proACTive

Number 219: December 2001

ACTive ALIA report of activities for 2001
ACT Branch of ALIA transformed into ACTive ALIA group this year, amid fanfare and much activity. Helen Roberts performed a sterling job as our first president/convenor, with Julie Ward as a terrific secretary. Thanks to members of the ALIA ACT Branch committee, including Julie Philips who stood down after many years great service as a treasurer. Our monthly newsletter, proACTive, continues to provide information about local happenings to all ALIA members in the Canberra region.

Groups active in the ACT this year have included the Special Librarians, Library Technicians, ALIA ACT and District Health Forum, PEARLS (Previously Employed Australian Retired Librarians), APSIG and UCRLS (now URLS). All the groups in the region had active programs of talks, library visits, seminars and of course 'Library Libations'.

ACTive activities this year included:

Branch meetings
Presentation on copyright, on 14 March, by Nick Smith, executive officer, Australian Digital Alliance and copyright adviser to the Australian Libraries Copyright Committee, covering the implications of the Copyright Amendment (Digital Agenda) Act 2000.
Seminar on electronic resources: acquisition and access. A very successful seminar was held, which was organised by ACTive ALIA and Kinetica. Over 120 people attended on 20 June from 1:30pm to 5:00pm in the National Library Theatre. 6 speakers covered issues on access and management of electronic resources.
The midwinter dinner on 10 August provided both mental and taste delights. Dorothy Harris and Tony Ralli were awarded the first dual ALIA ACTive Merit Awards. ALIA ACT prizes were awarded to University of Canberra students, Ben Miskin (Undergraduate) and Mandy Lupton (Graduate). Ben Miskin and Rachael Skyring jointly won the John Balnaves Prize for Information Retrieval. The Nancy Lane award was won by Stephen Hicks and the Doreen Goodman award was won by Bob Pymm. Moyra McAllister gave an interesting and amusing speech on the future of libraries and our present challenges.
The year will end with the Christmas function on 12 December. ALIA members in the ACT will attend a special showing of the NLA Centenary Exhibition, 'Treasures from the World's Great Libraries', with a tour by the curator of the exhibition, Margaret Dent.

Roxanne Missingham

Cataloguing Conference
The ACT was well represented at the 14th National Cataloguing Conference 'Seachange: cataloguing in a dot com world' which was held recently 7-9 November at the beautiful Deakin University Waterfront Campus in Geelong.

Around two hundred delegates, from New Zealand and Papua New Guinea as well as from every state of Australia, participated in a superbly organised and very relaxed two-day conference, preceded by two highly topical seminars, one on managing websites, and the other on educating yourself and planning your career.

The conference was opened by ALIA president Alan Bundy, and the keynote speaker was Geoff Payne of the Vision Australia Foundation. Delegates heard a number of papers on a variety of topics, but metadata, and the cataloguing of electronic and digital resources was undoubtedly the topic of the moment.

Among the many papers, Dr Marie-Louise Ayres of ADFA presented a stimulating paper on the AustLit gateway and using the Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records framework, and Lloyd Sokvitne of the State Library of Tasmania posed the question 'if librarianship is the right profession, are cataloguers the right people?'

The 125th anniversary of the Dewey Decimal Classification scheme was celebrated with a Birthday Reception hosted by OCLC, and the conference dinner was held at the Waterfront Campus overlooking the Bay. For those who attended an additional bonus was the inclusion of a complete published set of the papers (not just the overheads!), which will form a useful and permanent record of the conference.

Peter Haddad

Our neighbours
From high-tech Singapore to Noumea in the sunny Pacific to San Antonio in one hour

Twenty-five ALIA members enjoyed a further event in the series of Travellers' Tales organised by the Asia Pacific SIG on 13 November.

Sally-Anne Leigh (ANU) has been to Singapore recently as part of her academic liaison and gave a slide presentation on a branch of the Singapore Public Library in a department store she had seen and which has been built to attract customers and to encourage reading. With gleaming chrome, automation and new terminals galore Sally-Anne said that it was maintained at the highest level, with new PCs every year as in Singapore anything old must go and only the newest will do. The branch operates with a high degree of self-service and few staff through the use of automated charging systems.

Chris Foster (NLA) reported on her trip to Noumea to attend a workshop organised for Pacific Libraries by IFLA on the 'Universal Availability of Publications' in September. Ten countries were represented. The twenty six participants discussed a wide variety of issues. Their recommendations from the workshop cover a number of important topics for the emerging libraries of the Pacific including legal deposit, training programs, acquisitions and greater access to information about and for Pacific libraries via a Pacific portal. Chris also managed to visit some bookshops and libraries, including the Secretariat of the Pacific Community and the Institut de Recherche pour le DÈveloppement. She hopes that following her visit, it will be possible to improve the National Library's collecting of Pacific imprints.

Jeanette Regan (astronomy liaison librarian, ANU) attended the Special Libraries' Conference in San Antonio in Texas in June. She was particularly interested by the Physics, Astronomy and Maths Section presentations. Jeanette was able to talk to various American special librarians and make some visits. She found a very different library culture in the US, with a strong emphasis upon marketing library services and making the chief executive of the organisation aware of what they can contribute.

A very interesting trio of presentations.

Marie Sexton

Aurora Leadership Institute
Nominations are now invited for the Fifth Aurora Leadership Institute, at the Thredbo Alpine Resort, NSW, 1-6 March, 2002.

The Institute aims to assist future leaders in the library and associated cultural and information industries to maximise their leadership skills and potential. It is presented by the Aurora Foundation Ltd, a non-profit organisation established to provide education, development and training opportunities in leadership for the library and associated information professions in Australia and New Zealand.

For further details and nomination form, please consult the Aurora website at http://www.alia.org.au/aurora/

Sherrey Quinn

Quality control and evaluation
The ALIA ACT and District Health Forum held a joint lunchtime meeting in Woden with the Australian Society of Indexers on 14 November. Some 20 people attended, including members of other groups such as ACT Specials.

The purpose of the meeting was to discuss some of the professional issues arising from the HealthInsite Editorial Team's research project 'Using metadata to create navigation paths in the HealthInsite Internet gateway'. The meeting started with a slide show to demonstrate the HealthInsite navigation paths available to a user. Then the dynamic metadata searches which lie behind the topic pages in the navigation structure were described. The research project evaluated these searches and found significant recall and precision failures resulting from limitations with the thesaurus, indexing errors and inconsistencies, poor topic definition search strategy errors, and search engine defects.

Corrections were made to fix the problems identified, including the purchase of a new search engine, but it was realised that ongoing quality control and evaluation was needed. All metadata records are now checked. However some sampling will be needed to evaluate the topic page results because full recall precision studies are very labour intensive. It is important to test search engine functionality.

The session was presented by Jill Buckley Smith and Prue Deacon from the HealthInsite Editorial Team. Following discussion and lots of questions, Lynn Farkas, from the Australian Society of Indexers, summed up by saying that the project showed a clear need for quality control in our professional work.

(Jill, Prue and Stephanie Tow have published this work in Health Information and Libraries Journal, 2001, 18, 20-29.)

ACTive ALIA Christmas party
The Christmas function this year will include a tour of the 'Treasures from the World's Great Libraries' exhibition at the National Library of Australia. Margaret Dent, the curator of the exhibition, will be giving us a special tour from 5:00pm to 6:00pm on Wednesday 12 December.

This exhibition, featuring over 150 treasures from 39 libraries around the world, traces the story of civilisation and celebrates the role of libraries as collectors of the recorded memory of humanity.

The tour will be followed by our group Christmas party which will be held in the Conference Room on the 4th floor. The tour and Christmas party will cost $10.00 per person.

If you would like to come along to the special showing of the exhibition and join your friends and colleagues in Christmas celebrations please RSVP to: Julie Ward by at jward@nla.gov.au.

Thanks ... from the ALIA Library Technician of the Year
Attending the National Library Technicians conference this year was one of the highlights of my library career. To be acknowledged by the Association and in particular my peer group by being presented the 11th Award at the 11th Conference will always be a special memory.

In receiving this award I realised just how fortunate I am in having such great support around me both in my personal and working life. To achieve without support would be difficult. The other members of the Canberra Conference Committee (Ursula Macdermott, Glenis Matheson, Beth Clary, Margaret Drury and Lynn Bale) must be acknowledged as sharing in my award for the combined effort for our record breaking 1997 Conference and for being the 'backbone' of the local group.

My work at the High Court of Australia Library would not be a success without the team spirit of the people who have encouraged and worked with me over the years.

Marion Boyd

... and from Aska Moir
I wish to express my gratitude to the ACT ALIA Library Technicians group for giving me the chance to participate in the 11th ALIA Library Technicians conference. I was able to see and hear some inspiring speakers. It all contributed to my understanding of what Library Technicians are and what the future may hold for them. I networked, made friends, learned a lot and had fun. That's an excellent combination! Thank you again for letting me be a part of this experience.

Aska Moir

Are you a nerd?
In The Canberra Times on 8 October ... quoting a new report, 'The Psychology of Fonts', on how computer typefaces can reveal secrets of your personality and influence what the reader thinks about you. 'Don't use Courier,' says the article, 'unless you want to look like a nerd. It's a favourite for librarians and data-entry companies.' Now we know!

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