9:30 - 10:00am

Registration, tea and coffee

10:00 - 10:15am

Welcome – Opening Session
Dave Errington
CEO, Talis

Enabling Seamless Access: Developing Distributed Shared Services
Elaine Fulton
Director, Scottish Library and Information Council

Breaking through the Walls - A World Class Library
Martyn Wade
National Librarian, National Library of Scotland

With its origins going back to 1689 the National Library of Scotland's collections are world class. However national libraries are about more than their collections, and with its innovative strategy and initiatives the National Library aims to become a world leader in ensuring that everyone can explore, enjoy and learn from its service, collections and expertise.

Small but Perfectly Formed! - The Reality of Innovations and Transformation in East Renfrewshire's Library and Information Services
Liz McGettigan
Libraries and Information Service Manager, East Renfrewshire Council

Our role in the world must be defined not only in terms of our might, but also by our willingness to lead, to serve, and to share.

Customer Success, in all Shapes and Sizes
Talis

Customer success comes in all shapes and sizes, what this looks like and means to libraries varies dramatically. Talis has worked with libraries for many years helping them in their quest for service improvements. Delving further in to the conference themes, we will present a picture of planned product developments, service delivery and its impact. Focusing upon customer success and putting the user first, this session will include stories that encompass major implementations, converged services; institution merges and consortia initiatives.

Migration, merger and beyond – migrating to Talis in the context of a merger between Bell College of Technology and the University of Paisley
Barbara Catt
Librarian (Hamilton & Dumfries), University of Paisley

Bell College of Technology and The University of Paisley merged on 1st August to form a new university with campuses in Ayr, Dumfries, Hamilton and Paisley. Barbara Catt outlines Bell College’s migration to Talis prior to merger, draws lessons from the experience, and looks to the future integration of the two Talis systems into one.

The Next Generation of Public Private Partnerships
Jackie Smith
Lead Consultant, BT Global Services

An exploration of the new and innovative approaches being adopted within Public Private Partnerships.

Access to Excellence
David Lightfoot
Acting Head of Cultural Services, Lancashire Libraries

Lancashire Libraries share their experiences of how they are addressing community engagement and improving access to wider local authority services through their customer access strategy. The session will feature two stories demonstrating the approach to rural service provision in Cumbria and models being developed in Lancashire, followed by a focus on the use of technology in Lancashire which involves libraries in widening access and providing support for community social care and community health workers.

Enabling Access to Excellence - Talis Engage
Karen Reece
Sales Manager, Talis

Community – it’s what libraries and local authorities are all about. With a strategic focus on strengthening communities through joined-up services and community engagement, Karen Reece will present a new and dramatically different community information solution – Talis Engage. Opening up new collaborative opportunities for citizens, libraries and local authorities, this session will demonstrate new ways of achieving excellence, through both service provision and citizen development.

9:30 - 10:00am

Registration, tea and coffee

10:00 - 10:30am

Consumer Public Policy, Just What Could and Should Be Done
Andy Kerr
The Shadow Minister for Health and Community Care

The challenge of modernising our public services is absolutely fundamental to building a better Scotland. Our public services provide a gateway to learning, development, community engagement and are the enabler of economic sustainability. As a member of the Scottish Parliament, Andy has served as the Minister for Finance and Public Services and is now the shadow Minister for Health and Community Care. This keynote presentation will focus on consumer public policy - what could and should be done, closing with an open question and answer session.

Football in Libraries - What would Carnegie Say? The Development of the Sighthill Library Youth Project
Francesca Brennan
Teenage Librarian, Sighthill Library

This presentation will illustrate how the staff team at Sighthill Library, together with a number of key partners, tackled challenging behaviour from young people by adopting an inclusive and ground-breaking approach to working with excluded children and teenagers in the library setting. It will cover some of the innovative and diversionary projects and behavioural management techniques, which won the team the Libraries Change Lives Award 2006, and show how the project has developed over the past 12 months.

Technology - Liberating Staff Time
John Dempster
Senior Librarian, Systems Co-ordinator, Highland Council

John Dempster reports on an innovative Highland Libraries project supported by the Scottish Executive Public Libraries Improvement Fund. Self-issue machines from 2CQR were deployed at six sites across the Highlands to extend service availability and to free up staff time, thus enhancing the support they could offer to the public. At each library, staff were working with partner agencies to target the needs of particular groups, supporting the Polish community at Inverness Library for example, and the local reading group at Tain Library. The lessons learned from this successful initiative are widely applicable.

Joining the Dots, The Elegance of Integrated Services - Talis Keystone
Andy Latham
Programme Manager, Talis

Successful integration is not a technical initiative, it is a business initiative backed up by IT. What does the phrase ‘elegant services’ mean to you? System changes, service changes and changes in people have resulted in disparate or partially connected services. How elegant is your end user experience? Andy Latham will showcase real examples of how libraries are breaking through barriers, joining the dots and radically improving their service experience.

PPP in Fife - A Refurbishment & A Brand New Library!
Sally Joice
Support Services Librarian, Fife Council Libraries

We were doing well to get a refurbished library in one of the West Fife villages, but a brand new library? Remember those? The Eastern expansion of Dunfermline (DEX as the local paper has named it) has a new centre. The Duloch schools and community campus houses a primary school, a special needs school, a sports centre and a brand new library. Not always simple, often not straightforward, we have now opened. The Carnegie Children’s Book Festival is to be one of our first events (25/26 August), thus gaining extra publicity for an already much vaunted facility.

Higher Education: The Future in the Highlands & Islands
Gillian Anderson
Librarian, UHI Millennium Institute

The nature of the Highlands & Islands of Scotland is significant in shaping the provision of Higher Education in the region. Gillian Anderson, the UHI Millennium Institute's first Librarian will present a flavour of the remit and challenges of developing a distributed academic library service for Scotland’s newest university-to-be.

East Lothian Council have been operating successfully with smartcards for some time. Alison Hunter will outline the Library Service's involvement in the roll out of smartcards, how this was achieved and the benefits to the service of being involved in the project. She will also talk about the work currently being done with Talis to test smartcard functionality.

Searching for the Next Generation
Dan Mullineux,
Technical Lead, Talis

Looking beyond the OPAC, just how good should your library search be? While some libraries question and debate what a dream OPAC is, Dan Mullineux explores next generation search without being bounded by the limitations of an OPAC. With early development underway, this presentation will show rethinking library search in action.

Reaching Beyond the Library Web Site: The Role of the Talis Platform
Dr Paul Miller
Technology Evangelist, Talis

We hear a lot, rightly, about ways in which libraries are continually evolving the services that they offer in their physical buildings and via their websites. In a world in which other sources of information clamour ever-more loudly for attention, libraries must also work together in order to project their value out onto the 'open' web, delivering meaningful and compelling facets of the library service at the point of need, rather than requiring potential beneficiaries to actively visit the library's own buildings or websites.

In this presentation, we'll look at those opportunities, and explore some of the ways in which the Talis Platform gives libraries the capabilities and the reach to deliver compelling services, individually and (far more powerfully) together.

Open forum - Question and Answer Session