National Enquiry into School Libraries in Australia

A few days have come and gone since the expert witnesses made their appearance for the New South Wales public hearing. A reasonable range of 'interests' appear, but notable by its absence is the lack of secondary school representation.

Whilst many of the primary (K-6) principals worked with their teacher librarian in making joint submission, at a School of My Acquaintance the principal was told by the line manager that there was not even enough time to give the principals more information.

Go figure.

Hopefully the non-government sectors may have discussed the issues that are unique to the secondary environment, or the regional associations. The transcript of the public hearing in Sydney should make it into Hansard in the next few days.

Predictive Librarianship?

Mere days after announcing the decision to trash the Warrior Librarian Central collection of floppy disks full of old useless cr@p, media services are announcing that Sony now intends to cease production of floppy disks.

Not that we are suggesting there's any correlation or causative relationship here, but it sort of does seem kind of spooky, doesn't it?

LibCat Jigsaw Puzzle

Click on image below to access puzzle; use the back arrow in the browser to return here. Puzzle opens at Jigzone in this same window.
LibCat in Open Stack

Obsolete Format Archiving?

The Great Home Office Cleanup continues, with steady progress. I figure that if I put away one piece of paper a day (let's keep the goals realistic!) it will only take me about another 27 years to finish. Why don't I just trash the whole lot? Sit down - if you aren't already - I put the equivalent of about 3 filing cabinets worth through the shredder last week. We're talking a 30 year professional accumulation here, folks. Not just your average amateur OCD collection.

A pallet load of 'archival' material is being packed up for the National Library. If you know the books "Forgotten Children" (David Hill) and "Enemies of the State" (Tim Priest), you'll be able to work out pretty much what's going into secure holding.

But I have digressed, yet again. The current 'policy issue' is what to do with the old floppy disks. None of the computers here at Warrior Librarian Central even have a floppy drive. The NSW State Archives maintains a collection of obsolete hardware for accessing data from obsolete storage devices; maybe the National Archives could be getting a surprise bonus!

ANZAC Day