FYI, there is now a report on the web with recommendations for the establishment at UTAS of a new Institute of Marine and Antarctic Studies (IMAS).

This is extremely likely to eventuate and will have significant impacts upon our schools and even the Faculty of SET as it will sit outside SET and be in partnership with the State Government. TAFI will be devolved as will the ACE (CRC).

It is intended that IMAS will include all teaching and research in the marine and Antarctic areas so will have implications for the way we offer IL, our collections, and it may affect services we provide, particularly as collaborations with external organisations are central to its structure.

How much times does web 2.0 take?

This article might be interesting

Liaison Day Blog presentation

My presentation on blogs can be found here if anyone is interested in reading more.

Librarian Too

Apologies if you have come across this one before but have a look at this workshop run in Brisbane late last year, looking at some of the web 2.0 technologies that were discussed at yesterday's meeting.

http://www.quloc.org.au/

Under 'Meetings and Events', select Social Software and Libraries - Seminar blog and presentations.

Wendy

Google launches Wikipedia rival

This ITworld article  is pretty interesting.
Google has launched Knol, its user-generated online encyclopedia, which it announced in December but had kept under wraps in private testing.
They will be encourage authors/editors names to be public, (like Citizendium).
Is this the real beginning of the free-encyclopedia wars?

Research Publications Online: Too Much of A Good Thing?

Apologies to those who read this at Stephen Abram's blog, but I thought it was worth sharing.

According to an article in Science, as a result of increasing electronic availability "scholars are actually citing fewer papers in their own work, and the papers they do cite tend to be more recent publications"

Read the story here

(http://www.nsf.gov/news/news_summ.jsp?cntn_id=111928&org=NSF)

What do you think this mean for Librarians?

Understanding Statistics!

I found this new ABS publication very useful, it gives concise, well written explanations (and diagrams) of terms like median, mode, time series etc.
For those of us who are mathematically challenged (like me) it provides a good introduction to statistical terms, and if we are going to be helping students with ABS data at the reference desk, it will come in handy.

http://www.abs.gov.au/AUSSTATS/abs@.nsf/mf/1332.0.55.002?OpenDocument

Quick Guides

I have recently found this Quick Reference Guide page. It contains two page summaries of Microsoft applications plus Adobe and Firefox. I like the Firefox Guide because it lists all the keyboard shortcuts.

Google Sites

In case you have not seen it... Google Sites allows you to create web sites on the fly. Nothing special in that, but the examples they give show promising applications in areas like Project Management. Like their blogger application, (used for this blog) GS web sites are rediculously easy to set up and maintain, are free, and have several levels of "openness", that is, you can have a completely public website, a completely private one that no one else can see, or several options in-between. These include an intranet type page or a page just for a selected project group.
Could this have a use in managing our small projects? Perhaps it could even work under the PRINCE2 system ??
Here's an example of a PM website created by GS.

The Library in the New Age

I have just read an interesting article by Robert Darnton published recently in the New York Review of Books.

The first half outlines the rise of information and how it has been recorded and distributed to society throughout history.

The second part of the article analyses the Google Book Project and discusses how this Project may or may not impact on the role of the research library. I quite enjoyed reading the article as many of the author's points reflect my opinions of Google's project to digitise the worlds' book collection.

You can find the article here