Countdown

No, this is not a blog post about an ancient popular music TV show. It is a revisit of the establishment of this blog on March 4 in 2007, when it became part of my campaign to be elected to the ALIA Board. We will come full circle at the ALIA Annual General Meeting on 19 May, when my term is completed, and Jan Richards becomes President of ALIA, with Graham Black the new Vice President.

This blog may look as if it has become neglected and fallen on hard times. However, inspired by an invitation to contribute to Carl Grant's new Commentary blog for Ex Libris, I have decided to put some of the time saved by not being President of ALIA into this blog. Naturally, I have decided to draw on this time in advance.

In fact, the absence of this blog for the past two months was not caused by onerous ALIA duties, but by having taken on the task of giving three presentations and visiting two partner institutions in Hong Kong over Easter (8-18 April). This ended up taking a great deal of time.

But being in Hong Kong was great. Of course I met with the Hong Kong Library Association, the event wonderfully organised by Venia Mak and Jim Chang; nice too that ALIA has quite a few members in Hong Kong. It was good to visit the Hong Kong Polytechnic University, my host, a visit kindly organised by Steve O'Connor and Winifred Ho. It was also a great pleasure to catch up with Mike Robinson, formerly of RMIT and now of Hong Kong Institute of Education, and Anne Douglas, Hong Kong's Diane Costello. I also got to meet Swinburne's partners at the City University of Hong Kong in Kowloon, and at the Institute of Vocational Education's campus at Tsing Yi.

Next, the IFLA 2010 National Committee meeting on 11 May in Brisbane, and my last ALIA Board meeting, on 19 May in Canberra.