Everything is Miscellaneous - By David Weinberger.

Read. This. Book.

That would be my advice to anyone interested in trying to grasp an understanding of how and why the information professional profile is changing. I was all set to do a review of the book, when Mark pointed out that there was an excellent one available at ALA Techsource...

But I can't resist mentioning a couple of points - he talks about the limitations of atoms, and how something like Wikipedia will always benefit over more traditional resources such as the paper based Brittanica because of there are no limitations on the number of articles and links that are embedded within. Whilst I agree that quality of information is crucial (and an area that perhaps Mr Weingberger doesn't cover in enough detail) I think the atom one is a beautiful analogy.

Teaching

We recently had some franchise students vist the library. Franchise students are ones that, although their final qualification is awarded by Sheffield Hallam, have their teaching undertaken by one of the Further Education Colleges in the area. The ones I saw were a collection from Sheffield College, studying Tourism. The difficulties arise when I have to show them what resources are available electronically as they normally don't have access to our electronic databases. Instead, we covered a number of online resources including Intute and Google Scholar. I managed to pull together a delicious page for them and put the presentation on slideshare.

BOBCATSSS 2008

I mentioned the BOBCATSSS symposium a while ago - we heard today that our proposal has been accepted. We have designed a workshop around the concept of "everyone's a librarian now" and will be presenting it over the course of the conference. More information on BOBCATSSS is available here. Hope to see you there.

LfN study day

I was invited to give an overview of Web 2.0 at an event organised for LfN (Libraries for Nursing) at Sheffield Hallam.

The theme of the study day was "Making Web 2.0 work for you and your library - the use of Blogs, Wikis and RSS in Health libraries" and it was good to see a number of speakers from NHS backgrounds as well as the usual suspects from HE.

The other speakers were mostly giving case studies and my brief was to put these in context and explain why we should be engaging with them - specifically asking where our role should go now that web 2.0 has made it possible for all internet users to participate in librarian-like activities.

As a former health librarian myself the day was an opportunity to catch up with former colleagues as well as learning about some interesting projects. All the presentations from the event can be found here.

I'll also be writing an article based on my presentation for the next LfN Bulletin, due for publication later in 2007.

BOBCATSSS 2008 - call for papers

The 16th BOBCATSSS Symposium is to be held next January, and they are looking for paper submissions. As the theme is "Providing Access to Information for Everyone" we are probably going to examine this from the point of view of the information professional in the information society, the digital divide and what we can do as librarians.

Here is the call for submissions;
"Contributions in any form - workshop, paper, poster presentation - are welcome until 15 May 2007. For further information and guidelines for the abstracts please visit our website: http://www.blogger.com/www.bobcatsss2008.org. There you will also find a printable version of the Call for Papers as well as flyers and a poster that can be handed out to students, colleagues or anyone interested."

BOBCATSSS is an important conference/symposium, as it is organised by library students, and therefore an excellent chance to work with the future of the profession. It's going to be in Croatia, so that should be cold, I mean good.