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Events Archive

The page contains a summary of various Information-Professional-type events I’ve attended. The most recent of these will be summarised on the blog as they happen, but this archive also has details of events I attended prior to starting the blog, in case anyone is considering going to an equivalent conference or training session themselves and wants another perspective on what they are like.

• Repository Preservation Infrastructure
  Otherwise known as REPRISE (which set the tone for an acronym heavy day), this event was organised by the OGF Repositories Group and WissGrid, and held in London in December 09 at the Gloucester Hotel - the kind of place where the staff can guess your annual income to the pound even before you're fully through the doors (which a nice man in a ridculous hat will open for you), and treat you with disdain or fawning sycophancy depending on how you measure up...
  
  This was a workshop to "discuss digital repositories and their specific requirements for / as preservation infrastructure, as well as their role within the preservation environment," according to the blurb. Although I have some experience of sitting in darkened rooms discussing metadata with Digital Repository people, it's an area I wanted to know more about in preperation for my new job as the LIFE-SHARE Project Officer (especially as the emphasis appeared to be on preservation). However, I found it was waaaay over my head.
  
  Although this wasn't quite apparent from the description (although I should have done some more research before booking) it was basically aimed at people who were actually BUILDING repositories. There was a lot of technical detail, discussions of points I didn't understand, and serious looking men making notes on laptops (or, in the case of one of the speakers I was sitting next to, Twittering the whole time). 'Loosely-coupled verb-based architectures', 'interoperability framework', all that stuff was largely beyond me. But there were some interesting points which I could grasp, such as Kevin Ashley of the ULCC Digital Archives asking if we'd considered the 'green' aspect of storing digital data - he mentioned environmental audits as a way to ensure Institutions didn't pay too high an environmental price over a long period of time. John Kunze of the California Digital Library made the most sense to me - his talk, entitled 'Preservation is not a place', argued that preservation should be decentralised, with permanent digital objects stored and accessed by what he called 'disposable systems'. His point being that the content was important, while the software (and to an extend the hardware) we use to get to that content tends to be more ephemeral. File systems, he said, work well. Files and folders are fast, plentiful, stable, and interoperable. We should exploit this - build the system around existing files, rather than building a system which forces us to use new file-types. He describes curation stewardship as a 'relay' - digital objects shouldn't have to go to one place to be preserved, they should be able to move without losing integrity. Curation shouldn't be a single act of preserving something, but rather a set of practices to maintain and add value to digital objects into the future. I found all of this very interesting, and John clearly knows what he's talking about - the coding he's developed is being used by Google Books.

  Overall, then, I'd reccomend this workshop if you're working with repositories at a very advanced and technical level, but be prepared for most of it to sail over your head if you aren't... The event was part of the 5th International Digital Curation Conference, so something similar be repeated in 2010.

• CILIP Graduate Open Day
  The CILIP Graduate Day held at CILIP in London in October 2009 was another really positive event. If you get the chance to be involved in one of these in the future (and there may soon be some regional versions) then I'd urge you to do so.
  
  The day was aimed at newly qualified professionals, people just entering the field, aspiring librarians - and people who are just wondering whether libraries are for them. It went very well, with loads of positive comments from people who learned a huge amount in a small space of time - as well as presentations, it featured speed-networking, panel discussions, and of course an excellent opportunity to meet and chat with fellow new professionals.
  
  For more on this, you can read my own blog post here, Emma Illingworth's post here, and Jo Alcock's here.
  
• CILIP New Professionals Conference
  The CILIP New Professionals Conference, held at London MET in July 2009, was a brilliant event. It was a real call-to-arms for new professionals in the world of libraries, with the emphasis on providing out-standing service and dispelling some of the old myths about librarians and their trade. It was one of those events (it being the first of its kind for the CILIP Career Development Group) which reveals a real need – a need for a platform to talk about the issues relevant to New Professionals, a need to share concerns and ideas with others.
  
  I was proud and delighted that my presentation on and around library stereotypes ( available here in PDF format ) was voted Best Paper by the delegates, and I got a huge amount out of a lot of the other presentations too. The whole conference was the catalyst for a huge number of other opportunities which have since opened up to me, so I’m very grateful to the work of Maria Cotera (President of the Career Development Group) and Chris Rhodes (New Professionals Coordinator) and all the others from CDG and the Diversity Group for making the day such a success.
  
  For others' accounts of the Conference, see accounts from speakers Joeyanne Libraryanne here and Emma Illingworth here, and from observers Woodsiegirl here, and Digitalist here, and a CILIP perspective here.
  
  
• HERON User-Group Days
  I would recomend the HERON User-Group Days to anyone working in the field of digitising from print. If you are a Higher Education Institution who digitises under the CLA Licence, then the HuGs are a fantastic source of information, case-studies, and networking. They are often open to non HERON-members (if you are already a HERON member there's really no excuse not to go...) so try and come along to one if you think the schedule of presentations looks interesting.
  
• CILIP Copyright Training
  I have attended two CILIP copyright training courses: Advanced Copyright and Digital Copyright, both taught by Paul Pedley.
  
  Advanced Copyright I paid for myself, and was generally impressed by. We covered a vast amount of information, and Paul had good examples to illustrate his points. The course over-ran so I missed the end (I had a train to catch) but I came away knowing a lot more than I did before. ~
  
  Digital Copyright I didn't rate so highly. I don't know if it was just because it's a subject I knew quite a lot about already, but I don't feel I got that much out of it, for two reasons - firstly, many questions we had went unanswered (sometimes completely ignored) and secondly, the course again massively over-ran. As someone who travels down from York for CILIP courses, I don't have a huge amount of flexibility in that situation - I have to get the train I'm booked on. In this case, I missed more than a third of the slides, and I'm told by colleagues at Leeds that Pedley's courses pretty much always overrun. I don't want to disparage anyone who puts a lot of work into their craft, has a huge amount of knowledge, and manages to make a dry subject like copyright relatively interesting. But, the fact is, if the courses always overrun they should either be changed or increased in length, so people like me can get their money's worth. My employer paid for this one, and I still felt pretty short-changed by it... So my advice if you attend any of the copyright courses is, ignore the stated end time and book a much later train, or you may miss some key information.