World Library and Information Congress 2013

Thanks to the generosity of the John Campbell Trust in awarding me a travel / conference bursary, I was able to attend the IFLA WLIC2013 conference in Singapore - my first ever large-scale global conference!

Singapore is such a vibrant place, it's a real melting pot of cultures from all over Asia and India. With over three thousand delegates from across the globe, I knew I was about to get some serious international perspective! After registering, where we were even given complimentary travel cards for the metro, my first session focused on e-books and e-book provision. It was invaluable to be given a perspective on the developments and challenges faced by each continent of the world on this topic straight from my international colleagues. Seeing how much people do with comparatively little budgets and next to no infrastructure is truly humbling.

The main theme was all about the future; future libraries, infinite possibilities. Are we ready for the future? Are our services? Can we even predict how trends will happen? How can we ensure that our collections and our services will still be a part of the information process in a hundred years time? These are difficult and challenging questions to ask, but I found it really inspiring to be able to ask them together with international colleagues without any pre-existing assumptions or fears. It was liberating to gain different perspectives.

Essentially, we need to start to look at resource collaboration where appropriate and we need to think really carefully about how we can best expose our collections to the ubiquitous web search engines.

 Open Access cropped up in several guises: as an aid to collection development in Canadian libraries, as an important tool in research development, and as a bridge between knowledge management and democracy. Subject access and collection management models also came under scrutiny. One newly established library explained how their collections model had been set up and the policy developed. Resource sharing models were explored, such as Taiwan's public library e-books model and the Uborrow scheme set up between several academic libraries in the mid-West of North America.

The British Library explained their project to transform over ten thousand off-air recordings from pure video speech into transcribed text. One of the problems they faced were accents. For example, 'turn-up' was often mistaken for 'turnip.' Retrieval of specific content within videos was also discussed, with several indexing methods proposed.

The future of MARC was a hot topic and much discussed in light of developments in linked data standards. As someone who has recently trained staff across my organisation in RDA, the future of bibliographic standards and models is very relevant to my work. If we accept that, as was proposed at this conference, a large proportion of our users are starting their information search on a web search engine, we need to make our bibliographic data more discoverable by web browsers. It is all about making sure that the library, our collections and our services, are not overlooked. We have so much value to add to the learning experience, we need to start making this more explicit.

On a professional development level, this conference was astoundingly important to me. I would encourage everyone to apply for awards and bursaries to attend international conferences. It has developed me and furthered my perspective on these issues that are affecting libraries now and will most likely continue to offer us challenges and opportunities in the future. What's really important is to recognise challenges and then turn them into positive opportunities. If we can do this, our future libraries will have infinite possibilities.

So a big thanks once again to the John Campbell Trust and to all the volunteers and speakers who made this conference possible! And finally, thanks to my wonderful husband for accompanying me to this amazing place, and for keeping busy when I was at conference sessions without one word of complaint. My very last thanks must of course go to Singapore itself, that steamy tropical multi-cultural technologically plugged-in paradise. Malls, 7/11s and hawker markets - I'll never forget you. So long, and thanks for all the Slings!

Summer's swan song

Today it is September. Those long, balmy, (often rainy) August days are far behind us. Those days when the English sun would shine from dawn til dusk over quiet libraries, closed lecture halls, a canteen with reduced opening hours. Order and calm reigned supreme over our faculties and spires, our parks and gardens. We had such plans. We would manually upgrade all our short bibliographic records. We would catalogue our backlogs. Every shelf would be checked. Every reading list scanned. We might even be able to - wait for it - sort out the 'store room.'

And what happened? The summer we envisaged in our minds back in June went on forever. Day after day of heat and quiet and time. Buckets of time, stretching out over the weeks until the time that no one could then  even imagine being real - the Start Of the New Academic Year. But the summer we saw in our minds in June was not the true being of reality; oh no, this Summer was a trickster, a prankster. She made us think she went on forever in the hot sunny days characteristic of June, July and August in England that exist only in the nostalgic memories of our childhoods. Instead of this majestic Summer, where everyone goes on long picnics and still manages to complete multiple big projects, we got summer - one rainy season followed by burning hot days where time manages to go quickly and slowly at once. And before we've had time to process where time has gone, it is September again and we're seeing on the horizon the SONAY riding out to meet us on the plains of the campus.

As the law of time goes, September will see us simultaneously riding out to meet the Start Of the New Academic Year and leaping off our metaphorical horses to run back to our projects that we planned to complete over the summer. After the quiet that has reigned supreme over the library and the campus, after two months of closed lecture halls and empty classrooms, I am waiting for the rush. Our students bring our campuses to life, their cycles lining the streets and their coats all over the library give us concrete proof that they value what we're doing and why we're here. If they didn't, they wouldn't be here, and we would have little point as libraries and librarians. And whilst every single short bibliographic record might not have been upgraded this summer, I suspect that we all completed projects and sections of bigger projects. That is what is important.

The summer always goes faster than we expect. I start missing our students in August. Every book in our library might have been shelf-checked and in the right place, but I miss our students coming in and browsing everything. I miss the clutter and the whispers and the bags and the illicit mobiles. A library should be alive and without readers it is dead. It has no point. One major thing that I have accomplished this summer is forging better links with our academics. I am now attending a big meeting for new students at the start of term to introduce the library and our services and I have been invited to resource meetings for one of our graduate degree programmes. Things are exciting, dynamic and fresh. There are challenges too, of course, but I like a challenge. When the SONAY rides out towards us, I'll be the one at the front on the big white charger.