Comments on: ALIA Information Online Conference

By: Jan Titcombe

Jan Titcombe — Fri, 09 Feb 2007 07:59:05 +0000

Comments from a (slightly worn out) Committee member. After 18 months of planning and hard work it is fantastic see so many delegates (over 1,000) at the Conference and the feedback on the various Blogs so far. The many discussions by the Committee on the choice of speakers obviously went the right way.

Thankyou to all who attended as a delegate, presenter, volunteer and exhibitor. See you all in 2009! Jan

By: Damian Conway

Damian Conway — Tue, 06 Feb 2007 19:38:56 +0000

Hmmmmm. I hope my actual message wasn’t as simplistic as “Librarians will rule”, even if that was the catchphrase I used to grab the audience’s attention. The actual message was: “Librarians face enormous challenges from disruptive information technologies (library-on-a-disk, print-on-demand, single-word-resolution digital call-numbers, collaborative knowledge, etc.) but are also presented with commensurately enormous opportunities because an ‘ambient knowledge’ economy will require precisely those information handling skills that librarians have been developing for the past 25 centuries.” I would fully agree with you that the future isn’t rosy for any librarians who are so “long established” that they can’t retool themselves to master these new technologies.

Indeed, that’s precisely why I spent the first third of the talk showing pictures of cavemen, shamans, clergy, and aristocrats progressively losing out as they failed to adapt. But I think it’s unfair to characterize my intent as “pandering” just because I chose to leave the audience with the hope that their fundamental skills will continue to be valuable, rather than in despair at the magnitude of the changes that will be required.

EDITOR: perhaps it is unfair, in which case sorry, but the audience seemed to take away the last line in their discussions afterwards because it’s only human nature to remember and promote the bit that said they’re great, than the bit which says they’re under threat eg: the post at librariesinteract.info says:

Damian Conway, futurist, made a keynote speech at Information Online 2007 this afternoon. It was an exciting presentation showing how Librarians were going to rule the World with the disruptive technology of ubiquitous computing – ambient knowledge — and unlimited storage leading to the demise of the info-stocracy (ie Rupert Murdoch et al.)

I tend to be fairly direct and forthright so would have made it clear that this was a “natural selection” kind of event where those who didn’t adapt fast would go the way of the dodo, but obviously as a good professional speaker you know that only saying this without saying something good would not endear you to the crowd

By: Richard Vankoningsveld

Richard Vankoningsveld — Mon, 05 Feb 2007 23:54:59 +0000

I agree with your comments that the keynotes were really good on the whole. One I’m suprised you didn’t mention was Damian Conway form Monash, perhaps you missed it? I thought he was really very good and inspiring, he asked pretty interesting questions like: What will be the purpose of a librarian when you have the whole of the Library of Congress on your Seagate 300Tb drive sitting next to your computer?

Matthew – you should take a look at Encore. It’s a new OPAC frontend kind of thing that was on show at the conference, very Web 2.0, and very impressive! Still in development phase though, I heard they were looking for development partners in fact, if your library is interested?

EDITOR: The reason I didn’t mention Damiens talk was because although he’s a very good speaker and it was very well delivered, the content was basically pandering to the crowd by saying librarians are in the box seat … I don’t think the future is that rosy for a large proportion of librarians long established in the field.

By: Matthew Nogrady

Matthew Nogrady — Mon, 05 Feb 2007 01:55:16 +0000

Thanks for posting this info for those of us who didn’t make it, Neerav. I’m interested in LM systems that incorporate Library2.0 features – my library uses Horizon, and I’m wondering what the next version (due next year) will contain in this regard.
Cheers, Matthew

http://librarianofthepossible.blogspot.com

By: Mark McGrouther

Mark McGrouther — Sat, 03 Feb 2007 11:32:01 +0000

Very interesting. Thank you Neerav. I found the WRON site quite thought provoking. Must chat to you about the Google Map interface.
Markmcg