Reference Excellence

This morning at Information Online 2009 Ross, Ellen & Cathy presented their paper detailing the path the Reference & Information Services Group (RISG) has been travelling with the development of the NSW Public Libraries' Reference Excellence project culminating in the Ref-Ex wiki.
It's been a long while coming but it's great to see that the Ref-Ex wiki is now out there for public library staff from around NSW to use as a training tool.
The talk came across well and received some good questions from the audience - now it's up to you to go online and use this training tool to both enhance your existing reference skills, develop some new ones or train up new staff - and don't forget to provide feedback to the maintenance & modification crew on how the Ref-Ex wiki could be made even bigger and better than it currently is.

http://wiki.libraries.nsw.gov.au

Information Online 2009 (day 1 - part b)

The session: From Sandbox to Search Box took 3 different approaches to the idea of "engagement". John Law from ProQuest discussed the need for having seemless and simplified access to content via the library catalogue; Lili Wilkinson from the State Library of VIC then spoke about 2 websites hosted by VSL - 'ergo' and 'inside a dog' - specifically targeting YA. Whilst 'ergo' is a learning and research site helping teens to develop onine literacy skills in exploring Victoria's rich history, 'inside a dog' is a teen-focussed site for books and reading, providing reading lists compiled and reviewed by teen peers rather than adults (librarians, teachers, parents). Both are extremely poplular and show the value of reading and blogging to this particular demographic.
Finally Paul Hagon from the National Library of Australia spoke about different ways of exploring visual collections (think Picture Australia) using specific examples from the PowerHouse Museum being loaded into flickr, translated by GoogleMaps into a geographical location, and then utilised by GoogleMaps Street View to enable a comparison between the hitorical image and the modern one. This process utilised the APIs of the sites to withdraw relevant information (such as geotagging on flickr) and then translate that into a different perspective (GoogleMaps Street View). So on the one screen you could see the historical picture as well as the modern street view - very cool.
Bottom line, the more we share, the more we engage.

Information Online 2009 (day 1)

It's great to see there's a few of us here at Information Online 2009 - yesterday was a full day with the Official Opening from Senator Stephen Conroy followed by Sherman Young from Macquarie Uni posing the question of the difficulties faced in finding a 'place' for the book in the Web 2.0 world. He made some interesting comments, among the few that standout are that the modern 'user' doesn't want to pick up a device and 'go online', today's user wants to pick up a device that is already online; modern access should be invisible, ubiquitous, connected, multimedia.
He also spoke about the need to consider 'book culture' and 'print culture' as distinct elements rather than the same thing - Young recently published a book, "The book is dead: long live the book" - and stressed that so as not to 'die out' altogether, books need to become part of the online community.