Bloomsbury Conference 2012 (#bc6)

The Bloomsbury Conference took place on Thursday and Friday. I couldn’t attend the first day because, of course, I was chairing RDA12, and on Friday I was busy with the BASc interviews for Postgraduate Teaching Assistants, so I had to be one of those annoying conference speakers who pops in, delivers their presentation and pops out again. (Sorry).

My understanding from the #bc6 tweets, is that day 1 talked mainly about scholarly communications in science, while day 2 opened the discussion out to other sectors. As usual, I was providing the part of the library perspective, but unusually for me, I was speaking about subject librarianship, and relationship building between libraries and academics more generally. This was really the first airing of some of the material I will cover in my paper at the Rare Books and Special Collections Group Conference (#RBSCG12) in September. Over the summer I’m completing a literature review on academics’ expectations of their library services and of library services’ plans for meeting those expectations.

At the Bloomsbury, I emphasised three recent reports alongside the Future Libraries scenarios for 2050:

• Aukland Report (Re-skilling for Research, RLUK January 2012)
• Researchers of Tomorrow (JISC and BL 2012)
• Ricky Erway. Lasting Impact: Sustainability of Disciplinary Repositories (OCLC, 2012)

As we move from the traditional models of liaison into whatever the future will bring, it is clear that the key components of impact will be engagement, cooperation and collaboration. The skills gap survey in the Aukland Report appears to be both a sensible and a practical starting point for all those whose job it is to cater for academic researchers.

Conference chair Anthony Watkinson will be writing up the conference for Against the Grain.

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Image: Helena Perez Garcia, copyright commons, some rights reserved.

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