Presenter: Martin Dillon, Executive Director Emeritus, OCLC Institute

This 1.5 day course is designed especially for reference and public services librarians at all levels. This all new OCLC Institute seminar will help you take a more active role in creating a new reference librarianship in your own career, work unit, library, or larger spheres of influence and concern. Key issue to be explored include:

• How are reference services to be defined in a world of networked knowledge?
• How might innovative metadata systems affect the provision of reference services and the daily work of a reference librarian?
• Can libraries improve upon systems such as AskJeeves? If not, why not?
• Can the co-operative cataloging model extend to reference librarianship? What would 'co-operative reference' look like? How do co-operative cataloging and co-operative reference interrelate?
• Can we create a compelling vision of a preferred future state for reference librarianship and develop specific, achievable near-term actions that begin to bring that vision to pass?

Speaker: Ken Eustace, Lecturer in Information technology at Charles Sturt University

Library users increasingly expect 24 hour access to all the information they need, from wherever they happen to be. And libraries are now frequently able to meet this need. But are the information services we provide to these (digi-age) users appropriate?

This will be a practical seminar concentrating on how a number of Australian libraries and information services are providing reference services in this digital environment. Speakers include Roxanne Missingham (NLA), Matilda Kolandaisamy (Macquarie University), Karen Borchardt (University of Queensland), and Marie-Therese Van Dyk and Monika Raber (Monash University).

As online resources proliferate, so the need for information professionals to organise and facilitate access to them becomes increasingly important. You have probably heard about metadata, but what is the simplest way to apply it and how can it be used to manage large resource collections?

The managers of EdNA Online, Australia's education and training gateway, recognised the concerns of stakeholders and developed a suite of metadata tools a resource editor for individual sites, a collection manager for simultaneously editing multiple sites and an online thesaurus. These tools are designed to not only to make it easier for collection managers to add sites to the EdNA database but to improve the accuracy and quality of searches against metadata-enabled resources.