emtacl10: emerging technologies in academic libraries
emtacl10 (26 – 28 April 2010. Trondheim – Norway) was a good conference, packed with inspiring talks and sometimes provoking thoughts such as the “libraries outside libraries” proposition of Lorcan Dempsey (OCLC), the reasons of Anders Söderbäck (LIBRIS) for why academic libraries should care about linked data or the challenging argument of Ida Aalen (a Norwegian university student) to librarians: “if I’ve got Google, why do I need you?“.
We presented the library as an entity somehow captured or surrounded by a large number of different management systems, aggregators, commercial databases, subscription gateways, etc. etc., and discussed the capabilities of simple technologies such as RSS feeds, APIs and mashups to enable libraries to link directly to the data that publishers are putting on the web for free.
Our presentation was based on creating useful mashups with the journalTOCs API. The Internet connection was very good and we were able to run various life sessions with the website and the API calls of JournalTOCs without any problem. After the presentation, I had the opportunity to talk with various librarians and a delegate from Elsevier. The immense majority of registered users with JournalTOCs (which it’s now approaching to the 3000 registered users) are from academic libraries.
The conference environment was also very good, friendly and full of animated conversations and networking. There were plenty of opportunities for enjoying the hospitality of our Norwegian hosts.
Good Norwegian music played with a “carrot and swede” mashup
