In the news
David Walsh’s Museum of Old and New Art (MONA) in Hobart has opened its new library, Phrontisterion. As reported by ABC News, the library has foresworn Dewey and other traditional classification systems in favour of… well, nothing. Books are placed on shelves wherever librarians feel they fit best, with photographs regularly taken of the shelves and book location data automatically updated.
Nic Whyte from consultancy Art Processors writes in greater detail on the project:
As David puts it: a book about Mars should be near a book about Mercury if we’re talking planets. But if the book is also about Roman mythology, we’d be browsing mythology, and we’d not find what we were looking for. Dewey assumes a book is about one thing and belongs in one spot. Real collections, and real curiosity, don’t work that way.
Reparative description
The report of The ATSILIRN Protocols – 30 Years On: Research Symposium, held on 26 November 2025 at the University of Technology Sydney, has recently been published. The symposium was convened by the Indigenous Archives and Data Stewardship Hub at Jumbunna Institute for Indigenous Education and Research, and supported by the Brett Clegg Foundation in collaboration with the ATSILIRN 2.0 group. The symposium brought together practitioners, researchers, and advocates to reflect on thirty years of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Library, Information and Resource Network (ATSILIRN) Protocols for Libraries, Archives and Information Services, first published in 1995 and last updated in 2012.
Australian Subject Analysis Project (ASAP)
The Working Group are currently analysing the results of the survey sent out earlier this year – many thanks to the almost 200 (!) respondents to the catalogue users survey, and to the four respondents to the thesaurus maintainers survey. Your feedback will directly shape the next stage of the project.
ALIA
As published in InCite Online, Adelaide University masters student Lewis Bronson Lando Caon is undertaking a survey on bibliographic metadata in Australian libraries. The survey is open until the end of August and can be accessed here.
Other
What did it take to build a library management system in the 1970s, from scratch? Systems librarian and former VALA keynote speaker Ruth Kitchin Tillman has published an oral history of LIAS, a pioneering in-house ILS developed at Penn State University in State College, Pennsylvania, USA between 1978 and 1999. It features interviews with programmers, cataloguers, reference librarians and managers.
The proceedings of the 6th Critical Approaches to Libraries Conference (CALC) have recently been published, including an insightful presentation from Murtaza Fakhri on ‘Decolonising Classical Arabic name authority control‘. Fakhri notes that international cataloguing standards in the Anglo-American tradition routinely mangle Classical Arabic names and proposes a more culturally appropriate approach to recording these names.