Tuesday, February 14, 2012

VALA 2012 continued

Thursday 9 February: attended afternoon sessions at VALA.
Ingrid Mason gave a paper on using Linked Open Data providing access to information in collections held in galleries, libraries, archives and museums where she used the analogy of Victorian steam-punk – the concept of presenting old information in new ways. Australian National Data Service - www.ands.org.au/about-ands.html  - and Intersect Australia - www.intersect.org.au – are working in this area. Unfortunately her presentation consisting of rapid fire words interspersed with 56 slides made following the topic, which she often referred to as difficult to understand, not easy to follow.
The second paper presented by Elycia Wallis from Museum Victoria looked at a global project, Biodiversity Heritage Library - a consortium of natural history and botanical libraries that cooperate to digitize and make accessible the legacy literature of biodiversity held in their collections making the literature available for open access and responsible use as a part of a global “biodiversity commons” – www.biodiversitylibrary.org . The Australian component of the project is the Atlas of Living Australia - www.ala.org.au.  The Biodiversity Heritage Library began with 12 libraries in the USA and UK establishing a digital research taxonic community in 2005. Other countries from Europe plus China, Brazil and Egypt as well as Australia are now involved. Scanning of material is continuing with links to articles and citations available. Linkages are also made from Trove and Flickr.
Robyn Van Dyke from the Australian War Memorial spoke about their new major digitisation project for 2015 – Anzacs online - http://anzacsonline.net.au/ 
The final plenary session for the conference was presented by Eli Neiburger from Ann Arbor District Library speaking on the topic, ‘Access, schmaccess: libraries in the age of information ubiquity'.
More details on the last two sessions in separate posts.

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