6 ICAHIS / ICML and BEARDED PIGS

In one of the 6 ICAHIS presentations, Vicki Croft of the Animal Health Library at Washington State University (WSU) described the steps they took to locate and digitize the proceedings of all the ICAHIS conferences from the first one held in 1992 in the UK. No 3, the one held jointly with ICML in London in 2000, was especially difficult as the papers had been uploaded electronically to the ICML website but unfortunately were later removed and no copy was available thereafter. Vicki could only find one paper online and that was Tertia’s paper which Antoinette Lourens of our library had uploaded in the University of Pretoria Veterinary Library homepage.
Like us, Vicki is also using DSpace for the repository of these ICAHIS proceedings. By 25 June 2009 their site had 6241 hits.

Kristine Alpi of North Carolina State University discussed “Assessing dissemination of animal health research findings”. She recommended that funders should make their findings more accessible. And that researchers webpages should link to free online abstracts or full text .

The keynote by Ian Frazer of the University of Queensland had the interesting title “Fossilised knowledge? Librarians as repositories of knowledge in biomedical research in the cyberspace era”. Since the time of the ancient Egyptians till now the place of the librarian seemed secure. But today the Megabyte information process centre has become the library. With mobiles and the Internet, will libraries survive? He pointed out some challenges:
- too much knowledge
- the rate of change of knowledge
- much valuable knowledge is pre-Medline
- there is knowledge created in the developing world which is not yet processed and made accessible.
He sees the role of the librarian will be to catalogue ideas rather than books, and to prioritise the value of sources of ideas. Ideas are the intellectual capital of the 21st century.

LIBRARIANS NEED SOME FUN TOO! The Conference Gala Dinner was a unique experience. The dishes were served in so-called Australian style i.e. by alternation, meaning that every second person received a dish different from his neighbour! All were delicious. The entertainment was provided by The Bearded Pigs – a medical librarian band! “The first and only open access international library band” – a fitting end to the conference.