A taste of an Aussie conference

Entrance to the exhibit hall

I had just attended my first ever conference here in Melbourne, notwithstanding the fact that I went on the last day of the Educause Australasia 2007 Conference held at the Melbourne Convention Centre. For the last day's programme, I was at the fifth plenary session and at the concurrent session on information management. Filipino librarians reading this post might wonder why I just attended the last day instead of the entire conference. Well, our library manager thought it was best to distribute amongst the staff attendance to the sessions that interested us rather than send two staff to attend full time. (This practice of sharing the badge while commonly practiced hereabouts is unusual in Philippine library setting and which merits a separate post.)

The fifth plenary session was on "Leading Beyond the ICT Conundrums for Scholarship 2.0" presented by Dr. Brad Wheeler, CIO of Indiana University. His presentation was as interesting as his visuals but much of it was directed to IT directors, academic policymakers and administrators. His talk was mainly on building an ICT infrastructure geared towards collaboration and the creation of a meta university. Throughout much of his examples taht he cited from his experiences, the library was a prominent figure in the bigger scheme of ICT in the campus.

For the concurrent session on information management, topics discussed were on knowledge management and wikis. Ainslie Dewe, University Librarian and KM Director of the Auckland University of Technology, discussed their university's efforts in coming up with a KM framework. Kate Watson, RUBRIC Coordinator from the University of the Sunshine Coast and Chelsea Harper, Electronic Services Librarian from the Central Queensland University, presented to an SRO crowd the result of their research project into blog and wiki use in Australian libraries citing the RUBRIC Project as a result of that study. Maryam Sarrafzadeh, a PhD student at RMIT and lecturer at the Persian Gulf University, Iran, presented a literature review on her current research on KM for library and information professionals which focused on the barriers that keep librarians from engaging in KM roles. These barriers are:

• the profession's focus on external information sources, as distinct from internal organization's knowledge assets;
• the lack of business knowledge;
• content ignorance;
• an image and name problem;
• personality issues; and
• the relative lack of the required management skills.

She concluded with some suggestions to overcoming these barriers addressed to library educators, practitioners, and researchers.