Wednesday, 3 September 2008 18:45 - 20:20

Sponsored by DA Information Services

The Organising Committee is pleased to announce the Australasian premiere screening of The Hollywood Librarian during DREAMing 08. Be amongst the first in Australia to see this entertaining film.

It's fun, it's provocative, and it's us.

The Hollywood Librarian: A Look at Librarians Through Film premiered at the ALA conference to an audience of 5,000. Since then, this film, the brainchild of director/librarian Ann Seidl has caught the attention of a world audience of library folks. Now it's set to premiere in Australia at Dreaming08, the ALIA Biennial Conference in Alice Springs, this September.

This first full length documentary film to focus on the work and lives of librarians gathers hundreds of examples of librarians and libraries from Hollywood - from Sophie's Choice to the Desk Set and on to The Shawshank Redemption. As the website blurb says - "some [are] positive, some negative, some laughable and some dead wrong". Interviews with dozens of real librarians are interwoven with these make-believe portrayals, opening up discussion on the things we, as a profession, care about - from the value of reading to intellectual freedom.

As the film unfolds, we will meet the dedicated children's librarian, the witty library director, the high-tech corporate librarian, the smart medical librarian, and the dedicated cataloger. We visit a prison literacy program, an elementary school library and a town faced with the most severe library crisis in decades. We will show the challenges created by shrinking financial support and increased materials costs. We will encounter older librarians who have witnessed the explosion of technology and younger librarians, who were born into the information age. We will travel to large library systems with dozens of staff and visit small libraries with one librarian working alone.

The film is currently being shown in libraries around America and library folk in other countries are clamouring to see it too. It's all done on a shoestring - like so much of what we do, it's not about making money, but about sharing the message. There's no commercial distributor involved, just Ann and her runaway surprise success.

You gotta be there.

For more information please visit http://www.hollywoodlibrarian.com