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As reported here and there. Evelyn Juers, one half of Giramondo Publishing and independent scholar and author, has been keeping me posted on this absorbing struggle. Having had struggles of my own at granular level here, patiently bashing out a community based program for my son with financial and moral support only, (heck, we take what we can and run with it, don't we?) I neglected to send out her media statement a while back.
She did faithfully send through links on the battle, which I tweeted, including one to a petition which eventually gathered almost 10,000 signatures.
And two some days ago, the exciting news appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald that the wishes of Australian scholars would be respected and their space inside this iconic study room extended and soundproofed, without diminution of the visual and practical support they usually enjoy there.
Service enhancements and improvements to the Mitchell Reading Room include a glass wall, extended study space for scholars and the maintenance of access to special collections, though the future of specialist librarians in these areas remains uncertain. Books previously removed (and even a card catalogue) will be returned to the reading room.
Glass walls. Serious Strong stuff. Sending a powerful message to beancounters in beautiful libraries everywhere - Scholars Matter.
I need to tell a little story about the pictures in this blog's header, particularly the one on the right. When I first selected it from a collection of pins on Pinterest marked "Libraries", I did not realise that each pinned picture in the collection corresponded to a whole article on the library in the picture.
Talking to someone the other day about this, I went back to my note in the sidebar to check where both shots came from and clicked right through to a brilliant article at Dezeen, an architecture and design blog now in its seventh year.
The article carries several more shots of the Liyuan library, designed by Li Xiadong. It was like opening a door.
Here is the outside of the library, on the outskirts of Beijing:
This next shot shows the rest of the library travelling back from the window shown in my header:
It is rather stunning. The whole library is covered on the outside with firewood, so that it blends in with the nearby village.
The act of photographing, the gesture, has become part of our interaction with the world. You photograph just like you look. You know that you can never look at all of those photographs again (in all likelihood you never will - who has the time?), but it’s not about the photographs - it’s about the photographing. The act of photography might have turned into the equivalent of whistling a song, something you do, something that might or might not have beauty, a communicative act just as much as an affirmative act: I was there, and me being there means I had to photograph it.
Not only that, the bloggers wrote over 1000 reviews of books by Australian women writers. Yes, we're talking about the Australian Women Writers' challenge, people.
Last year when I went hunting for books by Australian women at my local library in the World Heritage area of Katoomba in the Blue Mountains, I couldn't find any. The librarians weren't much help. They said, "Look for the kangaroo on the spine."
I asked friends. Like me, they'd heard of Geraldine Brooks (who lives in the US), Kate Grenville (who won the Orange Prize), and multi-award-winning author Helen Garner. Familiar, too, were names like Shirley Hazzard, Janette Turner Hospital and Kathy Lette (all non-Australian residents). But what about women living and writing in Australia - women of my own (younger) generation? Their books weren't being reviewed in Australian literary magazines.
Around the time that her entry at the Huffington Post blog was posted, she also discovered that the librarians at Nowra library had noticed a rise in the circulation of books by Australian women since they had promoted the Australian Women Writers' Challenge at their library.
That is the kind of story I just love to hear. Bloggers and librarians making a difference for a group of writers who deserve more attention. Very, very cool stuff, and every one of you must take a bow.
And on top of that, there's a massive database of reviews at the Australian Women Writers' Challenge website, and a new challenge planned for 2013. So all interested bloggers and librarians should go and have a look around, and consider joining up.
And here's two posts from the site I've saved for later:
“Keith Richards, the grizzled veteran of rock’n’roll excess, has confessed to a secret longing: to be a librarian,” says John Harlow in this profile for the Independent. “After decades spent partying in a haze of alcohol and drugs, Richards will tell in his forthcoming autobiography that he has been quietly nurturing his inner bookworm.”
Richards owns thousands of books, took refuge in libraries as a child of depressed '50s London, and considers the public library 'a great equaliser'. This is a story to warm the cockles of any shusher's heart, and I think Library Aid has found its patron at last. Thanks to Dennis Johnson for the news.
Lynne is a brave, brave person and I hope podcasting will enable me to listen to her broadcast on teh Beeb when it happens in a week or so, and drink champagne. If there is anyone out there who wouldn't mind translating that Latin from the BBC's head office in the picture for me, I'd be most grateful.
And if there are librarians out there looking for a testdrive of things to do with the library's new Kindle before it's released to the users, Kathryn Greenhill has a ripper list here.
Finally - Anne Beilby reports on the Text website that the French rights to Gerald Murnane's The Plains were sold to P.O.L. just before he won the Melbourne Prize. One more country besides Sweden in which Murnane can be enjoyed.
And this as well - I've read three of them, for once, and loved The Pages and Breath as well as this. Might just pick up Ice anyway, because 'I'm worth it'.
(If you'd like a chance to win them all, enter the Readings competition.)
Of Twain, and buttermilk, and important modern neologisms that aren't as new as we thought they were, Jack Pendarvis sings. Via Maud, comme d'habitude. Maud's been exceptionally helpful, too, evaluating the iPhone as an e-reader.
Since I started on this the other week, there have also been posts from Toni Jordan that are dry, warm and humorous, as one might expect from the author of her witty first novel Addition, and as I leave for the beach and some reading and festivities of my own, the blogging will continue over there, so get on down.
Other spots to watch include of course Ange's fabulous Literary Minded blog at Crikey, Lisa Dempster's book blog at Unwakeable, where she is reviewing her selection from the Summer Reads, and Mobylives, which seems to get better every week. (Yes, that whale is sure out there.)
And you might like to have a look at Perry's profiles of litbloggers over at Matilda - skip the first one, 'cause you know all about this space, and you may find some new sites of interest. I certainly did. Thanks, Perry.
Another week, a new blog to read - what fun. Linh Dinh describes her travels around the States in a recent tour, here on Harriet, the Poetry Foundation blog.
Antipodean SF#126 is now available, link via HorrorScope. TEN fabulous original science-fiction, fantasy, or horror mini-stories of about 500 words each that will entertain, yet won't take hours to read.
To coincide with his tour, Text Publishing will release two Leonard Cohen novels here.(And I say Hallelujah because Google Reader helped me pull a feed off their new website.)
And according to Bud Parr, there's some Pynchon-lite on the horizon.
She's a famous librarian who writes like a dream, she was here very recently (I could not really justify the outrageous price of the seminar without a current job), and she loved the joint. Of Melbourne, K.G. Schneider, the Free Range Librarian, says:
'Melbourne is a lovely city about as old as San Francisco, with similar Gold Rush origins. It’s the first city I’ve been in for a long time that felt truly sui generis.
Some old cities feel like a set piece, some have had their souls rebuilt into chilly commercial canyons, but Melbourne has kept a lot of character (not without proactive help from its citizens). From the Vic Market to the funky little cafes in alleys, Melbourne resists being bottled. Sydney is beautiful and tidier, but Melbourne has broader shoulders and a way of tossing its hair that says, “I’ve been through a lot.”' (And yes, I've cut the links to her photos there, but you can see them from her site.)
Bridgeport Public Library: Some library staff members say they have encountered a ghost in the 6th or 7th floor stacks near the historical materials in this 1927 building. The entity, which they have nicknamed Lola, is said to be friendly and helps find missing items. Former Director Michael A. Golrick said that something opened the garage door that the delivery van uses three times during the night of February 22–23, 2006, causing alarms to go off. A policeman who searched the building during the second alert said he heard someone “turning pages” on the 6th floor.
The list reads like a US library X-Files, and it sounds like quite a few librarians want to believe the truth is out there. At the old Bernardsville Public library in New Jersey, the resident spook, Phyllis, was so active that staff issued her a library card, saying that Phyllis “was not put on our computer with the rest of us mortals, but her card is always available should she choose to use it,” while one fairly superstitious librarian in Pittsburgh has claimed that books play 'hide and seek' on the shelves.
There are, reassuringly, a couple of libraries on the campus of Pennsylvania State University that have more robust manifestations, including a 'grumbling voice' in the laptop library and 'transparent girls thumbing through books, disembodied glowing red eyes, bookcarts that move without anyone present, and all sorts of other phenomena'. If there's a haunted Oz library out there, do share.
I didn't get there - but Alison, as always, brings it on home. What a session. After her scintillating readings and discussion at MWF of Akhmatova, though, she was a natural choice for conversing with Patti Smith. (Now I can't quite believe I've introduced myself to someone who has interviewed Patti Smith, can I.) Be sure to cross to Alison's link to read Chris Boyd's interview too.
Moving right along, from First Monday, the information management online journal, comes this article about Google and the Open Content Alliance digitisation initiatives. Author Kalev Leetaru is interested in why no comparisons of both have been made to date, and claims that:
While the academic community has lauded OCA’s “open” model and
condemned the proprietary Google, all is not always as it seems. Upon
delving deeper into the underpinnings of both projects, we find Google
achieves greater transparency in many regards, while OCA’s operational
reality is more proprietary than often thought.
(Link via Creative Economy Online.)
Comics on a DVD? OH NOES. On the other hand, perhaps I would be able to obtain that Disney comic with Donald as Jason trying to win the Golden Fleece, that I remember from my earliest years. Yes, that was my earliest exposure to the tale of the dragon's teeth, I'm afraid. (From the Journal of Electronic Publishing).
From the Bedside Books Club quarterly meet this evening, here's my list of table reads, which was available there in hard copy. Here, of course, it comes with links to reviews and other descriptive noises, where available.
And my totally personal categories for this rather idiosyncratic list are - recent good reads, anticipated good 'uns, and desired rereading.
It was important to me at the time of writing the talk a couple of weeks ago to include rereading. It remains important, not just as the component of a talk, but also as a practice. It won't happen overnight, but by gum, it's going to happen.
Elliott, Will. The Pilo Family Circus (most of the reviews for this contain spoilers, though I'm delighted to see it was published in the UK in 2007, after release in Australia in 2006. Just read it.)
Falconer, Delia. The Lost Thoughts of Soldiers
Ford, Richard. The Lay Of The Land (third of Ford's Bascombe trilogy - all three come recommended)
Mann, Thomas. The Magic Mountain (recommencing and FINISHING)
O’Toole, John Kennedy. A Confederacy of Dunces
Sacks, Oliver. Musicophilia
Yates, Richard. Revolutionary Road
Want to reread:
Ashton-Warner, Sylvia. Spinster
Bronte, Charlotte. Jane Eyre
Hazzard, Shirley. The Great Fire
De Kretser, Michelle. The Lost Dog (Conflicted about this one and need to understand if its mannered style was a problem, and if so, why.)
Maguire, Emily. The Gospel According To Luke (rereading is in order, to reconsider the judgments I made about it in a review in 2006.)
The first half of The Magic Mountain
Toibin, Colm. The Master
Winton, Tim. The Riders
Wordsworth’s early edition of The Prelude of 1799, in only two books rather than twelve -raw, brief and arresting, and still available from Norton along with the 1805 and 1850 versions.
What I am also looking forward to if I can handle the suspense:
Grace Paley and Ann Patchett – anything! I need to catch up with them.
Portis, Charles. True Grit A 1968 classic ‘comic Western’ which was reissued with an afterword by Donna Tartt recently
Silvey, Craig. Rhubarb(shortlisted for the Vogel around 2003)
‘Silvey shows amazing maturity and confidence for such a young writer. This offbeat love story about a blind girl and reclusive cello maker has a strong affection for its eccentric cast of characters and a ripe Australian sense of humour.’ That’s what the Vogel judges said. James Ley saw it differently at the time.
Zagajewski, Adam. Another Beauty Colm Toibin describes Zagajewski as 'the best prose essayist alive'.(Critical Mass blog)
Read ‘em all already? Then have a sticky here sometime, and don’t forget to check out Donald Barthelme’s suggestions while you are there…
Jennifer Mills is travelling in the States and blogging, vividly as usual, all about it here.
It sounds like Eddie Campbell's parents' attic is the perfect archive away from the archive. That's one graphic artist whose parents bought some good books, isn't it?
On the subject of children's books, this small but well-formed Vintage books blog came to my attention via WeHeartBooks, a sweet site dedicated by bookselling mums to young readers and their parents everywhere. (Found via a MWF blog alert, of all things. Love this searching stuff.) The only truly amazing kids books I own in collectors' terms, though, are two pristine Ant and Bee reprints we found on Brunswick Street about six years ago, bought for the future with my daughters' blessing - we all felt they was something we could not leave in the shop. They are no longer worth about $300 each, but even when they were, mine were not for sale, they are to read with little people only. (And serious comedians of course.)
I am not at all crazy about the way APC has used Wordpress to organise this news and information site, so be prepared for the link here (to APC Buzz) to run something quite different as time passes (and in fact the information page at the APC website suggests its e-mag, Zest, is a temporary service anyhow. But WOT, NO PERMALINX??? I don't like the snapshots all over the index page, either. The tabs at the top of the homepage are much easier to use.) So just in case you can't find this news in a few weeks time without scrolling down that page at Zest, here's what will be covered:
A six week course on the art of poetry and its long history, ranging from pre-literate cultures in which it had story-telling and choric roles down to our own time. We will look at how Classical cultures, Christianity, the rise of printing and of the electronic media affected poetry’s themes and its forms. The course will also show how Australian poetry rose out of Western traditions, and speculate on where poetry might be going next. Some key poems will be looked at in detail, but the broad, changing picture will be kept in mind. All interested readers or writers are welcome.
The text is John Leonard, ed., Seven Centuries of Verse in English (OUP, Melbourne), which is in print and readily available. Other materials will be provided at times for discussion.
Book early as numbers are limited.
There is also a terrific report at the Director's Desk section of the APC blog, from Teresa Bell, on her recent overseas trip, where she inspected national poetry centres in Ireland and the UK, and at Southbank found that the budget at the UK Saisons Poetry Library includes funding to employ TWELVE librarians (as well as purchase all the publications to keep them busy, eh).
She has come home dreaming of many things for Melbourne's Centre for Books and Ideas, and for our national Poetry Centre - it sounds like her trip was very fruitful.
I was lucky enough to meet Jessamyn when she was in Melbourne last year, at Mr Tulk with an enterprising bunch of new librarians. I continue to find her blog engrossing - I've yet to read Revolting Librarians Redux, but in both incarnations it made quite a stir.
What I love about her work is that she is constantly evaluating what may or may not work in the bright shiny world of library tech from the perspective of the people who have to use it, be they librarians or clients. Her approach is practical rather than deliberately iconoclastic, and most refreshing.
Emdashes reports regarding a new blog at the New Yorker that has a rather apt provenance: as one of its authors says, "We like to think of the book bench as a state of mind, too: a place for
considering literary matters great and small—and for occasionally
baring our teeth." I'm subscribing.
Over at Libraries Interact Kathryn Greenhill (of Librarians Matter) announces a prize for the booklover or librarian whom the Gale publishing company decides can best justify their love for books in song and video.
And this is just here because it's a damn good read, being something of a classic post from a great Australian blogger. Note the blog saving the accommodation crisis, slap bang in the middle. Rock and roll will satisfy my soooo-oul.
I went and commented on this post when I first saw it in my reader, then revisited after Maud linked to it. There are now 350-odd comments, and they make for good reading for anyone who was interested in the State Library's Text Appeal literary speed-dating events in early 2007.
I have managed to find Marieke Hardy's fabulous article about this too - no surprise that our royal Ms Fits has cracked an International Bloggie, either. About bloody time. And what a funny blog awards page, no permalinks??? that freaking page goes on forever.
Anyway. Rachel Donadio's NY Times article, which she refers to in her post, is also quite funny:
For most people, love conquers literary taste. “Most of my friends are
indeed quite shallow, but not so shallow as to break up with someone
over a literary difference,” said Ben Karlin, a former executive
producer of “The Daily Show” and the editor of the new anthology
“Things I’ve Learned From Women Who’ve Dumped Me.” “If that person
slept with the novelist in question, that would probably be a deal
breaker — more than, ‘I don’t like Don DeLillo, therefore we’re not dating anymore.’”
All important material to consider, if you feel a row over The Corrections is brewing between you and a loved one sometime soon. (And I'm not suggesting that's the subject of the last link, either - it's just a damn good post on that book, and other matters.)
$85,000 from lending rights to one Australian author is not too shabby, is it? Susan Wyndham is enjoying speculating who that author might have been in 2007. (The Age rather drily informed us on the weekend that said author remains anonymous).
And while Max Barry certainly isn't English, he might be pleased to hear about this. A spokesperson for MLA, the UK government's advisory body for libraries, claims that due to the cheaper prices of books, "people who couldn't afford books before and borrowed them are now buying them on the high street."
I occasionally worry about what will happen when all the old Australian Book Reviews crumble to dust, as there is no comprehensive digital preservation policy operating for it at present. I'm not quite sure I should be so concerned after reading bits of the Companion to Digital Humanities (Blackwell, 2004) which has been published online.
In chapter 37, a general introduction to issues of preservation in humanities computing, Abby Smith writes:
Preservation by benign neglect has proven an amazingly robust strategy over time, at least for print-on-paper. One can passively manage a large portion of library collections fairly cheaply. One can put a well-catalogued book on a shelf in good storage conditions and expect to be able to retrieve it in 100 years in fine shape for use if no one has called it from the shelf. But neglect in the digital realm is never benign. Neglect of digital data is a death sentence. A digital object needs to be optimized for preservation at the time of its creation (and often again at the time of its deposit into a repository), and then it must be conscientiously managed over time if it is to stand a chance of being used in the future.
From Jessamyn West, this link to a post by Rochelle, a librarian in the States who is asking some very sensible questions about the download system on the Kindle, and how its digital content management affects lending between family members, or in libraries. Bud Parr reports that a Brooklyn bookshop employee has won the Brooklyn Public Library's startup competition grant of $15,000 to start her own bookstore. On visiting Jessica's blog to read about this happy news, I find she's added a section to her links list of bookseller blogs. (In usual Blogger style, the links list is not visible on separate post pages, only on the home page.) So if there are bookshops out there wondering how they do it in Brooklyn, I recommend you start on this page, on the right, and work your way down.
Over at the Great Victorian Summer Read blog, author blogging is in full swing. One of my favourite posts is here, from Alex Miller - really belongs in a biography, I'm sure that's where it will end up one day. I did get a bit hot under the collar when I read Max Barry's post about libraries though. He sure got me big time.
Meanwhile, the Library of Congress has got all down and dirty with Flickr, in case you hadn't heard already - for those pictorial bloggers out there who would like some free copy, cop this.The beauty of this initiative is that all images in the LOC Flickr collection are already cleared for copyright, so you are saved the trouble of trawling through the general collection to check what's clear and what's not.
In other library news, the next anthology of Best of Technology Writing is now online at digitalculturebooks, an imprint of the University of Michigan Press and the University of Michigan Library. It can also be purchased in hard copy. Link via if:book.
And it's on again - Reading Victoria has a new name and a smart new blog. The Summer Read at the State Library of Victoria has been launched for 2007-8.
There are no huge surprises on the program, apart from a reduced Celebrities and Critics section, nicely repackaged and retitled as 'Reviewers' Views', and including, this year, Good Reading Magazine editor Alison Pressley and ABC books interviewer Ramona Koval. (I note however that there is a "Celebrities Reading Day" slotted in for Australia Day.) But first prize for most evocative contribution to the Reviewers' section definitely goes in my book to Claire Sutherland, books writer for the Herald Sun:
My teenage summer holidays always meant a banana lounge, sunglasses and an eventual book-shaped white patch on my torso. The white patch could have been left by anything from Stephen King's latest frightfest to a George Orwell novel (I devoured his entire canon in an Orwell orgy one Christmas holidays. Geek? Moi?).
Bless her boots, she also states a firm preference for the meaty, rather than the escapist, summer read, and has named Matt Condon's recent Snowy tract, Trout Opera, as her seasonal viand. (She could, of course, follow that up with Dorothy Porter's El Dorado from the list, if the brain is still feeling undernourished. What a pleasure to see a verse novel on a list like this.)
Along with the books (of course), the best new feature, in my opinion, is the introduction of author posts to the Summer Read blog, which augurs well for a continued increase in popularity in the application of this special new sunscreen called Victorian reading (as well as some respite from UV rays while people are online posting comments.)
Here's another report at Critical Mass, the National Book critics Circle weblog, this time by Jane Ciabattari, about literary magazines going electronic in large libraries.(An earlier post giving some essential background on what's been going down in academic libraries with regard to this appeared about a month ago, from K.G. Schneider of Free Range Librarian fame.)
A September 13 NBCC panel, "Literary Magazines Go Electronic: Now Where's the Print Edition in the Library," cosponsored by Library Journal is the subject of Ciabattari's report. Susan Thomas, a librarian on the panel, suggested that the dissolution of print journals into electronic databases can be halted by lobbying librarians and academic staff to ensure a supply of literary journals on the shelves for browsing. One panel member, Kevin Prufer, the editor of Pleiades, was inspired to set the evening up after he went to the University of Central Missouri library to catch up on poetry reviews and found that several important journals had vanished from the shelves.
Literary journals are not always easy to absorb as screen based artifacts: it can be done if needed, but it's more pleasurable to handle the magazine in paper if that's how it was designed to be handled. (Some of course are online productions, and their design is a different concern altogether.)
Susan Thomas notes in this post, "Reading a literary magazine is such a relief after hours at the computer screen," she said. "My job is to encourage young people to become lifelong learners. They lose interest in reading on the computer. If I can put an exciting literary magazine in their hands, it can be important."
From Mark Sarvas again, this link to a newish site in the States which is picking up on several threads I've noted here from time to time about publishing (Mark keeps a much better eye on these things though.) Mark was interviewed for their blog recently, here.
Why are we doing this?
In the last few years there has been enormous publicity about two separate but related trends - the demise of the independent bookstores and the apparent decline of reading in the U.S. Some critics accuse the temptations of the Internet, television, and video games. At the same time, the number of independent local booksellers in the U.S. has declined from over 5,000 in 1991 to only about 1,800 today. Unable to compete with the convenience of Amazon.com and the sales and distribution efficiencies of Borders and Barnes and Noble, the local independent bookstores have been going out of business.
We see a different world. Where others see an industry facing gloom and doom, we see an industry ripe for re-invention. Where others see a downward spiral for reading, we see reading leaping forward in innovative directions with a new generation of internet savvy readers and writers; new reading formats like e-books and audio books; and new opportunities for self-publishing.
Among the things that give them optimism, they include '60 million people writing their blogs on the Internet and developing their reader base with a do-it-yourself approach'.
From little things, big things grow. (Now if I called this post by that name, there'd be a lot of disgruntled searchers out there.)
The poets have a nice meme up, and I'm counting myself tagged by Andrew, just because it's there. Here's the drift, from his blog again:
'Tom Beckett tagged Jill Jones with this meme:
"I now propose a new tag: Things which one has read and has been influenced by which are not confined to those paper-bound vessels of the printed word we refer to as books. Let's call these Non-Books. Or maybe Impossible Books. Or Limen Books? It's up to you."'
And here's my take on it.
1. my youngest children running around our small house with great energy some years back whenever the James Brown number from The Blues Brothers came up on the cassette player, while I cooked dinner.
2. walking into a pediatrician's rooms in Warrandyte Road, Ringwood, eighteen years ago, with a tiny, adored, apparently perfectly formed blonde three year old boy who would be a different person when he came out again, labelled like a virus, a jamjar, a conundrum, but still a little boy in his best red and blue French wool jumper that he never got dirty.
3. saying to myself, I am 46, that's not very old is it. And alternatively, "I could go at any time" (Arnie Grape).
4. wanting to fight and to run away all in the same moment
5. learning to care and not to care, learning to sit still
6. at about ten years of age, driving around the Dandenongs with a carfull of bouncy, wrestling siblings, longing for quiet.
7. singing, many songs, most of them well-worded, quite a few less so.
Mike Shuttleworth, of the Centre for Youth Literature at the State Library of Victoria, informs me that he has put together a workshop on review writing, to be held at the library this weekend.
It has been designed with reviewers of young adult fiction in mind, but has equal application to anyone either interested in, or already engaged in writing reviews for publication. WHERE and WHEN?
Saturday, March 17th Conference Centre Lounge State Library of Victoria Entrance 3, La Trobe Street 1.00–4.00pm Cost: $30.00, Subscribers to BookTalk: $25.00
In other Victorian book news, it's great to hear that the Australian Book Club at Readings bookshop is going so well that they will be running two full meetings a month. For March, members will be meeting to discuss Rodney Hall's Love Without Hope, with new books by Deborah Robertson and Gail Jones to follow. Email Aviva for further enquires at [email protected].
Finally, I heard some humungous figures at the Library Unconference last week for SLV's incredibly popular program, Text Appeal- as Paula Kelly now knows, my previous remarks were firmly tongue in cheek. They had over 800 participants in the last sessions, have been invited to provide considerable media commentary on the program, and people keep ringing up to put themselves on a waiting list for the next one. Books are much bigger than we all think, even in tooled up Australia, where Internet use is the highest it is anywhere in the world. Now, if Apple had an iPod Speed Dating event, knowing what I know about music and lists, I think it would be - well, mayhem, actually. Much wiser to stick to one book per session per person, isn't it. (Which is a nice spot from which to nod to Sophie Cunningham's piece on blending book collections, over at Sarsaparilla.)
I had the very great pleasure of co-presenting at the Library Uncon with Paula and her web project manager Lili Wilkinson (she of the excellent YA blog and website, InsideADog), on books and blogging. I've had a bit of a rave about it all over at Library Sputnik (and got a bit carried away, I think - but judge for yourself. That's the kind of day it was). Thanks again to Christine Mackenzie of Yarra Plenty Libraries and her wonderful team, for running a very inspiring event, may there be many more opportunities for Victorian libraries to pick each others' brains using this highly creative format.
