The 10th CoLIS (Conceptions of Library and Information Science) conference was held earlier this month (16-19 June 2019) in Ljubljana, Slovenia, organised by the Department of Librarianship, Information Science and Book Studies at the University of Ljubljana. (It really doesn’t seem three years since the last CoLIS conference.)
The conference chairs were Polona Vilar and Maja Žumer, the programme chairs were Lyn Robinson and Jonathan Furner, and the ‘other formats’ chairs were myself and Jenna Hartel. The doctoral forum was run by Jack Andersen and Tomaž Bartol, assisted by Jutta Haider and Ryan Shaw.
The three keynote talks were given by: Sarah T. Roberts, on the internet’s invisible information workers; Sabina Leonelli, on data curation from a scientific perspective; and Ross Todd, on safe information lives. The organisers should be commended on getting three such disparate and intriguing contributions.
With over 70 papers, panels and posters, whose subjects covered the whole of the LIS spectrum, generally delivered in three tracks, it seems invidious to single out any, and the organisers sensibly decided against trying to award a ‘best paper’. I was particularly struck by Jenna Hartel‘s ‘Turn, turn, turn’ presentation of paradigms and turns in LIS, with artistic and musical support, and by the presentation by Deborah Lee on classifying musical transformations, which seems to have implications for knowledge organization well beyond the music domain.
I took part in a panel session, with Lyn Robinson, and our colleagues Stephen Pinfield (Sheffield iSchool) and Simon Wakeling (Charles Sturt), looking at the relation between theory and practice in LIS, stemming from our OATAP project analysing the theory and practice of open access.
Lyn and I also presented a paper on an approach to informational privacy, based on Luciano Floridi’s information ethics. It was interesting to note Floridi’s ideas coming into several of the presentations, confirming our suggestion that they are a valuable foundation for LIS.
The abstracts of all the presentations are available online. The full papers will be published open access in the Information Research journal.
Congratulations to organisers for providing not merely an interesting programme in a lovely venue, but also good weather and good food.
The next CoLIS conference will be in Oslo is 2022, organised by Oslo Metropolitan University.
The Occasional Informationist 