7 Tips for becoming a Great Digital Citizen

Guest writer, David Lukic, recently shared tips on how to become a good digital citizen in the Princh Library Blog.

What is Digital Citizenship?

The digital world is a future dimension where people interact virtually on all aspects of careers, education, and social life. Digital citizenship is our behavior in that world, including how we treat data, other people, and our participation and contributions. There are new rights and responsibilities involved, including some around potential data breaches.

Balance and self-policing

Being online for work or school at any time of day or night can lead to burnout. It’s important to set boundaries and to add self-care to the mix to avoid stress-related issues. Be sure to incorporate breaks such as going outside for a walk, setting periods of blackout time when devices are offline, and pursuing activities that are disconnected from the internet, such as cooking, reading books, playing basketball, or creative hobbies.

Respect

Along with respecting your body’s need for downtime, remember to take a step back and consider the individuals you are interacting with online, including those who facilitate your work or learning. The nature of online work and school tends to excite people, elevating stress. We all need to take a step back from the anonymity of computers and consider how people are likely to receive what we are saying or communicating. Criticism should be tempered with humility and used sparingly.

Responsibility

Digital citizenship is a right and a privilege. Each person participating should know (or make a point to learn) the appropriate settings when being included in an online group, to enter with a positive attitude of respect, and to treat the contributions of others (including materials accessible through online libraries) with deference.

Vale Mirka Mora

The renowned Australian-French artist Mirka Mora has died aged 90 years. Mirka was an important figure in the Melbourne art and restaurant scene after migrating to Australia from France with her husband, Georges, after WWII.

Mirka Mora is the artist who created the amazing mural on display in the Burdekin Library. The mural was commissioned for the building when it was first built in the early 1980s.

It took Mirka several weeks to paint the library’s mural, reaching 6.1 metres high and 5.7 metres wide. Hundreds of people came to watch Mirka at work, and it is said that she often allowed locals to pick up brush and paint and join her! She named it “The Painting of Life.”

We are very thankful Mirka accepted this commission and that we can continue to enjoy this vibrant, joyful painting here in the centre of Ayr.

Winter School Holiday Activities 2018

We are almost half way through the July school holidays already! We had lots of fun with our art workshop and tech time sessions. Today there is a maker space happening in the Burdekin Library and a Timomatic performance at the Burdekin Theatre.

Tomorrow (Friday) is Tania Cox’s launch of her new picturebook at 10.30am in the library. Fabulous! this is a free event and no bookings are required.

Next week Flipside Circus are in town with most sessions already booked out. We have a NAIDOC Week celebration on Wednesday at 10.00am in the Burdekin Library and Thursday at 7.00pm there is a performance of Around the world in eighty days in the Burdekin Theatre.

See our website for more details – or call the Burdekin Library on 4783 9970 or Burdekin Theatre.

2011 in review

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2011 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

A San Francisco cable car holds 60 people. This blog was viewed about 2,300 times in 2011. If it were a cable car, it would take about 38 trips to carry that many people.

Click here to see the complete report.

Have you tried Searching our catalogue from your mobile device ?

Did you know that the Burdekin Library Catalogue is mobile and can be searched from an Android or Iphone or Ipad device using LibraryAnywhere. Click on the Android Logo to download the Android App.

If you have an Iphone or Ipad you can get the app from the Itunes store

The Open Library and ebooks – Is the Burdekin Library the first public library in Australia to join this service?

The Burdekin Library is delighted to advise our borrowers that we have signed up to the In-Library eBook Lending Program provided by the Internet Archive.

How it Works;

http://openlibrary.org/borrow/about

From early next year when our public wifi service goes live you will be able to borrow ebooks by visiting the library with your laptop or wifi enabled mobile device such as an iPad or iPhone.

A more detailed explanation can be found here;

http://blog.archive.org/2011/06/25/in-library-ebook-lending-program-expands-to-1000-libraries/

Tips and Tricks with eBooks

The next session in the  “Tech Talks with John” series will be looking at The world of eBooks.

In this session John will take you through how to use a free program called calibre. We will also look at possible ways to convert e-books to the format that will work on your e-book reader.

Date:  Sarturday 17th September
Time : 10:30am – 11.30am
For Information and to book call 47839970

calibre is a free and open source e-book library management application developed by users of e-books for users of e-books. It has a cornucopia of features divided into the following main categories:
•Library Management
calibre manages your e-book collection for you. It is designed around the concept of the logical book, i.e., a single entry in your library that may correspond to actual e-book files in several formats.
calibre can sort the books in your library by: Title, Author, Date added, Date published, Size, Rating, Series, etc.
In addition, it supports extra searchable metadata:
Tags: A flexible system for categorizing your collection however you likeComments: A long form entry that you can use for book description, notes, reviews, etc.
You can easily search your book collection for a particular book. calibre supports searching any and all of the fields mentioned above. You can construct advanced search queries by clicking the helpful “Advanced search” button to the left of the search bar.
You can export arbitrary subsets of your collection to your hard disk arranged in a fully customizable folder structure.
Finally, calibre will even go out onto the internet to find book metadata based on existing title/author or ISBN information. It can download various types of metadata and covers for your books, automatically. The metadata system is written using plugins so that different types of metadata sources can be supported in the future.

•E-book conversion
calibre can convert from a huge number of formats to a huge number of formats. It supports all the major e-book formats. The full list of formats can be found here .

The conversion engine has lots of powerful features. It can rescale all font sizes, ensuring the output e-book is readable no matter what font sizes the input document uses. It can automatically detect/create book structure, like chapters and Table of Contents. It can insert the book metadata into a “Book Jacket” at the start of the book.

•Syncing to e-book reader devices
calibre has a modular device driver design that makes adding support for different e-reader devices easy. At the moment, it has support for a large number of devices, the complete list of which is here . Syncing supports updating metadata on the device from metadata in the library and creation of collections on the device based on the tags defined in the library. If a book has more than one format available, calibre automatically chooses the best format when uploading to the device. If none of the formats is suitable, calibre will automatically convert the e-book to a format suitable for the device before sending it.

•Downloading news from the web and converting it into e-book form
calibre can automatically fetch news from websites or RSS feeds, format the news into a ebook and upload to a connected device. The ebooks include the full versions of the articles, not just the summaries. Examples of supported news sites include:
The New York TimesThe Wall Street JournalThe EconomistTimeNewsweekThe GuardianESPNand many, many more…
calibre has over three hundred news sources and the news system is plugin based, allowing users to easily create and contribute new sources to calibre. As a result the collection of news sources keeps on growing!
If you are interested in adding support for a news site, read the User Manual . Once you have successfully created a new recipe, you can share it with other users by posting it in the calibre forum or sending it to the calibre developers for inclusion in calibre.

•Comprehensive e-book viewer
calibre has a built-in ebook viewer that can display all the major ebook formats. It has full support for Table of Contents, bookmarks, CSS, a reference mode, printing, searching, copying, customizing the rendering via a user style sheet, embedded fonts, etc.

•Content server for online access to your book collection
calibre has a built-in web server that allows you to access your ebook collection using a simple browser from any computer anywhere in the world. It can also email your books and downloaded news to you automatically. It has support for mobile devices, so you can browse your collection and download books from your smartphone, Kindle, etc.

Water Festival

Well it’s that time of year again for the Burdekin’s Annual Water Festival, which is held in the main town area of Queen Street on Saturday 3rd September. As some of you may already know, the Burdekin Shire Council is being represented with a Senior Ambassador entrant. This year the Council is represented by Miss Ashley Coppo, who is a trainee here at your very own Burdekin Library. If you are free this Saturday, and are looking for some fun, come down to the main street and watch the amazing parade of floats from all your local businesses and schools.  Take your children down for some rides and enjoy some of the great food and entertainment that will be provided.  Most importantly don’t forget to cheer on our own Ashley Coppo, and have a good time.

The Water Festival website can be found here

Does the term “Internet TV” intrigue you?

If you are seeing a lot of reference to “Internet TV’ in the media lately but are not quite sure of what it is all about then the next “Tech Talks with John” is for you.

As Wikipedia says “Internet television allows the users to choose the program or the television show they want to watch from an archive of programs or from a channel directory.

Many providers of internet-television services exist including conventional television stations that have taken advantage of the internet as a way to continue showing programmes after they have been broadcast often advertised as “on-demand” and “catch-up” services. Today, almost every major broadcaster around the world is operating an internet-television platform”

Here in Australia the most well known “Catch up” TV is the ABC’s Iview.

Recently the Library has purchased an internet enabled TV for use in the Library and this Tech talk will examine what might be possible with these “Internet ready” Televisions. The sucess or failure of Internet TV will be totally determined by the content that can be accessed on our TV’s.

The tech talk will examine our new Internet ready TV, look at content available from the internet and explore where this interesting world may take us.

Do you have a digital TV then why not come along and discover how you may be able to may be able to access Internet content on your TV.

This will be a fascinating look at the world of Internet TV and the content we can access from anywehere and view it on our Digital TV.

If you are considering purchasing a “Internet enabled TV” or have a Digital TV with a HDMI port and would like to access Internet TV then this session is for you.

Date:  Saturday 13 August
Time: 10:30am – 11:30am

All  bookings and enquiries welcome on 47839970

Home Hill branch library hours have changed

At a recent Council meeting changes to the opening hours at the Home Hill branch library were approved. The changes are highlighted in bold.

(Mon/Tues) 1:00pm – 5.00pm
(Wed) 10.00am-12.00pm, 2.00pm-5.00pm
(Thurs) 1.00pm – 5.00pm
(Fri) 1.00pm – 5.00pm
(Sat) 9.00am – 12.00noon
Closed: (Sun)