BOBCATSSS 2009

The website of the next BOBCATSSS symposium has recently opened! BOBCATSSS 2010 is to be held in Parma, Italy between the 25th and 28th of January 2010. Mark the dates in your calendar. The theme is “Bridging the digital divide: libraries providing access for all?”, and the call for papers is open until 15th of July 2009.

Further information and updates can be found at the BOBCATSSS 2010 website, and we recommend you to visit often or to subscribe to their RSS feed.

Regarding this BOBCATSSS 2009 website and its future: links to the full papers have been added to the abstracts page and to the list of full papers for easy access.

We will soon transfer an archived version of these pages to a new, permanent location (from www.bobcatsss2009.org to www.uta.fi/conference/bobcatsss2009). After the transition the old domain will redirect you to the new address for a while, but please update any links to point to the new location.

Updates to the content will not be made after the move.

We warmly welcome you to BOBCATSSS 2009! The symposium starts tomorrow, and here are a few points of notice:

• The first-night dinner is a social event which is only targeted to those who have paid the extra 5 euros.
• If you move by metro, the stop to leave is “I.P.O” for FEUP (days 1 and 3) and “Casa da Música” for FLUP (day 2).
• The addresses in the programme for FEUP were incorrect (days 1 and 3): the correct address is Faculdade de Engenharia (FEUP), Rua Dr. Roberto Frias, s/n 4200-465.

The organising team in Tampere held its last meeting yesterday in snowy Finland before travelling to Porto.

Most of the team is heading to Portugal this Sunday, and we are staying for seven days, some even longer.

This blog is going to be updated during the symposium too, as time allows, so do not stop following. Another way to keep up is to look at the photos in Flickr (tag: bobcatsss2009).

Here we come!

If you want to make sure that you have been accepted to attend a workshop or a tour, you can now check your place in the listings. We will contact you by email as well if it looks like you will not have a place in an event. (The status view of the registration system may not show you the actual situation because many events have been overbooked.)

Lists of the attendees can be viewed here. The user name is ‘bobcatsss’, and the password is the beneficiary account number (beginning 4726…) from the invoice you received by email.

Dialog ProQuest will also hold a company workshop under the title Dialogclassicweb (day 2, starting at 14:00). To this workshop you can register on the spot.

Update: The overbooking was caused by the design of the registration system. During previous years there had been problems with people not paying or arriving, but still registering and taking up places in workshops and tours.

This is why we decided to let those in who paid first, also to encourage quick payments. Unfortunately this meant that registration to a certain event was only closed after it was full of participants who had paid; meanwhile, people could still register to the event.

So if attendants did not pay immediately after the registration, overbooking could happen.

Abstracts of the full paper presentations have now been published. They are listed in the new abstracts page in the programme section of the website. You can use your browser’s find function to search for names of the presentations or authors. Poster and workshop abstracts will follow.

The “List of full papers, workshops, posters” page now lists the posters by day.

Update: workshop and poster abstracts added.
Update 2009-01-14: abstracts have now been linked from the programme.

We recently received a web questionnaire from the organisers of BOBCATSSS 2011, which will be a cooperative effort between Austria and Hungary. The multiple-choice questionnaire was directed to the organisers. The questions and answers may still be of interest to the general audience as well, so I will take a look at some of them in some detail and provide commentary from my personal point of view.

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The registration system has now been closed as the official registration period ended. If you still wish to attend, please write to us by email, and we will see what we can do. In passing, there are still quite a few people who have not paid their invoices in due time.

Happy new year on behalf of the BOBCATSSS 2009 team members as well! We are back to work. There is still much to do, especially all kinds of practical matters. Final preparations are underway.

The programme of the symposium is now available as web pages, in addition to existing PDF files: day 1, day 2, and day 3. Abstracts of the presentations and further details will be added in the near future.

There is still time to register for BOBCATSSS 2009! We are planning to close the registration on the 9th of January 2009. If you have not paid your registration fee already, please do so as quickly as possible.

As a practical note, some of the workshops and tours have been overbooked due to our registration system. Therefore we cannot guarantee a place if you were a late payer. We will offer you a chance to check out if you have been accepted before the symposium starts.

Also, more information about the keynote speakers and their topics has been added.

The programme of the symposium has now been published. At least at the moment it is only available in PDF format: day 1, day 2, and day 3. There are three parts; one for each day of the symposium.

We still reserve the right to make changes, but there shouldn’t be any major ones. This means that you can start planning your own conference schedule. Abstracts and closer details will be published later.

Update 2008-12-19: All full papers, workshops and posters are now listed on one page in the programme section.