Innovative 4for14

I went along to the Innovative 4for14 event at the Royal Armouries Museum in Leeds yesterday, and found a very different company to the one I’ve been working with for several years now. In the past, III staff were always highly knowledgeable about libraries and their software, but slightly less comfortable talking about theoretical areas such as how libraries are changing and how user and technological trends would influence them. Perhaps this represented the ‘black box’ nature of the old core product Millennium. However yesterday the reverse seemed to be true. The four themes which seemed to come out of discussions were Technology, Sharing, Partnerships and Change, whereas discussion was almost steered away from  the details of software functionality which would previously have been the focus. Maybe this just reflects Sierra, with its more open APIs? I await the next EIUG conference in Edinburgh to find out!