Bobcatsss2008

By now most of the German BOBCATSSS-Team is back in Berlin resp. Potsdam resp. Dresden...After a not really overcrowded but nice final coming together in the Arsenal where we unfortunately were asked to change to the Maya Pub during some intensive conversation around 11 p.m. So the forced change of place came a little unpleasant to us but as most of the people already either left towards home, hotel or hostel or to the Pub around the corner this is understandable. The major consequence was a splitting of the German group: about half of it got to the pub, trying to stay awake through the night while dancing in the club and after that walking in the rain. The other half went down to the sea organ and launched a small armada of paper boats swimming towards the island of Uglijan.

At a drizzling six in the morning we met again at the Puntamika-Bus Stop and even the black Bobcat came around to say goodbye, what we very appreciate, although some suspected the cat only seeking a dry place. As far as our tired eyes could see all of the group made it successfully to the "Autobusni Kolodovor" of Zadar, found their place and fell instantly asleep. Later the driver, who was kind enough to keep the radio on a very low volume, switched on a movie called 10 items or less starring Morgan Freeman and Paz Vega so those of the team who were awake for some reason could watch a dialogue loaden film without the sound track but Croatian subtitles. This spurred the creativity at least a little for those who are not able to read Croatian and made them guess their own lines. To sum it up from this showing the movie can be said to be a kind of calm Morgan Freeman homerun where he as the central cast could play himself encountering the simple life.
There was a short stop on some rest stop called Viva and indeed some of the team revivified tumbling of their seats into the rain and the shop spending the last Kunas on things to get sober and/or more awake. It worked somehow combined with some more (auxiliary) bed and additional breakfast during the second 1 1/2 hours of the bus ride. On time in Zagreb we got on time to the airport shuttle, on time to the airport, on time to the check in counter, on time to the security area, on time to the duty free shop, on time to the gate, on time on board and because of the easy going weather before schedule to Berlin. The won time got lost again by waiting in the entry cue a little but finally anyone got his baggage and hopefully succeeded heading homewards.
Now we're sitting here post-bobcatsssed trying to reintegrate into the daily routine and carrying a burden of about 4 gigabytes photographies plus megabytes additional media material to be sorted. This is definitely not a task for tonight but for the upcoming weeks so the BOBCATSSS-Flickr will continue to stack stuff. Stay tuned!

While the Donat-lobby gets a little more crowded as we approach the last panes, workshops, company presentations and finally the closing ceremony marking this year's BOBCATSSS' climax (including drawing the winner of the free ticket for BOBCATSSS 2009 in Porto - get your evaluation sheets back in time!) with the awarding of the "Best Research Proposal" and the "Best Poster" I'm sitting in the back of the hall and about to post the following text written by Ingo:

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Bobcatsss2008 discussions depict a difficult standing for librarians in adjusting new internet applicatons to customers needs.

It is not easy to create a shape of the new information literacy behaviour. There is no significant way how people especially children, teens and young adults use information resources.

Maggie Fieldhouse (University College London) who organised a workshop about "Information strategies in the digital age" provided a different definition about information literacy, digital library skills, the shifts for library tasks in the digital age and argued that librarians have to know how information are stored on the internet. Librarians need to know how search engines work if they want to stay experts in their function of knowledge organising professionals.

In the end the workshop was a productive discussion about the following topics:

- Internet plagiarism in graduate schools
- The future of the work in schools in digital surroundings
- The understanding of how people search the internet (or is it just a "chaotic bouncing search")
- Is information literacy the answer to cope with these challenges?- Who should be the person that teaches - pupils that are more familiar with the internet than teachers? This is especially interesting for the use of web 2.0 applications.-Are the teaching authorities put under stress?
- How can pupils being teached to look for special topics and reliable content?
- Who takes responsibility about what is tought?

Finally lots of questions remain. Now we have to think about the answers.

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