Swedish people!

Tonight is the last night of our stay here in Barçelona. The teams have worked very hard with the planning of the BOBCATSSS 2014 conference but of course we've have also got time to get to know each other as well as the city of Barçelona and Catalan culture. Many new memories have been created during these few days.
There's one memory though that is especially etched into our minds and that's the phrase "swedish people!". It's our friend, the driving spirit Vicent who has taken care of us and guided us through the Catalan way of living.

It must not have been easy for him guiding us everywhere. For some reason some of us always managed to go in the wrong direction or get stuck in something obviously very distracting. "Swedish people!" Vicent called for us when that happened. And it happened a lot. A LOT. Alot even. Soon it became a standard expression and we even started to use it when calling for each other. "Swedish people!".

Here's a really nice picture of our personal guide (in the foreground) guiding us through the National library of Catalonia. Oh! Poor guy having to deal with us, the "swedish people"

/Sofia and the rest

The National library of Catalonia

Today we got a guided tour at the National library of Catalonia. It's an old, gothic hospital from the 15th century. Beautiful!

They showed us their collections and told us about the history of the library and how they work. Apart from ordinary library service they also have a museum. There were printers and old documents, from different periods, on display. It was amazing to see the books that were completely written by human hand. In ink. And hundreds of pages. Someone, for some hundreds of years ago, really put both time and effort into these artifacts.

They also had a display case where different kinds of media were presented. This in order to show that information can be stored in many different ways.

My favourite part though was their Cervantes collection. So many editions of Don Quijote! Don Quijote was one of the first novels I bought and I might have been around ten at that time. My inner girl was jumping of excitement!

The weather here is okay. It rained a little today but it's still warm. Like swedish summer. In Sweden there's apparently this huge storm making a lot of mess throughout the country so we're quite happy with the weather here.

/Sofia Lundgren

Planning for our trip to Barcelona next week

Yesterday we had a very important meeting regarding our trip to Barcelona next week. We discussed practical issues such as what to bring to Barcelona and how to travel in the city. Of course we also discussed how to work with planning of the conference such as the menu for the gala dinner, scheduling of the program and social events. In other words there's a lot of interesting decisions to make!

Right now I'm looking at googles weather forecast and it seems like the weather in Barcelona next week is equivalent to swedish summer. It's going to be nice to leave swedish freezy and dark autumn (the picture above I took yesterday on my way home) for some more daylight and warmth.

/Sofia Lundgren

DIK, sponsor of BOBCATSSS 2014

We at BOBCATSSS 2014 are proud to present the DIK Association as one of our sponsors. The DIK Association is a trade union for academics in the fields of documentation, information and culture. There are many professions that work in these fields such as librarians, speech therapists, archivists, copywriters, musicians and curators among many, many other professions. There are currently around 22 000 members in the DIK Associaton.

This year the DIK Association have worked extra hard with communicating to different branches, such as IT and telecom, that professionals in the humanities have the right competences to get employed by those branches. For instance they presented at  a seminar, at the Almedalen Week, an archaeologist who got employed as a process leader because the competences she got from working with archaeology matched the competences needed for the process leader position. It showed that it's more importantr to look at competence rather than education when it comes to employing new personnel.

In the DIK Association there's also a very active student board - DIK Student. This year they have put their focus on investigating how much practical experience their student members get during their education. A report was written during spring 2013 and presented at the Almedalen Week in the same year.

Get to know DIK even further here:
http://www.dik.se/om-dik/about-dik/

And DIK student;
http://www.dik.se/om-dik/about-dik/student-membership-in-dik/

/Sofia Lundgren

Snart börjar konferensen.

Snart börjar konferenrensen. Vi befinner oss uppe i bergen med utsikt över stan i universitetets exklusiva åttakantiga konferensbyggnad av sten och marmor. Massor av deltagare och vi är förväntansfulla.

/Maria

På väg!

Nu är det spännande!
Vi satte oss precis på bussen till konferensen.  Här är fler studenter. Ska bli kul att lära känna dem.

Igår ägnade vi kvällen åt att öva på våra presentationer och diskutera vad vi ska ta upp på första mötet med Barcelona-teamet. Bob var förstås med.

Istanbul Twilight

Nu för tiden har jag har två huvudsakliga fritidsintressen: musik och stil. Ikväll ska jag skriva om musik. Jag lyssnar mycket på ambient musik. Exempel på det är Brian Eno, Popol Vuh och Lisa Gerrard. Mitt första bidrag till Bobcatsssbloggen blir därför ambient, tematisk musik. Dock fel stad. Inte Ankara, istället blir det Istanbul. Det finns en väldigt bra samlingsskiva som heter Istanbul Twilight och två av mina favoritartister är med: Azam Ali och Taksim Trio.

Istanbul - Ernst Koerner

Azam Ali är en sångerska begåvad med en oerhört sagolik röst. Jag rekommenderar verkligen hennes skiva Portals of Grace där hon inspirerats av folkmusik från hela världen. Bland annat finns det där en låt som heter Sackpipslät och som ska vara inspirerad av svensk folkmusik (njaaa). Taksim Trio består av en klarinettist, en kanunspelare (typ en cittra) och en Bağlamaspelare (typ en luta). De spelar ambient musik med en riktning mot jazz. En av deras bästa låtar, Bicare, finns med på Istanbul Twilight.

Spotifylänk:
Various Artists – Istanbul Twilight
Lyssna och njut!

Imorgon skriver jag om stil. Då blir det turkiska designers!

/Sofia