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VALA 2006 Report

Page history last edited by John Laurie 11 years, 7 months ago

In February 2006 with the assistance of the ITSIG sponsorship I was able to attend VALA 2006. VALA, the biennial conference held in Melbourne, focuses on current issues and new trends in technology for library and information professionals. VALA 2006 had the theme of ‘Connecting with users’. Speakers at the conference presented on a diverse range of topics and included a range of international speakers for the plenary sessions. The concurrent sessions represented a number of different strands and focussed on mostly practical examples and experiences from practitioners in a range of institutions including academic, public and state libraries. While most presentations focused on Australian experience and projects, there were several sessions on current projects in New Zealand. At thirty minutes for each presentation, including time for questions, the presentations were brief, and often a quick skim over the highlights. For most presentations the full papers and podcast can be found at

http://vala.org.au/vala2006/prog2006.htm

 

 

Keynote speaker Sandy Payette, leader of digital library research and development projects in the Information Science programme at Cornell University, offered an interesting session on technology evolving with user needs. She opened with a discussion of the generational differences in the use, acceptance and integration of technology, and noted library and information professionals should have an awareness of the upcoming generation of information users and their expectations, and implications for strategic directions. She pointed to the millennials (those born after 1982) as an example of a generation who experience online collaboration early, have technology woven into play, and link social interaction and study in their use of technology (blogging, IM). From this she suggested some trends (service oriented architecture, web 2.0, semantic web) and a move away from monolithic applications, which may enable user participation and integration between social and scholarly communication networks. Key concepts included the notion of services (individual resources and applications rather than one package), the architecture of participation, the enabling of researchers to build new information units and enabling processes of research. A current Cornell project, Fedora, was used as an example.

 

 

Two other keynote speakers, Professor Narayanaswamy Balakrishnan (Universal Digital Library) and Daniel Clancy (Google Print) discussed their respective projects. Daniel Clancy ran through the rationale behind Google Print, partnerships with libraries and publishers; and said one of the intentions for the Google Print project is that it acts a catalyst for more digitisation efforts. He listed issues for the project as selection, archival quality versus access, accessibility, copyright, preservation, other digital efforts and community impact. Much of the Google Print project is well documented and he fielded a number of questions from the floor. Professor Narayanaswamy Balakrishnan, from the Indian Institute of Science, spoke on the Universal Digital Library, a project that began in 2001 and has so far scanned about 600,000 books, and will probably have one million scanned by the end of 2007. The project involves international collaboration including texts from USA, China, Egypt and Australia. The aim is to connect users with digital content. In addition to online access they have experimented with a mobile ‘kiosk’ - a bus prints texts on demand. The UDL project set out to digitise whatever it could. He discussed issues around quality (the aim was to be ‘good enough’; they did not want ‘best to be the enemy of good’), copyright (and suggested a way of compensation), the challenges the project has faced, and the type of research it has triggered.

 

 

In the concurrent sessions I attended many of the technologies and trends discussed were familiar and have been in use for a while. The sessions focused on ways these were being used in library environments and some of the ways that libraries were working to ensure that technology and content provided through libraries were understood by library staff and effectively used by library users. Blogs, wikis and RSS featured in several sessions - Sean Volke from Thomson Gale gave an overview of blogs, wikis and RSS; and Sandra Jeffries and Corey Wallis from the University of Southern Queensland Library talked about the use of RSS and an in-house blog (known as the reading room) for library staff professional development. The project aimed to address gaps in IT knowledge, experiment with new technology before offering it to customers, and as a useful aid to disseminate relevant professional reading. The project has lead to the establishment of faculty librarian blogs for academic staff, future plans include a blog for information to students, and the investigation of RSS feeds from databases.

 

 

Many of the sessions discussed ways of training and developing skills in use of technology by both front line staff and the communities the technology was delivered to. Jo Manuel, from PLAIN Central Services, South Australia, presented a session on a pilot traineeship scheme that placed IT trainees in rural libraries, with the aim of assisting local library users to improve their skills to access online services (Get Connected @ Your Library project). While the project was aimed at assisting the local community, in some cases it had the outcome of up-skilling library staff; in addition it drew in a different group of library customers. For the local communities, the most popular skills taught were use of email, shopping on the internet, and the use of various Microsoft applications. Barry Nunn from the State Library of NSW ran through a project that has been developing services to the 264 branches of 97 library services in the state since 1997. The first part of the project focused on connectivity and the development of infrastructure. In 2001 their project ensured a high speed link to at least 70% of the rural communities. The following work has been on providing content; through using a consortium they are providing a number of databases to the library services. They have developed an ongoing training programme offered to staff in the branch libraries covering topics such as browsers, search engines and directories, search strategies and databases.

 

 

One of the more entertaining sessions was the panel discussion Top Ten Technology Trends, chaired by Anne Beaumont, and featuring Richard Giles who presented off site. Richard Giles gave an overview of various trends: Flickr, mashups, Myspace, Skype, gaming, podcasting, the creation of virtual worlds. Other sessions included Picture NSW from Judith Peppard and Derek Whitehead, and the digitisation of heritage maps from Peter (Mc Grath)? and Shirley Firth of the State Library of Victoria. About 750 delegates attended VALA this year; the conference offered a great opportunity to hear about a number of Australasian libraries and library practices, and the ideas and professional practice of information professionals in a variety of areas of work.

 

 

I would like to thank ITSIG and Christchurch City Libraries for providing support to attend VALA.

 

 

Amanda Brown Christchurch City Libraries.

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