Martin Belam presentation for the Association of UK Media Librarians

I gave a talk & presentation earlier this evening for the Association of UK Media Librarians, looking at how traditional librarian and information science skills were being applied to the internet at the BBC. It was admittedly a fairly superficial skate over some projects within the BBC New Media department. I mostly concentrated on elements of the work I've previously published about BBCi Search, but added some input from Steve Hunt's excellent IA work on our last homepage redesign project, and from a current project we have running using a metadata taxonomy within a content management system for which I am thankful to Karen Harvey Loasby.

The concept I hoped I was getting over is that in a world where Google is now indexing over 6,000 million web artifacts, there is a clear role for these previously physical archiving and organisational skills to be applied to the web. Computers are ace at doing very, very hard maths very, very quickly. People are good at language. We need to get a mix of both those skills to have an internet that is going to make sense to most people most of the time. Unfortunately my clumsy name for the skillset - "Future Librarians" - conjures up images of the people behind the counter in libraries wearing jet-packs and glass-bowl head-dresses.

For anyone reading this who I spoke to this evening, please do get in touch if you have any more questions, martin.belam@currybet.net.

Posted by Martin Belam, February 19, 2004
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