Thanks to the Queensland chapter for putting on such a great conference and also for being so welcoming and hospitable to all of us visitors from near and far.
I know there must have been a tremendous amount of planning, organisation and hard work to make it the success it was.
Great papers, great food,great venues and great company.
Well done team!
Barbara

For those who are interested in what I am doing for the staff and students at CIT I have just created a blog that includes new resources and interesting website. I'd be interested to know what other people are doing?

http://peta-cci.blogspot.com/

You guys put on a fantastic conference for us last week. I know a huge amount of work went into it and the result was a thoroughly enjoyable two and a half days of knowledge sharing, networking, and enjoying Brisbane and its cultural precinct.

(And the food was so good!)

It's always such a pleasure to catch up with members from other chapters and establish new connections and the program provided plenty of informal space in which to do this.

Thankyou for including so many opportunities to enjoy art - the Jon Cattapan exhibition and GoMA were particular highlights. The keynote by Suhanya Raffel (Curatorial Manager, Asian and Pacific Art, Queensland Art Gallery/GoMA) was an inspired way to close the conference and I'll be paying very close attention when the next Asia-Pacific Triennial rolls into town.

Huge thanks to all involved! And thankyou to all the speakers who shared their ideas with us.

I was lucky enough to attend the recent annual ARLIS UK & Ireland conference in Liverpool. Liverpool is a city re-inventing itself as a hip and vibrant destination, probably due to its winning the crown of European Capital of Culture for 2008.

The keynote presenter, Sir Drummond Bone, one of the organisers, spoke on what was a five-year journey to realise this dream. As a first-time visitor, I was very impressed with the city. It felt like a place with an exciting future, arising from a somewhat historically suspect past i.e. its connections with the slave trade. On the pre-conference day, I went on a tour of the newly opened International Slavery Museum. A moving yet simple feature of the exhibition design placed a window onto the area below, scene for the docking and departure of the slave ships.

Organised visits were offered as part of the conference and I chose to visit the Punk Archive at the John Moores University. After a fascinating illustrated talk, we were shown items from the archive, which included tee shirts, badges and fan letters.

Amongst the many interesting and engaging speakers was Linda Newington who enthused us all on the knitting archive at the Winchester School of Art. Who would have thought that knitting patterns and knitted objects could tell us so much about the individuals who made them and the society at that time?

I intend to write a longer piece for the ARLIS/ANZ Journal and will include feedback on the visits I made to six art museum libraries in London, following the Liverpool experience, yeah, yeah, yeah!

Thanks to the Arlis/ANZ Travel and Research Fund Award, I was able to attend the recent ALIA conference in Alice Springs. (checkout the photos) It was a wonderfully inspiring event packed with thought-provoking presentations and I recommend a visit to the website to read the full papers.

It was especially exciting that four of the papers were given by Arlis/ANZ members and their colleagues. Joye Volker and Jennifer Coombes (National Gallery of Australia), Andrea McKey (Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory), Georgina Binns and Michelle Evans (Victorian College of the Arts) and Ellen Thompson (QUT) and I all presented papers in the Arts stream.

Meeting and catching up with this arts bunch was such a valuable part of the whole conference experience. We even made some new contacts and encouraged others interested in arts libraries to join us. Some of them have already joined our online community – welcome Liz, Cathy and Jen!

Ellen and I presented a paper about the website redevelopment project which is available for download here on the QUT e-prints database. We made an unexpected connection with members of another small specialist network called ALIES (Australian Libraries in the Emergency Sector) – more on that another time. We were also very excited to hear and meet Stephen Abram, whose article "The New Normal: Association 1.5" inspired much of our strategy for this website.

I’m now looking forward to our Arlis/ANZ conference in Brisbane where I can share some of this experience with other members. I hope to see many of you there!

There is an announcement about the IFLA Conference to be held in Brisbane in August 2010 on the ALIA website at:
http://www.alia.org.au/media.room/2007.08.24.html

ARLIS/ANZ will need to organise events, visits, receptions, etc for the Art Libraries Section. The International Standing Committee for the ALS will organise the papers and presentations. A committee from the Queensland Chapter will need to take on the organising responsibility.

A Pre-conference Study Tour in Canberra has been suggested and a small committee from the ACT Chapter will need to take on the organising responsibility.

As venues are already being booked for IFLA events, we should discuss our plans and proposals at the AGM in Brisbane next month.

Joye

One of our fabulous library technicians is going on 12 months maternity leave and we're searching for a brilliant replacement.

All the details are here on the DET Jobs site.

Please don't hesitate to conact me (all details available via link above) if you have any questions about the role or your application - and feel free to pass this on to anyone you think might be interested.

Thanks!
Kelly

Come Monday, I'll be off to the ALIA Dreaming08 Conference in Alice Springs. I'm co-presenting a paper with Kelly McKeon, as well as co-presenting another paper on liaison in academic libraries on behalf of my boss - both on the same day!

Joye Volker and Jennifer Coombes are presenting in the same session, and a bit later on the same day, Andrea McKey - our chapter chair in NT - is also presenting. It's fantastic that Arlis/ANZ members are visible on the ALIA Conference circuit!

Are any other Arlis/ANZ members presenting or attending? It'd be great to be able to get together, perhaps, and catch up over a drink.

Hi,

I'm off to the ARLIS conference in Liverpool shortly. May I ask members if anybody else from NZ/Australia is going?

Thanks,
Caroline

Congratulations to the State Library of Victoria for making the exhibition and the conference and related public programmes possible. It was great to be able to see manuscripts from Cambridge, Australia and NZ in one place.

I have just shared the DVD about the making of the exhibition with library staff at Auckland. They were impressed with the MSS and inspired by the professionalism and dedication of the staff involved in making these rare MSS available to view.

Jane