When people ask me how my trip to Helsinki went I start telling them with enthusiasm about the beautiful city, the white nights, the friendly people, the good food, the seagulls,… only to realize then that what they really wanted to know is if there was something useful, innovative, important or in any way interesting at the conference. Okay, sounds legit, after all this wasn’t a holiday trip, although I had lots of fun.

Of course there were lots of interesting things to take away from the sessions. In order to tell it in a way that makes sense to someone who couldn’t attend I started with ordering my thoughts and my notes. The last one was easy, I constantly tweeted from the conference so I only needed to put together a storify to have an easy to access notepad: https://storify.com/RegistrarTrek/erc2014-the-twitter-notepad. I did the work to order the tweets by sessions two times, but unfortunately the program messed it up without me knowing what I’ve done wrong and without the possibility to right the wrong without investing hours. (Note to self: write post about the possibilities and challenges of tweeting from a conference).

Just when I started my report, I realized that the UK Registrars Group had set up a new blog where they posted articles about all the sessions. You can find it here: http://ukregistrarsgroup.blogspot.co.uk/

Because of this I feel somehow relieved from the pressure of reporting in an overarching way and instead can focus on some points in the sessions that seemed especially important to me. I will report in several posts in the order the sessions came up at ERC 2014.

And now, before we dive into the sea of registrar’s techno-babble, please allow me one last picture taken while approaching Helsinki accompanied by the words of the Finnish writer Alexis Kivi, which I unfortunately only found in English:

What is that land of hill and dale
That is so beautiful,
The land aglow with summer days,
Land with the northern lights ablaze,
Whose beauty all the seasons share,
What is that land so fair?

The Finnish Land

This post is also available in French translated by Aurore Tisserand.

Reports from ERC 2014:
ERC 2014: Security Matters
ERC 2014: Assessing Risk in Lending and Borrowing
ERC 2014: Art Theft and Recovery
ERC 2014: Be Prepared!
ERC 2014: Moving Collections

Additional stuff from ERC 2014:
Home from Helsinki: Presentation from ERC2014
Inside the mind of a registrar