What's new?

In this term's mailout you will find:

• Term 3 Topic List Update
• Infocus order form
• Topic suggestion form

In this update you can find articles on four of the poets featured in Ken Watson's At the round earth's imagined corners. The poets are Sujatta Bhatt, Charles Causley, Miroslav Holub and Bei Dao (Items 2294-2300).

We have also included articles on the work of two very different authors who have written about journeys both physical and imaginative. English author Bruce Chatwin travelled to many corners of the globe to study nomadic cultures, including our own Australian indigenous communities. He wrote about these experiences in The Songlines (Items 2289-2290). Jules Verne was a visionary science fiction writer who's novels such as Around The World In 80 Days and Journey To The Centre Of The Earth are still influential today (Items 2302-2301).

Sarah Condie, Senior Librarian, Legal Information Access Centre, State Library of New South Wales, writes

In each update of Infocus you will find approximately ten articles dealing with different aspects of the Legal Studies syllabus. The law is one area that is constantly changing. Parliaments pass new Acts and the courts keep handing down decisions that affect the lives of us all. Infocus aims to assist students and teachers in keeping abreast of these changes and making it easier to find information that is current, accurate and readable. If Legal Studies is taught at your school, or you have legal studies students using your library, please make sure that your students and teachers avail themselves of this excellent resource as it will certainly make their research task much easier.

If your Legal Studies students are studying "women and domestic violence", you might like to look at the latest New South Wales Law Reform Commission Report No 103 titled "Apprehended Violence Orders". It can be found at: http://www.lawlink.nsw.gov.au/lrc.nsf/pages/r103toc Students mostly need to evaluate the effectiveness of the law and this report provides insightful comments as well as recommendations on how the law should be changed to increase its effectiveness.

Students and teachers of French, or the history of New South Wales, will find Vive la difference! The French in NSW a fascinating exhibition. The gallery guide compliments the exhibition of images and artefacts and contains an essay outlining the contributions of the French people who lived in New South Wales, including food and fashion as well as the origins of our wine and wool industries. For a preview of the exhibition click http://www.sl.nsw.gov.au/exhibitions/vive/. A link to the guide can be found there too. Vive la difference! will be on display until 23 October 2004.

To celebrate the exhibition, a replica edition of Le Courrier Australien has been included for Infocus members in this mail out. It contains a variety of articles in both French and English as well as photographs from several issues held by the State Library. We hope you'll find it useful.

Picture Australia is a great source of images on the web. It is easy to search by keyword or you might choose an existing picture trail to find images on a theme. Both the 'Travel' and 'History' picture trails contain pictures relating to the HSC English Area of Study. Links on the Picture Australia site will take you to many other valuable sources of images in Australia. See
http://www.pictureaustralia.gov.au

The State Library of New South Wales Pictures and Manuscripts catalogue, PICMAN, also has a wealth of resources in several formats. A keyword search using 'journey' on http://www.sl.nsw.gov.au/picman/ yielded 247 records including 77 manuscripts.

For those of you wondering what items other members order, here's a list of our 10 bestsellers to date this year:

What are the popular items in your Infocus collection? We are always looking for new topics to research. If you can't find support material on a HSC topic, fax us a Topic Suggestion form or contact Infocus by sending an email to infocus@sl.nsw.gov.au.

We're delighted to enclose another Infocus poster in this mailout, and hope it will brighten your library. In case you haven't noticed, the space at the bottom has been left blank for you to add some local information. For example, you might want write "Now @ the library" on a poster placed in the staff common room, or you could add "All Infocus items can be borrowed on overnight loan" to a poster placed on the filing cabinet in which Infocus items are stored.

Infocus bookmarks like the ones sent at the beginning of the year are also available in multiples of 25, with a maximum of 100 per member. To request additional bookmarks, just add a note on your next order, telling us how many you'd like.

Infocus contact details

Infocus: linking people and information
State Library of New South Wales
Macquarie St, Sydney 2000
Tel: 02 9273 1519 Fax: 02 9273 1248
E-mail: infocus@sl.nsw.gov.au