Over the past few days, I’ve been exploring Canadian blogs and learning about more conferences, past and future. Today, I’m going to review and comment on  the Web2.You Conference held at McGill University in February 2009. Even though I could not attend, there is a good archive of video and blog posts that have been valuable to explore. For blog posts, I would point you to John Dupuis’ recap (Science Librarian at York University), Graham Lavender’s blog (a student at McGill and one of the organizers of the conference), presentation files from Stephen Abram and I’m sure there is more out there. Thanks are very much in order to Graham Lavendar for curating the conference’s wiki – you can find presentation slides and videos from several of the presenters in one convenient location.

I was particularly interested to watch videos of Michael Stephen’s on the Hyperlinked Library. The presentation is 10 parts on YouTube (here is Part One). I’ve read his blog – Tame The Web – with interest for over a year but I’ve never seen him present. I was very much impressed with this presentation. There was a great deal of good ideas and examples there (including examples of signage gone wrong). One point I took away in particular was the notion of thinking more deeply about privacy and participation. These are complex questions but I think Professor Stephens is right to point out that sometimes concerns about privacy shut down debate and exploration. Near the end of the presentation, new trends in employment were discussed: job titles like “user experience librarian” or “emerging technology librarian” (both of those interest me!) came up. Also, he suggested homework for those attending : create a Wikipedia entry for the McGill library/information school (there is a basic one now) and recommended reading Seth Godin’s book Tribes (which I did a few weeks ago).

Yesterday and today, I was notified that I received two seperate grants to attend conferences. This is fantastic news! The timing was perfect too – it came just in time to raise my spirits. There is a week left in the semester before everything is due…

I am now registered to attend the Canadian Library Association conference in Montreal, May 29-June 1 (where I will be co-presenting a poster session). I am also registered to the Special Libraries Association conference in Washington DC in June. While I will not be presenting at SLA, I will be taking a few courses, participating in the Research & Development (it occurs to me that I could now claim to work in “R&D”!) committee and otherwise enjoying the conference. I’m hoping to blog about both, but it already looks like I will have a very full schedule – I may end up with Twitter length blog posts.

On the second day of the Housing Memory conference, I focused on learning as an audience member. One presentation looked at the design of an information system that organizes information about a government program. The system had to bridge the needs of lawyers and those seeking to access government benefits. This act of understanding how each group understands the government government – how they even use different metaphors – is vital to designing good systems. This effort to design information services around the needs of users is also a move I approve it. Historically, information professionals have sometimes had the odd habit of creating classification systems based on their view of what makes sense, rather than what their users want. I grant that it is difficult to grasp user needs when designing large general purpose classification schemes (e.g. Dewey Decimal System) but I still appreciate the effort to do it. There was also an interesting discussion about differences between the US Freedom of Information Act and the Canadian Access to Information Act. Such laws play an important role in democratic society and ensuring government transparency is maintained.

The conference concluded with a round table discussion that explored memory and its meaning for information professionals. This was quite abstract, but such high level thinking plays a valuable role. One panelist mentioned the idea of the museum as a “non-place,” and this notion strikes me as interesting. I presume that “non-place” is meant a reference to the artificial environment of the museum. There was also much discussion of architecture (including the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montréal; something to I ought to visit on my next visit to the city), a topic which I have started to think about more deeply recently. While I might argue that a majestic setting such as the Bodleian Library is more inspirational for academic study than a modern concrete building, it is difficult to make something of this intuition. Certainly, interior design and architecture can have a very clear effect on morale (contrast a space with windows and natural light to one lacking such light), but I do not yet know enough to say more than that.

Today was the first day of the Housing Memory conference at the Faculty of Information in the University of Toronto, a graduate student event draing presenters from around North America. I had the pleasure of presenting a paper on libraries in recent conflicts (Bosnia, Afghanistan and Iraq) and received plenty of useful feedback. It had been some time since I presented at a conference and I had forgotten just how valuable the experience can be. The questions help me think more and discover gaps in my thinking. There is also a certain je ne sais quoi about the personal interaction with fellow panelists and the audience that really adds something to the experience.

The other papers and discussions at the conference has also been interesting so far.  One of the most thought-provoking moments of the day involved a discussion about the political and professional obligations of archivists. Specifically, a question was raised about whether granting access to certain sensitive materials (e.g. police records from South Africa’s apartheid regime or records from the Stasi from East Germany) could be damaging to the user and to society more generally. My own work in archives has not involved this particular challenge, but it may in the future. Nonetheless, I think it is valuable to begin grappling with these questions in the safe environment of a conference first, a situation where one can pause and consider the issues rather than responding to specific requests.

The day’s program concluded with a wide-ranging and thoughtful lecture by Dr. Geoffrey Bowker on, “Memory Practices and the Imagined Future Self.” He considered how memory, reading, and forgetting has changed over time. The questions were also very good. I only wish that I had noted down some of the many references Dr. Bowker provided – there were many promising scholars and works cited.

I’m looking forward to tomorrow as well.

Bruce