Resilience, connections and a clean slate

The inside-out library at ELAG 2013This year marked my fifth ELAG conference since 2008 (I skipped 2009), which is not much if you take into account that ELAG2013 was the 37th one. I really enjoyed the 2013 conference, not in the least because of the wonderful people of the local organising committee at the Ghent University Library, who made ELAG2013 a very pleasant event.This year’s theme was “the inside-out library”, a concept coined by Lorcan […]

Beyond The Library

The BeyondThePDF2 conference, organised by FORCE11, was held in Amsterdam, March 19-20. From the website: “…we aim to bring about a change in modern scholarly communications through the effective use of information technology”. Basically the conference participants discussed new models of content creation, content dissemination, content consumption, funding and research evaluation.Because I work for an academic library in Amsterdam, dealing with online scholarly information systems and currently trying to connect traditional library information to related […]

Change or be irrelevant

Or: Think “different” or paint yourself in a corner EMTACL12 – Emerging Technologies in Academic Libraries 2012 I attended the EMTACL12 conference in Trondheim October 1-3, 2012, organised by the Library of NTNU Norwegian University of Science and Technology, both as a member of the international programme committee and as a speaker. EMTACL stands for “emerging technologies in academic libraries”. Looking back, my impression was that the conference was not so much about emerging technologies, […]

Do we need mobile library services? Not really

Mobile services have to fulfill information needs here and now Like many other libraries, the Library of the University of Amsterdam released a mobile web app this year. For background information about why and how we did it, have a look at the slideshow my colleague Roxana Popistasu and I gave at the IGeLU 2010 conference.For now I want to have a closer look at the actual reception and use of our mobile library services […]

Dutch Culture Link

Linking library and cultural heritage data “Interested to publishing a test collection as linked open data to help @StichtingDEN with practical guide for heritage institutions?” That’s what my former colleague at the Library of the University of Amsterdam, now project manager at DEN (Digital Heritage Foundation The Netherlands), Marco Streefkerk asked me in April 2010. Was I interested? Of course I was. I had written a blog post “Linked data for libraries” almost a year […]

New users – new libraries – new librarians

Meeting new user expectations at ELAG 2010 In the near future libraries and librarians will be very different from what they are now. That’s the overall impression I took away from the ELAG 2010 conference in Helsinki, June 8-11, 2010.  ELAG stands for “European Library Automation Group”, which is an indication of its age (34 years): “automation” was then what is now “ICT”. The meetings are characterised by a combination of plenary presentations and parallel […]