Event review: ASLIB Knowledge and Information Strategy Summit by Jennie Findlay

SLA Europe DigiComms

Jennie Findlay was sponsored by ASLIB and SLA Europe to attend the first ASLIB Knowledge and Information Strategy Summit (AKISS) at the British Library, and kindly shares her experiences with us.

I was recently fortunate enough to receive a two day pass from the SLA, which allowed me to travel down to London to attend the first AKISS, or ASLIB Knowledge and Information Strategy Summit. That’s a somewhat tortuous route to create an acronym, but it’s certainly far easier to pronounce than some others!

The format was a mix of approaches: traditional conference-style presentations, where you sit and listen to a speaker; the presentation of case studies of success stories; and group workshop sessions. This was an interesting approach to running a conference: I have previously felt that the lack of in-depth interaction possible when a speaker on a stage has raised some interesting points has been a flaw in current conferences. Many conference attendees (myself definitely included!) are now used to a greater level of interaction with the creators of ideas, which has been fostered by the ease of engaging with the originators of ideas via social media like Twitter and blogs. It’s frustrating to be inspired by a speaker…then not be able to discuss the topics they covered with the speaker, or others who have an interest, because you have to shuffle off to yet another room, to be talked at yet again. Workshops allow a more in-depth analysis and examination of issues, but a substantial amount of time is often taken up to establish the focus of the workshop, leaving less time to actually explore the issues you want to discuss. The approach of having two or three speakers and a case study on a theme, followed by a workshop session to discuss the points raised seemed like it could provide the halfway house between a traditional conference, and a workshop session. Unfortunately, the chosen approach of asking the groups to repeat to each other what they had heard from the speakers that morning, rather than asking how the material that had been presented prior to the workshop was likely to inform their future practice meant that I felt the workshops weren’t particularly successful. However, this is the first time this conference has run, and hopefully the workshop focus next time will be on how ideas generated from the presentations could be put into practice by attendees, rather than summing up what the speakers had said.

Notes from the copyright workshop
Notes from the copyright workshop

Personally, I found one of the last sessions of the two days to be the most useful, taking the form of the more traditional method of a group workshop. Now, a two hour workshop on copyright issues might not seem like an enticing prospect to most people, but nevertheless, copyright and all the legal issues surrounding it are something that it’s essential that any information professional has a firm grasp of. Being in the presence of multiple copyright experts like Charles Oppenheim, I wasn’t going to miss out on the chance to update my knowledge and learn from them! Naomi Korn led the session, and her enthusiasm for a subject that even the mere mention of makes most people go pale and groan with despair was infectious. She didn’t attempt to tackle EVERYTHING about copyright, but after a quick roundup showing how the use of copyright materials in practice has rapidly outpaced how well the legislation we have in place is equipped to deal with it, she focussed on “orphan works”. These are original materials for which no legal owner can be traced, yet which people want to reuse. However, without a traceable owner, these works are unable to be reused legally.

My original thought was that orphan works wouldn’t be something that would really have much to do with my work role, but when she cited studies which said that there were 50 million orphan works in the public sector in 2009, and that a British Library study had found that 30% of public, published works are orphan works…I realised that this was highly likely to be something I needed to know about! At the speed that many government departments currently merge and shuffle, and with the rate of staff turnover in these departments, the chances of me coming across something “official” that I’d need to use, but would be unable to find the owner of increase by the day.

We were seated randomly at tables in groups of 5 or 6, and with a good mix of sectors and experience at each table. Naomi took us through the specifics of the two regimes which relate to orphan works – the EU Orphan Works exception, and the UK orphan works licensing scheme, both of which will come into force on the 29th of October 2014. Each scheme has merits, and downsides, and neither is perfect, but they’re at least a step in the right direction. Once we had some grasp of how each scheme would function, in our groups we worked together through some tricky but realistic scenarios about using orphan works in practice. The discussions were excellent, and helped us put the orphan works situation into context with our own workplace experiences. I left equipped with a sheet of useful web links to look up later, for further reading in the sort of detail that we couldn’t get into in a two hour session.

I’ve already put my new orphan works knowledge into practice in my current job: in response to an enquirer who’d asked about copyright for the publications of an informal cross-party group they’re involved in, I managed to work in a plea to make sure that there was some sort of policy in place to track the ownership of their publications in future, to prevent them from adding to the masses of orphan works already out there.

A good deed done, already!

About the author

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