Libraries on the agenda

It's been a while since we returned from Croatia, and Mark and I are still reflecting on a number of issues that came out of our discussions on everyone's a librarian now. Since then, I attended LILAC with another colleague, which was an interesting conference, not least for its attempt to cram in four keynote speakers over the two days. I'll be writing more on LILAC after some more reflection, but in the meantime, it was a pleasure to see our workshop mentioned on Steffi Schulz's blog;

http://libraries-at-the-agenda.blogspot.com/2008/03/workshop-everyones-librarian-now-at.html

Steffi was one of the organisers of BOBCATSSS, and was able to attend our workshop. Her blog is full of useful thoughts, and is worth a visit.

BOBCATSSS Over

We had a great time at BOBCATSSS 2008 and would like to thank the organizers and all the people we met. It was interesting to talk to so many librarians from all over Europe and to exchange ideas, in the beautiful surroundings of Zadar.

We were especially pleased with the attendance at our workshop and the ideas it generated. We are looking at the ideas, and hope to upload them to the wiki site soon.

Everyone's a librarian now? We didn't arrive at a consensus on this (although that was never our intention) but it's given us lots to think about.

Hvala!

Mark & Matt

BOBCATSSS continued...

While Mark was busy at a session on Open access vs copyright, I attended one on Special Needs in Libraries. The first speaker was Toni Kennedy from Australia, and talked about how she had worked to improved prison libraries in New South Wales. She mentioned a number of strategies, including training inmates as assistant librarians had helped to counter a culture of second hand books, and no trained librarians at all.

Although the content was quite far removed from my main areas of interest, it was very interesting to see the parallels with library life in Higher Education, including the novel uses for book stock (cigarette papers made from Bible pages is one example where this has happened in both locations!). The impact they have made is astonishing, and even more impressive given the lack of money and resources.

The other speaker talked about Information Access for disabled students in Lithuania, where disabled students have traditionlly been ignored. Again, a number of
innovations to improve information access for disabled students in the country. In doing so, they have utilsed a number of web 2 technologies, so again it was good to see parallels with what we are doing in Higher Education.

More from BOBCATSSS 2008

We attended a panel this morning with Margaret Heller, Patrick Danowski and Tom Roos on the subject of Web 2.0 and Web 3.0 (the latter, in case you were wondering, was envisioned by Roos as the ultimate arrival of the semantic web allowing for much greater sophistication in the retrieval of information).

Topics discussed included privacy issues (and librarians' role in educating users about these, especially in relation to social networking - not easy if like Margaret you work in Illinois where libraries have been forced by state legislation to block the use of such sites!); the inherent subversiveness of blogging (and how they challenge authority by giving the tools of communication to the masses - making them an obvious 'fit' for the mission of libraries); the usefulness of tagging and librarians' tendency to be 'prescriptivist rather than descriptivist' (>Margaret) in their use of language.

The discussion was lively and interesting ideas were shared, however what we couldn't arrive at an answer for was the time-old question of how exactly we're going to arrive at the semantic web, or what librarians' role in this will be. Will user-generated metadata help get us there? (and how many people are adding it anyway - Tom Roos says he rarely tags anything since it costs him time but the benefit is to someone else) Or is the breakthrough likely to be not in the content or metadata but in the search technology itself? We hope to revisit some of these areas of discussion in our workshop, tomorrow afternoon.

Please use the comments to add your own thoughts on any of these issues.

More later!

Live from Zadar!

Greetings from BOBCATSSS2008! (and apologies for any typing errors - this is a very strange keyboard!)

This morning we heard two keynote speakers:

Ana Marusic addressed the role of the medical publisher, a field in which issues of trust are paramount since lives depend upon the publication of accurate evidence.

It was interesting to hear her describe the role of the modern publisher as moving away from being a gatekeeper and toward that of an educator - similar to the shift Matt and I would suggest is taking place in the role of the librarian.

The second keynote was from Claudia Lux, president of the IFLA, who was also interested in the librarian role, but specifically how we need to ensure that those who provide our funding (be they local or central government authorities, or even vice chancellors!) perceive the value of our service. She argues that we need to be advocates for our services and for our profession, to "stop complaining" (where have I heard that before ;-) and to start talking about our successes.

Digital Footprints

We have been talking for a while about the changing role that information professionals play - especially in the academic sector that Mark and I primarily support. One of the areas that we have been discussing at work is the issue of "digital footprints" - the trackable trail that one leaves behind when interacting with the internet. This has started to become more and more of an issue - primarily because entries and information (including photographs) is easily created and saved on social networks such as MySpace and Facebook.

There is a BBC news article here about one student's attempts to remove information that he feared could damage future job prospects. What role can the information professional play in this area? Is it leading by example? Is it including it as part of our teaching on how to use
these technologies responsibly? Hopefully we'll discuss this on Wednesday as part of our workshop at BOBCATSSS. The theme of the conference is "Access to Information for All" - but if the information is incorrect, and the people that have access to it are your future employers - is this always a good thing?

Teenage use of Web 2.0

Part of our presentation for BOBCATSSS uses this report from Pew. It examines the online behaviour of teenagers in the US and finds that a high percentage are engaged with web 2.o activities such as social networking. They are also creating and re-mixing content to a degree that we haven't seen before. Crucially for us as academic librarians, the age range indicated (12-17 year olds) will be our intake for the next few years.

I would argue that unless we adapt and adopt, we will be alienating them from the moment they encounter our services.

The role of the librarian.

As part of our workshop for BOBCATSSS, we are trying to pin down what we feel is the role of the librarian. What we thought would be a quick slide has turned into a massive brainstorm, and naturally has even touched upon Ranganathan. We've distilled it into a number of areas, but are interested in what you think. Comments please!

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.

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.