The final theme was the future of librarianship, and this covered two main aspects - the need for leaders of the future, and the research library-specific consideration of how librarians' roles might change. There were two talks on leadership. The first came from Alistair Work, and mainly focused on how individuals react when the moment to show ...

Another theme of the conference was digitisation, and as one of my main interests is in the use of technology in libraries both of the parallel sessions I attended focused on this theme. Alice Prochaska from Yale University spoke to the whole conference about the opportunity for libraries to exploit their special collections as a ''unique and ...

It seemed inevitable that the credit crunch would crop up at some point during the conference - it seems to be everywhere at the moment - and Sir Drummond Bone launched straight in. He predicted less funding in the pot, and the responses research libraries would have to make to this, such as finding funding elsewhere. In what might have been good ...

From the 22nd to 24th October I attended the Research Libraries UK (RLUK) Conference, thanks to a competition for places set by my department. Over the next few days I plan to write a little about what were the major topics of the conference for me, influenced by my choice of parallel sessions. These were funding, digitisation and the future of ...

The free seminar and masterclass programme at Online Information has been announced. There’s a great spread of speakers, including Phil Bradley, Karen Blakeman and Peter Godwin. I can only attend on Thursday 4th, when I’m presenting on Third Sector 2.0, and I;m particularly looking forward to catching Francis Mezzu’s paper ...

I arrived on the red-eye flight from London>Turin just in time to catch the end of Bonaria Biancu’s workshop at Elisad, Do It Ourselves: Social Technologies for Information Retrieval, so I’m really pleased to see that she has posted a brief synopsis on her blog, The Geek Librarian (Google English translation here, with all the ...

It’s autumn in The UK; it’s time for some new sensible shoes and it’s also conference season. (tag from live tag surfing wall (work with Dan Dixon), 2gether08) Here’s where I will be for public conferences and what I will be doing at them: Making and organising knowledge in communities; Metaknowledge mashup ...

This week is week one - the first lectures of all my modules in the MA. Everything so far has been pretty interesting. The modules I'm taking this term cover management, libraries and society, information literacy and information retrieval, and the practicalities of the course itself. Each one's been a good mix of subjects I've got a genuine ...

In this podcast, ACRL 14th National Conference Virtual Conference Committee Co-Chair Scott Walter and Green Conference Planning Committee members Juliet Kerico and Karen Munro discuss environmentally sustainable practices at next year’s Seattle conference. Visit the conference website for more information, including the ACRL 2009 Green ...

Preparing my paper for Elisad on the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats, I’m grateful to the Blogging Section of SLA-IT and resource shelf respectively for highlighting articles on how to generate and limit User Generated Content. As governmental organisations or NGOs, Alcohol and Other Drug (AOD) information providers ...