From our colleague, Marydee Ojala

Editor, ONLINE: The Leading Magazine for Information Professionals

Wow, it’s nice to see a full hall! In his opening remarks, Tom Hogan welcomed us to Computers in Libraries and noted there were over 2,000 people here at the Washington Hilton in cold and rainy/sleety Washington DC. That’s up 7% from last year. He also told us there were representatives from 12 countries outside the U.S. The South African sitting next to me was somewhat skeptical about counting Canada as outside the U.S. To her, North America is one large entity, even though it’s multiple countries.

Waxing philosophical, Tom wondered if, with cutbacks in library staff, we will be relegated to learning by reading the factoids that appear in hotel elevators. Librarians, he went on, believe that being smart and knowledgeable is enough to have their worth recognized by their institutions. But that isn’t sufficient. Information professionals need to be part of the solution and not rely on others to tell us how to do this.

Keynote Cliff Hanger

Cliff Lynch, Executive Director of the Coalition for Networked Information, gave the opening keynote. He talked of unexpected consequences resulting from new technologies and the changed expectations that people now have, again as a result of technology. He cited several interesting technologies, including geolocation “The Net knows where you are,” RFID with its privacy concerns, and spam “the end game in excesses in advertising.”

Perhaps most germane to CIL attendees were his comments on changes in writing. “We expect humans to read what we write, but not all readers are human.” He referred, of course, to search engine spiders, fact extraction programs, and inference engines that can generate hypotheses. Quite a lot to think about!