Press release - 11th conference of the German chapter of ISKO held in Constance 20-22 February 2008

The 11th conference of the German chapter of ISKO took place from 20 to 22 February 2008 in Constance. The conference was entitled Knowledge Organization 2008 - "Repositories of knowledge in digital spaces: Accessibility, sustainability, semantic interoperability" (Wissensorganisation'2008 - Wissensspeicher in digitalen Räumen: Nachhaltigkeit, Verfügbarkeit, semantische Interoperabilität).

There were 33 papers presented and over 70 participants in attendance. The Discussion Panel session 'Standardizing Heterogeneity', moderated by Peter Ohly, took place on 21st February. The speakers were Winfried Schmitz-Esser (University of Insbruck), Daniel Kless (University of Utrecht), Vivien Petras (German Social Science Infrastructure Services, Information Centre Bonn) and Ulrich Reimer(Technical College, St. Gallen). On the last day of the conference there was an English speaking session with Thomas H. Baker (Göttingen), Aida Slavic (London), Claudio Gnoli (Pavia), and Markus Kattenbeck (Regensburg).

A selection of photographs from the Constance conference are available at http://www.bonn.iz-soz.de/wiss-org/WissOrg11Fotos/.
Abstracts of the talks will be made available at http://www2.bsz-bw.de/cms/isko2008.

The Proceedings of the 11th German ISKO Conference are now in preparation and are planned to be published in 2008.

We are also pleased to announce that the newely elected members of the executive committee of the German ISKO are Joern Sieglerschmidt, Peter Ohly and Christian Swertz.

The next, 12th German ISKO conference with the theme "Knowledge - Science - Organization" will be held in Bonn at the end of 2009.

Press release: North American Symposium on Knowledge Organization

Courtesy of Joe Tennis:

The first symposium North American Symposium on Knowledge Organization took place at the Faculty of Information Studies at the University of Toronto, on 14-15 June 2007. There were forty participants. Researchers contributed papers and posters, and delivered presentations over 2 days (to mention only a few R. Green, M. Kipp, K. La Barre, R. Smiraglia, J. Tennis)
The group resolved to form a North American chapter of ISKO, and are moving forward with that plan.

Papers are available in the dLIST archive.
Pictures from this event are available here .

Press release: JISC Conference on Digital Repositories

From JISC repositories discussion list:

Excerpts from a summary of the JISC Conference on Digital Repositories held in Manchester 6 June 2007:

'A major conference on digital repositories took place this week in
Manchester, attracting nearly 200 delegates from around the UK...

'Rachel Bruce, JISC programme director [said that] JISC's Digital
Repositories programme... had given significant impetus to repository
development in the UK...

'Andy Powell of the Eduserv Foundation gave the first keynote
presentation on the "Repositories Roadmap"... The vision for
2010... is increasingly "not if, but when" newly published scholarly
outputs [are] made... open access. The situation now might therefore
require us to set a more ambitious target than that of a "high
percentage"... the Web['s] role as a means of discovery and access
need[s] to be emphasised more... [C]onceptualising repositories as
websites forces us to "think about their usability, their information
architectures and their accessibility."

'Dr Keith Jeffrey of the Science and Technology Facilities Council
gave the second keynote address. The benefits of open access
repositories, he claimed, include faster "research turnaround",
improved quality for the originators of research as colleagues were
able review the research more easily, as well as improved quality for
the community in general. They also support innovation, he continued,
improve education and public engagement with science and research
and enhance an institution's standing.'

Further details of the conference, including presentations, will be available shortly.