Friday afternoon

I took myself to a session organised by the Multimedia and Information Technology Group, where Caroline Williams, director of the Resource Discovery Network spoke on the theme e-perspectives. It was a highly interactive session, with Caroline asking us to answer a series of questions: I got only right, the number of iPods sold prior to 2005, 10 million, if you want to know; later she had us imagine future libraries.
A couple of points form a very wide-ranging presentation: she speculated that the music industry model of selling increasingly small units (for example the iTunes store) might spread to other forms of publishing and that users would increasingly want to make their own collections of e-content, the course pack reinvented for the digital age. She referred to the success of the SOSIG blog at the time of the general election (it seems their recent Socail Sciences Online week was less successful).
She referred (as did others during the course of Umbrella) to the interview with Lynne Brindley and Penelope Lively on the Today programme