Friday, June 29, 2007

Elizabethan Banquet


I am so glad I came to this conference if just for the experience of an Elizabethan banquet at Hatfield House. The banquet hall is the original that was used by King Henry VIII and the meal was done in period with actors and performers - great stuff. I particularly enjoyed the singing and music as I am a fan of the music from that period and have sung quite a lot of it myself with the Lady's Mantle choir. Hatfield House is where the young queen elizabeth I grew up and she was seated in the garden when she was informed that she had become the queen of england.

The boys caught a bus to St Albans today to look around an historic English town and Richard was showing me the photographs they took when I got back from the dinner tonight.

I attended some interesting presentations today. They plenary session was a talk by Alex Byrne (current IFLA president) and university librarian from UTS. His topic was around Advocacy for Freedom of Information and Open Access which he is very passionate about. I was proud to be a fellow Australian.

There was a very good presentation on "Digital Outreach and Social Engagement: connecting with users" by Lisa Hinchliffe who is the head of the undergraduate library at the university of Illinois and Lisa Sloniowski who is the information literacy coordinator for York university in Toronto. These are both very large universities and they are doing very interesting things to foster student engagement and development of critical thinking and information literacy skills. They are both worth inviting to speak at a relevant event in Australia. Someone from CILIP heard them speak in the US and decided they had to invite them to speak at this conference.

I went along to Ed King's presentation on the British Library newspaper digitisation project. He is not a very good presenter though the content was well organised. I was surprised that the slides were all text based - there wasn't a single mock-up of how the user interface might look and he seemed uncertain about its features. The most depressing news is that they will be charging for search/browse access unless you are a member of a higher-education institution. This is because JISC funded the digitisation and Zoning/OCR processes. Their reason for charging others is to generate revenue to maintain the repository and fund further digitisation of more newspapers. I can't see how it will be worth the negative publicity as those eafected will be the least able to pay, independent scholars and researchers who are working in their spare time and have no money. Perhaps because it will be such a valuable research resource they anticipate organisations outside of the JISC community will be happy to pay. I have an impression though that most private entities interested in keyword searching this corpus probably have a staff member still attached to a University in some fashion or other and will be able to search it for free anyway.

I spent almost an hour with Richard Wallis from Talis and gained a better understanding of the talis arhitecture and how it might be applied in various situations. More detail later ... I have been thinking a lot about the issues of blending very divergent data sources describing archival collections into a national discovery service - some catalogue only at the collection level, some only at the item level and a few might be able to expose their collections with a multi-level encoding system like EAD. he had some really good ideas about how to manage that scenario although they do not as yet have such collections in their national union catalogue.

I asked the rep on the Innovative stand to give be a demo of the Electronic Resources Management system which they are marketing to Voyage clients in particular. I was not very impressed I have to say. I didn't have much time so I told him i was interested in their public interface (I am confident we would be able to do a better job what with the e-reources portal and an extension of our own platform (libraries australia).

Well I'd better wind up so I can sleep. I'll have a challenging day tomorrow

2 comments:

Mathieu said...

Dear Monica, it seems that you chose the most high tech places in Italy. I guess you are occupied with other things (and who could blame you...)

I hope the boys aren't giving you any trouble and that you use their arms well to spare your ankle... ;-)

J'ai hâte d'avoir des nouvelles!!!

Monica said...

Eh Mathieu, ecoutes-moi !

J'ai hâte d'avoir des nouvelles de toi aussi.