26 januari 2007
Frontiers in Information provision for the Bio- and environmental Sciences (FIBS)
Walking this crispy morning through Hyde Park and along the closed shops of Oxford Street. It was London for real. A very early rise, and a late return. All this effort to attend the one-day conference for information specialists.
This post has not the usual number of links since, most of it was written at the airport, on the plain or train.
The conference was organized by Roger Mills from Oxford University Library Services. A fully packed day with eleven presentations. Was it worth it?
Yes.
My main goal to attend this conference was to establish contacts with the people from Intute and look at the possibilities to make use of the Wageningen UR Library resources by Intute. Now we have moved all of our systems to the oracle database in XML format it must be easy to think of services that could harvest our electronic resources, either from the catalog or our repository. After these initial contacts, meeting the right people, it should possible to pull this through. Intute is seriously looking into these new ways of sharing and re-use of information. Let's call it web 2.0ish.
There were also two presentations from Intute on the program. One from the people working of the Health and Lifesciences (formerly Biome) part of Intute, on the new site that launched in July 2006. Quite impressive they have catalogued currently about 31,000 Web resources. Most interesting I found the fact that they are harvesting other web resources as well. That is what I came for. The second presentation was a more exploratory presentation, attempting to sketch a possible road ahead, and the opportunities that are presented by web2.0 type solutions, technology and user participation. Intute is really looking at it, and with personalization within My Intute and RSS feeds they are making inroads. The discussion which followed exposed quite some hesitation on web2.0/library2.0 in the audience. Mostly female information professionals, perhaps not yet the next gen generation in these positions yet.
The British Library launched earlier this month the UK PubMedCentral. A site which mirror NLM PubMedCentral, and is aimed at adding UK content. Since the launch the first 250 British papers have been archived. This UK content is subsequently mirrored to the USA PMC. The presentation by the engagement officer for UK-PMC was a bit confusing at times, partly he was quite new to the subject, partly because it is also a brand new service that needs to create its niche. They hadn't thought about the question of institutional repositories versus subject specific repositories yet. Well at least he didn't have the answers but was willing to take back these questions. There were plenty ideas about the possible developments with UK PubMedCentral however. Where the British Library has really worked hard was to make it easy for the researchers to submit their articles, whether it are the scientists who actually deposit versus the lab assistants, departmental secretaries or librarians perhaps, who are left to do these jobs hadn’t sunk in yet.
Quite interesting was the presentation by M. Dvray from the Mann Library at Cornell. She was being relly proud at her background as a scientist, which enabled her to take up all kind of new roles for the library as a liason between the library and the scientist. Actually a sitatuation which is very much alike for the information specialists at our Library. But what I really liked was the the projects she pointed out she was working on like their VIVO website, which is in reality a service what our we@wur should be. They were a lot further already at Cornell.
A beautiful presentation by Sally Rumsey on the brand new Oxford repository. Well they call it Archive. Oxford Research Archive http://ora.ouls.ox.ac.uk/ in full. It had a soft launch last Monday. So this was actually real news. Sally pointed out that convincing the researcher to submit their work was their hardest, but most important job. The competition with UK PMC was not making things easier in that respect.
Roger Mills did a presentation on behalf of Michael Popham on the Google Book project. Interesting that Roger pointed out that they were going to link from the catalogue to their own copies in Google Books, but that wasn't working yet. Well actually the global library community is waiting for that one to happen. If they can do that from Oxford we can o it in principle from any library catalogue. More is to be found at http://www.bodley.ox.ac.uk/google/
The most interesting presentation for me personally was the one about curation of actual data. A subject that we were discussing at our department 15 years ago as well. But still can't get our grips on today. Those days I was working with crop growth simulation models. And these are really data hungry, to verify the models. So it is a really felt need, but there are no solutions. Unfortunately Chris Rusbridge didn't have the answers either, but in principle there is potentially an important role for libraries. We only have to develop the answers and craft our niche in this area. There is certainly room for us in that area. Worth thinking about.
There were three more presentations, one on evidence based forestry, where I really missed the small hint or step to evidence librarianship, a very new and important theme in our own profession. It was not mentioned at all. A bit strange. The last two presentation were actually sales pitches, one from CABI and the other from CSA. Just before that last presentation I had to leave. To catch the tube, train, plain etc…. to get home.
This post has not the usual number of links since, most of it was written at the airport, on the plain or train.
The conference was organized by Roger Mills from Oxford University Library Services. A fully packed day with eleven presentations. Was it worth it?
Yes.
My main goal to attend this conference was to establish contacts with the people from Intute and look at the possibilities to make use of the Wageningen UR Library resources by Intute. Now we have moved all of our systems to the oracle database in XML format it must be easy to think of services that could harvest our electronic resources, either from the catalog or our repository. After these initial contacts, meeting the right people, it should possible to pull this through. Intute is seriously looking into these new ways of sharing and re-use of information. Let's call it web 2.0ish.
There were also two presentations from Intute on the program. One from the people working of the Health and Lifesciences (formerly Biome) part of Intute, on the new site that launched in July 2006. Quite impressive they have catalogued currently about 31,000 Web resources. Most interesting I found the fact that they are harvesting other web resources as well. That is what I came for. The second presentation was a more exploratory presentation, attempting to sketch a possible road ahead, and the opportunities that are presented by web2.0 type solutions, technology and user participation. Intute is really looking at it, and with personalization within My Intute and RSS feeds they are making inroads. The discussion which followed exposed quite some hesitation on web2.0/library2.0 in the audience. Mostly female information professionals, perhaps not yet the next gen generation in these positions yet.
The British Library launched earlier this month the UK PubMedCentral. A site which mirror NLM PubMedCentral, and is aimed at adding UK content. Since the launch the first 250 British papers have been archived. This UK content is subsequently mirrored to the USA PMC. The presentation by the engagement officer for UK-PMC was a bit confusing at times, partly he was quite new to the subject, partly because it is also a brand new service that needs to create its niche. They hadn't thought about the question of institutional repositories versus subject specific repositories yet. Well at least he didn't have the answers but was willing to take back these questions. There were plenty ideas about the possible developments with UK PubMedCentral however. Where the British Library has really worked hard was to make it easy for the researchers to submit their articles, whether it are the scientists who actually deposit versus the lab assistants, departmental secretaries or librarians perhaps, who are left to do these jobs hadn’t sunk in yet.
Quite interesting was the presentation by M. Dvray from the Mann Library at Cornell. She was being relly proud at her background as a scientist, which enabled her to take up all kind of new roles for the library as a liason between the library and the scientist. Actually a sitatuation which is very much alike for the information specialists at our Library. But what I really liked was the the projects she pointed out she was working on like their VIVO website, which is in reality a service what our we@wur should be. They were a lot further already at Cornell.
A beautiful presentation by Sally Rumsey on the brand new Oxford repository. Well they call it Archive. Oxford Research Archive http://ora.ouls.ox.ac.uk/ in full. It had a soft launch last Monday. So this was actually real news. Sally pointed out that convincing the researcher to submit their work was their hardest, but most important job. The competition with UK PMC was not making things easier in that respect.
Roger Mills did a presentation on behalf of Michael Popham on the Google Book project. Interesting that Roger pointed out that they were going to link from the catalogue to their own copies in Google Books, but that wasn't working yet. Well actually the global library community is waiting for that one to happen. If they can do that from Oxford we can o it in principle from any library catalogue. More is to be found at http://www.bodley.ox.ac.uk/google/
The most interesting presentation for me personally was the one about curation of actual data. A subject that we were discussing at our department 15 years ago as well. But still can't get our grips on today. Those days I was working with crop growth simulation models. And these are really data hungry, to verify the models. So it is a really felt need, but there are no solutions. Unfortunately Chris Rusbridge didn't have the answers either, but in principle there is potentially an important role for libraries. We only have to develop the answers and craft our niche in this area. There is certainly room for us in that area. Worth thinking about.
There were three more presentations, one on evidence based forestry, where I really missed the small hint or step to evidence librarianship, a very new and important theme in our own profession. It was not mentioned at all. A bit strange. The last two presentation were actually sales pitches, one from CABI and the other from CSA. Just before that last presentation I had to leave. To catch the tube, train, plain etc…. to get home.
Labels: English
