Iarla Flynn (an Irish name) from Google Australia quoted a tweet that had been sent to him: 'Google can bring you back 120,000 answers; a librarian can bring you the right one'. But he preferred the suggestion 'Don't JUST use Google'. He sees the 3 main trends as being mobile access, social media, and cloud computing. He thinks wireless is a scarce resource, so cable should be used whenever possible, to leave wireless when it is the only option.
Hazel Bowley spoke on corporate information management, and discussed the importance of words. She commented that Nicole Kidman and Keith Urban referred to their 'gestational carrier'. I think this is quite a good phrase. In my library studies we did a...n assignment looking at changes in the use of a subject heading over time. In quite a few databases the term 'surrogate mother' was used initially for the caring aspects of motherhood (eg, 'nurse as surrogate mother' - you could also have a surrogate father) and then gradually morphed, without being redefined, to mean a gestational surrogate mother.
Stephen Pugh presented the idea of using pre-publication metadata at article level especially for content from small publishers (who risk going under) to let people find and buy the specific article of interest, rather than having to subscr...ibe to the whole journal, or to a whole collection of journals. Someone said one institution had paid $1 million for Elsevier content for a year, and that students had downloaded 1 million articles. She wondered whether there was any evidence that this model would be cheaper (no evidence, as it hasn't happened yet). I like to think that this model could be expanded to include individual articles from individuals (eg, me!)
Day 3
Librarian in Black
Sarah Houghton-Jan’s talk and slides from her pre-conference workshop are online at http://librarianinblack.net/librarianinblack.
One of her suggestions was to look for ideas not just in other libraries, but in other industries. She also says you don’t have to know about every new web-based service, but should try to do a few of them well.
In a few months, San Jose Public Library (where Sarah used to work) will have less than half the funding they had five years ago.
In 2002, four governments censored the web. Now 40 do.
Mobile will soon be the main way people access the web (the Google guy also said this), so we need to make sure that our services work on mobile devices. (This will be important for indexes to books too – not only making sure that the links work online, but making sure that the display is effective for use on a small screen).
RDA
Philip Hider from CSU did a survey to see what fields people used in library catalogues, and compared this with the fields that were ‘core’ in RDA. Eg, people used subtitle a lot, but this is not a core field. Fields such as index were ignored by searchers. (But this doesn’t mean they’re not useful, eg, someone researching the proportion of books that have indexes depends on this field. Librarians making purchasing decisions may also use it when look at other libraries’ catalogues).
Game design theory in information literacy
David Di Muro, an IT specialist from UNSW library talked about the use of game design theory in library catalogues etc. He wasn’t advocating that information literacy should use games, but that the techniques that make online games so readily followed could be used. (In describing how intuitive Civilisation was, he said ‘I even showed it to my wife.’) Techniques include the use of colour, fonts, positioning on the page and icons, and also online prompts at the time of need (eg, ‘you’ve not got beyond the first page for five searches, try ….’
Interestingly the next speakers were from Sydney Uni, and they DID use games in their information literacy training, for which they got a $400,000 grant over 4 years. They also included training for university-wide information, eg, anti-plagiarism. They’ve made their resources available to everyone via Creative Commons.
Economist Intelligence Unit (vendor presentation)
The EIU has a range of free and paid resources including free country analysis at www.eiu.com/public. They also sell individual parts of reports online.
Open access
MaryAnne Keenan from CSU spoke about research into open access publishing by university staff (ie, how many publish in gold or green open access journals). Some libraries have paid the publication fees of academics so they can publish in gold open access journals (ie, fully open, with no paid option), but this seems to be decreasing due to budget constraints. University policies also have a big effect. It appears that the ERA project (Excellence in Research in Australia, http://www.arc.gov.au/era/), which aimed to capture citation details, has had a bad effect on OA, as the citation rather than the full article seems to have been the priority. (She said they thought it would drive OA through repositories, but it has stimulated ‘dark access’ instead – called ‘darchives’).
Doing more with less (final panel discussion)
The final panel discussion was on doing more with less. Sarah Houghton-Jan argued that you couldn’t do more, you could only do different. You can ask ‘Do you want this, or this?’ You have to focus on stopping doing things.
Someone talked about the Trojan Mouse approach – you start small, and then if there is buy-in you can start to talk about the costs of the full approach. Some recommended outsourcing, eg, of interlibrary loans.
Gary Conroy-Cooper (from LINC Tasmania – Learning and Information Network Centres, http://www.booksellerandpublisher.com.au/files/ALN190608.pdf) asked how much the ‘L-word’ was restricting us when invention is needed. (He had said before that the word ‘library’ didn’t relate to the headspace their potential users were in.) This comment (while not very relevant to the discussion) got the most response of anything I heard. MaryAnne Keenan said that it doesn’t have to restrict us unless we allow it to; someone said that after the reorganization of Auckland libraries the campaign ‘1 city, 55 libraries, all yours’ was a great hit. Melinda Stewart, the corporate librarian on the panel said that her official title is ‘information specialist’, but says that when she uses the L-word people know what she means. MaryAnne also said that not all library schools have ‘library’ in the name, which makes them hard to find, and gives uncertainty about what they teach. She remembered the late 70s and early 80s when there was a move away from the word ‘libraries’ but few people related to the alternatives such as ‘learning centres’ (and, as I remember, ‘resource centres’). Others said we have a good ‘brand’ and could be in danger of losing recognition with a name change. A recent OCLC report commented on perceptions of librarians, and found that people had confidence in them, especially in the economic crisis.
The program and later the papers should be available online at http://www.information-online.com.au/.
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