VALA and ALIAVic End-of-Year Event
Lightning Talks (and Walks)
This year’s Lightning Talks event featured five 10 minute presentations from outstanding contributors within the Library IT field.
| Brendan Fitzgerald – Infoxchange | Sarah Petchell – Australian Drug Foundation | Sarah Slade – SLV | Nathan Connors – MLS | Karen Tang – Curtin University |
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| Listen to audio in google docs | Listen to audio in google docs | Listen to audio in google docs | Listen to audio in google docs | Listen to audio in Google docs |
| View the presentation slides | View the presentation slides | View the presentation slides | View the presentation slides | View the presentation slides |
- Brendan Fitzgerald from Infoxchange – Winner of the 2014 Google Impact Challenge for their app to help the homeless
Navigating the service system is difficult for the 1 in 200 Australians who are homeless on any given night, with 1,200 specialist homelessness services and more than 300,000 health, welfare and community support services. The “Homeless Assist” project will develop a mobile app to improve access to food, shelter, health and other support services for people who are homeless or at risk of homelessness.
Brendan Fitzgerald, Manager Digital Inclusion will discuss the scale of homelessness and the vision of Infoxchange in what could be described as a slightly better approach to Homelessness than Robert Overcracker’s!October 1st 1995 Robert Overcracker rides a jetski over the brink of the Horseshoe Falls to help promote awareness for the homeless. His parachute did not open and Robert ended up promoting better parachutes. He plunged to his death and his body was never recovered. An Egyptian tourist captured this amazing image.
- Sarah Petchell from the Australian Drug Foundation – Digitising the library
A relatively new graduate into the library field, Sarah Petchell moved from public libraries into the specialist health library of the Australian Drug Foundation in September 2012. As eDiscovery Librarian, Sarah is responsible for the development and maintenance of the library’s physical and digital holdings, as well as assisting in the creation and development of information products for the organisation.In this role, Sarah has been part of a restructure of the ADF Library’s model of service, which saw not just the library, but the entire information service in which it sits, shift its focus into the digital sphere. How the information service embraced the digital will be the focus of her talk.
- Sarah Slade from State Library of Victoria – Digital preservation
Sarah Slade has worked at the State Library of Victoria for the last 9 years, after working for a range of organisations including Artlab Australia, Scottish Museums Council, International Conservation Services, Australian National Maritime Museum and her own consultancy, S. Slade Consulting. Her background is in conservation and collection management, more recently she has focussed on aspects of managing digital collections and digital preservation. She is the Project Manager for NSLA’s Digital Preservation Group, and is currently a member of NSLA’s Digital Skills Project. She is Manager, Storage & Digital Collection Services at SLV. - Nathan Connors from Docklands Library – Virtual Reality Project
Nathan Connors is the Emerging Technology Team Leader at Melbourne Library Service and has a background in performing arts, technology and media. He was a founding staff member of The Edge at State Library Queensland and has managed many performing arts venues in Brisbane including the Brisbane Powerhouse, Judith Wright Centre of Contemporary Arts and QUT Gardens Theatre. Nathan has been working closely with creative technologists in Melbourne to establish a new user base for Library at The Dock and has developed a creative technology skills program to support digital literacy development within community.As mobile VR becomes more accessible, our experience of the internet will shift from passively reading and viewing content to being fully immersed in a digital environment where you can interact with your surroundings. Melbourne Library Service is investigating whether this could be the future of the virtual library branch and is embarking on a new project to turn Library at The Dock into a virtual reality experience. By harnessing the power of Oculus Rift and skills of our local virtual reality community, we endeavour to bring you a virtual copy of our library for you to explore, create, learn and connect.
- VALA Award winner – presentation and brief talk