All Change LMLAG Conference

I got to go to this conference last week (Full title ‘All Change: Adapt and Thrive in a Digital Age’) put on by the London Librarians and Archivists Group (LMLAG). I’d never heard of the group before but it was reasonably priced and had an interesting sounding programme so I was allowed to go.
These are the talks that I found most interesting and relevant to me.

The Oxford-Google Digitization Project

Frances Boyle from the Oxford University Library talked about their experiences with Google Books. Having read lots (good and bad) about Google Books, it was fascinating to hear about it from one of the partners.

The library and Google share similar missions, Bodley’s vision of a library to serve the ‘Republic of Letters’ and Google’s “To organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful’

The library is open to non-students and the emphasis was put on opening up access for everyone not conservation.

Oxford differs from the other partners as it has decided to digitize out-of-copyright material only. Starting with the 19th century material, over one million items will be eventually be available.

OUL and Google work closely together. Each book must be identified, assessed to consider it’s suitability for digitization, taken off the shelf, passed to Google for metadata checks, digitization, QA, OCR and indexing, before returning to Oxford to be reshelved and the OPAC updated.

Some of the risks that had to be managed included: Copyright and IPR, the threat to existing publishers, encouraging poor research (the one search box covers everything approach), the project getting too large and digital preservation.

Low-cost Service Development Opportunities

Most of Brian Kelly’s (UKOLN) talk about Web2.0 I was familiar with. It was nice to hear that libraries are way ahead in using Web2.0 technologies, but also good to hear that museums are catching up. I remember a couple of years ago trying to find some museum blogs for a course I was doing and coming up with nothing, so I’m happy that things are improving.

I hadn’t come across Gabbly before. It’s a chat service that lets you have a chat about any webpage. You just type gabbly.com/ in front of a URL and have a chat with anyone else who’s done the same. A great way of providing IM reference , so I’ll have to look into that.

There was also some useful advice about risk management when using Web2.0 tools, including: Establish agreements, Use well established services i.e. Google and del.icio.us, engagement with users, use in non-critical areas. I’m very aware that I may have to argue the case for our use of Web2.0 at some point and this advice should help me out. I think I’m on the right lines though as some of this I’ve already been doing.

The slides from the talk are here and the links mentioned are on del.icio.us here.

The National Archives Online Marketing

I found this insight into The National Archives fascinating and was encouraged to see that some government organisations are embracing Web2.0 maybe local govt will catch up soon.
The vision of TNA is to lead and transform information management, guarantee the survival of today’s information for tomorrow and bring history to life for everyone.

Since 1997 they have: transcribed many paper catalogues, automated document ordering and copying, scanned about 7 million documents. Partnered with the private sector to digitise censuses, passenger lists etc and introduced search and wiki technology – Your archives.

Users are expecting to find more online (Microfiche readers are almost completely idle) and and TNA are consulting with them by developing online forums and encouraging discussion, learning from them in order to improve.

The TNA is increasingly becoming an online archive, it’s digital strategy includes digitising more popular records series, remote ordering of archives, make everything properly searchable (maybe allowing the databases to be searched by Google) and being open to risk.

The factors driving this strategy include Google, broadband (two thirds now have access), Family history, licensing to the private sector and the 1901 census launch. I think it’s great that when the 1901 Census launch ended in disaster when 1 million tried to access it, they turned it into a positive by concentrating on those 1 million potential visitors and learning from the experience.

Digital is making it harder – more documents are being produced, it’s harder to preserve as ‘government’ becomes more blurred, the first generation of born-digital (i.e. never existed on paper) records are now online, thirty years worth of paper still to come in including WW2 service records.

But, Visitors to Kew have increased, satisfaction is up and access to public records has increased massively.

The ratio of online visits to onsite visits is more than 100:1 as is the ratio of downloads to physical document deliveries.

TNA are now offering podcasts and RSS feeds.

The Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) Project

The Biodiversity Heritage Library project is digitizing the core published literature on biodiversity and making it available for open access on the web.

The part I found most interesting was that all the content will be open access and licensed under Creative Commons allowing it to be reused, repurposed, reformatted etc.

Links to the Encyclopedia of Life project.