Shanachies in Perth

Today I accompanied Kathryn (centre) as tour guide to Erik Boekesteijn (left) and Jaap van de Geer (right), who are here in Perth from Delft Public Library in the Netherlands, on their Shanachie Tour. They are going to be running a workshop at the State Library of Western Australia tomorrow on innovation in libraries.

We took them to Kings Park, where the guys enjoyed looking at our WA flora and fauna (including the cheeky magpies trying to get food off a woman who was sitting in the park). After lunch in the city we went to see the new iZone at MPOW (it’s terribly remiss of me but I haven’t put any photos up on Flickr yet! Thanks to Denise for her photos). The guys were suitably impressed and took lots of shots – plus video of me blabbing on about it, which should be interesting to see.

It was very good to meet Erik and Jaap, and to talk about the future for our libraries. In short, it’s all up to us.

Update: I should say that I left them after visiting Curtin; see Kathryn’s blog for more on what they did.