Featured Roy Tennant, California Digital Library; Mary Lee Kennedy, Consultant & most recently Director of Knowledge Networks at Microsoft; Stephen Abram, new VP, Innovation Initiatives, Sirsi and in-coming President of the Canadian Library Association.

Each speaker had a theme for their trends:

Roy talked about the golden age for digital libraries based on the following trends: standards & protocols, XML which is now part of our infrastructure, and the crisis in scholarly publication which is brining institutional repositories to the forefront.

Mary Lee focused on “getting personal” or “it’s all about me!”. She discussed instant messaging which is immediate and builds trust networks, personal portals which brings different applications into one space to improve relevance, and content integration which allows just-in-time content to be embedded in applications that support workflow processes. The latter delivers information and content at the point of need and where clients make decisions.

Stephen, said “its all about people”, and focused on people and what they do — work, learn, and play. He talked about workflow integration (IM conversations, link resolvers and more), massive archives and digital repositories, nomadic use of devices which allow us to contextualize, learning on the run, visual display, and he finished with some information on personality and searching. He referred to our world as an information ocean, not a highway, one where we explore the space and context is king.