[LINK] Information Awareness Month

Tom Worthington tom.worthington at tomw.net.au
Tue May 3 18:53:30 AEST 2011


Greetings from the launch of Information Awareness Month 2011 in the 
Brindabella Room of the National Library of Australia in Canberra: 
<http://www.informationawarenessmonth.com.au/>.

The Director General of the library opened proceedings by mentioning the 
need to keep access to information for the public and the excellent way 
the NLA helps this with the Trove system.

Bodies involved in the month include: Records and Information Management 
Professionals Australasia (RIMPA), Australian Society of Archivists 
(ASA), Health Information Management Association of Australia (HIMAA), 
Institute for Information Management (IIM), Australian Library and 
Information Association (ALIA), Public Record Office Victoria (PROV), 
and National Archives of Australia (NAA).

The official launch was by the Australian Information Commissioner, 
Professor John McMillan AO. He mentioned three dimensions of information:

    1. Information is valuable: The FOI act identifies government 
information as a public resource. Agencies are now required to publish 
details of what they do and what information they have.
    2. Legal Obligations with Information: Organisations have 
obligations to keep personal information private. The Commissioner gave 
examples of companies which have "learnt" from failures to keep 
information private. But from the long list of recent examples, it 
appears that corporations have not learnt, or they have learnt there are 
few penalties for failure.
    3. Managing Information Professionally: The commissioner pointed out 
that while there are numerous organisations involved with information, 
there is limited coordination between them. Many government 
organisations now use the FOI recommended icon on their front page.

ps: I will be speaking at the Meta 2011 Conference, as part of 
information awareness month: 
<http://www.metalounge.org/meta-2011-conference>


-- 
Tom Worthington FACS CP HLM, TomW Communications Pty Ltd. t: 0419496150
PO Box 13, Belconnen ACT 2617, Australia  http://www.tomw.net.au
Adjunct Senior Lecturer, School of Computer Science, The
Australian National University http://cs.anu.edu.au/courses/COMP7310/
Visiting Scientist, CSIRO ICT Centre: http://bit.ly/csiro_ict_canberra



More information about the Link mailing list