Friday December 2, 2011
Library News & Views - Summer 2011/2012
Thursday December 1, 2011
Mosman Faces at #SWITCH2011
Monday October 10, 2011
Beach branches for French libraries
For a fifth consecutive summer, the department of Seine-Maritime on the northern coast of France has brought its colourful library cabanas to beach-goers.
The seaside branches have about 1,000 titles each – kids books, graphic novels, classics, thrillers and romances, books in English and books by local writers.
Librarians (“animateurs du livre”) are at your disposal for help and advice.
The way it works is simple. Choose a book, then install yourself on one of the brightly coloured sun lounges. Books must be read ‘in place’.
The Lire à la Plage program runs daily in July and August at twelve popular seaside towns in the Haute-Normandie region.
Monday October 10, 2011
Buckle yourself in
… for one of the most anticipated author talks at Mosman Library!
Thursday September 1, 2011
Library News & Views - Spring 2011
Wednesday August 17, 2011
Biblion – the boundless library
A new iPad app from the NY Public Library developed to explore their collections, holdings and exhibitions through this new media.
With Biblion you can experience the ‘The World of Tomorrow’ by exploring the 1939-40 World’s Fair collection through images, documents, films, audio and essays.
This was created directly from the NYPL’s Manuscripts and Archives Division and covers a range of topics from technological innovation, music and pop culture, to the issues of economic hardships and the crises developing from a world at war.
I was recommended this app through a magazine article on emerging technologies.
- Introduction: Explains how to use Biblion
- A Moment in Time (On the brink of War)
- Beacon Of Idealism (Building Democracy)
- Fashion, Food and Famous Faces (Pop Culture At The Fair)
- From The Stacks (The Fair Comes To NYPL)
- You Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet (Fun At The Fair)
- Enter The World Of Tomorrow (To Futurama…and Beyond)
I found Biblion easy to navigate and full of fascinating stories, photos and original documents.
I particularly enjoyed the ‘Fashion, Food and Famous Faces’ Mad Science section with pictures of epic competitions of hand washing vs the modern dishwasher, robots of the future and first looks at plastic from the Bakelite Corporation which was described as a material of a thousand uses!
Take a leap into history and discover what riches can be found within!
Monday July 25, 2011
Lindsay Tanner lets loose
The former MP and Federal Minister for Finance with a timely talk on the interaction of media coverage and political activity, and the state of public life in Australia.
Wednesday June 29, 2011
Help- My assignment is due tomorrow!
I’m sorry to tell you, but there are only so many books out there, and if you’ve left it too late, you will probably find that all the books in the library have been taken. But don’t worry- Mosman Library is still here to help you find what you need!
A good starting point is to make use of the online resources on the Mosman Library website- you can access many of these from home using your Library card.
Encyclopedia Britannica online will give you a good overview of most topics. The online format is highly interactive and you have the option of searching in “Junior” or “Student” mode, which breaks down the information into a form suitable for children. Each article also contains links to expand your research, and pictures and multimedia to use for your projects.
Other electronic resources available from home are an Australian History database, and Electric Library which gives you access to a large selection of newspaper archives (including the Mosman Daily), photographs, sound and video recordings.
The key to making the most of the web for research is to make sure you choose information from a reliable source. Most Government Departments have an education section, with information developed for students, often with interactive games and factsheets, and lots of links to resources designed specifically for syllabus topics.
For example, If studying Antarctica, try the Australian Antarctic Division, for Environment and global warming issues, try the Department of Climate Change.
Also try websites for museums, historic sites and other cultural institutions as many of these are excellent organisations with very informative websites suitable for children. Here are just a few, but there are many, many more!
- Art Gallery of NSW
- Australian Museum
- Australian National Maritime Museum
- Australian Parliament
- Australian War Memorial
- Historic Houses Trust
- Museum of Australian Democracy
- National Museum of Australia
- NSW Parliament
- Port Arthur Historic Site
- Powerhouse Museum
- Reconciliation Australia
- State Library of NSW
The NSW Board of Studies also has a range of partner websites that address subjects studied by students, such as Multiculturalism, World Wars I and II, Anzac Day, Vietnam War and more.
There is a librarian on duty in the Children’s Library every day after school, so always ask for help if you need it- that’s what we’re here for!
Good luck!
Thursday June 23, 2011
Where do old websites go to die?
Uploaded photos to Facebook or Flickr? Shared stories by email with friends and family? Made artworks or saved documents on your PC? Got a great snap of your kids on your phone?
If this personal digital archive disappeared tomorrow—how would you feel? What about about future generations of your family?
Although the web is relatively young, our use of it is growing exponentially. This is apparently what happens every 60 seconds on the internet:
- 6,600+ pictures are uploaded to Flickr
- 600 videos are uploaded to YouTube, amounting to 25+ hours of content
- 695,000 status updates, 79,364 wall posts and 510,040 comments are published on Facebook
- 168,000,000+ emails are sent
- 98,000 tweets are generated on Twitter
- 20,000 new posts are published on Tumblr
Even if you think just a millionth of that stream is worth keeping, it’s still a lot of data. And how do you know which bits are the good bits? 
Last night I went to the ‘Recordkeeping Roundtable’ event Where do old websites go to die? with Jason Scott, founder of Archive Team, ‘a loose collectives of rogue archivists, programmers, writers and loudmouths dedicated to saving our digital heritage.’
Jason is an entertaining speaker (in Australia he might be called a sh*t stirrer) with an inexhaustible line in analogies.
If you came back to your parking spot and your car was gone, he said, you wouldn’t shrug your shoulders and say “oh well.” But that’s what happens when we upload our stuff to the web and the companies that host it disappear. There should, he said, be a law against it.
Right now Jason and his volunteer force of web preservationists are busy saving GeoCities for posterity — ‘working hard to save your junk’ is how he describes it.
GeoCities was a popular web hosting service, founded in 1994 and purchased by Yahoo in 1999. It allowed people to publish for free and was once the 3rd most-browsed site on the World Wide Web.
“Organisations also like to think they’re immortal.”
Does the cloud make archiving irrelevant?
Jason said ‘cloud people’ are just “hiding the bunny”. It’s a magic trick. Behind the curtain, the same old issues are playing out. He pointed to Amazon’s recent drop-out and DropBox’s 4 hour password snafu.
Over at the Internet Archive – the gold standard for ‘Internet Library’ – three hard drives die every day, but failure is factored into their archiving process. Nothing is lost.
Jason is not only archiving our digital history. He’s collecting the lore that surrounds technologies and communities, with films like BBS: The Documentary and GET LAMP: a documentary about adventures in text.
As the Archive Team say, “HISTORY IS OUR FUTURE—And we’ve been trashing our history”.
Incidentally, the Internet Archive is a fantastic resource for books, films and music. Mary Lou Byrne, Local Studies Librarian, today sourced public domain music from the Archive for a Mosman Faces trailer (coming soon).
And if you’d like to hear a good story on digital archaeology, check this BBC radio doco on technology and the art of archiving the work of writers and poets.
