The ALISS (Association of Librarians and Information Professionals in the Social Sciences) summer conference was held at the LSE on Wednesday 23rd August. I was chairing the event and Matt from CLT was one of the presenters.
The theme of the conference was ‘Meeting the Challenge of the Google Generation: technology or training” and there were 6 presentations including Matt Lingard and Peter Godwin, talking about social software that many of the ‘Google Generation’ now use, such as blogs and wikis. Margaret Flett from UCL and Frank Parry from Loughborough were looking at MetaLib and the role of federated searching, particularly in comparison to Google Scholar. Sarah Pavey, a school librarians gave an insight into information literacy education in schools and finally Angela Joyce from Intute, gave us an overview of the new Intute: Social Sciences website and the services available.
I really enjoyed the conference and initial feedback suggests that the delegates found it a thought provoking and useful day. ALISS would like to follow this up with a hands-on session, perhaps early in 2007. Heather has now made the slides available on the ALISS website: http://www.lse.ac.uk/library/other_sites/aliss/23august2006.html
All conference attendees are encouraged to comment on this post! I’ve started you off so don’t be shy 😉
Mad Rattling (aka Matt)
It was indeed thought-provoking – I’m finally starting to shift my thinking towards how we put our training within the context of the technologies which users are now familiar with. ie not just saying “You should be using the library’s resources” but showing them how our resources fit in to their existing online experience – let’s try out some of these tools, as Matt suggested!
[…] This follows on nicely from some of the presentations and discussion at the recent ALISS conference. […]