A roundup of things I’ve been reading, working on, and paying attention to lately:

The first couple of months this year have been very busy with committee meeting after meeting for various groups and projects that I am a member of. We are (just!) under nine months away from NLS2006, and we’re coming up to the close of Call for Papers. It’s been interesting reading all the comments about how ALA should do more for new librarians, like having programmes for new librarians at conferences (on NEWLIB-L, Meredith’s post and ACRLog this week), and a reminder how good we have it with ALIA as this is the fourth time the New Librarians’ Symposium will be held in Australia.

If you ever needed an excuse to come to Australia, this is it!

Meanwhile, I’ve booked all my flights and accommodation for Annual, and the rest of my trip. A process that seemed much more difficult to organise than my last few trips.

Further to the need for library organisations to communicate more with their members, ALIA has just launched their first blog, primarily authored by our new Executive Director, Sue Hutley. The current list of RSS feeds for the ALIA site can be found at - http://www.alia.org.au/rss/.

Via Imagining Australia, here’s an amazing opportunity for any librarians or information managers researching public policy issues -

The Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars is pleased to announce a new Wilson Center Australian Scholar Program. Successful applicants will spend 2-4 months in residence at the Wilson Center, where they will carry out advanced, policy-oriented research and writing designed to bridge the gap between the academic and policy communities.

[…]

This scholarship competition is open to men and women currently residing in Australia, or of Australian citizenship. Applications will be accepted from individuals in academia, business, journalism, government, law, and related professions. Candidates must be currently pursuing research on key public policy issues facing Australia, including U.S.-Australian relations and East Asian political, security, and economic issues.

Unusually, this programme is open to a wide range of professions, and recognises that there are different terminal degrees amongst professions, so you don’t need a PhD to apply. There have been a few Australian librarians looking at public and information policy issues lately, so it would be great if someone applied.

Library Juice is back! Rory Litwin has a link to ad free blog which I was not aware of before, and I will probably add that image to this site once I find some time to fix the style and category links (yes, they’re still broken).

After a couple of months of spending as little time as I could manage on my computer at home, I’ve gotten back into the swing of things by updating to mySQL 5.0, starting to convert my Endnote reference libraries to BibTeX using BibDesk, and discovering that unlike the last time I tried to get Ruby on Rails happening, there is now a nicely compiled disk image, Locomotive, for the Mac. My last task has been to install the LaTeX tools using MacTeX, another step to finding better writing tools and reducing my usage of Microsoft Word, which I have found increasingly distracting when I write of late.

Once the conference organising has settled down a little and everything computer-related is running smoothly again, I’m hoping to return to a couple of specific writing projects I have started and not yet completed. One is in need of a primary data methodology, the other is in the midst of data collection and processing. Not the most interesting stages of any writing project, to be sure, but one that do need to be completed to get to the interesting part - writing up the results!