Thanks to Southern Railways, I was late for this, and arrived as Greg was talking about search engines, but I don't think I can have missed too much. As I arrived he was using Google to search for the pages of the London Assembly to illustrate some of Google's developing features.
Then he passed on to changes in commercial databases, which he pointed out change their interfaces either too often or not frequently enough, and the shifting sands of linking to e-journals. He described an alphabet soup of standards, formats and schema that we have to keep up with. He alluded to new developments in wearable computing, PDAs and e-book readers.
He proposed that we should think of ourselves as sponges, and that traditional skills remained applicable in a changing environment. He was rather scathing about blogs and RSS feeds. He seemed to think that e-mail isn't broken and that young IM users would grow up into e-mail users. I think this rather misses the point. Discussing wikis he referred to the Internet Librarian Wiki (I think he must have meant for the Monterey event, as I didn't come across one for the London conference), and referred to the problem if empty and unused wikis.
He showed some interesting uses of collaborative spreadsheets though, to log reference enquiries. He questioned whether libraries should really be trying to emulate Google and Amazon, especially since we do not have their resources. He was also sceptical about WorldCat, not least because libraries have to pay to contribute records, but also because the WorldCat reviews feature is so far unimpressive and underused.
So his conclusion was that the Internet librarian uses old skills on new sources, that we should be prepared to experiment and use that which helps users. In the questions, I said that his view of blogs was of course justified, in that they can be trivial and ephemeral, but pointed to that day's One Day in History experiment as something that might appear trivial now, but which historians of the future would find a rich resource.
Technorati Tags: ILI2006, internetlibrarianinternational
