Planning a conference programme is a great deal of hard work, as we've
discovered to our cost over the past few months. But when it all comes
together there is a great sense of excitement. I'm now very pleased with
the programme for the forthcoming eLib conference in York (2-4 December
1998, information at URL http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/events/elib-conf-98/).
The conference is set around a core of reports from eLib publishing
projects, and looks at the impacts on libraries (and users) of these
diversifying information types (or 'species').
The opening keynote from Jim Michalko, President of the Research Libraries
Group, will be exploring these issues in some depth. The effects of the
coming transition towards electronic resources will be as subtle as they
are profound. We seem poised on the cusp of change and may all need to move
fast in the next few years, so I am looking forward to Jim's presentation.
Likewise the closing keynote from Paul Kobulnicky, Library Director at the
University of Connecticut will cover some of the work in America on changes
in the academic attitudes to the publishing sector, both in the AAU/ARL
"Publish and Perish" work, and in the ARL's SPARC publishing programme.
There will be other discussions during the conference on the economics of
journal publishing, with a report on the Peak project at Michigan from
Maria Bonn, plus the (controversial) eLib supporting study by Frank
Fishwick.
We will also have a session on rights metadata and the systems for handling
them. Like it or not (and we mostly don't like it), Libraries are going to
have to engage with many digital objects for which they will have to pay
under various arrangements. As the number of these moves up from hundreds
to (eventually) millions, we need automated systems to handle decisions on
whether we have the right to do certain things with any particular object.
The effectiveness of these systems will greatly affect the viability of
libraries as intermediaries, and I'm looking forward to this session as an
indication of work going on in this area.
Getting money is always important, and we've scheduled a session which
looks at some of the opportunities coming up, including the Heritage
Lottery Fund, and also Framework 5 of the EU. It will be good to know the
inside information on what we can expect in these areas.
We also plan a session on JISC's new arrangements for subject gateways.
This might seem to fit slightly oddly in the programme, but with this
increasing variety of resources, free and charged, finding the information
you need is increasingly an issue. We can't say who will be the speaker in
the first part of this, but we hope to have a speaker from the Resource
Discovery Network Centre, to be established later this year. We will also
have Susan Calcari from the Internet Scout project talking about some of
the exciting possibilities for international cooperation n the subject
gateway area.
We have tried to structure the programme with plenty of opportunity for
discussion, and there is a session near the end where we are genuinely
looking for input from you on some aspects of how JISC runs its programmes
in this area. Come and give us the word!
I don't think I've been able to do full justice to the programme, and I
don't want to give the impression that other sessions are less interesting.
I think it will be a great conference. There are still places available, so
I hope to see you there! Registration information is at the URL above.
Chris Rusbridge
Programme Director, Electronic Libraries Programme
The Library, University of Warwick, Coventry CV4 7AL, UK
Phone 01203 524979 Fax 01203 524981
Email [log in to unmask]
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