Adapting to a new environment

The 2010 EADI Information Management Working Group meeting in Bergen focussed on the way IMWG members have adapted to the new environment in which they work. Both the new work environment in terms of organisation and the new technological environment online.

There were two threads to the meeting:
1) Looking at the new opportunities arising from mergers and partnerships.
2) Seeing how organisations in development research are adapting to the new internet environment.

1)Working through partnerships and effective mergers
The opening keynote discussed how working in partnership has brought capacity building to the University of Juba Library in Sudan through a partnership between the University of Bergen Library and Makere University in Uganda. The South South cooperation between Makere University and Juba that emerged from the initial partnership was a particular success - demonstrating that new digital technologies could be successfully used in similar situations and that the challenges of internet connectivity and power can be overcome. We also heard from the Universitty of Zimbabwe in a separate presentation on the practicalities of library suppport.


The panel discussion on mergers and acquisitions raised some interesting criteria on choosing partnerships, identifying advantages in sharing capacities and resources and taking advantage of the purchasing power with publishers, which comes with a larger organisation. Library mergers could keep the exisiting users content when the identity of their collection was preserved. It was interesting to here how the different groups had addressed the merger process, with the discussion of a three level merger - the Libray, Librarians and Users.


2)The new opportunities online
The meeting covered adaptation to the new internet environment through a series of presentations and participatory sessions resulting in the showcasing of new devices and applications - an exchange of experience with social media and presentation of monitoring and evaluation approaches.

Against a backdrop of recent discussions that the "web is dead" in both the economist and Wired magazine the group is faced with new possibilities and challenges as social media and mobile applications gain importance and information needs to be placed on the sites were the audience is rather than just on an organisations website.

Many of these applications change fundamentally how information flows work. The application FlipBoard provides the usr with a newspaper drawn from tweets and incorporating the content of references, just view the tweets using #imwg using the ipad application . http://www.flipboard.com/

The experience in the room session looked at the issues library and information managers are facing in their use of social media, ranging from organisational policies to monitoring and evaluation.

Two sessions presented how online analysis and monitoring and evaluation could be undertaken on website and library use respectively.

Slideshare

Experience in the room

Online analysis

Happy delegates

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