How to give a good presentation

I went to a professional development session on Tuesday afternoon entitled “Present with Confidence” sponsored by the Ikaroa region Lianza group (Yay Ikaroa!). So this post is aimed at all those about to present at the upcoming Lianza Conference in Christchurch. You may find some tips useful. The session covered such topics as: • How [...]

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Why Google needs librarians

This week, references to a couple of articles: I recently read a blog post, Language Log, about the “train wreck” that is the metadata for Google books.  I won’t repeat the examples but there are plenty in the blog post to indicate that the metadata are a mess, particularly for older books.  Google’s chief engineer [...]

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Come Together, Right Now

One of the cool things I have discovered I love about blogging, apart from statistic watching, is looking at the incoming links.  So far we haven’t got too many that aren’t from one of our own blogs linking us back to here. These show that we are part of a much larger conversation about libraries. [...]

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Got the job, now get the t-shirt….or a tattoo

Librarians are a funny lot in many ways.  No more so than the fact that we seem to love t-shirts celebrating our profession.   I mean, there really is an amazing number of librarian t-shirts available.  Cafepress, which is a major online t-shirt retailer, has 5,720 designs alone, and that is just one site.    Zazzled, The [...]

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de knee bone connected to de thigh bone…

Recently, our joint academic/public library was investigated by a researcher looking at the difficulties involved in having two different organisational cultures working along side each other.  No doubt the paper will be published and you will all get to read about it. Yesterday I read through the copy given to us and came away feeling [...]

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I don’t like other people’s libraries

Inspired by a discussion on one of the listservs, I think it’s time to confess. “I don’t like other people’s libraries.” Well okay so that’s not strictly true. Let me rephrase. “I don’t like walking into library buildings where I don’t know any of the staff or where any of the collections are.” Hhm. That’s [...]

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There Is No Such Thing As A Free Lunch!

After conference finishes I have to stay in Christchurch for an extra day. I, along with a number of others, am going to have training in administering a Kete through the auspices of the APN. This is quite exciting for us at Tararua as we have been looking forward to developing a Kete. Some of [...]

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Dirty Librarian Chains

Judi told me that she’d already posted on the Cushings library ditching its books. So i’ve offered to do another post! and yes, related to fashion! Apparently librarians have a jewellery line, just for them! I came across this whimsical article on the LIS news site, Librarians as Fashion’s Frontline: “The chains are described as [...]

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Library Ditches Books for Sony Readers

In a desperate bid to come up with a post and not get side-tracked by a whole lot of fashion week sites, I came across a library in New England, that is giving away its books (20,000+). Cushing Academy, a 144 year old school 90 minutes west of Boston, has bought 18 Sony electronic readers [...]

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Sick of Twitter? Try Flutter!

Cos, you know, like, 140 characters takes way too long to type…

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