Saving our farms and our Documentary evidence

Last Saturday the Dominion Post newspaper and others published this full page advertisement from the Save the Farms group.  The issue of foreign ownership is big in New Zealand right at the moment.

At the moment our largest export commodity depends on farms, and therefore it is an issue for exporters and international trade since foreign owners may not wish to continue to use the land in the same way.  The big question is do we want to protect our golden goose and keep the proceeds in NZ. 

But there is also the issue for information specialists of how do we in the future find the documentary evidence within our media - is it likely that this particular advertisement will be indexed?  What are we doing about this?

Another Conference - FREE!

The 3rd International Koha Conference is being held in Wellington, New Zealand from Monday 25th October to Wednesday 27th October.  And like the software it is FREE - can you believe it?

If you are not familiar with Koha, the New Zealand School of Export uses this software for its catalogue - ELIScat: http://ets.kohalibrary.com/ and so do hundreds of other libraries around the world.
The conference speakers are also from around the world: UK, France, Nigeria, Taiwan, Malaysia, Australia and New Zealand.   You can find the full programme here:
http://www.kohacon10.org.nz/2010/program/day1.html and registration is now open.  The Conference Organiser is Chris Cormack who works for Catalyst IT in Wellington.

LIANZA Centennial Conference

At the Edge -- Te Matakāheru
LIANZA Centennial Conference
28 Nov – 1 Dec 2010
Dunedin, New Zealand

 The Conference Programme, the Conference Registration Brochure, and the online registration form are available on the Conference website – http://www.conference.co.nz/index.cfm/Lianza10 or at http://lianza.org.nz/ (click on the Conference logo).

The Centennial Conference theme is ‘At the Edge - Te Matakāheru’. This allows us the freedom to celebrate the many aspects of librarianship including history, innovation, space, integration and people. Matakāheru is the face of a Maori digging tool and the term is used figuratively in much the same way as the English ‘cutting edge’, particularly in relation to knowledge.

One hundred years ago the Libraries Association of New Zealand was formed. The Centennial Conference celebrates both our history and looks forward to the profession forever being at the [cutting] edge of the developing information landscape.
 
I have copied the above information from advertising for the LIANZA Centennial Conference but I did want to add a personal note.   I was a member of the Otago-Southland Branch of LIANZA (or NZLA as it was then), in the 1970s and 80s. Through that membership I became familiar with people such as Ada Fache, Dorothy Ballantyne, Mary Ronnie and Jock McEldowney.   All of them contributed so much to librarianship in Dunedin and in New Zealand.  I gave my first ever conference presentation at a LIANZA conference in Dunedin - on collecting posters in libraries.  My focus was of course on the Hocken Library collection which is where I was working at that time.  Michael Hitchings, who died earlier this year, was so encouraging and supportive of my efforts.  This paper was later published in New Zealand Libraries. 
 
 I am sure the Centennial Conference will be a superb event for everyone.

Tātarihia tō Reo Pākihi - Assess your business reo - Kōrero Māori

Tātarihia tō Reo Pākihi - Assess your business reo - Kōrero Māori

If staff at your company or organization have asked about resources for Maori Language Week - here is one place you can recommend from the Maori Language Commission website. You can also try this quiz from Stuff:
http://www.stuff.co.nz/national/3957277/Place-names-quiz

Adult Learners Week 6-12th September 2010

Adult Community Education Aotearoa

The Week is a UNESCO initiative to celebrate adult learners.
It also incorporates International Literacy Day, Wednesday September 8 2009. Exporters studying any aspect of international trade are of course adult earners par excellence and thus to be celebrated during this week.

Time to Celebrate

The Catalogue of the New Zealand School of Export has reached a milestone - it now has over 1000 catalogued items! This is a significant achievement, not only because each of these items has been manually described, but because each has been selected for what it can contribute to the international trade community and of course to the work of the School.

Over 10% of all the items in the Catalogue are digital resources: pdfs, html, php, or websites which are immediately available to the user's desktop. We hope that this proportion will grow as time goes on.

Besides being a unique collection, the thesauri used to describe the items are also different and a different combination. We have used the International Trade Center's Thesaurus of International Trade Terms and where a resource focuses on a Maori aspect of trade we have used the Maori Subject Headings which are hosted by the National Library of New Zealand.

All of which is a real cause for celebration with some export quality New Zealand beverage!!!

Do take a look at our Catalogue http://ets.kohalibrary.com/ and if you want to see how a Maori suubject heading has been used - try "tauhokohoko"

Five Principles of Trade Librarianship

Looking back to the previous post, I see that there seems to be a very philosophical trend emerging! It was clearing out a folder of filed photocopies and course notes that uncovered Maurice Line's five laws of librarianship which lead me to thinking... So here are my five principles with a short intro:

Various notable librarians have set forth laws of librarianship: Ranganathan 1931, Line 1996, Gorman 1998, and in 2008 librarian Carol Simpson recommended that editing be done to Ranganathan's law because of the current richness of media available within libraries.

Ranganathan’s original five laws were:
1. Books are for use
2. Every reader his or her book
3. Every book its reader
4. Save the time of the reader
5. The library is a growing organism

Simpson suggested the following variations:

1.Media are for use.
2.Every patron his information.
3.Every medium its user.
4.Save the time of the patron.
5.The library is a growing organism.

Recently I re-read Line’s five laws of librarianship in The Library Association Record 98 (3) March 1996, and decided that it would be useful to enumerate some principles for the very specialised section of librarianship which I call ‘trade librarianship’. I use the abbreviation LIP here to mean a “Library and Information Professional”.

Principle 1
The LIP will serve the organisation in which he/she is working by the provision of a wide range of evaluated, high quality resources in whatever format is most appropriate. This may be through a digital information portal for example such as the one we call ELIS on the website of the New Zealand School of Export: http://www.export.ac.nz/library.html.

Principle 2
The resources will for the most part be digital in nature and available to the desktop. The LIP will ensure that appropriate help in using various media is available to all clients, and that the principles of information literacy are integrated into each transaction.

Principle 3
The LIP will use traditional methods such as subject headings in the catalogue and recently developed social networking tools, such as blogs, Twitter and facebook, to make links between related pieces of information and between information and users.

Principle 4
The LIP will be committed to his/her organisation’s ethos and will play a full part in achieving its goals while also ensuring that information sources used, and knowledge disseminated retain balance and integrity.

Principle 5
The most immediate focus for the LIP will be the provision of accurate and timely information that meets the needs of usersw. However he/she may also need to store and promote the preservation of information and knowledge produced by their organisation, through archiving, knowledge management and transfer.

What do you think? Any need for principles 6 or 7 or...?