Issue 8

The magnificent venue (St Peter's College) and inspiring keynote speakers are two of the main highlights that remain with me from the ASLA XIII and the IASL 22nd Conference.

This is the first opportunity I have had to attend an ASLA conference. I have worked in the educational field for 19 years, the last 134as a Teacher-Librarian, gaining experience with the Ministry of Education, Catholic and now the Independent System.

To make it possible for the Junior School Librarian, Ann Romain and I to attend the conference and to assist with finance, I applied for the J.A.T. Beard Travel Scholarship. This scholarship is funded by the St Anne's and Gippsland Grammar School Foundation and is open to all members of our staff. We were fortunate to be the recipients for 1993 and hopefully both campuses will benefit from our experience.

I was impressed by the fact that there was a theme for each day of the conference-Society, Literature, Education and Technology. The keynote speakers: Professor Mike Tyler, Jennifer Rowe (Emily Rodda), Jim Dellit (Principal Curriculum Officer S.A.) and Warren Horton (Director of the National Library of Australia) focussed on these themes. All speakers were informative, entertaining and provided us with a broader outlook than solely focussing on education or librarianship. More importantly each shared with us their dreams and gave inspiration for 'change'.

Two changes I would like to pursue at S.T.A.G.G.S. are the networking of all Resource Centre terminals and a subscription to an on-line data base. The terminals would become 'Information Terminals' incorporating OPAC, CD-ROMS and word processing.

The dynamics of putting these dreams into action were explored at a variety of workshops. Prior to the conference one of the dilemmas I had was in selecting which 8 of the 60 workshops I would like to attend. After making a decision it was disappointing to find that quite a few workshops were cancelled, or demand exceeded the seating capacity in others. (Maybe some workshops could have been repeated.) At the workshops I attended I participated in role plays for human resource management, discussed whether student outcome statements will improve information literacy, looked at library services to Aboriginal people, explored trends childrens' literature (including violence and censorship) and new technology and on-line data bases.