The opening session included presentations from Alan Howarth MP, the UK Government's Minister for the Arts, and Matthew Evans, who will be Chair of the new Museums, Libraries and Archives Council when it replaces the Museums and Galleries Commission and Library and Information Commission in April 2000.
Matthew's talk was really excellent, and hit all the right topics. He made it very clear that he's currently listening to different interest groups, and open to approaches on various issues.
After his speech, Matthew had coffee with members of the mda Board (including me). In the walk over to the V&A for coffee, I talked to him about People's Network (libraries) and 'Netful of Jewels' (the recently published Museum equivalent of 'New Library', in response to which DCMS have just allocated a wadge of money to commission the museum equivalent of 'Building the People's Network'). He said that as far as he was concerned, the network currently being constructed by Chris Batt for libraries was as much the 'Netful of Jewels' vision as it was the 'People's Network' vision. i.e. - it's not a library network, but a cultural network.
I gave a paper that afternoon (up on the web site) in a session alongside Godfrey Rust (indecs) and Angela Spinazze of CIMI. Angela talked about the CIMI Dublin Core testbed, and Godfrey talked about <indecs> and event-based modelling.
My paper was a general intro to DC, RDF, et al., and served to place the other two in context.
Whilst in London, I also attended my second (and third!) mda Board meetings, and payed a visit to Brian Kelly's Institutional Web Managers workshop, being run on the other side of town.
Whilst in Washington, I also spoke at the cultural heritage community's ichim conference, which the workshop preceded.