Topic: Kete at the Bridging World's Conference in Singapore
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Joann Ransom was invited to present Kete at this conference organised and hosted by the National Library Board of Singapore.
What an experience!
This conference would be one of the better conferences I have ever been fortunate to attend. World class speakers, thought provoking content and great hosting. Well done to the conference organisers!
Day 1
Nayla Al Khaja delivered the keynote presentation which got the conference off to a great start. As well as being a lively and entertaining presenter she spoke very eloquently about the ways in which digital technologies, like text mesaging, email, msn, facebook, myspace, web cams etc have completely revolutionized the social modes of interaction for Arabian women in Dubai. Very thought provoking as well as entertaining! Nayla is a talented filmmaker and I did track down a short film "Arabana" on youtube - which is beautiful and powerful.
Penny Carnaby - our own National Librarian - delivered a supporting keynote which really set the framework for the rest of the conference.. and I do have to say I was so proud to be a Kiwi! We really are doing well as a country on adapting to and addressing the opportunities now available.She mentioned a whole bunch of groovy stuff happening in New Zealand, including Matapihi, Aotearoa Peoples Network, NZ Research and National Digital Heritage Archive. Her paper can be viewed here.
Jenny Levine - if I didn't love her before I do now! I have been subscribing to Jenny's blog The Shifted Librarian for a year or so now and it was pretty cool to listen to her present live. As well as supplying about a dozen links and questions and issues for me to think about and follow up on (which should keep me going for months) she argued that the seven ages of Librarianship as discussed by D.W. Krummel in "Fiat Lux, Fiat Latebra" have actually expanded so its really library 8.0 not library 2.0 we are talking about! Her slides are here.
What Jenny highlighted for me is that adopting web 2.0 tecnologies to better engage with our clients is an entirely appropriate and important thing to be doing.
The problem with the conference is it had two tracks so I missed Linda Foster talking about the iconic Peckham library. Fortunately her slides are available here.
Next I sat in on Andrew Malin talking about how they have achieved phenomenal growth in usage and visitor statistics for the libraries in Hillingdon Borough, London. Now much of this presentation I didn't like (hideous staff uniforms, forcing qualified professional librarians to man the Starbucks coffee counter, a 'recipe' for renovating all 14 libraries etc) but the stats speak for themselves - 500% increases! So I will read their paper thoroughly as clearly there is much I can learn from this 'Accountants method on how to transform a library service".
Before lunch I missed Sidsel Bech-Petersen and after lunch I had to miss John Blyberg in order to listen to HVX Silverstar from Secondlife - which was splendid! (In fact the only problem with the conference was choosing who to listen to!) Bernadette Daly Swanson has 3 different avatars and I am definitely going to have a look at the opportunitys she raised in her presentation; firstly in terms of personal professional development but also in engaging with other sector's of the community.
I chose to listen to Peter Godwin over Bonna Jones - which could have been a terrible mistake since everyone was raving about Bonna's presentation - but luckily Peter was good too (phew!) discussing all sorts of groovy web 2.0 tools for students. I plan to read the book he recently coedited: "Information Literacy meets Library 2.0: and have a troll around the related blog.
Day 2
Day 2 was equally stimulating. I missed the keynote presentation as 3 of us were frantically trying to reformat our powerpoint presentations, restoring lost animations, coping without inroom internet etc.
First up I heard Fleur Stigler and the exciting work she talked about with The European Library and Europeana site which is will be launched on the 20th November 2008. Her paper is here. Both of these projects are really exciting and relate directly to Penny's keynote address where she talked about the national libraries of the world sharing digital resources. Europeana goes one step further and shares resources from a range of cultural organisations - not just libraries! Incidentally, Fleur's talk contained some really useful looking project planning and analysis tools which I will be using in future I am sure eg PESTLE
I stuck with track 2 all day, and heard Brian Kelly next sharing some really good stuff in his presentation on balancing the risks and benefits of web 2.0 to maximise benefits. His blog will be one I follow from now on I feel!
Joe Pagano shared next, and this guy was great! I am really interested in how we know we are doing well in a web 2.0 world and how we can 'read' the data we collect from website usage stats. I loved his opening equation that questions + metrics = answers - and how its the answers you want... not more numbers. He had an interesting matrix he used for analysing issues and stats. His slides are here but I definitely plan to read his full paper.
After lunch I (my profile on the Digital Worlds website) got to present Kete to a small but select audience (who obviously had very good taste as they chose not to listen to the Google man!) My paper is added as a linked document to this topic. The slides uploaded to slideshare actually bore little resemblance to the final presentation. If you click here you can read an article I wrote for Kete Horowhenua combining the best bits of the paper and the slideshow.
Following the panel discussion Dr N Varaprasad delivered his closing remarks which drew the various threads together and it was a real morale boost that he quoted from my Kete presentation twice, concluding his remarks with "as Joann said, it is all about connections and people". (I did wonder several times how the heck I got to be invited to such a high profile and inspirational conference ..)
So all in all, absolutely terrific time. Great conference and the conference organisers are to be congratulated for a superb job.
was the last to edit Kete at the Bridging World's Conference in Singapore
on Oct 24th, 2008 at 4:08 PM
