The International Ticer School: Getting inspired to shape your library of the future

Tilburg University in the Netherlands was the first university in Europe to develop a strategic vision of the digital library (Wieers, 1989 and 1990). This strategy focussed on electronic access to information from the users' desktops. In 1992, the library managed initially to implement these ideas with a new library building, 450 desktop computers for students in the library, and integrated access to various electronic information sources for all university staff and students (Dijkstra, 1994; Geleijnse & Roes, 1996).

On 1 January 2007, three departments: the Library, IT Services, and the Audiovisual department at Tilburg University were converged in one department: Library and IT Services. It was decided that Ticer should be included in this new service department. The private company was discontinued, and the Ticer manager now reports directly to the director of Library and IT Services. The services Ticer provides will remain the same. Ticer will continue to organise high-quality international courses and provide consultancy and programming/development services.

SET UP
Ticer became known for its annual International Summer School on the Digital Library, the first of which was organized at Tilburg University in August 1996. It was a two-week course that attracted a total of 57 participants. The course covered a wide set of issues related to the digital library, including strategic planning, human resources management, IT, publishing, digital content, knowledge navigation, etc. In 1999, an article on the first four summer schools was published in D-Lib Magazine (Prinsen & Geleijnse, 1999).
The set-up of the summer school changed drastically in 2000, when the two-week set-up was abandoned and Ticer management chose one-week or even 2-to 3-day courses. With the expertise and experience worldwide in digital libraries growing, it was no longer necessary to offer the kind of broad, introductory courses we started with in 1996. Instead, Ticer management decided to cover specific themes, e.g.: • seminar on the library's role in education for Avans University (2001) • three courses for Japanese and Korean librarians by order of Elsevier (2002) • course at CERN in Geneva on digital libraries in science and technology (2002) • seminar on university libraries for Elsevier account managers (2003) • course at CERN in Geneva on digital libraries in science, technology and medicine (2004) We even left our original field to organise a highly successful course on security and legal issues for IT managers (2004).
Over time, we had good and bad years, since educational activities are highly influenced by economic recessions. Especially in the years 2000, and 2002-2004 we experienced a lower number of applications. Through market research it was discovered that not only the economic recession was the reason. Library managers indicated that they had less time to be away from the office and alumni did not return to attend a second or third course because the programmes looked so much alike.
From 2005 onwards, we have been offering modular courses, with one-day modules around themes. This set-up enables participants to pick and choose and be away from home for a shorter time. Themes until now include: • trends and strategic issues for libraries Also, we now have a policy to not re-invite the same speakers for years in a row, thus making sure that the programmes of successive courses look less alike. This set-up has turned out to be very popular.
All these changes also affected the social character of the Ticer courses. Participants attending the two-week course (until 2000) developed a real bond, which resulted in yearlong international contacts between the alumni after the course. Of course, the bonding decreased when the courses became shorter.

PARTICIPANTS
Since Ticer's start in 1996, over 1,000 individuals from 59 different countries have attended one or more Ticer courses.
Alumni do return to attend other courses, so the total number of participants is even higher. Some 20% of our participants are alumni. Also, some 20% of participants are colleagues of alumni.
Countries best represented include the following. European countries that have been surprisingly underrepresented over the years include Austria, France, and Germany.
If we look to the continents, it is not surprisingly that the majority of our participants are from Europe, followed by Asia. What maybe is surprising is that over the years we've had more participants from Africa than from the United States and Canada.

CONTENT
If we compare the content of the Ticer courses since 1997, we can see an evolution. 1 1 1 1 1

Environment
Not surprisingly, in all courses there were lectures on the subject of the future role of libraries in general. Special attention for the future role of libraries in teaching and learning started in 1999, followed by special attention for the role in research from 2002 onwards.

Libraries supporting teaching and learning
In the area of libraries supporting teaching and learning, information literacy has been present since 2001; gaming is clearly a newcomer.

Libraries supporting research
The attention to scholarly communication shifted from general lectures about scholarly communication to lectures more specific on Open Access, eScience and virtual research environments. Although this cannot be deduced from the above table, within the field of self-publishing, the accent shifted from setting up electronic journals, via Open Access, to institutional repositories. In 2007, we will cover open access to research data for the first time.

Library management
Up until 2003, considerable attention was paid to visioning/strategic planning and change management. In 2004, the change management course had to be cancelled due to insufficient applications. Since then, we haven't picked the subject up again. One of the reasons behind that decision is that in 2005 we started with the 1-day modules and this subject is difficult to cover in one day. It is interesting to see that project management hasn't been covered since 1999. We decided that specialised project management courses could better cover this subject. The interest in the convergence of libraries and computer centres has ceased since 2000. We covered archiving and preservation from 2001-2003, but because this was increasingly considered a task of national libraries and not of university libraries, we abandoned the subject. Now that universities manage more and more institutional repositories, the subject will become relevant again.

Technology
Throughout the years, we have included overview lectures on IT, generally neither the library director's expertise nor his/her favourite subject, but always recognized as a very important topic for library managers. In the first few years, we presented lectures on internet/intranet and knowledge navigation. In recent years, we see a shift to lectures on search/search engines and innovations in OPACs. Reference linking has been an important topic in all Ticer courses, and this topic has evolved over the years from interlinking and searching heterogeneous databases, via CrossRef, OAI-MHP, and OpenURL to cross-repository functionality. In all years, this topic was evaluated as very important and we were lucky to have a lecturer who was able to explain this important, but technical, subject to library managers.

Library 2.0
Clearly a new topic, first covered in our 2005 courses. In 2006, we even decided to change the learning method on these subjects from lectures to hands-on sessions.

Legal issues and consortia
Attention moved from copyright and licensing, via consortia to negotiation. Many negotiations with information providers are currently no longer done by individual libraries, but by consortia. Because of this, the interest for these topics diminished and we decided to abandon them.

Information industry
Clearly, this topic has been abandoned in the past years, the aggregators being the first, following by the vendors and then the publishers. We still invite speakers from the industry, but, unlike the early years, they do not lecture on their company or line of industry, but rather on worldwide developments, showing that a certain convergence has taken place in the industry.

LECTURERS
Over the years, Ticer has been able to attract renowned speakers. Although I do some 200 speakers wrong by not mentioning them, I would like to list a very small selection of speakers, in alphabetical order: • Over the past ten years our experience has been that identifying and locating experts and speakers has become easier. What is happening in the (international) academic library scene has become more visible with the increasing use of the web, blogs and other electronic resources. Also, since 2005 Ticer has used programme committees, which means that we get input from more people.
We are lucky to find that many of the speakers we approach feel honoured to be invited to the International Ticer School. In spite of that, being able to get potential speakers' confirmation and finish the programme in time has become more difficult. This has internal and external causes.
• The best speakers have busier schedules than ever.
• More and more, our invitations threaten to get lost in an increasing amount of other incoming mail or even spam filters.
• We changed our policy and decided not to invite the same speakers several years in a row (with some exceptions). This means that we have to introduce and prove ourselves to every speaker instead of falling back on existing contacts.

•
In the recent years we have no longer limited our search for speakers to the library environment, but have tried to interest, for example, strategists or futurologists to lecture at our school. In these cases, the unfamiliarity with Ticer and the Ticer courses of potential speakers from outside the library environment is a big disadvantage.
At the end of a Ticer course speakers are generally very pleased with the result. Many of them arrive earlier or do not leave after their presentation and stay a couple of days or even a whole week. This is greatly appreciated by participants, Ticer and the lecturers themselves. Participants thus get an opportunity to talk to lecturers in an informal setting. Discussion sessions usually become more interesting and sometimes evolve towards panel sessions. Lecturers can get a flavour of the atmosphere prior to their own lecture. They can also link to other lectures and to adapt their presentation on the basis of what happened during previous sessions.

THE 2007 TICER COURSE
Ticer will again organise a summer course in 2007. "Digital Libraries à la Carte 2007" will be held at Tilburg University, the Netherlands, from the evening of Sunday 26 August up to and including the evening of Friday 31 August. The course director is Norbert Lossau, Director of the Goettingen State and University Library in Germany.
This year, our international programme committee consists of