Catch up thoughts about info online 07

Back to work in the very rainy north, and another attempt to reflect on some conference sessions.

Overall, what an excellent conference. The keynotes were all excellent. The exhibition seemed to have a wider variety of companies, and the concurrent sessions were mostly good too.

Day 1.
Ross Ackland from CSIRO and Australia's W3C office talked about how the W3C operates and the future of the web. His explanation of the semantic web was the best I've heard, and the first I've really understood...I think! He also talked about the mobile web, and made me realise how we really need to make our online content into a format that is easily accessible by online devices.

In my previous post about the NLA presentation I didn't include the link for the National Library's "lab" for playing with new things... http://ll01.nla.gov.au/

I attended a couple of sessions about federated search which were interesting and helped fill some gaps in my knowledge. Not immediately relevant to us yet, but sometime soon...

Dr R. David Lankes from the Information Institute of Syracuse (IIS) was a funny, dynamic, excellent keynote speaker, plus he even managed to squeeze a Monty Python quote into his talk :-)
The IIS and ALA's joint research and publication "Participatory Networks: The Library as Conversation" was one of my favourite reads of 2006. David talked about moving from the old model of librarians looking after items and artefacts, to moving to a culture of customer service and being people focussed. He suggested we need to be 'nimble' in how we plan and react to change. His final recommendations were to expand the conversation about participatory networks and librarianship, and to create a testbed, a pooled effort where librarians can test the ideas of web2.0 / library2.0.

Information Online 2007 Conference nearly over already...

...and I've only managed one post about one session.

Once I get home I'll go through and post some notes / thoughts about sessions I attended.

Overall, an excellent conference, the best of the 3 Info Online's I've been to. Big congrats to the organisers for the quality of the key note speakers, the variety of concurrent speakers and the expanded and diverse range of exhibitors. Well done folks.

Information Online 2007

A new year, another conference...

Information Online started well this morning, and there were two really good sessions that I caught.

Tony Boston and Alison Dellit from the National Library of Australia spoke about developments with Libraries Australia, in particular their efforts to include relevance ranking in search results. They also discussed the other 'ideals' they are working on, to make Libraries Australia even more user friendly and user centered. These ideals included:

• ranking results
• clustering
• FRBR
• Spell checker
• Citation links
• annotations (tagging)
• Integration

I wonder how long it might be before we could use a service like Libraries Australia as a local OPAC? Users searching for a known item not held by their local library would instantly be exposed to the holdings of libraries around Australia. Local holdings could be ranked higher in results list, but I wonder how local circulation data could be included....

Anyhow, the National Library seems to be continuing to do a great job in embracing the new opportunities that new technology is bringing, in order to make our library collections more accessible to our users.