A blog from Australia
Some Australian Librarian and related blogs worth following.
ADHD Librarian by the ADHD Librarian (twitter/ADHD_librarian)
Better than cheesecake by Susanne Newton
Bronwyn’s Library Blog by Bronwyn Ritchie
Bright Ideas – School Libraries Association of Victoria
ConnectingLibrarian by Michelle MacLean
Derek’s ALIA Blog by Derek Whitehead
Explodedlibrarian by Morgan Wilson
Speaking at the Delaware Library Town Hall, Dover, in January 2011, R. David Lankes spoke about ‘The future of librarianship’. R. David Lankes challenges librarians, and library staff, not to be passive as change occurs in the profession. Librarians need to be “proactive” when they encounter changes which some in the profession fear will push library professionals out of libraries in favour of dumbed down services. Change will happen whether we like it or not, so can librarians see opportunities in the change to engage more fully with “members” of the library?
This is a really inspiring talk, worth listening to a few times if you think you understood it the first time. It is just under 20 minutes on Vimeo.com, (audio from R. David Lankes website). Lankes asks ‘Are you OK with that?’ when librarians see a future in which library services are delivered not by librarians but by computers. He wants librarians to see people, “YOU”, as the centre of activity for librarians, not buildings, statistic collection, technology, or the latest computer applications. Using this idea, he changes the usual question ‘What is the future of libraries?’ into ‘What should be the future of libraries and librarians in a democracy?’ He suggests ‘The mission of librarians is to improve society through facilitating knowledge creation in their communities.”
Some great quotes I took away from from the talk include:
Libraries across the USA undertake an annual ‘Snapshot’ Day, which allow library staff to document some activities on an ordinary day in the library. A listing of the states and links to their sites is available from the American Library Association. Below are some examples of videos put together so far this year.
The New York Library Association’s ‘SnapshotNY’ is conducted as part of a campaign supporting their libraries called ‘New York’s Libraries : Essential’. There is a website, a facebook page, and I came across the campaign from the vimeo account, ‘protectnylibraries’ which also documents some of the ‘SnapshotNY’ videos. Below, a patron of the library tells why he needs the library.
The Washington Library Association have a wiki for their Snapshot Day, which was in April. Below
The Australian Library and Information Association‘s April InCite has an interesting article by Anne Lahey (James Cook University Library, Cairns) called ‘EEI… Energise, Enthuse, Inspire.’ Anne Lahey asks:
Anne Lahey asks are we adequately training our potential library and information sector (LIS) leaders to be ready for the expectations of the future?… The ‘greying’ of the profession forces us to look at our next generation of managers, and offers us the opportunity to influence how this changing of the guard will play out.
A Searching Librarian 