Visit to University of Peradeniya Library

The ASAA Conference in Kandy was a great success . There's a brief report about the conference in the 21st December 2008 edition of The Island which is the main independent English newspaper in Sri Lanka.

After the conference we visited the largest university in Sri Lanka which is 20 minutes drive from Kandy: University of Peradeniya

Their beautiful campus was established in 1954.

After speaking with the Vice Chancellor and Dean of the Faculty of Arts, I visited their Library which is the the oldest and the largest University Library in Sri Lanka. It was quite late in the day when we arrived, so I did not have a lot of time, but did have a meeting with the University Librarian, Harrison Perera, and took a photo of their atmospheric Periodicals Reading Room.

I'll hopefully find time to post more about some of the fabulous conference papers from this cross-disciplinary conference.

Media Participatory Activism Seminar in Perth

A small, but select group of students and academics attended this CREATEC seminar at ECU Mount Lawley yesterday: “Media Participatory Activism”, with the Keynote address delivered by Prof Geert Lovink.

Lovink is a Dutch/Australian media theorist and Research Professor of Interactive Media at the Hogeschool van Amsterdam (HvA) and an Associate Professor of New Media at the University of Amsterdam (UvA). His keynote topic was: “Publish Now: the Cultural Politics of Blogs and Web 2.0”

It was all stimulating, and too much to summarise in a blog post but some brief dots point might give an idea:

• Blogging has moved on from being a separate entity and is now completely integrated into websites and embedded in social networking sites
• Technorati reported on the phenomenal growth of blogging which has probably not yet peaked, but Technorati itself is undergoing changes and their annual report on blogging is no longer happening
• Not enough is being done to map the Australian blogosphere
• World internet statistics show use has reached saturation in North America, but growth in China or India has not nearly reached its peak
• While the predominant language of the internet is still English, Mandarin is growing rapidly and will surpass English within the next few years
• We are now at the end of the Web 2.0 economic cycle
• The world economic crisis is putting enormous pressure on internet companies such as Yahoo and there is concern re the future of Flickr.
• MySpace and Facebook are matched internationally by examples of other social networking sites, which have enormous take up in their countries/languages of origin such as: Studieverzeichnis (Germany) Hyves.net (Netherlands), SkyRock (France/Africa),
• National webs are being created in an attempt to recreate the “nation state” online. One example of a national web is even Australia’s ABC website as it is closed to overseas access

You can follow up on Geert Lovink's work as he has written widely. His latest book is Zero comments : blogging and critical Internet culture, Routledge 2008

A great panel discussion followed consisted of: Mark Balnaves is Professor of New Media at Edith Cowan University, Associate Professor Matthew Allen is the foundation Head of the Department of Internet Studies, Curtin University of Technology, Perth, Australia and Tama Leaver teaches Communication Studies at the University of Western Australia, focusing on digital media and participatory culture.

Off to Serendip

All the security problems have been elsewhere in Asia this week.

Sauron's evil eye is focussed elsewhere (I hope), so this little hobbit is headed off to Sri Lanka to attend the ASAA conference in Kandy. There’s been so much drama surrounding DFAT Security warnings and so forth, that it looked like my paper (on literary blogs) would be read by someone else. But now it’s all happening.

ASAA, what's that? stands for Association for the Study of Australasia in Asia.

No more blog posts for 2 weeks, then, while I’m out in elephant country. I hope I see some.

Getting published --- full citation

Silly me! In my rush to announce the news, I forgot to give the citation details of our article in TEL

Full citation details are:

Gross, Julia & Leslie, Lyn (2008)
Twenty-three steps to learning Web 2.0 technologies in an academic library.
The Electronic Library 26 (6), 790-802.

Getting published

It's been a long time coming, but Lyn and I have finally had our article about the Learning 2.0 Program published in the latest issue of The Electronic Library, known as TEL. We sent the article off about a year ago as I reported in my blog post at the time. But then we needed to respond to reviewers’ comments before it finally went forward in April 2008.

The reviewing process can be challenging, but it did help sharpen up the research.

TEL rates highly in terms of being a high impact journal, if you are interested in that sort of thing. TEL is available in print form or via a subscription to Emerald Group Publishing Limited. It’s online also through a subscription to the Emerald Insight database. They publish a good selection of business and library journals, but the library journals are not indexed in LISA, just in Emerald.

Emerald have now introduced something called EarlyCite to alleviate the long wait to publication. This is an

“online, pre-publication service that enables customers to access journal articles prior to official publication. Papers will be made available at least three months and, in some cases, as much as one year before they appear in the hard copy and final online journal issue. A phenomenon of academic journal publishing is that articles can often be held in a queue, awaiting publication for many months until an issue becomes available.”

Having a journal article published stands as a permanent record of research which has been through a peer-review process. But in a technology area, to find very current information you would be better served accessing a really high quality blog.

Search ECU catalogue from your Google Toolbar

Do you already use the Google toolbar? If so, you can now add an ECU library catalogue search button to your Google toolbar. This brings the library catalogue search several clicks closer and means you don't need to go into the library website to find the catalogue and run your keyword search.

The Google Toolbar is an Internet browser toolbar available for Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox. It can be downloaded from here

To find out more about how to set up the catalogue search in your toolbar check out the ECU library blog

Another similar feature is the iGoogle catalogue gadget for searching the library catalogue which I wrote about a few months back.

EBooks qualify for Australia's richest literary prize

Keen to be trend setters in Australia’s leading literary award, the WA Department of Cultural and the Arts are heading down the digital path and allowing ebooks to qualify for the $110,000 prize:

“This ground-breaking award is for a book-length work of literary fiction written by an author resident in Australia or Asia, or a work primarily set in Australia or an Asian country. Works must have been either written in, or translated into, English and published in the preceding year.”

The short list for Australia's richest literary prize, the Australia-Asia Literary Award is:

* Michelle DE KRETSER The Lost Dog Publisher: Allen & Unwin
* Mohsin HAMID The Reluctant Fundamentalist Publisher: Penguin
* David MALOUF The Complete Stories Publisher: Random House
* Ceridwen DOVEY Blood Kin Publisher: Atlantic Books
* Janette TURNER HOSPITAL Orpheus Lost Publisher: HarperCollins

This year all are print books and it's hard to imagine reading a full work of fiction in digital format. Also some authors are nervous about their rights and royalties in the ebook world: The Perils of Being an Author in a Digital Age

Meanwhile we wait with bated breath for the big night when the winner is announced on 21st November 2008.