Many of us have been adapting to life in lock-down, including groups such as ISKO UK, which I have the honour of chairing.\u00a0 We are a small, specialist and very active group that promotes the science of knowledge organization.\u00a0 As part of an international network of societies, the UK chapter is particularly interested in the interface between research and practice.\u00a0 The opportunity to work with IRSG and others on the UKeiG Tony Kent Strix Award has been beneficial to members of both groups.<\/p>\n
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ISKO UK\u2019s principal activity is organizing events: a conference every two years, one-day and half-day meetings, training sessions and evening meetups using the Meetup.com network.\u00a0 This year\u2019s meetups started in January with evening sessions at the Canada Water Public Library in London.\u00a0 With the sudden emergence of the pandemic and the lockdown in March 2020, the organizing group very rapidly decided to run the rest of the evening meetings as online Zoom sessions.\u00a0 The Meetup infrastructure is used to publicise the meetings and register participants.\u00a0 Password-protected Zoom sessions are used to deliver a short talk followed by discussion.\u00a0 One of the themes was \u2018Knowledge organization everywhere\u2019 where invited speakers spoke about their experience of using knowledge organization techniques in their work.\u00a0 The autumn series of meetings will focus on techniques for organizing information.\u00a0 The September meeting will include talks by ISKO UK members about the use of mind mapping, automatic clustering software and other techniques for developing taxonomies.<\/p>\n
Zoom has worked well for our purposes \u2013 it works from a browser and does not require participants to install an app or subscribe to a service.\u00a0 We make use of features such as polling and the chat line for managing questions.\u00a0 The password feature allows us to control numbers \u2013 our subscription currently allows up to 100 participants for a meeting.\u00a0 We can record sessions, which provides an on-going educational resource \u2013 something that a number of iSchools make use of.<\/p>\n
Perhaps the greatest benefit of virtual meetings is that we have been able to become much more inclusive.\u00a0 Our online meetings are attended by 40-50 participants from both the UK and abroad.\u00a0 It has also allowed us to invite speakers from abroad to give a talk without the enormous financial exposure that would normally result.\u00a0 ISKO UK has been considering organizing webinars for some time but were it not for the pandemic lock down we would have not embraced online meetings so quickly and to this extent.\u00a0 Although we hope for a return to face-to-face meetings, I think that the virtual meetings will become a permanent feature of the offerings of ISKO UK.<\/p>\n
For details of our current programme of meetings and for slides from previous meetings visit: https:\/\/iskouk.org<\/a><\/p>\n David Haynes, Chair of ISKO UK<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Many of us have been adapting to life in lock-down, including groups such as ISKO UK, which I have the honour of chairing.\u00a0 We are a small, specialist and very active group that promotes the science of knowledge organization.\u00a0 As part of an international network of societies, the UK chapter is particularly interested in the… Continue reading Meeting in a time of lock-down – ISKO UK\u2019s experience<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":79,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[204,226],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6607","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-org-overview","category-summer-2020","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive-irsg.bcs.org\/informer\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6607","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive-irsg.bcs.org\/informer\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive-irsg.bcs.org\/informer\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive-irsg.bcs.org\/informer\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/79"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive-irsg.bcs.org\/informer\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6607"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/archive-irsg.bcs.org\/informer\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6607\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive-irsg.bcs.org\/informer\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6607"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive-irsg.bcs.org\/informer\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6607"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive-irsg.bcs.org\/informer\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6607"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}