VALA

I was extremely lucky to be able to attend a whole day at this year’s VALA Conference. I am a member of Health Libraries Inc and they bought a shared registration to distribute amongst its members. I scored big time by being able to attend for the whole second day – the Wednesday. Here are my notes:

Schubert Foo – National Library of Singapore

Think of the library as an information concierge.

Brick vs Click (Physical vs Online)

He discussed that Singapore library users are very similar to ours in that they want access now without having to do all the steps in between. Instant access is taken for granted – if its not on the net it doesn’t exist for them. Therefore they are trying to delve into the spaces of their users to connect them to resources that users need for whatever purpose, in any format – anywhere!

Bookjetty.com (similar to Amazon??) But instead of having the option to buy the book you can see holdings from libraries and link users back to the library webpage). This all revolves around inter-connectivity which the library can provide through many of the Web 2.0 technologies.

They also do things like make their physical exhibitions virtual so that they can be enjoyed for many more years to come, once the physical exhibit has changed.

SMS Reference Service (Singaporean’s are very tech savvy).

Reference point – so much info sent in regards to a query. Books, journals, pay peer view, tailor made (like look at Chapter 7), where to find the book in the library etc. Then you evaluate the service and the queries are stored and can be re-used and histories are kept.

Google – like in maps they have information that is connected from the National Library. (Like run you cursor over a statue in town and info box from library pops up). Just another way they are connecting with users and bringing them back to the library via the online world.

Vendor Presentations

I was there for the vendor presentations and attended the following. All were interesting, many irrelevant to my workplace but was also going to comment on how great the trade exhibition was. Awesome, lots of freebies, so many different vendors – just great!

Ovid SP – Brief overview of the new system.
ProQuest – Newspapers overview (free two month trials available).
Softlink – Online e-reference system. LMS looked great with ILL forms, Lit search
forms and Chat embedded. Lots of customisation options.
E-book Library – Great demand driven option (but how $). Swinburne uses this model.
Oxford – Language dictionaries online. Oxford Reference Online available through the Electronic Resources Australia Consortium.
DA – Portable reader/writer ILIAD.

Many vendors mentioned that they can collaborate with COUNTER – the statistical package.

Concurrent Sessions

Garry Hall

Clinician’s knowledge network (QLD’s CHC). CKN also run by HCN.

Other states:
CIAP (NSW) EPOCH (Tas) CROC (NT)
HIAP (ACT) SALUS (SA) CIAO (WA)

CKN has Up-to-date. Total cost is $3.5million per year which work out to be 90cents per head of population. Single licenses for institutions for other databases can also be run through the CKN page.

Important to remember the QLD Health is very different to what we have here in Victoria. Public Hospitals are more centrally run. The libraries across the state use a shared drive to store training materials.

They are also involved with QULOC and other collaborations to maximise CKN. Additional products that they are looking at introducing include PEMSOFT and Map of Medicine. They also trial other products.

Like CHC it is an established an integral resource.

Barbara Kirkham

WRMS: Work Request Management System

Allows the SLQ to track a request through all the stages of its life span. The system connects with reports, statistics, email, word document templates and archives requests. A single integrated system for all departments across the library which also calculates the total time it has taken to complete a request.

It enhances the organisations ability to log and track requests. There is also a 12 hour time limit per month per client.

Heather Jenks

E-resources grew but full text downloads decreased? Why?

They used EnCompass (a federated search engine) then the tool was withdrawn as it ceased vendor support.

So, they used Google Scholar as the federated search engine. Full text downloads rapidly decreased as Google Scholar does not have all publisher and aggregators information available (ie. no commercial publishers). The library catalogue also wasn’t available to search so stats went down.

Then they instigated a new federated search engine (or multi-search as they call it) called 360 search. Stats have once again sky rocketed.

Just interesting to compare stats whilst using a freely available tool compared to properly integrating one and tailoring it to your system and libraries resources.

Michael Geist – Canada

Internet 2008…

We still grapple with the same issues after 10 years (filtering, policies, offensive content etc.)

Technorati – a blog search engine (over 100,000,000 blogs)

The power of people. Like Facebook where a group formed opposing Canadian Copyright Law. The policy was reviewed due to the 40,000 members complaining, sending letters etc.

Podcasting lectures – which not only allows students who missed a lecture to catch up but is attracting new students to Universities because they can hear what they are in for before they arrive and are choosing particular universities over others because they like the lectures presented.

Postsecret (blog) – A blog where you can tell your secret to the world through art. 250,000 posts in 2 years. Since then, books and art shows have arisen all from this one blog!

Videos (like Star Wreck) freely available to download, but then as it was so good, people bought DVD, merchandise and the license was sold.

You tube – like the professional season of “Lonelygirl” and the power it provided. Bigger ratings than TV.

Find it! Rip it! Mix it! Share it! Come and get it!

Flickr – with creative commons (also look up general creative commons website)

Books freely available under “cc” – like his book! In the interest: future of Canadian Copyright Law. But people read it, then want it so buy it. Then they buy other books by same publishers etc…

Encyclopaedia of life: cataloguing all life forms (10 years project – 9 years left.)

Librivix – Audio version of Project Guttenberg. Volunteers read these books and upload the audio.

MITOpenCourseWare – course notes, syllabus, podcasts, videocasts, powerpoints etc.

Digitisation projects (like Project Guttenberg, Google Book Search, Alouette?)

Open Source Software (like Firefox, Apache etc.)

All these enable creativity…..

Internet 2018…

Four pillars….

1. Access/connectivity: Broadband for all, muni wifi. Spyware, net neutrality, spam. We must ensure that we all have access and the ability to participate, all in an equal fashion.

2. Enhance participation: transparency, trust, privacy, domain names, intermediary liability issues (like he is getting sued for something someone wrote on his blog about someone else!)

3. Copyright: Anti-circumvention, fait use, term extension, orphan works, wipo.

4.Content: Open access, digitisation, crown copyright, public broadcasting.

The future of the internet….is in our hands!

WOW! Awesome speaker, so much more to find out about!