BIALL 2008

On Thursday and Friday of last week I was at the British and Irish Association of Law Librarians annual conference in Dublin. They invited me to talk about Web 2.0 as well as developments in library and information courses and what we have been up to at the University of Brighton. I really enjoyed the 2 days and had some interesting discussions with the organisers and some of the 400 or so delegates.

For the Web 2.0 session on Thursday I made a short presentation (download slides HERE) and then sat on a panel with Sue Hill of Sue Hill Recruitment. Sue’s presentation was particularly interesting as she confessed to knowing next to nothing about Web 2.0 several weeks before but had become very interested in it while doing research for the session. She informed us that her company would be experimenting with blogs, RSS feeds etc over the coming months and using them to help share knowledge internally as well as promote their services externally.

On Friday morning I gave a presentation titled “The Future of Information Work: developing university courses” (download slides HERE). This was based on my experiences of working in the development of new courses at our university as well as my broader observations about possible future directions for the provision of university courses and the profession in general.

BIALL is certainly a dynamic group of library and information professionals and I hope to keep in touch with some of the people I met there.

June 16th, 2008