City from Art Museum rooftop bar

rooftop-bar-view
Originally uploaded by Wasting Moments.

Wow. I think every year the DC conference gets better. The presentations I was able to attend were excellent. Missed most of the short papers, including Dav's, who was my boss from my

NIEHS days. Really too bad, as I wanted to see him speak. Unfortunately, the User Documentation WG meeting was concurrent with that session of short papers. The bibliography issues

came up at the tail end of that session, so I was unable to slip away. I was roped into registering as an expert for the AskDCMI service while there. I had promised to do this before, but had

never gotten around to signing up.

I guess I haven't posted since Tuesday morning. I'll give a quick rundown of the conference, which is now drawing to a close. Makx Dekkers just wrapped up his closing plenary, and I'm

posting quickly before lunch, then I have a day and a half of free time before returning to Eugene on Saturday. As always, trips to exotic places never last long enough. This is likely to be my

last post until I get back to Eugene, at which point I'll post a much more detailed account of some of the conference highlights, as well as some of my own thoughts and reflections.

Tuesday's Keynote was by Wayne Hodgins, Strategic Futurist at Autodesk, Inc. I talked to him pretty extensively at dinner last night. Fascinating individual, with a very interesting job and

take on things. Tuesday also saw a number of excellent presentations, including a talk about preservation by Douglas Campbell of the National Library of New Zealand. I'm planning to pass

this on to interested members of the Digital Content Coordinators group on Monday. There were also very good papers from Ann Apps of the U. of Manchester and Diane Hillmann from

Cornell during this session.

Tusday afternoon saw the betginning of working group meetings, which kept me out of most of the short paper sessions throughout the next two days. The working group meetings seemed

more productive than in either of the past two years. It also seems like most of the groups whose meetings I attended had come a lot further on accomplishing items on their workplan

between the Seattle and Shanghai meetings.

I attended the Libraries, Architecture, Preservation and User Documentation Working Group meetings. A bit of accidental volunteerism created a bit more work for me in the coming year.

Mary Woodley and I decided that the Glossary and Bibliography would be better updated semi-annually rather than annually. Not sure if this will mean more work or less, but it will certainly

help with maintaining the currency of these documents. I also finally got around to registering as an expert for the AskDCMI reference program. Finally, the preservation working group will

be getting an early peek at the preservation element set that PREMIS is working on. I offered to co-ordinate the group's comments on this document. I have a bit of an ulterior motive, in that

the aforementioned Digital Content Coordinators group at UO has been tasked with addressing our own digital preservation issues. Summarizing the comments of the DC working group will

give me a much stronger sense of how the community at large would be likely to make use of the work being done by PREMIS. I don't expect coordinating these comments to be too much

work. Essentially, I'll just have to look through responses on the list serve, pull out the salient points and write up a summary to pass on to the PREMIS people.

The evenings have been much fun as well. Have stayed out far too late the last 3 nights, hanging out with various groups of interesting and brilliant individuals. When at DC, I find that I

learn as much if not more from the coffee breaks and evenings out than from the conference itself. Last night, a large group of us went to the Shanghai Center Theater to see the Shanghai

Acrobats. Amazing stuff. Pretty incredible what these folks could do. Weren't supposed to take pictures, so I only took a couple.

Today, I'm going to be doing a bit more sightseeing and shopping. My last free day. Not really looking forward to going home. As soon as I get back, I have a massive stack of work that

needs to be done, and a variety of meetings beginning early monday morning. My leisure time here blew by, and the conference elapsed remarkably quickly, too. I managed to corner most of

the people that I had specific questions for. Once again, I'm coming away with an increasingly strong understanding of DCMI, it's efforts and directions, and a variety of related work. I think

the concept of application profiles has really revitalized the community and begun to lead us in new directions. The work is moving well beyond the original element set. I think that DCMI is

going to continue to have a very significant impact on the metadata community in general. For the second year, IEEE-LOM colocated their meeting with ours, and it looks like there is

tentative agreement to make this a more longstanding arrangement. As in the past, a number of individuals from the W3C, and from SWAD-Europe were in attendance, and the connection

between the Dublin Core and the technologies enabling the Semantic Web is becoming increasingly formalized.

The conference was a little smaller this year than last, but still unbelievably international. Here are some stats from Makx Dekkers closing plennary:
There were 160 attendees, 68 of these were from China and the other 92 represented 21 countries in Europe, North and South America, East and Southeast Asia, Australia and New Zealand. There were representatives from the corporate sector, governement agencies from around the world, libraries, the larger library and information science community, educational institutions, the educational technology sector and a variety of international organizations. It's a remarkable group, very tight knit, very friendly, very ambitious and very, very industrious. I feel honored to be a part of these efforts, and inspired by what the people in this group are doing.

I'll likely post a much longer summary of my notes from the conference sometime over the weekend, or next week. This may be my last post from China. I fly back tomorrow in the early

afternoon. I'll see many of you next week, and talk to the rest soon.