CIL, day 2

The morning’s Keynote from one of the big wigs at Northern Light was actually quite interesting. His point: all the search engines are interested in is increaing advertising revenue. This shouldn’t have been suprising to anyone in the audience but even I was taken aback by some of his evidence.

Unfortunately, that presentation was the highlight of the morning as the rest was down hill from there. I went to the “collaboration” presentation in the “Working and Learning Electronically” track and that turned out to be about the libraries and IT departments at universities collaborating. Should have read the full description I guess as that was not what I was expecting at all. I was hoping for something on learner collaboration in an online environment.

The next session I attended was on “Supporting KM with Weblogs.” This sounded very interesting especially since I’m teaching the KM Technologies class at DU again this summer. Unfortunately, the talk was very high end focusing around software that was most appropriate to libraries in corporate environments. I got a few good quotes out of it but I’m not sure how I can apply it to the class except in a very general way. This wasn’t the presenter’s fault. I think if the presenter was given double the time and was able to slow down a bit it would have been much better. It is as it is in conference presentation land.

I did finally meet up with Rachel Singer Gordon and introduced myself. I’ve also realized that our dinner is tomorrow evening not tonight. Tonight is the bloggers dine-around. This should be interesting since bloggers tend to be chatty by nature. Also, they’ve closed off the attendance for this dinner at something around 20 people and several of them are from the Library Underground list including Chris from L.A.C.K. This is going to be fun.

One other note. This year instead of tapes of the presentations they’re offering CD-ROMs with MP3 files of all the presentations and all the PowerPoints too. The price at the conference is $79 for a complete set and after the conference the price goes up to $289. I broke down and ordered one. This’ll be nice since tomorrow there’s several interesting presentations going on at the same times which I’ll have to miss. This wasy I’ll get to hear them and be able to steal/borrow slides form the presentations. If anyone is interested in hearing the “Dead and Emerging Technologies” session just drop me a line.

Now on to the next two sessions, “Beyond way 101: Applying Reference Skills to Weblogs” and “Unleashing the Power of RSS” then on to a meeting witht the editor-in-chief of Information Today about my next book proposal. This afternoon should be much more interesting than the morning was.