Video from Drupalcamp in Stockholm Sweden May 29-30 2009

I attended the Drupalcamp in Stockholm, Sweden, last weekend and most funny was the Drupal puppy. Watch this Video ’cause it’s awesome:

Update: You’ll also find it at the Nodeone blog.

Today Daniel Forsman at Jönköping University Library is talking at the conference Computers in Libraries 2009 (abr. CIL 2009) in Arlington, Virginia, U.S.

I just been looking up some documentation of the conference and found the Twitterstream at hashtag #CIL2009.

An interview at Vimeo with Lee Rainie from Pew Internet with interviewer Jaap van De Geer:

If more interesting documentation from CIL 2009 just make a note of it in the commentary section.

Afterthoughts from EAHIL june 2008 in Helsinki, Finland.

Just some following up to my speech at EAHIL and other EAHIL thougths. You’ll find my 15 minutes speedtalk at Slideshare: “Is there a mobile challenge for the libraries?“:

I was told afterwards I did a “american failure”. I didn’t discover it myself you see. In Sweden at least our view of americans are they do not know anything about geography outside the States. It refers to a documentary TV clip from the late 70’s or early 80’s at the swedish DDR-public-service-television (at that time we just had two channels) where a middleaged lady pointed out Sweden on the map, but pointing to Iran.

I apparently pointed out Austria Czech at slide 5 and saying Germany and making Oliver Obst confused. It wasn’t one of my “Borat way of jokes” ;-) Maybe it was the light, maybe it was that I’m colour-blind, they have problems with light green and dark green I think. No, I’ll stop with finding excuses here.

It felt like I was running 100 meters trying to hold the time of 15 minutes and also trying to say something at least half-clever at the end. With that stern but justifying look of EAHIL-evalutor of Eva Alopaeus keeping track on me and my statements or whatever that gang of evaluators are happen to evaluate ;-)

Thanks to you listeners. The interaction from you during and after my talks are one the most important parts for me. I will try to keep on as long as you don’t throw tomates at me. (Implicit: It’s the only way to get rid of me).

And, Elisabeth Husem, chairman for that track of the Mobile Web, I will strive to hold the time in the future also. I also just happened to find som new figures on PC:s existing in the world 2008 and mobile subscribers in the world August 2007, rather than that older figures mentioned in my abstract.

Well, I maybe hadn’t that exhaustive answers to your questions afterwards, but I didn’t want to infer on my followers time and I was just exhausted in that bunker. Next time I will demand for a microphone attached at my ear and not like that singsong microphone. I mean I’m no singer as you may did discover. It’s not that I don’t like microphones, I just like similar to italians to wave my hands freely. In a non-typically northern Sweden-way.

We did chat some at the check pub near the railway station saturday afternoon and “Eureka”, I had my new title for the call of papers of some cosy librarian conference: Could men get pregnant? – information use and critical appraisal in medical librarianship. If you steal the title I already have a patent licensed as number 6,7677678688768,876876768768,76767868,76876786 in Über States.

Oliver Obst on “Marketing virtual services” at Eahil 2008

Today Friday 27th June 9.00 Oliver Obst was talking about “Marketing virtual services” at the EAHIL Conference 2008 in Helsinki, FInland. He talked about the libraries and the loss of information monopoly, loss of face-to-face interaction and need for a ROI-philosophy. “How much money is the library saving with their efforts?”, he thought was an important question in this case. He also said libraries are in competition with free resources like Google Books and other services. Some librarians see for example companies offering free resources as a truly cooperating partner like free is always good. I don’t agree with that and as I understood Oliver he has a critical eye of that also.

Oliver showed an investigation of the Münster Medical library products and customer satisfaction with them. The homepage, the teaching and the opening hours as the worst and document delivery, e-journals and handheld computers as the best.

Then he showed all the ways they used to market their library. Let me say it was impressing. They have a blog maintained since 2003. An e-newsletter maintained since 1997, sent out every friday. It has 800 subscribers and they have produced 520 Issues. They have a 3-monthly journal, each issue about 12-16 pages and 45 issues published this far. He also showed how they worked with the content of the articles. Often it’s interviews with user statements and in the text they promote extra-ordinary library services. They also have an URL near the article content to the blog.

They have what he called a knowledge wiki, where the users can get answers of the library services. Their own toolbar for webbrowsing and -searching at: zbmed.ourtoolbar.com. They also produce a podcast irregulary but he said nothing more about that experience during the talk so I asked him afterwards.

Tell me more about your podcast?

-The podcasts are 3 minutes but unfortunately it takes about 2 hours to make. It takes time to cut and read same parts over again. I usually audio record my speeches at conferences and publish it as a podcast. The audio recorder I have with me is excellent. I also have jingles in my podcast. For example I use the sound from a pinball computer game.

Can anyone edit in your knowledge wiki? For example me? :-)

-You have to register and I decide who’s allowed to edit the wiki.

Do you see the wiki as a replacement of the usual textbased web pages?

-Something like that in the future maybe.

Update:

Oliver’s talk at EAHIL recorded by Guus van den Brekel and uploaded at Blip.tv:

Conference in Malmö, Sweden, on designing websites

From Business to Buttons is the name of a conference in Malmö held in June 14-15 and arranged by InUse and Malmö University. The focus is on usability and interaction design. Ben Jacobsen will hold a seminar with title “The impact of the Internet on everyday US life”. Ben let 13 households in USA give up internet usage for two weeks and their life was self-documented in different ways. Ben made an in-depth ethnographic study with the participants. Many studies of internet behaviour are conducted with quantitative methods such as surveys. Qualitative methods such as participant observation or naturalistic inquiry are more rare.

There are also a lot of other interesting seminars and workshops like a case study of a New York Times Redesign by Karen McGrane and Kevin Kearney and Practicing Design at the Yahoo! Media Group by Jens Jonason.

Conference on Computing, Communications and Control Technologies in Orlando, Florida, USA.

Here’s another conference in U.S. called The 5th International Conference on Computing, Communications and Control Technologies: CCCT 2007 jointly with The 4th International Conference on Cybernetics and Information Technologies, Systems and Applications: CITSA 2007. It takes place in July 12-15, 2007, Orlando, Florida, USA. Briefly what’s it all about:

“…Conference that will bring together researchers, developers, practitioners, consultants and users of Computer, Communications and Control Technologies, with the aim to serve as a forum to present current and future work, solutions and problems in these fields, as well as in the relationships among them”.

Conference on mobile learning in Australia

MLearn is a conference with aim to promote the development of mobile learning. It will be hosted here in Australia between 16-19 October 2007, in Melbourne. Here’s a brief conference description:

This conference will appeal to a wide range of audiences who are interested in enhancing learning, designing content and developing systems for mobile devices and wireless networks.

Will the libraries be there?

National library and information event in Birmingham, UK

UK conference Library Information Show will be held in Birmingham NEC 18-19 April 2007. NEC ist the same conference building as when I was attending the Internet Librarian International Conference 2003.

Another conference for medical librarians

Here’s another conference for medical librarians held on Ireland: Health Sciences Libraries Group (HSLG) Conference Teaching, Learning and Promotion Skills for Health Care Librarians. 15 & 16th February 2007. Here announced at EAHIL website.

Search Engines conference in Boston April 2007

Don’t forget the search engines conference Search Engines Meeting in Boston April 23-24 2007. I was there on a scholarship in 2000 when Larry Page was in a panel review with Eric Brewer from Inktomi and some others. Who remembers Eric Brewer and Inktomi today and who remembers Larry Page? ;-) I remember the Google stickers Larry Page distributed to his audience. Remember, this was a time just before the Google hype. Larry was quite, in contrary to boasting Eric Brewer, laconic but had the most listeners wanting to ask him questions afterwards. To many to getting me a chance to ask the questions I didn’t dare to ask during the panel discussion. ;-)

Since then I haven’t vistited the Search Engines Meetings conference. The 2000 conference was not splendid if I compare to others but quite interesting though. As always nice meeting other professionals. Any one who been at Search Engines Meetins conferences the latest years? What’s your opinion on the quality? I thought it was a bit to much of commercial product presentations disguised in informative conference talks.

Yet another conference for those info pros

A new conference in Prague called INFORUM for information specialists from public and special libraries, corporate sector and government agencies. Read this presentation extracted from the website:

“The 13th annual conference of INFORUM that deals with professional electronic information resources for research, development, education and business purposes will be held from May 22 to May 24, 2007 in Prague”.

Both Peter Jacsó, Phil Bradley and Guus van den Brekel are guest speakers. Never heard Peter Jacsó but would be delighted to hear him. Though I’m not going there. Read a lot of Peter Jacsós articles. Guus I heard and met in Cluj-Napoca, Romania.

Colis 6 – a conference on Conceptions of Library and Information Science held in Borås next year

Just discovered a Library and Information Science (LIS) conference called COLIS 6 – Sixth International conference on Conceptions of Library and Information Science with theme title: “Featuring the Future”. It will take place in Borås, Sweden, in August 13-16, 2007. The conference themes are Reframing LIS from Different Perspectives, LIS in Contemporary Society, LIS versus New Research and Professional Fields
and New Research Methods in LIS.

Session “Open document formats” at Internetdagarna, Sthlm, 2006

At the session “Öppna dokumentformat (eng. open documents formats)” [PDF] 13.40 Tuesday 24 October Predrag Mitrovic from Microsoft talked about “Open document formats adds value” and the standard Open XML which Microsoft created and wants ISO certified as open office ODF. Predrag meant that the market will decide which format to support. He thought that open XML formats is the future. Nice to hear from a MS guy. But this doesn’t necessarily means open office will be more used than MS.

16 May 2006 Matt Mondok at M-dollar wrote that Gartner Analysts predicts that the ISO certifiaction of ODF lower’s openXML hopes for certification. He also says:

“Nevertheless, ODF’s standardization doesn’t mean less Microsoft Office customers. Earlier this month, the OpenDocument Foundation, Inc. released the ODF Plugin for Microsoft Office. The ODF Plugin has been seen by many as an advantage to Microsoft because companies can still use Microsoft Office while leveraging the ODF format”.

By the way, Predrag looks like a mix of Tommy Körberg and Gerard Depardieu;-)

At last Predrag mentioned this developer website: openxmldeveloper.org.

Jonas Öberg from Freesoftware foundation had a talk with the title: “Esperanto för datorer (eng. Esperanto for computers)” [PDF].

It demands a very strong will to make open standards to work! We must reduce the economic incitements for private participants. Jonas encouraged users to not use software that don’t implement use of open formats.

A format is about how something is stored and transfered. If we know how the format looks like we can read the information and take part in the communication. A standard is an agreement between several parts to use the same format and that increases the value of the format and allows exchange between different systems.

Format focuses on data and information and standard on systems to work together. Open formats or standards can’t permit patents to limit dissemination. Anyone should be able to copy, distribute and use the format specification without cost.

Standards should be established and maintained of an organisation that permits all interested parts to participate in an open process of decisions. As customers we must demand for open standards and formats.

Karl Wessbrandt from Verva [PDF] also talked about open documents within the authorities

Opening session “The vision gets real” at Internetdagarna, Stockholm, 2006

I’m sitting here listening at the opening session “Visionen blir verklighet (eng. The vision gets real)” at the Internetdagarna (eng. Internet days) in Stockholm, 24th October 2006. Håkan Eriksson, research director and CTO at Ericsson, is talking about the three screens: plasma screen, laptop and cellphone. When you’re sitting in your sofa you want the plasma screen, when you want to work on the desktop you use your laptop and when you’re on the run you always have your cellphone in your pocket. Then it’s important to be able to move or reach data from all three screens. Further he talked about techniques behind.

Instead of Jonas Persson (he was sick) Predrag Mitrovic, CTO Microsoft Sverige, was talking. Quite new in the MS corporation, started his employment at the beginning of this year. Good speaker. Interesting content? Yes, some of it. He talked about different divisions. Their plattform services division is the solid ground. On this division they have to productivity arms: the business division for information workers and their Entertainment and devices division for digital lifestyle. Microsoft has three research labs at the US east coast, one in Cambridge, UK, and one in Bangalore and one in Peking. 7 billions USD are financing Research and Development for more than 700 employees. Predrag says MS want to develop interfaces for the whole family with broad user base and good support for 10 years forward. MS want to have search engine Windows Live as a central hub and build a services-based concept around it. Some of the big challenges he said was security (and integrity). Not strange for a MS guy to focus on that big problem for windows users (my comment when I’m blogging via my Linux OS ;-)

Predrag also talked about more relevancy when searching. Not a new issue indeed. He meant you should be able to search fast with your cell phone and get fast delivery. We need more natural interfaces and that’s why MS spend lot of money on R&D.

Geoff Huston, Chief scientist APNIC in Australia, was the third talker. Here is a short description of APNIC:

APNIC is one of five Regional Internet Registries currently operating in the world. It provides allocation and registration services which support the operation of the Internet globally. It is a not-for-profit, membership-based organisation whose members include Internet Service Providers, National Internet Registries, and similar organisations. APNIC represents the Asia Pacific region, comprising 56 economies.

Because I’m in hurry I just blog som sentences and power point notes from his speech about network and IP’s:

- What is happeing here seems happening everywhere.
- Is “convergence” still a valid concept? Bringing alltogether in a single network really a solution.
- Bittorrent has taken over the whole network!
- Overlay-based services now oen the user.
- Who really owns the user? Google, Ebay etc does.
- Forget about adding value in the network.
- The unconverged internet is vibrant etc.

All talks will be podcasted and published on the website if I’m right understood.

More pictures from EAHIL conference in Cluj-Napoca, Transylvania

Filip Kriz from National Library of Medicine in Prague has put up his pictures from Cluj on Flickr. And what can you say: He’s indeed a fantastic photographer, though his free (not pro) Flickr account stops him from putting up more pics at the moment.