Workshop
WORKSHOP A: Information Generations: Change or Continuity?
Session coordinator: David Bawden, City University London, United Kingdom
Where: 26. 5., 10.00 - 13.00, CERGE, Praha 1, Politických vězňů 7, 2nd floor, room no. 7
The purpose of this workshop is to allow participants to reflect on and discuss what, if anything, is different about the needs
and behaviours of the new generations of information users. These are the young people now at school, and soon to enter
universities, and then become professional workers ?
There has been much discussion in Britain and the USA about how
the information habits of the successive 'new generations' of young people: Generation X, Generation Y, 'Millenials',
'Google Generation', and so on. This has generated controversy. Some commentators believe that the new generations of
'digital natives' are completely different in their behaviour and needs, and even in their basic mentality and brain
structure. This would mean that they will want a completely different form of information access, based on digital social media
rather than libraries and databases. Other commentators believe that the changes are much less deep and significant.
After an initial introductory presentation, the workshop will look at this in two ways, through structured discussions,
brainstorming and group work.
First, we will reflect on our own experiences of the information behaviour and
expectations of young people, perhaps contrasting the experiences in the Anglo-Saxon world with that in the Czech Republic and
Central Europe. We will try to reach a consensus as to the likely changes to be seen over the next 10 years.
Second, we will
try to build on this, to consider what changes, if any, we need to make to library and information services in response. Should
libraries and information centres be on Facebook? or in Second Life? Will books and journals transform themselves into wikis and
blogs? To what extent will e-books and e-journals become the norm? Will users expect all information provision through mobile
devices ? Where will these sort of changes, if they happen on a large scale, leave the library or information centre?
The workshop is organized in cooperation with CERGE-EI.
WORKSHOP B: An Overview of the OAI Object Reuse and Exchange Interoperability Framework
Session coordinator: Herbert Van de Sompel, Los Alamos National Laboratory, USA
Where: 26. 5., 13.00 - 16.00, Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic, Praha 1, Narodni 3, room no. 205
YouTube, Flickr, del.icio.us, blogs, mash-ups and other Web 2.0 technologies are indicative of the contemporary web experience. There is a growing interest in appropriating these tools and modalities to support scholarly communication, research, and education. This requires the ability to leverage the intrinsic value of digital objects beyond the borders of the hosting repository. This presents a challenge among others because digital objects used in scholarship and education are typically compound. For example the multi-part "virtual data" objects envisioned by the National Virtual Observatory Project, the "datuments" described in the chemistry community, and the learning objects implemented by NSDL share the property that their components are distributed over multiple databases, web servers, databases, and the like.
In order to achieve Web 2.0-like capabilities for such compound objects, the OAI Object Reuse and Exchange (OAI-ORE) effort proposes an approach that is fully aligned with the Web Architecture. It specifies a resource-centric interoperability framework that recasts the repository-centric notion of digital objects to that of a bounded, URI-identified aggregation of Web resources. In this manner, compound digital objects become more integrated with the Web, and thereby more accessible to standard Web applications and clients.
This workshop will give an overview of the OAI-ORE interoperability framework, including: Motivation & Foundation, Data Model, Serializations (Atom, RDF/XML), HTTP Guidelines, and Discovery approaches. See http://www.openarchives.org
The workshop is organized in cooperation with the Library of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic.
