There's less than a week to go till the Health Libraries Group comes to Eastbourne for its 2006 conference. All police leave has been cancelled. This venue is comme il faut; conferences are always better by the seaside, with its atmosphere of hedonism and abandon. Tomorrow I go on a reconnaissance mission, and may bring back photographs.
I'm looking forward to all sorts of things in the programme: keynote speeches by Ian Snowley, (CILIP President-elect) and Bernard Barrett of the Irish Health Sciences Libraries Group who kindly gave me an audience at their Kilkenny conference earlier this year. Bernard speaks on Questioning one's mental health: confessions of an information scientist. Dr Steven B Kayne gives the 2006 Bishop LeFanu lecture on the controversial matter of homeopathy, under the title Christian Samuel Hahnemann - the first independent prescriber? I trust he will take a robust attitude towards mumbo-jumbo.
In a plenary Peter Morgan speaks on open access and institutional repositories, and I hope will describe Cambridge University's efforts in this area. There are also plenaries on the National Library for Health and the topical matter of work with public libraries on health information, and parallel sessions on collaboration, evidence based librarianship, harnessing information technology, international collaboration, information literacy and expanding rôles.
In the special interest group sessions, I'm particularly interested to see that CHILL, of which I was once a member, is organising one, as are Libraries for Nursing, IFM Healthcare and the NHS Scotland e-Library.
Of course there's a social programme too, and the conference dinner is at the English Wine Centre.
I shall be blogging the conference. if anyone else is, in order to make our offerings more discoverable, may I suggest we agree on some Technorati tags (and Flickr tags too if anyone's taking photos). I'd suggest HLGEastbourne2006.
Technorati Tags: eastbourne, hlg, hlg2006, HLGEastbourne2006