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.

Finding the right voice in podcasting

We have agonised over voice delivery for our podcasts, when right under our noses was a fabulous voice resource we had not tapped into: that of our WAAPA (Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts) Broadcasting students.

For our recent podcast on What is Endnote we wrote the script, and then a WAAPA student did the voice recording in their recording studio. We then took the WAV file and put it through Garage Band on the Macintosh Laptop and added our music and finished it off.

Reading another person's script is a particular skill. My advice would be read it through yourself so the language flows naturally. Then eliminate as many library jargony phrases you can before you hand it over to a voice expert. We spent time going over the script with their Broadcasting lecturer before we got it right.

The only problem for us now is our library voices have developed stage fright!

Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts (WAAPA) is based at Edith Cowan University Mount Lawley Campus. They offer a number of performing arts streams including WAAPA Broadcasting

Web 2.0 and more political change

Another election results that brought unprecedented change recently is in the Maldives, where Asian's longest serving leader has just been toppled.

This one has crept under the radar with all the other political news and optimism this week.

The new leader is in the Maldives is Anni (Mohamed Nasheed) who received 54.21% of the total votes. After 30 years in power President Maumoon Abdul Gayoom received just 45.79%.

According to the BBC World website:
"Mr Nasheed - a former Amnesty International prisoner of conscience ... has been a constant critic of the regime of Mr Gayoom over the years and has spent long periods in jail for his political activities. To his supporters Mr Nasheed is a latter day Nelson Mandela, overcoming the hardships of prison to secure an inspirational election win against the odds"

I wrote about recently about all the Maldivian blog activity, and videos on YouTube that were now part of modern electioneering there: blogging in a closed society. Many of the local political activists were spreading online content, from non-government sources, thru their blogs: See a Partial Journey

Interesting, since the end of the election some of these blogs, having served their purpose, have ceased.