INFORUM 2010

I have been speaking at the INFORUM 2010 conference in Prague, Czech Republic 25-27 May. http://www.inforum.cz/en/ or in Czech http://www.inforum.cz/cs/ and there is a Facebook page at http://www.facebook.com/pages/INFORUM-2010-Conference/309426798874 and twitter stream at http://twitter.com/search?q=%23inforum10 though it mostly consisted of informative tweets from Karen Blakeman (a speaker) when I just looked.
Just in general: INFORUM is a well-established annual event, which has hundreds of delegates and a good atmosphere (for older people, it reminded me of earlier days of the UK's Online conference). It started with an amusing "panel session" with spokespeople from Heaven, Hell and Purgatory talking about their ideas of information hell, purgatory and heaven (see Karen's tweets for pictures). However then it got down to the more serious business of electronic journal publishing. This is an electronic information conference rather than an information literacy conference, so I will just blog a few things. This is my first pick.
Eileen Lawrence, of Alexander Street Press, talked about How Students and Faculty are Using Streaming Media in the Classroom: How Does a “Playlist” Become an Online Publication or Course?
She was talking about creating playlists for use in teaching. Alexander Street Press have, in particular, a good amount of classical recordings, and some educational videos, but also a wide range of other material. They make it fairly easy to search the existing content to put together playlists of different kinds of material. In some cases they have got transcripts of audio/video and division into scenes so you can select particular parts of a video rather than the whole thing. I think the usefulness is in having an interface for putting it together easily (rather than using Netvibes etc.) and that all the copyright clearance has been taken care of, and you know it is ok to use in class.
She used the example of the Czech Composer Leos Janacek, and putting together a list with a biography, score, audio recording of a piano sonata, and a video of the Cunning little vixen. As well as linking to their material, you can bring in other web links too. She gave examples of people using playlists for library promotion and for supporting study. People reuse playlists, but you have to be an Alexander Street subscriber to have access to them.
The speaker mentioned a webcast Video in the Library: Trends and Best Practices at http://www.libraryjournal.com/webcastsDetail/2140496488.html. Incidentally, it's worth bookmarking the page for Library Journal webcasts since they are free events that they hold fairly regularly and you can look at archived webcasts if you register.
Photo by Sheila Webber: Tomas Bouda, who interviewed me after my talk: on the laptop is his Second Life avatar Zdenek, who I had already me in Information Literacy Week in SL last year.