ALIA AGLIN End of year Christmas Party

A successful end of the year Christmas party was held at University House, Fellows Gardens on 25 November 2009. Many of the ALIA groups joined in with the URLs, Library Techs, ALIAACtive and many fro AGLIN. It was enjoyable to catch up with colleagues across all library sectors to find out what they had been up in their libraries and what was happening in their own lives. Thanks go to Annette McGuiness for arranging this.

St Marks Library Visit

The ALIAACTive and AGLIN organised an end of year tour of St Marks’ Theological Library. We only got a few participants which as a real pity as the library is an unexpected delight and worth a look. Susan Phillips gave the those of us who attended an in-depth tour of this treasure of a library down on the shore of Lake Burley Griffin in Barton.

Susan and her staff have done a lot to organize and update the library and its collections for the students and staff that heavily rely on it. Most librarians would empathise with the struggle Susan has had in organizing a growing collection and a tight space in an old building. As St Marks’ is affiliated with the Charles Stuart University (CSU), they have help and technological assistance with all upgrading of their IT infrastructure and the array of electronic full test services that CSU provides access to for the theological students.

However as Susan was showing her library to fellow librarians it was interesting to view the unique collections that are now housed in the St Marks’ library. The missionary society papers are a treasure for anthropologists and other researchers interested in island cultures and the indigenous cultures of Australia. Indigenous Australians have also begun to plum the depths of such resources in an effort to discover their heritage and genealogical roots as well as to uncover the grammars and linguist structures of their languages recorded by the missionaries. For many aboriginal languages, the only formal written version is provided in the missionary papers. Another gem of a collection that interested me in particular was the Bible Society collection of rare and unique bibles that have come to St Mark Library. These include Hebrew, Greek and Latin Vulgate bibles to one of the first translated into English. By viewing these rare resources made me very aware of how important the Bible is to Western culture and informing our literary heritage for a long period of time.

Anyway for the dedicated few who came on the library tour, it was a delight to have St Marks’ Library and its treasures revealed.

ALIAActive Midwinter dinner 2009

Nicola Cross at the Proactive Dinner

Roxanne Missingham and Trish Milne with her award for Outstanding Contribution

Roxanne Missingham and Trish Milne

Roxanne Missingham awarding Annette McGuiness the Initiative Award

The 2009 Midwinter Dinner was held on 11 August at the Southern Cross Yacht Club. Over forty librarians turn up to the event. This year the dinner was held to commemorate the long fruitful career of Trish Milne, who served as Associate Professor at University of Canberra for 20 years teaching librarianship and knowledge management. Trish has taught many librarians who now staff and manage the many libraries around Canberra.

Karna O’Dea as convenor opened the dinner by welcoming the guests. Helen Roberts who was awarded the Active ALIA Award for Outstanding Contribution award for 2008 came forward to collect her prize for her sustained contribution to ALIA and librarianship and legal librarianship in particular. Helen is now serving as the copyright officer at ALIA so her voluntary work has come full circle.

At mid meal Roxanne Missingham stepped forward to recongise and present the prizes to the recipients for 2009. Annette McGuiness Lewins Library, Australian Catholic University, was given theALIAActive Award for Initiative “Annette is well known to her colleagues in the library world for her energy and professional commitment and contribution. She has been a major contributor to professional activities including the very successful Metadata seminar run in the early days of the web. Annette has been the President and member of the ALIA University and Research Libraries ACT committee for several years. As well as planning and contributing to a comprehensive program of lunchtime events during this time, Annette has been principally responsible for two workshop initiatives – an E-books seminar in June 2008 and the ‘Growing your Career’ workshop in May this year. In spite of her work responsibilities and family commitments to two small girls, Annette makes time for association involvement in a leadership role.”

Trish Milne was award the ACTive ALIA Award for Outstanding Contribution. She is recognized widely throughout he ACT, Australian and international Library and Information Sectors and Knowledge Management community as a key contributor and thinker who has supported the development of the profession. Perhaps most powerfully she is also know for the enormous contribution that she has made in both developing new professionals and her great commitment to sharing and supporting those involved in the sectors and communities for many decades.

Associate Professor Milne has worked at the University of Canberra for more than 20 years, she was appointed as Program Director, Library and Information Studies in 1995 and her career progressed to being appointed as Deputy Pro Vice-Chancellor Education in June 2008. In addition to her significant academic contribution she took study leave in 2001 to work at BT Knowledge Management Human Factor Research Group and Knowledge Management Institute UK.

Her greatest contribution to ALIA has been in the field of LIS education. She has exhibited great energy and enthusiasm for the professional aspects of LIS education in the ACT, the Nation and the global community. She also made an outstanding contribution as a key member of a small team that developed a mentoring program for ALIA ACT.

Trish has been a member of the program committee for ALIA conferences and was responsible for the development of a knowledge management stream at the 2000 conference in Canberra. She was the academic representative for assessment for admittance as a professional member of the association from 1995 till 2000.

Trish’s research in the knowledge and information sector led her to supervise a number of research students at the Honours, Masters and PhD level thereby extending and developing the theoretical base for the future of the information sector. Her own research capacity attracted significant industry funded joint research project that include from Defence Science and Technology Organisation (DSTO), the National Library of Australia, the Australian Library and Information Association and the One Umbrella Group.

Trish pushed past the academic boundaries of LIS into the emerging knowledge management discipline and established a Master of Knowledge Management in 2002. This highly successful curriculum, with ongoing updates, is still being offered at UC and demonstrates her foresight and innovative thinking.

Trish has fostered an engaged profession and many current librarians and knowledge workers across the nation are grateful for her commitment, energy, insight and dedication. She is also well known to her former students as a very kind person who developed excellent pastoral care for undergraduate and post graduate students who undertook her course and did much to make UC library and knowledge management studies a happy and rewarding experience for her many students.

For those of us who attended the night, it will be remembered as a pleasant night of convivial fellowship.

Who Knows What You’re Reading? Surveillance Technologies, Libraries and Privacy

As part of the Information Awareness Month, Dr Stuart Ferguson presented a very informative and thought provoking paper entitled “Who Knows What You’re Reading: surveillance technologies, libraries and privacy”.

The presentation centred on an examination of the privacy concerns of using RFID. While RFID is expected to provide many benefits, particularly in supply chain management, there are many legal, ethical and privacy issues that need to be acknowledged and addressed. In particular this can involve intruding on the privacy of citizens without their knowledge, monitoring customer behaviour and the reading of tags from a distance. In relation to libraries in the US, law enforcement agencies are increasingly able to access data held in libraries.

There are three key privacy principles to be noted

a) notice and consent

b) choice – de-activation, i.e. opt in, opt out

c) control – the right to have personal information kept separate from other data

Dr Fergsuon then went on to discuss the benefits of RFID to libraries as well as factors that needed to be considered if considering the implementation of RFID. An important point for libraries is the moral question – “what moral duties do libraries have in the protection of the privacy of patrons?”. Also the questions “What is the obligation of libraries to the user and to the state?” and “Do libraries need a code of ethics?”.

This paper raised a lot of issues which public libraries in particular need to be aware of when considering these surveillance technologies. At a time when RFID is being considered by many libraries, the full implications of its use, in terms of function as well as privacy, moral and legal rights, needs to be understood and addressed before any move towards implementation of this monitoring tool.

This paper will be a contributing paper as part of a series being presented at an International Ethics Conference next month.

Jan Bordoni

Library Manager
Treasury

Information Awareness Month May 2009.

Information Awareness Month commenced with a launch at the National Archives by Minister John Faulkner well attended by the diverse range of the Information Management professionals in the ACT. The Month is a collaboration between many organisations involved in Information Management including in the ACT: ALIA, AGLIN, RMAA, ACTKM, ASA and the National Archives. The theme for this year was “Diversity” and a wide range of presentations and events were held in the ACT over the month. The closing ACT IAM event was held at the National Portrait Gallery and included a presentation on information management in the new Defence Strategic Command headquarters.

The AGLIN/ALIA event for this month was a presentation at the National Library titled “Using SharePoint for Libraries”. Key speakers were Alison Jones from Meyer Vandenberg Lawyers and Kathy Stapleton from the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade.

Alison Jones commenced the session and presented quite a detailed overview of how SharePoint is being used by her law library. Her starting point was an examination of how alerts, or “announcements” as they are called in SharePoint, can be used to facilitate targeted announcements from the library to her users. This is seen as an alternative option to a traditional “Library News” service. In addition, her Library also provides a legal news service created from a compilation of news sources. Quite notably this service can transition any Library away from push technology to pull technology and aids in streamlining information.

Templates are also deployed by Alison to create a wiki and to use as a survey tool. The wiki enables the creation of shared content between the librarian and the users.

Alison has also ambitiously deployed SharePoint as a library catalogue. In this section Alison openly shared her successes and challenges with SharePoint and offered very useful insights into the challenges that searching SharePoint presented.

Most notable in the presentation was Alison’s willingness to impart her experiences, document her journey and share her learnings. It proved a very informative session and her notes should certainly be read by any librarian thinking of starting down the SharePoint path.

Following Alison was a presentation by Kathy Stapleton and the use of Sharepoint in her library. Kathy has only recently worked with SharePoint and her detailed explanation of the advantages and limitations of the systems functionality was very useful. Kathy used screen shots to demonstrate how she has deployed SharePoint. Like Alison, Kathy has used the announcements facility. The survey instrument has been used as the vehicle for client forms. Kathy also pointed out the usefulness of the alerts functionality and a range of options for its use.

Sharepoint also links to TRIM, the electronic document management system and can be used for many other functions such as provision of statistics, use of widgets to make applications such as the search box transportable (see the ppt graphic provided by Jan Bordoni to demonstrate this, apologies for the lack of clarity) and can embed its forms into systems such as an LMS. Kathy is also using SharePoint to manage her electronic documents accessed from the library’s catalogue.

Lastly Kathy suggested these tips:

• It is important to set up a style guide and user’s manual for consistency. It is important that this is done as you go and not retrospectively as there are different ways that functionalities can be deployed

• Look carefully at the functionality and think about what you want to achieve.

- work out what data is required then how to do it

- set user permissions for appropriate access and control.

- while branding is possible, there is a limitation in the use of colours

In addition to the key speakers, Jan Bordoni briefly demonstrated the ability of bringing the Library to the user workspace. As users, teams or groups can have their own space in SharePoint, information specific to them can be selected and exposed. This enables great flexibility in being able to customise information for that user, team or group and to ensure that other “noise” is filtered out. In a very significant way it can transition the future library model to something very different as the library moves away from being the central focus via a single gateway to gaining even greater exposure on the user, team or group SharePoint space and also highlights the increasing importance that provision of value-added services will become to the success of any library.

AGLIN and ALIA Active would like to thank both Alison and Kathy for the very generous volunteering of their time and experiences. Anyone also doing interesting work with SharePoint is also encouraged to share their experiences on the AGLIN discussion list. In addition, anyone interested in becoming involved in an open Libraries’ Innovation Group should contact Jan Bordoni at jan.bordoni@treasury.gov.au or call 02 6263 3182. If you would like to be involved in the 2010 Information Awareness Month committee or activities please contact Kym Holden at Kym.Holden@deewr.gov.au or call 02 6121 9133.

For further details of Alison Jones’ presentation and the Jan Bordoni’s graphic, see the AGLIN wiki at https://wiki.nla.gov.au/display/AGLIN2/Events+and+Training

Jan Bordoni
Library Manager
Treasury

Postgraduate library studies at University of Canberra

It seems like a few nights ago that I stood as a guest of ALIAActive at its Midwinter dinner, prattling on about the joys of moving to Canberra to take on development of the Librarianship specialisation in University of Canberra’s new online Master of Information Studies; now I’m marking the final assignments of Semester 1. The wonderful thing is I’m still having a great time – the students are essentially doing a fifth year (twelve months full-time equivalence) of tertiary studies and it has been marvellous to work with them.

There has also been the opportunity and support (which is important) to progress a couple of new research projects:

In the field of information ethics, I delivered a seminar during Information Awareness Month at the National Library organised by Jan Bordoni of AGLIN. The presentation, entitled “Who Knows What You’re Reading: Surveillance Technologies, Libraries and Privacy”, was a work-in-progress seminar, based on early findings into a study of the ethical implications of RFIDs in libraries. It is a collaborative project, involving work with Professor Forbes Gibb (University of Strathclyde), Dr Clare Thornley (University College, Dublin) and Professor John Weckert (Charles Sturt University and the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Professional Ethics, based here in Canberra). We’ll shortly be meeting as a group to present a panel discussion at an computer ethics conference in Corfu (http://cepe2009.ionio.gr/), which sadly will mean missing part of the lovely Canberra winter.

Another research project in its early stages is a study into the application of Knowledge Management guides such as the Australian Standard in Australian government and industry. The researchers are Sally Burford (University of Canberra) and I. Knowledge Management is a discipline in which the University of Canberra has a significant history, with its Master of Knowledge Management having commenced in 2002.

Sally Burford’s research is in the area of effective Web Information Architecture and how it is achieved in large organisations,

We offer PhD programs and a Master of Information Studies (Research) so please contact me if you are interested in researching in the Knowledge and/or Information fields of study.

I’ll be course convenor while Sally Burford is on sabbatical in Semester 2 2009 and will be preparing for an ALIA Course Recognition visit in December. Because University of Canberra has formally applied for course recognition, you will now see the course listed on ALIA’s website: http://www.alia.org.au/education/courses/librarianship.html

I’m sure you’ll agree that, after a few years absence, it’s great to see an ACT program listed up there among the country’s Postgraduate Courses!

Stuart Ferguson, University of Canberra

National Archives of Australia and Australian Bureau of Statistics Metadata Seminar 27 May 2009

Stephen Ellis (NAA), Michael Beahan (ABS), Senator Kate Lundy, Michele Berkhout (SEMA Group)

The National Archives of Australia and the Australian Bureau of Statistics co‑presented a program, “Sharing Data, Sharing Ideas” as part of Information Awareness Month on 27 May 2009. The aim of the forum was to bring together a diversity of metadata communities to share experiences, collaborate and look to the future.

Senator Lundy, a long-time advocate for metadata and the only parliamentarian to have uttered the word “metadata” in the chambers, opened the program with her perspectives on the digital revolution and the place of metadata in managing the information space. Senator Lundy sees that metadata can be a key enabler for:

• making information easily accessible to Australian citizens when and where they need it; and
• enabling the development of innovative and robust government policy and programs based on good, timely, open information.

Michele Berkhout, a data professional from the SEMA Group in Queensland, delivered the keynote address and put “sharing data, sharing ideas” into a global context for us all by “using metadata to interpret our world”. Attendees participated in a group exercise SMSing a word or phrase in response to a series of images which were compiled live into a kind of tag cloud at the end of the presentation – a new form of audience participation!

There followed a number of presentations on various Australian web portals, online information systems and web tools utilising metadata:

• Joanne Evans, a Research Fellow for the Smart Information Portal Project at Monash University, led a project to develop a consumer portal for breast cancer information, BCKOnline, (http://www.bcna.org.au). While the project was successful, the project team is still grappling with the most efficient means to produce quality metadata.
• Vanessa Scott (Information Victoria) is the Content Manager for Victoria Online (http://www.vic.gov.au), a government information portal for Victorian citizens. Vanessa creates all the metadata for Victoria Online and she described how the portal’s flexibility and degree of customisation can be exploited to respond to client needs and current events.
• Gary Anderson (Attorney-General’s Department) has been involved in the development of the Emergency Management Metadata Application Profile with XML Syntax (draft) using AGLS Metadata Standard Part 2 as part of the AusDIN (Australian Disaster Information Network) portal project (http://www.ausdin.gov.au).
• Mary Jane Stannus (ABC) gave us some interesting insights into the management of content using metadata on their websites and the development of “ABC Core” metadata for key entities produced by the ABC (http://www.abc.net.au).
• Barry Thomas spoke about the development of the National Electronic Conveyancing System (NECS, http://www.necs.gov.au) due to go live in 2011. In this case, metadata was used to solve the problem of data interoperability between parties who would not otherwise be inclined to collaborate.
• Ross Wilkinson explained how ANDS (Australian National Data Service, http://ands.org.au) is building a data commons for Australian researchers. Metadata will be used for data citation, to support data re-use, for data management, and for data collections to enable discovery.
• Ron Chernich, University of Queensland, is developing metadata tools for e-Research, leveraging IT to assist research data sharing and researcher collaboration (http://www.itee.uq.edu.au/~eresearch).
• Peter Alexander from AGIMO told us why australia.gov.au (http://www.australia.gov.au) doesn’t use AGLS metadata for search: the quality of Australian Government metadata is, with a couple of exceptions, too low to be an effective resource discovery tool.

Some common themes emerging from the presentations were:

• Metadata is being utilised for resource discovery and information sharing

• In general, good quality metadata is not available for harvesting
• Manual metadata creation gives fine control and good quality, but the cost is too high
• Automated systems for metadata creation are not yet good enough
• Who bears the costs and where do the benefits accrue?

All of the presentations are available from the National Archives of Australia website: http://www.naa.gov.au/whats-on/outreach-and-advocacy/forums/metadata/.

Catherine Brady

HealthInsite Editorial Team