BIC AT FRANKFURT 2012 – BIC’s Consultant Simon Edwards on this year’s Book Fair
Frankfurt 2012 was its usual busy self, large crowds, queues to get into Halle Acht, long but generally productive meetings, announcements, poor hotels and late nights.
But over the years it has become something of a habit to go, meet with people we could probably have seen in the UK and have amazingly productive and positive meetings with everyone very much open for business and willing to discuss new ideas. And then head for home. Why do we do it? Because it works!
Karina attended Tools of Change and announced the setting up of the new international subject code scheme, PanThema.
This was a subject of interest to many people that we talked with at Frankfurt. The delegates to the iBIC/PanThema meeting might not have been able to agree on exactly how to pronounce the new scheme name, whether Theema or Tama or Thama but everyone knew it was an idea whose time has come.
It felt great to be giving the global book industry something of real value. This is all on the condition that it is for the benefit of all and it is not to be used by any one organisation to promote their own agenda. A genuine pro-bono gift with no strings.
The PanThema scheme will be necessarily high level but global in scope and ideal for searching on the web or for use in filtering with other searches.
There will be a lot of work to do on the detail to make the scheme work for all but there now seems to be a will and a commitment to do the necessary work.
Next stop on the Thema express will be London Bookfair in April 2013.
P.S. We also had a great meeting with the Australians from BICC – although this name may present a few problems in the future!
More info on panthema from www.panthema.org
