The morning opened with another keynote speech, this time by Bernard Barrett of the Irish Health Sciences Libraries Group, who gave his confessions of an information scientist. Bernard spoke about his experiences working outside a library, in mental health in Ireland. , developing guidelines and policies, identifying areas where there might be a lack of evidence and on service development.
He picked up some of the themes about professions that Ian Snowley had mentioned the previous day. He felt that the vocabulary of "user" and "support" used in library and information service discourse holds us back, and that it was more helpful to speak of colleagues and fellow team members when H called on us to be precisionists and ended with his ten confessions of faith, which I'll link to when his presentation goes up.
Next, I attended the sessions on international collaboration, where Emma Farrow spoke of her experience in Sri Lanka, and the work that PHi is doing in Uganda and Sierra Leone, and Tony McSéan spoke on the HINARI project (and also told us of Mike and Bernie Winters' legendary p[performance in the same auditorium...at the start of the act the straight man of the two appeared and began a monologue; when the second poked his head through the curtains and grimaced at the audience, a member of the audience was heard to shout, "oh no, there's two of them".
After the break I went to a very comprehensive presentation by Ina Fourie of the Department of Information Science, University of Pretoria, on current awareness services.
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