Blog changes direction

Many thanks to those scores of people (well, hundreds) who voted for me in the recently-declared ballot for vice president of ALIA. The job starts in May, when Roxanne Missingham becomes President of ALIA.

Congratulations to Damian Lodge and Kate Watson, who have been elected to the ALIA Board, where they will join Philip Keane,Michelle Brennand and Helen Partridge, whose terms extend to 2008.

Many thanks to Kevin Dudeney, Margaret Allen, Graham Black and Richard Sayers, who also contested these positions. They would all have been great additions to the ALIA Board, and hopefully will have other opportunities in ALIA in the future. It is great to see the level of interest and participation increasing.

Many thanks to the readers of this blog, too, and especially those who have posted long and thoughtful comments, and concise comments too. Several readers? Dozens? I think "happy throng" is probably a bit too much, Ainslie. This blog is having a slight change of direction, but not of name. It is no longer an electoral blog.

I am looking forward to being involved in ALIA again. I was reminded by Deirdre McNally that I currently hold the record for chairing the shortest AGM on record - Acquisitions Section, early 1990s, 2 minutes I think. Watch out.

I am looking forward to getting around. Kerrie Kelly and Tania Barry have already suggested that I should rock up to the National Library and Information Technicians Conference in October 2007 and the New Librarians Symposium in December 2008, respectively.

Wikipedia again

I mention this topic again because I am part of a panel at one of the Jimmy Wales seminars - Challenging How Knowledge is Created - that education.au is organising. You can find out all about them here. Jimmy Wales is the founder of Wikipedia.

I also mention the topic because I have to start thinking about it, the Melbourne seminar being on 27 April (there are also seminars in Perth, Adelaide and Sydney).

Naturally, I would appreciate your ideas. I offered to represent ALIA on a panel, and got the gig due to the absence of competition, as is so often the case. It is a busy week for me, mostly in Canberra - a meeting of the board of the Australian Digital Alliance, an AICTEC (IT in education) interoperability jamboree on Tuesday, the National Library's very popular Innovative Ideas thing on Thursday, and a meeting of Picture Australia contributors on Friday.

What to say? What to avoid saying? Let me know. I will be representing libraries, and I am currently operating on the principle that the Wikipedia is the best thing since the invention of the library two millennia or so ago.

Word of the day

The word of the day, as an acknowledgement of Kurt Vonnegut, an inspired writer who died on 11 April, is Bokononism. The BBC obituary refers to Bokononism, a religion created in his novel Cat's Cradle. The novel is loosely about the meaning of life, and you can read it in a couple of hours. I'll lend you mine. Its a wonderful book.

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.

Word of the day

Today's word is subprime, which means risky, ill-advised. So far it is used only to refer to the US property market where subprime loans are those which involve a higher level of risk. However, sitting here with a very subprime cup of coffee, I predict that it will very soon be used in a wide range of other contexts too, and I plan to be the first.

Values

One of the matters I mentioned in my 100 word statement was values. I suggested that the key to our future is our core values. This is not just a statement of the obvious. Like other professions, library professionals have values which are integral to what they do. We handle information, and our primary value is the free flow of information.

From this core value come a great number of our activities as a profession. These activities are a very strong reason why libraries and library professionals should support their professional association. They include our long-standing opposition to censorship, our approach to copyright, our support for free access to libraries and cultural institutions more widely, and of course our strong support for libraries as an open public institution maintained for everyone and accessible to everyone.

How do these values translate into the Internet age? Our statement of values does not specifically refer to related online values, such as net neutrality and equity of access to online information, and maybe we should be thinking about these too. In doing this, we would have strong support from other groups like the Internet Society of Australia (ISOC-AU), Electronic Frontiers Australia (EFA) and for that matter the Australian Computer Society (ACS).

It would be good if we could start to form the kinds of close connections with these bodies that we already have with the paper-descended associations like us - archivists, records managers, school libraries. Of course, none of us is limited to the paper business nowadays.

(My very varied Easter activities included a meeting on Tuesday involving Philip Argy (president of the ACS) and Holly Raiche (executive officer of ISOC-AU). And my first ever live rugby league game . . . Newcastle Knights and Melbourne Storm . . . another story altogether).

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!