The final session of Monday afternoon, chaired by Jenny Levine, gave us four speakers.
Graham Spooner and Gillian Wood told us about the New South Wales Clinical Information Access Project. Librarians worked as back seat drivers of the project launched in 1997. Back then, access to libraries was limited, libraries were open office hours, and there was a very poor service to rural clinicians,
Though CIAP is by clinicians for clinicians, librarians were involved from start, promoting the project and encouraging use, training, purchasing content, dealing with complaints, and building a unified search environment and an interface with Ovid bibliographic databases, adding thesauri and mapping.
They also steered health in New South Wales in a new KM direction.
They mentioned (I think the only time at this conference so far) evidence-based information practice and speculated about whether there was a paucity of evidence on Library 2.0.
Barbara Peacock, from Nedbank, one of the four South African banks, spoke about their Knowledge Centre. I found this presentation more interesting for the context, than the details of her centre itself, as, in the new south Africa, the bank grapples with issues such as micro-lending, Mzansi, the system of bank accounts for people who have never held one before and the problems of training people in information literacy in a country where only 3 million out of a population of 46 million people have internet access.
Andrew Lewis ended this session with Shock Horror! Computer games in public libraries based on his experience in Windsor & Maidenhead.
He showed how his authority had used computer games to build a trailer for their summer reading scheme, a Flash-based comments form for younger users to give feedback on services and an information literacy game, big bad world.
Gaming technologies have the advantages of being multimedia, appealing to young, ubiquitous, high impact applications, collaborative, requiring social interaction and problem-solving and being deliverable on existing channels
There's a report at http://www.rbwm.gov.uk/web/library_policies.htm
