Celebrate Qld LIS Professionals Research Success

I will be making an appearance, and promoting my research, at the following event:

You are invited to join with the ALIA Research Committee and the ALIA Quorum Committee to celebrate the presentation of the 2005 ALIA Ray Choate Scholarship to this year's recipients - Kate Watson and Chelsea Harper from Central Queensland University.http://www.alia.org.au/awards/choate.scholarship/ Kate and Chelsea will be conducting research "Investigating blog and wikitechnology for the enhancement of internal reference services processes" during the coming year.

When : Tuesday 6th December, 2005 5.30pm for 6pm start. 7.30pm finish.
Where : O J Wordsworth Room 12th Floor, S Block QUT Gardens Point Campus

Speaker for the night will be Anna Raunik, Acting Director of Public Library Services, State Library of Queensland. Anna was the recipient of the 2005 VALA Travel Scholarship and she will be discussing herr esearch and study into webconferencing and webcasting in the UK and USA. Other current Queensland library research projects will also be showcased on the night.

Food and Drinks provided so please RSVP for catering by Monday 5th December to Joy Goldsmith - email joy_goldsmith@hotmail.com

Parking available at the QUT Gardens Point Pay & Display Carpark under the South East Freeway.

All Welcome.

Sue HutleyALIA Quorum Convenor
http://www.alia.org.au/groups/quorum/

It's great that there are so many Qld LIS Professionals winning research awards. I can't emphasise enough how important LIS reseach is to our profession - for those with a passion, please apply for an ALIA research award: http://alia.org.au/awards/

On a side note (since we are celebrating Qld LIS success), congratulations to Clare Glanville who was today presented with the ALIA Metcalfe Award!! Claire has recently optained the position of Campus Librarian for the new USQ Springfield Campus Library: http://www.usq.edu.au/springfield/default.htm

I'm Mobile

Today Christmas arrived at my temporary work desk in Library Systems (the Reference area is currently being refurbished)!! Yes my laptop has finally arrived!!

What does this mean??

It means my research is now mobile!! I can write notes about my research anywhere, anytime!!

It means that when I eventually travel to perform interviews for my research I no longer have to worry about deciphering my indecipherable handwritting (funny how the introduction of computers has lead to a destruction to handwritting skills!!) I can write on the run!! And I can take my laptop into our future baby's nursery and still complete work without disturbing baby!!

My world has opened so much further!! Ok slight exageration but I've been waiting for this moment for some time!!

Articles on Secondments

It's been a while, but since I'm on a mini-holiday, I thought I better post something to prove that the Scholarship is still on my mind.

Here are some articles I found whilst researching secondments for my conference paper: Multi-Skill Me: Secondment Opportunities and Challenges at QUT Library - http://eprints.qut.edu.au/view/person/Uthmann,_Sharon.html

Malinski, RM 2002, 'Job rotation in an academic library: Damned if you do and damned if you don't', Library Trends, vol. 50, no. 4, pp. 673-680.

Kish, K 1996, 'Multi-skilling and job rotation', Nexus, January, pp. 2-5.

Pierce, J 2001, 'Job rotation: Beyond your own branches', Library journal, vol. 125, no. 12, pp. 48-50.

Bond, P 2002, 'Changing places', Nursing management, vol. 9, no. 8, pp. 12-16.

Critchley, D 2002, 'Second sight', Nursing management, vol. 9, no. 7, pp. 12-13.

Burley, D 2004, 'Take a second chance', Nursing standard, vol. 19, no. 7, pp.112.

O'Reilly, N 2004, 'Stepping in to a new role', Personnel today, January 6, pp. 18-19.

Olorunsola, R 2000, 'Job rotation in academic libraries: The situation in a Nigerian university library', Library management, vol. 21, no. 2, pp. 94-98.

Cope, B 1995, 'Pros and cons of secondments', Canadian lawyer, vol. 19, no. 10, pp. 30-32.

Morris, B 1993, 'Making a swap: Making the most of secondments', Librarian career development, vol. 1, no. 3, pp. 23-25.

Watt, E 1994, 'Work attachments and secondments at National Library of Australia for librarians from Asia and Pacific', Education for library and information services: Australia, May, pp. 22-23.

Did you note some of the articles discussing secondments in other professions??!! You may have thought that these were not relevant, but really issues and challenges can be very similar to those encountered in the LIS industry.

What I found interesting was that there is very little written about secondments in large public libraries - is this because they don't happen??!! If you work in a large public library with multiple branches and you know your library offers secondments, please contact me as I'd like to learn more about how they work in the public library sector. I'd also like to know what happens in special libraries. http://alia.org.au/~suthmann/

Applying for research grants and scholarships: Just do it!

Thought I'd share with you a short article I wrote for the ALIA QUILL Newsletter about applying for research grants and scholarships. It also gives a bit of insight into why I applied for the D&W scholarship.

If you are interested, please visit: http://alia.org.au/groups/quill/issues/2005.9/applications.html

I have also wrote a number of other articles for QUILL over the last couple of years. So you might be interested in reading those as well.

On a side note, although still about research, I'm not sure if many of you work in academic libraries, but if you do, I'm sure you've heard of the Research Quality Framework. I think it's something that academic libraries should be keeping an eye on this as it will be opening many doors for us in assisting academics to discover how to put together portfolio's of their research. It may even prompt us to thinking how we do our research in the future.

For more info, see: http://www.dest.gov.au/sectors/research_sector/policies_issues_reviews/key_issues/research_quality_framework/rqf_preferred_model.htm

Conference Paper Now Available Online

For those interested in reading my conference paper I presented at the ALIA neXt conference in Sydney in September 2005 - please see:

http://e-prints.alia.org.au/archive/00000078/

Excellent to see so many Library Technician papers on the ALIA eprints site!! I'll also be linking to my paper through the QUT E-Prints site: http://eprints.qut.edu.au/

Questions I want answered

Semester is almost finished - only one exam to go (on 15th Nov.) and then it's heads down and bum up into this research. This is not to say I haven't been thinking about it, in fact I have been having numerous brain dumps - I suppose this is what this blog is for. A record of my brain dumps.

So today's brain dump concerns what I hope to answer through my research. As you know, I presented a paper on how QUT offers secondments and now I'm looking at how other organisations offer them. So really there are a few things I hope to find out - like:

• How does your organisation decide whether a position should be advertised as a secondment rather than a regular position?
• Does your organisation have a policy that covers when secondments should be offered?
• What are the requirements of your staff in responding to a secondment advertisement, e.g. expression of interest or full application process.
• Does your organisation have guidelines (similar to those that QULOC have - see earlier post) on how secondments are offered and organised?
• Are particular staff targeted for secondments, if so, why?
• Can you give an approximate on how many secondments are offered at the library technician level in your organisation?
• When would you encourage a staff member to take part in a secondment and why?
• If your organisation doesn't offer secondments - why doesn't it?
• What do you see are the benefits of offering secondments?
• Do you have any challenges in offering secondments?
• If you currently offer secondments and have policies and guidelines - are there any changes that you'd like to make?

That's all I can come up with at the present time. But if you read this and think of more questions you'd like answered - please contact me - see http://alia.org.au/~suthmann for a link to my contact details. I'd love to hear from you!! 8-)