UKeiG Annual Seminar

Published by Martin De Saulles | Filed under Innovation

Yesterday, I attended the UK eInformation Group’s annual seminar. I have been to several of these now and they have always been interesting and well organised events - yesterday’s was no exception. The theme was “Confronting the challenges of a volatile electronic environment” with speakers from Gartner, TFPL, University of Bedfordshire and Sue Hill from Sue Hill Recruitment. All the speakers made interesting points about the challenges facing information professionals from the new range of Web 2.0 services as well as the impact of organisational changes. I particularly enjoyed Jan-Martin Lowendahl’s presentation on some of the global changes taking place in electronic environments. He used a tool I had not seen before to illustrate the evolution of technology penetration across a range of countries over the last 25 years - this was then correlated with various social and economic indicators. The tool is called Gapminder and Google have a beta online version that anyone can use - it could not be simpler to use. I have only played with it for a few minutes but can see a number of uses for it in my teaching.