Click 06 has been a very strange time for me. The conference dinner was the strangest of times. Dr Click had decreed we must not sit with our work mates. I moved to the front of the ballroom and spied a table with vacant seats. It was quite a shock for both myself and my honours supervisor from almost 30 years ago, in a totally different career, to be seated beside me (partner is one of the CEOs of the very successful CLICK 06 trade display)- six degrees of separation. That is the tangent by the way.

RAILS started at 16:30 on Friday Sept 22nd. The circle of chairs in room 1 level 2 Perth Convention Centre grew in circumference as more people left the food and drink of the closing celebration of Click 06 and joined RAILS 3. This session was taken up with a discussion on whether there should be a database of LIS researchers and LIS research. It was decided that both was needed. The researcher database will be incorporated into the CILIP (UK) database. The research database will be a part of the ALIA research set. A proposal was put forward to actively devise a list of journals that the LIS academics, educators and practitioners may put forward to DEST (AUST) for RQF purposes. If you are interested in this process keep an ear to the RAIL or this blog.

Saturday, Saturday, Saturday, Saturday – conference opens at 8:30 but the State Library (WA) at 10:00. Quick thinking Dr Click sends out an email early enough to pre-warn us all and registration goes without a hitch.

The presented papers were on a wide variety of subjects from provison of legal information services to how you might provide information preventing suicide in the XY human population. We were snowballed by graphic novels – ah Astroboy, my hero! I must admit I had to many carbs in the lunch or was it that after so much information over so many days that the left and right brain leaked, whatever the IM & KM was a bit out to lunch for a Saturday for me (1st session after lunch) but I did get the jist of the relevance of Australian LIS courses, outside Australia – bottom line – let’s all do some laughter yoga. Terminology, once again ‘Is your word tomatoe the same as my word tomatoe?’ Note this was true for both the session on LIS courses and to the sessions on info literacy.

The last word go check out the Navigator program for year 12 students of English developed by the State Library of New South Wales, something to aim for.

Well by this time most of the attendees had been conferencing for days, we were absolutely bushed. I’m de-RAILed.

The day began with Martha Yee, who began her cataloguing life under a scientific cataloguer and now is the Cataloguing Supervisor, UCLA Film & Television Archive. Martha lectures at some stage every year to students of film preservation and tries to instil in them the importance of cataloguing moving images. She believes passionately in ‘full cataloguing’ and is one of the few people I have met who has read the delightful Presidential Address (ca. 1900) by our own John Ferguson on bibliography.

Morning tea was the usual lines, tea, coffee, muffins, but there was an interesting apple slice

Next came the team from the University of Adelaide. I was doing OK with ‘The Well Connected Catalogue’ until —- I know I should not get HUtC (Hot Under the Collar) about the loss/death of information but well —- NASA just hasn’t got a good track record. Re: NASA reports, I know space is always at a premium, by the way that was not a pun. If we all throw out hard copy and NASA ‘looses’ or fails to migrate the digital then the fact that UoA has the best catalogue records in the world will mean a big zero. No in fact it will be a real frustration, sort of like the frustration (almost in reverse) I have at present for a bibliography I am doing — does anyone know the where-abouts of the following Ansoff, H, I. 1967 The Evolution of Corporate Planning,Menlo Park CA: Stanford Research Institute, Report 329 (not in WorldCat been through each entry one-by-one for the series, for the author, for the corporate author)- I digress.

The next speaker Diedre Kiorgaard described RDA — YES, Hoorah, so big deal Bob likes it.

Philip Hider talked about the impact of RDA on OPAC displays and I could hear my partner finally understanding what is being returned in a libray search screen. This is great. Finally I will not have to explain “well you see, that / is there because the cataloguer has to put it there under the AACR2 rules and the system that the library is using can’t filter blah blah blah” with the retort “but why is the authors name there twice”.

Lunch: lines once again the convention staff have not learned to place the plates where the delegates are entering the lunch area and so there is a lunch jam. Lunch was a pleasant selection of coldmeats and salads with a cheese and fruit salad plate. It is difficult to balance the food and there is nowhere to sit. I sat on the stair.

Lloyd Sokvitne, State Library of Tasmania sensibly discussed using the ILMS as a data repository an ‘milking’ it for data, rather like ‘googling’ it to give the ‘punters’ what they want. I personally think he is on the money when he says that Herbert Simon’s satisficing is the behaviour of 80% of clients. If the ILMS is the repository then we can build many different interfaces for the scores of client groups. For example, the ‘sports mad’ 60% who only need a partial title and the last 12 months of data why would you use the complete repository (note I am not a sports person).

Tony Boston then talked about the work Libraries Australia are doing with Google and Yahoo. Thank you for the frisbee Tony

Martha finished this session with a discussion of projects applying FRBR to library catalogues which was another interesting talk by this overseas visitor. It is a pity that she will not be here for CLICK 06.

Afternoon tea: more lines same pack drill

I was not able to stay for the last session. So that is the end of my report.