Announcing the Keynote Speakers for VALA2024!
Our six keynote speakers are at the centre of the conference, and showcase some of the most inspiring and creative professionals in the GLAM IT sector.
Details about the speakers and presentations will be included below as they are available.
Keynote
Trumped Literacies: A new model for information and knowledge in claustropolitan times
Tara Brabazon
Tara Brabazon is the Dean of Graduate Studies and Professor of Cultural Studies at Charles Darwin University, Professor of Cultural Studies at Flinders University, Fellow of the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures & Commerce (RSA), Member of the College of Distinguished Educators, and Director of the Popular Culture Collective. She has worked in ten universities in four countries and most of the states and territories of Australia. Tara has held the leadership roles of Dean, Head of School, Head of Department, Head of Programme and Institutional Research Leader of national assessment exercises.
Tara is currently writing three books, on academic failure, the Claustropolitan University and Claustropop: Popular culture at the end of the world. She is a columnist for the Times Higher Education, produces audiobooks, and runs a successful and popular podcast programme (since 2008). Tara has developed the genre of academic vlogs for higher degree students, through her weekly series.
She will be presenting on her latest work at VALA. “Trumped Literacies: A new model for information and knowledge in claustropolitan times”, which will explore how librarians, educators and information professionals manage the speed of mis/information while enabling debate, diversity and expertise?
Keynote
The Interdependent Library System: Revisiting Human Aspects of Library Automation
Ruth Tillman
Ruth Kitchin Tillman works on discovery, the library catalog, and linked data projects at Penn State University Libraries. Her current research focuses on library systems and the people who use and maintain them. She has written and presented on metadata encoding standards, library discovery, linked data, institutional repositories, and labor issues in libraries.
Ruth will be presenting: The Interdependent Library System: Revisiting Human Aspects of Library Automation
Once the star of the library technology circuit, the integrated library system (ILS) has long taken a back seat to emerging technologies—from the repositories of the late aughts to the AI of the mid-twenties. Yet the ILS is more than the origin of library automation; it still underlies the everyday work of a 21st century library.
In this presentation, Ruth considers the ILS as workspace and re-envision it as a system that is as fundamentally as human as it is technological. What can we learn by re-engaging with this apparently-monolithic and oft-monopolistic presence in our workplaces? She draws from the oral histories of Penn State’s homegrown ILS (1970s-1998) and her research into library systems maintenance and into the impacts of present-day ILS migration.