Keynote Speakers

Dr. Andrew Dillon

Professor and Dean
School of Information, The University of Texas at Austin, USA

Recent/widely recognised publications:

Designing Usable Electronic Text, 2nd Ed., 2004

Crying Wolf: An examination and reconsideration of the perception of crisis in LIS, Journal of Education for Library and Information Science, 46(4) 2006, pp. 280-298

Title of talk at CoLIS 6:

LIS as a research domain: problems and prospects

For half a century LIS has been caught in an identity crisis that divided the field artificially between library and information science, a division that mirrored implicit distinctions between people and technology orientations, between qualitative and quantitative methods and between impressionist and scientific identities. While the field argued, the world moved on and other disciplines took LIS-based problems of information organization, management and use as their own, threatening some within LIS but encouraging others to embrace a broader, more theoretically-driven conceptions of our problem space. With the emergence of a networked knowledge society where information plays key economic, social and cultural roles, there are two broad futures for LIS research, neither of which is necessarily wrong but both of which will force upon the field choices in identity. In the present talk I will outline these possible futures and argue that no single discipline as currently construed can adequately cover the information domain. How LIS responds to this challenge will determine our problems and prospects in the near future.

Dr. Elizabeth Orna

Dr. Elizabeth (Liz) Orna, FCLIP
Orna Information Editorial Consultancy, UK

Recent/widely recognised publications:

Making Knowledge Visible: Communicating knowledge through information products. Aldershot: Gower, 2005

Information strategy in practice. Aldershot: Gower, 2004

Current projects:

With information designer/typographer, Graham Stevens, new and completely revised edition of Orna and Stevens (1995) Managing information for research.

Title of new edition: Managing information for research; using it to design and write the end product. Publication date: late 2007

Title of talk at CoLIS 6:

Collaboration between LIS and information design disciplines: On what? Why? Potential? Benefits?

The necessity for collaboration between LIS professionals and information designers on ‘information products’ (the products, in any medium, where users meet the information they need and gain access to the knowledge of others) is a key theme in my recent book Making Knowledge Visible. The arguments for it are supported by research that conducted in the 1990s on how organisations manage their information products. The talk will make the case for this (non-adversarial) encounter in terms of benefits for all concerned; it will draw on practical experience from case studies and consultancy, and on recent thinking about visualising knowledge.

Dr. P.F. (Paul) Wouters

Programme Leader
Virtual Knowledge Studio for the Humanities and Social Sciences, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Recent/widely recognised publications:

Wouters, P., & Beaulieu, A. (2006). Imagining e-science beyond computation. In C. Hine (Ed.), New infrastructures for knowledge production: Understanding e-science, London, Information Science Publishing, pp. 48-70.

Andrea Scharnhorst and Paul Wouters (2006), "Webindicators - a new generation of S&T indicators", Cybermetrics, vol. 10, issue 1, http://www.cindoc.csic.es/cybermetrics/articles/v10i1p6.html

Current projects:

The Erasmus Virtual Knowledge Studio KNAW. This project entails the organization of a subcentre of the VKS at the Erasmus University of Rotterdam. Its main theme is Information in Practices, with a double focus on research practices and the role of research in social practices. The Erasmus Studio is located at the interface between information science and social science.

Resistance to ICT-mediated innovation in research. This project studies the dispute about the innovation of the main bibliography for Dutch literary studies. Innovation of research instruments is not only a methodogical issue, but has a deep intellectual and emotional impact on the identity of the field and the researchers involved.

Title of talk at CoLIS 6:

The informational turn: the implications of digital research objects for the humanities and social sciences

This talk discusses the potential of "materialistic information studies" for our understanding of the role of information and information technologies in the humanities and social sciences. Increasingly, the central research objects in these fields appear in digital form, either as digitally born materials, or as digitized representations of non-digital objects. The dynamics in this process of informatisation leads to double mediation. On the one hand, scholars adapt ICTs and digital tools to their use by embedding them in their routines and work practices. Because of this, the impact model of ICTs fails to adequately describe the consequences of digitisation. This does not mean, however, that ICTs do not have implications. This relates to the second mediation process, by which scholarly practices are being inscribed in digital media and networks. The interaction between these two processes of mediation, resulting in a process of co-evolution, has deep implications for the nature of the humanities and social sciences, and the type of knowledge they produce.

Invited Speaker at Educational Forum

Dr. Michael Seadle

Professor and Director,
Institute for Library and Information Science, Humboldt University in Berlin, Germany
Editor, Library Hi Tech

Recent/widely recognised publications:

A Social Model for Archiving Digital Serials: LOCKSS. Serials Review 32(2), 2006, pp. 73-77

Copyright in the Networked World: Copyright Police. Library Hi Tech, 24(1), 2006

Current projects:

Building a recommender system using data from OAI-PMH (Open Archives Initiative Protocol Metadata Harvesting) and from user markup of the metadata.

An anthropological assessment of copyright law as practiced in libraries and universities.

Title of talk at CoLIS 6:

Envisioning an iSchool Curriculum, Michael Seadle and Elke Greifeneder (Berlin)

The core curriculum for digital libraries includes themes familiar to traditional library training: collection development, user services, cataloging and metadata construction. It also includes topics such as systems development, long-term digital archiving, and cyberinfrastructure. Part of the new curriculum at Humboldt University examines these issues from an anthropological viewpoint that takes into account the multiple microcultures involved in the construction of a digital library community.