ALLA (WA) News Blog

Hi ALLA (WA) Members, Just a reminder that the ALLA Conference 2021 takes place this week – Kicking off on Thursday 23 September with a Welcoming Address from Her Honour Chief Justice Helen Murrell from the ACT Supreme Court, followed by a Keynote Address by the Honourable Justice Stephen Gageler AC from the High Court of Australia. Due to Covid restrictions, the conference is being held virtually. This allows us all to access the program of speakers and events this year from the safety of our home or workplace. If you want to know more about the presentations to help plan your schedule, including abstracts, click on the title of the session in the Conference Program . Be sure to register , if you haven’t done so already. Registrants will be able to access the conference recordings for 6 months following the conference. If you aren’t registering – all ALLA Members are encouraged to attend the ALLA Ltd. Annual General Meeting at 12:38pm on Thursday, where we can hear from Nat...

The 2021 New Zealand Law Librarians Association Online Conference takes place Monday 23rd - Friday 27th August, and registration is complimentary to ALLA Members.  The virtual conference theme is waiho i te toipoto, jaua i te toiroa - stronger together. The Conference Program includes a range of expert speakers and some standout sessions include: The Coming Storm: Value-added carbon zero knowledge services in the mid 21st century Te Ao Marama: The Response to calls for Transformative Change American Legal Research for New Zealand Librarians Australian Legal Research for New Zealand Librarians Building Resilience Lightning Sessions including - Flexible Working in Your Library, Opening Up in Lockdown - Parliament's Engaging Response, The Department of Mysteries, and more From Native Land Court to Maori Land Court 1865-2021 Cultural Confidence, One Word at a Time Each day of the conference, sessions are scheduled to run from 8.00-10.30am Perth Time - making this one of the easier int...

The ALLA (WA) Committee is excited to offer ten bursaries to cover the virtual registration costs for the 2021 ALLA Virtual Conference  taking place on the 23 and 24th of September 2021.  These bursaries are valued at $120 each and will reimburse ALLA (WA) members for the cost of registering to attend the 2021 ALLA Virtual Conference. Applications are open to ALLA (WA) Members only. To apply please provide a short statement (no more than 500 words in length) outlining why you believe attending the ALLA Conference 2021 would be beneficial to your career development.  Requirements for Successful Recipients: Successful recipients must register for the conference before seeking reimbursement from ALLA (WA). Successful recipients must attend the specific conference within the calendar year of receiving the award. If the award is not taken up within the time frame, the funding and registration will be void.  Successful recipients are required to either  Submit content...

 In great news for those in Western Australia, the 2021 ALLA conference is now going virtual. The program will be much as usual, plus all the usual exhibitors, but tweaked to allow for a virtual conference.  This is a great opportunity for ALLA (WA) members to attend, without the pesky costs of flights, accommodation and of course, hard-borders.  The details for our conference are below: Dates: 22-24 September 2021 Theme: ALLA – Past / Present / Future Registration fees: Member – $120.00 Speaker Registration – $100.00 Non Member Registration – $150.00 To register for the event please go to the ALLA Conference website .  The ALLA (WA) Committee hopes 'to see' many of you at the conference.

Where: Geographe room, State Library of Western Australia When: 29th September 2018 Registrations from 10.30am, Workshop from 11am -12.30pm. To register please use the form here. Cost: Gold coin donation. Places are limited! Why: This workshop will help LIS professionals identify skills they already have and how they can transfer these skills to the job they aspire to have - in a fun way! Librarians and Dragons uses gamification to promote professional development for librarians, and to encourage a different way of thinking about the skills that we can bring to the table to enter the industry or progress within it. It brings together ideas and concepts from games, such as Dungeons and Dragons and escape rooms, to offer an alternative way of viewing our professional development. The workshop will take participants on a quest through a library experience, using pre-developed characters, before tasking everyone to develop their own character profiles. The profiles foc...

Adieu or au revoir? Goodbye or see you later? We certainly hope to see Alison, Margaret and Noelle again but whether the Department of Premier and Cabinet Library will resurface is anyone’s guess. On 15 December 2017, the Library formally ceased to exist. The collection and two of the library staff have moved to the State Library with a view to implementing a service to the Department. The fate of the Government Libraries Directory is yet to be decided. It would be a shame if it didn’t continue, if only as a reminder of what once was.

Over the past few weeks, ALLA (WA) has received some queries relating to access at the Law Library at the David Malcolm Justice Centre. It has come to the committees attention via these queries that some people had thought that ALLA (WA) is the authority which decides access to the Law Library – that assumption is incorrect. Access to the Law Library is determined by the Western Australian Parliament as per the Legal Profession (Law Library) Regulations 2016 , specifically regulation 8. The committee referenced in regulation 7 is not the ALLA (WA) committee, rather it is the Library Advisory Committee.  The Library Advisory Committee is a separate body comprised of 2 Judges, a Law Society representative, a Western Australian Bar representative, a Legal Practice Board representative, and two persons nominated by the Director General of the Department of Justice. The  Legal Profession (Law Library) Regulations 2016   are best read in conjunction with the Lega...

Our friends over at ALIA have just released the fourth annual ALIA LIS Education, Skills and Employment Trend Report .  The report seeks to provide students, educators, employees and employers with an understanding of the national landscape and inform ALIA's work. The ALIA news post for the Report provides a summary of its findings: The report shows that over the five years from November 2010 to November 2015, there were 43.5% fewer Librarian positions in the workforce; 16.3% fewer Technician positions, and 12.4% fewer Library Assistant positions. However, looking ahead to May 2022, the Department of Employment predicts a 15.6% employment rise for Librarians, a relatively stable number of Library Technician positions and a drop of 13% for Library Assistant positions. There is expected to be a modest increase in the number of qualified positions available over the next five years, but a significant decrease in the number of positions for staff without a library and inform...

Registration for the 2018 IFLA World Library and Information Congress is now open. The 84th IFLA Conference will take place in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia on 24-30 August. Attendees can register via the Congress website . Please note that if you registered for one of the previous IFLA Congresses since 2012 via the online registration system, you can use the same login username and password for IFLA WLIC 2018. Should you have a group booking of ten or more attendees please contact: wlic2018-registration@kit-group.org for further information on how to register your group.

Announcing the 'LibrariesWA' Facebook Group At the Library Leadership: A Celebration day, one of the consistent themes was about enabling communication across silos and different types of library and information services. In an effort to achieve this, we are pleased to announce the launch of a Facebook group specifically for Western Australia LIS professionals. Why a Facebook Group? Facebook is one of the most popular social networking platforms in the world. It may not be for everyone, but a lot of us use it to stay connected with friends and family, and now increasingly for work as well. A Facebook Group allows you to post messages to anyone who has joined even though you aren't necessarily connected with them directly, the potential to reach a relevant audience is much higher than posting from your personal or organisation page. The other really useful functionality is that any group member can create an event! The Libraries WA group has the potential to beco...

ALLA WA today received a written response from the Chief of Staff to the Attorney General regarding the access of self represented litigants to library resources since the closure of the Library at the Supreme Court of WA. ALLA WA had written to the Attorney General in May expressing concern on this matter. The reply acknowledges that self represented litigants have been left without a valuable resource since the library's closure. Further, the Department of Justice is investigating options for enabling self represented litigants to have access to library resources. ALLA WA will be informed of the outcome of this investigation. We thank the Chief of Staff to the Attorney General for their reply.

Just a reminder that membership renewals for Australian Law Librarians' Association (ALLA) are due by the end of June. In addition to various CPD and social events that ALLA organise for law librarians, your ALLA membership also entitles you to a discount to attend the 2018 ALLA conference in Darwin as well as a number of other discounts with other associations through ALLA's agreements with them. You also receive the bimonthly ALLA newsletter. If you have not received your renewal notice or wish to join ALLA, see here for how to apply.

There are some wonderful people in the WA Australian Law Librarians Association that sometimes go unnoticed. To acknowledge these people, we are calling for nominations for Certificates of Appreciation.  If you would like to nominate a member, please take a look at the Nomination Criteria outlined here and send your nominations to allawaexec@gmail.com . If suitable nominations are received, Certificates will be presented at the upcoming AGM.

A new book out this month is This Is What a Librarian Looks Like . It features photographs of over 200 Librarians along with original essays by such authors as George R.R. Martin, Amanda Palmer and Nancy Pearl. You can see some of the images at this gallery from The Guardian https://www.theguardian.com/fashion/gallery/2017/may/29/tattoos-and-baseball-caps-this-is-what-a-librarian-looks-like-in-pictures I hope some Law Librarians are in there...

[ View the story "Library Leadership: A Celebration" on Storify ]

There are 100 librarians, library technicians and library lovers today at Library Leadership: A Celebration! Speed networking with librarians is certainly not a quiet exercise! Check out our Twitter @lawlibsWA and follow #LibrariesWA for updates and more from speakers including Dr Carmen Lawrence, Jennefer Nichols and members of the LIS profession in Western Australia!

Update: There was an incorrect date on yesterday's post about the LexisNexis session of insights from their Legal and Regulatory Technology Review. The correct date for the session is 25 of May. You can register for the event at: https://attendee.gotowebinar.com/register/8204403317089221891 Updated details are: When: Thursday 25th of May Time: 1-2 Cost: Free for members. Not a member? Join now! We Thank: LexisNexis Hashtag: #Legaltechnology A recording of the session will be made available to members after the session.

Are you thinking about extra studying or upskilling yourself? Or maybe you just want to fulfill your lifelong dream of becoming a librarian. Take a look a the courses from the School of Information Studies at Charles Sturt University. Applications are now open for Session 2 2017 in the follow courses: Master of Information Studies; Master of Education (Teacher Librarianship) Master of Education (Knowledge Networks and Digitial Innovation) Bachelor of Information Studies. For more details, check out the course information website here . Thanks to Kelly Underwood for suggesting this post. 

Can't quite decide if you want to join your fellow WA LIS professionals for this unique, first of its kind, professional development day? Please feel free to ask Alice any questions you have, but for now here's a little bit of a sneak peek at the schedule to help you decide. 8.30 - Registration 9.00 - Introduction & Welcome 9.30 - Speed Networking 10.00 - Morning Tea (Catered) 10.30 - Leadership Speaker, Dr Carmen Lawrence 11.30 - Sector Leadership Roundtable 12.00 - Lunch (Catered) 1.15 - Laughing Yoga with Grant Stone 1.45 - Library leadership in the wider environment: IFLA on the world stage.  Jennefer Nicholson, former Secretary General of IFLA.   2.45 - Workshops: Three issues in Library Leadership. What we do now - What we want to do - What we will do  3.30 - Afternoon Tea (Catered) 4.30 - What next? 5.00 - Finish 5.30 - Optional Dinner at Sauma.  For more, and to register, see our previous blog post.  Note: this post ha...

All members of the Western Australian Library sector are invited to attend this all day professional development event. Organised as a joint project by representatives from LIS within WA including, ALIA West, ALLA (WA), WASLA, ALIA ARL WA, ALIA HLA, WALTG, TAFE WA Learning Resources Services Network, CURTIS, and with special thanks to the State Library of Western Australia. This event will offer attendees the chance to improve cross sector networking, by getting together, discussing and exploring what we all how in common and how we can all positively influence our changing profession. The day will earn ALIA members 6 points for the ALIA PD scheme and include:     Guest Speakers Dr Carmen Lawrence, formed Premier of Western Australia and Jennefer Nicholson, former Secretary General of IFLA Workshops and Discussion Panels Speed Networking and Laughing Yoga Library Leadership: A Celebration will be held at the State Library of Western Australia on Friday 19th of ...