Thoughts and feedback by Ina Smith

abernard102@gmail.com 2012-06-24

Summary:

[The blog post references the Southern African Online User Group (SAOUG) whose goal is to “Provide an insight into the extent of the growth and activity taking place in the information industry.” The SAOUG sponsored the recently held 11th Southern African Online Information Meeting (SAOIM). More information about the conference can be found at .] “I am of the opinion that the SAOIM conference organizers managed to bring together a huge variety of speakers and topics, all of importance for information and library workers... I’ve been in the library profession for the past 20 years, and gained valuable experience especially at the University of Pretoria, and for the past two and a half years at Stellenbosch University. I am interested in finding solutions on how we can better address the needs of researchers, how we can work together as a country and also on the continent, and exchanging ideas and solutions – also with international communities. Sometimes it can become frustrating if one knows the technology is there, but due to a lack of skills, work ethics, expertise and money, institutions can’t move forward. So my message for librarians is: Look ahead, and see the bigger picture. What is the next big wave as applied to SA libraries? Currently the top issues on the agenda are still open access, publishing, digitisation, digital curation. See also the 2012 top ten trends in academic libraries: A review of the trends and issues affecting academic libraries in higher education, ACRL Research Planning and Review Committee ... Universities should start publishing their own open access journals, and libraries can play a major role – hopefully they won’t miss the boat again. I also foresee that more online library services will move into the cloud, and some libraries might consider building their own clouds. Most of our e-journals and e-books are hosted in clouds, therefore working in the cloud should not be something new. As a physical space, I think the research library will more and more become a place where researchers can sit in quiet spaces and access online resources – I foresee libraries will consider investigating offsite storage, and move printed material out of their buildings.”

Link:

http://saoug.org.za/2012/06/20/1031/

Updated:

08/16/2012, 06:08

From feeds:

Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) » abernard102@gmail.com

Tags:

oa.new oa.gold oa.business_models oa.comment oa.libass oa.libraries oa.events oa.attitudes oa.preservation oa.presentations oa.books oa.librarians oa.digitization oa.africa oa.cloud oa.acrl oa.publishing oa.curation oa.data.curation oa.u.pretoria oa.stellenbosch_u oa.saoim oa.stellenbosch.u oa.journals oa.south

Authors:

abernard

Date tagged:

06/24/2012, 21:45

Date published:

06/24/2012, 22:33