Tangentally related to my last post on managing information, I was made aware of Open Conference Systems today. OCS is produced by the University of British Columbia (aka ‘ubic’) as part of their Public Knowledge Project. I’m hoping to trial the software sometime soon. I’m co-ordinating the program for the New Librarians’ Symposium to be held in Sydney in December 2006 and I’ve been looking for a solution to handle scheduling, paper acceptance, and electronic publishing of conference proceedings, and OCS could be it. And it’s OAI-compliant to boot.

The other aspect of conferences I’m investigating at the moment is indexing of papers. Conference papers online tend to fall into Grey Literature. While Google Scholar has started to branch out and index a lot of papers, it would be nice to have the papers indexed elsewhere as well for ease of retrieval.