Kate Theimer (ArchivesNext) held an excellent (ok, the slides, the summaries in the blogosphere and what she told me in a mail give a strong impression that the presentation was excellent, I was unfortunate enough to miss this year's SAA meeting) presentation on the concept of participatory archives. I do quite agree with her that there is no satisfactory definition of a participatory archive.

Several speakers at the ongoing Information Science and Social Media -- International Conference (ISSOME2011) (I am organising together with my colleagues at Åbo Akademi University) have made interesting implicit and explicit references to the notion of 'social' that are rather different from the earlier rather fuzzy references to the concept in this kind of a venue.

I was last week participating  as one of the 19 grantees in the European Science Foundation Humanities Spring workshop on  changing publishing cultures in humanities organised by An Foras Feasa, NUI Maynooth in Ireland.

The first ever ASIS&T European Workshop was held in the beginning of June in Cork, Ireland. The event was kindly hosted by Cathal Hoare (chair of the European Student Chapter) together with his colleagues Adrian, Lisa and Margot from the Department of Computer Science at the University College Cork.

 This year's Computer Applications and Quantitative Methods in Archaeology (CAA) conference was held in the beginning of April in Beijing. In spite of the somewhat distant venue, the conference collected a whole bunch of familiar faces (Daniel Löwenborg, Mike Rains and others) with interesting projects going on, and a number of new acquaintances.

Swedish media, including the daily newspaper Dagens Nyheter, reported today about a study on information searching in daily work. The study was conducted by YouGov for Canon Sweden.

 I participate yesterday a panel on the Europeanisation of Information Science at the International Symposium in Information Science in Hildesheim, Germany as a representant and chair of the ASIS&T European Chapter. We had an interesting discussion on the existence of a European Information Science community, a need for one and possible means to create such a community.

The aim of the first ISSOME conference is to address new modes of information behaviour in different contexts focusing the effects of social media and technologies in the interactive web. The change process is not always straight forward and we need to underline what is really changing and what is only a trend. The conference will discuss skills needed to manage the new information platform and how to develop needed competencies in the information society.

CAA-SE (Swedish section of the international organisation Computer Applications and Quantitative Methods in Archaeology, best known for its annual conferences) organised an interesting workshop on monday on the management of archaeological documentation.