The last day of the CHLA conference! The official program closed at the end of the morning sessions, which again were three keynote addresses.
Ingrid Parent, Assistant Deputy Minister, Documentary Heritage Collection Sector, Library and Archives Canada was the first speaker. In her talk, Ingrid focussed on the need for digital archives to be stable since one of the major issues facing any digital archiving of material was to ensure that it would have stable urls to ensure retrieval in the future. There have already been two harvests of government internet domains for archiving of internet pages, and this produced a terrifying amount of data. There are already many collaborative digitisation projects underway, but mass digitisation of print material held in the national archives will begin in the new financial year.
An update from CISTI – partnerships and digital initiatives, was given by CISTI’s Director General, Pam Bjornson. CISTI is part of the National Research Council and has 15 locations around Canada, with its headquarters in Ottawa. A major project is the development of a federal science e-library which involves negotiating government-wide licences of scientific and technical publications. This project, not surprisingly, is very complex, and has been planned for some years. CISTI is also involved in collaborative projects. I’ve already mentioned the National Library for Health; it also works on the OSPRey partnership – a joint submission and peer review system – with Australia’s CSIRO. CISTI’s Doc Delivery service has partnered with My I Library to provide digital ILLs of books – all of CISTI’s e-books are available via My I Library on ILL.
The final speaker for the morning struck a less formal but nonetheless provocative note: “Study says Canadians think cancer news media is blatant product placement wrapped in human melodrama.” The speaker was Alan Cassels, creator of the website Media Doctor Canada (www.mediadoctor.ca) whose main research area focuses on consumer perceptions of health reports in the media. Alan freely admitted that he pinched the idea for his website from an Australian colleague’s site, Media Doctor Australia: (http://www.mediadoctor.org.au/ )
The conference concluded with thanks to the conference committees, and an invitation to delegates to attend next year’s meeting in Nova Scotia.
The afternoon was devoted to more continuing education sessions for those with stamina! The lunchtime session was provided by Embase, during which there was a presentation of how the Emtree heading differ from MeSH, and how they are used in indexing drug-related material.
In the afternoon, John Loy and I conducted an information / demonstration / hands on session in the University of Ottawa Library’s computer lab on Chasing the Sun. This gave interested people the chance to see what it’s actually like and to ask more specific questions. Again, the interest was pleasing, and John and I have many contacts to follow up regarding Canadian participation in the CTS service!
I had two main reasons for attending the CHLA conference – the Chasing the Sun paper and training session, and to take the display material and leaflets about ICML Brisbane 2009. The koalas ran out. Most of the leaflets were taken. I was asked to leave the rest of the leaflets as they’ll be given out at future meetings. Many of our Canadian colleagues are planning to come to Australia – it’s a wonderful opportunity to come, they say! Many Canadian health librarians have also indicated that they’d like to join the CTS service and are keen to work with the UK and Australia in the future. So from my perspective, the conference was an outstanding success. The fact that I also found the papers to be stimulating, encouraging and informative was a bonus, but really to be expected, as health librarianship is much the same in Canada as Australia. In fact, there are many similarities between the two countries. I feel quite at home here – in fact if I weren’t careful, I could end up sounding like a Canadian – eh!
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