Last weekend, I went to Bathcamp, a barcamp style event, but slightly unusual as it actually included camping. Although I don’t live particularly close to Bath, I knew several of the people involved – mainly via Twitter (at least initially).

After I booked, I suddenly had the idea that rather than drive down to Bath, I could instead do a combination of cycling and taking the train. I had one days holiday to take before the end of September, so I decided to set off on Friday morning aiming to get to the campsite in time to get my tent up before the sun went down.

I set off slightly late after a last minute search for the keys to my bike lock, and headed from Leamington Spa down to Moreton-in-Marsh. I was aiming to get to Moreton in time to get the 10:48 train – I had just under 3 hours to do about 25 miles. As I went along I tweeted – starting with this tweet. What I wasn’t aware of was a whole other twitter conversation going on around me.

Unfortunately I made it to Moreton-in-Marsh just in time to see the train I wanted pulling out. So, I stopped for an early lunch (BLT and Chips) in the local pub, and got the 12:48 train to Bath. I’d originally intended to go to Chippenham by train and cycle from there, but I decided I might not make it to the campsite before sundown, and that going to Bath was a safer bet. I tweeted that I was going that way, and got an offer of some company for a bit of the way from Andy Powell – which was extremely welcome as he was able to show me a canal-side route that avoided the huge hill outside Bath.

The weekend included a huge variety of talks – from an introduction to jQuery to Libraries (me), from HTML Email to making music with Ableton Live, as well as films, live music, barbecued dinner and breakfast and the odd sip of cider.

A couple of the talks I managed to make some reasonable notes about – and it surprised me they were both very relevant to my work. The first one was by Giles Turnbull, and was about the use of URL shorteners – Giles said that he was responsible for the original idea which, with some help from other people, became makeashorterlink.com. Giles described how they really didn’t anticipate the level of abuse that the service would get from spammers. However, despite this they kept it going for a couple of years. Then for various reasons – changes in lives and locations – they decided they could no longer maintain the service – they asked if anyone wanted to take over the service, and the fledgling service TinyURL took it over.

The issue that Giles wanted to highlight was that really the service relied on the enthusiasm of a few individuals – and he felt that this was essentially true of all online services. This, combined with the experience of finding old papers belonging to his step father (I think), made him realise how emphemeral what he put online was compared to paper. He said he was excited by the idea of Newspaperclub which is a service (currently in Alpha) to create a printed ‘newspaper’ from your online content – something you can keep, or give as a gift.

I’m not convinced by this – the solution to digital preservation can’t ultimately be to print it all out – and as Cameron Neylon pointed out, this is a form of caching rather than preservation – online content isn’t like printed content.

Giles’ talk provoked some discussion – but mainly about the longevity and economic viability of various Internet companies – which for me isn’t the heart of the problem. Even if companies survive, the question of how my grandchildren will access, say, my photos saved as JPEGs is far more of an issue.

The second talk I took notes from was Chris Leonard from BioMedCentral (bit hard to believe at this point, but this really wasn’t a library conference!). Chris spoke about how scientific publishing was gradually creeping outside the journal – to blogs, video and other media – but that it was difficult to keep track, and also difficult for scientists to be ‘rewarded’ for these routes of publication (in the way they are recognised and/or cited when they publish in journals).

Chris suggested an approach like that taken by Friendfeed or Faculty of 1000, which I’ve not come across before. He listed some pros and cons of these different services and suggested that what was needed was a service:

• that is open and free
• uses metrics to motivate contributors (RAE-worthy metrics)
• rewards contributors for their efforts
• archives contribution and discussions – making them citable

Chris suggested this approach would mean:

• Scientist’s whose work is not suited to being shoehorned into a pdf may no longer need to write an article
• The interconnected web of data could lead to new ‘article’ types
• Unpublished research could reach a wider audience [where it is merited] and discredit crackpots

He suggested that “Peer-review Lite” should be able to sort the wheat from the chaff – if not replace the usefulness of traditional peer-review.

I think Chris is right there is a need to look at new forms of publication and how the effort put into these is recognised and rewarded. However, I also think this is a big challenge – it means changing attitudes towards how academic discourse is conducted, which will be hard to do.

On Sunday morning I skipped out early to cycle back to Bath – a beautiful ride across country, and then along the Kennet and Avon canal – and took the train home. Thanks again to all who organised, especially Mike Ellis, and all those who sponsored an excellent event.