when a favourite author dies you feel like you have lost a friend.

I was sad to hear yesterday of the death of E.L Konigsburg.  One of my all time favourite authors. I grew up knowing and loving "From the mixed up files of Mrs Basil E Frankweiler" and thought it would be great to hide in a museum after it had closed for the night.  I re-read "The outcasts of 19 Schuyler Place" after hearing the news, and it is still a lovely read. Eccentric uncles loved for who they are.

Enjoying Coraline, for the third time

I love Neil Gaiman books and as I had a long car journey I selected the audio copy of Coraline to accompany me. I have read the book, seen the movie in an open air cinema in Darwin and now had Neil Gaiman perform it for me in the privacy of my own car.  He has such a way with language and I love that big black button eyes can be a horror feature.

PLN Networking

Sometimes my input from my online communities is overwhelming. I am getting information from OZTL Net via email (which for some weird reason I can't read on my iPad) and Facebook, CBCA Vic and Australia through email and Facebook, Scoopit links, and other general emails that are professionally interesting. Most times I can manage it, and when I look back and see old emails unread I can now delete them unread without panicking that I will miss something.


I do like Flipboard and will continue to use that and expand what I have in that.  Twitter I joined sometime ago but feel that most things that interest me have come from a network such as OZTL Net and already going around the twittersphere and I don't need to retweet it.  Having said that, I did retweet something in the last week.  It may be that because I follow some blogs which are perhaps not the usual library ones, Boing Boing, and Danah Boyd that I will have something different to offer, we'll see.
I have joined some Facebook groups that interest me professionally, and through one of them I keep in touch with one of my colleagues who lives interstate but also contributes to the group (we are also Facebook friends but I get a buzz seeing her professional comments!).
I have only been at my current school for 14 months and it was so refreshing to see that students were not banned from accessing their mobile phones during the school day (not during class).  Why waste time telling the students to put the phone in their locker?  I am yet to see how we can utilise it fully for the library but we are thinking.  The school has an official Facebook page (not sure how the community interact with it) and the school captains regularly upload talks to students via Youtube (not sure if it is a private link).  These are positive ways of using the social media which the students use daily, if not hourly.
As I have been a lurker for many years on OZ TL Net and occasional contributor I can see many fantastic ways that collaboration and support is offered to librarians all around Australia and overseas through this resource.  
Librarians have always been great at sharing ideas and resources and the online community is another way to do this and to tailor it to what is relevant and timely to us.

Twitter: mmeglib