See you in Brisbane

I'll be heading to Brisbane in February to present at Information Online 2013. My presentation is titled "Hide and seek in the library: Geocaching as an educational and outreach tool". At this stage it's on the program on Wednesday morning, so if you're free come along! You'll learn about what geocaching is, and how we used it as an outreach tool to encourage people to visit the library. There's some information that I'd like to include in my presentation that I don't think will fit within the time limit, so I'll probably post it here before the conference.

Library Day in the Life for 2011

I came across this post on the Libraries Interact blog this morning, and thought that it sounded like an interesting project. I'll certainly try and take part by posting on this blog. In previous years there have been entries from librarians all over the world who work in all sorts of libraries. It certainly opens your eyes to all the possibilities that being a librarian opens up. Why not give it a go?

Happy New Year!

Yes, I know it's closer to the end of January than the beginning, but this is my first post for 2011 so it's the first chance I've had to wish you all a happy new year. I hope that you had a relaxing and restful break, and that you haven't broken any of your new year's resolutions yet.

This will be a bit of a mixed post, and I'll be talking about both library- and geocaching-related stuff. Firstly, the main library-related news, of course, is that we are now in 2011, which means that the new library will open this year. This will be a challenging, busy and perhaps nostalgic time for all library staff at Macquarie. I was lucky enough to visit the new library in December as part of the ASRS training, and it was interesting to see how the plans look in "real life". The ASRS vault is a very impressive space and I was able to see the cranes in operation.

The other major news recently has been the flooding in Queensland/northern New South Wales, and now Victoria. We've all seen the news footage and photos of what has happened, and ALIA has set up pages on its website detailing the libraries that have been affected in Queensland and Victoria.

Now, on to the other subject of this blog - geocaching. I found out last week that there is another member of library staff who geocaches, so it's good to know that the hobby is gaining a following. I don't have any geocaching resolutions for the year, although it would be nice to reach 250 finds by the end of the year (currently our total stands at 216). I'm also slowly working my way through solving some of the puzzle caches around Sydney. It would be nice to complete some more of this type of cache.

That's all for now. I'll try and keep the blog a bit more up-to-date this year than I did last year, but I can't promise anything. I think I'll be pretty busy once our baby arrives next month!

ALA Annual Conference

The 2010 American Library Association Conference was held last week in Washington, DC. Here are some links to various sessions and presentations:

• A summary of the LITA (Library and Information Technology Association) Top Tech Trends panel. The live blog and video of the session are also available.
• "What is your library doing about emerging technologies?", presented by LITA.
• A list of programmes presented by ACRL (Association of College and Research Libraries), with links to some of the PowerPoint slides for each session.

The ALA Annual Conference is organised quite differently to Australian library conferences (apart from being much, much bigger - there were 26,201 attendees at this year's conference!) There isn't a single programme which all the sessions are part of. Rather, each Division of ALA organises their own programme. This means there are dozens of sessions all running at the same time at several different venues. It can be hard trying to decide which session to go to.

Libraries and geocaching

Well, I guess it would make sense for me to post some projects and ideas I've come across (mainly in the US) that combine libraries and geocaching.

• The University of Notre Dame in Indiana came up with "Caching in at the Library" for their orientation programme for first year students.

• The Toledo-Lucas County Public Library in Ohio hosted a geocaching event as part of National Library Week. 

• A librarian at Shoshone Public Library in Idaho has hidden a cache in the library as part of their summer reading programme.

There are a copule of caches I've come across (but not found) that involve visiting a library or using Dewey Decimal Classification to solve a puzzle.