1001 Australian Nights / Andrew Wright

Story, narrative, discourse, world-view ... were words conjured up before me when I sighted Andrew's topic. My curiosity was aroused as to how spinning tales can aid and abet one's professional undertakings as a librarian. From Fanon's lament of being possessed by another's language (read "story") in the sixties to the present cacophony of post-colonial literature, feminist writings of herstory and postmodern critical theory, it sometimes seems as though marginalised groups have seized back their space (read "centre"). But the dominant discourse is predominant not from want of nothing. Adept at accommodating to changing circumstances, such voices, no longer silenced, are heard but rarely heeded as they pan out as ritualised steam-letting within the larger social context.
Political maelstrom aside however, I agree the librarian should be all things to all people. Whether as story-teller, story told to or from, for or against, reasonable or absurd, we are all the authors of our fate as we make sense of our idiosyncratic sojourn and place in the world.

Sai-Kee Kek (SLWA)

Friday at the National Library Stand

10.30 am Explore Libraries Australia during the Morning Tea Break

1 pm Find out about using Libraries Australia for Reference and Acquisitions

click06 conference blog

OPAC Seminar:
The ACOC Seminar Monday 18th Sept.- Beyond the OPAC- was verry interesting. I came away buoyed by the program and as a cataloguer, more enthusiastic (is that possible?) about making access to catalogue data easier. I think, but most libraries are struggling to achieve the "now" let alone plan the future of OPACs . Presentations on the new bib. standards (FRBR and RDA) were the main threads that interested me, but Patricia Scott and Helen Attar showed us how useful linking beteen analyticals and the parent documents on an OPAC could be set up- a great enhancement. I can't wait to see how Lloyd Sokvitne's new OPAC turns out. NLA's seeding search engines (Google & Yahoo) sounds great. I wasn't aware that this had to be done for bib recs. to be pulled up on a Google as I've found some of SLWA's on my searches. -- I'm looking over past documents of Martha's on FRBRization and feel a little overwhelmed by the amount of change we are looking at and the amazing ways the OPACs in future can be really workable and productive. I'd like to hear what others thought about it.

John Draffin SLWA

From the new grad...

What fun!

I admire Cathy's discipline, in being able to stay with the one stream of concurrent sessions - it would certainly be less exhausting! However, I comfort myself with the knowledge that I am perhaps going someway towards walking off the lovely cakes from the coffee shop at the Convention Centre.

Dear reader, I am incapable of sitting in one concurrent session - each time there are 4 or 5 sessions I would like to attend, do you think the Committee would consider re-staging the conference next week so we could sit in on the papers we had to choose to miss this week? I am like a child in a lolly shop, a fly in a bottle, a mother let loose from the kids for a week (did I really say that?). I too am prowling the exhibition gathering goodies for the young ones back home - although I still haven't managed to find anyone with a writing pad to use during conference sessions (you will recall I didn't get the glamorous Click06 bag that possibly had writing paper in it...?). Today I am heading straight for the Dreaming08 stand, as they have promised me stickers for my leftover-plain-black-look-everyone-she-must-have-registered-late bag!

To all you WA people, thank you for making me feel so welcome - Perth is a lovely spot, everyone is so friendly, everything is so close (although everything does shut at 6pm, what's that about?) and I just loooooooooooooove the free buses.


Clare

More images of Librarians on TV

Have been thinking about Grant Stone's presentation and am racking my brain for more depictions of Librarians (and other library staff) in film and TV.

I've come up with:

1. Giles (the watcher) from Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
2. Mr Bookman (the Library Investigations Officer [or book detective]) from Seinfeld
3. the female Library Assistant (who Kramer gets to know in the library after hours)
and let's not forget
4. Barbara Gordon (Batgirl) - from the 1960's Batman TV series