E-books and E-content 2009

University College London, 12 May 2009, 10.00 to 17.00

The theme of E-books and E-content this year was innovation – the new tools and techniques which have emerged in e-publishing which will impact on everybody involved in content creation and delivery. The event was attended by publishers, librarians, content developers and managers, and all involved in the information value chain. It took both a strategic view and looked at some practical implementations of these new ideas which include the impact of social networking, Web 2.0 and the web generally, using search as a publishing tool and re-publishing and re-purposing content to suit different requirements.

The day was led by Professor David Nicholas, Director of the Centre for Publishing and the Department of Information Studies at UCL, who presented the research agenda for E-content, particularly focusing on how users interact with electronic sources in the scholarly sector. He was followed by two keynote speakers with contrasting views of the future, starting with Ruth Jones, Director of Publisher Business Development in EMEA for Ingram Digital, one of the world's major publishing enterprises. Ruth has over 20 years' experience in the publishing, library and electronic information industries and brings not only experience of the publishing sector but until recently was Head of Product Development at the British Library. She provided a strategic view from the perspective of a commercial publisher, and was followed by Richard Wallis, the Technology Evangelist of Talis, the library and information systems solution provider, who predicted trends in web and IT generally and how they impact on our domain. Richard has spoken at many major international events and publishes a blog on all matters to do with information and libraries.

Subsequent papers reviewed in more detail issues such as Open Access models, with a presentation from Eelco Ferwerda from Holland, CEO of OAPEN, the network of University publishers in Europe. Finally, social networking also featured through presentations from Timo Hannay of Nature, a leading Web 2.0 adopter, and Dan Pollock, lead analyst with Outsell – the information industry analysts. Steven Flower, Technical Analyst with Substance, an innovative social research and communication organisation, talked about how they have established a national programme of portals which combine content from multiple sources pitched at the difficult audience of young adults. PLINGS (places to go, things to do) is a project and network deploying multi-channel web technologies.

A plenary session chaired by Hazel Woodward and Anthony Watkinson (UCL), brought together the day’s experts and others to debate what stakeholders can get from these new developments, what are the business trends and models, and what will be the impact on our customers and service users.

The event was chaired by Hazel Woodward, Librarian of Cranfield University, with input from Anthony Watkinson and John Akeroyd of UCL.

Speakers' presentations:

Eelco Ferwerda
Steven Flower
Ruth Jones
Professor David Nicholas
Dan Pollock
Richard Wallis





For further information, please email infostudies-conferences@ucl.ac.uk