Wow, it's so great to be in Perth. It feels like the city is buzzing with library chit-chat. When Tom and I arrived yesterday I overheard some librarians chatting in the foyer of our hotel. When we were out with two Curtin people last night we bumped into 2 or 3 other groups of librarians. Constance assured me that it was just that Perth is "a small city", but I'm quite happy to see it as librarians taking over.
Tom and I had a great visit to Curtin yesterday. I have to say that they looked well on top of their game. They've had SFX for 3 or so years (they call it "Article Find It"). In fact, they're doing this great thing with SFX where they're tying it into their document delivery process. From a research database the client uses SFX linking to check to see if the library has the article. If there are no local holdings they can place a document delivery request directly - and here's the great part - their request form is auto-populated with all the bibliographic information. Also, I got quite excited about their classes/training database that calculates all their training statistics, as well as allowing automatic signup and email reminders. The system they use is home-grown. They also have a library blog and they're podcasting library tutorials.... Anyway, I felt very much excited by the visit, and full of ideas. Tom took a bunch of photos - hopefully he'll be uploading them later.
I better sign off - my walking tour starts soon. My tour will be visiting some government and hospital libraries, plus the state library, which I got a got a glimpse of last night from the Brass Monkey (sorry Sten, we couldn't wait for you!) I'm pretty excited at checking out some different area libraries - will report on my visits later.