I was fortunate enought to attend another exciting, challenging and inspiring mashed library event  Chips and Mash at University of Huddersfield . One of the main topics of the day was RFID. Having recently been involved in implementing self service at one of our libraries, I really appreciated the opportunity to see RFID from a different perspective. Two talks I enjoyed were Andrew Wilson from Blink and Julian Cheal from UKOLN.

Andrew described RFID as technology for telling a story and described some of the projects he has been involved with, including a snakes & ladders game where people could play an online game of snakes & ladders by touching physical RFID readers around the building and thereby encouraging more circulation throughout the building. It was fascinating seeing use of RFID aside from simply issuing and returning library items.

Julian started his talk by confessing to having tagged his own personal book collection and showed how it was possible to send targetted messages to people via their smart phones as their entrance into the building is registered. Taking the interaction with a user away from a self service kiosk to a method of their choice provides much more flexibitliy and  highlights the extent of this type of technology.

Both Andrew and Julian inspired me to think about RFID outside the library context, which is what I needed having recently been distracted by the difficulties in finding an effective solution to tagging multimedia stock, just dont ask.

All the talks during the day were very interesting which as always diverted my attention from actually sitting down and trying to develop any of the ideas whizzing round my mind. It was good to have an update on the Jerome project run at University of Lincoln.  Lincoln are working on improving access to resources, improving search speed,  utilsing the data more effectively to provide a better search experience. Matt from Talis sped through their work on JUICE which is also working to enhance the search experience in enriching the information found on library catalogues. There seems a real need to provide relevant appropiate information speedily to users  alongside a desire to augment the information provided. I think its interesting to see how as the information libraries provide access to becomes larger, richer and complex the methods of discovery however need to become simpler and faster.

It was an enjoyable day with the advantage of many badger related paraphanalia for distraction, I recomend Laura’s Dark Archive for a great summary of the day and an explanation of how ‘badgers are the official mascot for mash up events’

Over 30 ideas were generated throughout the day which hopefully will be added to those on the mashed library wiki, all in all an inspiring day and many thanks to the organisers and speakers.

Cotswold Water Park

A few weeks ago I attended the JISC digitisation conference at the lovely cotswold water park. The conference was streamed, blogged, tweeted etc so please check out the blog posts and videos for a good summary (I would definitely recommend watching the talks by Nick Poole and Robert Miller, inspiring stuff)
It was an enjoyable conference and JISC had put together a fantastic line up of talks. It was a good mixture of people from all aspects of the digitisation world highlighting the importance of collaboration and the value it adds to the collections. While there is now lots of access to some amazing resources the volume of use, ease of integration into teaching and research, questions of copyright and IPR, ease of search and discover were all issues raised during the 2 days.
I found it hard to select which talks to attend in the 4 different streams (and was often distracted by twitter as to what was going on in the sessions I couldn’t attend) There were plenty of useful case studies and resources which I wanted to go away and look at in more detail (unfortunately still not made the time for that). I particularly enjoyed a (too brief) talk by Dave Flanders touching upon wire frames to map out potential ideas and thinking about services from the point of view of a model user, it made me appreciate how it is possible to realise some of those ideas that occasionally pop into my head.

During the conference I really enjoyed tweeting and it really helped me consider some of the sessions in more depth during the time. I am however now  wondering if perhaps blogging some of the sessions would have been more useful with regards to being able to look back and reflect.

What I hope to take away from the conference is to;

• discover more digitisation projects
• appreciate the amount of available resources to researchers, students and teachers
• appreciate how enriched media resources can be used to engage students
• gain a better understanding of the reasons behind digitising collections
• realise the need to secure resources that maybe lost via digitisation
• understand the importance of copyright and IPR and not to view it as a block
• creating these resources does not guarantee use
• appreciate the need to add value to digital collections, enhance the data with other services
• appreciate the need to promote them further
• investigate better search platforms to this data
• better intergration of resources into teaching, and understand how they can be part of the workflow
• freeing the raw data, allowing innovative and greater use
• the importance of collaboration with partners nationally and internationally

On Monday June 22nd I atteded RESCON09 at Birmingham City University, this was the first research conference of its kind and was a really good day.

I had the opportunity to hear about the new research strategy which seems very ambitious and aspirational in moving towards being a ‘research engaged’ university. I also attended a number of presentations on various research projects across the university.

I found it a very useful day, I really appreciated hearing about the wonderful and varied research taking place and was a great introduction to the university. Sitting in the audience it was interesting to see the potential synergies between research groups, how technologically engaged many of the projects were and the real value of national and international collaborations. It depicted a picture of a vibrant, engaged and creative institution which I look forward to working for.

There are clearly some big challenges ahead for the university including co-ordinating these projects and building the infrastructure to support the growth of research across the insitution. From a library perspective this strategy raises many questions/issues regarding its impact to the resources and services we offer but there is also some real potential to provide expertise especially for example with regards to capturing research output. It will also be interesting to see how they build a research community and if web 2.0 tools could be used.

There is more detail available at research at Birmingham City University
and a couple of projects which particularly interested me were

• The Baskerville Project – the man and the typeface
• Haptics – lots of interesting projects
• Artists book collective