POST: ‘Despatches from the Fourth Quadrant’: Three observations from this year’s Discovering Collections, Discovering Communities (DCDC) conference

Stephen Brooks shares reflections from the recent DCDC2019 in Jisc‘s Content and Digitisation blog. ‘Despatches from the Fourth Quadrant’: Three observations from this year’s Discovering Collections, Discovering Communities (DCDC) conference, held November 12-14 in Birmingham, U.K.

In addition to providing a thoughtful and detailed overview of the conference and its many innovations, Brooks noted several key themes of the conference:

Theme 1: ‘Always on’ emphasized the importance of connection and engagement at the conference. He noted the diversity of roles present, observing that, “the movers and shakers of the information sector mingled with frontline librarians, local archivists, digital innovators and the technologically curious. There were representatives of galleries and museums, specialists in accessibility, publishers and a number of researchers.”

Theme 2: ‘We have more in common than we have differences’ praised the diversity of sessions as much as the overlapping and intersecting topics covered.

Theme 3: ‘You are the infrastructure’ reflects on the keynote talk by David De Roure, who “made it clear that we who ply our trades in the ‘fourth quadrant’ – where growth in both technology and human engagement gives rise to the creation of ‘social machines’ and new forms of research – are all responsible for building and maintaining the environment needed to support these new capabilities in learning and research.”

Brooks noted the importance of human stories across the many collections and communities shared at the conference.