From our colleague,

Marydee Ojala, live at Computers in Libraries, DC

Editor, ONLINE: The Leading Magazine for Information Professionals

Thursday’s keynote speaker, David Seuss, started his talk by saying he was the happiest person in the room to be at Computers in Libraries. Having sold his company, Northern Light, then bought it back, he certainly has reason to be delighted to be back in the library and information world. His talk about the Web of the future echoed one term from Cliff’s previous day keynote — “unintended consequences.” Seuss acknowledged the difficulties inherent in predicting something that’s unintended, but charged ahead none less. What do people expect from “The Google Age?” According to Seuss, that all information will be available to everybody with a common interface and be free. Essentially, this is impossible. Instead, Seuss thinks we need librarians to organize the Web, to put boundaries around specialized topic areas of information, and to create fragmented subsets of information. The ultimate future will be Personal Search Engines, engines that search content only for you. How this would work at a public library reference desk I don’t quite understand.

His final prediction was that there’s a bright future for complexity. In my opinion, there’s been a pretty stellar past for complexity as well, particularly for librarians.

Ten Years into the Web: The Search Problem is Nowhere Near Solved [ PowerPoint Slides ]