We gathered in the George Square lecture theatre at the
University of Edinburgh to hear the official conference close before moving
into workshops over the next day and a half. 460 people registered for OR2012
representing 40 countries. Of these, I counted six Australians and one New
Zealander though the delegate list may reveal some I didn’t catch up with in
person. Queensland had the greatest representation with QUT, UQ and Griffith
all represented. The Australasians had a small but surprisingly loud presence,
as each of us gave a talk, PK or workshop. The charismatic Peter Sefton from
University of Western Sydney was on the conference committee and chaired the
Developers Challenge. The challenge was sponsored by DevCSI and was to “show us something new
and cool in the world of open repositories”. They had the best ever response to
the challenge this year with 28 ideas. The winner was Patrick McSweeney with
his ‘Data Engine’ idea and the runners up also put together a great idea about
using mobile devices in the field to upload audio and video files, with
transcriptions, into a repository. You can read about the Developers Challenge
winners here.
At the closing plenary we saw a nice little wordle based on the
conference tweets. The word ‘data’ was very prominent, as was (of course)
repositories, but it showed that data is now mainstream whereas in past
conferences it has been more of a side issue. Reflecting on the theme of ‘Open Services for Open Content: Local In
for Global Out’ the discussion highlights were summarised
as: a recognition of the role of registries; identifiers (how to use, manage
and economise); citation (sufficiency, connectivity) and repository fringe
(success of). The folks from Prince Edward Island off the East coast of Canada
will be hosting next year’s OR and gave a very enjoyable presentation on what
we can expect, should we have the fortune to attend. Personally, I thought this
was an excellent conference. Edinburgh is a beautiful city and the conference
had a wonderful and distinctly Scottish flavour. At the same time, it was truly
international conference and that led to a diversity of experiences and ideas
which made for rich discussions about repositories and related issues,
particularly on shared challenges such as name and data identifiers. I’ve had
the opportunity to meet and talk with some very clever and talented people and
I’ll take home some good ideas and pertinent thoughts on difficult topics. This
unique conference with its Scottish flavour will linger for quite some time yet
and I hope I have been able to share some of it with you. Finally, it’s stopped raining!