VALA - inspiration and mundane

My VALA experience included 3 sessions on Friday. Two inspirational and one not so.
First up session by one of my favourite RMT lecturers now at Monash, Graeme Johanson on ICT policy, and Australian civil society. There has been a lot of high level international discussion at WSIS (World Summits on the Information Society) and then research by Graeme and others on how we can take lofty principles of creating an informed"civil society" and put them into practice in Australia.
His paper challenged librarians to take seriously their responsibility for supporting information equity. Not only by providing information access via publically funded libraries but also contributing to a "civil society" through creating information that is usable and training/encouraging people to be functionally information literate. Having a vision of how international policy can filter down to action at the community level was fascinating.
Mr Barry Nunn of the State Library NSW talked about "connectivity, content and confidence" . He discussed how the SLNSW provided the necessary Internet connections for the councils and public libraries, provided training both for users and train the trainer coaching for staff. A great project just presented in far too much detail and presented in a manner that made you contemplate your shopping list or how many days until your birthday.
Final paper from Andrew Wells of Uni of NSW about the newish ARC funded project to create the Dictionary of Australian Artists Online (DAAO). He is also a very engaging speaker who gave some enjoyable insight into the huge undertaking and detailed journey that this project will take from the lobbying of academic staff and scoping of the project through to its ongoing growth.
It started in 2005 and though the project is funded for 3 years, as with other similar undertakings, it is an ongoing commitment for UNSW and their other partners. They are at the stage of data mining 6000 biographies and we were given a little peek into how this works.