VALA has had yet another busy and successful year in 2004/05.
During the year, our general meetings have continued to provide stimulating speakers on a wide range of topics (often followed by an enjoyable social event for those able to join speaker and Committee at dinner). The VALA Award, a Travel Scholarship and the VALA Student Awards were announced at the November meeting.
Planning for the thirteenth biennial conference is now well under way, and the Main Announcement and Registration brochure for VALA2006 will appear early in August. Special thanks to the members of Programme and Conference Committees for their hard work on this.
General Meetings
As always, the Association is grateful to the speakers who give of their time and expertise for our general meetings, and also to the University of Melbourne for continuing to provide the venue.
| June 2004 | What’s hot in libraries? | Christine Mackenzie, Yarra Plenty Regional Library |
| September 2004 | Acquisitions – what’s happening? | Stephen Pugh, YBP Australia, Suzanne Clark, University of Melbourne and Sandra Bugeja, Enakt Systems |
| November 2004 | Library assessment in North America: observations and opportunities | Steve Hiller, University of Washington |
| April 2005 | Journal Reading in Universities: Comparing the U.S. and Australia | Carol Tenopir, University of Tennessee |
| May 2005 | The ARROW Project: Australian Research Repositories Online to the World | Geoff Payne, ARROW |
Awards
The VALA Award was presented to the Marrickville Municipal Library, for its multiple language Unicode-compliant library catalogue.
A Travel Scholarship was awarded to:
Anna Raunik, from the State Library of Queensland, who was awarded a VALA Travel Scholarship to study webcasting technologies in the UK and the USA, and the use of these technologies in making “Libraries without walls” a reality.
A paper reporting on her studies will be presented at the Conference next February.
VALA Student Awards were presented to to Simone Pakin, who was a student at RMIT University, and to Christina Davidson, a final year student from Monash University.
The Robert D. Williamson Award is only given in Conference years, and nominations for this award are to be sought shortly.
Committee
The 2004/2005 committee has been:
| Sandra Bugeja | President |
| Darrin Vouch | Vice-President |
| Stephen Gillespie | Treasurer |
| Cathie Jilovsky | Secretary |
| Belinda Blaswick | |
| Tom Denison | |
| Simon Huggard | |
| Lian Todd |
I would like to thank my fellow Committee members, and also Alyson Kosina, from Computer Systems Engineering Pty Ltd, and the team from Waldron Smith Management, for their support during the year. Special mention is due for Simon Huggard, who is retiring from Committee after more than seven years, including as Vice-President, President and as Programme Committee Chair for VALA2002. Thank you, Simon, for all your hard work.
Sandra Bugeja
22 June 2005