The Australian Library Journal
volume 45 issue 2
[editorial] John Levett
Letters
Reading the future
Sir Anthony Mason
Sir Anthony Mason is Chairman of the Council of the National Library of Australia. He is also Chancellor of the University of New South Wales and National Fellow, Research School of Social Sciences at the Australian National University. He is involved
in many other legal pursuits. He has had a distinguished legal career spanning over 40 years. He was appointed a Queen's Counsel in 1964 and was Commonwealth Solicitor-General from 1964 to 1969. He was a Chief Justice of the Court of Appeal, Supreme Court
of New South Wales from 1969 to 1972. He was a Justice of the High Court of Australia from 1972 to 1987 and Chief Justice from 1987 to 1995. He holds Honorary Doctorates from the ANU, the University of Sydney, the University of Melbourne, Monash
University, Griffith University and Deakin University, and is an Honorary Doctor of Civil Law at Oxford University. For a year from October 1996 Sir Anthony will be a Fellow of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge University where he will take up the
Arthur Goodheart Chair of Legal Science.
Reading the future is the inaugural Australian Library Week Oration, and was delivered to an invited audience in Sydney on 1 May 1996.
The full transcript of Sir Anthony Mason's speech is also available from the speeches pages on ALIAnet.
The use of total quality management [TQM] in libraries and information services in Australia and overseas
Michael Cooper
Total Quality Management (TQM) is a management philosophy which is driven by customer needs and a commitment to continual quality improvement. A system which focuses on processes as much as products, key components of its methodology include customer
input, staff participation and continual measurement of its success. This essay summarises where TQM has been successfully used in libraries and information services, and includes an outline of its implementation in selected case studies from overseas and
Australia.
Manuscript received March 1996
Cyberspace: No women need apply? Librarians and the Internet
Roxanne Missingham
The internet has the potential to break down or ameliorate gender-based barriers to communication, mentoring, travel and discourse. The author reviews the potential inherent in a recent sampling of traffic on FEMINIST, an ALA feminist internet discussion
group, and PACS-L, a large general discussion group on professional issues run from MIT, and a survey of librarians and their use of the internet undertaken in 1995. She found there were marked differences in both the content and tone of messages posted by
male and female participants and that the Internet had the capacity to broaden opportunities for mutual support to women who for various reasons (some of them gender-related) lacked the resources to travel in person.
Science and technology can easily be applied in ways which bolster existing power structures, but they can be applied too, in ways which promote alternative structures. They can be used in this way only as adjuncts to social movements for change (Arnold,
Erik and Burr, Lesley, 1985: 161)
Manuscript received December 1995
Chilling the community: Information literacy and the Hindmarsh Island bridge
Richard Owen
The author examines the concept of information literacy as an aspect of the political process, and taking as a case-study the protests against the building of the Hindmarsh Island Bridge at Goolwa in South Australia. This article is based on the transcript
of a presentation given to the ALIA National RAISS Conference held in Adelaide in September 1995; a condensed version of it was published in The learning link; information literacy in practice ed Di Booker, Adelaide, Auslib Press 1995.
For the past 3 years I have been rediscovering people and a sense of community. As I became more involved in the group of people that was determined to stop the Hindmarsh Island bridge being built, I decided that this would be a good opportunity to test
what I believed about information literacy, about access to information and personal empowerment,... to see whether the beliefs we had held actually worked in real life, outside of the formal education system... so I intend to describe my understanding of
that process... and of information literacy.
Manuscript received May 1996
The construction of a directory of theological libraries and collections of theology
Coralie Jenkin
Collections of religion and theology in Australia and New Zealand' (CORT) (Jenkin, 1992) is a directory of theological libraries and collections of theology in libraries, although originally it was confined to Judaeo-Christian theological libraries and
collections of Judaeo-Christian materials. It was written to assist people locate and have access to collections of theological materials, and therefore both theological libraries and collections of materials in libraries other than theological libraries
were recorded. These include special collections in academic, college, public, special and state libraries and the national libraries of Australia and New Zealand.
Manuscript received February 1996 - This article was originally published in Philip Harvey and Lynn Pryor (eds.) 'So great a cloud of witnesses':libraries and theologies. Melbourne: Uniting Church Theological Hall and the Australian and New Zealand
Theological Library Association, 1995) and is reprinted here with permission.
Professional mentoring in Victoria
Sue McKnight, Eva Fisch and Bea Donkin
The Australian Library and Information Association's Victorian Branch mentoring scheme has been operating for just over two years. The history of the scheme, the administrative processes employed and the successes and failures are outlined to inform those
interested in professional mentoring.
Manuscript received February 1996
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