BOBCATSSS 2009

Still some news from BOBCATSSS ‘09: we have finally published the conference papers in a free web archive called E-Lis. You can find the papers at http://eprints.rclis.org/. We recommend you to search documents by e.g. author’s name.

Now practically all the post-conference work is done, though, we are having discussions and advising our followers from Parma, Manchester and Liverpool. We bet there will be a great BOBCATSSS on next year! See you there!

BOBCATSSS ’09 is successfully over and now even (most of) the Team Tampere has reached home again. The organizing team wants to thank everyone who participated and especially those who gave us feedback. We will take your words into account and pass the relevant information to the next BOBCATSSS organizers to help them to organize a great conference next year.

As it was informed at the closing ceremony, BOBCATSSS 2010 will take place in Parma, Italy. We hope to see you there again!

We have started to upload conference photos to Flickr with the tag ’BOBCATSSS 2009’. There is a lot of photos still to come from our team, and we hope our guests will also add their pics to Flickr as well and tag them like we do.

Find the photo collection at http://flickr.com/photos/tags/bobcatsss2009/

People in BOBCATSSS seem to have adopted the conference theme “Challenges for the New Information Professional” well.

Professor Tom Wilson, as the first keynote speaker, headlined his speech plainly “Thinking about the future” and put an emphasis on the rapid growth of population and the number of Internet users in developed countries. As hundreds of millions of people get access to the highway of information, professionals of our business shall have big new challenges, he stated.

The second keynote speaker, doctor Kimmo Tuominen, spoke mostly about participation. Mr Tuominen presented bold metaphors by, for instance, building allegories between information science, punk rock and Star Wars phenomenon. The third keynote speaker, professor Fernanda Ribeiro, pondered about the diversity and interdisclipinarity of information science by, for example, highlighting facts such as the growing number of new profession titles on information field.

For Thursday the BOBCATSSS caravan moved to other side of the city, to the Faculdade de Letras do Porto, but thinking about the future has continued as lively as it started on Wednesday.

One of Thurday’s workshop presenters was Aneta Ostrowska from Poland with the topic “WHOIS Librarian 2.0 − creating a characteristic of librarian of the future”. As a result of one hour’s mindstorm the participants could present some kind of image of librarian 2.0. According to that, the professional has to be very flexible and has to have good skills in communication, communicative technology, pedagogy, and many, many other features.

Aneta turned out to be one of those who try to get the maximum out of BOBCATSSS. After her workshop she just grabbed some breath and coffee before rushing into next workshop which was held by Tord Høivik from Oslo University College. The topic was “Counting the traffic − with students as observers” and it was about usage of public libraries in Norway.

“I like to do it in a bit different way than the others. That’s why the participants are not going to sit here all the 90 minutes, instead they go to library for a while to seek information”, Tord explained before the workshop. The concept seemed to work well.

“Really nice to have some action during the workshop, something very different if you compare to mine”, Aneta thanked after the session. “Sure I can take some advantage of this information in my studies in the future.”

During the two days of BOBCATSSS ’09 there has been approximately forty presenters giving speeches, introducing posters and leading workshops. There is still a lot to come, not to mention the guided tours and evening parties. Let’s see if there will be again an after party for over thirty people (like Finns and Germans had on Wednesday).

The BOBCATSSS Thursday evening party at Real Feytoria will start at 22.00, not at 20.00 as it had been previously announced. Due to technical difficulties we probably cannot modify the web page before the evening, so please spread the word as much as you can.

The BOBCATSSS organizing team apologizes for the misinformation and hopes to see you all at Real Feytoria at ten o’ clock.

The first guest to arrive at this year’s conference was a true BOBCATSSS veteran. Laurits Rasmussen from Denmark has participated four times in BOBCATSSS before this.

Laurits was part of the organization team in ’06, last year he spoke at the students’ panel, and this time he will have a presentation with the topic “The Librarian 2.0 and the Visual Information Professional”.

“It’s an old story in a new case”, describes Laurits, with a wide smile on his face as always. “There will be talk about the new rooms and spaces of librarians and also something new about language, I think.”

Laurits has always enjoyed his visits in BOBCATSSS, and, based on his instincts, this one won’t be an exception.

“Every BOBCATSSS is a bit different than others. This year I have got well informed beforehand through the website, and that’s why I expect that this BOBCATSSS will be a great event. And now that I am here, everything looks good so far.”

As the zero hour for our symposium is closing day by day, the sponsorship and finance groups of both universities are constantly looking for more company partners. The work is done mainly by email, but phone calls or even traditional mail is not excluded. Sponsors are given three different levels to choose from, each including different amount of benefits. The model is copied and modified from earlier Bobcatsss organizers.

The programme is under construction, and we’re trying to get the company presentations to fit in. The highest level, platinum sponsor, offers an opportunity to have a short presentation, which the company can use as they like. Some of our partners have already decided to take advantage of this opportunity. Participants have thus a great chance to get to know the future of information specialists in the working life.

Besides the company presentation, we’re going to have an exhibition area on the conference site. As amount of participants is expected to rise above 300, companies will have good visibility among the students and professors from several universities. Bobcatsss 2009 is built to raise discussion about the occupational and scientific future of information science, and we believe that our partners have their own opinion to say on that matter. What that might be, you’ll find out it in January.

The search for Bobcatsss 2009 partners is still underway. Should your company be interested, you can contact our organizing team (bobcatsss2009@uta.fi).

Erkka Rautio
Sponsorship and finance group

Hello everybody,

organizing the 17th Bobcatsss is already on the way! Or actually it started already a year ago. Last spring after Bobcatsss in Prague we were asked if we wanted to take this opportunity and to start to work with it. Our department had contacts with the University of Porto and they were interested in co-operating, and so this project began.

Last year passed doing background work and planning the project. In the beginning of this year the University of Tampere started a project course to organize Bobcatsss 2009, and it has worked quite well. A lot of work has been done and little by little the general view of the whole project is getting clearer. Different areas and their tasks are outlined and planned. Now we have to just start doing concrete things.

We have agreed that our distribution of work is that Team Tampere takes care of these websites and prepares an on-line registration system there. And Tampere is also responsible for accounting and money transactions. The host city Porto is handling the on-the-site issues such as the venues, events and all the practical aspects of the conference. Both teams are also seeking sponsors and will take part in reading and reviewing abstracts.

Every now and then both teams write in turns about how the project is progressing, and what the current issues are. This way everyone can find out what is behind the scenes and what it is like to organize a conference like Bobcatsss 2009.

Stay tuned!