Sandra Henderson retires in mid-April after more than 30 years service with the National Library. During this time Sandra’s career has moved through many phases. From a beginning in the Library’s then specialist science section, Sandra has worked across a broad range of functions and leaves the Library a much valued member of staff.
After completing a Bachelor of Science at the Australian National University and a Graduate Diploma in Librarianship at the Canberra College of Advanced Education, Sandra started at the National Library in early 1977 as a science reference librarian. In 1978 she moved to the Life Sciences Section, which provided a MEDLARS search service for Australian health professionals, and participated in the development of the Australian MEDLINE Network. This was real ‘pioneer’ work and Sandra’s strong IT capabilities came to the fore at this stage.
As the MEDLINE Network expanded, Sandra took on roles in training, customer helpdesk support, indexing and newsletter editing, and became the Principal Librarian of the section in 1983. In the following years APAIS and ANB were added to the Section’s responsibilities and in the early 1990s the focus shifted to the production of APAIS and AMI. It was during this time that Sandra acquired significant expertise in indexing and she remains an active member of the Australian and New Zealand Society of Indexers.
Soon after the indexing services moved to the Library’s Collections Management Division in 2000, Sandra moved to a position in the Coordination Support Branch within the Executive area of the Library, where her responsibilities included national and international liaison, for example providing support for bodies such as the Australian Library Collections Task Force and the Conference of Directors of National Libraries. In recognition of her dedicated work in this area, Sandra was awarded a National Library staff Australia Day Award in 2006. More recently, she has organised a number of Australian and international conferences held at the Library, managed the Libraries of Asia Pacific website and been the project manager for the initial stages of the Library’s rights management project.
Sandra will be greatly missed when she retires. Over the years she has acquired an in-depth knowledge of Library activities and is able to turn her hand to any task. She embodies the word 'professional', and those outside the Library who have worked on conferences, seminars, visits and many other things besides, attest to her abilities through their letters and emails of thanks.
In retirement Sandra will pursue her interests in birdwatching, indexing and gardening.
Jasmine Cameron Assistant Director-General, Executive & Coordination Support – NLA
(This article was published in, Gateways, Number 92, April 2008)
ProActive Blog
Wednesday, April 30, 2008
Tuesday, April 29, 2008
Accessing ABS Information
Libraries often need to respond to statistical queries and locate data for clients. The Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) has a vast range of data available free on its website: http://www.abs.gov.au/, but it can be difficult to locate the information you need.
There is a range of help available for library and information staff:
There is a range of help available for library and information staff:
- the ABS offers free introductory sessions. The latest Accessing ABS Information seminar at ABS House in Belconnen on the 2nd April 2008 was attended by over 60 people from a range of sectors. A hands-on workshop will be offered in the coming months, details will be posted to the ABS Training Calendar soon.
- the ABS Services for Libraries webpages provide more information and resources for library staff (access via the 'Services we provide' link on the homepage)
- keep up-to-date with the latest ABS information and tips for finding data via the ABS blog for librarians: Statistically Speaking
- if you can't find what you need on the website: contact the free National Information and Referral Service for assistance - phone 1300 135 070.
For any further information contact Nicola Cross: nicola.cross@abs.gov.au
Information Sharing Forums
ALIA / AGLIN Information Sharing Forums are a great way to learn about new initiatives in other libraries, share knowledge, and maintain your professional development. The forums are organised jointly by ALIA and AGLIN (the Australian Government Libraries Information Network) and usually held at the National Library. ISFs are presented on a diverse range of topics, and are an excellent opportunity to meet and network with a wide range of people in the ACT library & information sector. Everyone is welcome.
The next forum promises to be a highly interesting session, with Shirley Oakley, the Executive Director of Library Services at Charles Sturt University giving a talk on 'Meeting the needs of the 21st Century learner: the learning commons concept at Charles Sturt University'. This forum will be held 4.30pm, Wednesday 28th May, at the National Library Conference Room. For further information check the AGLIN Events & Training page.
Nicola Cross, Information Sharing Forums Contact Officer:
a bit about me: I currently work at the Australian Bureau of Statistics, as part of the ABS Information Skills Program (which incorporates the Library Extension Program). I am a member of the AGLIN Training & Development taskforce and have previously also worked at the University of Canberra Library and Canberra Institute of Technology. If you have any questions about upcoming ISFs, or suggestions for speakers or topics please get in touch with me: nicola.cross@abs.gov.au
The next forum promises to be a highly interesting session, with Shirley Oakley, the Executive Director of Library Services at Charles Sturt University giving a talk on 'Meeting the needs of the 21st Century learner: the learning commons concept at Charles Sturt University'. This forum will be held 4.30pm, Wednesday 28th May, at the National Library Conference Room. For further information check the AGLIN Events & Training page.
Nicola Cross, Information Sharing Forums Contact Officer:
a bit about me: I currently work at the Australian Bureau of Statistics, as part of the ABS Information Skills Program (which incorporates the Library Extension Program). I am a member of the AGLIN Training & Development taskforce and have previously also worked at the University of Canberra Library and Canberra Institute of Technology. If you have any questions about upcoming ISFs, or suggestions for speakers or topics please get in touch with me: nicola.cross@abs.gov.au
Monday, April 28, 2008
Vale Peter Sinfield (1950 – 2008)
Peter Sinfield (1950 – 2008)
Peter, who passed away from cancer on 25 March 2008, had worked as a librarian at the Australian National Audit Office (ANAO) for 13 years prior to his retirement at the end of 2006.
Peter was born in
Prior to retiring from the Navy, Peter studied librarianship at the Canberra College of Advanced Education (now the
Peter and I became work colleagues when I commenced at the ANAO in 1994 as a cataloguer and systems librarian – he was by then a well respected and knowledgeable reference librarian.
In 1997, Peter was acting Library Manager when the ANAO library underwent a major review and restructure in 1997. He oversaw the implementation of the review’s recommendations, which saw the library change its name (to the Information Research Centre), location (from the 3rd to the 2nd floor) and focus (from traditional collection based services to more research-oriented services utilising electronic resources). The library review also saw the abolition of the library manager position and a change in our roles, with both of us providing research services and co-managing the library. Peter generously shared with me his corporate knowledge and reference skills, and helped me to morph from a cataloguer and systems librarian into a “research librarian”. His professionalism and amiability also ensured our unorthodox partnership endured until his retirement.
Outside of the ANAO, Peter was active in the Australian Government Libraries Information Network, and the Military History Society of Australia. He helped produce the Society’s journal Sabretache for many years, and also organised the annual HMAS Canberra memorial service.
In his younger years, his transport of choice was motorbikes. As a responsible family man he had stopped riding, but the yearning remained. In his mid fifties he purchased a motorbike and joined the Ulysses Club. His wife supported him in this aim to “grow old disgracefully” and bought a large motor scooter to join him on the road.
Towards the end of 2005 he started to plan for, and look forward, to his retirement, giving himself and the ANAO a year’s notice. Things went slightly awry in February 2006, when on a regular weekend ride Peter uncharacteristically came off his motorbike on a gravel road. Medical investigations revealed that he was suffering from something more serious than just abrasions and cracked ribs. After a major operation for cancer, he spent several months convalescing at home before returning to work and seeing out his plan to retire in December 2006.
Unfortunately 2007 saw a recurrence of the cancer, and Peter had little opportunity to enjoy his retirement or motorbike, between medical appointments and further treatments.
He is survived by his mother and brother, wife Sylvia, daughter Patricia and son Andrew.
Vale Peter! A great librarian and human being.
Christine Herrmann
Research Librarian
Thursday, April 24, 2008
A Quick look at the Innovative Ideas Forum
Innovative Ideas Forum, National Library, 10 April, 2008.
Last week I attended the Innovative Ideas forum, for 2008, held at the NLA. The theme for this year was Web Archiving and there were a number of interesting and sometimes fun presentations. I thought I would give a very brief overview of the day, and provide a few URLs for people to follow up, if they wish.
The first talk was by Professor Gerard Goggin, from University of NSW, talking about the creation of history of the internet and the mobile phone. It is amazing to think that people are starting to write histories of these applications already. This presentation was highly academic, but it was one of the few which addressed the mobile phone issue. Kris Carpenter Negulescu discussed the Internet Archive in the US, discussing what they do and their holdings, currently running at 4 petabytes of information (2 x50 bytes or 10x15 bytes) , taking 6 million downloads per day. They hold 110 billion URLs, including 380 thousand books, images, moving images, open audio, and NASA images, and 1 million YouTube items. They are identifying the existing and emerging trends on the visible web, not including the hidden web and cyber scholarship .The hidden web refers to university libraries, university websites, government organisation websites, non- government organisation websites and academic and scholarly websites, which are not readily available on search engines such as Google. The URL for the Internet Archive is below.
Richard Walis gave an entertaining and professional presentation entitled Beyond Web 2.0 discussing the global semantic web platform, covering 2000-2010, which has developed a set of attributes eg, wikkis, RSS, blogs, social networking , and tagging- who knows what new developments there will be in the next few years? (The Semantic Web is an evolving extension of the World Wide Web in which the semantics of information and services on the web is defined, making it possible for the web to understand and satisfy the requests of people and machines to use the web content. From Wikipedia) .
He predicts there will be more interactive sites, participative sites and more mashups- machine talking to machine interaction. He noted that Google’s success over other search engines lay in its ability to use the network effect, site 1 points to site 2 etc, a hierarchy of sites and importance of sites which register more hits.
According to Walis, the way to break down silos on the web is to use the semantic web, which allows you to query across separate silos and use networks. This will enable massive social and economic shifts.
National Archives of Australia ex- staff member, David Pearson, and his colleague Douglas Elford, from the NLA , gave a presentation on the Mediapedia, which has been designed to identify various types of media and evaluate it, as to whether not to keep it. It’s usage is internal at this stage, for the use of the NLA digital preservation and collection areas. Classification systems they have used in its development have included Dublin Core & AACR 2 . They use the following classes _ genre, process, carrier, and name. For more information, see digitalpres@nal.gov.au
Stewart Wallace gave a brief overview of a project currently underway in Sydney, called The Dictionary of Sydney. This project is building a digital repository of text and multimedia related to Sydney’s history. The repository is designed to facilitate a variety of attributes including web, mobile, and RSS. In seeking the best method of connecting these resources to Sydney’s urban history, the dictionary project team is developing an accompanying semantic model of terms to create an extensible web of digital connections.
See http://www.dictionary/ of Sydney.org for more project details.
The next speaker, Julien Masanes, is the director of the European Archive Foundation . He spoke on the Next generation web archiving methods. The library holds his book, listed below, Web archiving.
He discussed the Living Web Archives project, which has been funded by the European Union. This project will carry web archiving into the next generation of the web, and will develop a range of services and technology for cultural institutions. It provides weekly snapshots of websites, simple client view archiving, abstract storage /identification, browsing and basic searching, and institution - centric access.
The archive looks at a site from the client’s view using the spider/crawler, capturing the site page by page. It stores items in containers, which have proved to be efficient and compressible. Searching is simple, by URL. The problem they have identified is that this paradigm doesn’t make a memory of the web, it is a frozen snapshot, and it doesn’t yet capture the interactive nature of the web. http://www.liwa-project.eu/
This brings us to the final presentation, which was a lot of fun and quite exciting.
Gordon Mohr from the Internet Archive addressed the challenges of future archiving of the web, looking at spam, malware, desktop Web 2.0, social networks, and virtual worlds. For a detailed analysis of the effects of malware, see the paper by Peter Gutmann , from the University of Auckland, who gloomily comments that as malware develops all you can do is “kiss your *** goodbye”… Google however does provide safe browsing lists which are reliable.
To attempt to archive social networks, Mohr suggests that to gain access to these previously open activities which are moving into private areas and friend networks, we could use an android harvester or android assistant to go in and ask to be a friend, and then be able to archive interaction with permission.
To archive virtual worlds is a challenge, particularly since these activities are replacing other communications (in his opinion), and are very popular, replacing popular and children’s literature. You could use the trusty android to go “in- world” into 2nd Life.
Another quandary flagged was the access conditions if you want to archive personal correspondence on interactive sites, eg Face Book or other social networking sites.
See the Internet Archive at : http://www.archive.org/index.php
To find out what some of this techno babble means, see the following books:
Masanes, Julien, Web archiving, 2006, 005.7 WEB
Jones, Dennis, How to do everything with the internet, 2001 004.678 JON
Henniger, Maureen, The hidden web , 2003 004.678 HEN
By, Beth Rogers, NAA
Last week I attended the Innovative Ideas forum, for 2008, held at the NLA. The theme for this year was Web Archiving and there were a number of interesting and sometimes fun presentations. I thought I would give a very brief overview of the day, and provide a few URLs for people to follow up, if they wish.
The first talk was by Professor Gerard Goggin, from University of NSW, talking about the creation of history of the internet and the mobile phone. It is amazing to think that people are starting to write histories of these applications already. This presentation was highly academic, but it was one of the few which addressed the mobile phone issue. Kris Carpenter Negulescu discussed the Internet Archive in the US, discussing what they do and their holdings, currently running at 4 petabytes of information (2 x50 bytes or 10x15 bytes) , taking 6 million downloads per day. They hold 110 billion URLs, including 380 thousand books, images, moving images, open audio, and NASA images, and 1 million YouTube items. They are identifying the existing and emerging trends on the visible web, not including the hidden web and cyber scholarship .The hidden web refers to university libraries, university websites, government organisation websites, non- government organisation websites and academic and scholarly websites, which are not readily available on search engines such as Google. The URL for the Internet Archive is below.
Richard Walis gave an entertaining and professional presentation entitled Beyond Web 2.0 discussing the global semantic web platform, covering 2000-2010, which has developed a set of attributes eg, wikkis, RSS, blogs, social networking , and tagging- who knows what new developments there will be in the next few years? (The Semantic Web is an evolving extension of the World Wide Web in which the semantics of information and services on the web is defined, making it possible for the web to understand and satisfy the requests of people and machines to use the web content. From Wikipedia) .
He predicts there will be more interactive sites, participative sites and more mashups- machine talking to machine interaction. He noted that Google’s success over other search engines lay in its ability to use the network effect, site 1 points to site 2 etc, a hierarchy of sites and importance of sites which register more hits.
According to Walis, the way to break down silos on the web is to use the semantic web, which allows you to query across separate silos and use networks. This will enable massive social and economic shifts.
National Archives of Australia ex- staff member, David Pearson, and his colleague Douglas Elford, from the NLA , gave a presentation on the Mediapedia, which has been designed to identify various types of media and evaluate it, as to whether not to keep it. It’s usage is internal at this stage, for the use of the NLA digital preservation and collection areas. Classification systems they have used in its development have included Dublin Core & AACR 2 . They use the following classes _ genre, process, carrier, and name. For more information, see digitalpres@nal.gov.au
Stewart Wallace gave a brief overview of a project currently underway in Sydney, called The Dictionary of Sydney. This project is building a digital repository of text and multimedia related to Sydney’s history. The repository is designed to facilitate a variety of attributes including web, mobile, and RSS. In seeking the best method of connecting these resources to Sydney’s urban history, the dictionary project team is developing an accompanying semantic model of terms to create an extensible web of digital connections.
See http://www.dictionary/ of Sydney.org for more project details.
The next speaker, Julien Masanes, is the director of the European Archive Foundation . He spoke on the Next generation web archiving methods. The library holds his book, listed below, Web archiving.
He discussed the Living Web Archives project, which has been funded by the European Union. This project will carry web archiving into the next generation of the web, and will develop a range of services and technology for cultural institutions. It provides weekly snapshots of websites, simple client view archiving, abstract storage /identification, browsing and basic searching, and institution - centric access.
The archive looks at a site from the client’s view using the spider/crawler, capturing the site page by page. It stores items in containers, which have proved to be efficient and compressible. Searching is simple, by URL. The problem they have identified is that this paradigm doesn’t make a memory of the web, it is a frozen snapshot, and it doesn’t yet capture the interactive nature of the web. http://www.liwa-project.eu/
This brings us to the final presentation, which was a lot of fun and quite exciting.
Gordon Mohr from the Internet Archive addressed the challenges of future archiving of the web, looking at spam, malware, desktop Web 2.0, social networks, and virtual worlds. For a detailed analysis of the effects of malware, see the paper by Peter Gutmann , from the University of Auckland, who gloomily comments that as malware develops all you can do is “kiss your *** goodbye”… Google however does provide safe browsing lists which are reliable.
To attempt to archive social networks, Mohr suggests that to gain access to these previously open activities which are moving into private areas and friend networks, we could use an android harvester or android assistant to go in and ask to be a friend, and then be able to archive interaction with permission.
To archive virtual worlds is a challenge, particularly since these activities are replacing other communications (in his opinion), and are very popular, replacing popular and children’s literature. You could use the trusty android to go “in- world” into 2nd Life.
Another quandary flagged was the access conditions if you want to archive personal correspondence on interactive sites, eg Face Book or other social networking sites.
See the Internet Archive at : http://www.archive.org/index.php
To find out what some of this techno babble means, see the following books:
Masanes, Julien, Web archiving, 2006, 005.7 WEB
Jones, Dennis, How to do everything with the internet, 2001 004.678 JON
Henniger, Maureen, The hidden web , 2003 004.678 HEN
By, Beth Rogers, NAA
Innovative Ideas Forum
Innovative Ideas Forum
On 10 April the National Library hosted its third Innovative Ideas Forum. This year the Forum coincided with the meeting in the Library of the International Internet Preservation Consortium. This presented the opportunity to invite some IIPC members to make presentations to the Forum.
The program for the event, with links to powerpoint and audio files from the day, is online at http://www.nla.gov.au/initiatives/meetings/InnovativeIdeas2008program.html.
Professor Gerard Goggin from the University of New South Wales, spoke on the Internet and mobile phone, and the phenomenon of mobile technology. Kris Carpenter, from the Internet Archive, gave a very interesting presentation on the work of the Archive and the future of digital services.
Richard Wallis, from TALIS in the UK, entertained greatly with his lively presentation style. He said there is still some way to go in fully utilising web technologies in libraries, and a number of the following presenters referred back to his discussion of the semantic web.
Several National Library speakers gave short presentations on some rapid prototyping projects underway at the Library. Comments from delegates after the event indicated that they particularly enjoyed the presentation by Mark Triggs and Steve McPhillips, who gave a non-librarian perspective on a catalogue redevelopment they’ve been working on using VuFind. One of the delegates commented by email afterwards that “we need more honest reflection like this from OUTSIDE the profession and median age group - such cool insight and a model for us to think about”. If you want to try out the prototype Mark and Steve have been working on, go to the NLA catalogue and select the beta catalogue from the box at the top.
Stewart Wallace from the Dictionary of Sydney project outlined some of the ways information is being collected for this undertaking.
The final two speakers, like Kris Carpenter, were from the IIPC. Julien Masanès spoke about a European project, the Living Web Archives, which is working on ensuring the viability of web archiving into the future. Gordon Mohr of the Internet Archive addressed the challenges being faced by organisations such as the Internet Archive.
If you did not get a chance to attend, or you want to revisit the various presentations, please go to the web page above.
Sandra Henderson, National Library
On 10 April the National Library hosted its third Innovative Ideas Forum. This year the Forum coincided with the meeting in the Library of the International Internet Preservation Consortium. This presented the opportunity to invite some IIPC members to make presentations to the Forum.
The program for the event, with links to powerpoint and audio files from the day, is online at http://www.nla.gov.au/initiatives/meetings/InnovativeIdeas2008program.html.
Professor Gerard Goggin from the University of New South Wales, spoke on the Internet and mobile phone, and the phenomenon of mobile technology. Kris Carpenter, from the Internet Archive, gave a very interesting presentation on the work of the Archive and the future of digital services.
Richard Wallis, from TALIS in the UK, entertained greatly with his lively presentation style. He said there is still some way to go in fully utilising web technologies in libraries, and a number of the following presenters referred back to his discussion of the semantic web.
Several National Library speakers gave short presentations on some rapid prototyping projects underway at the Library. Comments from delegates after the event indicated that they particularly enjoyed the presentation by Mark Triggs and Steve McPhillips, who gave a non-librarian perspective on a catalogue redevelopment they’ve been working on using VuFind. One of the delegates commented by email afterwards that “we need more honest reflection like this from OUTSIDE the profession and median age group - such cool insight and a model for us to think about”. If you want to try out the prototype Mark and Steve have been working on, go to the NLA catalogue and select the beta catalogue from the box at the top.
Stewart Wallace from the Dictionary of Sydney project outlined some of the ways information is being collected for this undertaking.
The final two speakers, like Kris Carpenter, were from the IIPC. Julien Masanès spoke about a European project, the Living Web Archives, which is working on ensuring the viability of web archiving into the future. Gordon Mohr of the Internet Archive addressed the challenges being faced by organisations such as the Internet Archive.
If you did not get a chance to attend, or you want to revisit the various presentations, please go to the web page above.
Sandra Henderson, National Library
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