Tuesday 31 March 2009

Conference report

I had actually intended posting daily updates - with a summary of the sessions that I'd attended on each day. However, I haven't really got enough out of any of the sessions to make it worthwhile, so I think I'll just do an overall summing up post of the main issues following the close of the conference tomorrow.

I am actually quite disappointed with LILAC2009 so far. The presentations have been good, I've had lots of interesting chats and it's clear that there are great things being done by librarians. But, I'm not hearing anything I didn't hear last year.

And the focus is still very much on HE. One of today's keynote speakers was Leslie Burger who is Director of Princeton Public Library and there has been a sprinkling of non-HE parallel sessions. However, the vast majority (about 90% as a very rough estimate) of the participants are from universities. There are many reasons why this is the case, but it's something the LILAC committee (all from HE) need to address. One of the themes of the conference is 'information literacy for life' but I fear it's an issue that's only going to get a very superficial treatment.

2 comments:

Paul Gray said...

Yeah. Also been following Sheila Webber on LILAC (herself, of course, in HE) and there's a strong HE focus there. Although she made the keynote by Leslie Burger sound good - non HE and "making information seeking real fun".

Hope t' Web 2.0 course is worth the journey :-)

Unknown said...

Yep, Sheila's making rather a better job of it than I could!

Leslie Burger's keynote was all good stuff - but nothing that we don't already know. We've been making information seeking fun for years!