Welcome to the Talis Library Platform News - Autumn Conference Special Edition.

An Autumn Conference Special Edition was a really good idea for this issue for two reasons. Firstly, October/November isa very busy period for library oriented conferences - culminating from a Talis point of view in Talis Insight in Birmingham on November 6-7th. Secondly, the editorial team have been either on the road visiting and/or speaking at these conferences, or helping bringing together the inspiring programme for Insight. So I can only apologise for the lack of some of our regular favourites such as Meet the API & Meet the Team - they will be there in upcoming issues.

As this busy conference period draws to a close, we have brought together reviews of some of the conferences that have taken place, both in the UK and further afield. I hope you will find all of them of interest.

Having said all of that, we have found space to bring you an overview on what Bernd Wunsch, our August 2007 Meet the Developer subject, has been doing with the NIAS Portal and the Talis Library Platform.

If you are new to the newsletter sign up, pass it on and tell your colleagues about it and join us in creating a community that shares, innovates and learns from each other. If you would like to contribute an article or offer comments please email richard.wallis@talis.com.

Richard Wallis, Editor

Internet Librarian International

London October 8-9th

Richard Wallis attended the first day of this conference, which opened with a forthright call to action from SirsiDynix's Stephen Abram. If we are still worrying what to do about Library 2.0 we are too late. He came out with some interesting facts and figures, including the one that of the high school generation, only 20% learn textually, the rest learn visually. Take a look at the interfaces we are trying to deliver today - they are all text oriented. Stephen's general theme was that us library folks need to get on and do something about exposing and delivering library services in this new networked world, where our users are in learning environments, FaceBook, or Youtube - if we don't someone else will do it for us - the Googles and the Microsofts of this world.

Also on the programme were, former member of Talis and now Consultant, Ken Chad and Dave Pattern from the University of Huddersfield. Ken gave us an overview of the library systems market and how that needed to change. People should move on from the old ways of thinking. Dave provided an insight in to the results of his OPAC survey and how they reflected on the enhancements he has made to the Huddersfield system.

Kitty Pope & Barbra Galik of Alliance Second Life Libraries talked about the initiatives that they have been undertaking in the Second Life virtual world, unfortunately their demonstration was spoiled by the terrible networking in the conference hotel which I suspect did little to dispel the fears of the Second Life sceptics. For a conference with Internet in its name, the poor Internet connectivity and lack of power points for audience laptops was very disappointing. Apparently the conference is moving to a different hotel next year - let's hope the technology improves with the move.

Featured Developer - Update

Bernd Wunsch

Since being the subject of Meet the Developer in Issue 2, Bernd has not been idle. He has been working on AsiaPortal the new web presence for the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies which was launched in October. This excellent site draws together all things Asian, from Academic Resources including books and journals, through to live news feeds and relevant events in the Nordic region.

One section I find really fascinating on the site is the Newspapers page. Although, because of licensing, you need to log in to view the contents of individual newspapers, the page uses the front covers to link you through to them. Asian newspapers certainly do look more colourful than I'm used to.

As well as launching an impressive looking site, Bernd has made significant use of the Talis Library Platform to deliver the Book Search section of AsiaPortal. Bernd initially provided 33,000 MARC records in XML form which, once his Platform Store was set up and the XML had been parsed to clean up a couple of issues, only took a few minutes to load and be indexed one Friday afternoon. By the following Monday he had completed the work using the Platform APIs to embed the service into the portal. We are always saying how simple it is to implement on top of the Platform APIs, Bernd is certainly good at demonstrating this.

Inform, Educate, Entertain – Whose Role is it Anyway?

PLA Conference, Glasgow, 10-12 October 2007

This year’s CILIP PLA Conference explored the multiple roles of the public library through a number of themes such as Quality Services for Young People, and Libraries and Reading. The city of Glasgow, which has been undergoing a pretty much constant process of regeneration since the 1970s, provided a fitting backdrop for a public library service grappling with issues around showcase central libraries, community engagement, and how to bring young people into the library.

One of the most exciting areas of public libraries right now is the number of capital projects involving new buildings and major refurbishments. In Northern Ireland, for example, a series of modern accessible spaces has been created throughout the province as a result of a major capital programme since 2002. During the conference, the Public Library Building Awards for 2007 were presented, and judges saw evidence of “a developed sense of the user in building design” and “a resolution of reflection and activity”. Personalised services and connected approach were identified as significant trends. Tony Durcan, Head of Newcastle Libraries, reminded the audience that in the era of the community library, content is still important and public libraries have impressive collections that can only really be housed in large libraries. Later in the conference, he highlighted that people come to Newcastle from all over the world to look at the Harney (a key figure in the 19th century Chartist movement) Collection in Newcastle. Durcan wondered how many more of these collections could be made more visible.

The British Library are investing in Web 2.0 initiatives, using wikipedia to give their readers a voice in their collections, for example. Maybe they’ve already been rewarded for this step into what their speaker described as a “scary space”, as recently, to their amazement, a “Save the BL Group” spontaneously appeared on Facebook, with 4000 members almost overnight. They have spent £75K with JISC on how the Google generation wants to do research in their “Next Generation” project.
Liverpool and Glasgow ran a joint workshop on their respective local history collections, and of the explosion in popularity of family history research. Both speakers highlighted a shift away from paper-based resources, with established databases and significant digitisation activities underway.

The Reading Agency (TRA) is a dynamic third sector organisation collaborating extensively with public libraries. In March 2008, as a part of their youth-centred “Fulfilling their potential” programme, they will be launching a website for young people consisting exclusively of content created by young people. The following day, the director of TRA, Miranda McKearney, called for a national platform for library catalogues, possibly from the forthcoming MLA IT Strategy, reminding the audience of the opportunity that the 2008 Year of Reading presents to public libraries.

Joanna Prior from Penguin argued that book retailers have yet to grasp the enormous desire for shared reading experiences, with the phenomenon of reviews, blogs, book clubs, book festivals et al over the past decade. The author, Kate Mosse, said that the Orange Prize, which she founded, had uncovered a broad need for someone to tell people what’s out there to read. Miranda McKearnan urged libraries to exploit their “if you liked that, you’ll love this” strength, and underlined how this could be harvested, to promote the backlist of a prominent author, for example.

Podcast of the Month

A conversation with LibLime's Joshua Ferraro

Joshua Ferraro President, Technology for LibLime discusses Open Source library systems in this Talking with Talis Podcast. The Open Source alternative to the traditional model of library system purchase has attracted much interest over recent months. Joshua dispels a few myths and clarifies what it is like for a library to go OS.

Access 2007 - Techtonic Technologies

Victoria, BC, Canada - 10-13 October 2007

A stimulating and interesting conference, opened on the first day by a keynote from Jessamyn West, of librarian.net, delivered an entertaining opening to the first day, punctuated with clips from the UK Channel 4 TV show, The IT Crowd. Her theme was that, we can't describe this Web 2.0 stuff but we know it when we see it. Possibly the role of the library is to bridge the gap - on the one hand shout at the technologists, calling their bluff on the difficulties of providing technology only via five year plans, or that connecting remote libraries is difficult - whilst on the other hand introducing the public to simple wonders it can improve their lives with.

My presentation on the Talis Platform appeared on the first day - video of the session and the slides I used are available to view. Other presentations of note included Mark Leggott of UPEI, who became the butt of the conference running joke (his picture and the fact he joined UPEI last year, appeared in practically every presentation), gave an interesting overview of the Fedora/Drupal/Moodle based repository system that thy have assembled at UPEI which is offering broad services for ingesting and making available all sorts of data - a refreshing mention of the benefits of semantic web technologies, through Fedora. [video] The closing Keynote came from OCLC's Roy Tennant with an overview of OCLC's intentions with their Grid - an interesting approach to opening up the APIs to WorldCat services. An initiative worth watching. [video] These are just a few of the excellent presentations, there are videos and slides available for most of the rest available from the conference web site.

Internet Librarian

Monterey, USA - 29-31 October 2007

A good conference, in a similar style to its International Cousin in London - some of the speaker highlights being Lee Rainie, Pew Internet & American Life Project, providing a mass of statistics about Internet user types and their activities. A great reminder about the world that we are all operating in to set the scene for the rest of the conference. The final day of the conference coincided with Halloween, so pointy-hat and World of Warcraft replica costume did not seem at all out of place as Elizabeth Lane Lawley, Director, Rochester Institute of Technology, Lab for Social Computing, took the stage for the closing Keynote. Her romp through the way gaming is a major part of her, her family's and many of her friends' and associates' lives included a pretty good hatchet-job on the inadequacies of Second Life when compared with World of Warcraft.  Her serious point being that all children and adults are motivated by the things that make games popular - prizes, recognition, challenges etc., and we should be looking to be making successful real life more like games rather than the other way around.  A great close to the conference.

Third International Conference on Universal Digital Library (ICUDL)

Pittsburgh, USA - 2-4 November 2007

The Universal Digital Library's Million Book Project has made significant progress with the Chinese already scanning well over a million books, which are supplemented by 400,000 from India, and 40,000 from Egypt. In total nearly 300 million pages have been scanned. Much of the conference was concerned with copyright and how it influenced the scanning work. The subject of orphan works, those still theoretically in copyright but not being published, is of high importance.

The slogan of the Universal Digital Library Million Book Project is "free to read for anyone anywhere anytime", and the work being undertaken is already showing benefits in countries where books for schools can be a problem.

Talis Insight 07

Birmingham UK - 6-7 November 2007

Well over 400 people congregated in the Hilton Metropole Hotel for a packed conference of speakers and workshops in four tracks. From Euan Semple's opening Keynote, showing how social networking tools can change an organisation, to the lucky winner of an iPhone at the end.

It is always difficult to report on an event run by your own organisation, so I won't try. I will leave it up to others. Owen Stevens on his blog Overdue Ideas, did an excellent live blog of the conference. Although having said that Rob Styles on our own Panlibus Blog also produced excellent coverage of some of the sessions: 1, 2, 3, 4.

Finally I can recommend this short video (2:56mins) , produced by our Marketing team that will give you a feel of the conference. Most of the conference sessions were also recorded, so keep your eye on the conference web page where they will be posted over the next couple of weeks.

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