National Library of Australia - Gateways

ISSN 1039-3498 | no. 57| June 2002


Kinetica Annual Users’ Meeting

John Shipp, Librarian, University of Sydney
John Shipp, Librarian, University of Sydney

The year’s Kinetica Annual Users’ Meeting will be held on 8–9 August at Dockside, Darling Harbour in Sydney. This meeting is an annual event, designed to provide a forum for issues relating to Kinetica to be discussed with customers.

A draft program has been prepared and can be accessed online with registration details at www.nla.gov.au/kinetica/

We encourage all Kinetica customers to attend the Annual General Meeting and if you have any particular issues, to raise these by phoning or emailing the Kinetica Helpdesk or contact your state user group convenor. We welcome all contributions and suggestions.

John Shipp will chair the Meeting this year. John is the University Librarian, University of Sydney, a position he has held since 1997. John has been an active member of the professional association, serving in many capacities including the role of ALIA President in 1998. Prior to his appointment at Sydney, John was University Librarian at Wollongong for 10 years. He was President of the Council of Australian University Libraries (CAUL) and in this capacity developed a broad view of issues affecting higher education as well as tertiary sector libraries. For some years he has coordinated a database access program for CAUL and the Australian Vice-Chancellor’s Committee. This program has sought to provide better access to commercial information databases by negotiating on behalf of all university libraries.

The program this year will cover topics critical to the future directions of resource sharing and include the following:

An important agenda item will be the parallel sessions, which provide an opportunity for discussion and participation by users on key issues. This is an invaluable time for members to raise and discuss issues they deem to be critical. The Kinetica Advisory Committee and the National Library of Australia will keenly review the feedback from the parallel sessions.

Trevor Wakely from the National Meteorological Library will provide an overview of the key developments from the state user groups while the expert advisory groups will report back on major developments.

The National Library will also report on future Kinetica developments including electronic resource developments, end users access and inter-lending.

In line with last year’s structure there will be a session on Friday where Kinetica managers will answer questions on notice and questions without notice. All questions with notice should be received by 26 July. Responses to questions on notice will be published on the Kinetica web site before the meeting.

We encourage all our users to send in questions of general interest. Agenda Papers for the Annual Users’ Meeting, including the Kinetica report for 2001/02 will be available from the Kinetica web site before the meeting.

We hope that you can make the time to join us in Sydney to participate in the Annual Users’ Meeting, our ‘happy hour’ which will be spent overlooking Sydney Harbour and will celebrate the 21st birthday of the National Bibliographic Database.
—Roxanne Missingham

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