I had a very full and interesting day at UQ Library yesterday. Newcastle staff will remember Keith Webster, who is now the UQ University Librarian and Director of Learning Services. Keith made me very welcome and I enjoyed dinner with him and his wife Berenika during a spectacular thunderstorm (what was that about nice weather over here??)
UQ is a large Library with >2.5 million books and over 46,000 EJs. They also have 60 liaison librarians, so a little different to Newcastle!
Deb Turnbull is the IL coordinator. Although UQ is so much larger I did feel that their approach to IL is very similar to ours.

Note how the writing really is on the wall – it’s very effective.

http://www.library.uq.edu.au/

Thank you to everyone who has been emailing me about my blog – It’s great to hear from you and to know at least some people are reading it! I’ve added some more pics to last week’s posts so do go back and look.

This is me at Australia Zoo, where Steve Irwin was based, a very emotional place to visit at present.

It seems that no one works in Australia on Cup day, so no one wants to talk to me at the moment, they are all preparing for parties, wearing big hats (the ladies!) and running sweepstakes. I am happy to chill out by the river in Brisbane for a few hours!

I watched some kind of rugby match with my hosts last night – not a sport I know much about except that it seemed to involve a lot of rolling around in the mud. However, I was pleased that GB unexpectedly won!

Sylvia in her Melbourne Cup hat!
Last night I met Sylvia Edwards, Mandy Lupton and Hilary Hughes, some IL researchers and experts from Brisbane. Mandy and Sylvia have written a fascinating article – Six frames for IL education (see link above), which is well worth reading as it explains a model for understanding different perspectives of IL. It was great to meet people whose work I have admired from afar and to get their advice on my project and what value they think it will have. Sylvia also plans to introduce me to some people doing research on the First Year experience, which will be very helpful and Hilary has given me some useful info on international student issues.

http://www.ics.heacademy….final%20_1_.pdf

I am staying in a house where wallabies hop past the windows and rainbow lorikeets and royal kingfishers perch on the trees in the garden! If I’m lucky a koala may visit us too!
Everyone is very pleased as I seem to have brought the rain with me from New Zealand – it hasn’t rained here for months but was torrential last night after I arrived! It’s not fair!!

Today, I met with Meg Upjohn, who is the chemistry librarian at the University of Canterbury here in Christchurch. Meg is very interested in the work I have been doing with Christine Bleasdale in our chenistry school, looking at embedding info lit into the chemistry curriculum and specifically this term at using the SRS system to do some diagnostic testing with the chemistry first years. I’ve agreed to send Meg some more info about this work to see if she can replicate it.
She is also going to collaborate with me in my research about perceptions of IL and will run my survey with her own staff and students in chemistry and hopefully also in a local high school, to give us some comparative international data to work on. This promises to be a very useful collaboration and I’m delighted to be working with Meg on this.
The photo is the Botanic Gardens in Christchurch.

new Zealand is also the only place you can see the yellow eyed penguin in the wild -we were lucky to see this one outside his burrow, having a stretch before going back to incubate his egg. My photos of the giant royal albatross were less successful!