Lyn Hay wins ALSA Citation Award for 2007

The School of Information Studies' Lyn Hay has won the Australian School Library Association Citation award for 2007.

The Australian School Library Association presents this award "for outstanding leadership in promoting and developing teacher librarianship in one or more of the following fields: policy formation, program implementation, publications, administration of the association, research, innovation and education. The award was presented to Lyn at the awards ceremony held during the very recent ASLA 2007 conference in Adelaide. Lyn has given outstanding service and leadership to school libraries in Australia and receives this award for the areas of education, publications, research and innovation. Her vision has had ongoing positive consequences for the profession of teacher librarianship across Australia" (Karen Bonanno, ASLA Executive Officer, OZTL_NET message).

You can read the citation and Lyn's acceptance speech on the ASLA website.

Photo credit: Australian School Library Association at http://www.asla.org.au/advocacy/citation/citation2007.htm

Study group visit to Melbourne Museum Discovery Centre

James Herring recently took one of our study visit groups to the fascinating Melbourne Museum Discovery Centre. James reports below......

The visit was excellent with the centre manager (a librarian by any other name) introducing the work of the centre as a focus for education but also as a gateway to the museum for inquiries and identifications. This means that people send in photos of beasties for the museum to identify. In some cases, people send specimens and sometimes, the specimens e.g. spiders, are still alive.

Students were then split into groups and each group was given an artefact e.g. a sheep’s skull or a shell and they had to go and use the centre’s displays, collection (i.e. drawers of fossils, bones etc), book collection and catalogue on the centre’s website, to identify the artefact - a real live information retrieval exercise, enjoyed by all.

There was also a chameleon in a glass case which was fascinating to watch – see James' blog for a link to a photo of the chameleon in the centre.

If you’re in Melbourne, it’s a fascinating – and free – place to visit.