What the Board is reading …
Many of our members know our current Board of Directors - you can see their photos and biographies here. We have received quite a few positive comments about our ‘Future of Reading’ edition of inCite (have you read it?) so I thought I would ask what some of our Board members are reading at the moment - here are their snippets …..
PHILLIP KEANE — I have just finished rereading ‘A Year in Provence‘ by Peter Mayle. It was prompted by some of my family having various trips to France last year and this year. It was a delight to read it again, partly imagining the author as played by John Thaw in the TV series. I’ve just started reading ‘An Infinity of Things : how Sir Henry Wellcome collected the world‘. Wellcome was famous as the cofounder of the Burroughs Wellcome & Co., now part of GlaxoSmithKline. He was perhaps more famous for the Wellcome Trust, now one of the largest private biomedical charities. I’m finding it fascinating how this man collected over a million artefacts for his Museum of Man, some parts of which took over 40 years after his death to put in order, though much of his collections were dispersed to various museums after his death. There seem to be many parallels with the life of David Scott Mitchell and his passion to own everything he could pertaining to Australia, Antarctica and the Pacific. His collection was bequested to the State Library NSW as the basis of the Mitchell Library.
MICHELLE BRENNAND – The three books I have ‘on the go’ are : The Mighty Toddler, the latest Harvard Business Review , and Sense and Sensibility - pretty much reflecting the three components of my life – mother, manager and me.
HELEN PARTRIDGE — At the moment I am enjoying Book 3 in the Millennium Series by Stieg Larsson, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest. I can never just read one book at a time, so I am also reading Ayn Rand’s Fountainhead. This is my fun reading. My work reading is Learning to be Professionals by Gloria Dall’Alba.
KATE SINCLAIR — Working in an academic library, we have just plunged into the chaos of first semester, so most of my reading is done at the end of the day, on the couch with a nice glass of wine! Here’s just a selection from my bedside table & RSS Reader…
- Bite-Sized Marketing: realistic solutions for the overworked librarian Don’t you just love that title? This is a fantastic little book and the best thing about it is that it can be read in “bite-sized” chunks. It has a great chapter on using Web 2.0 tools to make your marketing life easier…and also a whole section on the importance of “telling a good story” when advocating for your library resources & services. It’s full of practical tips and examples of easy, simple marketing ideas that work. My favourite quote: “Marketing goes beyond trying to get people to use your library; it is a concerted effort to articulate your value. It is that plain and simple.”
- Text Patterns Alan Jacobs is an English professor who blogs at The New Atlantis about technologies, reading, writing, research & everything in between. I can always open up a new post here and find something to contemplate, question or reassess. Lately he’s been talking about ebooks (isn’t everyone!), the Google Books settlement, Chatroulette, Google Buzz and what an email application actually is: “It’s three things, it seems to me: it’s a text editor, it’s a database, and it’s a file manager. The problem is that there is no email client that fulfils all these functions really well.” Fascinating stuff!
- Smitten Kitchen This is one of my favourite food blogs, great for those days when you aspire to be a domestic goddess (or just when you are on the couch with a glass of wine & a toasted cheese sandwich)! Deb cooks in a tiny NY kitchen and serves up her simple take on fancy recipes with passion, humour, and some amazing food photography. (And even better for those of us who care about such things, she has a great recipe index and search engine).
GILLIAN HALLAM – I am working on a literature review at the moment, so I have read and read and read – on topics like current directions in government administration, trends in government libraries in Australia and internationally, issues in contemporary special libraries, and the skills and competencies of special librarians. Beyond that, I am reading all the abstracts for the IFLA-ALISE-EUCLID satellite meeting in Boras, Sweden, and am blind reviewing a paper on ePortfolio research in the UK and Europe. I am reading widely to identify case studies about good practice in library associations around the world as part of the work I am doing for IFLA… and in my spare time I am analysing the data coming in from the neXus3 study…There is a novel by the bed “The Children’s Book” by Antonia S Byatt , but am not making fast progress there. Finally, I get to flick through The Australian – but I think ‘read’ might be an ambitious term there.
JAN RICHARDS — I’m currently reading: Alice I have been by Melanie Benjamin. This novel blends together fact and fiction to tell the story of the real Alice in Wonderland, Alice Liddell. It’s a book which is guaranteed to make you re-examine this much loved children’s book and the mythology surrounding its creator. Publishers Weekly describes it as ‘bookclub gold‘ and I can only but agree. When you’ve finished Alice I have been I’d suggest you read (or re-read) Still she haunts me by Katie Rophie - and then perhaps make a visit to the movies to see the new Disney version of Alice starring Johnny Depp as the Mad Hatter.
(and me) SUE HUTLEY – As per my Directline in inCite, I have now finished ‘Lunch in Paris‘ and I am now aiming to cook some of the recipes from the book.
All the board members are also reading ALIA Board Papers this weekend - as we have a meeting in Canberra tomorrow. We will also be welcoming our incoming board members as observers this week to the meeting, to begin their ALIA Board induction.
I hope you enjoy reading whatever is on your list this weekend !
Sue Hutley, ALIA Executive Director