Report from the first in-person SWIB node
If you are capable of reading German, you might rather enjoy the original report at Metadaten-BarCamp in Köln - #6 von acka47 - Veranstaltungen - metadaten.community
The Metadaten-BarCamp happened as planned on the third day of SWIB24, November 27th. It was a get-together of a small and heterogenous circle of metadata practitioners (from two library networks, national library, university libraries, a special library and more).
We had a fruitful exchange and a very good time, here is a photo of the participants.
Schedule
The schedule looked like this:
| Time | Programme |
|---|---|
| from 9:30 | arrival and welcome coffee |
| 10:00 | session planning |
| 10:30 | 1st session block |
| 11:45 | presentation of session results |
| 12:00 | Lunch break with catering |
| 13:00 | 2nd session block |
| 14:15 | presentation of session results |
| 14:30 | coffee break |
| 15:00-18:00 | watching the SWIB24 live stream together |
| ab 18:30 | joint Braushaus visit with dinner (on self-pay basis) |
As we were quite a small group, we started with an introduction round before the session planning.
Two session blocks with 2-3 sessions each
In total, we had two main sessions per block and took notes together in a session pad. The topics ranged chances and problems of subject indexing, over open/accessible metadata and how to address historicity of controlled vocabularies to metadata community growth (see links in the original report in German). A two-person session addressed additional topics.
Lunch break & demos
With two session blocks and eleven participants, the number of feasible sessions was limited and we could not accommodate all proposals made in the session planning. So we spontaneously added a demo session where three software solutions were presented:
- Metafacture / Metafacture Playground: [Metafacture Playground
- DatAasee: GitHub - ulbmuenster/dataasee: DatAasee - A Metadata-Lake for Libraries; Docs with screenshots: dataasee/docs/docs.md at main · ulbmuenster/dataasee · GitHub
- BARTOC und coli-conc
SWIB stream and Brauhaus visit
Watching the SWIB live stream together definitely is more fun than watching it alone in front of your computer. We enjoyed all the talks and were especially carried away by @airobert’s walk ‘n’ talk performance.
The benefits of an in-person meeting especially came to fruition when we closed the day in a Cologne Brauhaus.
Conclusion
Here are some take aways of this first SWIB node:
- It is very fruitful having metadata practitioners with different backgrounds coming together for personal exchange, looking beyond one’s horizon.
- A BarCamp works really well even with a smaller number of participants which will also lead to vivid and interesting sessions.
- However, we should advertise possible successor events more and earlier to reach more people from even more areas, e.g. researchers and public librarians were missing.
- We should schedule the event so that people with a travel time won’t need to book two hotel nights for a one-day event.
- Regarding the setup for live stream watching, we better should have broken up the seating order by then so that all the seats would be placed in front of the screen. Sitting around the tables made it sometimes hard to read the slides.
- Though it was announced as a SWIB node, it was an event in itself – with another event language (German), another scope (all things metadata not only LOD or machine learning) and another format (BarCamp).
It would be great to have more in-person SWIB nodes in the future, in different locations, languages ans formats and to share photos in community or even have a live connection to the different events. If you have read until here, why not think about setting up a SWIB25 node at your location?