Opening plenary
Towards the end of the
rainbow - finding the box?
Speaker
- Lena Olsson
Presentation
Closing plenary
A review of the key
points of the seminar
Speaker - David
Smith
Paper
Outside the box - broadening
horizons
What next and how do I get there?
Skills for the future
Speaker
- Alison Raisin
This
paper considers the skills that librarians will require in the future,
both in core library work and in broader information work. Both
professional and general skills, e.g. communication, are considered, as
are changes in the balance of skills required, and the way skills may
evolve. Particular consideration is given to the skills required of
government librarians.
Full
text and presentation
Government
Library and Information Services in Portugal: the
need to broaden horizons
Speaker
– António
José de Pina Falcăo
In
open and democratic societies, public administration should be ruled by
principles that make possible to shape it as a tool serving the promotion
of citizenship and the economic and social development.
The
modernization movement that aims to give such nature to the Portuguese
public administration should include the development and the promotion of
the quality of services that manage the information produced inside and
outside, this way giving answers to the needs of Administration itself as
well as of the citizenry.
In
Portugal, there is no governmental strategy concerning the governmental
libraries. This situation prevents these information services to play a
more important part concerning the support to the decision making, the
modernization of public administration and the acess to the public sector
information.
There
are, however, governmental initiatives and programs to develop the
information society and some of them have in view public administration.
They are an opportunity not to be wasted concerning the development of
modern and high quality information services and their integration in
networks through which the information resources can be optimized and the
access to information improved.
BAD
will try to contribute to the definition of a strategy in this area,
mobilizing the information professionals and presenting proposals to the
government.
Sadly,
Antonio has been taken ill and will not be able to give his paper.
In its place we are pleased to announce the following paper
The role and
status of government library, information and documentation
professionals in two European countries - France and the United Kingdom
Speaker - Peter
Griffiths
The role played by library, information
and documentation professionals in government programmes is affected by
the status of the profession in the central government administration of
each country. This overview will contrast the organisation of these
professions working in French and British government, considering
especially the official parameters for the work they undertake and their
relations with other professional groups, such as their respective
government information services.
Full text
The role of evidence in successful
policymaking - a new challenge for all
Speaker - Sharon
Jones
Since the UK Government announced that
'what counts is what works', the role of evidence in successful
policymaking and de ivery has become ever more crucial. Put this into the
melting pot of increasingly global perspectives; the burgeoning Internet
and growing awareness of the importance of information and knowledge
management and we see an immediate challenge to information providers and
recipients. Thinking - and acting - outside of the box are now the order
of the day. This paper discusses the key challenges for all concerned and
looks at how the work of the Centre for Management and Policy Studies is
playing a vital role in promoting the skills and resources to successfully
deliver evidence-based policy. The session will include a demonstration of
Policy Hub - the new web-based resource to support improved policymaking
and delivery.
Cataloguing and indexing: an
essential skill reborn
The art of information governance
Speaker - Pekka Kuittinen
An evaluation of the previous version of the intranet; - rethinking the concept of intranet, portal and document management;
use of structured documents and metadata; organisation knowledge and work space
(okws); government's internal personalised portal as a coordinated knowledge
management network of potentially 5000 users and 100 different systems; virtual working and
meetings - a challenge in changing the way
of working?
Full text and presentation
Controlled
vocabularies, metadata and mappings in
the UK public sector
Speaker -
Stella Dextre Clarke
Thesauri are coming back into fashion, now that
organisations are discovering how hard it is to find things on their
intranets. A well-designed
vocabulary should make browsing and/or searching among internal resources
a much more fruitful activity. But
the original problem resurfaces as soon as the resources from more than
one public body are merged in a cross-sectoral pool.
If all have been indexed with different vocabularies, Babel
results.
The interoperability strategy adopted by the UK
government starts by encouraging all departments and agencies to implement
specialist vocabularies for indexing their resources to suit the needs of
users in their respective sectors. All
the better if groups of organisations in one sector can collaborate in the
development and implementation. But caution: they should first take note
of the Government Category List (GCL), a high level taxonomy with broad
coverage of public sector topics. To
comply with the government’s metadata standard, public sector bodies
must also index with the GCL. This
is most efficiently managed by adopting automatic mapping from the
specialist vocabulary to the GCL.
This paper will describe, at a rather practical
level, the styles of vocabulary that some public bodies are adopting and
how they organise the meta-tagging (alias indexing) of their resources. Careful planning can minimise the workload and address
quality control issues. At
the end of the process, all resources should emerge appropriately indexed
for their internal and sectoral audiences, and also tagged to enable
high-level categorisation in cross-sectoral services.
Full text
and presentation
Workshop
on cataloguing government publications - Lynda Cooper
The Workshop is an opportunity for discussion and an exchange of ideas
based on the theme of cataloguing government publications. I shall offer a
personal view from my experience at the Home Office, where we use our
traditional library skills to catalogue our own organisation's wide
variety of material. There are also future challenges as we move into an
electronic information age where we are also applying our skills to new
metadata standards and electronic publications to meet cross-government
initiatives to make information more widely available.
There will also be the opportunity of a visit to the main Home Office
Library during the Workshop
Full
text
IT and electronic delivery
Librarian
skills, user education, and support
Speakers - Nancy
Bolt and Gladysann Wells
This paper
focuses on the skill set needed by librarians who serve government
officials and employees and special training programs that are in place
both for the librarians and for the governmental officials and staff.
Particular attention is paid to electronic resources created or
made available for the benefit of government officials and staff.
Nancy Bolt - Full
text and presentation
GladysAnn Wells - Full text
Information overload: how the UK Department of the Environment, Transport and the Regions tackled the issues and were we successful?
Speaker
- Clare Gibson
In late 1998 the
Department of the Environment, Transport and the Regions moved to
open-plan accommodation, introduced a new e-mail system, and had plans to
make the Internet available at the desktop. Concern about the resulting
information overload on staff led the Board to instigate a review to
identify both what was wrong and ways to tackle those issues.
Results
showed that it was the "soft" behavioural and corporate issues
rather than the "hard" technology issues that were crucial to
tackling the problems successfully. The Review team drew up a plan to take
action in DETR, and also set up a series of cross-governmental meetings
for workers in information management, aiming to benchmark issues and to
deal with cross-cutting issues jointly. An internal working group tackled
issues such as proper use of e-mail, ICT training, and IM /KM competences,
which eventually led to the publication of an integrated document tackling
"Better working practice in the Department". This does focus on
many of the "soft" issues originally identified by the IOIR. How
does it feel three and half years later? Better - but this may be mainly
down to natural human tendencies to adapt: many of us have adapted in a
quite extraordinary fashion in a very short time.
Full text
Information
support for the strategic projects of the government – the virtual
library
Speaker -
Maija Jussilainen
The paper
discusses how the government information services can serve
inter-ministerial projects by organizing information material and offering
it for use in the government. The framework is the reform
of the central government, and especially the reform of the strategic
management of the government.
Full text and presentation
Management - shifting up a gear
Co-operation
and further education in German governmental and administrative authority
libraries
Speaker
- Maria
Göckeritz
There
has been a massive change in the recent years in the area of
administrative libraries in Germany. For some federal countries the change
had already started when the Berlin Wall fell. Due to changing procedures
and objectives librarians are forced to become information managers in
their respective parent organizations. This requires a tailored continuing
education, and this is what regional and inter-regional professional
working groups have to focus on.
Overall
changes in the information environment and a looming reform of the
administration in Germany form the impact libraries will have to deal
with.
To
cope with the demanding tasks and to gear up in performance at the
threshold of the 21st century, bilateral cooperation and
networking are the only opportunities that small and medium sized
administrative libraries have to survive in their environment.
Full text and presentation
The knowledge strategy and the Government Library and Information
Service
Speaker
-
Irja
Peltonen
The paper
discusses the position of the library and information service in the
knowledge strategy of the parent organisation. What questions does
the knowledge strategy pose for a library and information service?
Is there room for strategic thinking in the daily work of libraries? The
strategic management in the Ministry of Finance (Finland) is used as an
example.
Presentation
The tail
wags the dog: Innovation
centre, parliamentary archive – or how the setting up of a parliamentary
database affects work processes and organisation.
Speaker
- Christine
Wellems
It will be
shown using the example of the administration of the Hamburg Parliament
how, through the project, ‘Setting up and introducing a new
parliamentary database’, work processes in the department
“Parliamentary information services” were gradually changed.
Already, during
the pilot phase in 1998, the first changes, in other departments of the
parliamentary administration and also at an external supplier, were
necessary.
The management
of this process of change will be presented together with a description of
the current situation.
Altogether, the
innovation, which was mainly introduced for technical reasons, has already
led to changed in-house work processes, and furthermore, to changes in
demands on staff expertise. Finally it has also resulted in an improvement
in the quality of service offered.
On the basis of
the experience gained from the project parliamentary database, the newly
set up working group ‘Documentary management’ is taking the process of
change further.
Full
text and presentation
Further
papers and presentations will be posted as they become available.
