#ALIAAccess 2010 Brisbane

say hello to the future. it was good.
#ALIAAccess group on flickr

highlights:

1. meeting tweeps @jobeaz, @rachelwray, @newgradlib, and catching up with Jo and Robyn (fraser coast)
2. Dr Neil Carrington's leadership workshop
3. Helen Partridge's LIS education project
4. the massive twitter interaction during the conference (33%+ delegates tweeting) - realtime responses to discussion
5. north brisbane library visits - checking out design, spaces, information service models, community engagement, staffing, collection development and customer service
6. the interaction and community atmosphere of many sessions, especially #camp
7. the walk from Ibis, across the Victoria Bridge to the convention centre - Brisbane turned on beautiful weather

suggestion:

1. brilliant to have iPads on the perch to play with, but next time - perhaps loan out a few iPads and other devices to delegates in each stream, particularly to newbies so they can tweet intensively in sessions; get a real feel for it.
2. loan out flipcams so short films can be uploaded to the website (#camp, dinners, the lunch buzz, exhibits)

If delegates haven't used these devices preconference, then actually putting them out there will do more to encourage their use and the influence will spread. 

congratulations:

committees did a fabulous job :) thnx

brisbane in september

will post images from ALIA Access conference to my flickr later. Enjoyed tour of northern libraries, and have many ideas for my information services investigation project and for information services delivery.

more later.

novel writing software

I started exploring novel writing software today, after seeing a review of Scrivener on Justine Larbalestier's site.
So Scrivener is for Macs, but on their site they list alternatives for Windows. I tried a couple that were freeware, others were 30 day downloads and others you have to buy.

• RoughDraft - no longer being developed
• WriteWayPro - 30 day demo
• Liquid Story Binder - looks incredible, and again available on 30 day demo
• PageFour - at first this looked too simplistic to me, but I may need to persevere with it

And then I found I had OneNote on my pc. Has some good features.
The software should really be called 'novel organisation software'.
I'm trialling my character profiles on OneNote and PageFour.

robert frost philosophy

riddle:
there are several paths to take which will lead you to several different destinations. if you don't try some or all of the paths, how will you know which is the correct destination for you?

answer:it is not the destination that is most important. it is the journey.

joe egg

Curious. In about 1971 my cousin Susie played the part of Joe Egg in a Townsville theatre production of 'A Day in the Death of Joe Egg'. I only know this because I saw a faded newspaper clipping in a family album. Suse would have been about 10 at the time, living in Townsville in between Moresby and W.A. As far as I know this was her only production. Our cousin Wendy is the actress in the family (she was a brilliant Miss Hannigan!).

That news clipping is, until now, the only time I had ever heard of this play. I have never seen it in production, never heard of it anywhere else. I sought out the playscript out of curiousity some years ago, but that was it. Until today. Forty years after that Townsville production, Joe Egg is on again in Townsville, at The Civic Theatre.
http://www.townsville.qld.gov.au/recreation/theatres/civic/theatreseason
Maybe it's a Townsville theatre classic?

Have you seen Joe Egg performed? When and where?

my grandmother's waitui

i'm writing a list poem in a workshop exercise and it has turned out to be about my grandmother. it's not as good as the one about my grandfather, but it is only yet a first draft.
my grandparents lived in maroochydore on the sunshine coast where a mcdonalds now stands. They actually had to sell their house in the seventies because mcs wanted their block, and their neighbours'. they moved to toowoomba to be closer to their sons* but their toowoomba house never had the character of maroochydore's waitui.

Waitui was the name of their house, and is a Fijian word meaning ocean or sea. they lived a block from alexandra headland and quite close to cotton tree. in better news, at least one of their previous homes in suva, fiji, is still standing and people still live in it.

my grandfather often greeted us and his sons with Bula Vinaka, which is a hearty hello in fijian. he was a bristol lad who served in the army over there before setting up shop in bulimba. my grandmother was born in suva but was neither fijian fijian or fijian indian. she was a scottish fijian.
*when they moved to toowoomba three of their four sons lived in that very chilly city. none of them do now. sensible lads. two of the sons were born in oz, two in fiji - suva and taveuni. they all have some great stories to tell about growing up in fiji.

goodbye culture portal, hello pandora

The Culture Portal was a valuable Australian information resource. Was, I say, because it was closed on 1st July. I used it as a resource in my information service work and I was proud that the editor accepted wordbox for inclusion on Culture.gov.au from 2008.

But things change. The interesting moment for me, on finding the CP closed, was that it was then being archived by the National Library of Australia, and therefore available as a 'permanent static resource through PANDORA'.

PANDORA, Australia's Web Archive, is a  collection of Australian online publications, established initially by the National Library of Australia in 1996, and now built in collaboration with nine other Australian libraries and cultural collecting organisations. The name, PANDORA, is an acronym that encapsulates our mission: Preserving and Accessing Networked Documentary Resources of Australia.
So, a search on PANDORA through Trove, throws up a list of websites that have also been archived and that included wordbox in their list of information resources. Oh what a tangled and pretty web.

http://trove.nla.gov.au/website/result?q=wordbox4writers
http://trove.nla.gov.au/website/result?q=wordbox

When I started wordbox four years ago it was like a garage band playing to its mates in the suburbs. I was between jobs, tinkering with code and web management, and keen to support young writers. I wanted it online for maximum market penetration; a one-stop information resource for teachers, parents and young people. Authors, librarians and organisations thought the 'box was okay too. So I now have a job, work in the webs, and wordbox is hanging out in all the cool places.

Lovely to see them grow up isn't it :)