characters (hint: make a list) and the fact that they all have many different names you can get an entree into the story.

Two of these I read as ebooks on my Kindle: A Journey Tony Blair and Lovesong by Alex Miller

Six of those, the (A) ones are Australian literature. Geraldine Brooks is Australian too, but I don’t think of her as writing about Australia, especially.

Is it online, digital or electronic information? mine Google data to find out

2010-12-22T19:30:00.002+08:00

I love playing around with new Web tools. This week I had a look at the new Google Books Ngram Viewer which is a tool for comparative analysis of word usage. Google Books Ngram Viewer lets you enter words and phrases and then it does an analysis and displays a graph showing how often those words phrases have occurred. The data set being interrogated is a particular corpus of books on Google Books generated in July 2009.

We often have discussions about the terms: "online information", "electronic information" and "digital information". When you do a comparative analysis of those three phrases on Google Books Ngram Viewer from 1940 onwards, you get the graphs above, showing that "electronic information" (red line), is the most commonly used term, followed by digital information" (green line), while "online information" (blue line) has definitely plateaued.

Here are a few blog posts explaining more about the new tool: The Google Books Ngram Viewer from +Datavisualization.CH and Charting the Epic Battle of “Geek” vs. “Nerd”

Will this sort of analysis will be a boon for linguistics' scholars, or will it just remain a fun tool to explore?

ANDS, data management and libraries

2010-12-02T15:01:00.004+08:00

Slides from my presentation this week to library staff on ANDS (the Australian National Data Service) and data management and libraries.

ANDS and Data Management

View more presentations from Julia Gross.

Slides from data management roadshow in Bath

2010-11-12T08:33:00.007+08:00

Our university is about to commence an ANDS Seeding the Commons project on research data management.

These slides look very relevant to what we will be embarking upon.

Facing the Data Challenge: Institutions, Disciplines, Services and Risks

View more presentations from LizLyon.

23 Things program, follow up article published

2010-11-03T08:02:00.009+08:00

The Electronic Library (TEL) has just published our follow up article on the 23 Things program at our library. It seems like it has been a long time coming. We submitted it in early 2009, but there were many other articles in the pipeline at TEL, so we had to wait.

Thanks to my co-author, Lyn Leslie, and all involved.

The full citation:
Julia Gross, Lyn Leslie, (2010) "Learning 2.0: a catalyst for library organisational change", Electronic Library, The, Vol. 28 Iss: 5, pp.657 - 668

Abstract:
Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to describe “what happened” with round two of the implementation of Learning 2.0 with a large and diverse group of library staff at Edith Cowan University (ECU) Library during 2007/2008.

Design/methodology/approach – A previous paper reported on a study of the suitability of the 23 Things Learning 2.0 program for a small group of early adopters in the ECU Library. This follow-up paper reports challenges that library management faced when the remaining staff were given the 23 Things Learning 2.0 program. All remaining library staff members were encouraged to undertake the program, but take-up was not strong and only 25 per cent of staff completed the program. At the conclusion of round two of Learning 2.0, all staff were surveyed to find out reasons for completion or non-completion, what types of technologies they needed support with, and how they wished to learn about the emerging/Web 2.0 technologies.

Findings – From the observations and survey responses in this study it was found that while Learning 2.0 was a suitable program, some staff required extra time and a more hands-on approach to their workplace learning.

Originality/value – The paper is unique in that it follows up on previous research at the same institution, and reveals new findings.

DOI
10.1108/02640471011081942

The Electronic Library is one of the Emerald Insight journals: www.emeraldinsight.com

Sharing a Google Doc

2010-11-02T08:21:00.006+08:00

This year with our 2010 Book Club votes I have decided to share it on the Web as a Google doc. Here it is above with the embedded code. Google also makes a separate web page version for shared docs and also gives you a link to the doc on the Web. The doc contains our votes for 2010 rating the books from 1-7.

Story telling using Make Beliefs Comix

2010-10-25T16:56:00.001+08:00

The October digital story telling challenge was started by RestructureGirl in her blog post. For Week 4 of I have done a comic using MakeBeliefsComix.com

The key to story telling is to simply your message and get the story told in a few images. Comics are good for that in that you can pick characters, change their mood and gestures and add text as words or thought bubbles.

I can see many applications in a library setting, even in academic libraries. The story is told in my comic is aimed at postgraduate students promoting our library's open access repository and the comic is called How does you research find an audience ?

The direct link to it is:
http://www.makebeliefscomix.com/Comix/?comix_id=20368245C324795

You can't save this work on their website, but have to print a copy, do a screen capture or email the link. It's dead easy to do one.

Joan Sutherland tribute using Google Search Stories

2010-10-17T19:27:00.003+08:00

For a wrap up of Week 2 in the October Show and Tell, digital story telling challenge go to Restructuregirl's latest blog post.

The digital story telling challenge was organised by Restructuregirl I'm having some fun with it!

It's now up to Week 3. This week I had a go at Google Search Stories Video Creator, which is available on a YouTube channel. The final video story gets uploaded to YouTube.

It's straightforward once you nut out a story sequence. Essentially you tell a story using a combination of Google searches. Start by getting the script down and then decide if you want the search to be of: text, images, maps, blogs, books etc. Then choose the music. The choice of music is pretty ordinary, but I settled on some cello music they list under "Drama". Of course the whole deal results in shameless advertising for Google, but you can have some fun with it!

I can see an educational use for this and I'm sure you could turn it into something related to learning and information skills.

So this is my little tribute to "our Joanie", world famous Australian soprano, Joan Sutherland who died this week, 12 October 2010. If this video is not the best quality when embedded in the blog, try going to YouTube direct for my Tribute to Joan Sutherland.

Open Access Week Video from McGill University Library

2010-10-15T09:47:00.005+08:00

Open Access Week 2010

2010-10-14T11:47:00.005+08:00

Visit Open Access Week

Open Access Week is on next week: October 18-24 2010. It's a global event, now in its 4th year and it is promoting open access as a new norm in scholarship and research.

The themes are: Learn Share Advance

There are many activities happening in Europe and North America, all listed at http://openaccessweek.org and follow the Twitter tag #oaw2010.

There's even some OAW haiku my favourite is:

It's the online age
You're losing research impact...
Make it free online

From what I can see the awareness in Australia seems to be pretty negligible. But well done to Deakin University for an interesting program of seminars.

Week 2 October show and tell

2010-10-11T10:00:00.003+08:00

Create your own video slideshow at animoto.com.

I decided to stick with Animoto to make a promotional video for Open Access Week, which is coming up 18-24th October 2010.

What have a I learned? Well, this time I spent more time on arranging the images and text in some coherent sequence. The images I've used should be a bit larger to get a better resolution. Selecting images and music takes an inordinate amount of time, I find. And, don't copy the embed code into Notepad, but take it straight from the Animoto website.

I think the text function that Animoto includes could make this a useful tool for library promotional type videos.

Week one of October show and tell

2010-10-09T07:48:00.005+08:00

RestructureGirl has a wrap up of week one with links to all the learning activities. Animoto has been a hit, but there are many more approached to vblogging to try out.

http://restructuregirl.wordpress.com/2010/10/08/octshowntell/

October Show and Tell challenge

2010-10-06T19:35:00.010+08:00

Create your own video slideshow at animoto.com.

There's a challenge on again from a group of librarians on Twitter. The October challenge is to explore digital story telling and video blogging — for more info in Restructuregirl’s blog post.

Here's my entry for week one. I decided to do Animoto as we had a presentation on that at our staff Library 2.0 day in July and it looked interesting. Then I saw an Animoto video done by BonitoClub which was a picture tour through Japan using some Flickr photos and Animoto.

So this is my first attempt using some of my bird photos taken in Australia and Bali. You need between 12 and 16 photos for this short video and you can pick the music from Animoto's selection.

Animoto allows you to make a short 30 second video with their free Animoto account. Anything more costs you only $30+ something a year. You can embed the code in your blog, as done here, or share it on Twitter, Facebook, etc. I haven't done any editing to this, but will play around more with Animoto maybe for next week's challenge.

It's on again - Perth Library Camp (AKA Perth Unconference)

2010-10-05T16:23:00.007+08:00

Once again there is going to be a library Unconference (Library Camp) in Perth. It will be held at the Grove Library on October 25th 2010 from 9.30 to 4.30.

The registration for library Unconference 2010 is now open.

To register just go to http://www.librarycampperth.com and add your name to the list.

Please be quick these things usually fill up fast.

If you have something you'd like to see a session on, even if you don't want to do the session yourself, please add it to the sessions ideas page.

The Twitter hashtag for the day is: #lcp2010

Delving into military history and a sad story of two brothers

2010-09-06T08:35:00.013+08:00

I stumbled across this sad story of two brothers, killed in action on the same day during the Australian North African campaign of World War Two.

Recently I attended an excellent family photo workshop at Wanneroo Public Library run by Julie Martin. I brought along some family photos taken by my uncle. They are a collection of photos of the Australian 9th Division during the North African campaign of World War Two. Julie was interested in the collection and also commented on the photo shown here that my uncle took in 1942. The photo is of the grave of two men with the same surname.

Thanks to all the online records available on the Australian Army World War Two Nominal Roll and the Australian War Memorial, I have been able to do some detective work and have pieced together a story that is more local than I expected. My uncle was from N.S.W., but the grave photo is of two Western Australian brothers. These two brothers were killed in action on the same day: 23 October 1942. The names are visible if you enlarge the photos, so I have been able to track down some records.

They were both Gunners in the 2/7 FD REGT RAA, so were probably killed during the battle of El Alamein. 23 October 1942 was the first day of the battle of El Alamein. The Allied victory at El Alamein was a critical turning point for the Allies in the North African campaign and for World War Two generally.

I just came across this photo, pieced together a likely story, but I have no experience in military history, so I am contacting a journalist to see if they wish to write up this story. Obviously effort would have to be made to contact possible relatives who may be out there. The terrible impact of this on the family can barely be imagined.

This photo is precious to me so please don’t use it without my permission. Thanks!

Our students take to web scale discovery

2010-08-27T16:49:00.010+08:00

Library OneSearch

Earlier this year we did a usability study of our new web scale discovery product, Summon.This is a very brief presentation I did on the study's findings during ECU Research Week in August 2010.

The full paper detailing all the findings, has been submitted by Lutie Sheridan and I and is expected to be published by Emerald Publishing later in 2010

View more presentations from Julia Gross.

Art Exhibition launch in the library

2010-07-31T17:27:00.006+08:00

The Mount Lawley Campus library has an lovely exhibition area called "Breathing Space", which is an ideal spot for showcasing local art from our students and staff. This week there was a launch of art works from visual artist, Catherine Gomersall entitled "Body Bags: I am a Trash Bag"

The series of colour photographic prints explore the “trash bag” as a metaphor for a particular category of emotion: “bad” ones.

Library Day in the Life 2010, post two

2010-07-28T19:19:00.001+08:00

Julia Gross. Faculty Librarian for Education and Arts at Edith Cowan University in Perth, Western Australia.

This is my second post for Library Day in the Life 2010.

Tuesday is my day at Joondalup, our growing northern campus. This is a view from my office. Pines tress you see are left over from when there was a pine plantation on this site. Alas, there also used to be a group of kangaroos wandering around on campus, munching the grass. But the place is so built up now that they have vanished…wonder where to?

It is always a good day for catching up with faculty people as I have an office in the faculty teaching and learning area on Tuesdays. Had some good corridor discussions with academic staff today about Research Week and research in Education.

Another big project we are in the midst of is the new TRIM Records Management system that is being rolled out across the uni. The library is next cab off the rank, so we need to get our act together with how we manage our records. So.... I met with Records Management staff and went through the Classification Model and securities that have been set up for each work area. All very interesting and it strikes me that records managers and librarians have some things in common: classifications systems, making order out of chaos. Also some of what we are looking at is similar to the research data management area.

I starting to prepare my Research Week session on our institutional repository which is managed by the library. Despite some of the whiz bang new presentation products out there like Prezi, I think we will have to use the standard uni Powerpoints they have prepared for Research Week.

Last week 58 boxes of new Education books arrived in Acquisitions. I went over to the library and met with one of the librarians in my team and we checked out the new materials. Looks like some great stuff coming through. We have been ordering lots, through a type of approval plan.

We are also planning a library display for Children's Book Week on August 21-27 2010. One of my staff has been some ordering some merchandise which looks great.

Caught up with a couple of library colleagues over coffee and lunch during the day. Discussed some glitches in last week's Orientation program and how to avoid them next time.

All in all a pretty busy day!

Library Day in the Life 2010, post one

2010-07-28T10:55:00.005+08:00

Julia Gross. Faculty Librarian for Education and Arts at Edith Cowan University in Perth, Western Australia.

This is my first post for Library Day in the Life 2010

Started the day at home catching up on Twitter, while listening to the glorious striated pardalote peeping away in the neighbours old gum tree. They are a glorious little birds, but you hardly ever see them as they spend most of their day way up high in the canopy. I'm a bit of a bird nut!

Today is the first day of semester and I came in later as I’m doing the evening shift. I have been flat out, because I’ve been away on leave for 10 days there is lots of catching up to do: socialising speaking to the team and getting through the mountain of emails.

There are a couple of big projects on the horizon, one is the university's Research Week and I’m on the university committee for this. The library is planning some displays and a series of research seminars. We have the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts (WAAPA) on my home campus and they come within the Faculty of Education and Arts portfolio, which is pretty exciting. So I spoke to a library staff member about doing a music installation display for Research Week, using work from one of our Music academic staff members. The WAAPA research in the creative areas challenges the library in all sorts of ways, such as how to store creative research on our institutional repository.

I emailed the faculty team with some catch up news. There are staff on two campuses, so it’s important to keep everyone informed. Had some casual conversations wiht colleagues about staffing and a new librarian’s induction. We also have two librarians about to join a web2.0 leadership project which is a federally funded collaboration with three local Perth unis, so I spoke to people about that.

I met a new PHD student who is doing Creative Writing. He’s coming to see me later this week to get started with the library research part of his PHD.

Today I have also been getting ready for going to research data management training at ANDS in Canberra and have been doing some prior reading up for that.

And finally I did one desk shift til 7pm. Good just to keep my hand in.

It is interesting, looking back over all this and it’s clear a lot of my job these days is concerned with support for research.

PS the photo of the big crane is the construction site of our new engineering building.

Now a parody of the Old Spice library ad

2010-07-16T17:40:00.002+08:00

Here's a fantastic parody of the Old Spice library ad done by the Multimedia Production Unit for Harold B. Lee Library on YouTube

Do you want to be a scholar? Then study at the Harold B. Lee Library. Do your research here, study here, and be a scholar!

Old Spice add goes viral with library version

2010-07-16T17:29:00.003+08:00

Old Spice add has gone viral this week.

On Twitter, @wawoodworth wrote "ATTN LIBRARIAN TWEEPS: Need help getting @oldspice guy to say a few words regarding libraries. RT plz. Thanks.

this is the result:

Spreadsheet comparing ebook readers

2010-07-11T12:31:00.005+08:00

My brother in law has done this useful spreadsheet comparing various ebook readers and their capabilities: inputs, size, battery life, storage capacity, price in US and/or Aussie dollars.

He has looked at the Kindle 2, Kindle DX, Sony PRS-700, Barnes and Noble Nook, Borders Kobo, AcerLumiRead, Pico Life W960, IRivers Story.

Here's a link to the spreadsheet

WISE library session on giving presentations

2010-06-28T06:41:00.001+08:00

On Friday the Perth universities WISE group held its mid-year get-together, this time at the University of Western Australia.

In case you are wondering WISE stands for WAGUL Information Sharing Exchange. And WAGUL is the Western Australian Group of University Librarians.

For the mid-year meet up Lisa Cluett ran a terrific session on giving presentations.

Lisa is an experienced presenter herself and a member Toast Masters.

It was the type of session that gave us some tangible ideas to help us make changes to how we present, and to rethink bad habits.

What I took away from it was:

1. Focus on your audience not what information you want to get across. Don’t think about what you want to tell them. I think I have been guilty of that in the past, especially in library skills session when we have so much to get across. But how much can students really absorb in one session. If you don’t know you audience do a bit of research. This applies not just to presentations but in a number of other settings: writing this blog for example.

2. Prepare your presentation outline on paper rather than launch straight into getting your Powerpoints done and don’t use someone else’s Powerpoints and adapt. Oops I have done that too!

3. Start strongly so your initial impression grabs the audience’s attention and avoid slipping into clichéd intro lines. I have heard this before too, but we all need reminding.

4. To improve your presentations get some honest feedback from friends and colleagues

I’m preparing a short session for our ECU Library 2.0 training day on ebook readers, so I will focus on what the staff might want to know about these devices. I know already that most of the audience don’t already have an ebook reader, but some are interested in buying one. Staff will also want to know what the library is planning to do and if our existing ebooks could be made available to students, with a loan of an ebook reader for example.

Ebook readers the story so far

2010-06-05T17:36:00.005+08:00

Mike Oetting, Reference Librarian from Hinsdale Public Library provides these slides on Slideshare which outline the state of the eReader market after the entry of Apple’s iPad.

This relates to the state of play in the U.S. Here in Australia not all these devices are available, however the iPad has just hit the market here.

iPads, Kindles and Nooks--Oh My!

View more presentations from Mike Oetting.

Battle to save Charlotte Mecklenburg Public Libraries in North Carolina

2010-03-22T08:58:00.013+08:00

There's a crisis at the Charlotte Mecklenburg Public Libraries in North Carolina. The Library Board plans to lay off 148 staff and close 12 libraries by 3rd April, due to a massive US $2million budget hole.

This seems incredible that the libraries that brought the Learning 2.0 (aka 23 Things) to many libraries around the world and changed so many lives are now battling to survive.

American Libraries magazine has a report of the public rally over the weekend to help raise funds to alleviate the impact of budget cuts.

What can you do to help? Go to Save our Libraries and also Lori Reed 's website for more information. The Twitter hash code is #cmlibrary

Singing in the Rain, Hong Kong library conference

2010-03-11T14:47:00.002+08:00

There’s an exciting library conference on in Hong Kong this week, with some local and international presenters.

It’s the Academic Librarian 2: Singing in the Rain conference held at Hong Kong Polytechnic University March 11-12, which is all about the future of libraries and the library profession.

This conference is the second "Academic Librarian" conference in Hong Kong and is an extension of The Academic Librarian: Dinosaur or Phoenix Conference held by the Chinese University of Hong Kong in 2007.

The major themes are:

Librarians of Tomorrow
Quality Enhancement
New Tools & Culture
Collaboration & Networking

There will be some presentations on how libraries are embedding Web 2.0 and training staff in this area.

conference summary is:

“Academic Librarians face unprecedented challenges to their role, to how they manage their collections and how they interact professionally with their academic colleagues. They require different professional and personal skills as well as different ways of interacting with their communities, both in the academic, publishing and other vendor communities. In the current context of a global recession, without doubt, it is going to be a future full of challenges and opportunities. What has changed and what needs to change? As suggested by the Conference subtitle "Singing in the Rain", a new generation of academic librarians cannot survive without an optimistic, positive and thoughtful attitude towards the future.”

Moira Bent's visit to Curtin University

2010-03-06T21:23:00.013+08:00

A special event was organised at Curtin University Library, Perth last week.

Moira Bent, National Teaching Fellowship recipient was visiting from the U.K. Moira is a Science liaison librarian from Newcastle University and one of only 5 U.K. librarians who have received a National Teaching Fellowships. Her blog posts about the fellowship are here.

Having the fellowship has given Moira the opportunity and time to undertake research and publish in a number of areas which she spoke about:

Facilitating research roles and opportunities for librarians. This is one area that Australian librarians can (and are already) be involved with in providing research support with the ERA and imperative to publish. (The Newcastle University library has a useful “Writing for publication brochure”
Librarians framing information literacy as a set of learning attitude or behaviours, rather than just as a set of skills.

At the tea discussion she talked about librarians getting out to conferences in non-library areas. I totally agree. We need to collaborate with academic and teaching and learning colleagues.

There's lots more to explore here. These are links to the articles and activities Moira has been involved with.

Perceptions of Information Literacy in the Transition to Higher Education. NTF Final Report.

Providing effective library services for research (book)

Information Literacy in a researcher's learning life: the Seven Ages of Research (article)

Integrating information literacy as a habit of learning (article)

SCONUL Report on Library Services for International Students (report)

Vale Jillian Beswick, Lake Macquarie librarian

2010-03-06T10:05:00.003+08:00

The Perth library community was saddened to hear of the recent death of Jillian Beswick, who passed away in Brisbane on February 15th 2010, after a long battle with cancer.

Jillian was a qualified teacher and had worked in school and public libraries in Tasmania and the Northern Territory prior to moving to Western Australia.

She completed an MBA at Murdoch University in 1993 and we remember her fondly at Edith Cowan University Library where worked in a number of management roles from 1994-1997.

Jillian was active in ALIA during her time in Western Australia and was also an ABN trainer.

Her interests ranged widely and she was involved in the local community and stood for local government in the Shire of Cambridge, W.A.

She left Perth in 1997 to take up a senior position in charge of public libraries and cultural activities at the City of Lake Macquarie, New South Wales.

Jillian was a keen flyer and had her pilot’s licence. While in Lake Macquarie she took up sailing and enjoyed the lakeside lifestyle.

She remained in NSW until she became ill a few years ago.

The Australian library community has lost an active, committed and passionate member.

Teaching & Learning Forum 2010 program is out now

2010-01-24T13:20:00.007+08:00

The program for the 2010 Perth Teaching & Learning Forum 2010 is up on the website now: http://www.ecu.edu.au/CLT/tlf/program/

This year the Forum will be hosted by Edith Cowan University and will be held at the Joondalup Campus on Thursday/Friday 28-29 January 2010.

It looks to be an interesting and varied program centred around the theme: Educating for Sustainability.

Keynote speakers are: Professor Marnie Hughes-Warrington, PVC Teaching & Learning, Monash University and Professor Jan Herrington, Professor of Education, Murdoch University

Wordle word cloud from my Delicious tags

2009-12-23T11:03:00.003+08:00

Remembering Ascilite 2009

2009-12-15T14:36:00.007+08:00

Auckland really turned on some fabulous weather for Ascilite 2009, which was held over December 6-9 in the bright new University of Auckland, Faculty of Business, Owen G. Glen Building. Over 400 attended and for over 100 delegates, including me, it was their first Ascilite. The themes were Same places, different spaces: Blended Space, Virtual Space, Social Space, Mobile Space, Work Space.

There were many mentions of libraries and how they are re-inventing themselves in the digital age and the convergences are obvious. For libraries too, it is getting harder to engage students, and we face the same challenges as faculty and tertiary learning and teaching. One keynote speaker, James Clay, is also the Manager of the Library at his institution, Gloucestershire College. A few other NZ librarians attended, but no others from Australia as far as I could gather.

The full Ascilite Programme, with all the papers, posters are available online.

Some keynotes are online in various places:

Gráinne Conole, Pushing the boundaries into the unknown, trajectories of user behaviour in new frontiers. These slides are at SlideShare

For James Clay, The future of learning, see Cloudworks . James ran the Twitter backchannel during his keynote (see above), and had his tweets all automated. Pretty neat and folks in the UK were joining in!

The following are links to some of the conference papers that I found especially interesting:

Don't dilly dally on the way - driving towards digital information literacy. Kelly, O etal

Smartphones give you wings: Pedagogical affordances of mobile Web 2.0. Cochrane, T & etal. This paper won an award.

Introducing Jass Easterman: My Second Life learning space. Sue Gregory and Tynan, B

Our paper was: Adding value to first year student learning with embedded library pod/vodcasts. Julia Gross and Eva Dobozy:

Others have already written some great blog posts about Ascilite09. In particular, check out:

James Clay's blog

Col's blogroll

Learnerbytes

Some of the Twitter action post Ascilite 2009 is at Twapperkeeper and the Twitter search hash tag is #ascilite09

The Ascilite09 Conference Hub has some presentations and loads of other good info for delegates.

Also Cloudworks which was new to me and I love it! Go here for the Cloudworks Cloudscape for Ascilite 2009

Take away messages for me were:

Digital literacy and information literacy, what relationship do they have and, where do library/searching skills fit. (Digital information literacies is one of the in EDUCAUSE 2009 challenges too).
The potential of Web 2.0 tools to enhance the learning process. With Web 2.0 we need to walk the walk as well as talk the talk: you need to be doing web2.0 or you don’t get it.
Is the LMS just another repository of courseware, or can the full potential be realised of it being a fully interactive, dynamic learning space?
Second Life is not dead! Several papers had good applications for Second Life: There was an excellent paper from UNE on SL (see above) with ICT teacher education students really engaging them. Also applications in the medical area, language teaching, cultural awareness teaching, and in the NZ TAFE equivalent area with preparation for job interview skills.
Use of mobile devices to access learning materials is not yet high. (Our teacher education students are still mainly using desktops/laptops to access the LMS material). This will change over time as smart phones become common within the next year or so in Australia.
Question everything, don’t jump on the band wagon without interrogating: Nichols challenged the notion of “the wisdom of the crowd” comparing it to Groupthink. We have all been guilty of that at some stage.

I had a terrific time, met some great people, and came back inspired. Special thanks to the organisers and the Kiwis for the hospitality. And someone (?) for the awesome weather ;)

Ascilite here we come

2009-12-02T15:37:00.008+08:00

I’m heading off to the Ascilite 2009 conference in Auckland in a few days. The Ascilite (Australasian Society for Computers in Learning in Tertiary Education) conference is held every year and this will be only the second time that the conference has been held in Aotearoa New Zealand.

The themes for Ascilite Same places, different spaces December 6-9, 2009 are: Blended Space, Virtual Space, Social Space, Mobile Space, Work Space.

Keynotes are:

Scott Diener, who has led the development of the University of Auckland's simulation island in Second Life; Grainne Conole, a Professor of e-Learning at the Open University, UK; James Clay ILT & Learning Resources Manager at Gloucestershire College.

The full programme and all the papers went online last week. I really like the idea of putting papers up ahead of time so delegates can get a better idea of what is on offer. Most library conferences seem to do this after the event.

There is the Ascilite09 Conference Hub , a fabulous way to facilitate communication and interaction, before during and after the conference. There's lot of great stuff here for delegates including a Twitter stream which is starting to take off.

An Ascilite SlideShare account has also been set up, but nothing has been uploaded, yet.

You can follow Ascilite on Twitter. And if you are tweeting about the conference the hash tag is #ascilte09

This will be my first Ascilite conference, so should be a blast. I’ll be presenting a paper:
Julia Gross and Eva Dobozy: Adding value to first year student learning with embedded library pod/vodcasts PDF

The other thing about Ascilite is they publish the Australasian Journal of Educational Technology

Learning spaces: students tell us what they think

2009-11-30T15:24:00.006+08:00

The ECU Library’s learning spaces photo competition attracted some interest from ECU students when it ran during October 2009.

We were asking students to take photos of what they considered “good” and “bad” learning spaces around the campuses and to give us some reasons why they made their choice. Photos were taken of a range of areas such as e-labs, libraries, teaching spaces and outdoor areas on all campuses: Joondalup, Bunbury and Mount Lawley.

Adrianna Pracas, a final year Teacher Education student from Mount Lawley Campus was the lucky winner of teh photo competition. Dan Archibald, University Librarian, presented the iPod Touch prize at a morning tea function. Thanks to all students who participated.

This is a small part of a much bigger ALTC Project: Retrofitting university learning spaces: from teaching spaces to learning spaces. Queensland University of Technology is leading the project, joined by Charles Darwin University and Edith Cowan University.

The outcome of the project, including student photos and comments, will inform the redesign of learning spaces and contribute to developing an integrated campus learning environment.

Embedding library media in the LMS

2009-11-23T12:26:00.014+08:00

Here's my presentation from Friday November 20, 2009 at the WISE ShareCase held at Notre Dame University, Fremantle, Western Australia. WISE stands for WAGUL Information Sharing Exchange. And WAGUL is the Western Australian Group of University Librarians.

Each university library in Perth and also TAFE presented. A great event and thanks to the organisers.

If anyone else puts up their presentation can you let me know and I'll link to it.

Library podcasts and vodcasts

View more presentations from Julia Gross.

Impressions of LIANZA Conference October 2009

2009-11-02T17:02:00.001+08:00

I got back to Perth last week from the excellent LIANZA Library Conference in Christchurch, New Zealand. The conference was a great mix of outstanding keynotes, targeted papers, with some opportunities for interaction with colleagues in the embedded unconference and workshop settings. The conference started with the Powhiri which is the NZ equivalent to our Indigenous "welcome to country" and was all conducted in Maori (see pic). Luckily I was standing next to an ex-Aussie who explained what was going on and how the local tribe were welcoming the visitors to their patch. The theme of the conference was: He Tangata He Tangata He Tangata meaning It is people, it is people, it is people.

New Zealand is ahead of Australia in terms of digitisation projects which are capturing local history and knowledge, in development of open source softwares (eg ketes), and funding for public libraries. And, it goes without saying, way ahead in terms of recognition of indigenous knowledges and the need for librarians to have cultural awareness.

Some of the abstracts are on the LIANZA website, but not the full papers yet. I do hope the papers or at least Powerpoints will be added in due course, but as the conference papers are not peer reviewed before, this may not occur.

All the keynotes featured high calibre international and local experts, so I’ll just highlight a few:

The opening keynote, Generation Ngai Tahu was Sir Tipene O’Regan and Hana O’Regan, engaging father and daughter team talking with love and humour about sharing of indigenous knowledges across generations.

Libraries Building Communities: Communities Building Libraries Jessica Dorr of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation talked about the Foundation’s work in United States libraries starting back in 1997 and how this work raised so many related issues about local and indigenous communities and lack of services. The Foundation is now spreading this work internationally.

Penny Carnaby, the National Librarian of New Zealand is a very inspirational speaker. Her keynote, A new equity emerges: citizen-created content powering the knowledge
Economy brought home for me how New Zealand is a world leader in cultural digitisation projects.

Some of the conference sessions I attended were Our journey into the future: Using ePortfolios to capture our learning and development with Gillian Hallam of QUT. She was speaking about an ALTC project using Pebble Pad software to help new career librarians develop E-Portfolios. Librarians involved in the project found this very beneficial for career advancement and finding work in this difficult financial environment. Co-incidentally some Australian tertiary organisations are using New Zealand Open Source software, Mahara to develop E-Portfolios.

Talking to the World: Using Online Identities for Professional (and Personal)
Communication: Brenda Chawner of School of Information Management, Victoria University of Wellington talking about how librarians are using Web 2.0 and social software for professional development and to build learning networks, how her surveys show how this has changed over time.

Here, there and virtually everywhere. Library services for distance learners with Anne Ferrier-Watson, Information Services Librarian of Waikato University Library, Hamilton. This was of particular relevance to me as it dealt with my subject area of services for teacher education. The Waikato University School of Education has developed VERD (Virtual Education Reference Desk) which provides an online communication channel to meet the needs of distance and online learners. It is a Moodle based online resource which combines web technology and learner-focussed service to help distance students find the resources and information they need. This could be implemented in many learning environments and across other disciplines where the majority of students are distance students.

One session I did not attend, but which was very well received, dealt with the problem of engaging university students with library orientation and first year student sessions. Simon Hart and Charlotte Brown of University of Otago Library, Dunedin delivered this session called: “I had no idea that the Library has so much to offer!” The Cephalonia method of library induction: shaped by students, for students, and starring students! Their ideas are soundly based in constructivist pedagogy and I feel could be adapted to other settings.

Connecting your Library to DigitalNZ delivered by Andy Neale, Jo Eaton, Virginia Gow, of DigitalNZ, National Library of NZ, Wellington. The DigitalNZ search system brings together NZ digital content from a wide range of content providers. They use search widgets, gadgets, enhanced catalogues, and mashups to enhance and deliver the data. DigitalNZ content can be embedded in blogs and on websites etc. I'd like to explore this more and embed some DigitalNZ into this blog.

There was a LIANZA 2009 Conference blog which is continuing to post follow ups. All in all a great conference, smaller and more accessible and interactive than some of the larger library conferences. The next LIANZA will be held in Dunedin in December 2010.

Richard Stallman will speak at LIANZA Conference 2009

2009-10-05T14:03:00.012+08:00

I'm really looking forward to hearing Richard Stallman the free software activist an author of Free as in Freedom, deliver a keynote at the LIANZA Conference in New Zealand, October 2009. He's been getting some press in New Zealand during his visit there and was interviewed on NZ radio. If the podcast of the interview is anything to go by, this promises to be an inspiring and controversial keynote. Of course Wikipedia has lots of background information on Richard Stallman

The LIANZA conference blog is full of all sort of news and advice for attendees too.

Fires burning at Perth Library Camp

2009-10-05T08:11:00.008+08:00

We had another really successful Library Unconference in Perth on Saturday October 3rd 2009. This year called Libcamp 09 LibraryCamp Perth 2009: Keeping the fire burning.

One of the highlights for me was our last minute surprise guest participant and Web Tamer: Michael Stephens.

Michael is part way through a CAVAL research project looking at outcomes of the 23 Things Learning 2.0 program in Australian libraries and he presented some of the preliminary findings of the research and also generously made himself available to answer questions and ask questions of the group.

Along the same vein it was also great the hear the Murdoch library people talking about implementing their 14 things ( an updated version of the 23 Things) for academic, library and other staff at Murdoch University.

One of the best parts of these days are the serendipitous lunchtime chats with people about all sorts of things like the recent: IAML conference in Amsterdam ...makes me wish I was still a music librarian!

Also heard about Central TAFE signing up to Microsoft Live@Edu

Another good session was on the New Zealand Kete. Kete Horowhenua is “a knowledge basket of images, audio, video and documents which are collected and catalogued by the community”. Kete seems to be like a Digital Commons for community and local history information

Coverage of called Library Camp Perth is at the wiki

Session notes here and there is also a Twitterfountain harvesting all the Twitter feed on the Librarians Matter blog.

Thanks to Michael, all the un-organisers and those who gave up their Saturday to participate and make the Library Unconference a great success.

Learning spaces, good and bad, what do university students think?

2009-09-29T11:38:00.005+08:00

We are about to embark on a “photo elicitation” project with ECU students to taking photos of what they consider good and bad learning spaces around the campus. Participants will go in the draw to win an iPod Touch

Our students will be taking photos during October and it will be interesting to see what campus spaces students value for their learning.

This project is a small part of a much bigger ALTC Project: Retrofitting university learning spaces: from teaching spaces to learning spaces. Queensland University of Technology is leading the project, joined by Charles Darwin University and Edith Cowan University (ECU).

The project will develop guidelines, principles, exemplars and evaluation rubrics to guide the sustainable refurbishment of existing tertiary learning spaces to support a range of current and emerging pedagogical practices. Guidelines for academic staff development, facilities, AV and IT support, and for architects involved in institutional refurbishments are also included.

Eventually a selection of photos will be stored and made available on a Flickr photo site

Special guest at Perth Library Camp in October

2009-09-14T15:58:00.007+08:00

Dr Michael Stephens, Assistant Professor in the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at Dominican University and author of the influential Tame the Web blog, will be a participant at LibraryCamp Perth on Saturday 3 October 2009.

There are a few places left. Just go to the wiki to register your place and then put your name down to facilitate a session or do some other job on the day. Further details are on the wiki, Library Camp Perth.

If you have already registered, it would be great if you could add to the list of sessions on the wiki so far, or think about facilitating a session on the day.

So far we have:
• * • iPhone apps – Kathryn
• * • Can we use Kete or Omeka in Western Australian Libraries? (eg. Kete Horowhenua) – Kathryn
• * • Setting up a new library
• * • RFID
• * • Using drupal for library web sites
• * • What are the next 23 things- technologies on the horizon
• * • Keeping up to date – what tools do you use? – Con
• * • Mandatory Internet Filtering in Australia – Amy
• * • LibJam
• * • What should we stop doing to make room for new library services?
• * • Outrageously expensive, ambitious and impractical ideas for libraries
• * • Beyond death by Powerpoint try Keynote!..and how not to use everything Rosemary
• * • Engaging non-users
• * • Open Source and libraries
• * • How do we prepare now for the library of 2019?
• * • My favourite web tools and tricks
• * • Step-by-step hands-on creating a LibX toolbar for your library
• * • Zotero vs Refworks vs Endnote Cage Match
• * • If our brand is books, then what is the future of the format and how does this affect our future ?

Perth Library Camp 2009

2009-09-10T17:26:00.006+08:00

Registrations are now open for the third Western Australian Library
Unconference. More than 60 have registered so far and it promises to be a great day. There are still spots available.

This year we are calling the event: *LibraryCamp Perth 2009: Keeping the
Fire Burning* .

The agenda will be decided on the day by the participants.
To register and for more information about unconferences and what happened in 2007 and 2008, go to our Library Unconferences page.

*Date:* Saturday, 3 October 2009*
Time:* 9:30am for a 10am start. 4pm finish.
*Venue:* Central TAFE, 140 Royal St, East Perth. Map here

It's Google 2.0

2009-08-11T14:27:00.003+08:00

Here's my Google 2.0 presentation from our Library 2.0 Training Day

Google 2.0

View more presentations from Julia Gross.

Our Library Facebook page - pros and cons

2009-07-22T16:05:00.012+08:00

Many libraries have a Facebook page where they post library information, announce special events and respond to queries. Anyone can become a “fan” of the Library Facebook page if they are already on Facebook. Those who are not already on Facebook will receive a link, inviting them to join up. Pages are free, however the option of placing paid advertisements is also available.

What has been our library's experience with the Facebook page?

We started the Edith Cowan University Library Facebook page back in March 2008 and now, 15 months later, we have 300 fans. Initially we took the minimalist approach and kept the Facebook wall locked down, as we were not wanting to devote too much staff time to page maintenance. We opened the wall in mid 2008, and we find we do get some messages from our students there.

What Benefits can a library Facebook page deliver?

What I like about the Facebook page is you can you can run an RSS feed into your page, so all our blog posts come up there. You can add videos and photos to give more of a presence. If you are tech savvy you can write a Facebook catalogue search widget. Database search widgets won't work unless you adjust authenication settings. Since June 2009 Facebook page owners have been able to claim their organsiational name for the page, so this will help with brand recognition. We are now www.facebook.com/ECU.Library. Facebook also provides statistics so you can get some good demographics on your fans.

Any Downside?

What I don’t like about the Facebook page, is the lack of control over the interface and the closed network (i.e you need to be a Facebook member to access the site). Facebook’s interface has had two new revamps over the last 15 months and each time we needed to take stock. The latest design gives a more Twitter feel to the pages which we are now trying to exploit.

Where to now?

We probably need to market the Facebook page more and use some of the functionality it does provide. 15 months down the track we are still exploring ways to engage with our fans and keep them coming back.

Was it worth the effort?

Given that it did not take a lot of setting up I would say the return on investment has been OK, but I would not throw huge resources into it. I view it rather as a test bed which will give us a glimpse into future opportunities for libraries to use social media to connect with customers. Facebook may not the best medium for a university library to reach students. It’s just one of many social media options around and worth investigating and we know our students love it. Also, the exercise of setting up a page can expose library staff to social networking media and help them learn new skills ... until the next big thing comes along.

Book review Ben McNeil The Clean Revolution

2009-07-14T12:57:00.005+08:00

Photo from jety's photostream
http://www.flickr.com/photos/jety/3315217963/

Book review of Ben McNeil’s new book The Clean Industrial Revolution

I recall hearing environmentalist David Suzuki speaking during a visit to Perth in 1999. He was addressing the global challenge of climate change. Someone from the audience asked him: “can science save us?” and Suzuki replied that he wasn’t convinced that it could.

Since that time our region is experiencing the impact of climate change, with fires and record low rainfalls in much of southern Australia. Perth rainfall in 2009 so far is 60% below average.

Ben McNeil’s timely new book, The Clean Industrial Revolution, takes us through the latest scientific research, and provides strong economic arguments that support urgent action on climate. Australia faces a particular challenge in the new low carbon age. Our vulnerable position as a high carbon, high energy economy is isolating Australia from the rest of the developed world and our trading partners. The book outlines many opportunities for business in the new carbon free environment which will include new “green collar jobs”. But, as McNeil points out, business will always act in self interest, so government must lead the way with legislation to introduce a strong carbon trading scheme. Our Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) or Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme (CPRS) is a long time in coming.

To quote from the video Discovering the future :the business of paradigms: “when the paradigm shifts everyone returns to go”. McNeil’s book does a good job of outlining ways forward as the paradigm shifts and Australian’s trading partners turn away from high carbon economies like ours.

Ben McNeil is a climate scientist and an economist. He’s also a senior research fellow at the Climate Change Research Centre at the University of NSW and is on the executive of Federation of Australasian Scientific and Technological Societies

McNeil’s book should be picked up by public, government, university, TAFE, school and special libraries.

Samuel Pepys tweets

2009-07-01T11:24:00.000+08:00

I've found another "lit-twit" even more exciting than Moby Dick: the Samuel Pepys diary.

Some say Samuel Pepys was the original blogger. His famous 17th Century diary gives us a detailed account of personal and public life in Restoration London.

I've been following the diary which is being published online, day by day, on the The Diary of Samuel Pepys website. And since May 2009, the diary is being tweeted day by day at twitter.com/samuelpepys

How is the Tweet being done? Phil Gyford manages the website and the Twitter account. Check out what Phil Gyford says to say about the Twittered diary: for someone already immersed in Twitter it really feels like having a sense of what Sam is up to right “now”.

On the Diary website and on Twitter we are up to June 1666, as the days are more or less synced. The Great Fire of London occurred on 2 September 1666, so stay tuned for an amazing eyewitness account of the Fire in September 2009.

Samuel Pepys maintained his diary for nine years, from 1660-9, writing a personal account of his life, penned in a type of shorthand. He left us "eyewitness accounts of great events, such as the Great Plague of London, the Second Dutch War and the Great Fire of London"

I confess I have not read the whole diary which runs to several volumes, but there's a fascinating account of Pepys' life by Claire Tomalin which first brought Pepys to my attention and I've been fascinated ever since: Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self by Claire Tomalin.

Presentation on Privacy and Web 2.0

2009-06-23T10:40:00.005+08:00

Presentations for the June ECU Library 2.0 Training day are now on the Wiki.

Privacy Web 2.0 J Gross 2009

View more OpenOffice presentations from Julia Gross.

Blogging coverage in Iran elections

2009-06-15T07:37:00.003+08:00

I wrote back in November 08 about the political role of blogging in the Maldives election of 2008.

Now in Iran the New York Times live blog is doing a good job covering the Elections and getting on the spot information from bloggers on the ground there:

The wider issue of Iran and blogging is covered in Antony Loewenstein's The Blogging Revolution, Melbourne University Press, September 2008, 9780522854909

Here's a link to Literary Minded interview with Loewenstein on Crikey last year

This quote from the interview seems very pertinent today:

"When visiting a country like Iran – a population of 70 million, the majority under 30 years old and millions of web users – it’s immediately clear that solely relying on state-run media isn’t an option"

What is Google Wave?

2009-06-01T11:30:00.004+08:00

Google's new Web 2.0 killer app is coming later this year: Google Wave.

Here are some links I've found that help explain what it's all about:

10 reasons why Google just reinvented online communication

Google Wave: A Complete Guide

"Google Wave is a real-time communication platform. It combines aspects of email, instant messaging, wikis, web chat, social networking, and project management to build one elegant, in-browser communication client."

Could Google Wave Redefine Email and Web Communication?

Tweeting Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

2009-05-16T09:14:00.003+08:00

Now that the Moby Dick tweet I wrote about is finished, "danco" (Dan Coulter) is moving on to tweeting the two Lewis Carroll books: Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass. Tweeting will commence on Monday May 18th 2009. If you want to follow the daily Alice tweets then you need to be on Twitter and follow the publicdomain tweet.

I've been intrigued about this whole project and how it was achieved. The whole 1000+ page book took danco nine and a half months. Read More on the Moby Dick tweet

Trendy EDUCAUSE tweeters

2009-05-08T16:13:00.006+08:00

At the EDUCAUSE Conference in Perth Western Australia this week the Twittering delegates on Tuesday May 5 2009 contributed to the conference tag #edaust09 reaching the dizzy heights on the Trending ranking in the new look Twitter. EDUCAUSE tweeters ranked, at one stage, the 3rd most tweeted topic for the day.

See this Twitpic of the Trending list added by Kathryn Greenhill. We were up there with Swine Flu, wolverine and other daily trends worldwide

Librarians Matter blog has the twitter "fountain” for the tweets, to see what was being posted

Libraries Interact Blog has more live blogging links

EDUCAUSE Keynote Moodle Open Source

2009-05-06T17:51:00.005+08:00

EDUCAUSE 09 Perth Conference is over, but it may be a few days before the papers go up. In the meantime, some are appearing on SlideShare.

here are the slides from the excellent Keynote from Martin Dougiamas on Moodle Open Source

Moodle Development Educause Australia 6th May 2009 (edaust09)

View more presentations from moodler.

EDUCAUSE iPhone, iTunes Workshop

2009-05-04T12:24:00.004+08:00

It was a good EDUCAUSE workshop yesterday on From Creation to Delivery - iLife, iPhone, iTunes U, I'm done.

The Apple guys gave a quick overview of podcasting, and the iPhone and iTunes. Podcast Producer is useful to manage workflows. Touched in iTunes U also. Since I posted last year about iTunesU in Australian unis there's a lot of good stuff happening out there with iTunesU. In Australia the leaders seem to be Griffith and Swinburne.

A concurrent session I didn't get to, but which sounded great, delivered a timely reminder on what footprints we are leaving behind when we waltz around the Net, especially on social networking sites: Walking on clouds: managing your digital footprints

The Educause Australasia conference will be live blogged by Libsmatter using the CoverItLive widget

You can search all conference related tweets via the hash tag #edaust09. There have been a few different tags, but the one finally decided on is: #edaust09

Tweeting Moby Dick

2009-04-24T14:00:00.005+08:00

There she blows!--There she blows!--There she blows!--Tweeting Moby Dick

Thanks to the Maud Newton blog via the reeling and writhing blog I am following Danco who is tweeting Moby Dick.

Follow at publicdomain

I confess I never did manage to finish this book. The tweeting has been going for nine months and they have just sighted the whale: There she blows!--

In a strange way the broken up feed of tweets strangely focuses you on the language, eg:

A gentle joyousness--a mighty mildness of repose in swiftness, invested the gliding whale

EDUCAUSE Perth Wiki

2009-04-22T15:05:00.007+08:00

EDUCAUSE Conference is coming up soon in Perth May 3-6 2009 and some of the participants have set up an EDUCAUSE Perth09 Wiki at wikispaces: http://educauseperth.wikispaces.com/
A few are gathering there already.

I am going to one of the pre-conference workshops: From Creation to Delivery - iLife, iTunes, I'm done and also Day 3, Wednesday 6th May

Twitter newbie

2009-04-20T11:49:00.002+08:00

Finally succumbed and started tweeting under @jaygee35 and using this icon of our dear old Max (R.I.P.)

There are some great Twitter for libraries guides out there:

Phil Bradley's webpage What is Twitter and Twitter for librarians

Ellyssa Kroski the iLibrarian wrote this Twitter Guide for libraries back in 2007 and if you search her blog under Twitter there are a few more ideas.

Things have got to the point that now we need some tips on how conference speakers can manage the "back channel". How about this! How to present while people are twittering

EDUCAUSE also has some resources on Twitter use in universities

In receipt of Vice-Chancellor's Citation

2009-04-15T12:25:00.001+08:00

That photo is a bit too formal, but nevertheless...

great news, I am a member of the ECU Lbrary team of five who are in receipt of the Vice-Chancellor's Citation for Outstanding Contributions to Student Learning for 2009.

the wording of the citation is:

For a sustained contribution to the improvement of teaching and learning through the provision of innovative and effective learning spaces and library services

This is on behalf of the whole library and has been several years in the making, steadily gathering evidence, interviewing staff and students and implementing many changes.

Details of all the award winners are on the ECU Website

One Australian Book Meme

2009-04-08T08:51:00.003+08:00

After doing the One Book Meme a few weeks back I've done my own variation on that:

The One Australian Book Meme. Unlike the others, this one has some non-fiction in it.

One Aussie book you’ve recently read:
Doing Life: a biography of Elizabeth Jolley by Brian Dibble. Thoroughly researched and full of detail, but a good read for those who know a bit about EJ's amazing life

One Aussie book you’d want on a deserted island:
Eucalyptus by Murray Bail. If you were stuck on a desert island you'd need something to lift your spirits and remind you of the Australian bush

One Aussie book you’ve read more than once:
Highways to a War by Christopher Koch. I love this book and it's so evocative of time and place. It transports you into the life of a war correspondent in South East Asia in the 1970s. I had a thing for Neil Davis, on whose life the novel is loosely based

One Aussie book you’ve never been able to finish:
Illywacker by Peter Carey.
Enjoyed Carey's Oscar and Lucinda, Bliss, and several others, but couldn't finish this one for some reason

One Aussie book that made you laugh:
Unreliable Memoirs by Clive James. I'm chuckling just thinking about it. The others in the autobiographical series are great too

One Aussie book that made you cry:
Joe Cinque's Consolation by Helen Garner
Clearly a one sided picture of this terrible miscarriage of justice, but good on you Helen for tackling this story. Wonderful writing too.

One Aussie book you’ve been meaning to read:
Tree of Man by Patrick White. I have the first edition at home, bought by my father when it came out in the 1950s, so I have no excuse ;)

One Aussie book you keep rereading:
The Reader's Digest Book of Australian Birds.
This is the book that got me started on my whole crazy bird watching life. Parts of the book are imprinted on my brain.

One Aussie book you believe everyone should read:
The Man who Loved Children by Christina Stead. It's an Australian classic and should have been recognised as such at the time, except for its American subject matter. Apparently Stead had originally set the book in Sydney, but changed it to meet her U.S. market. It is a depressing, Depression story :(

2009-04-03T11:30:00.005+08:00

Further to my post on EBL ebooks on your iphone , I came across this paper at the ascilite conference in Melbourne last year: Usability and usefulness of eBooks on PPCs: How students’ opinions vary over time

The paper by Paul Lam, Shun Leung Lam, John Lam & Carmel McNaught from The Chinese University of Hong Kong, was voted one of the ascilite paper award winners. It makes interesting reading. It seems even in a place such as Hong Kong, where acceptance of online would seem to be high, students have trouble adapting to reading whole books onscreen. Of course this is referring to reading on mobile readers and devices such as iphones. I don't find this a surprise at all, and it may be a while yet before we see changes in practice.

EBL on your iPhone

2009-03-24T16:23:00.001+08:00

EBL (Electronic Book Library) titles can be downloaded to the Sony Reader, but now also EBL’s new reader is already accessible on an iPhone and iPod Touch?

Users can access EBL titles on their iPhone or iPod Touch through the standard EBL interface. In fact, EBL's online reader will render the full book in just about any mobile browser.

And news just in… downloading EBL ebooks to the iPhone/iPod Touch is soon to follow. Adobe have just announced a partnership with Stanza Reader, the reader application designed for the iPhone. Read more on the EBL blog

This is really setting the scene for a mobile learning future.

Edith Cowan University (ECU) has had the whole EBL catalogue loaded into its OPAC for 2 years now. In this demand driven acquisitions model, our users have book choice within their control. Budget permitting, of course.

New Facebook doesn't impress

2009-03-23T16:38:00.005+08:00

There's not much to like about the new Facebook interface.

They have created a Twitter type environment with the daily update feeds dominating the cover page. You can make adjustments and get feeds from specific friends, but it's all rather irksome. I find I am using Facebook a lots less now, so maybe that's a good thing.

However we would like to market our ECU Library Facebook page. FB are still promoting institutional or corporate pages, and The Facebook blog has some ideas on attracting millions of fans to the page. Maybe we can use the News Feed dominance to our advantage.

EDUCAUSE Perth 2009

2009-03-05T10:27:00.002+08:00

It's been late coming, but the EDUCAUSE program is finally out and Early Bird registration closes on March 18, 2009. There's an interesting program with a good mix of Web 2.0 Library and I.T.

I'll be following the trail to sessions on MLearning, training staff in Web 2.0, Moodle, ELearning.

"Perth, Western Australia will be host to EDUCAUSE Australasia Conference to be held 3 - 6 May 2009 at the Perth Convention Exhibition Centre. This is the premier event for professionals working in higher education who manage technologies to advance scholarship, learning and teaching. With the theme Innovate, Collaborate & Sustain, this conference will explore the challenges in areas such as how to innovate in the knowledge economy, collaboration with virtual teams and the ever present green agenda and action."

A One Book Meme

2009-03-02T11:42:00.005+08:00

The One Book Meme has been posted by:
reeling and writhing and Ruminations

Here's my go at it:

One book you’re currently reading: The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga
One book that changed your life: Bury My Heart of Wounded Knee by Dee Brown
One book you’d want on a deserted island: The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco. So many ways to interpret this book. After reading this my friend went into the Claremont bookshop and asked the owner what else they had that was like The Name of the Rose. She was told there IS none!
One book you’ve read more than once: Lord of the Rings by J.R.R.Tolkein
One book you’ve never been able to finish: An Instant of the Fingerpost by Iain Pears
It's the sort of book I normally like, but when Pears started looking at the story again through different eyes I sort of lost interest. I should give it another go...one day.
One book that made you laugh: The Monkey Wrench Gang by Edward Abbey
This one was hard. And then I remembered this hilariously anarchistic adventure I came across in the 1980s. I must read some more fun stuff.
One book that made you cry: A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry
It's wonderful, but pretty grim
One book you keep rereading: Pride and Prejudice and everything by Jane Austen, what a genius. How many novels of that period are still so fresh?
One book you’ve been meaning to read: Sophie's World by Jostein Gaarder
After buying it some years ago it's still sitting on my shelf
One book you believe everyone should read: 1984 by George Orwell

This was fun, but if I did it again next week I'd probably come up with a different result.

Perth's abysmal power supply

2009-02-26T06:25:00.003+08:00

Excuse me a little rant. I guess I should get into micro-blogging from my mobile. A blog about new technology usually needs some power, which was not be be had in some areas of Perth on Feb 25, 2009.

Yesterday our suburb was without power for more than 8 hours. The reason? A few mm of rain fell during the day. It seems incredible, but Perth's above ground power poles cannot cope with being rained on, after a long period of dry weather. There were 10 pole fires caused by the rain and teams of technicians were working well into the night to replace the poles. This is the third time in several months that we have had major outages of power.

Time to write to the MP. I'll let you know how I go!

Victorian bushfires, books and libraries

2009-02-23T10:48:00.010+08:00

With the devastating bushfires in Victoria many libraries and booksellers are rallying around and contributing to the affected communities.

There's a message from Jan Richards ALIA Vice President on the ALIA Blog outlining some of the action taking place: " libraries across the country are acting as collection points for local relief efforts and throwing their weight behind fundraising campaigns. "

One of the major Australian book suppliers, DA Information Services, is donating $5 to the Bushfire Appeal from the proceeds of every book ordered before the end of February 2009:
"This collaboration between members of the Australian Library and Information Association, Public Libraries Victoria, the Australian Publishers Association and the Australian Booksellers Association is demonstrating a unity of purpose for these times. Books are being consolidated at the Mitcham premises of library wholesaler DA Information Services located just 40km from the nearest affected region"

Borders are also donating books to schools and libraries in fire affected communities.

The major centre for cash donations via phone or online is the Australian RED CROSS Bushfire Appeal

Organisational change, herding cats

2009-02-04T20:54:00.004+08:00

At the Teaching and Learning Forum, at Curtin University last week, January 29-30, 2009, Barbara Holland gave the first keynote address. Her point about organisational change and the difficulties in getting staff involved in change, related quite well to our efforts with the
Web 2.0 training. We were trying to get staff to complete the Learning 2.0 program and thought 50% completion would be ideal. Barbara felt 20% buy in was quite good, so maybe we were aiming too high.

Holland also showed this hilarious video about organisational change: "Herding cats"....

Sophie Masson's love song to libraries

2009-02-02T12:01:00.001+08:00

Staying with the theme of libraries and love of libraries, I read this a while back and starred it in my Google Reader account. It’s a beautiful post, written by Sophie Masson: A love song to libraries
What a great tribute to the power of parents to engender in their children a love of books and libraries.

Sophie Masson is one of the writers on the excellent literary group blog, Writer Unboxed, dedicated to the "craft and business of genre fiction".