The Theory and Practice of Digital Libraries conference (TPDL) was held in Valletta, Malta on 22-26 September, and Digital Development Team manager Claire Knowles got an extra week of summertime by attending. She writes:

It was my first time attending this conference which attracts lots of attendees from academia as well as fellow library colleagues.  On the first day I attended two tutorials, one on Linked Data http://www.tpdl2013.info/tut-lddl.php and the second on ResourceSync http://www.openarchives.org/rs/0.9.1/resourcesync slides http://www.slideshare.net/OpenArchivesInitiative/resourcesync-tutorial.

The following day the conference proceedings started, Christine Borgman (@SciTechProf) from UCLA, gave the opening keynote on “Digital Scholarship and Digital Libraries: Past, Present, and Future“, which was based on her current book (yet to be published) with 4 themes:

1. Open scholarship is becoming the norm
2. Formal and informal communication is merging
3. There are a variety of data practices
4. Open access to data is a paradigm shift

The closing keynote was titled: What can linked data do for Digital Libraries? by Soren Auer (http://aksw.org/About.html) who has just joined the University of Bonn. He discussed how to digitise the concept of the library and he demonstrated a number of projects he has worked on to enable this:

• OntoWiki a semantic data wiki
• Cortex, used by https://www.deutsche-digitale-bibliothek.de/ as a search tool
• Slidewiki to enable online collaborative presentations http://slidewiki.org/
• Semantic publications, which are at the prototype stage, to allow annotations to be added to publications to enhance their searchability.

There were a few re-occurring topics during the conference:

• Linked Data and how researchers are using linked data to model the complex relationships within their research.
• Europeana and its use for those working within cultural heritage. There was a lot of discussion around Europeana and how the API allows the data to be used locally.
• How academic research is becoming more open, with information being shared earlier than at the traditional publication stage.
• Web Archiving and how to create an accurate archive of a website.
• How to make use of the PDF through extraction of information and annotation.

Next year’s conference will combine the European TPDL and North American JCDL Conferences and be held in London.