Published 1 July 2012 by Lou Woodley
Opening up the experiences – Sunday’s opening ceremony
One of the recurrent themes at the Lindau meetings,and one reason that I’m pleaseed to have been involved for three years now, is that of education. It’s often mentioned in the more formal opening presentations, but it’s also apparent in the interests of number of the laureates (and not just those in science) who, after receiving their prize, go on to use their influence to set up various education projects around the world.
It’s therefore no surprise that the Lindau foundation has realised the potential of the internet to extend the lessons shared at its annual meetings. A repeated mention at this year’s opening ceremony was the updated mediatheque media library, found on the official Lindau website and hosting an archive of information, lectures and interviews with the laureates. While it seems obvious that the plenary lectures that the laureates give each morning during the meeting have been video recorded since 2005, I was pleasantly surprised to learn that records have been kept of the lectures from every meeting since 1951.
In total that makes 174 video lectures, 288 abstract and the online "CVs" of 428 laureates – an impressive resource. To help search through it all, you can browse e.g. by most popular videos, as rated by other viewers or by most viewed items. In addition to the notes and films from the meetings, there is also a selection of portraits of the laureates – just in case you need to identify one!
Several of the speakers at today’s opening ceremony, including Countess Bernadotte, stressed how this improved resource opens up the meeting so that many others who are not lucky enough to attend the lectures in person can also follow along online. Now I wonder who to speak to about including our Storify round-ups of all the tweets and online conversations in this vast library…? 🙂