IATUL Conference July 2015

I attended the IATUL conference in Hannover, Germany this month. The following series of posts will detail the experience. Click on the day listed below to view the blog post, and photos form that day. Day 1, Day 2, Day 3, Day 4, Day 5.

Conference details:  

“Strategic Partnerships for Access and Discovery”, 36^th IATUL Conference: Hannover, Germany; 5-9 July, 2015. 

The conference sponsors were:

·        Elsevier

·        IEEE Xplore

·        ExLibris

The following posts give a general summary of the IATUL conference and is laid out so that the sessions attended by the author are outlined in brief. The aim of the conference was to explore collaboration, provide talks at the cutting edge of strategy, management and practice, while allowing attendees to discover state of the art developments in librarianship, worldwide. Any errors or omission are entirely the author’s own.

The conference was spread over 4 days, succeeded by a half day visit to the TIB library [German National Library of Science and Technology] at Leibnitz University. A large range of topics were covered, with days being structured with a unified morning session, followed by break outs into parallel sessions. This allowed attendees to focus on topics of relevance / interest to them.

Topic Streams

• Library Strategy and Management: Methods of strategic planning and steering
• Strategic Partnerships: International and national networks and alliances for improving library services
• Changing Environment for Librarians: In between new types of publication, access options and discovery tools – challenges and solutions
• Open Science/Science 2.0: Enabling networked web-based scientific collaboration
• Management of Research Data: New approaches and best practices for data repositories
• Non-textual Information: Novel ways to provide added value while managing growing data volumes
• Digital Preservation: Collaborative projects, service and business models, limitations in legal framework, involving researchers in curation

In addition to a very busy and insightful programme, I attended some sessions with the staff of the TU9 libraries in the exhibition hall, discovering services such as Bibsonomy [http://www.bibsonomy.org/ ] on the way. Exploring the exhibition hall led to discovering library system suppliers such as H+H Software and angewandte Systemtechnik GmbH, which were previously unknown to me.

This was a very worthwhile programme, which certainly brought me more up to date with developments in the library and technology fields in a very short space of time, in addition to allowing me to meet colleagues from all around the world.

Selected photographs taken at the conference are available at: https://photos.google.com/story/AF1QipPOPCP8wtEwCk9l0sX3pHGAsIHa2klOg5vy2oxNNNBLw2TguE78dNS9Z9qltra5LQ

The full conference programme and the proceedings / presentations are available at: http://www.iatulconference2015.org/programme

IATUL

IATUL is The International Association of University Libraries.
The main objective of IATUL is to provide a forum where library directors and senior managers can meet to exchange views on matters of current significance and to provide an opportunity for them to develop a collaborative approach to solving problems. IATUL also welcomes organizations who supply services to university libraries into membership, if they wish to be identified with the association’s activities. Find out more at: http://iatul.org/about/

My attendance was made possible by funding from BI International [Bibliothek and Informaiton Deutschland]. Find out more about these grants at: http://www.bi-international.de/english/grants/