I spent yesterday in Monterey with a thousand internet librarians. I was disappointed with the day. Why?
1. Duplicatation - I attended a few talks about search and there was too much duplication of content in the talks. I don’t blame the speakers for this, I blame the organizers. I agree that Exalead is a respectable search engine, but I don’t need three speakers telling me about them.
2. RSS and blogs - If you’re attending IL 2006 you should know what a blog is. You should know how to find them. You should know how to subscribe to them. Blogs were cutting edge (kinda) in 2004; they were still cool to talk about in 2005; but in 2006 we need to move our conference topics onwards.
3. Crowded - I tried to get into one talk and it was too crowded. That’s disappointing.
4. Keynote - J. A. Jance, a mystery author, gave the keynote. She gave an interesting speech. She discussed her life and some of the troubles she’s faced. She was funny and appropriately serious. But why was it the opening keynote? In 2004 Chris Sherman discussed the state of internet search; last year Lee Rainie of the Pew Internet & American Life Project discussed online demographics. Those are appropriate keynote topics for Internet Librarian. Sarah Houghton has a write-up of the talk itself.
5. My expectations - and lastly, to be fair, I should say that in 2004 and 2005 I loved this conference. Really loved it! (My IL 2005 write up on ysearchblog) I was inspired by it and by the collective excitement of the attendees. Maybe this year, having worked at Yahoo! now for a couple of years, my perspective is different and I’m looking for more in-depth talks about search. I feel a kindredness to the other attendees, but most of them are real-life librarians working in public, academic, and special libraries, and their needs are different from mine.
Maybe you missed my snarky comments the most.
These sound like fair criticisms…as an aside, I don’t think I’ve seen a really good corporate/organizational blog yet. They should be talking about integrating librarything or Amazon reviews with their catalog, not the ephemeral blogs…No offense to blogs I might be typing on right now.
Yes, your comments were sorely missed.
Good points about Amazon and Librarything. Steven Cohen did talk for a few minutes about Amazon. He stressed that librarians should love Amazon and take advantage of its tools and tricks, rather than fearing it as a competitor.
I agree. Too much repetition. Not only did several of this year’s sessions cover the same ground. But it felt like many of them covered the same ground as last year’s sessions. I would like to see more on topics like faceted browsing. While not an entirely new concept, I think it is the direction many interfaces seem to be headed in the library world and I don’t think enough people are talking about it.