VALA 2016 – A Perspective and Highlights

The Australian library community recently had the opportunity to gather for the VALA Conference and Exhibition (9-11 Feb) in Melbourne.  Pam Millist from Maxus attended one day of the conference and exhibition.
Together with reviewing the available papers, webinars and the very active twitter stream (#vala16), there seemed to be a number of strong themes that emerged of particular interest to special librarians.

These included:

  • developing capabilities of library staff (eg. Content management, design thinking) and library management (planning and strategy)
  • the use of taxonomies and metadata – creating ‘order out of chaos’
  • developments in the GLAM (Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums) sector.

As much of the discussions and knowledge presented at this conference would be of interest to many of our clients, we will present a series of articles to summarise the discussion around these themes.

To review the conference papers, VALA has already made videos of the Plenary speakers available at https://webcast.gigtv.com.au/Mediasite/Catalog/catalogs/vala2016.
Other papers are available for attendees and will be available generally in about 6-12 months for others.

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