The annual seminar, presented by the Reference and Information Services Group is on again on 4 May.

About the Program

Much of the program for 2010 Reference @ the Metcalfe Seminar explores the role of data in libraries. With library collections and services moving away from just the physical and expanding rapidly into digital resources, this year's speakers will explore the library's role in creating, collecting and sharing digital data.

We have presentations that cover the life cycle of digital data - from creating and collecting primary source material - to digitising and sharing library resources (including the potential for getting the public involved in improving the data quality) - to Linked Data, a glimpse of the future possibilities of sharing data and making connections via the web.

Creating and sharing digital resources will become increasingly important to libraries that want to remain service based, surely a key feature of reference work, and not be relegated to just physical store houses. This year's program promises to stimulate your thinking about what that could mean for public libraries.

The program includes:

• Tim Sherratt will talk about Linked data : what is it and why is it important
• Cathy Johnston and Pam Langridge in conversation about reference collection management.  What are the issues in this critical area?
• How is ref-ex working?  Staff from Gosford Library will talk their experiences of using this training and we will show you information about how this program is being evaluated
• The National Library's Newspaper digitisation project and the accompanying contribution of the public in correcting the automatically generated data has been widely acclaimed.  Rose Holley, NLA Newspaper project manager, will talk about process of digitising and sharing the historical newspapers and the benefits of allowing public contribution to improve the accuracy of the data.
• Mal Booth will talk about his trip to Iraq on behalf of the Australian War Memorial, gathering content for their collection.  His experience has direct correlation with the work libraries do on local history.
• There will also be a series of lightning talks - hot reference topics covered in five minutes.

To tweet, blog or post to Flickr about the day please use #risg2010

Program

 9.30 Morning tea in the McDonalds Room

10.00 – 10.10  Welcome to the State Library by a member of Executive

10.10 - 11.00 Tim Sherratt on Linked data

 11.10 - 11.30 Pam Langridge, Central Northern Library and Cathy Johnstone, Clarence Regional Library in conversation about reference collection management

11.40 - 12.00 Three lightning talks and discussion

12.00 - 12.45 lunch

12.45 – 1.05  Ref-ex – stories from Gosford Library.  Michelle Swan-Beardmore and others from the team at Gosford Library will talk about how they are using Ref-ex as part of their staff training

1.15 Evaluation of the first year of ref-ex and future developments.  Some of the ref-ex team will tell you about what is coming in future modules, and how it is measuring up.

1.35 Rose Holley, Manager of Trove will talk about the crowdsourcing of the newspaper database, and about Trove.

2.30 - 3.00 afternoon tea

3.00 – 4.00pm Mal Booth, now the Director Education & Research Services Unit at UTS will talk about a collecting expedition to Iraq.  This has application in each public library for how they think about their reference and information services provision.