It’s VALA time in Melbourne
Posted by Christine on 6 February, 2008 in Conferences
The 14th biennial VALA conference in Melbourne has a real buzz around it this year. VALA Libraries/Technology and the Future/Inc. celebrates its 30th birthday this year - providing an opportunity to celebrate the past and look forward to the future. Attendance is up 20% over the last conference, and of course the major topic is social networking, closely followed by repositories and open access publishing.
I attended sessions yesterday, and was interested to listen to Andy Powell, the keynote speaker, who is the Head of Development at Eduserve, talk about the need to make academic content available on the web and the importance of search engine optimisation. He discussed service orientation vs resource orientation and also national vs global interests. He believes that institutional repositories do not allow social networking for researchers, which is one of their major requirements. He talked about how repositories need to reflect and use the web 2.0 technologies, and suggested that Slideshare is a good example of how a repository could look, being highly visible to Google and global in reach. He also discussed the Semantic web and the opportunities that this is presenting. His view is that institutional repositories aren’t working, that academic researchers aren’t using them and they aren’t making the work visible. Socialness is paramount, and and building global repositories need not be a problem with Amazon S3. He posed the question - why are people still publishing in PDF, with all the limitations that format has.
Lynette Lewis talked about what we are doing here at Yarra Plenty to integrate Web 2.0 into our everyday activities and services. Katherine Greenhill gave a fabulous tour of Second Life, and the Information Archipeligo. If you ever wanted to fly, visit. Joann Ransom from the Horowhenua Library Trust gave a wonderful presentation on Kete Horowhenua - a wiki type project that uses community volunteers to tell the story of their area - already they have 12,000 photos uploaded and described. Joann described the ownership and pride that the local community has in the Kete (Maori for basket)
Tonight is the conference dinner at the heritage listed Plaza Ballroom, which is the social highlight of the conference. Tomorrow I chair the final session, when Stuart Wiebel from OCLC talks about persistent identifiers.
The exhibition is humming too, with vendors with great products and services to offer, VALA time in Melbourne is a great time!
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