on a night like this

I wish Kathleen Noonan would write a book - her articles in The Courier Mail are so poetic.
Read her latest, then close your eyes and compose your own stories starting with her first line 'on a night like this'.
Then send them to me in the comments, 'cause you know I love to read.

always a surprise

was surprised on the weekend to read that Rod Stewart was diagnosed with thyroid cancer in 2001. he can still sing.
laughed ironically with this article though - fine needle aspiration is a 'virtually painless procedure'. dreaming.

http://www.usatoday.com/news/health/spotlight/2001-02-22-stewart-thyroid.htm

happy christmas!

just wanted to share my secret santa story. it can be difficult to find a special gift for a colleague (or classmate if you're at school) for under $10. the person who got the gift i bought liked it (i was eavesdropping) *whew*. and then i received these little figurines - the largest is only about 5 centimetres high - wrapped in a beautiful little red recycled paper bag. i immediately set the little nativity scene up for others to enjoy. i think i know who gifted it, but i haven't been able to catch up with her yet to say thanks - but i could be wrong of course!

thank you secret santa!

it's very sweet.

and starting this saturday down at the strand, townsville has http://www.stableonthestrand.com.au/ - an interactive nativity scene transporting you back to the day. i haven't seen it yet, but there was a similar production in maryborough - get in amongst it.

before our christmas morning tea and secret santa we had our last full staff meeting for the year. our ceo and director attended and listened to us all talk up our service. harps, i mentioned you in my spun conference report - with your library launching IM use. were your ears burning?

If I don't get this book for Christmas I'll be very surprised:

It's probably under the tree already. I'm a very bad gift buyer. I always get given much better gifts than i receive. i just don't shop. or i think - i'll come back later and get that. don't be like me!

Happy Christmas everyone, and if you're travelling - have a splash of fun for me!

spread the joy at christmas

wordbox4writers in MARC!

*smile* Hume Library in Victoria has wordbox linked in their Dynix catalogue, also visible in MARC. As a librarian that makes me smile.
They have the old url but I've alerted them to the new site just now.

So if wordbox was a book it would be hanging out at 808 at Hume. Interesting.


082: 14 $a 808 $b WOR $2 a14

082: 04 $a 808.02079 $b WOR $2 22

245: 00 $a Wordbox $h [website] : $b for young Australian writers and readers!

260: $a [Australia] : $b wordbox.bravehost.com, $c [2006?]-

writing workshops, qwc & hbca

pleased to find i've managed to attend one creative workshop a year for the previous four -

1. poetry workshop with Julie Beveridge from Queensland Writers Centre, townsville, november 2009
2. short story and poetry workshops with Ross C. Clark, hervey bay, november 2008 (organised by lynn from hervey bay council of the arts)
3. teaching writers to teach with Cynthia Rohner at Queensland Writers Centre, february 2007 (useful when planning my maryborough workshop)
4. writing for children workshop with Jill Morris, hervey bay, april 2006 (again, hbca)

check out the 2010 workshops available from QWC.

julie made some great suggestions for my airport poem, so that's what i'm working on now. that and the review for cmis!

incite into townsville

my article published in InCite December 2009, page 34 - celebrating the people I've met along the way. Happy Christmas inspiring people - http://tinyurl.com/ye82lkw (pdf article).

I got the print copy in the mail today and found more townsville people had written for InCite also!

Mr Ron Store's article about our QPLA/PLA conference (that he organised so well) is on page 8 with the pretty origami twist fish we all folded (he's going to hate my favoured use of lowercase, but I'm an e.e. cummings fan, and he knows it :)

Bronia Renison from the Townsville Health Library writes with Margaret Larcombe about librarians working with nurses on a research project (page 17). I was at the hospital today and a doctor mentioned how good their library was.

article also from kellie ayre from tablelands - nearish to townsville - page 21.

and, not townsville, but someone I know from CSU and mentioned in my article - Sharon Uthmann, Shire Librarian at Bellingen Shire wrote 'going on a book hunt on the dorrigo plateau' with a colleague.

Jan Richards, ALIA president, made an interesting observation in this themed issue (rural and regional libraries): 'In small rural libraries you can work across a range of tasks and roles, and you have the authority to make decisions and try out new ideas at an early stage in your career'.* It's so true.

* Richards, J. 2009. Frontline. InCite. 30(12). p.4.

Another Townsville colleague, Keil Jones, had an article published in the October issue on Movember.

It all happens in Townsville.**

** although for me it began like this - I grew up in the little library on Toowoomba's Little Street where Robyn Sheahan was children's librarian, and where I read my way through an amazing collection of paper dreams

If you read my article, share in the blog comments your memories of the libraries/librarians in Toowoomba, Dalby, Fraser Coast or Townsville.

D*P*C awards night!

... and the staff Christmas party. Great night with friends and seafood. Found out another colleague who used to live in Tooowoomba. After the fun of the learning 2.0 program Warren and Susan presented prizes. I got a participant's prize of a pebble mp3!! and have spent awhile downloading music onto it. So far: Garbage - Absolute Garbage, Robbie Williams Live at Knebworth Summer 2003, So Fresh 2009, Bridezilla and Triple J's Hottest 100 of all time. Love my prize, love my workplace, and love spell with flickr.

townsville!

My birthplace! My family lived in Acheron Avenue. Kerry, my dear friend who I met as an 11 year old in Toowoomba, started out in Vincent. My aunt, Anne Rogers, worked in what is now the JCU library. I love The Strand, Harold's and Masala, the one-act play festival, the bikeways, Magnetic Island, Riverway, the people, the libraries, sunday markets...
I've lived in a few places around Queensland. Toowoomba was great (now, looking back..) but not the year it snowed.
Where do you come from, and what do you love about Townsville?

D*P*C #7 tagging

I couldn't find my D*P*C #7 anywhere!! so had to start over. I obviously hadn't tagged it very well if at all.
It's all about tagging.
What I like about LCSH 'tags' is that they are set in stone. For a previous course I had to construct a thesaurus and that was difficult but rewarding. Remembering which tags you used for something two months ago is hard. What if you feel differently about it now?

I like the use of the hashtag in twitter, especially to follow conferences or group things. Check #qpla09, and #infservice (what's happening on information service?). I've tried to use minimalist labels/tags on this site so things are easily found (like the tag D*P*C for this program).

This is the wordle I created using content from the D*P*C website, and this one is from a beautiful Robert Frost poem I discovered when I was impressionable and reading Susie Hinton's The Outsiders. After The Outsiders I then read Gone With the Wind. I still think of Rob Lowe as Sodapop from TO even though I've seen him most recently on Brothers and Sisters. Anyway, the poem is Nothing gold can stay, written in 1923. An earlier version did not include the Edenic reference. And the article in wikipedia includes a see also reference to The Outsiders. That Susie Hinton! She brought a whole new generation to American poetry and boy culture. And all at a very young age.


And for more visual tagged wordart, revisit this site: The Visual Dictionary, and my 'cafe' and 'library' images that used to be outside the Uni cafe in Hervey Bay and Nerang Library respectively. Here's their mashup of the visual dictionary and twitter.

D*P*C # 6 & #16 mashups and finale

Loved Caitlin's name in Spell with Flickr so much that I had to try too. That's so pretty.




That was so much fun! Thanks, Warren, Neal and everyone who set up the program.
I've learned a lot, and need to revisit many of the discoveries, like IM and I really should put more images into flickr. And refine my delicious account. But I'm just not that into Facebook.

I still like blogs as a 21C way to communicate industry information among colleagues, like Skerricks among TLs, and still my favourite information services librarian site: the swissarmy librarian. I want to investigate mashups with maps.

So, not the end - the beginning.

And here's a book I just found on the library returns shelf of interest -

The rough guide to blogging: navigate the blogosphere, by Jonathan Yang, published October 2006 (old, much?). 006.7 YANG at Flinders Street, or ISBN 978184353682X from your bookstore.

Am I done yet?

you will use IM you will use IM you will use IM