Big Issues for Libraries

In the recent ALIA survey of members, lobbying and advocacy were given as an extremely high priority. This was unexpected (for me, anyway) but it did prompt me to urge you all (Rebecca has proven that a plural audience might be assumed) to do some reading.

Here are three big issues.

Copyright, and the debate is hotting up about the settlement in the US between Google and the publisher and author organisations. Bernie Sloan, posting to the liblicense list, refers us to a
resource compiled by Timothy Vollmer, an IT policy analyst in DC. You can find it here. Many of the items listed relate to libraries, and the example of a report by OCLC Research on the impact on libraries is given.

Online content regulation (censorship) is interesting too, and there has been a recent article by Derek E Bambauer of the Brooklyn Law School which summarises, in a brief 30 pages, the development of the Australian Government's filtering plans. If development is the right word.

Finally, all of you interested in broadband and things related will want to read the consultation paper issues by the Department of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy, just out. There is a link from here, and comments are due by 11 February.

There's a lot going on which might concern us, and one element in successful lobbying and advocacy is being informed. In the meantime, if you are interested in these kinds of issues, or just in helping to put together a library viewpoint, let me know.

Google Alerts

Regular readers, if there is such a person, will recall my experiment before Easter with Google Alerts.

For those interested in how my Google alerts have turned out, it has been a mixed experience. On one hand, one Google alert did turn up several references to this blog, so clearly Google is indexing it. On the other hand, it also turned up a really random selection of references, some of them going back a number of years - a 12-year-old conference paper, a radio interview, and a short paper on The Fabulous LILO, Swinburne's metadata application profile. Why?

Try it out for yourself here.

Have a nice Easter . . . last chance to vote

Here are a few thoughts about different topics.

The main topic of course is that if you have put off voting in the ALIA elections, you are now cutting things very fine. It is Saturday, and your vote must be received by ALIA national office (which is in Canberra) by 5.00pm on Wednesday. I think you should post your vote today. Although I guess

People sometimes ask, why don't you have a blog post about [insert current topic of interest to questioner]? Well, the latest one of these, from a late voter, was Why can't we vote online? I pass that one on. Perhaps next year we will set something up to enable online voting; All those envelopes do seem a little old fashioned, and people lose them amongst the mass paperwork of modern life.

I have been trying out Google Alerts. Google Alerts are compilations of Google searches sent to you by email and based on search terms you provide. your choice of query or topic. I have set up an alert based on the word Swinburne, which is the name of my employer, Swinburne University of Technology. Its a wonderful service, and an illustration of the fact that we have to get used to the fact that lots of things we used to do are done well in other ways. As you can see, I'm using the word Swinburne in this post to see if Google indexes it. I'll let you know.

And a wonderful welcome to my newest grandson Liam Ferguson, born on Good Friday!