Hear the one about a librarian that went to the Internet librarian in London?

No. Neither did I. My question is to anyone out there how do library professionals afford to go to Internet Librarian this year. The cost this year is over £500.00 for a two day conference. Obviously, the event has some great speakers, but is this show just for managers? Is there no way there could be some places at a reduced rate for 'ordinary' librarians? I have been to library mash ups and these have not been prohibitively expensive. Though on the new website Owen Stephens does point out:-

The venue and catering are probably the main costs associated with hosting an event. If you are inviting people to speak you may need to cover their expenses (or even pay speaking fees, although the first three events haven't had speakers who charge to speak). The main ways of covering the costs are through sponsorship, and through a fee for the event. Costs can be kept down considerably by getting a venue for free - which is often an option at Universities.

So, my question is this. Is anyone going? And if you don't mind me asking, how did you get your company to agree?

New library mashup website released

(Found via twitter). Owen Stephens has set up a website for UK mash ups here. Includes an upcoming events page, how to organise your own event, Ingredients, Techniques, Recipes,Menu suggestions and Projects.

Mash oop north............lightning talks

After lunch, the lightning talks started, which were 5-10 minute talks on what could and/ or maybe done at other institutions.

First up was Owen Stephens discussing interactive fiction and information literacy. He pointed us in the direction of this site as an example.

Next up was Tanya Williamson, who discussed Edward.R.Tufte. Tufte she described as an 'artist, economist and statistician'. Tufte also had a thing against, confusion and clutter are failures of design, not attributes of information.' He also had a treaty against PowerPoint (not a bad thing then?)

Next up was Paul Stainthorp and Joss Winn discussed Scriblio. Both looked at the plug-ins for word-press, and how you can create your own database and tags. Both looked at how you could individualise the users experience, which remind me of Nicholas Negroponte Idea of the Daily me and Ranganathan idea :-

These laws are:

1. Books are for use.
2. Every reader his [or her] book.
3. Every book its reader.
4. Save the time of the User.
5. The library is a growing organism.

There were more talks, but these are the one's I have notes for.

Anyway, thats it for my write up of the Mash oop north.

Mash oop north......Mike Ellis talk

Mike Ellis was next up.  He was discussing Scraping, scripting, hacking. Mike looked at how we could scrape data via Yahoo pipes, Google Docs, Dapper, YQL, HTTRACK, Regex (which Mike said was very powerful), Mail Merge (I kid you not), Html tidy, Open Calais (which is better than Regex Mike said) and many more. It was all pretty quick, and I found it hard to keep up with (read I'm not too hot on this). Owen Stephens gives a lot better overview of it here though.