Chris Betcher

Our school has a subscription to a  website called the Study Skills Handbook  which offers study tips to senior students. I'm sure it's a valuable resource; so valuable in fact that it's behind a $1200/year paywall that requires a login password in order to access it. What a bargain. I'm sure those tips wouldn't be found anywhere else on  the Internet for free at all. Anyway, I got an email from someone at school today promoting this resource, and amongst the several study tips it suggested, it listed this one... 3. DISCOVER OTHER RESOURCES: You could also ask your local librarian for any additional direction on where to look for resource material for your assignment. Librarians are often your best source of information. They know how to help people access relevant and appropriate information, in books, the Internet or computer based references. One of the challenging aspects of Internet based searches for school students is the complexity, language and pur...

2011 has been an interesting year for blogging. I feel like my own personal blogging has been really suffering lately, not just from being really busy at work, but also from the endless distractions of Twitter and Google+ which, if I let them, could easily become my sole places for sharing stuff online.  Certainly, there are some people, like Mike Elgan , who use Google as their sole online presence and funnel all their other online stuff into G+.  It's a potentially intriguing strategy, as the engagement factor on G+ is certainly very high.  You could also argue that Twitter has replaced a great deal of sharing that was one done via blogs, and there's little doubt that between the "Big Three" of Facebook, Twitter and Google+, the nature of blogs and blogging  has shifted considerably since I first started using them back in 2005.  I'm blogging less, for sure, and it definitely leaves a void that I miss filling. However, this was also the year when I ...

Ah serendipity, how I love it. We have a major building project going on at school right now.  The bulldozers are busily demolishing walls from our old library, and and we will soon have a beautiful new library Information and Research Center.  From the plans I've seen, it should be a great space. I was asked today to come to a meeting next month and give a short talk to a group of parents and supporters of the new school library building project.  Many of these folks are still getting their head around the massive shifts in the way information is managed.  Many of them perhaps don't realise that the term "library" no longer means what it once meant.  Information is different in a digital age, and so libraries need to manage information differently.  My talk to them needs to cover (briefly) an overview of how information and libraries and "books" are different to what they used to be. So I thought it extremely serendipitous when I opened my email this afte...