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!

Geocaching update

I thought it was about time that I gave an update on my geocaching activities. During a trip to Port Stephens in August, we reached our 200 finds milestone. It's taken us just over three years, which is quite slow compared to some, but we've enjoyed the experience. Next stop, 500!!

With daylight saving starting again, we've had the chance to do some geocaching after work. We were on a bit of a streak recently, where we went caching for three days in a row. Normally we can only do that on holidays, but daylight saving combined with some new caches in our area meant we had the chance for a bit of weekday afternoon caching. We also managed to find our third ever First To Find - very exciting!

Finished my online training course

Last week I submitted my portfolio for the FOLIOz course that I did on Evidence-Based Library and Information Practice. The going got a bit heavy at times, but I completed all the tasks that we were set. It my first attempt at completing an online training course, and I found it quite enjoyable. The tasks were interesting and relevant, and the course helped to develop my understanding of EBLIP. I think I'll keep an eye out for other FOLIOz courses that might be relevant for me.

Online learning course

Well, I've signed up for an online course offered by ALIA in partnership with ScHARR at the University of Sheffield. The course looks at Evidence Based Library and Information Practice (EBLIP) and is called EBLIP-Gloss. Quite a catchy title, but at least there's no need to actually wear lip gloss as part of the course.

The course runs for a few weeks, and I'm looking forward to it.

Burke and Wills, geocaching and the SLV

As part of their activities to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the ill-fated Burke and Wills expedition, the State Library of Victoria has got into geocaching. A series of caches will be placed along the route that the expedition took, as well as at other sites associated with the explorers. Sounds like it could be fun - I wonder if something like this could work with the Lachlan Macquarie bicentenery celebrations?

Web 2.0 training - wikis

Well, with Lhan unavailable for a couple of weeks, it's up to Paul and I to deliver the four training sessions dealing with wikis. The first week went well, with all the participants learning how to edit a wiki page and how to create a page. I'm sure this week will be as successful. I hope everyone posts to their blog with what they've learnt, otherwise they won't be eligible for any of the prizes that are on offer!

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.