Dr. Jennie Bales wins Beth Southwell Award

Congratulations to Dr. Jennie Bales, a recent PhD graduate of ours, who has won a Beth Southwell Research Award for Outstanding Educational Thesis from 2008! This award is from the NSW Institute for Educational Research and nominations are limited to one per university. Beth Southwell was a well known educator and academic who gave many years of committed service to the NSW Institute for Educational Research. This award perpetuates her memory.

Dr. Bales' thesis, "Supportive Online Learning Environments for Primary Students: Literature Circles in an Education MOO", is attracting a great deal of favourable attention from the educational community. Well done, Jennie!

Annual Conference Brisbane 2009

Australian Society of Archivists - Annual Conference Brisbane 2009

The Australian Society of Archivists recently held their annual conference in Brisbane this year as a joint event with the Archives and Records Association of New Zealand (ARANZ) and PARBICA (the Pacific and Regional Branch of the International Council on Archives). The theme for the conference was Voyaging Together – Integrity, Memory, Sustainability.

With over 200 delegates, and a busy program of workshops, papers and panels, the event provided archivists, records managers and related professionals with a range of opportunities to share knowledge, network and socialise. Two CSU staff were involved. Sigrid McCausland was a conference organiser and co-presented two workshops – Advocacy for Small Archives (with Desley Soden of the Anglican Diocesan Archives of Brisbane) and Review of the Statement of Knowledge for Recordkeeping Professionals (with Marian Hoy, Professional Development and Education Officer of the Records Management Association of Australasia). Bob Pymm presented a paper on the 9/11 Virtual Archive in the US and was a panel member for a discussion on Educating Archivists: Life after Bradley.

SIS students excel at workplaces

Always is good to hear about the good things our students are doing:
_______________________________________________________

From: Sally Kudrna [mailto:S.Kudrna@australiacouncil.gov.au]
Sent: Tuesday, 13 October 2009 3:14 PM
To: Pymm, Robert
Cc: Claire Eggleston
Subject: CSU students who volunteered at the Australia Coucnil for the Arts

Hi Robert,

Three students from the post graduate Library and Information Studies course volunteered to help us with a stocktake here at the Australia Council for the Arts.
Ellen Fitzgerald, Antonia Wall and Jess Irwin.
They have been extremely keen to learn about our library and library management system. They have been hard working and their time has been recognised and valued by us in the library, our directors and the finance division of the Australia Council.
When I am next asked how to become a librarian I will definitely be recommending CSU by correspondence.

Thanks again for posting our work experience opportunity on your forum. We have really enjoyed having work experience student here and I hope they learnt some things and enjoyed their time with us as well.

Thanks


Sally Kudrna
_________________________________
Research Librarian
Research and Strategic Analysis, Arts Development

Australia Council for the Arts
PO Box 788 Strawberry Hills NSW 2012 Australia

SIS at the Institute for Information Management Annual Conference in Canberra

On Wednesday October 8th Bob and Mary Anne took information about the new SIS Courses to the annual conference of the Institute for Information Management Conference “Managing Information Today and Tomorrow” in Canberra. We met lots of interesting people, including past, present and hopefully future students of SIS.

The conference provided a forum for both information practitioners and solution providers to come together in order to develop their understanding of theory and practice in all aspects of information management. The conference had interesting papers in three streams:

• Governance, Risk and Compliance
• Enterprise Content Management
• Business Intelligence

In the afternoon there was a panel discussion on "Freedom of Information (FoI) and Web 2.0". Panel members included Vladimir Videnovic, Institute for Information Management; Tony Corcoran, Department of Defence; Christine Johnson, National Archives of Australia; Thomas Kaufhold, Records Management Association of Australasia; David Eade, Objective; Peter Outteridge Australian Computer Society; and Mary Anne. A large part of the discussion centred around education in the changing information landscape.

Study visit to Sydney 13th to 16th October 2009

A group of 45 students from the masters degrees in library and information management, information studies and teacher librarianship, and the undergraduate degrees in library and information management and information studies, visited a range of libraries in Sydney from 13-16 October. The group were guided by SIS staff James Herring, Kim Thompson and Roy Crotty. The students all visited the Ultimo TAFE library on Tuesday morning and the University of Technology Sydney library on Friday morning. In between, students had a choice each morning and afternoon of 3 different libraries, including public libraries, a medical library, the state records, the parliamentary library and other special libraries.

The photos below show a group of students at the Australian Research Museum library a) under a spectacular peacock and b) next to a very tall but remarkably well behaved ostrich. The library has a notice saying that animals such as this would not be exhibited in today’s more enlightened times.

The Sydney Royal Botanic Garden Library visitors were shown a remarkable rare books collection and learned about how a small special library survives by working extensively with volunteers.

On the Friday morning, in the debrief session at UTS, students were given an outline of what ALIA can do for them as information professionals by Nikki Kallenberger.

At the debriefing, students were asked to reflect on the value of the visits to the various libraries and students noted the enthusiasm of the librarians they had met, especially those working under severe financial restrictions. Students also saw the study visit as an excellent opportunity to meet both the staff (James, Kim and Roy) as well as other students on their own course but also on other courses. The studetns were full of praise for the organisation of study visit, including all the preparatory work done by Carol Morton, the professional experience officer. Students were split into groups to discuss their findings.

At the close of this very successful study visit, Nikki Kallenberger kindly took a group photo of SIS staff and students.

How I use classification and thesaurus at home?

Sharyn Mayne is my student in INF 116. She sent the following to the forum. It is interesting to see application of information organization at home:

I classify my food cupboard thus:

top shelf is items that are used most often like condiments, vegemite, salt, milo, etc.
2nd shelf down is that are used less often like canned goods. I classify them according to type of packaging with cans on the right and boxes and packages on the left.
3rd shelf (and least likely to make me bend as often) is items used least often like cereal, flour, vinegar etc.

So to summarise, my food cupboard is classified according to:
1. Need
2. Type of packaging

Now my bookshelf is atypical of libraries and very typical of my laziness... just like the food cupboard, my bookshelf is classified according to need with items I haven't read at the top. Books that have been read are moved to the bottom. BUT, when i do a spring clean, i often move my favourite series to the very top shelf, so I can admire them whenever I look at the bookshelf.
Other than need, the books are classified according to Author, then series. For example, the Eddings series is situated to the left of the Jordan series and each series is situated in numerical order e.g. Book 1 is to the left and progresses upward to book 12.

Now, my spare bedroom has been harder to classify and generally I use a Thesaurus which I created myself and use annually or bi-annually, depending on the amount of resources and their condition. It's called the JUNK THESAURUS and I think with a bit of marketing, could become a worldwide tool for household description.

My Junk Thesaurus is so easy to use that a baby could do it. It contains limited broad terms - namely "Junk" and "Useful Stuff". When I acquire new resources for this room, they are given the narrower term "junk to be sorted". Occasionally (i.e. once a year), I will find the need to add a new term, "Rubbish", to the Thesaurus when I reclassify the parts of the room.

Just like the traditional library stocktake, my stocktake of the Spare Bedroom involves alot of dusty moving of objects with 3M sticky notes that classify piles of resources related terms like "Rubbish Junk", "Junk" and "Useful Junk".

During the last stages of the classification, instead of using "Useful Junk", I assign the terms "Storage", "Kitchen drawer", "Bedroom" and "Study". At the end of the process instead of using a broad term like "Rubbish" I use a narrower term - "Garbage bin".

SIS at Oz-IA in Sydney, Oct 2-3, 2009

Here is Asim introducing our new curriculum to the country's Information Architects at Oz-IA in Sydney.