This will be the last of my posts about the conference (for now, at least) and I'll mainly use it to talk about the presentation I gave last Friday.
This was a lively lunch session titled New subjects, new communities, new formats: The library collection in the digital world - 75 minutes which included a presentation (about 45-50 minutes) and opportunities for discussion. I described my research project and then explored some issues relating to the challenges posed by emerging interdisciplinary subjects, new types of user community (communities of practice and online communities) and format issues in the digital world. I included some audience questions, gathering responses using a very basic voting system (pieces of paper of different colours and numbered 1-5) and asking the audience to record their responses on a questionnaire sheet. I'm very grateful to the audience for taking part in this - these responses will be very valuable to me as I try to refine some of the questions for inclusion in larger questionnaire which I'll be working on over the next few months. There were some really valuable contributions made during the discussion - I am particularly grateful to the people who pointed me towards Radical Reference (an example of a type of social enterprise information service acting for social justice), who suggested alternative search terms which I can use to extend my literature review and who discussed different approaches to linking to freely accessible web based materials. I was also very fortunate that my supervisor was able to be there, too (thank you!).
It was the longest presentation I've given so far about my research - it was good to be able to use some of the data I've collected over the summer and to feel that it might have value for library practitioners working in collection development and management, particularly people working with collections for interdisciplinary subjects. At the same time, I'm very aware that this project is still very much a work in progress: I'm only a year into the project and still very much in the initial stages of data collection and analysis, so it was very helpful to have suggestions about things I could improve.
Partly for this reason, I've been unsure about how widely to share the presentation - I feel that by sharing it I give some of its content a sort of permanence which doesn't really reflect how fluid this is. However, I have decided to add a version of the presentation to the Charleston Conference 2011 presentations site which I'd heartily recommend having a look at for many of the rest of the conference presentations. I've paraphrased some of the information from interviews, but the rest of the presentation is as I delivered it last week. I've also embedded it below - let me know what you think!
I think sharing the presentation may add permanence but that permanence is there as it's in your mind TODAY. This starts to make sense and bring the two topics together so sharing is good, IMHO. Slide 25 begins to point to what I understand your focus to be. Hopefully I'm keeping up
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