Finita la commedia

A free day before the evening flight. Again an excuse to catch the old number 19 tram, this time to visit the Science Museum, where they have  an even older tram.

Science Museum tram

There are several boats and jet fighters, and even an autogyro. There are lots of models of Da Vinci’s machines, but the star exhibit is an entire submarine.

Submarine Toti

Alas, no time to go to see Da Vinci’s Last Supper in nearby Santa Maria delle Grazie– it’s booked for weeks ahead – but a chance to return to the Sforza and visit the galleries there. Apart from the art gallery there are galleries for ceramics, musical instruments, prehistory, Egyptology and ancient art. The last is in the main Sforza halls with magnificent painted ceilings including one by Da Vinci consisting of intertwined willow branches. Sadly, it’s been much over-restored despite efforts to return it to more like its original state.

Da Vinci ceiling

A last tram ride back to the hotel to collect the luggage, and a journey to Malpensa airport, with its grand views of the foothills of the Alps. You don’t want to know about delays at airports, but what’s the point of a self-check-in facility that requires airport staff to stand by it to help passengers, and where they open up an old-fashioned check-in desk to speed up the process?

 And here endeth this blog.

GB

From now on GB will mean Governing Board for me, and PC Professional Committee not Personal Computer or Politically Correct.

The conference is over but today is an all-day meeting of the GB. IFLA is governed by 10 elected representatives, the five Divisional chairs representing the sections, the chair of the Professional Committee, the President and President-Elect.   It will have to be a rapid learning curve – I have only two years without the option of re-election.

 I also have to find a line between breaking GB confidentiality and writing a totally uninformative blog! Not unnaturally, many of the issues are of a sensitive nature. (I’m also on the Professional Committee, which looks after the interests of the sections and the content of the conference, but that isn’t meeting today.)

Almost all the morning is taken up with introductions, while most of the afternoon is taken up with elections to the various committees and boards of IFLA itself or of other bodies to which IFLA nominates. I draw the IFLA/International Publishers’ Association Steering Group. This group looks at areas where the two bodies have mutual concerns but different perspectives, for example collective licensing, or legal deposit.

The most substantive debate of the day is about the Google Book Agreement. As an affected party (being a publisher and copyright holder of books falling under the agreement), IFLA is entitled to make  a submission to the court hearing. The Copyright and Other Legal Matters committee has been working hard all week to draft a position statement, as submissions have to be made by 4 September. Our main concerns revolve around the international implications of a strictly American process and agreement.

In reviewing the conference the usual things emerge — not enough social space or refreshment facilities. The wifi issue is deferred to the December meeting of the Professional Committee. The social evening in city-centre restaurants was thought to be a good idea with some failings in its execution. It transpired that most of the volunteer student helpers were from overseas and couldn’t help very much with local matters.

We finish at twenty to six. Time to pack for departure tomorrow, but not before the opportunity for more sightseeing in Milan first.

Scooters are all the rage in Milan -- here's a fetching one in pink, outside La Scala

Nessun dorma

There is only the closing session left. This is where the awards and prizes are announced. We already know (now) that the 2010 conference will be in Gothenburg but we haven’t had the flashy video before  because it wasn’t in the frame in previous years. So we have a flashy video, finishing with Abba’s ‘Take a Chance on Me’. We have another flashy video for San Juan, Puerto Rico in 2011. The region is announced from which the venue for 2013 will be selected: in a gesture of reassurance after its bruising about Brisbane, the chosen region is South-East Asia and Oceania. Then the announcement for 2012. We already knew it was to be Europe (hence candidate city Gothenburg’s ability to step into the breach for 2010) and the winner now announced is Helsinki. Cue yet another flashy video. Never mind Eurocentrism, this is Scandocentrism!  2005 Oslo, 2010 Gothenburg, 2013 Helsinki. (If global warming continues, we can probably look forward to Spitzbergen  in 2017…)

 Mauro Guerrini, chair of the Italian National Committee, gives the final figures: 3,931 delegate registrations, 128 exhibitors; when all the interpreters, volunteers, IFLA staff etc are added in the grand total of attenders is 4,496 – an impressive achievement  in the light of the recession.

 Bob McKee gives the vote of thanks – in Italian, with an extended analogy between the IFLA conference and Milan’s other great passion, football. I think I understood almost every word, although Bob assures me that that was because it was more like Itanglish (my Italian friends demur).

 It’s time for Claudia Lux to hand the President’s gavel over to Ellen Tise of South Africa, who gives her opening address on her Presidential theme – ‘Libraries driving access to knowledge’. Unfortunately the wifi has failed again in the conference centre and I get back to the hotel too late to make it worth purchasing internet time there, so you’re getting access to this particular bit of knowledge (well, information) the next morning.

 The last reception of the conference is to thank the departing General Board and is held in the 18^th-century Braidense Library, which is a regional legal deposit library fo Lombardy. Dinner with Jesus Lau of Mexico and Anna Maria Tammaro of Italy, then at long last I get to ride on a No 19, one of Milan’s oldest set of trams with wonderful polished wooden seats.

 

Braidense Library

Anna Maria Tammaro, Jesus Lau, and me

The No 19 tram

Last conference day

I have a bit of a choice today — time to go to a session just because it sounds interesting. I pick on the IT section session on interoperability and repositories. (It’s next door to the wifi centre so there’s  a reasonable signal!) First Cesare Concordia talking about Europeana, providing a single point of access to cultural heritage,  Europeana.  It’s a portal to a series of aggregators of content  across Europe. Viewing and using data is done on the item’s original website. Europeana is now looking for people to develop APIs to allow it to interoperate with external services such as geolocating services and seach services. To this end the Europeana source ocde is available under an EU open source licence [EUPL].

Unfortunately the next paper, which sounded interesting, on European  TV heritage online, is not being given. But we can look at the Videoactive website. It uses the semantic web to provide a multilingual interface and search service.

Next is Emanuele Bellini of the Digital Research Foundation in Florence (which supported our pre-conference). He’s talking about a trust p2p network for access to open archive resources. There are lots of ways of storing complex objects but Emanuele maintains that the host institutions are concentrating on storing the data and not giving enough attention to the user needs. The deep web and broken links get in the way. There’s no user enrichment/annotation.  The speaker suggests that a p2p approach can help and recommends Axmedis.

 At this point I have to leave to do the rounds of section meetings. As I leave I catch sight of the word ‘Iconclass’  in the presentation in the hall across the way, which turns out to be the Education and Training session. As we use Iconclass in our Broadside Ballads database I’m tempted to stop off and listen, but duty calls and I move on to the Women in Libraries Special Interest Group, who are in my Division, with not a little trepidation. But it’s in a hard-to-find hall and when I get there only the convener and one other are there. I present my felicitations and leave to move on to the Copyright and Other Legal Matters meeting, where they’re discussing a possible response to the Google Book Agreement. The big question is,  can IFLA make representations as a member of the class (i.e. one of the classes of bodies affected, as author and/or publisher), or as an ‘amicus curiae’, a friend of the court, to make reprsentation on behalf on non-members of the class. From there we move on and IFLA’s Senior Policy Adviser Stuart Hamilton pitches for a copyright capacity building workshop similar to the one we’re doing for statistics. We move on to IFLA’s developing policy in relation to librarianship and traditional cultural expression. The draft is a strange mixture of statements of fact (‘traditional cultural expressions …often are associated with communities rather than specific individuals’) and aspiration (‘Libraries educate their patrons on the ethical use of documentary materials’)

 Time to leave for the mext meeting…a quick catch-up with Tord Hoivik to continue planning our expert meeting to develop the statistics for advocacy work package — things are shaping up very well and Tord has some good ideas. Then on to the Management of Library Associations meeting to put our pitch for the off-site workshop next year.  Stuart Hamilton is here too, so I hang my coat off his peg and invite their support  (which is of course forthcoming).

Library Theory and Research Section is next and I get there as they are discussing their Strategic Plan. They also agree to make a conference on LIS Education and Research Cooperation and Collaboration, already in planning for Sweden next year, into a Satellite meeting of  the IFLA conference. The thing that strikes me about this meeting is that it’s all very subdued  during the course of the meeting but as soon as it’s over everybody starts talking animatedly.

Then for our second conference session, ‘Statistics on the agenda’, the last full session of the congress. The highlight is probably a paper on impact assessment of the Gates Library Program — it is really informative and fits well with our own advocacy programme. Some very good advice, including knowing whom you are trying to influence and speaking to their needs. We may well try to recruit the author for our expert workshop!

Shall we all Kindle in future?

In the IFLA publications session this morning we heard a talk by the CEO of the Frankfurt Book Fair. He said that the predicitions were for Kindle and similar devices to be selling at the rate of 28 million units a year in 4 years’ time and for Amazon to be doing $1 billion a year in trade for them.

There’ll be Kindles everywhere (except in the Bodleian of course)

Goodbye to all that

My final Statistics and Evaluation Section Standing Committee meeting took place this afternoon. We had quite a few observers, which is testament either to the excitement surrounding the work we are doing or to some very sad lives.

I reported briefly on two meetings I’d attended on IFLA’s behalf during the year:  International Book Statistics project meetings under UNESCO’s auspices in Paris then in Amsterdam; and a similar European Expert Meeting on Book Statistics organised by the Tiele Foundation, also in Amsterdam  (within its World Book Capital City programme).

We then turned to activity over the coming year. First up is the Global Statistics for Advocacy programme we’ve agreed to produce; we now propose to run the workshop in several parallel sessions in an all-day off-site workshop in Gothenburg next year. New project leader Tord is raring to go and already has a blog about it.

The Emetrics SIG format is discussed: either very brief (5 minute) presentations followed by discussion, or invite the serials group (who want us to jointly sponsor a pre-conference on measuring e-journal use, which we don’t think we can take on, other than to provide advice on content) to discuss the result of their pre-conference in a wider setting.

The Libraries Serving Print-Disabled People section has also agreed the project bid on performance measures; we’ve given them Sebastian’s and Maria’s contact details and are now awaiting their next move. We may want to present the outcome from the project in a session next year, but if so it would be a bid for an extra session over and above our ‘entitlement’ to a 2-hour slot.

We agree that our main programme should focus on outcome measures for the Gates Foundation Global Libraries projects. One of the program reviewers is among our observers and offers to help, via his colleague and our member Michele Farrell.

Frankie Wilson reports that the Science and Technology Section is interested in staging a joint session with us.

In the closing minutes I mentioned under AOB the work I’d persuaded OCLC to do on data mining in the Worldcat database to examine cultural diversity – how many original books and translations are published in each country each year in all the different languages? Timothy Dickey at OCLC has produced reams of data which is now looking for a research student or two, or three, to make use of it.  Several members are keen to know more, so it’s just as well that I happen to have sample data on the laptop.

Looking back over that, there really is excitement over the work we’re doing and I’m going to miss it. The coup-de-grace comes  later that afternoon in Claudia Lux’s farewell address as demitting President of IFLA, reviewing her theme of ‘Libraries on the agenda’. She singles out our section for the way in which we’ve responded to that by getting statistics on the agenda.

Smug just doesn’t begin to describe it.

Live at last…or not

The original aim of this blog was to do it as near as dammit to when it happens. In Florence there was no wifi in the Spedale. Here in Milan wifi has only been available at a significant cost, much to the anger of many of the conference participants. It’s amazing how quickly wifi has become an essential. But so far all of the posts have been made from my hotel room.
The IT Section here has submitted a resolution to affirm that free wifi should be provided at IFLA conferences. Yesterday there was a surprise announcement that from now to the end of the conference free wifi will indeed be available. What’s the collective noun for a group of overexcited wifi addicts? So here I am, live at last and listening to the report from yesterday’s off-site conference.

Or that’s what I wrote three hours ago, at which point I lost the connection and have only just succeeded in getting back. A combination of poor reception in some areas and massive contention for the resource.

I was about to post a picture taken moments before, of a video being shown from the closing speech at the offsite conference. I took the picture so here it is:

Penny Carnaby, National Librarian of New Zealand, on screen

 

At that point I had to go off to the IFLA Publications launch as the book from our conference last year was published in April. I was going to boast about our quick-footedness in getting the publication (and these are good-quality professionally published hardbacks by KG Saur) within 7 months of the event; but I was upstaged by Jana Varleis presenting the proceedings of the conference on Strategies for Regenerating the Library and Information Profession held in Bologna last week! Apparently all delegates to that conference were given the proceedings. (Makes one wonder why it was then necessary to hold the conference, but I suspect that’s just sour grapes on my part).

The book

Well the wifi’s just gone down and come up again but here goes to post this…

Mediaeval and modern

OK let’s get this bit out of the way first. It was I who knocked over the large pot plant on a pedestal in the middle of the Galleria. It was an accident, OK? And if any member of my family mutters ‘Not safe to let out’ one more time… Anyway nothing was broken. Let’s move on.

IFLA always arranges a series of library visits in the host city. I haven’t been on one for some years, but was determined to see the Bibliotheca Ambrosiana (founded by Cardinal Borromeo 400 years ago) while here, so I put down for the tour. In the opening session the Bibliotheca was described as ‘second only to the Bodleian’ – how’s that for benchmarking? But I found I’d been allocated a place on the tour for Tuesday morning which I couldn’t do, so no library tour after all.

Still, that leaves the afternoon free (after the morning in the President’s brainstorming session and the E-metrics meeting) so it’s an opportunity to see a bit of the city.  First to the Sforza Castle dating from the 14^th century (though much rebuilt). There’s a bookbinding exhibition in the Trivulziana Library there, but I don’t really have time to do the Castle  justice if I’m to get to the Duomo.

Sforza Castle

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Duomo’s front features on the logo of the conference and it really is the heart of the city, gleaming white with innumerable pinnacles, many capped by statues. The only cathedral to compare is Notre Dame, but this is so much brighter and doesn’t have Notre Dame’s brooding air. The view from the roof is breathtaking (though the Alps weren’t visible today) and the modern Torre Velasca rises to the south mirroring the tower of Sforza Castle to the north.

Milan Cathedral

La Torre Velasca

Crockets and pinnacles

A wander through the Galleria is an excuse for an ice cream, then to the Palazzo Marino to view two leaves from the Da Vinci Codex Atlanticus and a page-turning ineractive display of other leaves from the work. No photos allowed there, but in the centre of the Galleria in the evening there’s a display of Luca Pacioli’s De Divina Proportione illustrated by Da Vinci.

De Divina Proportione

Before that there’s time for a visit to the ancient Romanesque church of St Ambrose, but then the Section dinner beckons. Instead of a cultural evening with massive catering, the Milan organisers have arranged with all the restaurants in the centre of town to take bookings (for a set menu) at their expense, while the various exhibitions (the Da Vinci material, the Trivulziana, and art exhibitions in the Palazzo Reale) are open till midnight. We have made good use of our new Italian member Maria Cassella and she has booked us into one of the best restaurants in Milan, Savini’s. (The unlucky ones will have ended up at the Macdonald’s also participating in the scheme.)

Statistics and Evaluation replete

(The plant  pot was keeling over behind me as I prepared to take this.)

I take the tube back to the nearest tube station, still about a mile from the hotel, and after being pointed in the wrong direction by a helpful Swede eventually get back around half past twelve.

Oh yes, I forgot. We started the day by sorting out requirements for the Statistics for Advocacy training package, and over dinner sorted out what we’ll do at next year’s conference. Not a bad day’s work.

La Scala again

Just read CILIP Chief Executive Bob McKee’s account of the La Scala evening.

Poster for the performance

From culture to copyright

Until a couple of years ago the first session each day at IFLA began at 8:30, which meant a very early arrival if you were actively involved in it. Thankfully, more flexibility was introduced last year and today’s 3+hour morning session, of which I’m chairing the first half, is scheduled to start at 9:30. It gives me a chance to prepare an few introductory slides for our session on Thursday, and to hand those and another short presentation in at the Speakers’ centre to get them pre-loaded and checked on the conference network.

This first session is on ‘Statisics for cultural heritage’ and an excellent set of papers they turn out to be. Go to the conference programme  and scroll down to Session 92.  The first two papers developed methods for assessing conservation needs, highlighting the need for prioritisation because not everything can be conserved. The next two papers looked at the digitisation of items of cultural heritage in libraries, archives and museums, and recent surveys to assess the situation.  Roswitha Poll described the pan-European NUMERIC initiative, while Trilce Navarrete Hernández and Frank Huysmans decribed how it had been applied in the Netherlands. One surprising result was that many archives and museums considered an object ‘digitised’ if it merely had a computerised description.

The next papers examined the measurement of usage once material had been digitised. Matthias Schulze of Stuttgart described the German Open-Access Statistics project.The project has two aims. First objective is the establishment of a permanent infrastructure for the collection and processing of usage data. The second objective is to develop and establish a binding standard for measuring traffic and statistics of searches for publications in institutional repositories.  This was an strong analysis of the points in the delivery of information at which measurements might be taken, and what it signifies. Emmanuelle Bermes and Gildas Illien produced the most striking image of the morning in thir chgaracterisation of the web as both big and fast:

'Big and fast'

 

They looked at the different agents involved in the process: the techies, managers and consumers, and the kinds of data they needed.

 Milena Dobreva (with several co-authors) from Strathclyde described the DiSCmap project aiming to prioritise collections for digitisation. A salient feature is that user needs play a large part in the process; it is not driven by conservation or technical issues. Finally there was a paper on museum statistics, including a proposal to harmonise them for benchmarking.

There was then the briefing session for officers, followed by a panel on the Google Book Agreement, with contributions from a lawyer,  publisher, Google and a librarian (Jim Neal of Columbia). One interesting figure to emerge was that the majority of works falling into the lucrative ‘in copyright but out of print’ category are non-US publications. Google’s representative indicated that the Book Rights Registry governance would recognie this fact.

The very first international conference I attended, 23 years ago, was the DOBIS conference (our LMS, pre-GEAC) in Atlanta. There I met one Merilee MacKinnon from Vancouver. She came up and said hello today. Amazing! Twenty-three years older and sporting a beard (that’s me not her) and she recognised me!