UKOLN
Raising Awareness

"A centre of excellence in digital information management, providing advice and services to the library, information and cultural heritage communities."

UKOLN is based at the University of Bath.

"Standards Are Like Sausages"

"Standards Are Like Sausages"

Brian Kelly gave a talk on "Standards Are Like Sausages: Exploiting the Potential of Open Standards" in the "B105" session on Open Standards at the ILI 2009 conference. The talk was given on Thursday 15th October 2009 from 16:15-17:00.

Title
Standards Are Like Sausages: Exploiting the Potential of Open Standards
Speaker
Brian Kelly (UKOLN)
Abstract

To update the old saying about purchasing computers from IBM, these days we might say "Nobody got sacked for suggesting use of open standards". And as we know, open standards provide application- and platform-independence, interoperability and universal access. Sounds too good to be true? What if it is too good to be true? What if an unquestioning belief in open standards is counter-productive, leading to investment in approaches which fail to gain market acceptance or live up to their initial promises?

In this talk Brian Kelly will suggest that standards can be like sausages - tasty, perhaps, but you may not care to explore too deploy how they are made! Brian will provide examples of failed open standards, explore some of the reasons for such failures and describe approaches which can help organisations to identify the successful open standards. After all, you can be critical of open standards without having to join the dark side of a proprietary non-interoperable world.

This talk is based on over 10 years of experience the speaker has had in promoting use of open standards in national digital library development programmes followed by subsequent reflections on mistakes made and the open standards which failed to deliver.

Date And Time
The talk took place in the "B105" session on Open Standards which was held on Thursday 15th October 2009 from 16:15-17:00. The talk lasted for 45 minutes.
Materials
[MS PowerPoint] - [HTML]

Accompanying Resources

For a list of related resources please see the del.icio.us social bookmarking Web site using the tag 'ili-2009-standards'.