Yesterday I attended ETD2005 as a volunteer. My duties were to monitor sessions and walk with the roving microphone during question time. I handed the microphone to a range of interesting people and chatted to others at the registration desk. In between, I got to listen to some of the papers.

Grame Barty of HarvestRoad discussed turning universities’ intellectual property into a profit-making value. Andrew Wells raised the important point that at many universities, the university does not own any of the IP created by academics. This point is related to the biggest stumbling block in the Open Access movement - while librarians are doing a lot of work to promote the benefits of OA, it is the authors that have the control over the content. Unless they think there is a value in OA, they won’t contribute their work to institutional repositories or OA journals.

Robyn Williams from the ABC discussed podcasting of the Science Show, and a project in which he would like the ABC’s archives of interviews and backgrounders to be turned into podcasts giving an overview of different scientific topics. The issue of digitisation and preservation of the ABC’s archives was also mentioned - he described the mould that is found all over many tapes at the ABC. The crowd winced. I’ve seen it myself - while I was in my previous job we went to visit the ABC and talked to the archivist about the machines they’ve been using to remove mould from reel-to-reels. It’s a timely and expensive process, and one that could have been avoided if we knew earlier the cannisters that tapes are stored in cause the mould!

Arthur Sale of the University of Tasmania discussed putting all university content into a single repository, instead of separate institutional repositories and theses archives.

One theme that came across strongly was the need for librarians to provide a value-adding service to information, plus the move to ‘knowledge’ from ‘information’. These themes are not new, they have been around since the popularisation of the Internet but it is interesting that they are raised at almost every library conference, no matter the topic being discussed. Overall an interesting day, and one that discussed issues well beyond those of eletronic theses.