The Ministry of Culture (of Sweden) arranged a half-day seminar on the cooperation of cultural institutions and research (broadly, including academic institutions and researchers in general). The event was a laudable initiative from the part of the ministry, and with excellent speakers the seminar was highly interesting from multiple points of view.

 I was participating in the Nordiska arkivdagar (Nordic archives conference) in Tavastehus in Finland. Much of the discussion I was been following in the first plenary session and the parallel session on archives and new information services was about users, participation and reception (in Swedish, bemötande). That is more or less directly. Anneli Sundqvist made some insightful remarks on user studies and archives and their users in her article on the state of (or, perhaps the relative lack of it) in 2007.

I was last Friday in Copenhagen participating in and presenting at the research meets practice workshop on innovation and market creation in virtual worlds organised by Ursula Plesner of Copenhagen Business School.

I have been participating at the Critique, Democracy and Philosophy in the 21st century (CDP21) conference organised by the Department of Informatics and Media of the Uppsala University. As Mathias Klang (@klang67) notes in Twitter, the conference is not very techie. It is more about society than about ICTs. 

The proceedings of the last years CAA conference came out about month ago. My piece is about semantic wikis and semantic web technologies in the management of archaeological records and information. 

 One of the interesting issues raised in the discussions of the data track at this year's CAA 2012 conference in Southampton is the question of teh purpose of the Linked Data. The purpose in the sense that whether Linked Data should be opened on the premises of its creators or users. @kidehen was kind enough to underline in Twitter (once I posed this rhetorical question) that "#LinkedData == Open Data Access, Connectivity, and Representation.

The 2012 edition of the BOBCATSSS conference continuing one more day today in Amsterdam. The conference is an excellent venue for LIS and other ALM students (ok, more so for archival science than museum studies students) to meet other students from around the Europe and the world (that is, future colleagues), practice conference participation and presentation and to get a broad additional point of view to the field that is difficult to get at the home university.

Call for submissions & participation: Doctoral forum on Quantitative Research in Information Science 12-13 April 2012, University of Wolverhampton, UK

Website: http://www.asis.org/Chapters/europe/

I have been participating in the 2011 edition of the DISH, Digital Strategies for Heritage Conference in Rotterdam, The Netherlands. A common observation in many conferences is that there tends to be a certain concentration of ideas. Even if one of the conference themes this year was crowdsourcing, it was quite apparent that the impact of this particular phenomenon went far beyond the thematic choice. Crowdsourcing has become mainstream.

My now over two years old article on 'information creation literacy' The Complete Information Literacy? Unforgetting Creation and Organisation of Information is out in the Journal of Librarianship and Information Science after a rather long publication process.