I'd been invited to an E-Resources event hosted by Lancashire Libraries and Anne Kail from Credo. As it was only down the road in Preston I was given a day pass and escaped from the mad house. It was a great day for me, not only because it was a chance to catch up with colleagues I'd previously worked with on the North West Reference Group but because it was genuinely interesting. Focused very much on networking the group was made up of librarians from public and college libraries with a few intruders in the form of Anthony Beal from JISC NW and Bill Doktor from Newsbank.
Hosted by Credo it was inevitable that their services were going to be showcased. Their free topic pages are something I will have to look into but realistically Credo reference is to expensive for us ever to consider for all it is one of the best services of its type. Lancashire are Beta testing a brand new product of Credos called illuminati which brings together different streams of content. It was good and from a public library point of view it is interesting but I think for colleges many features are just to similar to what our VLE already do to make it worth while.
The main purpose for me was to see what other people were doing so I was a bit taken a bit when I everyone got really excited about my training plans for the team. I hadn't thought it was anything special but a number of people there said they were going to try it out with their services. I was also pleased to hear that JISC are investigating how to split services such as Infotrac and Ebrary into groups suitable for the different levels of student we work with in colleges. Anne Kail is going to provide us with summaries of the day so I'll post that when I get it.
