I'm fighting my way through the backlog of notes to write a final post on the JISC Digital Content Conference, wrapping up those sessions I haven't covered yet. The unreliable wifi at the conference means that while I managed live tweeting for some sessions, others exist as notes on the PowerBook. Given the very full coverage of the conference by the official conference bloggers, the slides, audio and video, and the aggregation at #JDCC09 I'm going to concentrate on my reactions to the sessions, rather than trying to give point-by-point accounts.
Plenaries
A Modest Proposal - A California Digital Library, Robert Miller, Director of Books at the Internet Archive: the memorable thing about Robert's presentation was probably his closing offer to digitise, gratis, ten books for any institution who wanted to try out the service. This sparked an idea for an after-conference dinner game: which ten books would you choose and why? I was impressed by the richness of the services hosted at the Archive: a biodiversity collection, a television archive of 27 channels, Yiddish literature online, early Korean printed books and NASA's collection of still and moving images.
Fostering knowledge: the JISC's contribution to the UK e-Infrastructure: Sarah Porter, JISC's head of innovation, amused us by comparing interoperability to a bourbon biscuit, while giving a cogent view of the way JISC will develop the networks now and in the future.
Content is king: but we are in a republic: Stuart Lee, in an entertaining presentation that included NSFW aardvarks, Star Trek, Ruskin's road-building and Alfred the Great urged us to tap the huge potential for community digitisation brought about by the mass ownership of digital cameras, something along the lines of a 21st century digital Mass Observation project
Parallel sessions:
Content in Education Strand - Supporting academic practice: embedding content in teaching, learning and research: people from the Reproduce project, hitherto unknown to me, presented on different aspects of their work. One issue raised was how to get people to use digital resources. One of the important lessons I learnt here was that the librarian's traditional approach of building subject pages or portals doesn't work for teachers, whose interests are far more fine-grained. JORUM is being relaunched as much more of a social area than a repository. We were also shown a site still under development which exploits the potential of NewsFilm Online, offering exemplars, practical examples and guidance
Looking Into The Future - Libraries of the future. With a new LRC opening in September, provided the furniture arrives in time, I was looking forward to this session. Richard Ovenden of the Bodleian introduced, and showed us the new Libraries of the Future video.
Then Les Watson, quick to emphasise he was not a librarian, took us through some possible futures, discussed some of the theory behind educational spaces and quoted Alain de Botton on the inhumanity and depressing atmosphere of a McDonalds in Westminster; Peter Godwin spoke about information literacy, but the Q&A was the most interesting part. A spirited discussion took place about the Saltire Centre, held up by some as the epitome of the new type of learning space, but denounced by a Glaswegian in the audience as 'not a library' and nothing more than 'an innovative use of an inner-city car-park' . Chris Batt asked us to consider if libraries didn't exist, would anyone now bother to invent them, though we had no real answer
Looking Into The Future - New technologies for delivering and accessing digital content. I found this session unsatisfactory. It was only at the end that we started to see something real when the very last speaker, Shelley Hales of the University of Bristol, showing a fascinating Second Life project, the Pompeiian house, a digital interactive representation of something itself a reconstruction, the Pompeian house built for the 1851 Great Exhibition and then housed in Crystal Palace until it burnt down. To get to Shelley we had to sit through an unnecessary Second Life for dummies presentation, and an ad man. Matthew of Shadowplay who, I'm afraid, added little, telling us for example, that 'the internet and digital media are transforming the landscape' or making unsupported assertions about iPhone ownership. Rather better was the first speaker, Dave Flanders, who spoke on form factor , format and agile prototyping, methods used in software development that were new to me
