Liber Conference - Barcelona, 29th June - 1st July 2011

This was Liber (The Institute of European Research Libraries)'s 40th Annual Conference, and it was held in the Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya.  The theme of the conference was 'Getting Europe Ready for 2020: The Library's Role in Research, Education and Society' and accordingly there were a variety of talks on digitisation, institutional repositories and Open Access, web 2.0 and mobile technologies as well as many other innovative ways in which libraries around Europe (and beyond) are changing and improving their services.
 
My main reason for going was to present our poster on 'Open Access at Salford - Where next?'.  All posters were displayed in the lunch hall throughout the conference, and poster presenters each gave a one minute 'poster madness' presentation in the main auditorium.

Whilst not at my poster, I was able to attend a number of talks during the 3 day conference.  As there were so many talks and presentations, I have chosen to summarise a selection below.  However full details and slides from all presentations can be found at http://bibliotecnica.upc.edu/LIBER2011/



Science and Culture in the EU's Digital Agenda
Neelie Kroes, the EU Commissioner for the Digital Agenda, gave a keynote speech via video.  She stated that Open Access to research is a must, and that it was intended that digital objects (European cultural heritage) should be available via Europeana by 2025.  The significant number of EU commissioners involved in the Digital Agenda was highlighted, and it was stated that there is now a general principle of Open Access to publications for all projects funded by the EU research framework programme.  The commissioners are also working on a new open data policy for all public sector information.


Making data citable - The German DOI registration portal for social and economic data (da ra)
Datacite is a registration agency with 15 members across 10 countries, and 1,000,000 records registered so far.  Members (except associated members) are able to register their own DOIs with the site.  Datacite establishes best practice for data citation, however the members themselves are responsible for quality assurance. http://www.datacite.org/


Staying relevant in the Google age: implementing verticle search at the University of Manchester; a technological and cultural perspective.
This talk by Lorraine Beard summarised some of the obstacles they had faced during implementation of Primo, and also feedback and lessons learned.  Inital issues included portal access problems and Talis logon issues.
Manchester decided to make the inital search as simple as possible, and focussed on post-search filtering.  However, feedback from special collections suggested that title and author search fields were still required.
They carried out a survey of a group of students, and received a 12% response rate.  Of those respondents, 89% found the search either simple or very simple to use.  The aspects that students liked were that the system is fast, clear, easy, and easy to find journals.  However, the points that they disliked were too many results, unrelated results, and difficulty if looking for a particular paper.  The students also said that they wanted more search options.
The team also then surveyed staff users who listed positives including the promotion of IR content, valuable alerts, preferable to Google, less intimidating than previous system, intuitive.  Among the negatives were the system has limitations, not ideal for special collections, nor for researchers.  They suggested improvements of more integration with reading lists, and better management of user expectations.
Lessons that Manchester have learnt, were summarised as follows:  Technical; stay in the project window, in order to get all the required support, and carry out as much usability testing as possible.  Cultural; one size does not fit all, manage expectations, and have clear marketing - of both what it is, and what it isn't.

Does library use affect student attainment? A preliminary report on the library impact data project.
Graham Stone gave a very interesting report on the project carried out by Huddersfield University to investigate the link between library use and degree acheivement.  The data showed a very likely correlation between library usage and degree attainment - it was clarified that this was not a cause and effect relationship, but there was clearly a link  The data will be released on an Open Data Commons Licence, and a toolkit will also be released to help others benchmark.