I am a librarian and a generalist. I work with public library staff across NSW, seeking through collaborations to develop a better outcome than would be possible separately. This year this has included : • Working on revision of Digital practice – guidelines for NSW public libraries to use for digitisation • #bookbinge with the readers advisory group which encouraged library staff to read as many books as possible in April and write about the experience on the wiki http://readersadvisory.wetpaint.com/page/Australian+Librarians+Book+Binge • reading challenge - read something out of your comfort zone each month and write about it • planning for twitter based reading group discussion for 2011 – with each month a different theme. This will target library clients http://readersadvisory.wetpaint.com/page/2011 • working on a collaborative reference training wiki – three new training module added this year http://wiki.libraries.nsw.gov.au/index.php/Reference_excellence • successful seminars at the State Library for reference http://referenceandinformationservices.wetpaint.com/page/2010 , readers advisory work and games • ran the first ever library seminar or conference in World of Warcraft http://gamesandlibraries.wetpaint.com/page/Edited+Transcript+of+Online+Seminar • I am exploring how games can be used with reference and information services I co-led and cowrote the learning 2.0 courses for NSW public library staff http://nswpubliclibrarieslearning2.blogspot.com/ and State Library of NSW staff http://learning2slnsw.blogspot.com/. I wrote 11 weeks of the leaning 2.1 course for NSW public library staff http://newsouthwalespubliclibrarylearning21.blogspot.com/ and work with public library staff in their use of web 2.0 tools.
Campers
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Cemeteries
August 20th, 2010 Comments Off
Cemeteries are a key local studies and family history resource. Work is being done with gps to aid in the locating of graves. In some cases communities are assisting with recording locations. Many libraries, archives and museums have images, information, and in some cases audio/visual recording of relevance. It would be amazing if when walking through a cemetery you could access information/images/recordings of some of the people buried there simply by having a location aware mobile device. It would build on the often scant or cryptic information on headstones or grave markers. Detailed information would not need to be available for every grave, but some would be a great start – and the information may be as simple as reading transcript of the text on a hard to read headstone. It would also tie in with the with way some cemeteries are changing how they record location information for burials. For new burials this could be a way for people or their families to provide information/images for the future. Obviously anything done in this area would need to be respectful of the general ambiance of cemeteries.
It would mean that image databases may need improved location information, but it would enhance the experience of visiting cemeteries. Ideally it would scalable so once developed it could be used in cemeteries everywhere from areas of war graves to town cemeteries and cemeteries associated with properties. It may be that the Australian War Memorial datasets may be a way of exploring this idea.
I have not been able to find example of this yet.
This ideas was developed using crowdsourcing with NSW public library staff.
wildcards
August 20th, 2010 Comments Off
As light relief we could use wildcards created by Richard Watson and Oliver Freeman to aid in brainstorming for ideas (not that there seems to be a shortage of ideas so far).