Wednesday 9 April 2008

DLF - Digital Libraries (are) Fundamental

I'm speaking at the Digital Libraries Federation spring forum in a couple of weeks in Minneapolis (28th-30th April if you're interested).

The last industry event I was at had a real "bunker" mentality. Budgets seemed under pressure, people felt unappreciated and there was a dearth of great work. Same old same old I suppose, but in the presentation I gave, I tried to offer some hope.

In the library and museum communities we are currently sitting at a happy collision of a burning desire to have universal access to all human knowledge and the appearance of an array of tools that make that dream realisable. The people who will realise that dream were sitting in the room. How much more of an exciting challenge do you want in your career?

As we slowly make inroads into the vast mountain of paper than needs converting to binary information, libraries are moving centre stage.

I hope DLF Minneapolis is full of people excited by the challenge and not those wishing life was like it used to be - analogue.

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