Tara Brabazon
Tara Brabazon is Professor of Media at the University of Brighton, Programme Leader of the Master of Arts Creative Media and Director of the Popular Culture Collective. She has formerly worked in both Australia and Aotearoa/New Zealand. She has written ten books, including Digital Hemlock, The University of Google and her most recent release in December 2008, Thinking Popular Culture: war, terrorism and writing.
Tara has won five teaching awards, including the Australian Prime Minister’s Award for teaching in the humanities. She was a finalist for both Australian of the Year and Australian Businesswoman of the Year in the community service category.

Abstract Title: "Click and Think: (Post)Google and the future of literacy"
Presented by Tara Brabazon
Professor of Media
University of Brighton
t.m.brabazon@brighton.ac.uk

A cycle of words and phrases have signified change, crisis, confusion and fear in the last decade: new media, digital convergence, multimedia and web 2.0. Each phrase became a slogan, conveying innovation, transformation, redundancy and opportunity. As each was replaced, the cycles of pseudo renewal, change management, promised funding and lived disappointment were perpetuated.
The web is now a mature media rather than ‘the next big thing.’ The money being granted to projects with titles like “Social networking and student centred learning,” “Wiki-enabled assessment” or “Student 2.0” is drying up the available funds for teaching-led research in a credit crunched economy. The time has now arrived to focus on building careful integrations, grafts and relationships with the existing institutions of schools, universities and libraries. The problem is not – and has never been – technological platforms. The issue – for over a decade – is that scarce public funding has been siphoned to the promises of efficient, productive, creative, collaborative software and hardware, rather than acknowledging, capturing and developing institutional memory and staff expertise
My presentation offers a positive, productive and integrated strategy of and for literacy and explores how – through curriculum, assessment and partnerships between teachers and librarians – we can create a portfolio of learning strategies where Google is the start, rather than the end, of a research journey. We explore how a changing service relationship must be based on – and developed from – a subtle conceptualization of literacy.


Cathal McCauley, University Librarian, National University of Ireland Maynooth
Cathal McCauley was appointed University Librarian at NUI Maynooth in September 2008. He was formerly Head of Reader Services in UCD Library. In that role he was responsible for the delivery and development of the Reader Services functions across all five libraries in UCD. Cathal has also previously worked in the Science, Medical and Business sections of the UCD Library service. At UCD he was responsible for a range of service innovations including UCD being the first academic library to provide an instant messaging reference service, enter Second Life and to have a presence in Facebook. Prior to joining UCD Cathal worked for the management consultants FGS (Farrell Grant Sparks) where he held a variety of posts including director of consulting. Cathal's current research interests include the harnessing of new technologies and new service models to enhance the library experience for staff and readers.

Peter Clarke, Library IT, UCD
Peter Clarke is a member of Library IT Services at UCD. Previously he has worked for a number of private sector companies in Ireland and France. In his current role, Peter provides hardware and software support to all UCD Library staff. Since joining UCD in 2006 he has been involved in a number of initiatives within the Library, such as Second Life, RFID, EzProxy implementation, Express Service, Laptop Loan Scheme and Instant Messaging.

Cathal McCauley and Peter Clarke’s Abstract Title: Second Life and Virtual Worlds - A Service Opportunity?’
Virtual worlds, particularly Second Life, have been the focus of much attention in recent years. Academic institutions in the US, Europe and elsewhere have been keen to explore the potential of such platforms and have been amongst their most enthusiastic advocates. This session will examine the potential of virtual worlds for service delivery, examine the associated IT challenges and assess whether or not they should form part of Third Level institutions' plans for service development.


Jeff Haywood is Vice-Principal Knowledge Management, Chief Information Officer and Librarian at the University of Edinburgh. He is responsible for the University’s integrated Information Service which contains the Library, the IT services and the eLearning Services, and for the current major initiatives in high performance computing, research data services, selection of the next generation VLE, the digital and information literacies programme and e-assessment including implementation of the e-portfolio.
Jeff is also Professor of Education & Technology in the School of Education. His research interests are in the development of strategies for effective use of ICT in education at institutional, national and international levels, with a particular emphasis on understanding learner experiences. Jeff is a member of the JISC Board and immediate past Chair of the Coimbra Group Taskforce on E-learning (www.coimbra-group.be).

Email: jeff.haywood@ed.ac.uk
Personal homepage: http://homepages.ed.ac.uk/jhaywood

Abstract Title: “Chasms and Bridges - successfully managing the relationships between IT, Library and eLearning"
Many of the difficult challenges facing Information Services (library, IT, e-learning) during the coming years are around area that do not lie neatly inside traditional professional boundaries, and there is plentiful debate about this in the literature. Examples of such trans-domain problems are e-learning, research data management, technology-rich learning spaces and mobile working/learning. There are parallels for this need to amend previous working methods in the very substantial movement in academic research to solving complex problems through interdisciplinary research, harnessing the expertise of individuals in existing domains in multi-professional teams to bridge the gaps between the professions. In the support areas, this may be the only way to provide real user-centred solutions effectively, preventing the only-too-familiar ‘falling between stools’ problem.
In some universities and colleges, services have been merged/converged/integrated to form a single entity that offers services in library, e-learning and IT domains, although the degree of true integration varies, and some of these converged serviced have subsequently ‘de-converged’ for various reasons, politics always being one of the key ingredients.
In this presentation, I shall explore some of the reasons why I believe that in the future successful Information Services will have taken an interdisciplinary, multi-professional approach, and I will examine what cultural and organisational barriers will need to be addressed to
maintain them as successful service providers. I shall also reflect on
the ways in which service leaders can find common ground to enable staff with different backgrounds to work successfully together, and to help their user communities, including senior managers, to understand the reasons for changing traditional services, and the value such changes can bring.


Dr Susan Schriebman, Director, Digital Humanities Observatory
Dr Schreibman is Founding Director of the Digital Humanities Observatory, a newly-established national digital humanities centre based at the Royal Irish Academy. Dr Schreibman joined the DHO from the University of Maryland where she was Assistant Dean and Head of Digital Collections and Research (2005-2008) and Assistant Director of the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (2001-04).
Dr Schreibman holds an MA from the University of Pennsylvania in English and Creative Writing and an MA and PhD in Anglo-Irish Literature and Drama from University College Dublin (UCD). She was also the holder of a Newman Postdoctoral Fellowship (1997-2000) where she began The Thomas MacGreevy Archive (http://macgreevy.org)
She is the principal developer of The Versioning Machine (www.v-machine.org) and is the founding editor and principal developer of Irish Resources in the Humanities (www.irith.org). Dr Schreibman is Vice Chair of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) Consortium Board, on the Executive of the Association of Computers in the Humanities, and is Chair of the Modern Language Association’s Committee on Information Technology.
She is the author of Collected Poems of Thomas MacGreevy: An Annotated Edition (1991), co-editor of A Companion to Digital Humanities (Blackwell, 2004), and A Companion to Digital Literary Studies (Blackwell, 2008).

Abstract Title: A Modest Proposal for Twenty-First Century Scholarship
The Digital Humanities Observatory (DHO) was established in 2008 as a part of an all-island shared infrastructure of the Humanities Servicing Irish Society Consortium funded under PRTLI4. It was established as a knowledge resource to further e-scholarship in Ireland while being aware of and participating in allied international initiatives. It provides data management, curation, and discovery services supporting the long-term access to and greater exploitation of digital resources in the creation of new models, methodologies and paradigms for 21st century scholarship.
Digital Humanities is a fast paced, rapidly evolving field. Practitioners are engaged with a wide variety of scholarly activities, from the creation of thematic research collection, to creating new models to engage with hundreds, even thousands of texts through novel methods such as datamining and visualistion, to creating 3-D reconstructions of ancient amphitheatres, cathedrals, and nineteenth-century theatres.
This talk will explore the area of digital humanities more broadly before concentrating on the activities of the DHO and humanities computing within Ireland.


John Breslin is currently a lecturer at the Department of Electronic Engineering in the National University of Ireland, Galway. He is also an associate researcher and leader of the Social Software Unit at the Digital Enterprise Research Institute at NUI Galway, researching semantically-enabled social networks and community portals. He is the founder of the SIOC project, which aims to semantically-interlink online communities. He has received a number of awards for website design, including two Net Visionary awards from the Irish Internet Association for the Irish community website boards.ie, which he co-founded in 2000.
Dr. Breslin is a member of the IEI, IET and IEEE.

Abstract Title: The Social Semantic Web
Many will have become familiar with popular Social Web applications such as blogging, social networks and wikis, and will be aware that we are heading towards an interconnected information space (through the blogosphere, interconnected wikis, mashups, etc.). At the same time, these applications are experiencing boundaries in terms of information integration, dissemination, reuse, portability, searchability, automation and more demanding tasks like querying. The Semantic Web is increasingly aiming at these applications areas - quite a number of Semantic Web approaches have appeared in recent years to overcome the boundaries in these application areas, e.g. Semantic MediaWiki, Twine, Google's Social Graph API and the DataPortability working group. In an effort to consolidate and combine knowledge about existing efforts, this talk will educate the audience about Social Web application areas and new avenues open to exploitation in the Semantic Web. The talk will give an overview of how the Social Web and Semantic Web can be meshed together.