Tom Roper's Weblog

HLG: Tuesday afternoon

Tuesday afternoon opened with a plenary at which Peter Morgan gave a very clear summary of open access and institutional repositories. Peter runs Cambridge's DSpace repository when he's not being a medical librarian.
He made some interesting points about the differences between computing and library approaches to repositories, noting that librarians who run repositories think of different ways to use them, particularly to manage other digital resources in institutions. He also pointed out some of the growing tensions between archivangelists and librarians, and drew our attention to a new SHERPA resource, JULIET, which sets out for authors the open access requirements of each of the British research councils.
Then we heard from Danielle Worster on the Seniors Health Research Transfer Network (SHRTN) project in Ontario.

Technorati Tags: eastbourne, hlg, hlg2006, HLGEastbourne2006

HLG: Tuesday morning

The morning opened with another keynote speech, this time by Bernard Barrett of the Irish Health Sciences Libraries Group, who gave his confessions of an information scientist. Bernard spoke about his experiences working outside a library, in mental health in Ireland. , developing guidelines and policies, identifying areas where there might be a lack of evidence and on service development.
He picked up some of the themes about professions that Ian Snowley had mentioned the previous day. He felt that the vocabulary of "user" and "support" used in library and information service discourse holds us back, and that it was more helpful to speak of colleagues and fellow team members when H called on us to be precisionists and ended with his ten confessions of faith, which I'll link to when his presentation goes up.
Next, I attended the sessions on international collaboration, where Emma Farrow spoke of her experience in Sri Lanka, and the work that PHi is doing in Uganda and Sierra Leone, and Tony McSéan spoke on the HINARI project (and also told us of Mike and Bernie Winters' legendary p[performance in the same auditorium...at the start of the act the straight man of the two appeared and began a monologue; when the second poked his head through the curtains and grimaced at the audience, a member of the audience was heard to shout, "oh no, there's two of them".
After the break I went to a very comprehensive presentation by Ina Fourie of the Department of Information Science, University of Pretoria, on current awareness services.

Technorati Tags: eastbourne, hlg, hlg2006, HLGEastbourne2006

HLG: Monday

Today, the morning of the first day of the HLG conference in Eastbourne, we heard a keynote speech by Ian Snowley, CILIP's President-elect. Ian's presentation, entitled I am a medical librarian and including a clip fromMLA's video of the same name, discussion stressed how professions and professional values are changing, citing a recent Demos report Production Values: Futures for professionalism. Everyone is now a professional and the relationship between professions and government, the media and society generally are different and more critical. We can continue our core tasks, setting standards and qualifications, advocacy and CPD.  Above all rank-and-file CILIP members need to become advocates for the profession.

Professor Mike Pringle of Nottingham University gave a succinct and at times humorous description of progress to date on the electronic patient record, in a session chaired by Veronica Fraser.

The venue is charming,  the exhibition spectacular and the posters impressive.  After coffee there was a choice of interactive sessions. I went to the anatomy of e-learning, led by two staff from the FOLIO programme, Lynda Ayiku and Anthea Sutton, who described the development of FOLIO courses. They then got us to divide into groups and design a e-learning programme, using different pedagogical techniques. This was a slightly artificial exercise, as we had no curriculum content, not any learning objectives, which normally would have influenced our choice of methods. Nevertheless it was an interesting insight into electronic course design.
I'm afraid I missed the sessions after lunch, as I had to prepare some papers for the HLG Annual General Meeting.

Technorati Tags: hlg, hlg2006, HLGEastbourne2006

Technorati Tags: hlg, hlg2006, HLGEastbourne2006

Health Libraries Group in Eastbourne

There's less than a week to go till the Health Libraries Group comes to Eastbourne for its 2006 conference. All police leave has been cancelled. This venue is comme il faut; conferences are always better by the seaside, with its atmosphere of hedonism and abandon. Tomorrow I go on a reconnaissance mission, and may bring back photographs.
I'm looking forward to all sorts of things in the programme: keynote speeches by Ian Snowley, (CILIP President-elect) and Bernard Barrett of the Irish Health Sciences Libraries Group who kindly gave me an audience at their Kilkenny conference earlier this year. Bernard speaks on Questioning one's mental health: confessions of an information scientist. Dr Steven B Kayne gives the 2006 Bishop LeFanu lecture on the controversial matter of homeopathy, under the title Christian Samuel Hahnemann - the first independent prescriber? I trust he will take a robust attitude towards mumbo-jumbo.
In a plenary Peter Morgan speaks on open access and institutional repositories, and I hope will describe Cambridge University's efforts in this area. There are also plenaries on the National Library for Health and the topical matter of work with public libraries on health information, and parallel sessions on collaboration, evidence based librarianship, harnessing information technology, international collaboration, information literacy and expanding rôles.
In the special interest group sessions, I'm particularly interested to see that CHILL, of which I was once a member, is organising one, as are Libraries for Nursing, IFM Healthcare and the NHS Scotland e-Library.
Of course there's a social programme too, and the conference dinner is at the English Wine Centre.
I shall be blogging the conference. if anyone else is, in order to make our offerings more discoverable, may I suggest we agree on some Technorati tags (and Flickr tags too if anyone's taking photos). I'd suggest HLGEastbourne2006.

Technorati Tags: eastbourne, hlg, hlg2006, HLGEastbourne2006

HLG Chair

Today in Belfast I stood down as chair of the Health Libraries Group. Alan Fricker takes over from me and will bring a lot more to the post than I ever did.  I still have some duties to discharge at the annual conference in Eastbourne.
It was liberating to be able to sit through most of the committee meeting and not have to give my mind to procedure, steering the committee towards a decision, making sure everyone could have their say and so on.
Belfast was fun. I had a fry at Maggie May's and some Guinness in a bar.

Technorati Tags: belfast, hlg