Happy Nurses Day to all our Singapore nurses! Wait, some of you will say isn’t Nurses Day supposed to be on May 12 (birthday of Florence Nightingale)? Yes, that’s the international Nurses Day, for Singapore we have set it for August 1 due to our own bit of history – we can trace the origins of nurses in Singapore all the way back to 1 Aug 1885 when it was first started by the sisters of a French Convent at the General Hospital at the Sepoy Lines. Those of you who want more can look up the infopedia article here.
In the meantime, looking at things more current and further out of our world, NASA’s probe to Mars ought to be landing around 5th August (or 6th August our time). The mobile science laboratory dubbed “Curiosity” hopefully would be able to land safely and provide information to us about things on the surface of Mars. Those of you interested or curious about “Curiosity” can follow what’s happening at NASA’s site on Mars Science Laboratory.
Back to Library News, August is also IFLA’s month – and this year they are having the WLIC 2012 in Helsinki – we have our Singapore contingent going over there to promote the WLIC 2013 event (which will be held in Singapore!). So best wishes and a good trip to our members making their way to Helsinki! In the meantime though, we really need our Librarians in Singapore to contribute by writing about yourselves and the libraries you work in! Yes, we need information about the Librarians and Libraries in Singapore – we are planning to compile a web site that holds this information (and let it grow – it will continue beyond the WLIC 2013 event) – from which we also hope to be able to collect suitable information for a souvenir publication for the participants of WLIC2013. So if you have been approached by one of our volunteers tasked to collect information please help by actively contributing – if we haven’t gotten round to asking you (firstly, our apologies as we have only a limited pair of hands) but you are most welcomed to submit a write up about yourself – we are looking for ALL librarians in Singapore (yes, that includes librarians whom may not be working in libraries, and no we are not restricting ourselves to Singaporeans only – we are looking for Librarians in Singapore and not Singaporean Librarians) – please send your information to publications@las.org.sg – thank you in advance for your support! (Post-edit: Our President Gene Tan is also calling for Librarians to turn up at NLB building Level 1 Plaza area on 3 Aug 2012 5pm for a video shoot – we are trying to send our greetings to the WLIC2012 folks to welcome them to Singapore for 2013 – please join us if you can make it!)
Other news – NLB has signed an MOU with the Genealogy Society of Singapore – this marks and official attempt to build up a resource that would be useful for people searching for their family histories.
One of our member, Soo Chin, went to a conference in Australia, and has sent in her report – please watch out for her report coming up soon.
Interesting bits from around the world includes Oakland’s Public Library’s Tool Lending Library – yep they actually lend out home improvement tools with How-to-do books to help people do their own home-improvement! The Librarians from the Australian Catholic University’s (ACU) Strathfield and Brisbane campuses studied the use of Ipads for the use of teaching and learning reported it at an ALIA event – link.
Yit (with leads from Sharon Teng’s CLIPS Alert for July 2012 – CLIPS stands for Current Library and Information PostingS)