I recently enjoyed attending the UK Serials Group conference in Warwick. This was a good opportunity to meet with a variety of publishers and institutions to discuss the impact of JISC’s approach to federated access management. My two sessions were well attended, and a UKSG blog report is available.

I was pleased to hear T Scott Plutchak discuss the importance of librarians ‘connecting people to knowledge’ in his plenary speech - echoing the JISC middleware campaign for ‘connecting people to resources’. This highlighted the importance of the role of both technology and skilled staff in meeting the needs of our users.

The number of sessions on ‘people’ identifiers was also very notable. I’ve been aware for some time that this is an area that we really need to start focusing on at JISC. Helen Henderson of Ringgold Ltd described a project looking at the use of institutional identifiers in the journal supply chain, reminding me of the Institutional Profiling study carried out by JISC in 2003. Perhaps it is time for us to revisit this study? I was also very interested in Daniel van Spanje’s presentation on DAI: Digital Author Identifiers - something that may well come up at the JISC Repositories Conference.

It was good to see a significant update to the UKSG website, and the introduction of the UKSG blog. This reflected the other major theme of the conference - the importance of web 2.0 and its impact on librarians and publishers. Look out for Stephen Abram’s excellent presentation on library 2.0 when it is posted. Stephen gave some interesting examples of how librarians are supporting users in their own virtual environments - through blogs, face book, second life and other applications - and challenged the audience to be ready for demand for these approaches. He also described a training programme for librarians covering 23 web 2.0 things covering everything from uploading digital photos to using and managing rss feeds.