Three SLA Europe members attended Internet Librarian International in October 2009. We've got reports from them all giving a real insight into what went on at this event.
The first is from Emma. Emma was one of the Early Career Conference Award winners from 2008, now after a year's travelling she's settling into her role at the British Standards Institute. A big thank you to SLA
Europe, for without this prize I would certainly not have been able to
attend, and it was a fascinating two days. Delegates
attended from many sectors - public libraries and education to
financial institutions and government bodies. Attendees were from
countries as close to home as France and Italy, to more distant lands
such as India and Qatar – a wonderful example of the diversity of the
Library, Information and Knowledge Professions. I
gained insight into many issues facing our profession, but two key
messages rang loudest for me. The first was the issue of copyright, as
raised by our keynote speaker Cory Doctorow: a journalist, blogger and
science fiction writer. I have just entered into this profession and
have a long way to go before I am budget holder, but his speech raised
a lot of issues that will no doubt be of particular concern to me when
I do have to take financial decisions. The
second message I took away was the apparent lack of take-up by users of
the more complex web 2.0 technology, and the possible reasons for
this. All of the seminars I attend on this issue concluded that their
user groups didn’t particularly want to blog, or wiki, tag, review or
chat. They wanted to find what they needed quickly and easily, happy
that any correspondence to be conducted by ‘old fashioned’ email. So
back to our keynote speaker Cory Doctorow. He talked passionately about
how restrictions on electronic content by the big publishing houses, be
it a novel or scientific paper, are having a profound effect on the
ease and rightful dissemination of information. Large publishing
companies, he says, are controlling that access through copyright and
this goes against the “information revolution” which is based on the
expansion of information, not the contraction. His
love of books was apparent as he told us about the relationship he
builds with a book, as many of us do. Once we have bought a book, it
is ours, we can do with it as we please and hold on to it as long as we
wish. We are the reader, we put the book on our shelves and admire
it. It’s a done deal. With
ebooks this is not so. With an ebook we are a user not a reader, we
have been granted permission to read a book - as long as we pay our
subscription to the publishing house. There is no physical object to
sit on our shelf, to admire or build a relationship with, and once our
subscription is finished the publisher removes it from our collection
as if never there at all. A tad sentimental? Perhaps, but a sentiment
a lot of people share. This
is clearly a complex issue that is not going to go away but become
increasingly pertinent as more and more institutions switch over to
e-content. What users want and what the publishers are prepared to let
them have will be an ongoing battle – and at what price? The
complexity deepens if information from outside your country as foreign
copyright laws will certainly be different to your own. Library
leaders will have to develop legal knowledge to ensure they are getting
the best deal and understand what they are entitled to at home and
abroad. As
an IP I often feel under a certain amount of pressure to be fully web
2.0 literate - to maintain a blog, comment on others’ blogs, tag
anything that has a www at the beginning, and generally be a ‘web
whizz’ - it was therefore a relief to me to discover that perhaps I
don’t have to be! I
attended a number of seminars looking at Web 2.0 and its uses within
academic libraries, particularly the University of Leicester, Singapore
Management University and The Norwegian University of Science and
Technology. The
universities had introduced Web 2.0 technologies into their university
catalogues and teaching materials. This included encouraging students
to write and comment on blogs, use RSS feeds, wikis, actively tag
content and contribute book reviews. The most adventurous of these
studies was from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology who
developed an iphone application by which users can search their library
catalogue, reserve items and even, in the future, loan out items on
their phone. However,
these institutions all found that students didn’t maintain their blogs,
didn’t comment on each others, didn’t engage in chatrooms and didn’t
use the iphone application. As Rajen Munoo from Singapore Management
University put it, “in the end students just want emails and to be told
what to do”. This
lack of engagement online could be for many reasons. A lot of what
might be discussed in a chatroom is discussed in a classroom. Many
students, particularly undergraduates, may not feel confident or
knowledgeable enough to comment on the work of others. Creating and
maintaining a blog, reading and commenting on the blogs of others takes
a vast amount of time. Helle
Lauridsen from Serial Solutions in Denmark agreed with this. She made
the point that ten years ago we had only a few websites on which to
search for information. Now we have hundreds, if not thousands – so
where do we start our search? For her, this is why federated searches
are becoming increasingly popular. The
research that she was involved with found that people want the easiest
information, not necessarily the best information, and summed this up
with a wonderful quote – “librarians like to search; users like to
find”. Despite
the fact that there wasn’t the expected uptake in these tools it is
wonderful to know that these studies are being carried out, that so
many universities are pushing boundaries, trying different technologies
for size and seeing how they fit. People are creatures of habit and
like to use the search tools they are comfortable with. Again to quote
Rajen Munoo from Singapore, we need to find ways of “enhancing the
traditional”. The likes of Singapore, Leicester and Norway are on
their way to doing just that, and once those enhancements become
tradition, new ones can be added. All
this discussion about Web 2.0 was in total contrast to the seminar with
Mark Douglas Frier from Cape Peninsula University of Technology in
South Africa. That was a real eye-opener for me as Mark told us how
many of his university students have never used a computer before
attending university and need to start from the very beginning – how to
switch it on, what the mouse is for, etc. Some of these students he
told us want to be computer programmers as they have heard there are
good jobs to be had in that field. To their credit, many of them are
programming within six months – testimony to the fact that where
there’s a will, there’s a way! And
so I have come to the conclusions that the controversy over copyright
and access will continue as we increasingly move over to e-content.
From what I can tell it may become quite a bitter battle between those
who believe information should be available to all and those who
believe it should be available to all who can afford it. And as for
2.0, that too will continue but in a much more positive way as forward
looking institutions carry on experimenting and trying new things to
the benefit of us all.
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