Information ALLA Carte: part the second
Posted by Davina on October 26th, 2007It’s been a long time coming but finally here is my second post on the Information ALLA Carte conference.
As the name suggests, the conference had an overall theme of information on the menu, and this was carried throughout in the titles of the session. There was however another theme that threaded its way through the conference - transformation. Many sessions were talking about transformation: of services, of people, of information.
The day started with an opening presentation from Justice Ruth McColl who gave an interesting look at the history of legal publishing and law libraries in Australia. She had the suggestion that there should be a repository of law reports and judgments similar to the seed back in Norway to preserve this knowledge.
Roxanne Missingham, the current president of the Australian Library and Information Asssociation (ALIA), gave a presentation on the Information Future and the changing face of information. I particularly liked her suggestion that when surveying users, we need to do more than just find out how they use the library currently, but how they create their ‘personal information environment’.
The next session was by Baden Hughes, Enterprise Information Architect at University of Melbourne, and he spoke about the effect of ‘non library mass market services’ on library user expectations. He talked about extreme convergence, and pervasive online access and metamorphosis. He also had an interesting discussion on “free” or as he called them “compromise cost” services - those services that are ostensibly free, but really we’re compromising by giving away personal information in return for a service. For example, a site that’s “free” to use, but you have to register and the service is supported by ads. He also compared the print versus digital collections issue to what happened with radio. Print won’t disappear overnight, and it won’t disappear completely, but it will move away from being the dominant paradigm, much like what happened to the radio over a couple of generations.
The day ended with a session by a marketing consultant, Sue-Ella Prodonovich. She took us through a guide that she uses in sessions with companies that she’s consulting to work out where they are and where they want to be. She gave a number of questions to ask when thinking about marketing the libraries services:
- What type of work do you want to do more of?
- What will you say no to?
- Who do you want to work with?
- If you’re successful (and happy) in 24 months you will be……….
- Where are you now?
- Where do you want to be in 12 months?
- What will you do to get there?
- What’s your action plan?
And that was just to start with! She then had questions about image, service, products, clients, collaborations and influence. It was a really motivating way to end the day and got everyone talking!
Tags: conference
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