Day 4 and Day 5

These two days have been really full of brilliant speakers ... I need time to digest everything, but some takeaways:

Dr Eugene Cloete, Dean of Science at US: Imagine having a university on the web using what is out there on the web already. The possibilities are endless.

Prof Renfrew Christie : We were given print copies of the talk, which I am certainly going to share with my colleagues in my library. Again, challenging .. SA University research is inadequate to serve the needs of a country of 50 million people and an economy which is in the top thirty of the world. Good specialist research librarians get Ph.ds. And what makes a Ph.d friendly library?

Dr Robert Morrell sharing his research journey, as didDr Gaelle Ramon, from the UCT Research Office. "Library" did not feature on the list of advice and services the Research Office tells their researchers about .. so here is something for the UCT Librarians to take back and work on. (Although talking to our other colleagues afterwards, the connections between the other libraries and the institutions' research offices are the same - so a challenge for all of us!)

And the very practical advice that came from Prof Chrissie Boughey about writing.

And today?
Wowee! The presentation by Prof Martin Villet on forensic entomology was fascinating, while Dr Andrew Kaniki demystified the NRF and flagged some issues for research librarians where they can support their researchers, which included the liaison with the institutions' research offices. Dr Andrew Nash compared Excellent Universities with Honest Universities, while Dr Adam Haupt introduced his research about HipHop (which I must admit I know very little about - maybe a generational thing?)

But the Wow today was Prof Adam Habib (DVC Research at UJ) with his thought-provoking, at times radical and controversial comments. We need to keep the South African context in view at all times. Yes, look internationally but keep the local context in view - in fact, start with the local context and what our students and academy needs.

A really radical thought was to use a public system to purchase access to journals, as is done in Brazil and Chile amongst other countries. That the journal budgets for all the libraries are combined and that access is purchased that way and that everyone (all institutions) have access. He raised the question of why the academic libraries were chasing international partners when we should also be looking at local partners. We need to act as a system, not individuals.


(Can I please get away from these food metaphors!!!)