[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
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