Diane is the program director of the Information Management program and lecturer at the School of Information Technology and Mathematical Sciences at University of South Australia. She teaches readers’ advisory, management, project management, and supervises the placement of her students in for the capstone project course and practicalexperiences. She was previously an assistant professor at a university in the Midwest of the United States. Her research interests include website evaluation and assessment, digitallibraries, research methodology, management and e-government in public libraries, reader’s advisory and librarians’ perception of readers of genre fiction but especially the romance genre. Dr Velasquez has a PhD in LIS from the University of Missouri, an MLS for the University of Arizona, an MBA in management from Golden Gate University in San Francisco, and a BA in political science from San Jose State University. She spent over 20 years in corporate America before switching careers to librarianship and academe.

 

Presentation:

The presentation will be about research that has been conducted by Dr Velasquez’s students on the assessment and evaluation of public libraries in Australia and Canada over the last two years. The main focus will be on Australian public libraries and on the findings of the research. Dr Velasquez will also discuss some findings on the state levels and some comparisons between them. She will also compare phase one of the Australian study and phase 1 of the Canadian study that has been completed so far.